He started with me. “So,” he said, when the sitting-room door shut behind us and the voices in the kitchen faded to a pleasant, muffled blur. “You got to see some action at last.”
“And about time,” I said. I was pulling up straight chairs to the card table, but Frank shook his head and dropped onto the sofa, waved me to an armchair.
“Nah, let’s keep this cozy. You in one piece?”
“The nasty man’s face ruined my manicure, but I’ll survive.” I fished in the pocket of my combats and pulled out a crumpled handful of notebook pages. “I wrote it up last night, in bed. Before anything could go fuzzy.”
Frank sipped his tea and read, taking his time. “Good,” he said finally, pocketing the pages. “That’s nice and clear, or as clear as we’re going to get with that kind of chaos.” He put down his tea, found his own notebook and clicked his pen ready. “Could you ID the guy?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t see his face. Too dark.”
“It might’ve been an idea to bring a torch.”
“There wasn’t time. If I’d messed about looking for torches, he’d have been well gone. You don’t need an ID, anyway. Just look for the guy with two black eyes.”
“Ah,” Frank said thoughtfully, nodding, “the fight. Of course. We’ll get back to that in a minute. Just in case our boy claims he got his bruises falling downstairs, though, it would be useful to have some kind of corroborating description.”
“I can only go on the feel of him,” I said. “Assuming this was one of Sam’s boys, Bannon’s definitely out: he’s way too chunky. This guy was wiry. Not very tall, but strong. I don’t think it was McArdle, either; my hand came down straight on this guy’s face at one stage, and I didn’t feel any facial hair, just stubble. McArdle’s beardy.”
“That he is,” Frank said, making a leisurely note. “That he is. So your vote goes to Naylor?”
“He’d fit. Right height, right build, right hair.”
“That’ll have to do. We take what we can get.” He examined the page of his notebook thoughtfully, tapping his pen against his teeth. “Speaking of which,” he said. “When you three went galloping off to fight for the cause, what did Danny Boy bring along?”
I was ready for this one. “Screwdriver,” I said. “I didn’t see him pick it up, but I left the room before he did. He had the tool kit out on the table.”
“Because he and Rafe were cleaning Uncle Simon’s gun. What kind of gun, by the way?”
“A Webley, early World War One issue. It’s pretty beaten-up and rusty and all, but it’s still a beauty. You’d love it.”
“No doubt I would,” Frank said amiably, making a little note. “With any luck I’ll get a look at it, sometime. So Daniel’s grabbing for a weapon in a big hurry, and there’s a gun in front of him, but instead he goes for a screwdriver?”
“An unloaded, broken-open gun with the grips off. And I don’t get the sense he knows his way around guns. Even if he didn’t bother with the grips, it would’ve taken him a minute to sort it out.” The sound of someone loading a revolver is unmistakable but small, and I had been across the room from Rafe when he did it; what with the music, there was a decent chance the mike hadn’t picked it up.
“So he goes for the screwdriver instead,” Frank said, nodding. “Makes sense. But for some reason, once he’s got his man, it doesn’t even occur to him to use it.”
“He never got the chance. It was a mess out there, Frank: four of us rolling around on the ground, arms and legs everywhere, you couldn’t tell what belonged to who—I’m pretty sure I gave Rafe that black eye. If Daniel had whipped out a screwdriver and started jabbing away, odds are he’d have got one of us.” Frank was still nodding agreeably, writing all this down, but there was a bland, amused look on his face that I didn’t like. “What? You’d rather he’d stabbed this guy?”
“It would certainly have made my life simpler,” Frank said, cheerfully and cryptically. “So where was the famous—what was it again?—the famous screwdriver, during all the drama?”
“In Daniel’s back pocket. At least, that’s where he took it out of, when we got home.”
Frank raised one eyebrow, all concern. “He’s lucky he didn’t stab himself with it. All that rolling around, I’d have expected at least a minor puncture wound or two.”
He was right. I should have made it a wrench. “Maybe he did,” I said, shrugging. “You can ask him to show you his arse, if you want.”
“I think I’ll pass, for now.” Frank clicked his pen shut, tucked it away in his pocket and leaned back on the sofa, at ease. “What,” he inquired pleasantly, “were you thinking?”
