I was sitting up by now; Daniel had put his book down. “That’s hardly your decision,” Justin said.

“If I’m going to have to listen to this crap, then yes, it bloody well is my decision. I fold. Justin, it’s all yours. Deal, Abby.” Rafe reached across Justin for the wine bottle.

“Speaking of using vices to release tension,” Abby said coolly, “don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink for one night?”

“Actually,” Rafe told her, “I don’t think so, no.” He filled his glass, so high that a drop sloshed over the edge onto the table. “And I don’t recall asking for your advice. Deal the fucking cards.”

“You’re drunk,” Daniel said coldly. “And you’re becoming obnoxious.”

Rafe whipped round on him; his hand was gripping the top of the glass and for a second I thought he was going to throw it. “Yes,” he said, low and dangerous, “I am in fact drunk. And I intend to get a whole lot drunker. Do you want to talk about it, Daniel? Is that what you want? Would you like us all to have a talk?”

There was something in his voice, something precarious as the smell of petrol, ready and waiting to ignite at the first spark. “I don’t see any point in discussing anything with someone in your condition,” Daniel said. “Pull yourself together, have some coffee and stop acting like a spoiled toddler.” He picked up his book again and turned away from the others. I was the only one who could see his face. It was perfectly calm, but his eyes weren’t moving: he wasn’t reading a word.

Even I could tell that he was handling this all wrong. Once Rafe had worked himself into one of his moods, he didn’t know how to snap back out of it. What he wanted was someone to do it for him, change the note in the room to silliness or peace or practicality so he could follow. Trying to bully him was only going to make him worse, and the fact that Daniel had made such an uncharacteristic mistake sent a jab through the back of my mind: amazement and something else, something like fear or excitement. I could have settled Rafe down in seconds (Oo, do you think I have PTSD? Like Vietnam vets? Someone yell “Grenade” and see if I dive . . . ) and I almost did, it took an effort of will to stop myself; but I needed to see how this played out.

Rafe caught his breath as if he was about to say something, but then he changed his mind, gave a disgusted head-shake and shoved his chair back hard. He grabbed his glass in one hand and the bottle in the other and stalked out. A moment later his door slammed.

“What the hell?” I said, after a moment. “I’m gonna go see that shrink after all and tell him I’m living with total loopers.”

“Don’t you start,” Justin said. “Just don’t.” His voice was shaking.

Abby put the cards down, stood up, pushed her chair in carefully and left the room. Daniel didn’t move. I heard Justin knock something over and swear viciously under his breath, but I didn’t look up.

* * *

Breakfast was quiet, the next morning, and not in a good way. Justin was pointedly not speaking to me. Abby moved around the kitchen with a tiny worried furrow between her eyebrows, till we finished washing up and she prised Rafe out of his room and the three of them left for college.

Daniel sat at the table and gazed out of the window, wrapped in some private haze, while I dried the dishes and put them away. Finally he stirred, caught a deep breath: “Right,” he said, blinking bemusedly at the cigarette burned away between his fingers. “We’d better get moving.”

He didn’t say a word on the drive to the hospital, either. “Thanks,” I said, as I got out of the car.

“Of course,” he said absently. “Do ring me if there’s anything wrong, not that I think there will be, or if you change your mind about having someone with you.” He waved, over his shoulder, as he drove away.

When I was sure he was gone, I got a Styrofoam cup of approximate coffee from the hospital café and leaned against the wall outside to wait for Sam. I saw him, pulling into a parking space and getting out of his car to scan the car park, before he saw me. For a fraction of a second I didn’t recognize him. He looked tired and pudgy and old, ridiculously old, and for that instant all I could think was: Who is this guy? Then he saw me and smiled and my mind snapped back into focus, and he looked like himself again. I told myself Sam always puts on a couple of pounds during a big case—junk food on the run—and I had been spending all my time with twenty-somethings, a thirty-five-year-old was naturally going to look geriatric. I tossed my cup in the bin and headed over.

“Ah, God,” Sam said, wrapping me in a massive hug, “it’s good to see you.” His kiss was warm and strong and unfamiliar; even the smell of him, soap and fresh-ironed cotton, seemed strange. It took a second before I figured out what this felt like: that first evening in Whitethorn House, when I was supposed to know everything around me inside out.

“Hi,” I said, smiling up at him.

He pulled my head against his shoulder. “God,” he said, on a sigh. “Let’s forget all about this bloody case and run away for the day, will we?”

“Business,” I reminded him. “Remember? You’re the one who wouldn’t let me wear the white lace undies.”

“I’ve changed my mind.” He ran his hands down my arms. “You look great, do you know that? All relaxed and wide awake, and not half as thin. It’s doing you good, this case.”

“Country air,” I said. “Plus Justin always cooks for about twelve. What’s the plan?”

Sam sighed again and let go of my hands, leaned back against the car. “My three lads are coming into Rathowen station, half an hour apart. I figure that’s plenty of time; for now, all I want to do is feel them out, not put their backs up. There’s no observation room, but from reception you can hear everything that goes on in the interview room. You can just wait in back while I bring them in, then slip out to reception and have a listen.”

“I’d like a look, too,” I said. “Why don’t I just hang out in reception? It might do no harm to let them see me, accidentally on purpose. If one of them’s our guy—for the murder, or even just the vandalism—then he’s going to have a pretty strong reaction to me.”

Sam shook his head. “That’s what I’m worried about, sure. Remember the other night, when we were on the phone? You thought you heard someone? If my boy’s been following you around, and then he thinks you’re talking to us . . . We already know he’s got a temper.”

“Sam,” I said gently, linking my fingers through his, “that’s what I’m there for. To get us closer to our guy. If you don’t let me do that, I’m just a lazy wagon getting paid to eat good food and read pulp fiction.”

After a moment Sam laughed, a small reluctant breath. “Right,” he said. “Fair enough. Have a look at the lads when I bring them out.”

He squeezed my fingers, gently, and let go. “Before I forget”—he fished inside his coat—“Mackey sent you these.” It was a bottle of tablets like the one I’d brought to Whitethorn House, with the same pharmacist’s label announcing loudly that they were amoxicillin. “He said to tell you your wound isn’t all the way healed yet and the doctor’s worried you could still get an infection, so you’ve to take another course of these.”

"At least I’m getting my vitamin C,” I said, pocketing the bottle. It felt too heavy, dragging at the side of my jacket. The doctor’s worried . . . Frank was starting to think about my exit.

* * *

Rathowen station was craptacular. I’d seen plenty like it, dotted around back corners of the country: small stations caught in a vicious circle, getting dissed by the people who hand out funds and by the people who hand out posts and by anyone who can get any other assignment in the universe. Reception was one cracked chair, a poster about bike helmets and a hatch to let Byrne stare vacantly out the door, rhythmically chewing gum. The interview room was apparently also the storeroom: it had a table, two chairs, a filing cabinet—no lock—a help-yourself pile of statement sheets and, for no reason I could figure out, a battered eighties riot shield in one corner. There was yellowing linoleum on the floor and a smashed fly on one wall. No wonder Byrne looked the way he did.

