I pulled plates out of the cupboard. “So what if he is? All I’m doing is going to a meeting. What’s the huge big deal?”
“That mentaller’s using you, is the big deal. You’ve not been yourself since that business last year—”
The words sent something straight through me, a swift vicious jolt like the shock from an electric fence. I whipped round on him, forgetting all about dinner; all I wanted to do with the plates was throw them at Sam’s head. “Oh, no. Don’t, Sam. Don’t bring that into this.”
“It’s already in it. Your man Mackey took one look at you and he knew something was up, figured he’d have no problem pushing you into going along with his mad idea—”
The possessiveness of him, standing in the middle of my floor with his feet planted and his fists jammed furiously in his pockets: my case, my woman. I banged the plates down on the counter. “I don’t give a flying fuck what he figured, he’s not pushing me into anything. This has nothing to do with what Frank wants—it’s got nothing to do with Frank, full stop. Sure, he tried to bulldoze me. I told him to fuck off.”
“You’re doing exactly what he asks you to. How the hell is that telling him to fuck off?”
For a crazy second I wondered if he could actually be jealous of Frank and, if he was, what the hell I was supposed to do about it. “And if I don’t go to the meeting, I’ll be doing exactly what you ask me to. Would that mean I’m letting you push me around? I decided I wanted to go tomorrow. You think I’m not able to do that all by myself? Jesus Christ, Sam, last year didn’t lobotomize me!”
“That’s not what I said. I’m just saying you haven’t been yourself since—”
“This is myself, Sam. Take a good look: this is my fucking self. I did undercover years before Operation Vestal ever came along. So leave that out of it.”
We stared at each other. After a moment Sam said, quietly, “Yeah. Yeah, I suppose you did.”
He dropped down on the sofa and ran his hands over his face. All of a sudden he looked wrecked, and the thought of what his day had been like sent a pang through me. “Sorry,” he said. “For bringing that up.”
“I’m not trying to get into an argument,” I said. My knees were shaking and I had no idea how we had ended up fighting about this, when we were basically on the same side. “Just . . . leave it, OK? Please, Sam. I’m asking you.”
“Cassie,” Sam said. His round, pleasant face had a look of anguish that didn’t belong there. “I can’t do this. What if . . . God. What if something happens to you? On my case, that had nothing to do with you. Because I couldn’t bloody well get my man. I can’t live with that. I can’t.”
He sounded breathless, winded. I didn’t know whether to hold him tight or kick him. “What makes you think this has nothing to do with me?” I demanded. “This girl is my double, Sam. This girl was going around wearing my fucking face. How do you know your guy got the right one? Think about it. A postgrad who spends her time reading Charlotte bloody Brontë, or a detective who’s put dozens of people away: who’s more likely to have someone out to kill her?”
There was a silence. Sam had worked on Operation Vestal, too. Both of us knew at least one person who would happily have had me killed without a second thought, and who was well able to get the job done. I could feel my heart banging, hard and high under my ribs.
Sam said, “Are you thinking—”
“Specific cases aren’t the point,” I said, too curtly. “The point is, for all we know I could be involved up to my tits already. And I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I can’t live with that.”
He flinched. “It wouldn’t be for the rest of your life,” he said, quietly. “I hope I can promise you that much, at least. I do plan to get this fella, you know.”
I leaned back against the counter and took a breath. “I know, Sam,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“If, God forbid, he was after you, then all the more reason to stay out of the way and let me find him.”
The cheerful cooking smell had grown an acrid, dangerous edge: something was starting to burn. I switched off the cooker, shoved the pans to the back—neither of us was going to feel like eating for a while—and sat down cross-legged on the sofa, facing Sam.
“You’re treating me like your girlfriend, Sam,” I said. “I’m not your girlfriend, not when it comes to this kind of thing. I’m just another detective.”
He gave me a sad, sideways little smile. “Could you not be both?”
“I hope so,” I said. I wished I hadn’t finished the wine; this man needed a drink. “I really do. But not like this.”
After a while Sam let out a long breath, let his head fall back against the sofa. “So you want to do it,” he said. “Mackey’s plan.”
“No,” I said. “I just want to know about this girl. That’s why I said I’d go to the meeting. It’s got nothing to do with Frank and his wacko idea. I just want to hear about her.”
“Why?” Sam demanded. He sat up and caught both my hands, making me look at him. There was a ragged edge to his voice, something frustrated and almost pleading. “What’s she got to do with you? She’s no relation to you, no friend of yours, nothing. She’s happenstance, is all, Cassie: some girl who was looking for a new life and ran into the perfect chance.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, Sam. She doesn’t even sound like a particularly nice person; if we’d met, I probably wouldn’t have liked her. That’s the whole point. I don’t want her in my head. I don’t want to be wondering about her. I’m hoping that if I find out enough about her, I can drop the whole thing and forget she ever existed.”
