The Likeness

25

The next few minutes are shreds of nightmare spliced together with great blank patches. I know I ran, slid on fallen glass and kept running, trying to get to Daniel. I know Abby, crouched over him, fought like a cat to keep me off, wild-eyed, clawing. I remember blood smeared down her T-shirt, the boom echoing through the house as someone broke the front door open, men’s voices shouting, feet pounding. Hands under my arms, pulling me back; I twisted and kicked till they gave me a hard shake and my eyes cleared and I recognized Frank’s face close to mine, Cassie it’s me stop relax it’s over. Sam shoving him away, his hands rough with panic all over me, checking for bullet holes, fingers coming away bloody Is that yours is that yours? I didn’t know. Sam turning me, grabbing at me, his voice finally sagging with relief: You’re grand, you’re OK, he missed… Someone said something about the window. Someone sobbing. Too much light, colors so bright you could cut yourself, too many voices, ambulance, get an—

Finally someone steered me out front and into a marked car, slammed the door. I sat there for a long time, looking at the cherry trees, at the quiet sky slowly dimming, at the distant dark curves of the hills. I didn’t think about anything at all.

There are procedures for this, for officer-involved shootings. There are procedures for everything, in the force, going carefully unmentioned till the day they’re needed at last and the keeper turns the rusty key, blows dust off the file. I had never met a cop who had shot anyone. There was no one who could have told me what to expect, or how to do this, or that it was all going to be OK.

Byrne and Doherty got stuck taking me to headquarters, in Phoenix Park, where Internal Affairs work in showroom offices and a thick puffy cloud of defensiveness. Byrne drove; the slump of his shoulders said, clear as a voice balloon coming out of his head, I knew something like this would happen. I sat in the back like a suspect and Doherty tried to be surreptitious about watching me in the rearview mirror. He was practically drooling: this was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, plus gossip is good currency in our world and he had just won the lottery. My legs were so cold I could barely move them; I was cold right down to my bones, as if I’d fallen into a freezing lake. At every traffic light Byrne stalled the car and swore morosely.

Everyone hates IA—the Rat Squad, people call them, the quislings, various other less flattering things—but they were good to me, that day at least. They were detached and professional and very gentle, like nurses going through their expert rituals around some patient who had been in a terrible, disfiguring accident. They took my badge—“for the duration of the investigation,” someone said soothingly; it felt like they had shaved my head. They peeled off the bandage and unclipped the mike. They took my gun like evidence, which of course it was, careful latex fingers dropping it into an evidence bag, sealing it, labeling it with neat marker strokes. A Bureau tech with her hair in a smooth brown bun like a Victorian maid’s stuck a needle in my arm, deftly, and took a blood sample to test for alcohol and drugs; I remembered, vaguely, Rafe pouring and the smooth cool of the glass, but I couldn’t remember taking even one sip, and I thought this had to be a good thing. She swabbed my hands for gunshot residue and I noticed, as if I were watching someone else from a long way away, that my hands weren’t shaking, they were rock steady, and that a month of Whitethorn House cooking had softened the hollows by my wrist bones. “There,” the tech said comfortingly, “quick and painless,” but I was busy staring at my hands and it wasn’t till hours later, when I was sitting on a neutral-colored lobby sofa under innocuous art waiting for someone to come take me somewhere else, that I realized where I’d heard that tone before: out of my own mouth. Not to victims, not to families; to the others. To men who’d left their wives half blinded, to women who’d scalded their toddlers with boiling water, to killers, in the light-headed disbelieving moments after everything came pouring out, I had said in that infinitely gentle voice, It’s OK, you’re OK. Breathe. The worst part’s over.

Outside the lab window the sky had gone black, a tainted rusty black smeared orange with city lights, and there was a thin breakable moon riding low among the treetops in the park. A shiver rocked my spine like a long cold wind. Cop cars speeding through Glenskehy and then away again, John Naylor’s eyes pure with rage, and night coming down hard.

I wasn’t supposed to talk to Sam or Frank, not till all of us had been interviewed. I told the tech I had to go to the bathroom and gave her a woman-to-woman look to explain why I was taking my jacket with me. In the cubicle I flushed the jacks and while the water was still running—everything about IA makes you paranoid, the thick carpets, the hush—I texted Frank and Sam, fast. Someone NEEDS to keep an eye on the house.

I set my phone to silent and sat on the toilet lid, smelling sick fake-flower air freshener and waiting, for as long as I could get away with, but neither of them answered. Their phones were probably off; they would be doing furious full-on interviewing of their own, expertly juggling Abby and Rafe and Justin between them, having quick undertone conferences in corridors, asking questions over and over again with relentless, ferocious patience. Maybe—my heart flipped upwards, punched at the base of my throat—maybe one of them was at the hospital, talking to Daniel. White face, IV lines, people in scrubs moving fast. I tried to remember exactly where the bullet had hit him, ran through it over and over in my head, but the film blinked and stuttered and I couldn’t see. That tiny nod; the leap of his gun barrel; recoil slamming up my arms; those grave gray eyes, pupils only a little dilated. Then there was just Abby’s voice flat and adamant No; the blank wall where Daniel had been standing, and silence, huge and roaring in my ears.