I stayed out of sight behind the desk, with Byrne, while Sam tried to kick the interview room into some kind of shape. Byrne stashed his gum in his cheek and gave me a long depressed stare. “It’ll never work,” he informed me.

I wasn’t sure where to go with this, but apparently it was no reply required; Byrne retrieved his gum and went back to gazing out the hatch. “There’s Bannon now,” he said. “The ugly great lump.”

Sam has a lovely light touch with interviews, when he wants to, and he wanted to that day. He kept it easy, casual, nonthreatening. Would you have any ideas, any at all, about who might have stabbed Miss Madison? What are they like, those five up at Whitethorn House? Have you seen anyone you didn’t recognize, hanging around Glenskehy? The impression he gave, subtly but clearly, was that the investigation was starting to wind down.

Bannon mainly answered in irritable grunts; McArdle was less Neanderthal and more bored. Both of them claimed to have no clue about anything, ever. I only half listened. If there was anything there, Sam would spot it; all I wanted was a look at John Naylor, and at the expression on his face when he saw me. I arranged myself in the cracked chair with my legs stretched out, trying to look like I’d been dragged in for more pointless questions, and waited.

Bannon was in fact an ugly great lump: a serious beer belly surrounded by muscles and topped off with a potato head. When Sam ushered him out of the interview room and he saw me, he did a double take and shot me a vicious, disgusted sneer; he knew who Lexie Madison was, all right, and he didn’t like her. McArdle, on the other hand—he was a long skinny streak of a guy, with a straggly attempt at a beard—gave me a vague nod and shambled off. I got back behind the desk and waited for Naylor.

His interview was a lot like the others: seen nothing, heard nothing, know nothing. He had a nice voice, a quick baritone with the Glenskehy accent I was starting to know—harsher than most of Wicklow, wilder—and an edge of tension. Then Sam wound it up and opened the interview-room door.

Naylor was average height, wiry, wearing jeans and a baggy, colorless sweater. He had a mop of tangled red-brown hair and a rough, bony face: high cheekbones, wide mouth, narrow green eyes under heavy eyebrows. I didn’t know what Lexie’s taste in men had been like, but there was no question, this guy was attractive.

Then he saw me. His eyes widened and he gave me a stare that almost slammed me back in my seat. The intensity of it: this could have been hatred, love, fury, terror, all of them at once, but it wasn’t Bannon’s narky little sneer, nothing like it. There was passion there, bright and roaring like an alarm flare.

“What do you think?” Sam asked, watching Naylor stride across the road towards a muddy ’89 Ford that was worth maybe fifty quid in scrap metal, on a good day.

What I thought, mainly, was that I was pretty sure where that prickle at the back of my neck had been coming from. “Unless McArdle’s very good at faking on his feet,” I said, “I think you can move him to the bottom of the list. I’d bet money he didn’t have a clue who I was—and even if your vandal’s not our guy, he’s been paying a lot of attention to the house. He’d know my face.”

“Like Bannon and Naylor did,” said Sam. “And they weren’t one bit pleased to see you.”

“They’re from Glenskehy,” Byrne said gloomily, behind us. “They’re never pleased to see anyone, sure. And no one’s ever pleased to see them.”

“I’m starving,” Sam said. “Come for lunch?”

I shook my head. “I can’t. Rafe’s already texted me, wanting to know if everything’s OK. I told him I was still in the waiting room, but if I don’t get into college soon, they’re going to head down to Wicklow Hospital looking for me.”

Sam took a breath, straightened his shoulders. “Right,” he said. “We’ve knocked one out of the running, anyway; only two to go. I’ll give you a lift into town.”

* * *

Nobody asked, when I got into the library; the others nodded at me like I’d been out on a smoke break. My snit fit at Justin, the night before, had made its point.

He was still sulking at me. I ignored it all afternoon: the silent treatment makes me tense as hell, but Lexie’s stubbornness would never have cracked, just her attention span. I finally snapped over dinner—stew, so thick that it barely counted as a liquid; the whole house smelled wonderful, rich and warm. “Is there enough for seconds?” I asked Justin.

He shrugged, not looking at me. “Drama queen,” Rafe said, under his breath.

“Justin,” I said. “Are you still mad because I was a snotty cow last night?”

Another shrug. Abby, who had been reaching to pass me the stew pot, put it down.

“I was scared, Justin. I was worried I’d go in there today and the doctors would say there was something wrong and I’d need another operation or something.” I saw him glance up, a quick anxious flick, before he went back to turning his bread into little pellets. “I couldn’t handle you being scared as well. I’m really, really sorry. Forgive me?”

“Well,” he said after a moment, with a tiny half smile. “I suppose so.” He leaned over to put the stew pot beside my plate. “Now. Finish that off.”

“And what did the doctors say?” Daniel asked. “You don’t need more surgery, do you?”

“Nah,” I said, ladling stew. “Just more antibiotics. It hasn’t healed up all the way; they’re scared I could still get an infection.” Saying it out loud sent a twist through me, somewhere under the mike.

“Did they run tests? Do scans?”

I had no idea what doctors would have done. “I’m fine,” I said. “Can we not talk about it?”

“Good girl,” Justin said, nodding at my plate. “Does this mean we can use onions more than once a year, now?”

I got a horrible dropping feeling in my stomach. I gave Justin a blank look.

“Well, if you want more,” he said primly, “then they don’t make you gag after all, do they?”

Fuckfuckfuck. I’ll eat just about anything; it hadn’t occurred to me that Lexie might have food quirks, and it wasn’t exactly something Frank could have found out in casual conversation. Daniel had lowered his spoon and was looking at me. “I didn’t even taste them,” I said. “I think the antibiotics are doing something weird to my mouth. Everything tastes the same.”

“I thought it was the texture you didn’t like,” Daniel said.

Fuck. “It’s the thought of them. Now that I know they’re in there—”

“That happened to my granny,” Abby said. “She was on antibiotics and she lost her sense of smell. Never came back. You should talk to the doctor about that.”

“God, no,” said Rafe. “If we’ve found something that makes her stop bitching about onions, I vote we let nature take its course. Are you having the rest of that, or can I?”

“I don’t want to lose my sense of taste and eat onions,” I said. “I’d rather get an infection.”

“Good. Then pass it over here.”

Daniel had gone back to his food. I prodded dubiously at mine; Rafe rolled his eyes. My heart was going ninety. Sooner or later, I thought, I am going to make a mistake that I can’t talk my way out of.

* * *

“Nice save on the onions,” Frank said, that night. “And when it comes time to pull you out, you’ve got it all set up and ready to go: the antibiotics were messing with your sense of taste, you quit taking them, and hey presto, you got an infection. I wish I’d thought of it myself.”

I was up my tree, bundled in the communal jacket—it was a cloudy night, fine drizzle spattering the leaves, threatening to turn into full-on rain any minute—and keeping a very sharp ear out for John Naylor. “You heard that? Don’t you ever go home?”

