The Likeness

15

I didn’t get to Dublin Castle till almost eleven, the next morning. I wanted to let the daily routine kick in first-breakfast, the drive to town, everyone getting to work in the library; I figured it would settle the others, make them less likely to want to go with me. It worked. Daniel did ask, when I stood up and started putting on my jacket, “Would you like me to come along, for moral support?” but when I shook my head he nodded and went back to his book. “Do the trembling-finger-point either way,” Rafe told me. "Give O’Neill a thrill.”

Outside the door of the Murder squad’s building, I chickened out. It was the entrance I couldn’t do: checking in at reception like a visitor, making excruciating chirpy small talk with Bernadette the squad admin, waiting under fascinated passing eyes for someone to come steer me through the corridors like I’d never been there before. I phoned Frank and told him to come get me.

“Good timing,” he said, when he stuck his head out the door. “We were just taking a little break, to re-evaluate the situation, shall we say.”

“Re-evaluate what?” I asked.

He held the door open for me, stood back. “You’ll see. It’s been a fun morning all round. You really did a number on our boy’s face, didn’t you?”

He was right. John Naylor was sitting at an interview-room table with his arms folded, wearing the same colorless sweater and old jeans, and he wasn’t good-looking any more. He had two black eyes; one cheek was lopsided, purple and swollen; there was a dark split in his bottom lip; the bridge of his nose had a horrible squashy look. I tried to remember his fingers going for my eyes, his knee in my stomach, but I couldn’t square those with this battered guy rocking his chair on its back legs and humming “The Rising of the Moon” to himself. The sight of him, what we had done to him, made my throat close up.

Sam was in the observation room, leaning against the one-way glass with his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, watching Naylor. “Cassie,” he said, blinking. He looked exhausted. “Hi.”

“Jesus,” I said, nodding at Naylor.

“You’re telling me. He’s saying he came off his bike, face first into a wall. And that’s about all he’s saying.”

“I was just telling Cassie,” Frank said, “we’ve got a bit of a situation on our hands.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes, like he was trying to wake up. “A situation, yeah. We pulled Naylor in around, what, eight o’clock? We’ve been going at him ever since, but he’s giving us nothing; just stares at the wall and sings to himself. Rebel songs, mostly.”

“He made an exception for me,” said Frank. “Stopped the concert long enough to call me a dirty Dub bastard who should be ashamed of myself for licking West Brit arse. I think he fancies me. Here’s the thing, though: we managed to get a warrant to search his place, and the Bureau just brought in what they found. Obviously we were hoping for a bloody knife or bloody clothing or what-have-you, but no such luck. Instead… surprise, surprise.”

He picked up a handful of evidence bags from the table in the corner and waved them at me. “Check these out.”

There was a set of ivory dice, a tortoiseshell-backed hand mirror, a small lousy watercolor of a country lane, and a silver sugar bowl. Even before I turned the bowl around and saw the monogram—a delicate, flourished M—I knew where these had come from. Only one place I knew of had this kind of tat variety: Uncle Simon’s hoard.

“They were under Naylor’s bed,” Frank said, “prettily packed away in a shoebox. I guarantee if you have a good look around Whitethorn House you’ll find a cream pitcher to match. Which leaves us with the question: how did this lot end up in Naylor’s bedroom?”

“He broke in,” Sam said. He had gone back to staring at Naylor, who was slouched in his chair gazing at the ceiling. “Four times.”

“Without taking anything.”

“We don’t know that. That’s according to Simon March, who lived like a pig and spent most of his time legless drunk. Naylor could’ve filled up a suitcase with anything he fancied, and March would never have known the difference.”

“Or,” Frank said, “he could have bought it off Lexie.”

“Sure,” Sam said, “or off Daniel or Abby or what’s-their-names, or off old Simon, come to that. Except that there’s not one single speck of evidence to say he did.”

“None of them ended up stabbed and searched half a mile from Naylor’s home.”

They had obviously been having this fight for a while; their voices had that heavy, well-practiced rhythm. I put the evidence bags back on the table, leaned against the wall and stayed well out of it. “Naylor’s working for just over minimum wage and supporting two sick parents,” Sam said. “Where the hell is he going to get the money to buy antique bits and bobs? And why the hell would he want to?”

“He’d want to,” Frank said, “because he hates the March family’s guts and he’d jump at the chance to screw them over—and because, just like you said, he’s skint. He may not have the money himself, but there are plenty of people out there who do.”