For a second I actually took it for a straight question about my thought process, instead of the opener for a major bollocking. I expected Sam to be pissed off at me, but Frank: he treats personal safety like a tetherball, he had begun this investigation by breaking every rule he could get his hands on, and I know for a fact that he once head-butted a dealer so hard that the guy had to be taken to the emergency room. It had never occurred to me that he might be in a snot about this. “This guy’s escalated,” I said. “He used to stay well away from people: he never did any damage to Simon March, last time he went out rock-throwing he picked a room that he could see was empty . . . This time, though, that rock missed me and Abby by inches—for all we know, he could actually have been aiming for one of us. These days he’s more than willing to hurt people, not just property. He’s looking more and more like a suspect.”
“Of course,” Frank said, crossing one ankle leisurely onto the other knee. “A suspect. The very thing we’ve been looking for. So let’s think this through for a moment, will we? Let’s say Sammy and I head down to Glenskehy today and pick up his three bright boys, and let’s say, just for the hell of it, that we manage to get something useful out of one of them—enough for an arrest, maybe even a charge. What do you suggest I say when his solicitor and the Director of Public Prosecutions and the media ask me, and I think they will, why his face looks like hamburger? In the circumstances, I’ve got absolutely fuck-all choice except to explain that the damage was inflicted by two other suspects and one of my very own undercover officers. And what do you suppose happens next?”
I had never for a moment thought that far ahead. “You’ll find a way round it.”
“I may well,” Frank said, in that same bland, pleasant voice, “but that’s not really the point, is it? I guess what I’m asking is what exactly you went out there to do. It seems to me that, as a detective, your goal would have been to locate the suspect, identify him, and if possible either hold him or keep him under observation until you found a good way to get backup in there. Am I missing something?”
“Yeah, actually. You’re missing the fact that it wasn’t as simple as—”
“Because your actions suggest,” Frank went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “that your main goal was to beat the living shite out of this guy. Which would have been just a tad unprofessional of you.”
Out in the kitchen, Doherty said something shaped like a punchline and everyone laughed; the laughter was perfect, unforced and friendly, and it made me edgy as hell. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Frank,” I said. “My goals were to keep hold of my suspect
and
not to blow my cover. How would you have liked me to do that? By dragging Daniel and Rafe off this guy and lecturing them on the correct treatment of suspects while I got on the phone to you?”
“You didn’t have to throw punches of your own.”
I shrugged. “Sam told me that last time Lexie went after this guy, she wanted to kick his nads into his esophagus. That’s the kind of person she was. If I’d hung back and let the big brave boys protect me from the bad man, it would’ve looked dodgy as all hell. I didn’t have time to consider the deeper implications here; I had to call it fast, and I called it in character. Are you seriously trying to claim you never got into a punch-up, when you were in the field?”
“Oh, God, no,” Frank said easily. “Would I ever say such a thing? I’ve been in many a punch-up; I even won most of them, not to blow my own horn here. Here’s the difference, though. I’ve got into fights because the other guy jumped me first—”
“Just like this guy jumped us.”
“When you deliberately goaded him into it. You think I haven’t heard that tape?”
“We’d
lost
him, Frank. If we hadn’t made him break cover, he’d have got away clean as a whistle.”
“Let me finish, babe. I’ve got into fights because the other guy started it, or because I couldn’t get out of them without blowing my cover, or just to earn a little respect, bump up my place in the pecking order. But I can safely say that I’ve never got into a fight because I was so emotionally involved that I couldn’t resist beating the holy crap out of someone. Not on the job, anyway. Can you say the same?”
Those wide blue eyes, amiable and mildly interested; that impeccable, disarming combo of openness and just a hint of steel. The edginess was building into a full-on danger signal, the electric warning animals get before thunder. Frank was questioning me the way he would question a suspect. I was one misstep away from being pulled off this case.
I forced myself to take my time: gave an embarrassed little shrug, shifted on the armchair. “It wasn’t emotional involvement,” I said at last, looking down at my fingers twisted in the fringe of a cushion. “Not like you mean, anyway. It’s . . . Look, Frank, I know you were worried about my nerve, at the beginning of this. I don’t blame you.”
“What can I say,” Frank said. He was slouching back and watching me with nothing at all on his face, but he was listening; I was still in with a chance. “People talk. The subject of Operation Vestal had come up, once or twice.”