“I’ve a double,” Sam said. “He lives in Wexford, he’s an engineer, and that’s all I know about the man. About once a year, someone comes up to me and tells me I’m the spit of him—half the time they actually call me Brendan. We have a laugh about it, sometimes they take a photo of me on their phones to show him, and that’s the end of that.”
I shook my head. “That’s different.”
“How?”
“For one thing, he hasn’t been murdered.”
“No harm to the man,” Sam said, “but I wouldn’t give a damn if he were. Unless I caught the case, it’d be no problem of mine.”
“This girl’s my problem,” I said. Sam’s hands were big and warm and solid around mine, and his hair was falling across his forehead like it always does when he’s worried. It was a spring Saturday night; we should have been walking on some beach down the country, surrounded by dark and waves and curlews, or making something experimental for dinner and playing music too loud, or settled in a corner of one of those rare out-of-the-way pubs where people still sing ballads when it gets past closing time. “I wish she wasn’t, but she is.”
“There’s something here,” Sam said, “that I’m not getting.” He had let our hands drop onto my knees and was frowning down at them, running his thumb around one of my knuckles in a steady, automatic rhythm. “All I’m seeing is a bog-standard murder case, with a coincidence that could happen to anyone. Sure, I got a shock when I saw her, but that’s only because I thought it was you. Once that was sorted, I figured everything would go back to normal. But you and Mackey, you’re both acting like this girl was something to you; like it’s personal. What am I missing?”
“In a way,” I said, “it is personal, yeah. For Frank, partly it’s exactly what you said—he thinks this would all be a big brilliant adventure. But it’s more than that. Lexie Madison started out as his responsibility, she was his responsibility for eight months while I was under, she’s his responsibility now.”
“But this girl isn’t Lexie Madison. She’s an identity thief; I could go down to Fraud in the morning and find you hundreds more just like her. There is no Lexie Madison. You and Mackey made her up.”
His hands had tightened on mine. “I know,” I said. “That’s sort of the point.”
The corner of Sam’s mouth twisted. “L
ike I said. The man’s mad.”
I didn’t exactly disagree with him. I’ve always thought one of the reasons for Frank’s legendary fearlessness is that, way deep down, he’s never quite managed to connect with reality. To him every operation is one of those war games the Pentagon plays, only even cooler, because the stakes are higher and the results are tangible and long-lasting. The fracture is small enough and he’s smart enough that it never shows in obvious ways; but, while he’s keeping every angle covered and every situation beautifully, icily under control, some part of him truly believes he’s being played by Sean Connery.
I spotted this because I recognize it. My own border fence between real and not-real has never been all that great. My friend Emma, who likes things to add up neatly, claims that this is because my parents died when I was too young to take it in: they were there one day and gone the next, crashing through that fence so hard and fast they left it splintered for good. When I was Lexie Madison for eight months she turned into a real person to me, a sister I lost or left behind on the way; a shadow somewhere inside me, like the shadows of vanishing twins that show up on people’s X-rays once in a blue moon. Even before she came back to find me I knew I owed her something, for being the one who lived.
This was presumably not what Sam wanted to hear; he had enough on his plate without adding several new flavors of weird into the mix. Instead—it was the closest I could get—I tried to tell him about undercover. I told him how your senses are never quite the same again, how colors turn fierce enough to brand you and the air tastes bright and jagged as that clear liqueur filled with tiny flakes of gold; how the way you walk changes, your balance turns fine and taut as a surfer’s, when you spend every second on the shifting edge of a fast risky wave. I told him how afterwards I never shared a spliff with my mates or took E in a club again, because no high could ever compare. I told him how damn good at it I was, a natural, better than I’ll be at DV in a million years.
When I finished, Sam was looking at me with a worried little furrow between his eyebrows. “What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying you want to transfer back into Undercover?”
He had taken his hands off mine. I looked at him, sitting across the sofa with his hair rucked up on one side, frowning at me. “No,” I said, “that’s not it,” and watched his face clear in relief. “That’s not it at all.”