“Not much, these days. Plenty of time to sleep once we’ve got our man. Speaking of which, my weekend with Holly’s coming up, so if we could start winding this up, I’d be a very happy camper.”

“Me too,” I said, “believe me.”

“Yeah? I got the feeling you were starting to settle in very nicely.”

I couldn’t read his voice; no one does neutral like Frank. “It could be a lot worse, sure,” I said carefully. “But tonight was a wake-up call. I can’t keep this up forever. Anything useful on your end?”

“No luck on what sent May-Ruth running. Chad and her buddies can’t remember anything unusual happening that week. But they might not anyway; it’s been four and a half years.”

This came as no surprise. “Oh, well,” I said. “Worth a shot.”

“Here’s something that came up, though,” Frank said. “Probably nothing to do with our case, but it’s odd, and anything odd is worth thinking about, at this stage. Just on the surface, what kind of person did Lexie come across as, to you?”

I shrugged, even though he couldn’t see me. There was something squirmy about this, too intimate, like being asked to describe myself. “I don’t know. Bouncy, I guess. Cheerful. Confident. Lots of energy. A little childish, maybe.”

“Yeah. Same here. That’s what we got off the video clips, and that’s what we got off all her mates. But that’s not what my FBI boy’s getting from May-Ruth’s pals.”

Something cold rippled through my stomach. I tucked my feet up higher into the branches and started chewing my knuckle.

“They’re describing a shy kid, very quiet. Chad thought that had to do with her being from some nowhere town in the Appalachians; he said Raleigh was a huge adventure to her, she loved it but she was a little overwhelmed by it all. She was gentle, a daydreamer, loved animals, was thinking of maybe becoming a vet’s assistant. Now tell me this: does that sound anything like our Lexie to you?”

I ran my hand through my hair and wished I were on solid ground; I needed to move. “So you’re saying what? You think we’re dealing with two different girls who both happen to look like me? Because I have to tell you, Frank, I’ve pretty much hit my limit for coincidences on this case.” I had this insane vision of more and more doubles popping out of the woodwork, matching mes vanishing and reappearing all over the world like a huge Whack-a-Mole game, a me in every port. This is what I get for wanting a sister when I was little, I thought wildly, biting back a hysterical giggle, be careful what you wish for—

Frank laughed. “Nah. You know I love you, babe, but two of you are enough for me. Plus our girl’s prints matched May-Ruth’s. I’m just saying it’s odd. I know people who’ve dealt with identity-swappers—protected witnesses, adult runaways like our girl—and they all say the same thing: these people were the same afterwards as they were before. It’s one thing getting a new name and a new life; it’s a whole other thing getting a new personality. Even for a trained undercover, it’s a constant strain. You know what it was like, having to be Lexie Madison twenty-four seven—what it’s like now, sure. It’s not easy.”

“I’m doing OK,” I said. I had that wild urge to laugh again. This girl, whoever the hell she was, would have made a fantastic undercover. Maybe we should have swapped lives earlier.

“You are, of course,” Frank said smoothly. “But so was our girl, and that’s worth looking into. Maybe she was just naturally gifted, but maybe she had training, somewhere—as an undercover, or as an actor. I’m putting out feelers; you have a little think and see if you’ve noticed any indicators that point in one direction or another. That sound like a plan?”

“Yeah,” I said, slowly leaning back against the tree trunk. “Good thinking.”

I didn’t feel like laughing any more. That first afternoon in Frank’s office had just flashed across my mind, so vivid that for an instant I smelled dust and leather and whiskeyed coffee, and for the first time I wondered if I had completely missed what was happening in that little sunlit room; if I had bounced blithely, unconsciously, past the most crucial moment of all. Here I had always believed the test had come in the first few minutes, with that couple on the street or when Frank asked me if I was afraid. It had never occurred to me that those were only the outer gates and that the real challenge had come much later, when I thought I was already safe inside; that the secret handshake I had given, without even realizing it, might have been the ease with which I helped come up with Lexie Madison.

“Does Chad know?” I asked suddenly, when Frank was about to hang up. “About May-Ruth not being May-Ruth?”

“Yep,” Frank said cheerfully. “He does. I left him his illusions as long as I could, but this week I had my boy tell him. I needed to know if he was holding something back, out of loyalty or whatever. Apparently he wasn’t.”

The poor bastard. “How’d he take it?”

“He’ll survive,” Frank said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And he hung up. I sat in my tree, making patterns in the bark with my fingernail, for a long time.

I was starting to wonder if I’d been underestimating, not the killer, but the victim. I didn’t want to think this, I’d been flinching off it, but I knew: there had been something wrong with Lexie, way deep down. The flint of her, the way she had left Chad behind without a word and laughed while she got ready to leave Whitethorn House, like an animal biting off its own trapped paw with one snap and no whimper; that could have been just desperation. I understood that, all the way. But this, the seamlessness of that switch from sweet shy May-Ruth to bubbly clown Lexie: that had been something else, something wrong. No kind of fear or desperation could have demanded that. She had done it because she wanted to. A girl with that much hidden and that much dark could have sparked a very high caliber of anger in someone.

It’s not easy, Frank had said. But that was the thing: for me, it always had been. Both times, being Lexie Madison had come as natural to me as breathing. I had slid into her like sliding into comfy old jeans, and this was what had scared me, all along.

* * *

It wasn’t until I was getting into bed, that night, that I remembered: that day on the grass, when something had clicked into place and I had seen the five of them as a family, Lexie as the cheeky late-baby sister. Lexie’s mind had gone along the same track as mine had, only a million times faster. She had taken one look and seen what they were and what they were missing, and fast as a blink she had made herself into that.

13

I had known, from the moment Sam said he was planning chats with his three potential vandals, that there would be consequences. If Mr. Baby-killers was in there, he wouldn’t be one bit happy about being questioned by the cops, he would blame the whole thing on us, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he would let it lie. What I missed was how fast the strike would come, and how straight. I felt so safe in that house, I had forgotten that that in itself should have been my warning.

It took him just one day. We were in the sitting room, Saturday night, not long before midnight. Abby and I had been doing our nails with Lexie’s silver nail polish, sitting on the hearth rug, and were waving them around to dry them; Rafe and Daniel were balancing out the estrogen surge by cleaning Uncle Simon’s Webley. It had been soaking in a casserole dish of solvent for two days, out on the patio, and Rafe had decided it was good to go. He and Daniel had turned the table into their armory zone—tool kit, kitchen towels, rags—and were happily cleaning the gun with old toothbrushes: Daniel was going at the crust of dirt on the grips, while Rafe tackled the actual gun. Justin was stretched out on the sofa, muttering at his thesis notes and eating cold popcorn out of a bowl beside him. Someone had put Purcell on the record player, a peaceful overture in a minor key. The room smelled of solvent and rust, a tough, reassuring, familiar smell.

