The mike was tiny, the size of a shirt button. It clipped onto the front of my bra, between my breasts: “Lucky our girl didn’t go in for low-cut tops,” Frank said, glancing at his watch. “Go lean over in front of the mirror, check the view.” The battery pack went where the knife wound should have been, surgical-taped to my side under a thick pad of white gauze, just an inch or two below the scar Dealer Boy had left on Lexie Madison the First. The sound quality, once Frank had done small complicated things to the equipment, was crystal clear: “Only the best for you, babe. Transmission radius is seven miles, depending on conditions. We’ve got receivers set up at Rathowen station and at the Murder squad, so you’ll be covered at home and in Trinity. The only time you’ll go out of coverage is on the drive to and from town, and I don’t anticipate anyone shoving you out of a moving car. You won’t have visual surveillance, so any visuals that we should know about, tell us. If the shit hits the fan and you need a subtle way to yell for help, say ‘My throat hurts’ and you’ll have big-time backup on the scene inside a few minutes—don’t go getting a sore throat for real, or if you do, don’t complain about it. You need to check in with me as often as possible, ideally every day.”
“And with me,” Sam said, not turning around from the sink. Frank, squatting on the floor and squinting at some dial on his receiver, didn’t even bother to throw me a mocking look.
Sam finished the washing up and started drying things too thoroughly. I sorted the Lexie material into some kind of order—that high-wire final-exam feeling, taking your hands off your notes at last,
If I don’t know it now
—stacked it in bundles and packed it into plastic bags, to leave in Frank’s car. “And that,” Frank said, unplugging the speakers with a flourish, “should do it. Are we good to go?”
“Ready when you are,” I said, picking up the plastic bags. Frank swept up his equipment one-armed, grabbed my case and headed for the door.
“I’ll take that,” Sam said brusquely. “You’ve enough to carry,” and he took the case from Frank’s hand and headed down the stairs, the wheels hitting each step with a hard dull thump.
On the landing Frank turned and looked back over his shoulder, waiting for me. My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone falling fast. I’d felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt’s house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it’s crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror,
I don’t want to do this any more.
All you can do with that moment is bite down and wait for it to be over. The thought of what Frank would have to say, if I actually pulled out now, helped a lot. I took one more look around my flat—lights off, water heater off, bins emptied, window locked; the room was already closing in on itself, silence seeping into the spaces where we had been, drifting up like dust in the corners. Then I shut the door.
5
T
he drive down to Glenskehy took almost an hour, even with no traffic and Frank driving, and it should have been excruciating. Sam slumped miserably in the back seat, next to the gadgetry; Frank helped the atmosphere by turning up 98FM nice and loud and bopping along, whistling and nodding his head and beating time on the steering wheel. I barely even noticed either of them. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and crisp, I was out of my flat for the first time in a full week, and I had the window rolled all the way down and wind streaking through my hair. That hard black stone of fear had dissolved the second Frank started the car, turned into something sweet and lemon-colored and wildly intoxicating.
“Right,” Frank said, when we hit Glenskehy, “let’s see how well you’ve learned your geography. Give me directions.”
“Straight on through the village, fourth lane to your right, way too narrow, no wonder Daniel and Justin’s cars look like they’ve been drag racing, give me good old dirty Dublin any day,” I told him, doing his accent. “Home, James.” I was on a giddy one. The jacket had been freaking me out all afternoon—it was that lily-of-the-valley smell, right up close, I kept whipping round to see who had come up beside me—and the fact that I was being given the heebiejeebies by a jacket, like something out of Dr. Seuss, was making me want to giggle. Even passing the turnoff to the cottage, where I had met Frank and Sam that first day, didn’t sober me up.
The lane was unpaved and potholey. Trees gone shapeless with years of ivy, hedge branches rattling along the sides of the car and flicking in at my window; and then huge wrought-iron gates, flaking with rust and hanging drunkenly off their hinges. The stone pillars were half drowned in hawthorn grown wild. “Here,” I said.