The tech handed me back to the IA guys and they told me that if I was feeling a little shaken up I could wait till the next day to give my statement, but I said no, thanks, I was fine. They explained to me that I had the right to have a lawyer or a union rep present and I said no, thanks, I was fine. Their interview room was smaller than ours, barely room to push your chair back from the table, and cleaner: no graffiti, no cigarette burns in the carpet, no gouges in the walls where someone had gone alpha gorilla with a chair. Both of the IA guys looked like cartoon accountants: gray suits, bald spots, no lips, matching rimless glasses. One of them leaned against the wall behind my shoulder—even if you know all the tactics inside out, they still work on you—and the other one sat across from me. He adjusted his notebook fussily so that it lined up with the edge of the table, turned on his tape recorder and did the preliminary spiel. “Now,” he said. “In your own words, Detective.”

“Daniel March,” I said; they were the only words that would come out. “Is he going to be all right?” and I knew even before he told me, I knew when his eyelids flickered and his eyes slid away from mine.

The Bureau tech—her name was Gillian—drove me home sometime late that night, when the IA twins had finished taking my statement. I told them what you’d expect: the truth, as well as I could put it into words, nothing but the truth, not the whole truth. No, I didn’t feel that I’d had any option except to fire my weapon. No, I had had no opportunity to attempt a nonlethal disabling shot. Yes, I had believed my life was in danger. No, there had been no prior indication that Daniel was dangerous. No, he hadn’t been our prime suspect, long list of reasons why not—it took me a second to remember them, they felt so long ago and far away, part of a different life. No, I didn’t believe it had been remiss of me or Frank or Sam to leave a gun in the house, it was standard undercover practice to leave illegal materials in place for the duration of the investigation, we had had no way to remove it without blowing the whole operation. Yes, in retrospect that decision did appear to have been unwise. They told me we’d talk again soon—they made it sound like a threat—and set up an appointment for me with the shrink, who was going to just about wet his polyester blend over this one.

Gillian needed my clothes—Lexie’s clothes—to test for gunshot residue. She stood at the door of my flat, hands folded, watching me while I changed: she had to be sure that what she saw was what she got, no switching out the T-shirt for a clean one. My own clothes felt cold and too stiff, like they didn’t belong to me. The flat was cold too, it had a faint dank smell, and there was a thin film of dust on all the surfaces. Sam hadn’t come by in a while.

I gave Gillian my clothes and she folded them away, efficiently, in big evidence bags. At the door she hesitated, hands full; for the first time she looked unsure, and I realized she was probably younger than me. “Are you going to be all right on your own?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. I had said it enough times, that day, that I was thinking of getting a T-shirt printed.

“Is there anyone who could come stay with you?”

“I’ll ring my boyfriend,” I said, “he’ll come over,” even though I wasn’t sure that was true; I wasn’t sure at all.

When Gillian left carrying the last of Lexie Madison, I sat on my windowsill with a glass of brandy—I hate brandy, but I was pretty sure I was officially in shock in about four different ways, and besides it was the only booze in the flat—and watched the lighthouse beam blinking, serene and regular as a heartbeat, out over the bay. It was some ungodly hour of the night, but I couldn’t imagine sleeping; in the faint yellow light from my bedside lamp the futon looked vaguely threatening, overstuffed with squashy heat and bad dreams. I wanted to ring Sam so badly it was like being dehydrated, but I didn’t have anything left inside me to handle it, not that night, if he didn’t answer.

Somewhere far away a house alarm screamed briefly, till someone switched it off and the silence swelled up again and hissed at me. Off to the south the lights of Dun Laoghaire pier were strung out neat as Christmas lights; beyond them I thought I saw, for a second-trick of the eyes—the silhouette of the Wicklow mountains, against the dark sky. There were only a few stray cars passing down the strand road, that time of night. The smooth sweeps of their headlights grew and faded and I wondered where those people were going, late and solitary, what they were thinking about in the warm bubbles of their cars; what delicate, hard-won, irreplaceable layers of lives were wrapped around them.

I don’t think about my parents much. I’ve only got a handful of memories, and I don’t want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut. That night, though, I spread them all on the windowsill like frail pictures cut from tissue paper and went through them, one by one. My mother a nightlight shadow on the side of my bed, just a slim waist and a ponytailed fall of curls, a hand on my forehead and a smell I’ve never found anywhere else and a low sweet voice singing me to sleep: A la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener, j’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baignée… She was younger then than I am now; she never made thirty. My father sitting on a green hill with me and teaching me to tie my shoelaces, his worn brown shoes, his strong hands with a scrape on one knuckle, taste of cherry ice pop on my mouth and both of us giggling at the mess I made. The three of us lying on the sofa under a duvet watching Bagpuss on TV, my father’s arms holding us together in a big warm tangled bundle, my mother’s head nudged under his chin and my ear on his chest so I could feel the buzz of his laugh in my bones. My mother putting on her makeup on her way out to a gig, me sprawled on their bed watching her and twisting the duvet cover around my thumb and asking, How did you find Daddy? And her smiling, in the mirror, a small private smile into her own smoky eyes: I’ll tell you that story when you’re older. When you’ve got a little girl of your own. Someday.

The sky was just starting to turn gray, far out over the horizon, and I was wishing I had a gun to take to the firing range and wondering whether a really serious swig of brandy would let me doze off on the windowsill, when my buzzer rang; a tiny, tentative flick of a ring, so quick I thought I’d imagined it.

It was Sam. He didn’t take his hands out of his coat pockets and I didn’t touch him. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said, “but I figured, if you were awake anyway…”

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “How did it go?”

