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Also by Tana
French
In the Woods
For Anthony, for a million reasons
Prologue
Some nights, if I’m sleeping on
my own, I still dream about Whitethorn House. In the dream it’s
always spring, cool fine light with a late-afternoon haze. I climb
the worn stone steps and knock on the door—that great brass
knocker, going black with age and heavy enough to startle you every
time—and an old woman with an apron and a deft, uncompromising face
lets me in. Then she hangs the big rusted key back on her belt and
walks away down the drive, under the falling cherry blossom, and I
close the door behind her.
The house is always empty. The bedrooms are bare and bright, only
my footsteps echoing off the floorboards, circling up through the
sun and the dust motes to the high ceilings. Smell of wild
hyacinths, drifting through the wide-open windows, and of beeswax
polish. Chips of white paint flaking off the window sashes and a
tendril of ivy swaying in over the sill. Wood doves, lazy somewhere
outside.
In the sitting room the piano is open, wood glowing chestnut and
almost too bright to look at in the bars of sun, the breeze
stirring the yellowed sheet music like a finger. The table is laid
ready for us, five settings—the bone-china plates and the
long-stemmed wineglasses, fresh-cut honeysuckle trailing from a
crystal bowl—but the silverware has gone dim with tarnish and the
heavy damask napkins are frilled with dust. Daniel’s cigarette case
lies by his place at the head of the table, open and empty except
for a burnt-down match.
Somewhere in the house, faint as a fingernail-flick at the edge of
my hearing, there are sounds: a scuffle, whispers. It almost stops
my heart. The others aren’t gone, I got it all wrong somehow.
They’re only hiding; they’re still here, for ever and ever.
I follow the tiny noises through the house room by room, stopping
at every step to listen, but I’m never quick enough: they slide
away like mirages, always just behind that door or up those stairs.
The tip of a giggle, instantly muffled; a creak of wood. I leave
wardrobe doors swinging open, I take the steps three at a time, I
swing round the newel post at the top and catch a flash of movement
in the corner of my eye: the spotted old mirror at the end of the
corridor, my face reflected in it, laughing.
1
This is
Lexie Madison’s story, not mine. I’d love to tell you one without
getting into the other, but it doesn’t work that way. I used to
think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled
the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I
think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out
of sight and way beyond my control.
This much is mine, though: everything I did. Frank puts it all down
to the others, mainly to Daniel, while as far as I can tell Sam
thinks that, in some obscure and slightly bizarro way, it was
Lexie’s fault. When I say it wasn’t like that, they give me careful
sideways looks and change the subject—I get the feeling Frank
thinks I have some creepy variant of Stockholm syndrome. That does
happen to undercovers sometimes, but not this time. I’m not trying
to protect anyone; there’s no one left to protect. Lexie and the
others will never know they’re taking the blame and wouldn’t care
if they did. But give me more credit than that. Someone else may
have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played
every card, and I had my reasons.
* * *
This is the main thing you need to know about Alexandra Madison:
she never existed. Frank Mackey and I invented her, a long time
ago, on a bright summer afternoon in his dusty office on Harcourt
Street. He wanted people to infiltrate a drug ring in University
College Dublin. I wanted the job, maybe more than I had ever wanted
anything in my life.
He was a legend: Frank Mackey, still in his thirties and already
running undercover operations; the best Undercover agent Ireland’s
ever had, people said, reckless and fearless, a tightrope artist
with no net, ever. He walked into IRA cells and criminal gangs like
he was walking into his local pub. Everyone had told me the story:
when the Snake—a career gangster and five-star wacko, who once left
one of his own men quadriplegic for not buying his round—got
suspicious and threatened to use a nail gun on Frank’s hands, Frank
looked him in the eye without breaking a sweat and bluffed him down
till the Snake slapped him on the back and gave him a fake Rolex by
way of apology. Frank still wears it.
I was a shiny green rookie, only a year out of Templemore Training
College. A couple of days earlier, when Frank had sent out the call
for cops who had a college education and could pass for early
twenties, I had been wearing a neon yellow vest that was too big
for me and patrolling a small town in Sligo where most of the
locals looked disturbingly alike. I should have been nervous of
him, but I wasn’t, not at all. I wanted the assignment too badly to
have room for anything else.
His office door was open and he was sitting on the edge of his
desk, wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, flipping through my
file. The office was small and had a disheveled look, like he used
it mainly for storage. The desk was empty, not even a family photo;
on the shelves, paperwork was mixed in with blues CDs, tabloids, a
poker set and a woman’s pink cardigan with the tags still on. I
decided I liked this guy.
“Cassandra Maddox,” he said, glancing up.
“Yes, sir,” I said. He was average height, stocky but fit, with
good shoulders and close-cut brown hair. I’d been expecting someone
so nondescript he was practically invisible, maybe the Cancer Man
from The X Files, but this guy had rough,
blunt features and wide blue eyes, and the kind of presence that
leaves heat streaks on the air where he’s been. He wasn’t my type,
but I was pretty sure he got a lot of female attention.
“Frank. ‘Sir’ is for desk jockeys.” His accent was old inner-city
Dublin, subtle but deliberate, like a challenge. He slid off the
desk and held out his hand.
“Cassie,” I said, shaking it.
He pointed at a chair and went back to his perch on the desk. “Says
here,” he said, tapping my file, “you’re good under pressure.”
It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. Back
when I was a trainee posted to a scuzzy part of Cork city, I had
talked down a panicked teenage schizophrenic who was threatening to
cut his own throat with his grandfather’s straight razor. I had
almost forgotten about that. It hadn’t occurred to me, till then,
that this was probably why I was up for this job.
“I hope so,” I said.
“You’re, what—twenty-seven?”
“Twenty-six.”
The light through the window was on my face and he gave me a long,
considering look. “You can do twenty-one, no problem. Says here
you’ve three years of college. Where?”
“Trinity. Psychology.”
His eyebrows shot up, mock-impressed. “Ah, a professional. Why
didn’t you finish?”
“I developed an unknown-to-science allergy to Anglo-Irish accents,”
I told him.
He liked that. “UCD going to bring you out in a rash?”
“I’ll take my antihistamines.”
Frank hopped off his desk and went to the window, motioning me to
follow. “OK,” he said. “See that couple down there?”
A guy and a girl, walking up the street, talking. She found keys
and let them into a depressing apartment block. “Tell me about
them,” Frank said. He leaned back against the window and hooked his
thumbs in his belt, watching me.
“They’re students,” I said. “Book bags. They’d been food
shopping—the carrier bags from Dunne’s. She’s better off than he
is; her jacket was expensive, but he had a patch on his jeans, and
not in a trendy way.”
“They a couple? Friends? Flatmates?”
“A couple. They walked closer than friends, tilted their heads
closer.”
“They going out long?”
I liked this, the new way my mind was working. “A while, yeah,” I
said. Frank cocked an eyebrow like a question, and for a moment I
wasn’t sure how I knew; then it clicked. “They didn’t look at each
other when they were talking. New couples look at each other all
the time; established ones don’t need to check in as often.”
“Living together?”
“No, or he’d have automatically gone for his keys as well. That’s
her place. She has at least one flatmate, though. They both looked
up at a window: checking to see if the curtains were open.”
“How’s their relationship?”
“Good. She made him laugh—guys mostly don’t laugh at a girl’s jokes
unless they’re still at the chat-up stage. He was carrying both the
Dunne’s bags, and she held the door open for him before she went
in: they look after each other.”
Frank gave me a nod. “Nicely done. Undercover’s half intuition—and
I don’t mean psychic shite. I mean noticing things and analyzing
them, before you even know you’re doing it. The rest is speed and
balls. If you’re going to say something or do something, you do it
fast and you do it with total conviction. If you stop to
second-guess yourself, you’re fucked, possibly dead. You’ll be out
of touch a lot, the next year or two. Got family?”