Frank nodded and turned, and we were looking down an endless, graceful sweep of avenue, between cherry trees crowded with exploded balls of flowers. “Fuck me,” I said. “Why did I have doubts about this, again? Can I sneak Sam in with me in my suitcase, and we can just live here forever?”
“Get it out of your system,” Frank said. “By the time we reach that door, you need to be blasé about all this. Anyway, the house is still shitty, so you can calm down.”
“You told me they’d redone it. I expect cashmere curtains and white roses in my dressing room, or I’m calling my agent.”
“I said they were doing it up. I didn’t say they were
magic.
”
Then the drive gave a little twist and opened up into a great semicircular carriage sweep, white pebbles speckled through with weeds and daisies, and I saw Whitethorn House for the first time. The photos hadn’t done it justice. You see Georgian houses all over Dublin, mostly turned into offices and undermined by the depressing fluorescents you can see through the windows, but this one was special. Every proportion was balanced so perfectly that the house looked like it had grown there, nested in with its back to the mountains and all Wicklow dropping away rich and gentle in front of it, poised between the pale arc of the carriage sweep and the blurred dark-and-green curves of the hills like a treasure held out in a cupped palm.
I heard Sam take a fast hard breath. “Home sweet home,” said Frank, turning the radio off.
They were waiting for me outside the door, ranged at the top of the steps. In my mind I still see them like that, lacquered gold by the evening sun and glowing vivid as a vision, every fold of their clothes and curve of their faces pristine and achingly clear. Rafe leaning against the railing with his hands in his jeans pockets; Abby in the middle, swayed forwards on her toes, one arm crooked to shade her eyes; Justin, his feet precisely together and his hands clasped behind his back. And behind them, Daniel, framed between the columns of the door, his head up and the light splintering off his glasses.
None of them moved as Frank pulled up and braked, pebbles scattering. They were like figures on a medieval frieze, self-contained, mysterious, spelling out a message in some lost and arcane code. Only Abby’s skirt fluttered, fitfully, in the breeze.
Frank glanced at me over his shoulder. “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Good girl,” he said. “Good luck. And we’re go.” He got out of the car and went round to the boot to get my case.
“Mind yourself,” Sam said. He didn’t look at me. “I love you.”
“I’ll be home soon,” I said. There was no way even to touch his arm, under all those unblinking eyes. “I’ll try to ring you tomorrow.”
He nodded. Frank slammed the boot—the sound was wild, enormous, bouncing off the house front and setting crows scattering from the trees—and opened the car door for me.
I got out, putting my hand to my side for a second as I straightened up. “Thanks, Detective,” I said to Frank. “Thanks for everything.”
We shook hands. “My pleasure,” Frank said. “And don’t worry, Miss Madison: we’ll get this guy.”
He pulled out the handle of the case with a neat snap and passed it to me, and I dragged it across the carriage sweep towards the steps and the others.
Still none of them moved. As I got closer I realized, with a shift of focus like a shock. Those straight backs, the lifted heads: there was some tension stretched between the four of them, so tight it hummed high in the silence. The wheels of my case, grating across the pebbles, sounded loud as machine-gun fire.
“Hi,” I said at the bottom of the steps, looking up at them.
For a second I thought they weren’t going to answer, they had made me already, and I wondered wildly what the hell I was supposed to do now. Then Daniel took a step forwards, and the picture wavered and broke. A smile started across Justin’s face, Rafe straightened up and raised one arm in a wave, and Abby came running down the steps and hugged me hard.
“Hey, you,” she said, laughing, “welcome home.” Her hair smelled like camomile. I dropped the case and hugged her back; it was a strange feeling, as if I were touching someone out of an old painting, amazed to find her shoulder blades warm and solid as my own. Daniel nodded gravely at me over her head and ruffled my hair, Rafe grabbed my case and started bumping it up the steps to the door, Justin patted my back over and over and I was laughing too, and I didn’t even hear Frank start the car and drive away.
* * *
This is the first thing I thought when I stepped into Whitethorn House:
I’ve been here before.