“Like you’d expect. They’re in bits, they hate our guts and they’ll be giving us nothing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I figured that.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said, automatically.

He glanced around the room—too tidy, no plates in the sink, futon still folded up—and blinked hard, like his eyelids were scratchy. “That text you sent me,” he said. “I did get on to Byrne, soon as I found the message. He said he’d keep an eye on the place, but… You know what he’s like. All he did was drive by when he got around to it, on his night round.”

Something gauzy and dark swept up behind me, looming, trembling at my shoulder like a great cat ready to pounce. “John Naylor,” I said. “What did he do?”

Sam rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “The firemen think it was petrol. We left crime-scene tape all around the house, but… The door was broken in, sure; and that window at the back, the one Daniel shot out. Your man just walked through the tape and straight in.”

A pillar of fire on the mountainside. Abby and Rafe and Justin alone in grimy interview rooms, Daniel and Lexie on cold steel. “Did they save anything?”

“By the time Byrne spotted it, and then by the time the fire service got there… It’s miles from anything.”

“I know,” I said. Somehow I was sitting down on the futon. I could feel the map of Whitethorn House branded on my bones: the shape of the newel post printed in my palm, the curves of Lexie’s bedstead down my spine, the slants and turns of the staircase in my feet, my body turned into a shimmering treasure map for a lost island. What Lexie had started, I had finished for her. Between the two of us, we had razed Whitethorn House to rubble and smoking ash. Maybe that was what she had wanted me for, all along.

“Anyway,” Sam said. “I just thought you’d better hear it from me, instead of… I don’t know, on the morning news. I know the way you felt about that house.” Even then, there wasn’t a spark of bitterness in his voice, but he didn’t come to me and he didn’t sit down. He still had his coat on.

“The others,” I said. “Do they know?” For a dizzy second, before I remembered how much they hated me now and how much right they had, I thought: I should tell them. They should hear it from me.

“Yeah. I told them. They’re not mad about me, but Mackey… I figured I’d better do it. They…” Sam shook his head. The tight twist to one corner of his mouth told me how it had gone. “They’ll be all right,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

“They don’t have families,” I said. “They don’t have friends, nothing. Where are they staying?”

Sam sighed. “They’re in custody, sure. Conspiracy to commit murder. It won’t stick—we’ve nothing admissible on them, unless they talk, and they won’t—but… well. We have to give it a go. Tomorrow, once they’re released, Victim Support’ll give them a hand finding somewhere to stay.”

“What about Whatsisname?” I asked; I could see the name in my head, but it wouldn’t come out. “For the fire. Did you pull him in yet?”

“Naylor? Byrne and Doherty went looking for him, but he hasn’t shown up yet. No point in chasing after him; he knows those hills like the back of his hand. He’ll come home sooner or later. We’ll pick him up then.”

“What a mess,” I said. The dim, unfocused yellow light made the flat feel underground, suffocating. “What a five-star, twenty-four-carat, all-out mess.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “well…” and hitched vaguely at the shoulders of his coat. He was looking past me, at the last stars fading in the window. “She was bad news from the beginning, that girl. It’ll all sort itself out in the end, I suppose. I’d better head. I’ve to be in early, have another go at those three, for all the good it’ll do. I just thought you should know.”

“Sam,” I said. I couldn’t stand up; it took all the guts I had left just to hold out my hand to him. “Stay.”

I saw him bite down on the inside of his lip. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You should get some sleep too; you must be shattered. And I shouldn’t even be here, sure. IA said…”

I couldn’t say to him, When I was sure I was about to be shot, you were what I thought in my last second. I couldn’t even say Please. All I could do was sit there on the futon with my hand stretched out, not breathing, and hope to God that I hadn’t left it too late.

Sam ran a hand over his mouth. “I need to know something,” he said. “Are you transferring back to Undercover?”

“No,” I said. “Jesus, no. Not a chance in hell. This was different, Sam. This was a once-off.”

“Your man Mackey said—” Sam caught himself, shook his head in disgust. “That tosser,” he said.

“What did he say?”

“Ah, a load of old shite.” Sam sat down on the sofa with a thud, as if someone had cut his strings. “Once an undercover, always an undercover; you’d be back, now you’d had a taste of it. That kind of thing. I couldn’t… It was bad enough for a few weeks, Cassie. If you went back full-time… I can’t handle that. I can’t.”

I was too tired to get properly angry. “Frank was bullshitting,” I said. “It’s what he does best. He wouldn’t have me on his squad even if I wanted to be there—which I don’t. He just didn’t want you trying to get me to come home. He figured, if you thought I was where I belonged…”

“Sounds about right,” Sam said, “yeah.” He stared down at the coffee table, rubbed dust off it with his fingertips. “So you’re staying in DV? For definite?”

“If I’ve still got a job after yesterday, you mean?”

“Yesterday was Mackey’s fault,” Sam said, and even through all the exhaustion I saw the hard flare of anger across his face. “Not yours. Every single bloody bit of this is on Mackey. IA aren’t eejits; they’ll see that, same as everyone else does.”

“It wasn’t just Frank’s fault,” I said. “I was there, Sam. I let things get out of control, I let Daniel get his hands on a gun, and then I shot him. I can’t put that on Frank.”