“You know,” Rafe said, putting down his toothbrush and examining the gun, “I think it’s actually in pretty good shape, under all the crap. There’s a decent chance it’ll work.” He reached across the table for the ammo box, slid a couple of bullets into place and clicked the cylinder home. “Russian roulette, anyone?”

“Don’t,” said Justin, with a shudder. “That’s horrible.”

“Here,” Daniel said, holding his hand out for the gun. “Don’t play with it.”

“I’m joking, for God’s sake,” Rafe said, passing it across. “I’m just checking that everything works. Tomorrow morning I’ll take it out on the patio and get us a rabbit for dinner.”

“No,” I said, snapping upright and glaring at him. “I like the rabbits. Leave them alone.”

“Why? All they do is make more rabbits and shite all over the lawn. The little bastards would be a lot more use in a lovely fricassee, or a nice tasty stew—”

“You’re disgusting. Didn’t you ever see Watership Down?”

“You can’t stick your fingers in your ears or you’ll ruin your manicure. I could cook you a bunny au vin that would—”

“You’re going to hell, you know that?”

“Oh, chill out, Lex, it’s not like he’ll do it,” said Abby, blowing on a thumbnail. “The rabbits come out around dawn. At dawn, Rafe doesn’t even count as alive.”

“I don’t see anything disgusting about shooting animals,” Daniel said, carefully breaking the gun open, “provided you eat what you kill. We’re predators, after all. In an ideal world, I’d love us to be completely self-sufficient—living off what we could grow and hunt, dependent on no one. In reality, of course, that’s unlikely to happen, and in any case I wouldn’t want to start with the rabbits. I’ve become fond of them. They go with the house.”

“See?” I said to Rafe.

“See what? Stop being such a baby. How many times have I seen you stuff your face with steak, or—”

I was on my feet and into a shooter’s brace, my hand grabbing at where my gun should have been, before I understood that I had heard a crash. There was a big jagged rock sitting on the hearth rug beside me and Abby, as if it had been there all along, surrounded by bright flecks of glass like ice crystals. Abby’s mouth was open in a startled little O and a wide cold wind swept in through the broken window, swelling the curtains.

Then Rafe sprang out of his chair and threw himself towards the kitchen. I was half a pace behind him, with Justin’s panicky wail—“Lexie, your stitches!”—in my ears. Somewhere Daniel was calling something, but I swung through the French doors after Rafe and as he leaped off the patio, hair flying, I heard the gate clang at the bottom of the garden.

The gate was still swinging crazily when we flung ourselves through it. In the lane Rafe froze, head up, one hand going back to clamp around my wrist: “Shhh.”

We listened, not breathing. I felt something loom up behind me and spun round, but it was Daniel, swift and silent as a big cat on the grass.

Wind in leaves; then off to our right, towards Glenskehy and not far away, the tiny crack of a twig.

The last of the light from the house vanished behind us and we were flying down the lane in darkness, leaves whipping under my fingers as I reached out a hand to the hedge to guide myself, a sudden burst of running feet up ahead and a harsh triumphant shout from Rafe beside me. They were fast, Rafe and Daniel, faster than I would have believed. Our breathing savage as a hunting pack’s in my ears, the hard beat of our feet and my pulse like war drums speeding me on; the moon waxed and waned as clouds skimmed past and I caught a glimpse of something black, only twenty or thirty yards ahead of us, hunched and grotesque in the strange white light and running hard. For a flash I saw Frank leaning over his desk, hands pressing his headphones on tighter, and I thought at him hard as a punch Don’t you dare, don’t you dare send in your goons, this is ours.

We swung round a kink in the lane, grabbing at the hedge for balance, and skidded to a stop at a crossroads. In the moonlight the little lanes stretched out in every direction, bare and equivocal, giving away nothing; piles of stones huddled in the fields like spellbound watchers.

“Where’s he gone?” Rafe’s voice was a cracking whisper; he whirled around, casting about like a hunting dog. “Where’s the bastard gone?”

“He can’t have got out of sight this fast,” Daniel murmured. “He’s nearby. He’s gone to ground.”

“Shit!” Rafe hissed. “Shit, that little fuck, that vile little—God, I’ll kill him—”

The moon was slipping away again; the guys were barely shadows on either side of me, and fading fast. “Torch?” I whispered, stretching to get my mouth close by Daniel’s ear, and saw the quick shake of his head against the sky.

Whoever this man was, he knew the hillsides like he knew his own hands. He could hide here all night if he wanted to, slip from cover to cover the way centuries of his rebel ancestors had done before him, nothing but narrow eyes watching among the leaves and then gone.

But he was cracking. That rock through the window straight at us, when he had to know we would come after him: his control was slipping, eroding to dust under Sam’s questioning and the constant hard rub of his own rage. He could hide forever if he wanted to, but that right there was the catch: he didn’t want to, not really.

Every detective, in all the world, knows that this is our best weapon: your heart’s desire. Now that thumbscrews and red-hot pincers are off the menu, there’s no way we can force anyone to confess to murder, lead us to the body, give up a loved one or rat out a crime lord, but still people do it all the time. They do it because there’s something they want more than safety: a clear conscience, a chance to brag, an end to the tension, a fresh start, you name it and we’ll find it. If we can just figure out what you want—secretly, hidden so deep you may never have glimpsed it yourself—and dangle it in front of you, you’ll give us anything we ask for in exchange.

This guy was fed up to the back teeth of hiding on his own territory, skulking about with spray paint and rocks like a bratty teenager looking for attention. What he really wanted was a chance to kick some ass.

“Oh my God, he’s hiding,” I said, light and clear and amused into the wide waiting night, in my best snobby city-girl accent. Both of the guys grabbed me at the same time, but I grabbed them back and pinched, hard. “How pathetic is that? Such a big tough guy at a distance, but the second we get up close and personal, he’s under some hedge shaking like a scared little bunny.”

Daniel’s hand loosened on my arm and I heard him exhale, a tiny ghost of a laugh—he was barely even panting. “And why not?” he said. “He may not have the guts to stand and fight, but at least he has enough intelligence to know when he’s out of his depth.”

I squeezed whatever bit of Rafe was nearest—if anything could flush this guy out of cover, it would be that lazy English sneer—and heard his fast, savage catch of breath as the penny dropped. “I doubt there’s any intelligence involved,” he drawled. “Too much sheep in the bloodline. He’s probably forgotten all about us and wandered off to rejoin the flock.”

A rustle, too faint and too quickly cut off to pinpoint; then nothing.

“Here, kitty,” I crooned. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty . . .” and let it trail off into a giggle.

“In my great-grandfather’s day,” Daniel said coolly, “we knew how to deal with peasants who got above themselves. A touch of the horsewhip, and they learned their place.”

“Where your great-grandfather went wrong was letting them spawn at will,” Rafe told him. “You’re supposed to keep their breeding under control, the way you would with any other farm animal.”

That rustle again, louder; then a tiny, distinct click, like one pebble hitting another, very close by.