“An aunt and uncle,” I said.
“Boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be able to contact them, but they won’t be able to contact
you. They going to be OK with that?”
“They’ll have to be,” I said.
He was still slouching easily against the window frame, but I
caught the sharp glint of blue: he was watching me hard. “This
isn’t some Colombian cartel we’re talking about, and you’ll be
dealing mostly with the lowest ranks—at first, anyway—but you’ve
got to know this job isn’t safe. Half these people are binned out
of their heads most of the time, and the other half are very
serious about what they do, which means none of them would have any
problem with the idea of killing you. That make you nervous?”
“No,” I said, and I meant it. “Not at all.”
“Lovely,” said Frank. “Let’s get coffee and get to work.”
It took me a minute to realize that that was it: I was in. I’d been
expecting a three-hour interview and a stack of weird tests with
inkblots and questions about my mother, but Frank doesn’t work like
that. I still don’t know where, along the way, he made the
decision. For a long time, I waited for the right moment to ask
him. Now I’m not sure, any more, whether I want to know what he saw
in me; what it was that told him I would be good at this.
We got burnt-tasting coffee and a packet of chocolate biscuits from
the canteen, and spent the rest of the day coming up with Alexandra
Madison. I picked the name—“You’ll remember it better that way,”
Frank said. Madison, because it sounds enough like my own surname
to make me turn around, and Lexie because when I was a kid that was
the name of my imaginary sister. Frank found a big sheet of paper
and drew a timeline of her life for me. “You were born in Holles
Street Hospital on the first of March 1979. Father, Sean Madison, a
minor diplomat, posted in Canada—that’s so we can pull you out fast
if we need to: give you a family emergency, and off you go. It also
means you can spend your childhood traveling, to explain why nobody
knows you.” Ireland is small; everyone’s cousin’s girlfriend went
to school with you. “We could make you foreign, but I don’t want
you fucking about with an accent. Mother, Caroline Kelly Madison.
She got a job?”
“She’s a nurse.”
“Careful. Think faster; keep an eye out for implications. Nurses
need a new license for every country. She trained, but she quit
working when you were seven and your family left Ireland. Want
brothers and sisters?”
“Sure, why not,” I said. “I’ll have a brother.” There was something
intoxicating about this. I kept wanting to laugh, just at the
lavish giddy freedom of it: relatives and countries and
possibilities spread out in front of me and I could pick whatever I
wanted, I could grow up in a palace in Bhutan with seventeen
brothers and sisters and a personal chauffeur if I felt like it. I
shoved another biscuit into my mouth before Frank could see me
smiling and think I wasn’t taking this seriously.
“Whatever your heart desires. He’s six years younger, so he’s in
Canada with your parents. What’s his name?”
“Stephen.” Imaginary brother; I had an active fantasy life as a
kid.
“Do you get on with him? What’s he like? Faster,” Frank said, when
I took a breath.
“He’s a little smart-arse. Football-mad. He fights with our parents
all the time, because he’s fifteen, but he still talks to me . . .”
Sun slanting across the scarred wood of the desk. Frank smelled
clean, like soap and leather. He was a good teacher, a wonderful
teacher; his black Biro scribbled in dates and places and events,
and Lexie Madison developed out of nothing like a Polaroid, she
curled off the page and hung in the air like incense smoke, a girl
with my face and a life from a half-forgotten dream. When did you
have your first boyfriend? Where were you living? What was his
name? Who dumped who? Why? Frank found an ashtray, flipped a
Player’s out of his packet for me. When the sun bars slid off the
desk and the sky started to dim outside the window, he spun his
chair around, took a bottle of whiskey off a shelf and spiked our
coffees: “We’ve earned it,” he said. “Cheers.”
We made her a restless one, Lexie: bright and educated, a good girl
all her life, but brought up without the habit of settling and
never learned the knack. A little naÄve maybe, a little unguarded,
too ready to tell you anything you asked without thinking twice.
“She’s bait,” Frank said bluntly, “and she has to be the right bait
to make the dealers rise. We need her innocent enough that they
won’t consider her a threat, respectable enough to be useful to
them, and rebellious enough that they won’t wonder why she wants to
play.”
By the time we finished, it was dark. “Nice work,” Frank said,
folding up the timeline and passing it to me. “There’s a detective
training course starting in ten days; I’ll get you into that. Then
you’ll come back here and I’ll work with you for a while. When UCD
starts back in October, you’ll go in.”
He hooked a leather jacket off the corner of the shelves, switched
off the light and shut the door on the dark little office. I walked
back to the bus station dazzled, wrapped in magic, floating in the
middle of a secret and a brand-new world, with the timeline making
little crackling sounds in the pocket of my uniform jacket. It was
that quick, and it felt that simple.
* * *
I’m not going to get into the long, snarled chain of events that
took me from Undercover to Domestic Violence. The abridged version:
UCD’s premier speed freak got paranoid and stabbed me,
wounded-in-the-line-of-duty got me a place on the Murder squad, the
Murder squad got to be a head-wrecker, I got out. It had been years
since I’d thought about Lexie and her short shadowy life. I’m not
the type to look back over my shoulder, or at least I try hard not
to be. Gone is gone; pretending anything else is a waste of time.
But now I think I always knew there would be consequences to Lexie
Madison. You can’t make a person, a human being with a first kiss
and a sense of humor and a favorite sandwich, and then expect her
to dissolve back into scribbled notes and whiskeyed coffee when she
no longer suits your purposes. I think I always knew she would come
back to find me, someday.
It took her four years. She picked her moment carefully. When she
came knocking, it was an early morning in April, a few months after
the end of my time in Murder, and I was at the firing range.
The range we use is underground in the city center, deep under half
the cars in Dublin and a thick layer of smog. I didn’t need to be
there—I’ve always been a good shot, and my next qualifying test
wasn’t for months—but for the last while I had been waking up way
too early for work and way too restless for anything else, and
target practice was the only thing I had found that worked the
jitters out of me. I took my time adjusting the earmuffs and
checking my gun, waited till everyone else was concentrating on
their own targets, so they wouldn’t see me galvanizing like an
electrocuted cartoon character on the first few shots. Being easily
freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop
subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don’t notice.
Pretty soon, if you’re a fast learner, you can get through the day
looking almost exactly like a normal human being.
I never used to be like that. I always figured nerves were for Jane
Austen characters and helium-voiced girls who never buy their
round; I would no more have turned shaky in a crisis than I would
have carried smelling salts around in my reticule. Getting stabbed
by the Drug Demon of UCD barely even fazed me. The department
shrink spent weeks trying to convince me I was deeply traumatized,
but eventually he had to give up, admit I was fine (sort of
regretfully; he doesn’t get a lot of stabbed cops to play with, I
think he was hoping I would have some kind of fancy complex) and
let me go back to work.
Embarrassingly, the one that got me wasn’t a spectacular mass
murder or a hostage crisis gone bad or a nice quiet guy with human
organs in his Tupperware. My last case in Murder was such a simple
one, so much like dozens of others, nothing to warn us: just a
little girl dead on a summer morning, and my partner and me goofing
off in the squad room when the call came in. From outside, it even
went well. Officially, we got a solve in barely a month, society
was saved from the evildoer, it looked all pretty in the media and
in the end-of-year stats. There was no dramatic car chase, no
shootout, nothing like that; I was the one who came off worst,
physically anyway, and all I had was a couple of scratches on my
face. They didn’t even leave scars. Such a happy ending, all round.
Underneath, though. Operation Vestal: say it to one of the Murder
squad, even now, even one of the guys who don’t know the whole
story, and you’ll get that instant look, hands and eyebrows going
up meaningfully as he distances himself from the clusterfuck and
the collateral damage. In every way that mattered, we lost and we
lost big. Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with
silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath
you take will wreck you from the inside out. Some cases—ask any
cop—are malignant and incurable, devouring everything they touch.