“And I let him run with his lunatic bloody idea, and I’ve to live with that. But he’s the one who was in charge. When you take that on, you have to take responsibility for whatever comes out of it. If he tries to dump this mess on you—”

“He won’t,” I said. “Not his style.”

“Seems to me it’s exactly his style,” Sam said. He shook his head, shaking off the thought of Frank. “We’ll deal with that when it comes. But say you’re right, and he doesn’t shaft you to save his own arse; you’re staying in DV?”

“For now,” I said, “yeah. But down the line…” I hadn’t even known I was going to say this, it was the last thing I’d ever expected to come out of my mouth, but once I heard the words it seemed to me that they’d been waiting for me to find them ever since that luminous afternoon with Daniel, under the ivy. “I miss Murder, Sam. I miss it like hell, all the time. I want to come back.”

“Right,” Sam said. His head went back and he took a breath. “Yeah, I thought that, all right. That’s the end of us, then.”

You’re not allowed to go out with anyone on your squad—as O’Kelly elegantly puts it, no shagging on the company copier. “No,” I said. “Sam, no; it doesn’t have to be. Even if O’Kelly’s on for taking me back, there might not be an opening for years, and who knows where we’ll be by then? You could be running a squad of your own.” He didn’t smile. “If it comes down to it, we’ll just stay under the radar. It happens all the time, Sam. You know it does. Barry Norton and Elaine Leahy—” Norton and Leahy have been on Motor Vehicles for ten years and living together for eight of them. They pretend to carpool, and everyone including their super pretends not to know.

Sam shook his head, like a big dog waking up. “That’s not what I want,” he said. “All the best to them, and all, but I want this to be real. Maybe you’d be grand with having what they’ve got—I always figured that was one reason why you didn’t want to tell people about us, sure: so you could maybe come back to Murder, someday. But I’m not after a shag, or a fling, or some half-arsed part-time thing where we have to act like we’re…” He fumbled inside his coat; he was so exhausted that he was pawing at it as if he were drunk. “I’ve been carrying this around with me since two weeks after we started going out. Remember, we went for that walk round Howth Head? It was a Sunday?”

I remembered. A cool gray day, soft rain weightless in the air, wide smell of sea filling my chest; Sam’s mouth tasted of wild salt. We walked on the edges of high cliffs all afternoon and ate fish and chips on a bench for dinner, my legs were killing me, and it was the first time after Operation Vestal that I can remember feeling like me.

“The day after,” Sam said, “I bought this. On my lunch break.” He found what he’d been looking for and dropped it on the coffee table. It was a blue velvet ring box.

“Oh, Sam,” I said. “Oh, Sam.”

“I meant it,” Sam said. “This. You; us. I wasn’t just having a laugh.”

“Neither was I,” I said. That observation room; the look in his eyes. Was. “Never. I just… I got lost along the way, for a while. I’m so sorry, Sam. I fucked up every way there is, and I’m so sorry.”

“I love you, for Christ’s sake. You going off undercover like that, I nearly went mental—and I couldn’t even talk to anyone about it, because no one knew. I can’t…”

He trailed off, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. I knew there had to be some delicate way of asking this, but the edges of my vision kept warping and flicking and I couldn’t think straight. I wondered if there could have been a worse time for this conversation. “Sam,” I said, “I killed a person today. Yesterday; whatever. I don’t have any brain cells left. You’re going to have to spell it out: are you breaking up with me or proposing to me?” I was pretty sure which one it was. All I wanted was to get it over with, do the good-bye routine, and chug the rest of the brandy till I knocked myself out.

Sam gave the ring box a baffled look, as if he wasn’t sure how it had got there. “Jesus,” he said. “I didn’t… I’d it all planned: dinner somewhere nice, with a view, like. And champagne. But I suppose—I mean, now that…”

He picked up the box, opened it. I couldn’t catch up; the only thing that registered was that he didn’t seem to be dumping me, and that the relief was purer and more painful than I could have imagined. Sam disentangled himself from the sofa and got down on one knee, clumsily, on the floor.

“Right,” he said, and held out the box to me. He was white and wide-eyed; he looked as stunned as I was. “Will you marry me?”

The only thing I wanted to do was laugh—not at him, just at the sheer screaming pitch of crazy that day had managed to hit. I was scared that if I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. “I know,” Sam said, and swallowed, “I know it’d mean you couldn’t come back to Murder—not without special permission, and…”

“And neither of us is going to get any special treatment any time soon,” I said. Daniel’s voice brushed along my cheek like dark feathers, like a long night wind coming down from some far mountain. Take what you want and pay for it, says God.

“Yeah. If… God. If you want to think about it…” Another swallow. “You don’t need to decide right now, sure. I know tonight’s not the best moment for… But maybe it needed doing. Sooner or later, I need to know.”

The ring was a simple one, a slim hoop with one round diamond glittering like a dewdrop. I had never in my life pictured an engagement ring on my finger. I thought of Lexie slipping hers off in a dark room, leaving it beside the bed she had shared with Chad, and I felt the difference slide into the crack between us like a narrow blade: I couldn’t put this on without knowing that it would stay on, for good.

“I want you to be happy,” Sam said. That stunned look had faded out of his eyes; they were clear and unfaltering on mine. “Whatever that takes. There’s no point if you’re not going to be… If you can’t be happy without coming back on the squad, then tell me.”

