I hated this. I had been in this room so many times, me and Rob working suspects with the flawless, telepathic coordination of two hunters circling their moment; being there without him made me feel like someone had scooped out all my organs and I was about to cave in on myself, too hollow to stand. Eventually I dug my pen into the wall so hard that the point snapped off. I threw the rest of it across the room at the camera and got it with a crack, but even that didn’t make me feel any better.
By the time Frank decided to make his big entrance, I was seething in about seven different ways. “Well well well,” he said, reaching up and switching off the camera. “Fancy meeting you here. Have a seat.”
I stayed standing. “What the fuck are you playing at?”
His eyebrows went up. “I’m interviewing suspects. What, I need your permission now?”
“You need to bloody well talk to me before you throw a curveball straight at my head. I’m not just having a laugh out there, Frank, I’m working, and this could wreck everything I’m trying to do.”
“Working? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“That’s what you called it. I’m doing exactly what you sent me in there to do, I’m finally getting somewhere, why the hell are you shoving a spoke in my wheels?”
Frank leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “If you want to play dirty, Cass, I can play too. Not as much fun when you’re on the receiving end, is it?”
The thing was that I knew he wasn’t playing dirty, not really. Making me sit in the naughty corner and think about what I’d done was one thing: he was furious enough—and with good reason—that he probably wanted to punch me in the eye, and I knew well that unless I pulled off a spectacular last-minute save I was going to be in big trouble when I came in the next day. But he would never, no matter how angry he was, do anything that might jeopardize the case. And I knew, cool as snow under all the spitting mad, that I could use that.
“OK,” I said, taking a breath and running my hands over my hair, “OK. Fair enough. I deserved that.”
He laughed, a short, tight bark. “You don’t want to get me started on what you deserve, babe. Trust me on that one.”
“I know, Frank,” I said. “And when we’ve got the time, I’ll let you give me hell for as long as you want, but not now. How’re you doing with the others?”
He shrugged. “As well as could be expected.”
“In other words, you’ve got nowhere.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I do. I know those four. You can keep going at them till you have to retire, and you’ll still get nowhere.”
“It’s possible,” Frank said blandly. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? I’ve got a few years left in me.”
“Come on, Frank. You’re the one who’s said that, right from the beginning: those four stick together like glue, there’s no point in going at them from the outside. Wasn’t that why you wanted me on the inside to start with?”
A noncommittal little tilt of his chin, like a shrug.
“You know well you’re not going to get anything good out of them. You just want to rattle them, right? So let’s rattle them together. I know you’re pissed off with me, but that’ll keep till tomorrow. For now, we’re still on the same side.”
One of Frank’s eyebrows flickered. “We are?”
“Yeah, Frank, we are. And the two of us together can do a lot more damage than you can on your own.”
“Sounds fun,” Frank said. He was lounging against the wall with his hands in his pockets, eyes hooded lazily to hide the sharp, assessing glint. “What kind of damage did you have in mind?”
I moved round the table and sat on the edge, leaning in towards him, as close as I could get. “Interview me and let the others eavesdrop. Not Daniel—he doesn’t rattle, all that’ll happen if we push him is he’ll walk out—but the other three. Switch on their intercoms to pick up this room, put them near monitors, whatever—if you can make it look accidental, great, but if you can’t it doesn’t matter. If you want to keep an eye on their reactions, then let Sam do the interview.”
“While you say what, exactly?”
“I’ll let it slip that my memory’s starting to come back. I’ll keep it vague, stick to stuff I can’t get wrong—running for the cottage, blood, that kind of thing. If that doesn’t rattle them, nothing will.”
“Ah,” Frank said, with a wry tip of a grin. “So that’s what you were setting up, with the sulks and the temper tantrums and the whole prima-donna bit. I should have guessed. Silly me.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, sure, I was going to do it anyway. But this way’s even better. Like I said, we can do a lot more damage together. I can get edgy, make it obvious that there’s more I’m not telling you . . . If you want to script it for me, then fine, do it, I’ll say whatever you want. Come on, Frankie, what do you say? You and me?”
Frank thought this over. “And what do you want in exchange?” he inquired. “Just so I know.”
I gave him my best wicked grin. “Relax, Frank. Nothing that’ll jeopardize your professional soul. I just need to know how much you’ve told them, so I don’t shove my foot in my mouth. And you were planning to share that with me anyway, right? Since we’re on the same side and all.”
“Yeah,” Frank said dryly, on a sigh. “Naturally. I’ve told them sweet fuck-all, Cass. Your arsenal is still intact. That being the case, it would make me a very happy camper if you were to actually use some of it, sooner or later.”