I came out with a variety of symptoms that would have made the
shrink bounce up and down in his little leather sandals, except
that mercifully it didn’t occur to anyone to send me to the shrink
for a scratched face. It was your standard-issue trauma
stuff—shaking, not eating, sticking to the ceiling every time the
doorbell or the phone rang—with a few ornamentations of my own. My
coordination went funny; for the first time in my life I was
tripping on my own feet, bumping into doorjambs, bonking my head
off cupboards. And I stopped dreaming. Before, I had always dreamed
in great wild streams of images, pillars of fire spinning across
dark mountains, vines exploding through solid brick, deer leaping
down Sandymount beach wrapped in ropes of light; afterwards, I got
thick black sleep that hit me like a mallet the second my head
touched the pillow. Sam—my boyfriend, although that idea still
startled me sometimes—said to give it time, it would all wear off.
When I told him I wasn’t so sure, he nodded peacefully and said
that would wear off too. Every now and then Sam got right up my
nose.
I considered the traditional cop solution—booze, early and
often—but I was scared I would end up phoning inappropriate people
at three in the morning to spill my guts, plus I discovered that
target practice anaesthetized me almost as well and without any
messy side effects. This made almost no sense, given the way I was
reacting to loud noises in general, but I was OK with that. After
the first few shots a fuse would blow in the back of my brain and
the rest of the world vanished somewhere faint and far away, my
hands turned rock-steady on the gun and it was just me and the
paper target, the hard familiar smell of powder in the air and my
back braced solid against the recoil. I came out calm and numb as
if I’d been Valiumed. By the time the effect wore off, I had made
it through another day at work and I could go whack my head off
sharp corners in the comfort of my own home. I’d got to the point
where I could make nine head shots out of ten, at forty yards, and
the wizened little man who ran the range had started looking at me
with a horse trainer’s eye and making noises about the department
championships.
I finished up around seven, that morning. I was in the locker room,
cleaning my gun and trying to shoot the breeze with two guys from
Vice without giving them the impression that I wanted to go get
breakfast, when my mobile phone rang.
“Jesus,” one of the Vice boys said. “You’re DV, aren’t you? Who has
the energy to beat up his missus at this hour?”
“You can always make time for the things that really matter,” I
said, digging my locker key out of my pocket.
“Maybe it’s black ops,” said the younger guy, grinning at me.
“Looking for sharpshooters.” He was big and redheaded, and he
thought I was cute. He had his muscles arranged to full advantage,
and I had caught him checking out my ring finger.
“Must’ve heard we weren’t available,” said his mate.
I fished the phone out of my locker. The screen said SAM O’NEILL,
and the missed-call icon was flashing at me in one corner.
“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Cassie,” Sam said. He sounded terrible: breathless and sick, as if
someone had punched the wind out of him. “Are you OK?”
I turned my shoulder to the Vice guys and moved off into a corner.
“I’m fine. Why? What’s wrong?”
“Jesus Christ,” Sam said. He made a hard little noise like his
throat was too tight. “I called you four
times. I was about to send someone over to your place looking
for you. Why didn’t you answer your bloody phone?”
This was not like Sam. He’s the gentlest guy I’ve ever known. “I’m
at the firing range,” I said. “It was in my locker. What’s
happened?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . sorry.” He made that harsh little
sound again. “I got called out. On a case.”
My heart gave one huge whap against my rib cage. Sam is on the
Murder squad. I knew I should probably sit down for this, but I
couldn’t make my knees bend. I leaned back against the lockers
instead.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“What? No—God, no, it’s not . . . I mean, it’s not anyone we know.
Or anyway I don’t think—Listen, can you come down here?”
My breath came back. “Sam,” I said. “What the hell is going on?”
“Just . . . can you just come? We’re in Wicklow, outside Glenskehy.
You know it, right? If you follow the signs, go through Glenskehy
village and keep going straight south, about three-quarters of a
mile on there’s a little lane to your right—you’ll see the
crime-scene tape. We’ll meet you there.”
The Vice boys were starting to look interested. “My shift starts in
an hour,” I said. “It’ll take me that long just to get out there.”
“I’ll call it in. I’ll tell DV we need you.”
“You don’t. I’m not in Murder any more, Sam. If this is a murder
case, it’s nothing to do with me.”
A guy’s voice in the background: a firm, easy drawl, hard to
ignore; familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Hang on,” Sam said.
I clamped the phone between my ear and my shoulder and started
fitting my gun back together. If it wasn’t someone we knew, then it
had to be a bad one, to make Sam sound like that; very bad. Irish
homicides are still, mostly, simple things: drug fights, burglaries
gone wrong, SOS killings (Spouse On Spouse or, depending who you
ask, Same Old Shite), this elaborate family feud in Limerick that’s
been screwing up the figures for decades. We’ve never had the
orgies of nightmare that other countries get: the serial killers,
the ornate tortures, the basements lined with bodies thick as
autumn leaves. But it’s only a matter of time, now. For ten years
Dublin’s been changing faster than our minds can handle. The
economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too
many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing
their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and
then starting all over again, and we’re fracturing under the weight
of it. By the end of my stint in Murder I could feel it coming:
felt the high sing of madness in the air, the city hunching and
twitching like a rabid dog building towards the rampage. Sooner or
later, someone had to pull the first horror case.
We don’t have official profilers, but the Murder guys, who mostly
didn’t go to college and who were more impressed by my psychology
semi-degree than they should have been, used to use me. I was OK at
it; I read textbooks and statistics a lot, in my spare time, trying
to catch up. Sam’s cop instincts would have overridden his
protective ones and he would have called me in, if he needed to; if
he’d got to a scene and found something bad enough.
“Hang on,” the redhead said. He had switched out of display mode
and was sitting up straight on his bench. “You used to be in
Murder?” This right here was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to get
chummy. I had heard that avid note way too many times, over the
past few months.
“Once upon a time,” I said, giving him my sweetest smile and my
you-do-not-want-to-go-there look.
Redser’s curiosity and his libido had a quick duel; apparently he
figured out that his libido’s chances were slim to none anyway,
because the curiosity won. “You’re the one who worked that case,
right?” he said, sliding a few lockers closer. “The dead kid.
What’s the real story?”
“All the rumors are true,” I told him. On the other end of the
phone Sam was having a muffled argument, short frustrated questions
cut off by that easy drawl, and I knew that if the redhead would
just shut up for a second I could work out who it was.
“I heard your partner went mental and shagged a suspect,” Redser
informed me, helpfully.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, trying to disentangle myself from my
bulletproof vest without losing the phone. My first instinct
was—still—to tell him to do something creative to himself, but
neither my ex-partner’s mental status nor his love life was my
problem, not any more.
Sam came back on the phone sounding even more tense and rattled.
“Can you wear sunglasses, and a hood or a hat or something?”
I stopped with my vest half over my head. “What the hell?”
"Please, Cassie,” Sam said, and he sounded strained to breaking
point. "Please.”
* * *
I drive an ancient, bockety Vespa, which is like totally uncool in
a town where you are what you spend, but which has its uses. In
city traffic it moves about four times as fast as your average SUV,
I can actually park it, and it provides a handy social shortcut, in
that anyone who gives it a snotty look is probably not going to be
my new best friend. Once I got out of the city, it was perfect bike
weather. It had rained during the night, furious sleety rain
slapping at my window, but that had blown itself out by dawn and
the day was sharp and blue, the first of almost-spring. Other
years, on mornings like this one, I used to drive out into the
countryside and sing at the top of my lungs into the wind at the
edge of the speed limit.