“We had uses for them,” Daniel said. His voice had a vague, abstracted note, the same note it got when he was concentrating on a book and someone asked him a question.

“Well, yes,” Rafe said, “but look what you ended up with. Reverse evolution. The shallow end of the gene pool. Hordes of drooling, half-witted, neck-less, inbred—”

Something exploded out of the hedge, only a few yards away, shot past me so close that I felt the wind on my arms, and crashed into Rafe like a cannon-ball. He went down with a grunt and a hideous thud that shook the ground. For a split second I heard scuffling noises, wild rasping breath, the nasty smack of a fist hitting home; then I dived in.

We went over in a tangled heap, hard earth under my shoulder, Rafe gasping for air, someone’s hair in my mouth and an arm twisting like steel cable out of my grip. The guy smelled like wet leaves and he was strong and he fought dirty, fingers groping for my eyes, feet jackknifing up and scrabbling to dig into my stomach. I hit out, heard a burst of breath and felt his hand fall away from my face. Then something slammed into us from the side, hard as a freight train: Daniel.

The weight of him sent all four of us rolling into bushes, branches clawing at my neck, breath hot on my cheek and somewhere the fast merciless rhythm of blows connecting with something soft, over and over. It was a vicious, nasty, messy fight, arms and legs everywhere, bony things jabbing, horrible muffled sounds like feral dogs worrying at a kill. It was three to one and we were every bit as furious as he was, but the dark gave this guy one advantage. We had no way of knowing who we were aiming at; he didn’t have to care, any blow that hit home was a good one. And he was using it, slippery and corkscrewing, tumbling the heap of us over and over on the ground, no way to get our bearings, I was dizzy and breathless and hitting frantically into thin air. A body thumped onto me and I lashed backwards with my elbow, heard a bark of pain that could have come from Rafe.

Then those fingers went for my eyes again. I felt out, found a roughstubbled jaw, got an arm free and punched with my whole body behind it. Something smashed into my ribs, hard, but it didn’t hurt; nothing hurt, this guy could have ripped me wide open and I would never have felt it, all I wanted was to hit him and keep on hitting. A small cool voice far at the back of my head warned, You could kill him, the three of you could kill him like this, but I didn’t care. My chest was a great burst of blinding white and I saw the final reckless arch of Lexie’s throat, I saw the sweet glow of the sitting room defiled with that jagged spray of glass, I saw Rob’s face cold and shuttered and I could have kept on punching forever, I wanted this guy’s blood filling my mouth, I wanted to feel his face explode into pulp and splinters under my fist and just keep going.

He twisted like a cat and my knuckles hit dirt and rock, I couldn’t find him. I grabbed in the dark, caught someone’s shirt and heard it rip as he shouldered me away. There was a desperate, heaving scramble, pebbles flying; a dull sick thud like a boot hitting flesh, a furious animal snarl; then running footsteps, fast and irregular, fading.

“Where—” Someone got a fistful of my hair; I beat the arm away and felt wildly for that face, that rough battered jawline, found cloth and hot skin and then nothing. “Get off—” A grunt of effort, a weight coming off my back; then, sudden and sharp as an explosion, silence.

“Where—”

The moon came out from behind the clouds and we stared at each other: wild-eyed, dirty, panting. For a second I barely recognized the others. Rafe scrambling to his feet with his teeth bared and blood shining dark under his nose, Daniel’s hair falling in his face and streaks of mud or blood like war paint across his cheeks: their eyes were black holes in the tricky white light and they looked like lethal strangers, ghost warriors from the last stand of some lost and savage tribe. “Where is he?” Rafe whispered, a low dangerous breath.

Nothing moved; just a coy little breeze flirting through the hawthorn. Daniel and Rafe were crouched like fighters, hands half curled and ready, and I realized I was too. In that moment I think we could have attacked each other.

Then the moon went in again. Something seemed to leach out of the air, some thrumming too high to hear. All of a sudden my muscles felt like they were turning to water, draining away into the earth; if I hadn’t grabbed a handful of hedge I would have fallen over. There was a long ragged breath, like a sob, from one of the guys.

Footsteps pounded up the lane behind us—we all jumped—and skidded to a stop a few feet away. “Daniel?” Justin whispered, breathless and nervous. “Lexie?”

“We’re over here,” I said. I was shaking all over, violently as a seizure; my heart was clattering so high in my throat that for a second I thought I was going to throw up. Somewhere beside me, Rafe retched, doubled over coughing and then spat: “Dirt everywhere—”

“Oh my God. Are you all right? What happened? Did you get him?”

“We caught him,” Daniel said, on a deep hard gasp, “but none of us could see a thing, and he got away in the confusion. There’s no point in going after him; by now he’s halfway to Glenskehy.”

“God. Did he hurt you? Lexie! Are your stitches—”

Justin was on the verge of panicking. “I’m totally fine,” I said, good and loud to make sure the mike could hear me. My ribs were starting to hurt like hell, but I couldn’t risk anyone wanting to look. “Just my hands are killing me. I got a few punches in.”

“I think one of them hit me, you little cow,” Rafe said. His voice had a giddy, light-headed note. “I hope your hand swells up and turns blue.”

“I’ll hit you again if you’re not careful,” I told him. I felt along my ribs: my hand was trembling so hard I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think anything was broken. “Justin, you should’ve heard Daniel. He was brilliant.”

“Oh, Jesus, yes,” said Rafe, starting to laugh. “A touch of the horsewhip? Where the hell did that come from?”

“Horsewhip?” Justin asked wildly. “What horsewhip? Who had a horsewhip?”

Rafe and I were both laughing too hard to answer. “Oh, God,” I managed. “ ‘In my great-grandfather’s day . . .’ ”

“ ‘When the peasants knew their place . . .’ ”

“What peasants? What are you talking about?”

“It all made perfect sense at the time,” said Daniel. “Where’s Abby?”

“She stayed at the gate, in case he came back and—Oh God, you don’t think he did, do you?”

“I doubt it very much,” Daniel said. There was the edge of a laugh ready to burst through his voice, too. Adrenaline: we were all crackling with it. “I think he’s had enough for one night. Is everyone all right?”

“No thanks to Little Miss Spitfire,” said Rafe, trying to pull my hair and getting me in the ear instead.

“I’m fine,” I said, batting Rafe’s hand away. Justin, in the background, was still murmuring, “Oh my God, oh my God . . .”

“Good,” Daniel said. “Then let’s go home.”

* * *

There was no sign of Abby at the back gate; nothing but the hawthorn trees shivering and the lazy, haunted creak of the gate in that small cool breeze. Justin was starting to hyperventilate when Daniel called into the darkness, “Abby, it’s us,” and she materialized out of the shadows, a white oval and a swish of skirt and a streak of bronze. She was holding the poker, in both hands.

“Did you get him?” she whispered, a low fierce hiss. “Did you get him?”

“My God, I’m surrounded by warrior women,” Rafe said. “Remind me never to piss you two off.” His voice sounded muffled, as if he was holding his nose.