“I’m going to, believe me. Which reminds me,” I added, as an afterthought. “The other thing I need: can you keep Daniel out of my hair for a while? Whenever you’ve finished with us, send the rest of us home—don’t tell him we’re gone, though, or he’ll be out of here faster than a speeding bullet. Then give me an hour, two if you can, before you cut him loose. Don’t spook him, just keep it routine and keep him talking. OK?”
“Interesting,” Frank said. “Why?”
“I want to have a chat with the others without him around.”
“That much I got. Why?”
“Because I think it’ll work, is why. He’s the one in charge there, you know that; he decides what they say and don’t say. If the others are shaken up and they don’t have him around to keep a lid on them, who knows what they’ll come out with?”
Frank picked at something between his front teeth, examined his thumbnail. “What exactly are you aiming for?” he asked.
“I won’t know till I hear it. But we’ve always said they were hiding something, right? I don’t want to walk off this case without doing my best to get it out of them. I’m going to hit them with everything I’ve got—guilt trips, tears, tantrums, threats, the kid, Slow Eddie, you name it. Maybe I’ll get a confession—”
“Which I’ve said from the beginning,” Frank pointed out, “is not what we need from you. What with that annoying little admissibility rule, and all.”
“You’re telling me you’d turn down a confession if I brought you one on a silver platter? Even if it’s not admissible, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. You pull them in, play them the tape, go at them hard—Justin’s cracking already, one good tap and he’ll fall apart.” It took me a second to realize where the déjU vu was coming from. The fact that I was having the exact same argument with Frank that I had had with Daniel gave me a strange cold twist in my stomach. “A confession may not be exactly what you asked Santy to bring you, but at this stage, Frankie, we can’t afford to pick and choose.”
“I’ll admit it would be better than what we’ve got now. Which is a big heaping plate of fuck-all.”
“There you go. And I could end up with something a lot better than that. Maybe they’ll give us the weapon, the crime scene, who knows?”
“The old ketchup technique,” Frank said, still inspecting his thumbnail with interest. “Turn ’em upside down, give ’em a good shake and hope something comes out.”
“Frank,” I said, and waited till h
e glanced up at me. “This is my last shot. Tomorrow I come in. Let me have it.”
Frank sighed, leaned his head back against the wall and had a leisurely look around the room; I saw him take in the new graffiti, the bits of exploded pen in the corner. “What I’m curious about,” he said eventually, “is how you’re so sure that one of them did it.”
My blood stopped moving for a second. All Frank had ever wanted from me was one solid lead. If he found out I had that already, I was toast: off the case and into big trouble, faster than you can say Up Shit Creek. I would never even make it back to Glenskehy. “Well, I’m not sure,” I said easily. “But, like you said, they’ve got motive.”
“Yeah, they’ve got motive. Of a kind. But then, so do Naylor and Eddie and a whole bunch of other people, some of whom we presumably haven’t even identified yet. This girl put herself in harm’s way on a regular basis, Cass. She may not have ripped people off financially—although that’s debatable: you could argue that she got her share of Whitethorn House under false pretenses—but she ripped them off emotionally. That’s a dangerous thing to do. She lived at risk. And yet you’re very, very sure which risk caught up with her.”
I shrugged, hands going out. “This is the only one I can go after. I’ve got one day left; I don’t want to ditch this case without giving it everything I’ve got. What are you bitching about, anyway? You’ve always liked them for it.”
“Oh, you picked up on that? I underestimated you, babe. Yeah, I’ve always liked them. But you haven’t. A few days ago you were claiming these four were a bunch of fluffy little bunnies who wouldn’t hurt a fly between them, and now you’ve got that steel-trap look in your eye and you’re working out the best way for us to fuck with their heads. So I’m wondering what it is that you’re not telling me.”
His eyes were on me, level and unblinking. I gave it a second, ran my hands through my hair like I was trying to figure out how to put this. “It’s not like that,” I said, in the end. “I’ve just got a feeling, Frank. Just a feeling.”
Frank watched me for a long minute; I swung my legs and tried to look open and sincere. Then: “OK,” he said, suddenly all business, shoving himself off the wall and heading over to switch the camera back on. “You’ve got a deal. Did you lot bring two cars, or am I going to have to drive Danny Boy all the way back to Glenarsefuck when I’m done with him?”
“We brought both cars,” I said. Relief and adrenaline were making me giddy; my mind was racing through how to work this interview and I wanted to shoot straight up in the air like a firework. “Thanks, Frank. You won’t regret it.”