Glenskehy is outside Dublin, tucked away in the Wicklow mountains
near nothing very much. I’d lived half my life in Wicklow without
getting any closer to it than the odd signpost. It turned out to be
that kind of place: a scatter of houses getting old around a
once-a-month church and a pub and a sell-everything shop, small and
isolated enough to have been overlooked even by the desperate
generation trawling the countryside for homes they can afford.
Eight o’clock on a Thursday morning, and the main street—to use
both words loosely—was postcard-perfect and empty, just one old
woman pulling a shopping cart past a worn granite monument to
something or other, little sugared-almond houses lined up crookedly
behind her, and the hills rising green and brown and indifferent
over it all. I could imagine someone getting killed there, but a
farmer in a generations-old fight over a boundary fence, a woman
whose man had turned savage with drink and cabin fever, a man
sharing a house with his brother forty years too long: deep-rooted,
familiar crimes old as Ireland, nothing to make a detective as
experienced as Sam sound like that.
And that other voice on the phone was nagging at me. Sam is the
only detective I know who doesn’t have a partner. He likes flying
solo, working every case with a new team—local uniforms who want a
hand from an expert, pairs from the Murder squad who need a third
man on a big case. Sam can get along with anyone, he’s the perfect
backup man, and I wished I knew which of the people I used to work
with he was backing up this time.
Outside the village the road narrowed, twisting upwards among
bright gorse bushes, and the fields got smaller and rockier. There
were two men standing on the crest of the hill. Sam, fair and
sturdy and tense, feet planted apart and hands in his jacket
pockets; and a few feet from him, someone else, head up, leaning
back against the stiff wind. The sun was still low in the sky and
their long shadows turned them giant and portentous, silhouetted
almost too bright to look at against skimming clouds, like two
messengers walking out of the sun and down the shimmering road.
Behind them, crime-scene tape fluttered and whipped.
Sam raised his hand when I waved. The other guy cocked his head
sideways, one fast tilt like a wink, and I knew who it was.
“Fuck me briefly,” I said, before I was even off the Vespa. “It’s
Frankie. Where did you come from?”
Frank grabbed me off the ground in a one-armed hug. Four years
hadn’t managed to change him one bit; I was pretty sure he was even
wearing the same banged-up leather jacket. “Cassie Maddox,” he
said. “World’s best fake student. How’ve you been? What’s all this
about DV?”
“I’m saving the world. They gave me a lightsaber and all.” I caught
Sam’s confused frown out of the corner of my eye—I don’t talk much
about undercover, I’m not sure he’d ever heard me mention Frank’s
name—but it was only when I turned to him that I realized he looked
awful, white around the mouth and his eyes too wide. Something
inside me clenched: a bad one.
“How’re you doing?” I asked him, pulling off my helmet.
“Grand,” Sam said. He tried to smile at me, but it came out
lopsided.
“Oo,” Frank said, mock-camp, holding me at arm’s length and
eyeballing me. “Check you out. Is this what the well-dressed
detective is wearing these days?” The last time he had seen me, I’d
been in combats and a top that said “Miss Kitty’s House of Fun
Wants YOU.”
“Bite me, Frank,” I told him. “At least I’ve changed my gear once
or twice in the last few years.”
“No, no, no, I’m impressed. Very executive.” He tried to spin me
round; I batted his hand away. Just for the record, I was not
dressed like Hillary Clinton here. I was wearing my work
clothes—black trouser suit, white shirt—and I wasn’t that crazy
about them myself, but when I switched to Domestic Violence my new
superintendent kept going on at me about the importance of
projecting an appropriate corporate image and building public
confidence, which apparently cannot be done in jeans and a T-shirt,
and I didn’t have the energy to resist. “Bring sunglasses and a
hoodie or something?” Frank asked. “They’ll go great with this
getup.”
“You brought me down here to discuss my fashion sense?” I inquired.
I found an ancient red beret in my satchel and waved it at him.
“Nah, we’ll get back to that some other time. Here, have these.”
Frank pulled sunglasses out of his pocket, repulsive mirrored
things that belonged on Don Johnson in 1985, and passed them to me.
“If I’m going to go around looking like that much of a dork,” I
said, eyeing them, “there had better be a damn good explanation.”
“We’ll get to that. If you don’t like those, you can always wear
your helmet. ” Frank waited till I shrugged and put on the dork
gear. The buzz of seeing him had dissolved and my back was tensing
up again. Sam looking sick, Frank on the case and not wanting me
spotted at the scene: it read a lot like an undercover had got
killed.
“Gorgeous as always,” Frank said. He held the crime-scene tape for
me to duck under, and it was so familiar, I had made that quick
easy movement so many times, that for a split second it felt like
coming home. I automatically settled my gun at my belt and glanced
over my shoulder for my partner, as if this was my own case I were
coming to, before I remembered.
“Here’s the story,” Sam said. “At about quarter past six this
morning, a local fella called Richard Doyle was walking his dog
along this lane. He let it off the lead to have a run about in the
fields. There’s a ruined house not far off the lane, and the dog
went in and wouldn’t come out; in the end, Doyle had to go after
it. He found the dog sniffing around the body of a woman. Doyle
grabbed the dog, legged it out of there and rang the uniforms.”
I relaxed a little: I didn’t know any other women from Undercover.
“And I’m here why?” I asked. “Not to mention you, sunshine. Did you
transfer into Murder and no one told me?”
“You’ll see,” Frank said. I was following him down the lane and I
could only see the back of his head. “Believe me, you’ll see.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Sam. “Nothing to worry about,” he
said quietly. He was getting his color back, in bright uneven
splotches. “You’ll be grand.”
The lane sloped upwards, too narrow for two people to walk abreast,
just a muddy track with ragged hawthorn hedges spilling in on both
sides. Where they broke, the hillside was crazy-quilted into green
fields scattered with sheep—a brand-new lamb was bleating
somewhere, far off. The air was cold and rich enough to drink, and
the sun sifted long and gold through the hawthorn; I considered
just keeping on walking, over the brow of the hill and on, letting
Sam and Frank deal with whatever seething dark blotch was waiting
for us under the morning. “Here we go,” Frank said.
The hedge fell away to a broken-down stone wall bordering a field
left to run wild. The house was thirty or forty yards off the lane:
one of the Famine cottages that still litter Ireland, emptied in
the nineteenth century by death or emigration and never reclaimed.
One look added another layer to my feeling that I wanted to be very
far away from whatever was going on here. The whole field should
have been alive with focused, unhurried movement—uniforms working
their way across the grass with their heads bent, Technical Bureau
crew in white coveralls busy with cameras and rulers and print
dust, morgue guys unloading their stretcher. Instead there were two
uniforms, shifting from foot to foot on either side of the cottage
door and looking slightly out of their depth, and a pair of
pissed-off robins bouncing around the eaves making outraged noises.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
I was talking to Sam, but Frank said, “Cooper’s been and
gone”—Cooper is the state pathologist. “I figured he needed to have
a look at her as fast as possible, for time of death. The Bureau
can wait; forensic evidence isn’t going anywhere.”
“Jesus,” I said. “It is if we walk on it. Sam, ever worked a double
homicide before?”
Frank raised an eyebrow. “Got another body?”
“Yours, once the Bureau get here. Six people wandering all over a
crime scene before they’ve cleared it? They’re gonna kill you.”
“Worth it,” Frank said cheerfully, swinging a leg over the wall. “I
wanted to keep this under wraps for a little while, and that’s hard
to do if you’ve got Bureau guys swarming all over the place. People
tend to notice them.”
Something was badly wrong here. This was Sam’s case, not Frank’s;
Sam should have been the one deciding how the evidence was handled
and who got called in when. Whatever was in that cottage, it had
shaken him up enough that he had let Frank sweep in, bulldoze him
out of the way and instantly, efficiently start arranging this case
to suit whatever agenda he had today. I tried to catch Sam’s eye,
but he was pulling himself over the wall and not looking at either
of us.