It took me that long to realize what they were fighting about, why the whole room was tight with that hard, bitten-down tension. Art and Antiques may sound like the nerd squad, a bunch of tweedy professors with badges, but what they do is no joke. The black market spreads worldwide, and it gets tangled up with a whole bunch of other kinds of organized crime along the way. People get hurt, in a swap network where the currencies range from Picassos to Kalashnikovs to heroin; people get killed.

Sam made a furious, frustrated noise, shook his head and slumped back against the glass. “All I want,” he said, “is to find out whether this fella’s a killer, and arrest him if he is. I don’t give a damn what else he’s been doing in his spare time. He could have fenced the Mona Lisa and I wouldn’t care. If you seriously think he’s been passing antiques, we can hand him over to A and A once we’re done with him, but for now, he’s a murder suspect. Nothing else.”

Frank raised one eyebrow. “You’re assuming there’s no connection. Look at the pattern. Up until those five move in, Naylor’s brick-throwing and spray-painting his little heart out. Once they’re there, he takes one or two more shots and then, just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“all quiet on the western front. What, he thought those five were cute? He saw them renovating and didn’t want to mess up the new decor?”

“They went after him,” Sam said. The set of his mouth: he was inches from losing his temper. “He didn’t fancy getting the shite kicked out of him.”

Frank laughed. “You think that kind of grudge vanished overnight? Not a chance. Naylor found some other way to do damage to Whitethorn House—otherwise he wouldn’t have quit the vandalism, not in a million years. And look what happens as soon as Lexie’s not there to slip him antiques any more. He gives it a few weeks, in case she gets back in touch, and when she doesn’t, he’s right back to the rock through the window. He wasn’t worried about getting the shite kicked out of him the other night, was he?”

“You want to talk about patterns? Here’s a pattern for you. When the five of them chase him off, back in December, his grudge only gets worse. He’s not going to take on all of them at once, but he keeps spying on them, he finds out that one of them makes a habit of going out walking during his window of opportunity, he stalks her for a while and then he kills her. When he finds out he didn’t even get that right, the rage builds up again, till he loses control and bangs an arson threat through the window. How do you think he feels about what happened the other night? If one of those five keeps wandering around the lanes on her own, what do you think he’s going to do about it?”

Frank ignored that. “The question,” he told me, “is what we do with Little Johnny now. We can arrest him for burglary, vandalism, theft, whatever else we can come up with, and keep our fingers crossed that it loosens him up enough that he gives us something on the stabbing. Or we can stick this lot back under his bed, thank him kindly for helping us with our inquiries, send him home and see where he takes us.”

In a way, this fight had probably been inevitable all along, from the second Frank and Sam showed up at the same crime scene. Murder detectives are single-minded, focused on narrowing the investigation slowly and inexorably till everything extraneous is gone and the only thing left in their sights is the killer. Undercovers thrive on extraneous, on spreading their bets and keeping all their options open: you never know where tangents might lead, what unexpected game might poke its head out of the bushes if you watch every angle for long enough. They light all the fuses they can find, and wait to see what goes boom.

“And then what, Mackey?” Sam demanded. “Just supposing for a second that you’re right, Lexie was slipping the man antiques to sell, and Cassie gets their little operation going again. Then what?”

“Then,” Frank said, “I have a nice chat with A and A, I head down to Francis Street and buy Cassie a handful of lovely shiny widgets, and we take it from there.” He was smiling, but his eyes on Sam were narrow and watchful.

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.”

A and A uses undercovers all the time, undercovers posing as buyers, as fences, as sellers with nudge-and-a-wink sources, gradually working their way towards the big shots. Their operations last for months; they last for years.

“I’m investigating a fucking murder here,” Sam said. “Remember that? And I can’t arrest anyone for that murder while the victim’s alive and well and messing about with silver sugar bowls.”

“So? Get him after the antiques sting winds up, one way or the other. Best-case scenario, we establish a motive and a link between him and the victim, and we get to use them as leverage towards a confession. Worst-case scenario, we waste a little time. It’s not like our statute of limitations is about to run out.”

There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Lexie had spent the past three months selling John Naylor the contents of Whitethorn House just for kicks and giggles. Once that pregnancy test came up positive, she would have sold whatever it took to get out, but up until then: no.