I grimaced. “I bet it had. And I bet I can guess what they said, too. Most people had me written off as a burnout before I’d even cleared out my desk. I know you took a chance sending me in here, Frank. I’m not sure how much you heard . . .”
“This and that.”
“But you’ve got to know we fucked up royally, and there’s someone on the streets right now who should be doing life.” The hard catch in my voice: I didn’t have to fake it. “And that sucks, Frank, it really does. I wasn’t about to let that happen again, and I wasn’t going to have you thinking I’d lost my nerve, because I
haven’t.
I thought if I could just get this guy—”
Frank shot off the sofa like he’d been spring-loaded. “Get the—Jesus, Mary and Elvis, you’re not here to
get
bloody
anyone
! What did I tell you, right from the beginning? The
one
thing you have to do is point me and O’Neill in the right direction, and we’ll do the rest. What, was I not clear enough? Should I have fucking written it down for you? What?”
If it hadn’t been for the others in the next room, the volume would have been through the roof—when Frank is mad, everyone knows all about it. I did a small quick flinch and got my head at an appropriately humble angle, but inside I was delighted: being bollocked out of it as a disobedient subordinate was a huge improvement on being batted around like a suspect. Getting overenthusiastic, needing to prove yourself after a bad slipup: those were things Frank could understand, things that happen all the time, and they’re venial sins. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Frank, I’m really sorry. I know I got carried away, and it won’t happen again, but I couldn’t stand the thought of blowing my cover and I couldn’t stand the thought of you knowing I let him get away and Jesus, Frank, he was so close I could taste him . . .”
Frank stared at me for a long moment; then he sighed, collapsed back onto the sofa and cracked his neck. “Look,” he said, “you brought another case with you onto this one. Everyone’s done it. No one with half a brain does it twice. Sorry you caught a bad one, and all that, but if you want to prove something to me or anyone else, you’ll do it by leaving your old cases at home and working this one properly.”
He believed me. From the first minute of this case, Frank had had that other one hanging like a question mark in a corner of his mind; all I had needed to do was mirror it back to him at the right angle. For the first time ever, Operation Vestal, bless its sick dark heart, was actually coming in useful.
“I know,” I said, looking down at my hands twisted together in my lap. “Believe me, I do.”
“You could have blown this whole case, do you realize that?”
“Tell me I didn’t fuck it up terminally,” I said. “Are you going to pick the guy up anyway?”
Frank sighed. “Yeah, probably. We don’t have much choice, at this point. It would be nice if you could join us for the interview—you might be able to contribute something good on the psychological front, and I think it could be useful to put our man face to face with Lexie and see what happens. Do you think you can manage to do that without leaping across the table and knocking his teeth in?”
I glanced up fast, but there was a wry grin at one corner of his mouth. “You’ve always been a funny guy,” I said, hoping the wave of relief wouldn’t leak into my voice. “I’ll do my best. Get a big table, just in case.”
“Your nerve is just fine, you know that?” Frank told me, picking up his notebook and fishing his pen back out of his pocket. “You’ve got enough bloody nerve for three people. Get out of my sight before you annoy me again, and send in someone who won’t turn my hair gray. Send Abby.”
I headed out to the kitchen and told Rafe that Frank wanted to see him next, just out of boldness and to show Frank I wasn’t scared of him, even though I was; of course I was.
* * *
“Well,” said Daniel, when Frank had finished doing his thing and steered Doherty off, presumably to break the good news to Sam. “I think that went well.”
We were in the kitchen, tidying up the teacups and eating the leftover biscuits. “But that wasn’t bad at all,” Justin said, amazed. “I was expecting them to be horrible, but Mackey was actually
nice
this time.”
“God, though, the local goon,” Abby said, reaching over me for another biscuit. “He spent the whole time staring at Lex, did you see that? Cretin.”
“He’s not a cretin,” I said. Doherty had amazed me by getting through a full two hours without calling me “Detective,” so I was feeling charitable. “He just has good taste.”
“I still say they’ll do nothing,” said Rafe, but not bitchily. Whether it was something Frank had said to them, or just the relief of getting his visit over with, they all looked better: looser, lighter. The sharp-edged tension of last night had faded away, at least for now.
“Let’s wait and see,” Daniel said, bending his head to a match to light his cigarette. “At least you’ll have an exciting story to tell Four-Boobs Brenda, next time she backs you against the photocopier.” Even Rafe laughed.