“Joan of Arc and Boadicea,” Daniel said, smiling; I felt his hand rest on my shoulder for a second and saw the other one stretch out to Abby’s hair. “Fighting to defend their home. We got him; only temporarily, but I think we made our point clear.”

“I wanted to bring him back and have him stuffed and mounted over the fireplace,” I said, trying to dust muck off my jeans with my wrists, “but he got away.”

“The little fucker,” said Abby. She blew out a long, hard breath and lowered the poker. “I was actually hoping he’d come back.”

“Let’s get inside,” said Justin, glancing over his shoulder.

“What did he throw, anyway?” Rafe wanted to know. “I didn’t even look.”

“A rock,” said Abby. “And there’s something taped to it.”

* * *

“Oh, sweet Jesus in heaven,” Justin said, horrified, the second we got into the kitchen. “Look at the state of you three.”

“Wow,” said Abby, eyebrows going up. “I’m impressed. I’d love to see the one that got away.”

We looked just about as bad as I’d expected: shaking and skittery-eyed, covered in dirt and scrapes, great dramatic smears of blood in weird places. Daniel was leaning heavily on one leg and his shirt was ripped half off, a sleeve hanging loose. One knee was torn out of Rafe’s trousers, I could see glossy red through the hole, and he was going to have a beauty of a shiner in the morning.

“Those cuts,” said Justin. “They’ll have to be disinfected; God only knows what you’d pick up from those lanes. The dirt of them, cows and sheep and all manner of—”

“In a minute,” Daniel said, pushing his hair out of his eyes. He came up holding a twig, gave it a bemused look and laid it carefully on the kitchen counter. “Before we start on anything else, I think we need to see what’s on that rock.”

It was a folded piece of paper, the lined kind, torn out of a kid’s school notebook. “Wait,” Daniel said—Rafe and I had both moved forwards. He found two pens on the table, picked his way delicately through the broken glass to the rock, and used the pens to pull the paper free.

“Now,” Justin said briskly, bustling in with a bowl of water in one hand and a cloth in the other, “let’s see the damage. Ladies first. Lexie, you said your hands?”

“Hang on,” I said. Daniel had carried the piece of paper over to the table and was unfolding it carefully, still using the butts of the pens.

“Oh,” Justin said. “Oh.”

We moved in around Daniel, shoulder to shoulder. His face was bleeding—either a fist or the rim of his glasses had split his cheekbone open—but he didn’t seem to have noticed.

The note was printed in furious block capitals, so hard that in places the pen had dug right through the paper. WE WILL BURN YOU OUT.

There was a second of absolute silence.

“Oh my God,” Rafe said. He collapsed backwards onto the sofa and burst out laughing. “Brilliant. Actual torch-bearing villagers. How cool is that?”

Justin clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “Foolishness,” he said. All his composure had come back now that he was in the house, with the four of us safely around him and something useful to do. “Lexie, your hands.”

I held them out to him. They were a mess, covered with dirt and blood, knuckles split open and half my nails broken down to the quick—so much for my pretty silver manicure. Justin drew in his breath with a little hiss. “Good heavens, what did you do to the poor man? Not that he didn’t deserve it. Come here, where I can see.” He steered me into Abby’s armchair, under the pole lamp, and knelt on the floor beside me. The bowl gave off a cloud of steam and disinfectant, a warm reassuring smell.

“Do we call the cops?” Abby asked Daniel.

“God, no,” said Rafe, dabbing at his nose and checking his fingers for blood. “Are you mad? They’ll just give us the same old spiel: ‘Thanks for reporting it, there’s not a chance in hell we’ll ever catch the perpetrator, get a dog, bye.’ This time they might even arrest us—one look and you can tell we’ve been in a fight. You think Laurel and Hardy will care who started it? Justin, can I have that cloth for a second?”

“In a minute.” Justin was pressing the damp cloth against my knuckles, so gently I could barely feel it. “Does that sting?” I shook my head.

“I’ll bleed on the sofa,” Rafe threatened.

“You will not. Tip your head back and wait.”

“Actually,” Daniel said, still frowning thoughtfully at the note, “I think calling the police might not be a bad idea, at this point.”

Rafe sat up fast, forgetting all about his nose. “Daniel. Are you serious? They’re petrified of those apes down in the village. They’d do anything to get on Glenskehy’s good side, and arresting us for assault would definitely do that.”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking of the local police,” Daniel said. “Hardly. I meant Mackey or O’Neill—I’m not sure which would be better. What do you think?” he asked Abby.

“Daniel,” Justin said. His hand had stopped moving on mine and that high, panicky note was seeping back into his voice. “Don’t. I don’t want—They’ve been leaving us alone, since Lexie got back—”

Daniel gave Justin a long, inquisitive look over his glasses. “They have, yes,” he said. “But I seriously doubt that means they’ve dropped the investigation. I’m sure they’re putting a considerable amount of energy into looking for a suspect, I think they would be very interested to hear about this one, and I think we have an obligation to tell them, whether it’s convenient for us or not.”

“I just want to go back to normal.” Justin’s voice was almost a wail.

“Yes, well, so do we all,” Daniel said, a little testily. He winced, kneaded at his thigh muscle, winced again. “And the sooner all this is over and someone’s charged, the sooner we can do exactly that. I’m sure Lexie, for example, would feel a lot better if this man were in custody. Wouldn’t you, Lex?”

“Fuck custody, I’d feel a lot better if the little bastard hadn’t got away so fast,” I said. “I was having fun.” Rafe grinned and leaned over to high-five my free hand.

“Regardless of the Lexie thing,” Abby said, “this is a threat. I don’t know about you, Justin, but I don’t particularly want to be burned out.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, he won’t do it,” Rafe said. “Arson takes a certain level of organizational ability. He’d blow himself up long before he got anywhere near us.”

“You want to bet the house on that?”

The mood in the room had turned. The tight-knit, giddy exhilaration was gone, evaporated with a vicious sizzle like water hitting a hot stove; no one was having fun any more.

“I’d rather bet on this guy’s stupidity than on the cops’ brainpower. We need them like we need a hole in the head. If the moron comes back—and he won’t, not after tonight—we sort him out ourselves.”

“Because so far,” Abby said tautly, “we’ve been doing such a brilliant job of dealing with our own problems by ourselves.” She whipped the popcorn bowl off the floor with a tight, angry movement and squatted down to collect the glass.

“No, leave it; the police will want to see it all in situ,” Daniel said, dropping heavily into an armchair. “Ouch.” He grimaced, fished Uncle Simon’s revolver out of his back pocket and put it on the coffee table.

Justin’s hand froze in midair. Abby, straightening up fast, almost fell backwards.

If it had been anyone else I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But Daniel: something cold as seawater surged over my whole body, whipped the breath out of me. It was like seeing your father drunk or your mother in hysterics: that freefall in your stomach, cables snapping as the elevator gets ready to plummet hundreds of sheer stories, unstoppable, already gone.