There’s so little mercy in this world. Lexie sliced straight through everyone who got between her and the door, people she had laughed with, worked with, lain down with. Daniel, who loved her like his blood, sat beside her and watched her die, sooner than allow a siege on his spellbound castle. Frank took me by the shoulders and steered me straight into something that he knew could eat me alive. Whitethorn House let me into its secret chambers and healed my wounds, and in exchange I set my careful charges and I blew it to smithereens. Rob, my partner, my shieldmate, my closest friend, ripped me out of his life and threw me away because he wanted me to sleep with him and I did it. And when we had all finished clawing chunks off each other, Sam, who had every right to give me the finger and walk away for good, stayed because I held out my hand and asked him to.

“I want to go back to Murder,” I said, “but it doesn’t need to be now. It doesn’t even need to be soon. Someday, sooner or later, one of us will do something brilliant and we’ll have all the brownie points in the world, and then we’ll ask for special permission.”

“And if we don’t? If we never do anything brilliant, or if they say no anyway. Then what?”

That wing brush again, along the line of my jaw. To go consenting.

“Then,” I said, “I’ll survive. And you’ll have to put up with me bitching about Maher for the rest of our lives.” I stretched out my hand to Sam and I saw the look that was dawning in his eyes, and as he reached over to put the ring on my finger I realized there was no jagged black terror falling through me this time, no wild scream at the irrevocable thing inches away and rising, I wasn’t frightened at all; the only thing I felt was sure.

Later, when we were cocooned in the duvet and the sky outside was turning salmon-colored, Sam said, “There’s one more thing I need to ask you, and I’m not sure how to do it.”

“Ask away,” I said. “Comes with the territory.” I waved my left hand at him. The ring looked good on there. It even fit.

“No,” Sam said. “Something serious.”

I figured at this point I was ready for anything. I turned over on my stomach and propped myself up so I could look at him properly.

“Rob,” he said. “You and Rob. I saw the way you were together, the two of ye; how close you were. I always expected… I never thought I had a look in.”

This one I had not been ready for.

“I don’t know what went wrong between ye,” Sam said, “and I’m not asking. I’ve no right to know. Just… I’ve some idea what you went through, during Operation Vestal. And after. I wasn’t trying to be nosy, nothing like that; but I was there.”

He looked up at me, steady gray eyes, unblinking. There was nothing I could say; my breath was gone.

It was that night with the headlights, the night I went to get Rob at the crime scene. I knew him well enough to know that otherwise he would disintegrate, just smash into a million pieces, but not well enough to guess that he would do it anyway, and that all I had done was draw the flak my way. We did something good; I thought that meant no damage could come of it. It’s occurred to me since that I may be a lot dumber than I look. If I learned one thing in Murder, it’s that innocence isn’t enough.

I’m not Lexie, I’m not clockwork, specially not when I’m wrecked and stressed and wretched. By the time the terrible sinking feeling kicked in, I had moved to DV, Rob had been bounced into bureaucratic limbo somewhere and all our bridges were burned to bitter ash; he had gone so far away I couldn’t even see him on the other side. I didn’t tell anyone. I got the boat to England before dawn one sleety Saturday and was back in my dark flat that night—the plane would have been faster but I couldn’t take it, the thought of sitting still for an hour each way, squashed elbow to elbow between strangers. I walked up and down the deck of the boat instead. On the way back the sleet came down harder, soaked me to the bone; if there had been anyone else on deck they would have thought I was crying, but I wasn’t, not even once.

Sam was the only person I could stand to be around, then. Everyone else was on the other side of a thick, wavy glass wall, they yammered and gestured and pulled faces and it took all the energy I had to work out what they wanted from me and make the right noises back. Sam was the only one I could hear. He has a beautiful voice: a country voice, slow and calm, deep and rich as earth. That voice was the one thing that made it through the glass and felt real.

When we met for coffee that Monday after work, he gave me a long intent look and then said, “You look like you’ve the flu; it’s going around. I’ll bring you home, will I?” He tucked me into bed, went to the shops to buy food, came back and cooked me stew. Every night that week he made me dinner and told terrible jokes till I laughed just at the hopeful look on his face. Six weeks later, I was the one who kissed him first. When those square gentle hands touched my skin I could feel ripped cells healing. I never fell for Sam’s big-thick-bogger act, I was always sure there was more; but it had never once occurred to me—I told you I’m dumber than I look—that he had known, every step of the way, and known to leave it.

“The only bit I need to know,” Sam said, “is whether it’s over, for you; the whole thing. Whether… I can’t be wondering, our whole lives, what would happen if Rob got his head together and came back wanting to… I know how hard it was for you. I tried to—give you space, I suppose they call it; to figure things out. But now, if we’re really engaged… I just need to know.”

The first sunlight was exploding onto his face, turning him grave and clear-eyed as some tired apostle in a window. “It’s over,” I said. “It really is, Sam. It’s all over now.”

I laid a hand on his cheek; it was so bright that for a second I thought it was burning me, a pure painless fire. “Good,” he said, on a sigh, and his hand came up to cup the back of my head and pull me down on his chest. “That’s good,” and his eyes were closing before he finished the sentence.

I slept till two in the afternoon. Sometime in there Sam dragged himself out of bed and kissed me good-bye and closed the door softly behind him, but nobody rang to tell me to get my arse into work, presumably because nobody had managed to disentangle what squad I was on right then or whether I was suspended or whether I still had a job at all. When I finally woke up I considered calling in sick, but I wasn’t sure who to call—Frank, probably, but he was unlikely to be in a conversational mood. I decided to let someone else figure this one out. Instead I headed up to Sandymount village, kept my eyes off the newspaper headlines, bought food, went home and ate most of it, and then took a very long walk on the beach.

