“Smell,” Daniel said softly. “Do you smell that?”
A first faint scent of rosemary drifting over from the herb garden, barely a tint in the air. “Rosemary; that’s for remembrance,” he said. “Soon we’ll have thyme and lemon balm, and mint and tansy, and something that I think must be hyssop—it’s hard to tell from the book, during winter. It’ll be a mess this year, of course, but we’ll trim everything back into shape, replant where we need to. Those old photos will be a great help; they’ll give us some idea of the original design, what belongs where. They’re hardy plants, these, chosen for their endurance as well as for their virtue. By next year . . .”
He told me about old herb gardens: how carefully they were arranged to make sure that each plant had everything it needed to flourish, how perfectly they balanced sight and scent and use, practicality and beauty, without ever allowing one to be compromised for another’s sake. Hyssop to loosen chest colds or cure toothaches, he said, chamomile in a poultice to reduce inflammation or in a tea to prevent nightmares; lavender and lemon balm for strewing to make the house smell sweet, rue and burnet in salads. “We’ll have to try that sometime,” he said, “a Shakespearean salad. Tansy tastes like pepper, did you know that? I thought it had died off long ago, it was all brown and brittle, but when I cut right back to the roots, there it was: just a tinge of green. It’ll be all right now. It’s amazing, how stubbornly things survive against incredible odds; how irresistibly strong it is, the drive to live and grow . . .”
The rhythms of his voice washed over me, even and soothing as waves; I barely heard the words. “Time,” I think he said somewhere behind me, or maybe it was “thyme,” I’ve never been sure. “Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.”
11
What people tend to forget about Sam is that he has one of the highest solve rates on the Murder squad. Sometimes I wonder if this is for a very simple reason: he doesn’t waste energy. Other detectives, me included, take it personally when things go wrong, they get impatient and frustrated and irritated with themselves and the dead-end leads and the whole fucking case. Sam gives it his best shot, then shrugs and says, “Ah, sure,” and tries something else.
He had been saying, “Ah, sure,” a lot that week, when I asked him how things were going, but not in his usual vague, abstracted way. This time he sounded tense and harassed, wound a notch tighter every day. He had gone door-to-door through most of Glenskehy, asking about Whitethorn House, but he got a smooth slippery wall of tea and biscuits and blank looks: Lovely young people up at the House, keep themselves to themselves, never any trouble out of them, sure why would there be any bad feeling, Detective? Terrible, what happened to that poor girl, I said a rosary for her, must have been someone she met up in Dublin . . . I know that small-town silence, I’d run into it before, intangible as smoke and solid as stone. We honed it on the British for centuries and it’s ingrained, the instinct for a place to close up like a fist when the police come knocking. Sometimes it means nothing more than that; but it’s a powerful thing, that silence, dark and tricky and lawless. It still hides bones buried somewhere in the hills, arsenals cached in pigsties. The British underestimated it, fell for the practiced half-witted looks, but I knew and Sam knew: it’s dangerous.
It was Tuesday night before the absorbed note came back into Sam’s voice. “I should’ve known better to start with,” he said cheerfully. “If they won’t talk to the local cops, why would they talk to me?” He had backed off, thought it over and then taken a taxi down to Rathowen for an evening in the pub: “Byrne said the people round there weren’t mad about Glenskehy folk, and I figured everyone likes a chance to gossip about the neighbors, so . . .”
He had been right. Rathowen people were a very different story from the Glenskehy bunch: they made him as a cop inside thirty seconds (“Come here, young fella, are you here about that girl got stabbed down the road?”), and he had spent the rest of the evening surrounded by fascinated farmers buying him pints and happily trying to trick him into giving away something about the investigation.
“Byrne was right: they think Glenskehy’s a lunatic asylum. Part of it’s just what you get between small towns—Rathowen’s that bit bigger, they’ve got a school and a police station and a few shops, so they call Glenskehy a mad backwater. It’s more than just your average rivalry, though. They really do think Glenskehy folk aren’t right. One fella said he wouldn’t go into Regan’s for all the tea in China.”
I was up a tree, wearing my mike sock and having a smoke. Since I had heard about that graffiti, the lanes had started to make me feel edgy, exposed; I didn’t like being down there when I was on the phone, with half my attention somewhere else. I had found a nook high up in a big beech tree, just at the start of the branches, where the trunk split in two. My arse fit perfectly into the fork, I had a clear view of the lane in both directions and of the cottage downhill, and if I tucked my legs up I vanished into the leaves. “Did they say anything about Whitethorn House?”
A small silence. “Yeah,” Sam said. “The house doesn’t have a great name, in Rathowen or in Glenskehy. Partly that’s to do with Simon March—he was a mad old bastard, by all accounts; two of the fellas remembered him firing his gun at them, when they were kids and they went nosing around the Whitethorn House grounds. But it goes back further than that.”
“The dead baby,” I said. The words sent something smooth and cold through the middle of me. “Did they know anything about that?”
