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.”