It was a sunny, lazy afternoon. The promenade was full of old people wandering along with their faces turned up to the sun, couples leaning into each other, overexcited toddlers tumbling along like big sweet bumblebees. I recognized a lot of people. Sandymount’s still holding onto being that kind of place, where you know faces and swap smiles and buy homemade perfume from the neighbors’ kids; it’s one of the reasons I live there, but that evening it felt strange and disconcerting all the same. I felt like I had been away too long for that, long enough that the shop fronts should all have been different, the houses painted new colors, the familiar faces grown up, grown old, gone.

The tide was out. I took off my shoes, rolled up my jeans and walked out onto the sand till the water was ankle-deep. One moment from the day before fell through my head, over and over: Rafe’s voice, soft and dangerous as snow, saying to Justin, You bastard fuck.

This is what I could have done, in that last second before it all exploded: I could have said, “Justin? You stabbed me?” He would have answered. It would have been there on the tape, and sooner or later Frank or Sam would have found a way to make him say it again, under caution this time.

Probably I’ll never know why I didn’t do it. Mercy, maybe; one drop of it, too little and too late. Or—this is the one Frank would have picked—too much emotional involvement, even then: Whitethorn House and the five of them still dusted over me like pollen, still turning me glittering and defiant, us against the world. Or maybe, and I like to hope it was this one, because the truth is more intricate and less attainable than I used to understand, a bright illusive place reached by twisting back roads as often as by straight avenues, and this was the closest I could come.

When I got home Frank was sitting on my front steps with one leg stretched out, teasing the next-door cat with an untied shoelace and whistling “Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her” through his front teeth. He looked terrible, crumpled and bleary-eyed and in serious need of a shave. When he saw me he folded his leg back under him and stood up, sending the cat whisking off into the bushes.

“Detective Maddox,” he said. “You didn’t show for work today. Is there a problem?”

“I wasn’t sure who I work for right now,” I said. “If anyone. Plus I slept it out. I’m owed a few days’ holiday; I’ll take one of those.”

Frank sighed. “Never mind. I’ll sort something out—you can count as one of mine for another day. Starting tomorrow, though, you’re DV again.” He stood aside to let me open the door. “It’s been very.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That it has.”

He followed me up the stairs into my flat and headed straight for the cooker—there was still half a pot of coffee left over from my unidentified meal earlier on. “That’s what I like to see,” he said, finding a mug on the draining board. “A detective who’s always prepared. You having some?”

“I’ve had loads,” I said. “Go for it.” I couldn’t work out what he was there for: to debrief me, kick my arse, kiss and make up, what. I hung up my jacket and started pulling the sheets off the futon, so we could both sit down without having to get too close.

“So,” Frank said, shoving his mug into the microwave and hitting buttons. “You hear about the house?”

“Sam told me.”

I felt his head turn; I kept my back to him, hauling the futon into its sofa version. After a moment he started the microwave whirring. “Well,” he said. “Easy come, easy go. It was probably insured. You talk to IA yet?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “They’re thorough.”

“They come down hard on you?”

I shrugged. “No more than you’d expect. How about you?”

“We’ve got history,” Frank said, without elaborating. The microwave beeped; he got the sugar bowl out of its cupboard and dumped three spoons in his coffee. Frank doesn’t take sugar; he was fighting hard to stay awake. “The shoot’ll come back good. I had a listen to the tapes: three shots, the first two a fair distance from you—the computer lads will be able to work out exactly how far—and then the third right by the mike, nearly blew my ear-drums. And I had a little chat with my mate in the Bureau, too, once they’d finished with the scene. Apparently the trajectory of one of Daniel’s bullets came up almost a perfect mirror image of yours. No question: you only fired after he’d shot directly at you.”

“I know,” I said. I folded the sheets and threw them in the wardrobe. “I was there.”

He leaned back against the counter, took a mouthful of coffee and watched me. “Don’t let the IA boys rattle you.”

“This was a mess, Frank,” I said. “The media are going to be all over it, and the brass are going to want someone to take the fall.”

“For what? The shoot was textbook. The house is on Byrne: he was warned to look after it, he didn’t follow through. Everything else along the way, we’ve got the ultimate defense: it worked. We got our man, even if we didn’t get a chance to arrest him. Just as long as you don’t do anything stupid—anything else stupid—we should all be able to walk away from this.”

I sat down on the futon and found my smokes. I couldn’t tell whether he was reassuring me or threatening me, or maybe a little of both. “What about you?” I asked, carefully. “If you’ve got history with IA…”

Flick of an eyebrow. “Nice to know you care. I’ve also got leverage, if it comes down to that.”

That tape—me disobeying a direct order, telling him I wasn’t coming in—flashed between us, solid as if he had tossed it onto the table. It wouldn’t get him off the hook—you’re supposed to be able to control your squad—but it would drag me in there with him, and it might muddy the waters enough to let him wriggle away. In that moment I knew that if Frank wanted to pin this whole mess on me, blast me right out of my career, he could do it; and that he probably had every right.

I saw the tiny flash of amusement, in those bloodshot eyes: he knew what I was thinking. “Leverage,” I said.