“A bit. I’m not sure they have all the details right—you’ll see what I mean in a minute—but if they’re anywhere near the mark, it’s not a good story. Not good for the Whitethorn House people, I mean.”
He left a pause. “So?” I said. “These people aren’t my family, Sam. And unless this story happened sometime in the last six months, which I’m assuming it didn’t or we’d have heard about it by now, it’s got nothing to do with anyone I’ve even met. I’m not going to be deeply hurt by something Daniel’s great-granddad did a hundred years ago. Cross my heart.”
“Grand, so,” Sam said. “The Rathowen version—there’s some variation, but this is the gist of it—is that, a while back, a young fella from Whitethorn House had an affair with a Glenskehy girl, and she was going to have a baby for him. It used to happen often enough, sure. The problem was, this girl wasn’t about to disappear into a convent or marry some poor local fella in a mad hurry before anyone noticed she was pregnant.”
“A woman after my own heart,” I said. There was no way this story was going to end well.
“Shame your man March didn’t feel the same way. He was furious; he was meant to be getting married to some nice rich Anglo-Irish girl, and this could have banjaxed all his plans. He told the girl he didn’t want anything more to do with her or the child. She was already pretty unpopular in the village: not just pregnant outside marriage—that was a big deal, back then—but pregnant for one of the Marches . . . Not long after, she was found dead. She’d hanged herself.”
There are stories like this scattered all over our history. Most of them are buried deep and quiet as last year’s leaves, long transmuted into old ballads and winter-night stories. I thought of this one lying latent for a century or more, germinating and growing like some slow dark seed, blooming at last with broken glass and knives and poison berries of blood all among the hawthorn hedges. My back prickled against my tree trunk.
I put out my smoke on the sole of my shoe and tucked the butt back into the packet. “Got anything to say this actually happened?” I asked. “Apart from some story they tell in Rathowen to keep kids away from Whitethorn House.”
Sam blew out a breath. “Nothing. I put a couple of floaters onto the records, but they’ve turned up bugger-all. And there’s not a chance anyone in Glenskehy is going to tell me their version. They’d rather everyone forgot it ever happened.”
“Someone’s not forgetting,” I said.
“I should have a better idea who that is, in the n
ext few days—I’m pulling all the info I can get on the people in Glenskehy, to cross-check against your profile. I’d love a clearer idea of what my fella’s problem is, though, before I get talking to him. The thing is, I’ve no clue where to start. One of the Rathowen fellas says all this happened in his great-granny’s time—which isn’t much help, sure: the woman lived to be eighty. Another one swore it was way back in the nineteenth century, ‘sometime after the Famine,’ but . . . I don’t know. I think he wants it as far away as possible; he’d say it was in Brian Boru’s time if he thought I’d believe him. So I’ve a window from 1847 to about 1950, and no one’s about to help me narrow it down.”
“Actually,” I said, “maybe I can.” It made me feel sticky all over, traitorous. “Give me a couple of days and I’ll see if I can get something more specific.”
A small pause, like a question, till Sam realized I wasn’t going to go into detail. “That’s grand. Anything you can find would be great.” Then, on a different note, almost shyly: “Listen, I was meaning to ask you something, before all this happened. I was thinking . . . I’ve never been on holiday, except to Youghal once when I was a little fella. How about you?”
“France, for summers.”
“That was to visit family, sure. I meant a proper holiday, like on the telly, with a beach and snorkeling and mad cocktails in a bar with a cheesy lounge singer doing ‘I Will Survive.’ ”
I knew where this was going. “What the hell have you been watching?”
Sam laughed. “Ibiza Uncovered. See what happens to my taste when you’re not here?”
“You’re just looking for topless chicks,” I said. “Emma and Susanna and I have been meaning to go away since we were in school, only we haven’t got round to it yet. Maybe this summer.”
“But now they’ve both got kids, haven’t they? That makes it harder to go off on a girlie break. I was thinking . . .” That shy note again. “I got a couple of brochures from the travel agencies. Italy, mostly; I know you like the old archaeology. Could I bring you on holiday, when this finishes up?”
I had no idea what I thought about this, and no room to figure it out. “That sounds gorgeous,” I said, “and you’re wonderful to think of it. Can we decide when I get home? The thing is, I’m not sure how long this is going to take.”
There was a tiny silence that made me grimace. I hate hurting Sam; it’s like kicking a dog too gentle to ever bite back. “It’s been more than two weeks already. I thought Mackey said a month max.”
Frank says whatever comes in useful at the time. Undercover investigations can last for years, and although I couldn’t see that happening here—the long operations are aimed at ongoing criminal activity, not once-off crimes—I was pretty sure that a month was something he had made up at random to get Sam off his back. For a second I almost hoped so. The thought of leaving all this, back to DV and Dublin crowds and corporate clothes, was vastly depressing.
“In theory, yeah,” I said, “but you can’t put an exact time on something like this. It could be less than a month—I could be home any time, if one of us gets something solid. But if I pick up a good lead and it needs following through, I might be here a week or two extra.”