I could have said so; should have. But the thing was that Frank was right on this much: Naylor would do anything that would damage Whitethorn House. He was going insane like a caged cat with his own helplessness, taking on that house charged with centuries of power, with no weapons in his hands but rocks and spray cans. If someone came up to him with a handful of spoils from Whitethorn House, a few bright ideas about where to sell the stuff and a promise of more, there was a good chance—an incredible chance—that he wouldn’t know how to say no.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Frank said. “Have another go at Naylor—just you, this time; he and I aren’t really clicking. Take as long as you need. If he gives you something on the murder—anything at all, even a hint—we arrest him, we forget the whole antiques question, we pull Cassie in and we shut the investigation down. If he gives you nothing…”

“Then what?” Sam demanded.

Frank shrugged. “If your way doesn’t work, then you come back out here and we all have a little chat about my way.”

Sam looked at him for a long time. “No tricks,” he said.

“Tricks?”

“Coming in. Knocking on the door when I’m on the edge of getting something. That kind of thing.”

I saw a muscle flick in Frank’s jaw, but all he said was, blandly, “No tricks.”

“OK,” Sam said, on a deep breath. “I’ll give it my best shot. Can you hang on here for a bit?”

He was talking to me. “Sure,” I said.

“I might want to use you—bring you in, maybe. I’ll figure it out as I go.” His eyes went to Naylor, who had switched to singing “Follow Me Up to Carlow,” just loud enough to be distracting. “Wish me luck,” he said, straightening his tie, and he was gone.

“Did your boyfriend just insult my virtue?” Frank wanted to know, when the door of the observation room shut behind Sam.

“You can challenge him to a duel if you want,” I said.

“I play fair. You know that.”

“Don’t we all,” I said. “We’ve just got different ideas about what counts as fair. Sam isn’t sure yours matches up all that well with his.”

“So we won’t buy a time share in the Med together,” Frank said. “I’ll live. What do you think of my little theory?”

I was watching Naylor, through the glass, but I could feel Frank’s eyes raking the side of my head. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t really seen enough of this guy to have an opinion.”

“But you’ve seen plenty of Lexie—secondhand, but still, you know as much about her as anyone does. Think she’d be capable of something like that?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? The whole thing about this girl is that no one has a clue what she was capable of.”

“You were playing your cards very close to the chest, just now. It’s not like you to keep your mouth shut for that long, not when you must have an opinion one way or the other. I’d like to have some idea which side you might be on, if your fella comes out of there with nothing and we have to pick up this argument again.”

The interview-room door opened and Sam came in, juggling two mugs of tea and catching the door with his shoulder. He looked wide awake, almost jaunty: the fatigue falls off you, the second you’re face to face with a suspect. “Shh,” I said. “I want to watch this.”

Sam sat down, with a comfortable grunt, and pushed one of the mugs across the table to Naylor. “Now,” he said. His country accent had magically got a lot stronger: us against the city folk. “I’ve sent Detective Mackey off to do his paperwork. He was only annoying us.”

Naylor stopped singing and considered this. “I don’t like the cut of him,” he said, finally.

I saw the corner of Sam’s mouth twitch. “Neither do I, sure. But we’re stuck with him.” Frank laughed softly, beside me, and moved closer to the glass.

Naylor shrugged. “You are, maybe. I’m not. As long as he’s here, I’ve nothing to say.”

“Grand,” Sam said easily. “He’s gone, and I’m not asking you to talk, just to listen. There’s something that I’ve been told happened in Glenskehy, a while back. As far as I can see, it could explain a lot. All I need you to do is tell me if it’s true.”

Naylor gave him a suspicious look, but he didn’t start the concert again. “Right,” Sam said, and took a swig of his tea. “There was a girl in Glenskehy, around the First World War…”

The story he told was a delicate blend of what he’d picked up in Rathowen, what I’d picked up from Uncle Simon’s magnum opus, and something star-ring Lillian Gish. He pulled out all the stops: the girl’s father had thrown her out of the house, she was begging in the streets of Glenskehy, locals spitting on her as they passed, kids throwing stones… He topped it all off with a semisubtle hint that the girl had been lynched by an angry mob from the village. The soundtrack here clearly involved a large string section.

By the time he finished his tearjerker, Naylor was rocking the chair back again and giving him a stony, disgusted stare. “No,” he said. “Jesus, no. That’s the biggest load of old shite I’ve heard in my life. Where did you get that?”

“So far,” Sam said, shrugging, “that’s the story I’ve heard. Unless someone else can correct it for me, I’ve no choice but to go on it.”

The chair creaked, a monotonous, unsettling noise. “Tell me, Detective,” Naylor said, “why would you be interested in the likes of us and our old stories? We’re plain people around Glenskehy, you know. We’re not used to getting the attention of important men like yourself.”

“That’s what he gave us all the way here, in the car,” Frank told me, getting comfortable with a shoulder against the edge of the window. “Our boy’s got a bit of a persecution complex.”