“Don’t I always,” said Frank, and just for a second he sounded tired and old. “Listen, IA need to throw their weight around, makes them feel like they can get it up, but as of now, they’re not out to get you—or your Sammy, come to that. They’ll give me a fun few weeks, but we’ll all be fine in the end.”

The shot of anger startled me. Whether or not Frank decided to throw me to the wolves—and I knew nothing I could say would sway him one way or the other—fine was not the word I personally would have picked for anything about this situation. “Right,” I said. “That’s good to hear.”

“Then why the long face? As the bartender said to the horse.”

I almost threw the lighter at his head. “Jesus Christ, Frank! I killed Daniel. I lived under his roof, I sat next to him at his table, I ate his food”—I didn’t say, I kissed him—“and then I killed him. Every day for what should have been the rest of his life, he won’t be here, and it’ll be because of me. I went in there to catch a murderer, I spent years throwing my heart and soul into doing that, and now I’m—” I shut up because my voice was shaking.

“You know something?” Frank said, after a moment. “You’ve got a bad habit of taking too much credit for the stuff other people do around you.” He brought his mug over to the sofa and collapsed, legs spread wide. “Daniel March was no idiot. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he deliberately forced you into a position where you had absolutely no choice except to take him down. That wasn’t homicide, Cassie. It wasn’t even self-defense. That right there was suicide by cop.”

“I know,” I said. “I know that.”

“He knew he was cornered, he had no intention of going to prison—and I don’t blame him; can you see him making friends with the boys on the cell block? So he picked his way out and he went for it. I’ll give the guy this: he had guts. I underestimated him.”

“Frank,” I said. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

He reached for my smoke packet, watched the flame as he lit his cigarette one-handed. “Yesterday was a good shoot,” he said, when he’d put his lighter away. “It happened, it was no fun, in a few weeks it’ll be over. The end.”

I didn’t answer. Frank blew a long trail of smoke at the ceiling. “Look, you closed the case. If you had to shoot someone along the way, it might as well have been Daniel. I never liked the little fucker.”

I was in no mood to keep a lid on my temper, not with him. “Yeah, Frankie, I spotted that. Everyone within a mile of this case spotted that. And you know why you didn’t like him? Because he was exactly like you.”

“Well well well,” Frank drawled. There was an amused twist to his mouth, but his eyes were ice blue and unblinking and I couldn’t tell whether he was furious or not. “And here I almost forgot you’d studied the old psychology.”

“The spitting image, Frank.”

“Bullshit. That guy was wrong, Cassie. Remember what you said, in your profile? Prior criminal experience. Remember that?”

“What, Frank,” I said. I realized my feet had come out from under me and were braced, hard, on the floor. “What did you find on Daniel?”

Frank shook his head, one small ambiguous jerk, over his cigarette. “I didn’t need to find anything. I know when someone smells wrong, and so do you. There’s a line, Cassie. You and me, we live on one side of it. Even when we fuck up and wander over to the other side, we’ve got that line to keep us from getting lost. Daniel didn’t have it.”

He leaned over the coffee table to tap ash. “There’s a line,” he said. “Don’t ever forget there’s a line.”

There was a long silence. The window was starting to dim again. I wondered about Abby and Rafe and Justin, where they would spend tonight; whether John Naylor would sleep sprawled in moonlight on the ruins of Whitethorn House, the one-night king of all our wreckage. I knew what Frank would say: Not your problem, not any more.

“What I’d love to know,” Frank said after a while, and his tone had changed, “is when Daniel made you. Because he did, you know.” Fast glint of blue, as he glanced up at me. “From the way he talked, I’m pretty sure he knew you were wired—but that’s not what’s bothering me. We could have wired Lexie, if we’d had her; the wire wasn’t enough to tell him you were a cop. But when Daniel walked into that house yesterday, he knew for definite that you had a gun on you, and that you’d use it.” He settled into the sofa, one arm spread along the back, and drew on his smoke. “Any idea what gave you away?”

I shrugged. “I’d bet on the onions. I know we figured I’d saved that, but apparently Daniel played better poker than we thought.”

“No kidding,” said Frank. “And you’re sure that’s all it was? He didn’t have a problem with, for example, your taste in music?”

He knew; he knew about the Fauré. There was no way he could be certain, but all his instincts were telling him something was there. I made myself meet his eyes, look puzzled and a little rueful. “Nothing springs to mind.”

Curls of smoke hanging in the sunlight. “Right,” Frank said, at last. “Well. They say the devil’s in the details. There’s nothing you could have done about those onions—which means there’s nothing you could have done to prevent yourself getting burned. Right?”

“Right,” I said, and that at least came easy. “I did everything I could, Frank. I was Lexie Madison as hard as I knew how.”

“And if, just say, you’d figured out a couple of days ago that Daniel had made you, is there anything you could have done that might have made this end better?”

“No,” I said, and I knew that was true too. This day had begun years before, in Frank’s office, over burnt coffee and chocolate biscuits. By the time I tucked that timeline into my uniform shirt and walked back to the bus station, this day had been ready and waiting for us all. “I think this was the happiest ending we were ever going to get.”

He nodded. “Then you did your job. Leave it at that. You can’t blame yourself for the stuff other people do.”