It zinged straight through me, straightened my spine like a crash of cymbals. The place bloody well should have looked familiar, all the hours I’d spent staring at photos and video, but it was more than that. It was the smell, old wood and tea leaves and a faint whiff of dried lavender; it was the way the light lay along the scarred floorboards; it was the little taps our footsteps sent flying up the stairwell, echoing softly along the upstairs corridors. It felt—and you’d think I would like this but I didn’t, it flashed danger-sign red right across my mind—it felt like coming home.
From there on, most of that evening is a merry-go-round blur, colors and images and voices whirled together into a burst almost too bright to look at. A ceiling rose and a cracked china vase, a piano stool and a bowl of oranges, running feet on stairs and a rising laugh. Abby’s fingers small and strong on my wrist, leading me out to the flagstoned patio behind the house, curlicued metal chairs, ancient wicker swing seat swaying in the light sweet breeze; great sweep of grass falling away to high stone walls half hidden in trees and ivy, blink of a bird’s shadow across the paving stones. Daniel lighting my cigarette, his hand cupped round the match and his bent head inches from mine. The full ring of their voices hit me like a shock, after the flattened-out video sound, and their eyes were so clear they burned on my skin. Sometimes, still, I wake up with one of their voices strong and close by my ear, fallen straight out of that day:
Come here,
Justin calls,
come outside, the evening’s so lovely;
or Abby says,
We have to decide what to do with the herb garden, but we were waiting for you, what do you—
and I’m awake, and they’re gone.
I must have talked too, somewhere in there, but I can’t remember most of what I said. All I remember is trying to keep my weight forwards on my toes like Lexie did, my voice up in her register, my eyes and my shoulders and my smoke at the right angles, trying not to look around too much and not to move too fast without wincing and not to say anything idiotic and not to whack into the furniture. And God the taste of undercover on my tongue again, the brush of it down the little hairs on my arms. I’d thought I remembered what it was like, every detail, but I’d been wrong: memories are nothing, soft as gauze against the ruthless razor-fineness of that edge, beautiful and lethal, one tiny slip and it’ll slice to the bone.
It took my breath away, that evening. If you’ve ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you’ve got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you’ve been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it. Abby and I rocked the swing seat lazily; the guys moved in and out through the small-paned French windows between the patio and the kitchen, making dinner—smell of roasting potatoes, sizzle of meat, suddenly I was starving—and calling to us. Rafe came outside to lean on the back of the seat between us and take a drag of Abby’s cigarette. Rose-gold sky deepening and great puffs of cloud streaming like the smoke of some faraway wildfire, cool air rich with grass and earth and growing things. “Dinner!” Justin yelled, against a clatter of plates.
That long, laden table, immaculate in its heavy red damask cloth, its snow-white napkins; the candlesticks twined with strands of ivy, flames glittering miniature in the curves of the glasses, catching in the silver, beckoning in the dimming windows like will-o’-the-wisps. And the four of them, pulling up high-backed chairs, smooth-skinned and shadow-eyed in the confusing golden light: Daniel at the head of the table and Abby at the foot, Rafe beside me and Justin opposite. In the flesh, that ceremonial feel I had caught off the videos and Frank’s notes was powerful as incense. It was like sitting down to a banquet, a war council, a game of Russian roulette high in some lonely tower.
They were so beautiful. Rafe was the only one who could have been called good-looking; but still, when I remember them, that beauty is all I can think of.
Justin loaded up plates with Steak Diane and passed them around—“Specially for you,” he told me, with a faint smile; Rafe scooped roast potatoes onto them as they passed him. Daniel poured red wine into mismatched wineglasses.
This evening was taking every brain cell I had; the last thing I needed was to get drunk. “I’m not supposed to have booze,” I said. “The antibiotics.”
It was the first time any of us had brought up the stabbing, even indirectly. For a fraction of a second—or maybe it was just my imagination—the room seemed to stop motionless, the bottle suspended in midtilt, hands arrested halfway through gestures. Then Daniel went back to pouring, with a deft twist of the wrist that left less than an inch in the glass. “There,” he said, unruffled. “A sip won’t do you any harm. Just for a toast.”