“Shh.”

“There’s been some hassle up at Whitethorn House,” Sam said. “Sure, I don’t have to tell you that. We’ve received information that there’s bad feeling between the house and the residents of Glenskehy. I need to establish the facts, so I can determine whether there’s any connection.”

Naylor laughed, a hard, humorless crack. “Bad feeling,” he said. “I suppose you could call it that, yeah. Is that what they told you up at the House?”

Sam shrugged. “All they said was that they weren’t welcome at the pub. No reason why they should be, sure. They’re not locals.”

“Lucky for them. They get a bit of hassle, and they’ve detectives crawling out of the woodwork to fix it. When it’s locals getting the hassle, where are ye? Where were ye when that girl was hanged? Filing it as a suicide and heading back to the pub.”

Sam’s eyebrows went up. “It wasn’t suicide?”

Naylor eyed him; those eyes swollen half shut made him look baleful, dangerous. “You want the true story?”

Sam made a small, easy gesture with one hand: I’m listening.

After a moment Naylor brought the chair down, reached out and wrapped his hands—broken nails, dark scabs on the knuckles—around the mug. “The girl worked as a maid up at Whitethorn House,” he said. “And one of the young fellas up there, one of the Marches, he took a fancy to her. Maybe she was stupid enough to think he’d marry her and maybe she wasn’t, but either way, she got into trouble.”

He gave Sam a long bird-of-prey stare, making sure he understood. “There was no throwing her out of the house. I’d say her father was raging, and I’d say he talked about waiting for the March fella in the lanes some dark night, but he’d have been mad to do it. Pure mad. This was before the independence, d’you see? The Marches owned all round Glenskehy. Whoever the girl was, they owned her father’s house; one word out of him, and his family would have been on the side of the road. So he did nothing.”

“That can’t have come easy,” Sam said.

“Easier than you’d think. Most people then wouldn’t deal with Whitethorn House any more than they had to. It had a bad name. Whitethorn’s the fairy tree, d’you see? Belongs to the fairies.” He gave Sam a grim, equivocal little smile. “There’s still people won’t walk under a hawthorn at night, though they wouldn’t be able to tell you why. It’s only leftovers now, scrapings, but back then there was superstition everywhere. It was the dark did it: no electricity and the long winter nights, you could see anything you liked in the shadows. There were plenty believed that them up at Whitethorn House had dealings with the fairies, or the devil, depending on what way your mind worked.” That sideways, cold flick of a smile again. “What do you think, Detective? Were we all mad savages, back then?”

Sam shook his head. “There’s a fairy ring on my uncle’s farm,” he said matter-of-factly. “He doesn’t believe in the fairies, never did, but he plows around it.”

Naylor nodded. “So that’s what people said in Glenskehy, when this girl came up pregnant. They said she lay down with one of the fairy men from up at the House, and she got up with a fairy child. And serve her right.”

“They thought the baby would be a changeling?”

“Yowza,” Frank said. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.” He was shaking with half-suppressed laughter. I wanted to kick him.

“They did, yeah,” Naylor said coldly. “And don’t be giving me that look, Detective. These are my great-grandparents we’re talking about, mine and yours. Can you swear to me you wouldn’t have believed the same, if you’d been born back then?”

“Different times,” Sam said, nodding.

“Not everyone said it, now. Only a few—the older folk, mostly. But enough that, one way or another, it got back to your man, the child’s father. Either he wanted rid of the child all along and he was only waiting for an excuse, or something wasn’t right in his mind to start with. A lot of them were always what you might call a bit odd, up at the House; maybe that’s one reason they got the name for having dealings with the fairies. He believed it, anyway. He thought there was something wrong with him, in his blood, that would wreck the child.”

His broken mouth twisted sideways. “So he arranged to meet the girl one night, before the baby was born. She went along, not a worry on her: he was her lover, wasn’t he? She thought he wanted to arrange to provide for her and the child. And instead he took a rope and he hanged her from a tree. That’s the true story. Everyone in Glenskehy knows. She didn’t kill herself, and no one from the village killed her. The baby’s father killed her, because he was afraid of his own child.”

“Bloody boggers,” Frank said. “I swear to God, you get outside Dublin and it’s a whole different universe. Jerry Springer, eat your heart out.”

“God rest,” Sam said quietly.

“Yeah,” Naylor said. “God rest. Your lot called it a suicide, sooner than arrest one of the gentry from the Big House. She went into unconsecrated ground, her and the child.”