“You cannot be serious,” Rafe said. He was on the edge of another fit of laughter.

“What the hell,” Abby inquired, very quietly, “did you think you were going to do with that?”

“Really,” Daniel said, giving the gun a faintly puzzled glance, “I’m not sure. I picked it up purely by instinct. Once we were out there, of course, it was much too dark and too chaotic to do anything sensible with it at all. It would have been dangerous.”

“Heaven forbid,” said Rafe.

“Would you have used it?” Abby demanded. She was staring at Daniel, her eyes huge, and holding the bowl like she was going to throw it.

“I’m not sure,” Daniel said. “I had some vague idea of threatening him with it to prevent him from escaping, but I suppose one never really knows what one is capable of until the situation presents itself.”

That click, in the dark lane.

“Oh God,” Justin whispered, a tremulous breath. “What a mess.”

“Not nearly as much of a mess as it could’ve been,” Rafe pointed out cheerfully. “Blood-and-guts-wise, that is.” He pulled off one of his shoes and shook a trickle of dirt and pebbles onto the floor. Not even Justin looked.

“Shut up,” Abby snapped. “You shut up. This isn’t a fucking joke. This is getting way out of hand. Daniel—”

“It’s all right, Abby,” Daniel said. “Really. Everything’s under control.”

Rafe collapsed back on the sofa and started to laugh again. There was a spiky, brittle edge to it, too near hysteria. “And you say this isn’t a fucking joke?” he asked Abby. “Under control. Is that really the phrase you want, Daniel? Would you really, really say that this situation is under control?”

“I already have,” Daniel said. His eyes on Rafe were watchful and very cold.

Abby slammed the bowl down on the table, popcorn scattering. “That’s bollocks. Rafe’s being a prick but he’s right, Daniel. This is not under control any more. Someone could have got killed. The three of you running around in the dark chasing some psycho arsonist—”

“And when we got back,” Daniel pointed out, “you were holding the poker.”

“That’s not the same thing at all. That was in case he came back; I didn’t go looking for trouble. And what if he had managed to get that thing off you? Then what?”

Any second now someone was going to say the word “gun.” As soon as Frank or Sam found out that Uncle Simon’s revolver had evolved from a quaint little heirloom into Daniel’s weapon of choice, we were into a whole new zone, one involving an Emergency Response Unit team on standby with bulletproof vests and rifles. The thought made my stomach twist. “Doesn’t anyone want to hear what I think?” I demanded, thumping the arm of my chair.

Abby whipped around and stared at me as if she had forgotten I was there. “Why not,” she said heavily, after a moment. “God.” She dropped down on the floor, among the shards of glass, and clasped her hands around the back of her neck.

“I think we definitely tell the cops,” I said. “This time they might actually get the guy. Before, they never had anything to go on, but now all they’ll have to do is find the one who looks like he’s been through a meat grinder.”

“In this place,” Rafe said, “that might not narrow it down very much.”

“Excellent point,” Daniel told me. “I hadn’t thought of that. It would also be useful in a preemptive capacity, in case this man decides to accuse us of assault—which I think is unlikely, but you never know. So we’re agreed? There’s not really much point in dragging the detectives out here at this hour, but we call them in the morning?”

Justin had gone back to cleaning my hand, but his face was drawn and closed. “Anything to get this over with,” he said tightly.

“I think you’re bloody insane,” Rafe said, “but then, I’ve thought that for a while now. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter what I think, does it? You’re going to do exactly what you want to, either way.”

Daniel ignored that. “Mackey or O’Neill?”

“Mackey,” Abby said, without looking up from the floor.

“Interesting,” Daniel said, finding his cigarettes. “My first instinct would have been O’Neill, especially as he’s the one who seems to have been exploring our relationship with Glenskehy, but you may be right. Does anyone have a light?”

“Can I make a suggestion?” Rafe asked sweetly. “When we’re having our little chats with your cop friends, it might be an idea to leave that out.” He nodded at the gun.

“Well, of course,” said Daniel absently. He was still looking around for a lighter; I found Abby’s, on the table beside me, and threw it to him. “It doesn’t actually come into the story at all, anyway; there’s no reason to mention it. I’ll put it away.”

“You do that,” Abby said tonelessly, to the floor. “And then we can all just pretend it never happened.”

Nobody answered. Justin finished cleaning my hands and wrapped Band-Aids around the split knuckles, carefully aligning the edges. Rafe swung his legs off the sofa, went into the kitchen and came back with a handful of wet paper towels, gave his nose a perfunctory scrub and tossed the towels into the fireplace. Abby didn’t move. Daniel smoked meditatively, blood drying on his cheek and his eyes focused on something in the middle distance.

The wind picked up, swirled in the eaves and sent a high wail down the chimney, banked around and came rushing through the sitting room like a long cold ghost train. Daniel put out his cigarette, went upstairs—footsteps overhead, a long scraping noise, a thump—and came back with a scarred, jagged-edged piece of wood, maybe part of an old headboard. Abby held it for him while he hammered it into place over the broken window, the hammer blows echoing harshly through the house and outwards into the night.

14

Frank got there fast, the next morning; I got the feeling he’d been waiting by the phone with his car keys in his hand since dawn, ready to leap into action the second we made the call. He brought Doherty with him, to sit in the kitchen and make sure no one eavesdropped while Frank took our statements, one by one, in the sitting room. Doherty looked fascinated; he couldn’t stop gawping, at the high ceilings, the patches of half-stripped wallpaper, the four of them in their spotless old-fashioned clothes, me. He shouldn’t even have been there. This was Sam’s line of investigation, plus Sam would have been out to the house like a shot if he’d had any idea that I’d been in a fight. Frank hadn’t told him. I was very glad I wasn’t going to be in the incident room when this one came out.

The others did beautifully. Their polished façade had gone up as soon as we heard tires on the drive, but it was a subtly different version from the one they used in college: less chilly, more engaging, a perfect balance between shocked victims and courteous hosts. Abby poured the tea and set out a carefully arranged plate of biscuits, Daniel brought an extra chair into the kitchen for Doherty; Rafe made self-deprecating jokes about his black eye. I was starting to get a taste of what the interviews must have been like, after Lexie died, and why they had driven Frank quite so far up the wall.

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.

* * *

We were drinking wine and playing 110, that night, when my mobile rang. It startled the bejasus out of me—it wasn’t like any of us got calls on a regular basis—and I almost missed the call, trying to find my phone; it was in the coat closet, still in the pocket of the communal jacket after last night’s walk. “Hi,” I said.

“Miss Madison?” said Sam, sounding deeply self-conscious. “It’s Detective O’Neill here.”

“Oh,” I said. I had been heading back to the sitting room, but I reversed and leaned up against the front door, where there was no chance of the others picking up his voice. “Hi.”

“Can you talk?”

“Sort of.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“For definite?”

“Totally.”