“Can you climb walls in that getup,” Frank inquired sweetly, “or
would you like a hand?” I made a face at him and vaulted into the
field, up to my ankles in long wet grass and dandelions.
The cottage had been two rooms, once, a long time ago. One of them
still looked more or less intact—it even had most of its roof—but
the other was just shards of wall and windows onto open air.
Bindweed and moss and little trailing blue flowers had rooted in
the cracks. Someone had spray-painted SHAZ beside the doorway, not
very artistically, but the house was too inconvenient for a regular
hangout: even prowling teenagers had mostly left it alone, to
collapse on itself in its own slow time.
“Detective Cassie Maddox,” Frank said, “Sergeant Noel Byrne and
Garda Joe Doherty, Rathowen station. Glenskehy’s on their patch.”
“For our sins,” said Byrne. He sounded like he meant it. He was
somewhere in his fifties, with a slumped back and watery blue eyes,
and he smelled of wet uniform and loser.
Doherty was a gangly kid with unfortunate ears, and when I held out
my hand to him he did a double take straight out of a cartoon; I
could practically hear the boing of his
eyeballs snapping back into place. God only knew what he’d heard
about me—cops have a better rumor mill than any bingo club—but I
didn’t have time to worry about it right then. I gave him the
smile-and-stare number, and he mumbled something and dropped my
hand as if it had scorched him.
“We’d like Detective Maddox to take a look at our body,” Frank
said.
“I’d say you would, all right,” said Byrne, eyeing me. I wasn’t
sure he meant it the way it sounded; he didn’t look like he had the
energy. Doherty snickered nervously.
“Ready?” Sam asked me quietly.
“The suspense is killing me,” I said. It came out a little snottier
than I intended. Frank was already ducking into the cottage and
pulling aside the long sprays of trailing bramble that curtained
the doorway to the inner room.
“Ladies first,” he said, with a flourish. I hung the stud-muffin
glasses off the front of my shirt by one earpiece, took a breath
and went in.
It should have been a peaceful, sad little room. Long bands of sun
slanting through holes in the roof and filtering past the net of
branches over the windows, shivering like light on water; some
family’s hearth, cold a hundred years, with piles of bird’s-nest
fallen down the chimney and the rusty iron hook for the cooking pot
still hanging ready. A wood dove murmuring contentedly, somewhere
nearby.
But if you’ve seen a dead body, you know how they change the air:
that huge silence, the absence strong as a black hole, time stopped
and molecules frozen around the still thing that’s learned the
final secret, the one he can never tell. Most dead people are the
only thing in the room. Murder victims are different; they don’t
come alone. The silence rises up to a deafening shout and the air
is streaked and hand-printed, the body smokes with the brand of
that other person grabbing you just as hard: the killer.
The first thing that hit me about this scene, though, was how
slight a mark the killer had left. I had been bracing myself
against things I didn’t want to imagine—naked and spread-eagled,
vicious dark wounds too thick to count, body parts scattered in
corners—but this girl looked as if she had arranged herself
carefully on the floor and let out her last breath in a long even
sigh, chosen her own time and place with no need for anyone’s help
along the way. She was lying on her back among the shadows in front
of the fireplace, neatly, with her feet together and her arms at
her sides. She was wearing a navy peacoat, falling open; under it
were indigo jeans—pulled up and zipped—runners and a blue top with
a dark star tie-dyed across the front. The only thing out of the
ordinary was her hands, clenched into tight fists. Frank and Sam
had moved in beside me, and I shot Frank a puzzled look—And the big deal is?—but he just watched me, his
face giving away nothing.
She was medium height, built like me, compact and boyish. Her head
was turned away from us, towards the far wall, and all I could see
in the dim light was short black curls and a slice of white: high
round curve of a cheekbone, the point of a small chin. “Here,”
Frank said. He flicked on a tiny, powerful torch and caught her
face in a sharp little halo.
For a second I was confused—Sam
lied?—because I knew her from somewhere, I’d seen that face a
million times before. Then I took a step forwards, so I could get a
proper look and the whole world went silent, frozen, darkness
roaring in from the edges and only the girl’s face blazing white at
the center; because it was me. The tilt of the nose, the wide sweep
of the eyebrows, every tiniest curve and angle clear as ice: it was
me, blue-lipped and still, with shadows like dark bruises under my
eyes. I couldn’t feel my hands, my feet, couldn’t feel myself
breathing. For a second I thought I was floating, sliced off myself
and wind currents carrying me away.
“Know her?” Frank asked, somewhere. “Any relation?”
It was like going blind; my eyes couldn’t take her in. She was
impossible: a high-fever hallucination, a screaming crack straight
across all the laws of nature. I realized I was braced rigid on the
balls of my feet, one hand halfway to my gun, every muscle ready to
fight this dead girl to the death. “No,” I said. My voice sounded
wrong, somewhere outside me. “Never seen her.”
“You adopted?”
Sam whipped his head around, startled, but the bluntness was good,
it helped like a pinch. “No,” I said. For an awful, rocking instant
I actually wondered. But I’ve seen photos, my mother tired and
smiling in a hospital bed, brand-new me at her breast. No.
“Which side do you look like?”
“What?” It took me a second. I couldn’t look away from the girl; I
had to force myself to blink. No wonder Doherty and his ears had
done a double take. “No. My mother’s side. It’s not that my father
was running around, and this is . . . No.”
Frank shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“They say everyone’s got a double, somewhere,” Sam said quietly,
beside me. He was too close; it took me a second to realize that he
was ready to catch me, just in case.
I am not the fainting type. I bit down, hard and fast, on the
inside of my lip; the jolt of pain cleared my head. “Doesn’t she
have ID?”
I knew, from the tiny pause before either of them answered, that
something was up. Shit, I thought, with a
new thump in my stomach: identity theft. I
wasn’t too clear on how it worked exactly, but one glimpse of me
and a creative streak and presumably this girl could have been
sharing my passport and buying BMWs on my credit.
“She had a student card on her,” Frank said. “Key ring in the
left-hand pocket of her coat, Maglite in the right, wallet in the
front right pocket of her jeans. Twelve quid and change, an ATM
card, a couple of old receipts and this.” He fished a clear plastic
evidence bag out of a pile by the door and slapped it into my hand.
It was a Trinity College ID, slick and digitized, not like the
laminated bits of colored paper we used to have. The girl in the
photo looked ten years younger than the white, sunken face in the
corner. She was smiling my own smile up at me and wearing a striped
baker-boy cap turned sideways, and for a second my mind flailed
wildly: But I never had a striped one of those,
did I, when did I—I pretended to tilt the card to the light,
reading the small print, so I could turn my shoulder to the others.
Madison, Alexandra J.
For a whirling instant, I understood completely: Frank and I had
done this. We made Lexie Madison bone by bone and fiber by fiber,
we baptized her and for a few months we gave her a face and a body,
and when we threw her away she wanted more. She spent four years
spinning herself back, out of dark earth and night winds, and then
she called us here to see what we had done.
“What the hell,” I said, when I could
breathe.
“When the uniforms called it in and ran her name through the
computer,” Frank said, taking back the bag, “she came up flagged:
anything happens to this girl, call me ASAP. I never bothered
taking her out of the system; I figured we might need her again,
sooner or later. You never know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.” I stared hard at the body and got a
grip: this was no golem, this was a real live dead girl, oxymoron
and all. “Sam,” I said. “What’ve we got?”
Sam shot me a quick, searching glance; when he realized I wasn’t
about to swoon or scream or whatever he’d had in mind, he nodded.
He was starting to look a little more like himself. “White female,”
he said, “mid-twenties to early thirties, single stab wound to the
chest. Cooper says she died sometime around midnight, give or take
an hour. He can’t be more specific: shock, ambient temperature
variations, whether there was physical activity around the time of
death, all the rest of it.”