I didn’t even try to explain to him what I was seeing, the fine spreading web through which we had all tugged one another to this place, the multiple innocences that make up guilt. I thought of Daniel with that unutterable sadness like a brand on his face, telling me, Lexie had no conception of action and consequence, and I felt that slim blade slide deeper between her and me, twisting.

“Which,” Frank said, “brings me to my reason for coming over here. I’ve got one more question left about this case, and I’ve got a funny feeling you might know the answer.” He glanced up from picking something out of his mug. “Did Daniel really stab our girl? Or was he just taking the rap, for some fucked-up reason all his own?”

Those level blue eyes, across the coffee table. “You heard what I heard,” I said. “He’s the only one who got specific; the other three never gave me a name. Are they saying it wasn’t him?”

“They’re saying sweet fuck-all. We’ve been going at them all today and most of last night, and we’ve yet to get a word out of them beyond ‘I want a glass of water.’ Justin did a fair bit of crying, and Rafe threw a chair when he found out he’d been nursing a viper in his bosom for the past month—we had to slap him in cuffs till he settled down—but that’s as far as the communication goes. They’re like bloody prisoners of war.”

Daniel’s finger pressed to his lips, his eyes moving among the others with an intensity I hadn’t understood, then. Even for this point beyond the farthest horizon of his own life, he had had a plan. And the other three, whether out of faith in him or out of habit or just because they had nothing else left to hold on to, were still doing what he had told them to do.

“One reason I ask,” Frank said, “is because the stories don’t quite match. Almost, but not quite. Daniel told you he happened to have a knife in his hand, because he was washing up; but on the tape, Rafe and Justin both describe Daniel using two hands in the struggle with Lexie. Before she got stabbed.”

“Maybe they’re confused,” I said. “It happened fast; you know what eye-witness accounts are worth. Or maybe Daniel was minimizing: trying to claim he just happened to have the knife, when actually he picked it up specifically to stab Lexie. We’ll probably never know exactly what happened.”

Frank drew on his cigarette, watching the tiny red glow. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “there’s only one person who was washing up, and who wasn’t doing something else with his hands between the point when the note came out and the point when Lexie got stabbed.”

“Daniel killed her,” I said, and it didn’t feel like a lie then and it doesn’t now. “I’m positive, Frank. He was telling the truth.”

Frank watched my face for a long minute, searching. Then: “OK,” he said, on a sigh. “I’ll take your word for it. I’m never going to think he was the type to snap like that, no plan, no organization; but hey, maybe we had less in common than you think. My money was on someone else from the start, but if everyone wants it to be Daniel…” A small backwards jerk of his head, like a shrug. “There’s not a lot I can do about it.”

He stubbed out his smoke and stood up. “Here,” he said, fishing in a jacket pocket. “I figure you might as well have this.”

He tossed something across the table to me; it flashed in the sunlight and I caught it reflexively, one-handed. It was a minicassette, the kind Undercover uses to record a mike feed.

“That’s you flushing your career down the jacks. I seem to have stepped on a cable while I was on the phone to you that day, disconnected something. The official tape has about fifteen minutes of nothing, before I caught the problem and plugged everything back in. The techs want me drawn and quartered for abusing their beloved gadgetry, but they’ll just have to get in the queue.”

Not his style, I had said to Sam the night before; not Frank’s style, to let me take the fall. And before that, way back at the beginning: Lexie Madison was Frank’s responsibility when he made her from nothing, she stayed his responsibility when she turned up dead. It wasn’t that he felt guilty about this godawful mess, nothing like that—once IA got off his back, he would probably never think about it again. But some people take care of their own, no matter what that turns out to mean.

“No copies,” Frank said. “You’ll be fine.”

“When I said you’re a lot like Daniel,” I said, “that wasn’t an insult.”

I saw the flick of something complicated in his eyes as he took that in. After a long moment, he nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Thanks, Frank,” I said, and closed my hand over the tape. “Thank you.”

“Whoa,” Frank said suddenly. His hand shot out, across the table, and grabbed my wrist. “And what’s this?”

The ring. I’d forgotten; my head was still getting used to it. It took an effort not to giggle at the look on his face. I’d never seen Frank Mackey truly gobsmacked before. “I think it suits me,” I said. “You like?”

“Is this new? Or did I miss something before?”

“Pretty new,” I said, “yeah.”

That lazy, malicious grin, tongue stretching his cheek; all of a sudden he looked wide awake and sparking with energy, ready to roll. “Well, fuck me sideways with a broomstick,” he said. “I don’t know which of you two just surprised me more. I’ve got to say, hand on heart, I take my hat off to your Sammy. Wish him good luck from me, will you?”

He started to laugh. “Holy Mother of the Divine,” he said, “if this hasn’t just about made my day. Cassie Maddox getting married! Sweet Jesus! Wish that man luck from me!” and he ran off down the stairs, still laughing at the top of his lungs.

I sat there on the futon for a long time, turning the tape in my hands and trying to remember what else was on there—what I had done, that day, besides go all in and dare Frank to fire me. Hangovers, coffee and Bloody Marys and all of us sniping at each other. Daniel’s voice saying, in Lexie’s darkened bedroom, Who are you? Fauré.

I think Frank expected me to destroy the tape, unspool it and stick it through a home shredder—I don’t have one, but I bet he does. Instead I climbed up on the kitchen counter, got my Official Stuff shoebox off the cupboard and put the tape inside, in with my passport and my birth cert and my medical records and my Visa bills. I want to listen to it, someday.