“Jesus,” Sam said, on a deep rush of breath. “Thank God. That prick Mackey heard the whole thing, did you know that? Didn’t ring me, didn’t say a word, just waited for this morning and headed down to you. Left me sitting on my arse in the incident room, like an eejit. If this case doesn’t wind up soon, I’m going to end up splattering that fucker.”

Sam almost never swears unless he’s full-on furious. “Fair enough,” I said. “I’m not surprised.”

A moment’s pause. “The others are there, right?”

“More or less.”

“I’ll keep it short. We sent Byrne to watch Naylor’s house, have a look at him when he came home from work this evening, and the man’s face is in bits—the three of ye did a good job, by the sound of things. He’s my fella, all right. I’m pulling him in tomorrow morning—into the Murder squad, this time. I don’t care about spooking him, not any more. If he gets itchy feet, I can hold him on breaking and entering. Do you want to come in, have a look?”

“Sure,” I said. A big part of me wanted to wuss out: spend tomorrow in the library with the others around me, eat lunch in the Buttery watching rain fall outside the windows, forget all about what might be happening just up the road, while I still could. But whatever this interview turned out to be, I needed to be there for it. “What time?”

“I’ll catch him before he goes to work, have him in here from about eight. Come whenever you like. Are you . . . You’re OK with coming into the squad?”

I’d forgotten even to worry about that. “No problem.”

“He fits the profile, doesn’t he? Bang on.”

“I guess,” I said, “yeah.” In the sitting room there was a comical groan from Rafe—he had obviously just made a mess of his hand—and a burst of laughter from the others. “You bastard,” Rafe was saying, but he was laughing too, “you sly bastard, I fall for it every time . . .” Sam is a good interrogator. If there was something to get out of Naylor, odds were he would get it.

“This could be it,” Sam said. The hope in his voice made me flinch, the intensity of it. “If I play my cards right tomorrow, this could be the end of it. You could be coming home.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I love you,” Sam said, keeping his voice down, right before he hung up. I stood there in the cool hallway for a long moment, biting down on my thumbnail and listening to the sounds from the sitting room—voices and the snap of cards, clink of glass, the crackle and whoosh of the fire—before I went back inside.

“Who was that?” Daniel asked, looking up from his hand.

“That detective,” I said. “He wants me to come in to them.”

“Which one?”

“The cute blond one. O’Neill.”

“Why?”

Everyone was looking at me, motionless as startled animals; Abby had stopped with a card pulled halfway out of her hand. “They’ve found some guy,” I said, sliding back into my chair. “About last night. They’re going to question him tomorrow.”

“You’re joking,” Abby said. “Already?”

“Go on, get it over with,” Rafe told Daniel. “Say I told you so. You know you want to.”

Daniel paid no attention. “But why you? What do they want?”

I shrugged. "They just want me to have a look at him. And O’Neill asked if I remembered anything more, about that night. I think he’s hoping I’ll take one look at this guy and point a trembling finger and go, ‘That’s him! The man who stabbed me!’ ”

“One of you has seen way too many made-for-TV movies,” said Rafe.

“Have you?” Daniel asked. “Remembered anything more?”

“Sweet fuck-all,” I said. My imagination, or did some wire-fine tension drop out of the air? Abby changed her mind about her hand, tucked the card back in and pulled out another; Justin reached for the wine bottle. “Maybe he’ll get someone to hypnotize me—do they do that in real life?”

“Get him to program you to get some work done every once in a while,” Rafe said.

“Oo. Could he? Program me to get my thesis done faster?”

“Possibly he could, but I doubt he will,” Daniel said. “I’m not sure evidence obtained under hypnosis is admissible in court. Where are you meeting O’Neill?”

“His work,” I said. “I would have tried to get him to meet up in the pub, come for a pint in Brogan’s, or something, but I don’t think he’d go for it.”

“I thought you hated Brogan’s,” Daniel said, surprised.

I was opening my mouth for a fast backpedal—Duh, course I do, I was only messing . . . It was nothing about Daniel that saved me; he was looking at me over his cards with calm, unblinking, owlish eyes. It was the puzzled little drop of Justin’s eyebrows, the cock of Abby’s head: they had no idea what he was talking about. Something was wrong.

“Me?” I said, puzzled. “I don’t mind Brogan’s. I never really think about it; I only said it ’cause it’s right across from where he works.”

Daniel shrugged. “I must have confused it with somewhere else,” he said. He was smiling at me, that extraordinary sweet smile, and I felt it again: that sudden slackening in the air, the sigh of release. “You and your quirks; I can’t keep track.” I made a face at him.

“What are you doing flirting with cops, anyway?” Rafe demanded. “That’s just wrong on so many levels.”

“What? He’s cute.” My hands were shaking; I didn’t dare pick up my cards. It had taken a second to sink in: Daniel had tried to trap me. I had been a fraction of a second from bouncing happily down his false trail.

“You’re incorrigible,” Justin said, topping up my wine. “Anyway, the other one is much more attractive, in a bastard-y kind of way. Mackey.”

“Oh, ewww,” I said. Those fucking onions—I was sure, from that smile, that I had called this one right, but whether it had been enough to reassure Daniel; with him you could never tell . . . “No way. Bet you anything he’s got a hairy back. Back me up here, Abby.”

“Different strokes,” Abby said comfortably. “And you’re both incorrigible.”

"Mackey’s a prat,” Rafe said. “And O’Neill’s a yokel. And it’s diamonds and it’s Abby’s go.”

I managed to pick up my cards and tried to work out what the hell to do with them. I watched Daniel all evening, as carefully as I could without getting caught, but he was the same as always: gentle, polite, distant; paying no more attention to me than to anyone else. When I put my hand on his shoulder, on my way past to get another bottle of wine, he reached up and covered it with his own hand, squeezed hard.

15

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

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

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

“Re-evaluate what?” I asked.

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

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

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

“Jesus,” I said, nodding at Naylor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Without taking anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then what?” Sam demanded.

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

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

“Tricks?”

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

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

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

He was talking to me. “Sure,” I said.

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

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

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

“I play fair. You know that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They thought the baby would be a changeling?”

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

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

“Different times,” Sam said, nodding.

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

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

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

“God rest,” Sam said quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam shook his head.

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

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

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

Sam shook his head.

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

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

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

Sam nodded. “A load of new jobs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. I never—”

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

“I don’t—”

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

“No—”

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll talk about it later.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened to him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16

It was lunchtime when I got back to Trinity, but the others were still in their carrels. As soon as I turned into the long aisle of books that led to our corner they looked up, fast and almost simultaneously, pens going down.

"Well,” Justin said, on a big relieved sigh, as I reached them. “There you are. About time.”

“Jesus,” said Rafe. “What took so long? Justin thought you’d been arrested, but I told him you’d probably just eloped with O’Neill.”

Rafe’s hair was standing up in cowlicks and Abby had pen smudged on one cheekbone and they had no idea how beautiful they looked to me, how close we’d come to losing each other. I wanted to touch all four of them, hug them, grab their hands and hold on hard. “They kept me hanging around for ages,” I said. “Are we going for lunch? I’m starving.”