Unlike most people, I get on well with Cooper, but I was glad I’d
missed him. The tiny cottage felt too full, full of clumping feet
and people shifting and eyes on me. “Stabbed here?” I asked.
Sam shook his head. “Hard to tell. We’ll wait and see what the
Bureau says, but all that rain last night got rid of a lot—we won’t
be finding footprints in the lane, a blood trail, nothing like
that. For what it’s worth, though, I’d say this isn’t our primary
crime scene. She was on her feet for at least a while after she got
stabbed. See there? Blood’s dripped straight down the leg of her
jeans.” Frank shifted the torch beam, obligingly. “And there’s mud
on both knees and a rip in one, like she was running and she fell.”
“Looking for cover,” I said. The image surged up at me like
something from every forgotten nightmare: the lane twisting into
the dark and her running, feet slipping helplessly on pebbles and
her breath wild in her ears. I could feel Frank carefully standing
back, saying nothing; watching.
“Could be,” Sam said. “Maybe the killer was coming after her, or
she thought he was. She could’ve left a trail straight from his
front door, for all we’ll ever know; it’s long gone.”
I wanted to do something with my hands, rub them through my hair,
over my mouth, something. I shoved them in my pockets to keep them
still. “So she got into shelter and collapsed.”
“Not exactly. I’m thinking she died over there.” Sam pulled back
the brambles and nodded at a corner of the outer room. “We’ve got
what looks like a fair-sized pool of blood. No way to be sure
exactly how much—we’ll see if the Bureau can help there—but if
there’s still plenty left after a night like this, I’d say there
was a load of it to start with. She was probably sitting up against
that wall—most of the blood is on the front of her top and on the
lap and seat of her jeans. If she’d been lying down, it’d have
seeped down her sides. See this?”
He pointed to the girl’s top, and the penny dropped with a bang:
not tie-dye. “She twisted up the top and pressed it against the
wound, trying to stop the bleeding.”
Huddled deep in that corner; rush of rain, blood seeping warm
between her fingers. “So how’d she get over here?” I asked.
“Our boy caught up with her in the end,” Frank said. “Or someone
did, anyway.”
He leaned over, lifted one of the girl’s feet by the shoelace—it
sent a fast twitch down the back of my neck, him touching her—and
tilted his torch at the heel of her runner: scuffed and brown,
grained deep with dirt. “She was dragged. After death, because
there’s no pooling under the body: by the time she got over here,
she wasn’t bleeding any more. The guy who found her swears he
didn’t touch, and I believe him. He looked like he was about to
puke his guts up; no way he got closer than he had to. Anyway, she
was moved not too long after she died. Cooper says rigor hadn’t set
in yet, and there’s no secondary lividity—and she didn’t spend much
time out in that rain. She’s barely damp. If she’d been in the open
all night, she’d be drenched.”
Slowly, as if my eyes were only just adjusting to the dim light, I
realized that all the dark patches and stipples that I had taken
for shadows and rainwater were actually blood. It was everywhere:
streaked across the floor, soaking the girl’s jeans, crusting her
hands wrist-deep. I didn’t want to look at her face, at anyone’s
face. I kept my eyes on her top and unfocused them so that the dark
star swam and blurred. “Got footprints?”
“Zip,” Frank said. “Not even hers. You’d think, with all this dirt;
but, like Sam here said, the rain. All we’ve got in the other room
is a shitload of mud, with prints matching the guy who called it in
and his dog—that’s one reason I wasn’t too worried about walking
you through there. Same thing out in the lane. And in here . . .”
He moved the torch beam around the edges of the floor, nosed it
into corners: wide, blank sweeps of dirt, way too smooth. “That’s
what it all looked like, when we got here. Those prints you’re
seeing around the body, those are us and Cooper and the uniforms.
Whoever moved her stuck around to tidy up after himself. There’s a
broken branch of gorse in the middle of the field, probably came
off that big bush by the door; I’m guessing he used it to sweep the
floor clean as he left. We’ll see if the Bureau pulls blood or
prints off it. And to go with no footprints . . .”
He handed me another evidence bag. “See anything wrong?”
It was a wallet, white fake leather, sewn with a butterfly in
silver thread and swiped with faint traces of blood. “It’s too
clean,” I said. “You said this was in her front jeans pocket, and
she bled out all over her lap. This should be covered with blood.”
“Bingo. The pocket’s stiff with it, soaked through, but somehow
this barely gets stained? The torch and keys are the same: not a
drop of blood, just a few smudges. Looks like our boy went through
her pockets and then wiped her stuff clean before he put it back.
We’ll have the Bureau fingerprint everything that’ll stay still
long enough, but I wouldn’t bet on getting anything useful. Someone
was being very, very careful.”
“Any sign of sexual assault?” I asked. Sam flinched. I was way past
that.
“Cooper won’t say for sure till the post-mortem, but nothing on the
preliminary points that way. We might get lucky and find some
foreign blood on her”—a lot of stabbers cut themselves—“but,
basically, I’m not holding my breath for DNA.”
My first impression—the invisible killer, leaving no trace—hadn’t
been far off. After a few months in Murder, you can tell One of
Those Cases a mile away. With the last clear corner of my mind I
reminded myself that, no matter what it looked like, this one was
not my problem. “Great,” I said. “What do
you have? Anything on her, other than she’s in Trinity and she’s
running around wearing a fake name?”
“Sergeant Byrne says she’s local,” Sam said. “Lives at Whitethorn
House, maybe half a mile away, with a bunch of other students.
That’s all he knows about her. I haven’t talked to the housemates
yet, because . . .” He gestured at Frank.
“Because I begged him to hold off,” Frank said smoothly. “I have
this little idea I wanted to run by you two, before the
investigation gets into full gear.” He arched an eyebrow towards
the door and the uniforms. “Maybe we should go for a wander.”
“Why not,” I said. The girl’s body was doing something funny to the
air in there, fizzing it, like the needle-thin whine the TV makes
on mute; it was hard to think straight. “If we stay in the same
room for too long, the universe might turn into antimatter.” I gave
Frank his evidence bag back and wiped my hand on the side of my
trousers.
In the moment before I passed through the doorway I turned my head
and looked at her, over my shoulder. Frank had switched off his
torch, but pulling back the brambles let in a flood of spring sun
and for the split second before my shadow blocked it again she rose
up blazing out of the darkness, tilted chin and a clenched fist and
the wild arch of her throat, bright and bloodied and relentless as
my own wrecked ghost.
That was the last time I saw her. It didn’t occur to me at the
time—I had other stuff on my mind—and it seems impossible now, but
those ten minutes, sharp as a crease pressed straight across my
life: that was the only time we were ever together.
* * *
The uniforms were slumped where we had left them, like beanbags.
Byrne was staring off into the middle distance in some kind of
catatonic state; Doherty was examining one finger in a way that
made me think he had been picking his nose.
“Right,” Byrne said, once he surfaced from his trance and
registered that we were back. “We’ll be off, so. She’s all yours.”
Sometimes the local uniforms are pure diamond—reeling off details
about everyone for miles around, listing half a dozen possible
motives, handing you a prime suspect on a plate. Other times, all
they want is to pass the hassle to you and get back to their game
of Go Fish. This was obviously going to be other times.
“We’ll need you to hang on for a while,” Sam said, which I took as
a good sign—the extent to which Frank had been running this show
was making me edgy. “The Technical Bureau might want you to help
with the search, and I’ll be asking you to give me all the local
info you can.”
“She’s not local, sure,” Doherty said, wiping his finger on the
side of his trousers. He was staring at me again. “Them up at
Whitethorn House, they’re blow-ins. They’ve nothing to do with
Glenskehy.”
“Lucky bastards,” Byrne mumbled, to his chest.
“She lived local, though,” Sam said patiently, “and she died local.