It could have been true. Any of the versions we’d heard could have been the true one, any or none; there was no way to tell, across a hundred years. What mattered was that Naylor believed what he was saying, every word. He wasn’t acting like a guilty man, but this means less than you might think. He was consumed enough—that bitter intensity in his voice—that he might well believe he had nothing to feel guilty about. My heart was going fast and heavy. I thought of the others, heads bent in the library, expecting me to come back.

“Why would no one in the village tell me this?” Sam asked.

“Because it’s none of your business. We don’t want to be known for that: the mad village where the lunatic killed his bastard for being a fairy. We’re decent people, in Glenskehy. We’re plain people, but we’re not savages and we’re not eejits, and we’re no one’s freak show, d’you get me? We just want to be left alone.”

“Someone’s not leaving this alone, though,” Sam pointed out. “Someone painted BABY KILLERS on Whitethorn House, twice. Someone put a rock through their window, two nights ago, and fought them like hell when they went after him. Someone doesn’t want to leave that child to rest in peace.”

A long silence. Naylor shifted in his chair, touched his split lip with a finger and checked for blood. Sam waited.

“It was never just the baby,” he said, in the end. “That was bad enough, sure; but it only showed the way they are, that family. The cut of them. I didn’t know what other way to say it.”

He was halfway to putting his hand up for the graffiti, but Sam let that slide: he was after bigger game. “What way are they?” he asked. He was leaning back with his mug balanced on his knee, easy and interested, like a man settled in for a good long night at his local.

Naylor dabbed at his lip again, absently. He was thinking hard, searching for words. “All your detective work about Glenskehy. Did you find out where it came from?”

Sam grinned. “My Irish is after getting awful rusty. Glen of the hawthorn, is it?”

Naylor gave a fast, impatient head-shake. “Ah, no, no, not the name. The place. The village. Glenskehy. Where d’you think it came from?”

Sam shook his head.

“The Marches. They made it, to suit themselves. When they were given the land and they built that house, they brought people in to work for them—maids, gardeners, stable hands, gamekeepers… They wanted their servants on their land, under their thumb, so they could keep them in line, but not too nearby; they didn’t want to be smelling the stink of the peasants.” There was a vicious, disgusted twist to the corner of his mouth. “So they built a village for the servants to live in. Like someone having a swimming pool put in, or a conservatory, or a stable full of ponies: just a little luxury, to make life more comfortable.”

“That’s no way to look at human beings,” Sam agreed. “It’s a long time ago, though.”

“A long time ago, yeah. Back when the Marches had a use for Glenskehy. And now that it’s not serving their pleasure any more, they’re standing by and watching it die.” There was something building in Naylor’s voice, something volatile and dangerous, and for the first time they came together in my mind, this man talking local history with Sam and the wild creature that had tried to gouge my eyes out in a dark lane. “It’s falling to bits, that village. Another few years and there’ll be nothing left of it. The only ones who stay are the ones trapped there, like myself, while the place dies and takes them along with it. Do you know why I never went to college?”

Sam shook his head.

“I’m no fool. I had the points for it. But I had to stay in Glenskehy, to look after my parents, and there’s no work there that needs an education. There’s nothing but farming. What did I need a degree for, to dig muck on another man’s farm? I started doing that the day after I left school. I’d no other choice. And there’s dozens more like me.”

“That’s not the Marches’ fault, sure,” Sam said reasonably. “What could they do about it?”

That hard bark of a laugh again. “There’s plenty they could do. Plenty. Four or five years back there was a fella came looking around the village, a Galway man, same as yourself. A property developer. He wanted to buy Whitethorn House, turn it into a fancy hotel. He was going to build it up—add new wings, new buildings round the grounds, a golf course, all the rest; he’d big plans, this fella. Do you know what that would have done for Glenskehy?”

Sam nodded. “A load of new jobs.”

“More than that. Tourists coming through, new businesses coming in to look after them, people moving in to work for the new businesses. Young people staying on, instead of clearing out to Dublin as soon as they’re able. New houses being built, and decent roads. A school of our own again, instead of sending the children up to Rathowen. Work for teachers, for a doctor, for estate agents maybe—educated people. Not all at once, like, it would’ve taken years, but once the ball starts rolling… That was all we needed: just that one push. That one chance. We’d have had Glenskehy coming back to life.”

Four or five years back: just before the attacks on Whitethorn House began. He was matching my profile immaculately, piece by piece. The thought of Whitethorn House turned into a hotel made me feel a lot better about the state of Naylor’s face, but still: you couldn’t help being pulled in by the passion in his voice, seeing the vibrant vision he was in love with, the village turned bustling and hopeful again, alive.