Sam made a furious, frustrated sound. “If I ever talk about doing a joint investigation again, lock me in a closet till I get sense. I need a deadline here. I’ve been holding off on all kinds of stuff—getting DNA off the lads to test against the baby . . . Till you’re done in there, sure, I can’t even tell anyone we’re dealing with a murder. A few weeks is one thing—”
I had stopped listening to him. Somewhere, down the lane or deep in the trees, there was a sound. Not one of the usual noises, night birds and leaves and small hunting animals, I knew those by now; something else.
“Hang on,” I said, softly, through Sam’s sentence.
I took the phone away from my ear and listened, holding my breath. It was coming from down the lane, towards the main road, faint but getting closer: a slow, rhythmic crunching noise. Footsteps on pebbles.
“Gotta go,” I said into the phone, just above a whisper. “Ring you back later if I can.” I switched the phone off, shoved it into my pocket, tucked up my legs among the branches and sat still.
The footsteps were steady and coming nearer; someone big, from the weight of them. There was nothing up this lane except Whitethorn House. I pulled my sweater up, slowly, to cover the bottom half of my face. In the dark, it’s the flash of white that gives you away.
Night changes your sense of distance, makes things sound closer than they are, and it seemed like forever before someone came into view: just a flick of movement at first, a dappled shadow passing slowly under the leaves. Flash of fair hair, silver as a ghost’s in the pale light. I had to fight the instinct to turn my head away. This was a bad place to wait for something to step out of the dark. There were too many unknown things around me, moving intently along their secret routes on their own private business, and some of them had to be the kind that isn’t safe for us to see.
Then he stepped into a patch of moonlight and I saw that it was just a guy, tall, with a rugby build and a designer-looking leather jacket. He moved like he was unsure, hesitating, glancing off into the trees on either side. When he was only a few yards away he turned his head and looked straight at my tree, and in the instant before I shut my eyes—that’s the other thing that can give you away, that glint, we’re all programmed to spot watching eyes—I saw his face. He was my age, maybe a little younger, good-looking in a forgettable clean-cut way, with a hazy, perplexed frown, and he wasn’t on the KA list. I had never seen him before.
He passed under me, so close I could have dropped a leaf on his head, and vanished up the lane. I stayed put. If he was someone’s friend come to visit, I was going to be up there a long time, but I didn’t think he was. The hesitancy, the confused glances around; he wasn’t looking for the house. He was looking for something, or someone, else.
Three times, in her last weeks, Lexie had met N—or at least planned to meet N—somewhere. And on the night she died, if the other four were telling the truth, she had gone out for that walk and met her killer.
My adrenaline was pumping hard and I was itching to go after the guy, or at least intercept him on his way back, but I knew that was a bad idea. I wasn’t scared—I had a gun, after all, and in spite of his size he didn’t look very formidable—but I only had one shot at this, metaphorically, and I couldn’t afford to fire it while I was completely in the dark. There was probably no way to find out whether or how he was linked to Lexie, I would have to play that one by ear, but it would be nice to at least know his name before we got into conversation.
I slid down from the tree in slow motion—the scrape of the bark pulled up my top and nearly dragged the mike off me, Frank would think I was being run over by a tank—and got behind it to wait. It felt like hours before the guy came wandering back down the lane, rubbing the back of his head and still looking bewildered. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t found it. When he had passed me, I counted thirty footsteps and then followed him, keeping on the grass verge and putting my feet down carefully, staying behind tree trunks.
He had a wankermobile parked on the main road, a hunormous black SUV with depressingly inevitable tinted windows. It was about fifty yards from the turnoff, and the road was bordered by wide open stretches—long grass, ragged nettles, an old milestone sticking up off-kilter—so there was no cover; I couldn’t risk getting close enough to read the plate. My guy whacked the hood affectionately, got in, slammed the door too loudly—sudden cold silence, in the trees all round me—and sat there for a while, contemplating whatever guys like that contemplate, probably his haircut. Then he revved the engine and bulldozed off down the road, towards Dublin.
* * *
When I was sure he was gone, I climbed back up my tree and thought this over. There was always a chance that this guy had been stalking me for a while now, that the electric feeling at the back of my neck had
been coming from him, but I doubted it. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t been particularly covert about it that night, and I didn’t get the sense that slinking through the wilderness was a major part of his skill set. Whatever had been lurking in the corner of my eye, it wasn’t coming into view this easily.
I was clear on one thing: neither Sam nor Frank needed to know about the SUV Prince, not until I had something a whole lot more concrete to tell them. Sam would go ballistic if he found out I was dodging strange men on the same late-night walk where Lexie had failed to dodge her killer. That wouldn’t bother Frank one bit—he always figured I was well able to take care of myself—but if I told him then he would take over, he would find this guy and pull him in and interrogate the bejasus out of him, and I didn’t want that. Something in me said that wasn’t the way to go at this case. And something else, deeper, said that this wasn’t Frank’s business, not really. He had stumbled into it by accident. This was between me and Lexie.