“Yeah,” Frank said, “well.” He swapped the chairs back around. “Sit. Stay. I’ll get back to you.”
* * *
He left me there for another couple of hours, presumably while he gave the others everything he’d got, in the hope that one of them would crack and he wouldn’t need to use me after all. I spent the time smoking illegal cigarettes—no one seemed to care—and working out the details of how to do this. I knew Frank would be coming back. From the outside, the others were impregnable, seamless; even Justin would be holding up cool as ice in the face of Frank’s worst. Outsiders were too far away to shake them. They were like one of those medieval fortresses built with such fierce, intricate, defensive care that they could only ever be taken from the inside, by treachery.
Finally the door flew open and Frank stuck his head in. “I’m about to link you up to the other interview rooms, so get in character. Five minutes to curtain.”
“Don’t link Daniel in,” I said, sitting up fast.
“Don’t fuck up,” Frank said, and vanished again.
When he came back I was perched on the table, bending the ink tube of the Biro into a catapult and flipping the broken bits at the camera. “Hey,” I said, brightening up at the sight of him. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”
“Now how could I ever do that?” Frank asked, giving me his very best grin. “I even brought you coffee—milk and two sugars, am I right? No, no, don’t worry about that”—as I hopped off the table and went for the Biro bits—“someone’ll get them later. Sit down and we’ll have a chat. How’ve you been?” He pulled out a chair and shoved one of the Styrofoam cups across to me.
He started out sweet as honey—I’d forgotten what a charmer Frank can be, when he feels like it. You’re looking wonderful, Miss Madison, and how’s the old war wound getting on, and—when I played up to him, gave a stretch to show him how well the stitches had healed—isn’t that a lovely sight, and just the right amount of flirtation in his grin. I threw in eyelash-and-giggle touches, just little ones, to piss Rafe off.
Frank took me through the whole John Naylor saga, or anyway a version of it—not exactly the version that had originally happened, but definitely a version that made Naylor sound like a good suspect: soothing the others down, before we started detonating things. “I’m all impressed now,” I told him, tilting my chair back and giving him a mischievous sideways look. “I thought you’d given up ages ago.”
Frank shook his head. “We don’t give up,” he said soberly. “Not on something as serious as this. No matter how long it takes. We don’t always want to be obvious about it, but we’re always working away, putting the pieces together.” It was impressive; he should have come with his own soundtrack. “We’re getting there. And right now, Miss Madison, we need a little help from you.”
“Sure,” I said, bringing my chair down and doing focused. “Do you want me to look at that guy Naylor again?”
“Nothing like that. It’s your mind we need this time, not your eyes. You remember how the doctors said your memory might start coming back, as you recovered?”
“Yeah,” I said, uncertainly, after a pause.
“Anything you remember, anything at all, could help us a lot. I want you to have a think and tell me: has anything come back to you?”
I left it a beat too long before I said, almost convincingly, “No. Nothing. Just what I told you before.”
Frank clasped his hands on the table and leaned towards me. Those attentive blue eyes, that gentle, coaxing voice: if I’d been a genuine civilian, I’d have been melting all over my chair. “See, I’m not so sure. I’m getting the impression you’ve remembered something new, Miss Madison, but you’re worried about telling me. Maybe you think I might misinterpret it, and the wrong person could get in trouble? Is that it?”
I threw him a quick looking-for-reassurance glance. “Sort of. I guess.”
He smiled at me, all crinkling crow’s-feet. “Trust me, Miss Madison. We don’t go around charging people with serious crimes unless we have serious evidence. You’re not about to get anyone arrested all by yourself.”
I shrugged, made a face at my coffee cup. “It’s nothing big. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway.”
“You let me worry about that, OK?” Frank said soothingly. He was about one step from patting my hand and calling me “love.” “You’d be surprised what can come in useful. And if it doesn’t, then there’s no harm done, am I right?”
“OK,” I said, on a breath. “It’s just . . . OK. I remember blood, on my hands. All over my hands.”
“There you go,” Frank said, keeping that reassuring smile switched on. “Well done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I shook my head. “Can you remember what you were doing? Were you standing up? Sitting down?”
“Standing up,” I said. I didn’t have to put the shake in my voice. A few feet away, in the interview rooms I knew inside out, Daniel was waiting patiently for someone to come back and the other three were slowly, silently, beginning to wind tighter. “Leaning against a hedge—it was prickly. I was . . .” I mimed twisting up my top, pressing it against my ribs. “Like that. Because of the blood, to make it stop. But it didn’t help.”