That means we’ll be needing to canvass the area. You should
probably give us a hand, seeing as ye know your way around.”
Byrne’s head sank farther into his shoulders. “They’re all
mentallers, round here,” he said morosely. “Stone mentallers.
That’s all you need to know.”
“Some of my best friends are mentallers,” Frank said cheerfully.
“Think of it as a challenge.” He gave them a wave and headed off up
the field, feet swishing wetly through the grass.
Sam and I followed him. Even without looking I could feel the
worried little line between Sam’s eyebrows, but I didn’t have the
energy to reassure him. Now I was out of that cottage, all I could
feel was outrage, pure and simple. My face and my old name: it was
like coming home one day and finding another girl coolly making
dinner in your kitchen, wearing your comfiest jeans and singing
along to your favorite CD. I was so furious I could barely breathe.
I thought of that photo and I wanted to punch my smile straight off
her face.
“Well,” I said, when we caught up with Frank at the top of the
field, “that was fun. Can I go to work now?”
“DV must be a lot more entertaining than I thought,” Frank said,
doing impressed, “if you’re in this much of a hurry. Sunglasses.”
I left the glasses where they were. “Unless this girl was a victim
of domestic violence, and I’m not seeing anything that points that
way, she’s got sweet fuck-all to do with me. So you dragged me out
here why, exactly?”
“Hey, I’ve missed you, babe. Any excuse.” Frank grinned at me; I
gave him a hairy look. “And you seriously figure she’s fuck-all to
do with you? Let’s see you say that when we’re trying to ID her,
and everyone you’ve ever known is freaking out and ringing up to
give us your name.”
All the anger deflated out of me, leaving a nasty hollow at the
bottom of my stomach. Frank, the little bollocks, was right. As
soon as this girl’s face went into the papers alongside an appeal
for her real name, there would be a tidal wave of people who had
known me as Lexie, her as Lexie, me as me, all of them wanting to
know who was dead and who both of us had been if we weren’t in fact
Lexie Madison, and general hall-of-mirrors overload. Believe it or
not, that was the first time it hit me: there was no way in the
world for this to be as easy as Don’t know her,
don’t want to know her, thanks for wasting my morning, see you
around.
“Sam,” I said. “Is there any way you could hold off on putting her
picture out for a day or two? Just till I can warn people.” I had
no idea how I was going to word this one. See,
Aunt Louisa, we found this dead girl and . . .
“Interestingly,” Frank said, “now that you mention it, that fits
right in with my little idea.” There was a jumble of moss-covered
boulders piled in the corner of the field; he pulled himself
backwards onto them and sat there, one leg swinging.
I’d seen that gleam in his eyes before. It always meant he was
about to come out, spectacularly casually, with something totally
outrageous. “What, Frank,” I said.
“Well,” Frank began, getting comfortable against the rocks and
folding his arms behind his head, “we’ve got a unique opportunity
here, haven’t we? Shame to waste it.”
“We do?” Sam said.
“We do?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. Jesus, yeah.” That risky grin was starting at the
corners of Frank’s mouth. “We’ve got the chance,” he said, taking
his time, “we’ve got the chance to investigate a murder case from
the inside. We’ve got the chance to place an experienced undercover
officer smack in the middle of a murder victim’s life.”
We both stared at him.
“When have you ever seen anything like that before? It’s beautiful,
Cass. It’s a work of art.”
“Work of arse, more like,” I said. “What the hell are you on about,
Frankie?”
Frank spread his arms like it was obvious. “Look. You’ve been Lexie
Madison before, right? You can be her again. You can—no, hang on,
hear me out—if she’s not dead, just wounded, right? You can walk
straight back into her life and pick up where she left off.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “This is why no Bureau and no morgue guys?
This is why you made me dress like a dork?
So nobody notices you have a spare?” I pulled my hat off and
stuffed it back in my bag. Even for Frank, this had taken some fast
thinking. Within seconds of arriving at the scene, he must have had
this in his head.
“You can get hold of info no cop would ever learn, you can get
close to everyone she was close to, you can identify suspects—”
“You want to use her as bait,” Sam said, too levelly.
“I want to use her as a detective, mate,” Frank said. “Which is
what she is, last time I checked.”
“You want to put her in there so this fella will come back to
finish the job. That’s bait.”
“So? Undercovers are bait all the time. I’m not asking her to do
anything I wouldn’t do myself in a heartbeat, if—”
“No,” Sam said. “No way.”
Frank raised an eyebrow. “What are you, her ma?”
“I’m the lead investigator on this case, and I’m saying no way.”
“You might want to think about it for more than ten seconds, pal,
before you—”
I might as well not have been there. “Hello?” I said.
They turned and stared at me. “Sorry,” Sam said, somewhere between
sheepish and defiant.
“Hi,” Frank said, grinning at me.
“Frank,” I said, “this is officially the looniest idea I’ve ever
heard in my life. You are off your bloody trolley. You are up the
wall and tickling the bricks. You are—”
“What’s loony about it?” Frank demanded, injured.
“Jesus,” I said. I ran my hands through my hair and turned full
circle, trying to figure out where to start. Hills, fields,
spaced-out uniforms, cottage with dead girl: this wasn’t some
messed-up dream. “OK, just for starters, it’s impossible. I’ve
never even heard of anything like this
before.”
“But that’s the beauty of it,” Frank explained.
“If you go under as someone who actually exists, it’s for like half
an hour, Frank, and it’s to do something specific. It’s to do a
drop-off or a pickup or something, from a stranger. You’re talking about me jumping right into
the middle of this girl’s life, just because I look a bit like
her—”
"A bit ?”
“Do you even know what color her eyes are? What if they’re blue,
or—”
“Give me some credit, babe. They’re brown.”
“Or what if she programs computers, or plays tennis? What if she’s
left-handed? It can’t be done. I’d be burned inside an hour.”
Frank pulled a squashed pack of smokes out of his jacket pocket and
fished out a cigarette. He had that glint in his eye again; he
loves a challenge. “I have every faith in you. Want a smoke?”
“No,” I said, even though I did. I couldn’t
stop moving, up and down and around the patch of long grass between
us. I don’t even like her, I wanted to say,
which made no sense at all.
Frank shrugged and lit up. “Let me worry about whether it’s
possible. It might not be, I’ll grant you that, but I’ll figure
that out as we go along. What’s next?”
Sam was looking away, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, leaving
me to it. “Next,” I said, “it’s somewhere out on the other side of
unethical. This girl must have family, friends. You’re going to
tell them she’s alive and well and just needs a few stitches, while
she’s lying on a table in the morgue with Cooper slicing her open?
Jesus, Frank.”
“She’s living under a fake name, Cass,” Frank said, reasonably.
“You really think she’s in touch with her family? By the time we
track them down, this will all be over. They’ll never know the
difference.”
“So what about her mates? The uniforms said she lives with a bunch
of others. What if she’s got a boyfriend?”
“The people who care about her,” Frank said, “will want us to catch
the guy who did this to her. Whatever it takes. That’s what I’d
want.” He blew smoke up at the sky.
Sam’s shoulders shifted. He thought Frank was just being
smart-arsed. But Sam’s never done undercover, he had no way of
knowing: undercovers are different. There is nothing they won’t do,
to themselves or anyone else, to take their guy down. There was no
point in arguing with Frank on this one, because he meant what he
had said: if his kid were killed, and someone kept that from him in
order to get the guy, he would take it without a murmur. It’s one
of the most powerful lures of undercover, the ruthlessness, no
borderlines; strong stuff, strong enough to take your breath away.
It’s one of the reasons I left.
“And then what?” I said. “When it’s over. You tell them, ‘Oops, by
the way, we forgot to mention, that’s a ringer; your mate died
three weeks ago?’ Or do I keep being Lexie Madison till I can die
of old age?”