“But Simon March wouldn’t sell?” Sam asked.

Naylor shook his head, a slow angry roll; winced, touched his swollen jaw. “One man, on his own in a house that could fit dozens. What good was it to him? But he wouldn’t sell. It’s been nothing but bad news since the day it was built, that house, and he held onto it for dear life sooner than let it do anyone a scrap of good. And the same when he died: the young fella hadn’t been near Glenskehy since he was a child, he has no family, he had no need for the place, but he held on. That’s what they are, the Marches. That’s what they’ve been all along. What they want, they keep, and the rest of the world be damned.”

“It’s the family home,” Sam pointed out. “Maybe they love it.”

Naylor’s head came up and he stared at Sam, pale blazing eyes amid the swelling and the dark bruises. “If a man makes something,” he said, “he has a duty to look after it. That’s what a decent man does. If you make a child, it’s yours to care for, as long as it lives; you’ve no right to kill it to suit yourself. If you make a village, it’s yours to look after; you do what it takes to keep that place going. You don’t have the right to stand by and watch it die, just so you can keep hold of a house.”

“I’m actually with him on this one,” Frank said, beside me. “Maybe we’ve got more in common than we thought.”

I barely heard him. I had got one thing wrong in my profile, after all: this man would never have stabbed Lexie for being pregnant with his baby, or even for living in Whitethorn House. I had thought he was an avenger, obsessed with the past, but he was a lot more complicated and more ferocious than that. It was the future he was obsessed with, his home’s future, seeping away like water. The past was the dark conjoined twin wrapped round that future, steering it, shaping it.

“Is that all you wanted from the Marches?” Sam asked quietly. “For them to do the decent thing—sell up, give Glenskehy a chance?”

After a long moment Naylor nodded, a stiff, reluctant jerk.

“And you thought the only way to make them do it was to put the frighteners on them.”

Another nod. Frank whistled, softly, through his teeth. I was holding my breath.

“No better way to frighten them off,” Sam said, thoughtful and matter-of-fact, “than to give one of them a little cut, one night. Nothing serious, not even meant to hurt her. Just to let them know: you’re not welcome here.”

Naylor’s mug went down hard on the table and he shoved his chair back, arms folding tight across his chest. “I never hurt anyone. Never.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Someone handed out a fair old beating to three of the Whitethorn House people, the same night you got those bruises.”

“That was a fight. An honest fight—and they were three to one against me. Do you not see the difference? I could have killed Simon March a dozen times over, if I’d wanted to. I never touched him.”

“Simon March was old, sure. You knew he was bound to die within a few years, and you knew there was a decent chance his heirs would sell up, sooner than move out to Glenskehy. You could afford to wait.”

Naylor started to say something, but Sam kept talking, level and heavy, cutting across him. “But once young Daniel and his mates arrived, it was a whole different story. They’re going nowhere, and a bit of spray paint wasn’t scaring them. So you had to up the stakes, didn’t you?”

“No. I never—”

“You had to tell them, loud and clear: get out, if you know what’s good for you. You’d seen Lexie Madison out walking, late at night—maybe you’d followed her before, had you?”

“I don’t—”

“You were coming out of the pub. You were drunk. You had a knife on you. You thought about the Marches letting Glenskehy die, and you went up there to end it once and for all. Maybe you were just going to threaten her, is that it?”

“No—”

“Then how did it happen, John? You tell me. How?”

Naylor shot forwards, his fists coming up and his lip pulling into a furious snarl; he was on the edge of going for Sam. “You give me the sick. They whistled for you, them up at the house, and you came running like a good dog. They go whining to you about the nasty peasant who doesn’t know his place, and you bring me in here and accuse me of stabbing one of them—That’s shite. I want them out of Glenskehy—and believe you me, they’ll be out—but I never thought about hurting any of them. Never. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. When they pack up their things and go, I want to be there to wave them good-bye.”

It should have been a letdown, but it went like speed through my blood, pounded high up in my throat, took my breath away. It felt—and I shifted against the glass, kept my face angled away from Frank so he wouldn’t see this—it felt like a reprieve.

Naylor was still going. “Those dirty bastards used you to put me in my place, just like they’ve been using the police and everyone else for three hundred years. I’ll tell you this much for nothing, Detective, the same as I’d tell whoever gave you that load of old shite about a lynch mob. You can look in Glenskehy all you like, but you’ll find nothing. It was no one from that village stabbed that young one. I know it comes hard to go after the rich instead of the poor, but if it’s a criminal you’re after and not a scapegoat, you look up at Whitethorn House. We don’t breed them round my way.”