* * *
This is the part I didn’t tell Sam: bad stuff happens to undercovers. A few of them get killed. Most lose friends, marriages, relationships. A couple turn feral, cross over to the other side so gradually that they never see it happening till it’s too late, and end up with discreet, complicated early-retirement plans. Some, and never the ones you’d think, lose their nerve—no warning, they just wake up one morning and all at once it hits them what they’re doing, and they freeze like tightrope walkers who’ve looked down. This guy McCall: he’d infiltrated an IRA splinter group and nobody thought he even knew what fear was, till one evening he phoned in from an alleyway outside a pub. He couldn’t go back in there, he said, and he couldn’t walk away because his legs wouldn’t stop shaking. He was crying. Come get me, he said; I want to go home. When I met him, he was working in Records. And some go the other way, the most lethal way of all: when the pressure gets to be too much, it’s not their nerve that breaks, it’s their fear. They lose the capacity to be afraid, even when they should be. These can’t ever go home again. They’re like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were. Some people are undercovers all the way to the bone; the job has taken them whole.
I was never afraid of getting killed and I was never afraid of losing my nerve. My kind of courage holds up best under fire; it’s different dangers, more refined and insidious ones, that shake me. But the other things: I worried about those. Frank told me once—and I don’t know whether he’s right or not, and I didn’t tell Sam this either—that all the best undercovers have a dark thread woven into them, somewhere.
3
So, on Sunday evening, Sam and I went to Dublin Castle for Frank’s council of war. Dublin Castle is where the Murder squad works. I had cleared out my desk there on another long cool evening, in autumn: stacked my paperwork in neat piles and labeled each pile with a Post-it, thrown away the cartoons stuck to my computer and the chewed pens and old Christmas cards and stale M&Ms in my desk drawers, turned off the light and closed the door behind me.
Sam picked me up. He was very quiet. He had been up and out early that morning, so early that the flat was still dark when he leaned over to kiss me good-bye. I didn’t ask him about the case. If he had found anything good, even the slimmest lead, he would have told me.
“Don’t let your man pressure you,” he said, in the car. “Into doing anything you don’t want to.”
“Come on,” I said. “When have I ever let anyone pressure me into anything?”
Sam adjusted his rearview mirror, carefully. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
When he unlocked the door, the smell of the building came at me like a shout: an old, elusive smell, damp and smoke and lemon, nothing like the antiseptic tang of DV in the new building up in Phoenix Park. I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories, but every step hit me straight in the gut with something: me running down those stairs with a bunch of files in each hand and an apple caught between my teeth, my partner and me high-fiving each other outside that door after getting our first confession in that interview room; the two of us double-teaming the superintendent down that hallway, one in each ear, trying to hassle him into giving us more overtime. It seemed like the corridors had an Escher look, the walls all tilting in subtle, seasick ways, but I couldn’t focus my eyes enough to figure out exactly how.
“How’re you doing?” Sam asked quietly.
“Starving,” I said. “Whose idea was it to do this at dinnertime?”
Sam smiled, relieved, and gave my hand a quick squeeze. “We don’t have an incident room yet,” he said. “Till we decide . . . well, how we’re doing this; where we’re working out of.” Then he opened the door of the Murder squad room.
Frank was straddling a backwards chair at the head of the room, in front of the big whiteboard, and all his reassurances about a casual chat between him and me and Sam had been bollocks. Cooper, the state pathologist, and O’Kelly, the superintendent of the Murder squad, were sitting at desks on opposite sides of the room with their arms folded, wearing identical narky looks. This should have been funny—Cooper looks like a heron and O’Kelly looks like a bulldog with a comb-over—but actually it gave me a very bad feeling. Cooper and O’Kelly hate each other; getting them in the same room for any length of time takes a lot of skilled persuasion and a couple of bottles of pretty serious wine. For some cryptic reason of his own, Frank had pulled out all the stops to get them both there. Sam shot me a wary, warning glance. He hadn’t been expecting this either.
“Maddox,” O’Kelly said, managing to make it sound injured. O’Kelly never had any use for me when I was on Murder, but the second I applied for a transfer, I somehow morphed into the serpent’s-tooth protégée who snubbed years of devoted mentoring and buggered off to DV. “How’s life in the minor leagues?”
“All sunshine and flowers, sir,” I said. When I’m tense, I get flippant. “Evening, Dr. Cooper.”
“Always a pleasure, Detective Maddox,” said Cooper. He ignored Sam. Cooper hates Sam, too, and more or less everyone else. I’d stayed in his good books so far, but if he discovered I was going out with Sam, I would shoot down his Christmas-card list at the speed of light.
“At least in Murder,” O’Kelly said, giving my ripped jeans a fishy look—for some reason I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear my nice new appropriate-image clothes, not for this—“most of us can afford decent gear. How’s Ryan getting on?”
I wasn’t sure whether the question was bitchy or not. Rob Ryan used to b
e my partner, back in Murder. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I hadn’t seen O’Kelly, either, or Cooper; not since I’d transferred out. This was all happening too fast and out of control. “Sends love and kisses,” I said.