He folded his arms, tilted his chair onto its back legs and started singing “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” Frank eased back away from the glass and laughed, quietly, to himself.

Sam tried for more than an hour. He went through every incident of vandalism, one by one, going back four and a half years; listed the evidence linking Naylor to the rock and the fight, some of it solid—the bruises, my description—and some invented, fingerprints, handwriting analysis; came into the observation room, grabbed the evidence bags without looking at me or at Frank, and tossed them on the table in front of Naylor; threatened to arrest him for burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, everything short of murder. In exchange he got “The Croppy Boy,” “Four Green Fields” and, for a change of pace, “She Moved through the Fair.”

In the end he had to give up. There was a long time between the moment when he left Naylor in the interview room and the moment when he came into the observation room, evidence bags dangling from one hand and the exhaustion back on his face, deeper than ever.

“I thought that went well,” Frank said brightly. “You could even have got a confession on the vandalism, if you hadn’t gone for the big prize.”

Sam ignored him. “What do you think?” he asked me.

There was one off chance left, as far as I could see, one way Naylor could have snapped badly enough to stab Lexie: if he had been the baby’s father, and she had told him she was going to have an abortion. “I don’t know,” I said. “I genuinely don’t.”

“I don’t think he’s our boy,” Sam said. He dropped the evidence bags on the table and leaned heavily against it, head going back.

Frank did amazed. “You’re giving up on him because he held out for one morning? From where I’m standing, he looks good enough to eat: motive, opportunity, mind-set… Just because he tells a great story, you’re going to arrest him on some pissant vandalism charge and throw away your chance to have him on murder?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

“Now,” Frank said, “we try it my way. Fair’s fair; your way got us nowhere. Cut Naylor loose, let Cassie see what she can get out of him on the antiques deal, and see if that takes us any closer to the stabbing.”

“This man doesn’t give a damn about money,” Sam said, without looking at Frank. “What he cares about is his town, and the damage that’s been done to it by Whitethorn House.”

“So he’s got a cause. There’s nothing in this world more dangerous than a true believer. How far do you think he’d go for that cause?”

This is one of the things about fighting with Frank: he moves the goalposts faster than you can catch up, you keep losing track of what you were originally arguing about. I couldn’t tell whether he actually believed in this antiques caper, or whether it was just that he was ready to try anything, at this stage, to beat Sam.

Sam was starting to look dazed, like a boxer after taking too many punches. “I don’t think he’s a killer,” he said doggedly. “And I don’t see why you think he’s a fence. There’s nothing pointing to that.”

“Let’s ask Cassie,” Frank suggested. He was watching me carefully. Frank’s always been a gambler, but I wished I knew what was making him bet on this one. “What do you think, babe? Any chance I’m right about the antiques scam?”

In that second a million things went through my mind. The observation room I knew by heart, down to the stain on the carpet where I’d dropped a coffee cup two years back, and where I had become a visitor. My Detective Barbie clothes hanging in my wardrobe, Maher’s juicy morning throat-clearing routine. The others, waiting for me in the library. The cool lily-of-the-valley smell of my room in Whitethorn House, wrapping around me soft as gauze.

“You could be,” I said, “yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Sam, who in fairness had had a long day already, finally lost it. “Jesus, Cassie! What the hell? You can’t seriously believe in that mad crap. What side are you on?”

“Let’s try not to think in those terms,” Frank put in, virtuously. He had arranged himself comfortably against a wall, hands in his pockets, to watch the action. “We’re all on the same side here.”

“Back off, Frank,” I said sharply, before Sam could punch his lights out. “And Sam, I’m on Lexie’s side. Not Frank’s, not yours, just hers. OK?”

“That right there is exactly what I was afraid of.” Sam caught the startled look on my face. “What, you thought it was just this tosspot”—Frank, who pointed to his chest and tried to look wounded—“that had me worried? He’s bad enough, God knows, but at least I can keep an eye on him. But this girl—On her side is a bad, bad place to be. Her housemates were on her side all the way, and if Mackey’s right, she was selling the lot of them down the river, not a bother on her. Her fella over in America was on her side, he loved her, and look what she did to him. The poor bastard’s a wreck. Have you seen that letter?”

“Letter?” I said, to Frank. “What letter?”

He shrugged. “Chad sent her a letter, care of my FBI friend. Very moving and all, but I’ve been through it with a fine-tooth comb and there’s nothing useful there. You don’t need distractions.”

“Jesus, Frank! If you’ve got something that tells me anything about her, anything at all—”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“Read it,” Sam said. His voice sounded raw at the edges and his face was white, white as it had been that first day at the crime scene. “You read that letter—I’ll give you a copy, if Mackey won’t. That fella Chad is bloody devastated. Four and a half years, it’s been, and he hasn’t gone out with another girl. He’ll probably never trust a woman again. How could he? He woke up one morning with his whole life in bits around him. Everything he dreamed about, gone up in smoke.”

“Unless you want that super of yours in here,” Frank said silkily, “I’d keep it down.”

Sam didn’t even hear him. “And don’t forget, she didn’t fall into North Carolina out of the sky. She was somewhere else before that, and for all we know somewhere else before that. Somewhere out there, there’s more people—God only knows how many—who’ll never be able to stop wondering where she is, whether she’s in a shallow grave in a dozen pieces, whether she went off the rails and ended up on the streets, whether she just never gave a damn about them to start with, what the hell happened to blow up their lives. All of them were on this girl’s side, and look what it did to them. Everyone who’s been on her side has ended up fucked, Cassie, everyone, and you’re going the same way.”

“I’m fine, Sam,” I said. His voice rolled over me like the fine edge of dawn haze, barely there, barely real.

“Let me ask you this. Your last serious boyfriend was just before you first went undercover, am I right? Aidan something?”

"Yeah,” I said. “Aidan O’Donovan.” He was good news, Aidan: smart, high octane, going places, an offbeat sense of humor that could make me laugh no matter how crap my day had been. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time.

“What happened to him?”

“We broke up,” I said. “While I was under.” For a second I saw Aidan’s eyes, the evening he dumped me. I was in a hurry, had to get back to my flat in time for a late-night meeting with the speed—bunny who ended up stabbing me a few months later. Aidan waited with me at my bus stop and when I looked down at him from the top deck of the bus, I think he might have been crying.

“Because you were under. Because that’s what happens.” Sam spun round to Frank: “What about you, Mackey? Have you got a wife? A girlfriend? Anything?”

“Are you asking me out?” Frank inquired. His voice sounded amused, but his eyes had narrowed. “Because I should warn you, I’m not a cheap date.”

“That’s a no. And that’s what I figured.” Sam whipped round to me again: “Just three weeks, Cassie, and look what’s happening to us. Is this what you want? What do you think happens to us if you head off for a year to do this fucked-up joke of an idea?”

“Let’s try this,” Frank said softly, very still against the wall. “You decide if there’s a problem on your side of the investigation, and I’ll decide if there’s a problem on mine. Is that OK with you?”

The look in his eyes had sent superintendents and drug lords scuttling for cover, but Sam didn’t even seem to notice it. “No, it’s not bloody OK. Your side of this investigation is a fucking disaster area, and if you can’t see that, then thank Jesus I can. I’ve got a suspect in that room, whether he’s our fella or not, and I found him through police work. What have you got? Three weeks of this insane bloody carry-on, all for nothing. And instead of cutting our losses, you’re trying to force us to up the ante and do something even more insane—”

“I’m not forcing you to do anything. I’m asking Cassie—who’s on this investigation as my undercover, remember, not your Murder detective—whether she’d be willing to take her assignment a step further.”

Long summer afternoons on the grass, the hum of bees and the lazy creak of the swing seat. Kneeling in the herb garden picking our harvest, soft rain and leaf-smoke in the air, scent of bruised rosemary and lavender on my hands. Wrapping Christmas presents on Lexie’s bedroom floor, snow falling past my window, while Rafe played carols on the piano and Abby harmonized from her room and the smell of gingerbread curled under my door.

Sam’s eyes and Frank’s on me, unblinking. Both of them had shut up; the silence in the room was sudden and deep and peaceful. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

Naylor had moved on to “Avondale” and down the corridor Quigley was being aggrieved about something. I thought of me and Rob watching suspects from this observation room, laughing shoulder to shoulder along the corridor, disintegrating like a meteor in Operation Vestal’s poison air, crashing and burning, and I felt nothing at all, nothing except the walls opening up and falling away around me, light as petals. Sam’s eyes were huge and dark as if I had hit him, and Frank was watching me in a way that made me think if I had any sense I’d be scared, but all I could feel was every muscle loosening like I was eight years old and cartwheeling myself dizzy on some green hillside, like I could dive a thousand miles through cool blue water without once needing to breathe. I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.