Frank squinted into the sun, considering this. “Your wound can get
infected,” he said, brightening. “You’ll go into the ICU and the
doctors will try everything modern medicine can offer, but no go.”
“Jesus Christ on a bike,” I said. I felt like this was all I had
said, all morning long. “What on earth is
making this seem like a good idea to you?”
“What’s next?” Frank asked. “Come on, hit me.”
“Next,” Sam said, still looking away down the lane, “it’s bloody
dangerous.”
Frank raised one eyebrow and tilted his head at Sam, giving me a
wicked private grin. For an off-balance second I had to stop myself
grinning back.
“Next,” I said, “it’s too late anyway. Byrne and Doherty and
Whatsisname with the dog all know there’s a dead woman in there.
You’re telling me you can get all three of them to keep their
mouths shut, just because it suits you? Whatsisname’s probably told
half of Wicklow already.”
“Whatsisname is Richard Doyle, and I’m not planning on getting him
to keep his mouth shut. As soon as we’re done here, I’m going to go
congratulate him on saving this young woman’s life. If he hadn’t
shown great presence of mind by calling us immediately, the outcome
could have been tragic. He’s a hero, and he can tell as many people
as he likes. And you saw Byrne, babe. That’s not a happy little
member of our glorious brotherhood. If I hint that there might be a
transfer in it for him, not only will he keep his mouth shut, he’ll
keep Doherty’s shut too. Next?”
“Next,” I said, “it’s pointless. Sam’s worked dozens of murders,
Frank, and he’s solved most of them, without needing to pull any
wack-job stunts. This thing you’re talking about would take weeks
to set up—”
“Days, anyway,” Frank amended.
“—and by that time he’ll have someone. At
least, he will if you don’t fuck up his investigation by getting
everyone to pretend there’s no murder to begin with. All this will
do is waste your time and mine and everyone else’s.”
“Would it fuck up your investigation?” Frank asked Sam. “Just
hypothetically speaking. If you told the public—just for, say, a
couple of days—that this was an assault, not a murder. Would it?”
Eventually Sam sighed. “No,” he said. “Not really, no. There’s not
that much difference in investigating attempted murder and actual
murder. And, like Cassie said, we’ll have to keep this pretty quiet
for a few days anyway, till we find out who the victim is, so
things don’t get too confused. But that’s not the point.”
“OK,” Frank said. “Then here’s what I suggest. Mostly you guys have
a suspect within seventy-two hours, right?”
Sam said nothing.
“Right?”
“Right,” Sam said. “And there’s no reason why this should be
different.”
“No reason at all,” Frank agreed, pleasantly. “Today’s Thursday.
Just through the weekend, we keep our options open. We don’t tell
civilians it’s a murder. Cassie stays home, so there’s no chance of
the killer getting a glimpse of her, and we’ve got our ace up the
sleeve if we decide to use it. I find out everything I can about
this girl, just in case—that would need doing anyway, am I right? I
won’t get in your way, you’ve got my word on that. Like you said,
you’re bound to have someone in your sights by Sunday night. If you
do, then I back off, Cassie goes back to DV, everything goes back
to standard procedure, no harm done. If by any chance you don’t . .
. well, we’ve still got all our options.”
Neither of us answered.
“I’m only asking for three days, guys,” Frank said. “No commitment
to anything. What damage can that do?”
Sam looked marginally reassured by this, but I wasn’t, because I
knew how Frank works: a series of little tiny steps, each one
looking perfectly safe and innocuous until suddenly, bam, you’re
smack in the middle of something you really did not want to deal
with. “But why, Frank?” I asked. “Answer me
that and yeah, fine, I’ll spend a gorgeous spring weekend sitting
in my flat watching crap telly instead of going out with my
boyfriend like a normal human being. You’re talking about throwing
huge amounts of time and manpower at something that could well turn
out to be completely pointless. Why?”
Frank whipped a hand up to shade his eyes so he could stare at me.
“Why?” he repeated. “Jesus, Cassie! Because
we can. Because nobody in the history of
police work has ever had a chance like this. Because it would be
bloody amazing. What, you’re not seeing
that? What the fuck is wrong with you? Have you gone desk on me?”
I felt like he had hauled off and punched me in the stomach. I
stopped pacing and turned away, looking out over the hillside, away
from Frank and Sam and from the uniforms twisting their heads into
the cottage to gawp at wet dead me.
After a moment Frank said behind me, softer, “Sorry, Cass. I just
wasn’t expecting that. From the Murder gang, sure, but not from
you, of all people. I didn’t think you meant . . . I thought you
were just covering all the bases. I didn’t realize.”
He sounded genuinely stunned. I knew perfectly well he was working
me and I could have listed every tool he was using, but it didn’t
matter; because he was right. Five years earlier, one year earlier,
I would have been leaping for this dazzling incomparable adventure
right alongside him, I’d have been in there checking whether the
dead girl’s ears were pierced and how she parted her hair. I looked
out at the fields and thought, very distinctly and detachedly,
What the fuck has happened to me?
“OK,” I said, finally. “What you tell the press isn’t my problem;
you guys fight it out between you. I’ll stay out of the way for the
weekend. But, Frank, I’m not promising you anything else. No matter
who Sam finds or doesn’t find. This does not mean I’m doing it.
Clear enough?”
“That’s my girl,” Frank said. I could hear the grin in his voice.
“For a moment there I thought the aliens had planted a chip in your
brain.”
“Fuck off, Frank,” I said, turning around. Sam didn’t look happy,
but I couldn’t worry about that just then. I needed to get away on
my own and think about this.
“I haven’t said yes yet,” Sam said.
“It’s your call, obviously,” Frank said. He didn’t seem too
worried. I knew he might have more of a fight on his hands than he
expected. Sam is an easygoing guy, but every now and then he puts
his foot down, and then trying to change his mind is like trying to
push a house out of your way. “Just call it fast. If we’re going
with this, for now anyway, we’ll need to get an ambulance out here
ASAP.”
“Let me know what you decide,” I told Sam. “I’m going home. See you
tonight?” Frank’s eyebrows shot up. Undercovers have an impressive
grapevine all their own, but they mostly stay away from the general
gossip, in a slightly pointed way, and Sam and I had been keeping
things fairly quiet. Frank gave me an amused look, tongue rolling
in his cheek. I ignored him.
“I don’t know when I’ll finish up,” Sam said.
I shrugged. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“See you soon, babe,” Frank said happily, through another
cigarette, and waved good-bye.
Sam walked me back down the field, close enough that his shoulder
brushed mine protectively; I got the sense he didn’t want me to
have to pass the body on my own. Actually, I badly wanted to have
another look at it, preferably by myself and for a long silent
time, but I could feel Frank’s eyes on my back, so I didn’t even
turn my head as we passed the cottage.
“I wanted to warn you,” Sam said abruptly. “Mackey said no. He was
pretty insistent about it, and I wasn’t thinking straight enough to
. . . I should’ve. I’m sorry.”
Obviously Frank, like everyone else in my bloody universe, had
heard the Operation Vestal rumors. “He wanted to see how I’d take
it,” I said. “Checking my nerve. And he’s good at getting what he
wants. It’s OK.”
“This Mackey. Is he a good cop?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. “Good cop” isn’t a phrase we take
lightly. It means a vast complex constellation of things, and a
different one for every officer. I wasn’t at all sure that Frank
fit Sam’s definition, or even, come to think of it, mine. “He’s
smart as hell,” I said, in the end, “and he gets his man. One way
or another. Are you going to give him his three days?”
Sam sighed. “If you’re all right with staying in this weekend, then
yeah, I’d say I will. It’ll do no harm, actually, keeping this case
under the radar till we’ve some idea what we’re dealing with—an ID,
a suspect, something. It’ll keep the confusion down. I’m not mad
about giving her friends false hope, but sure, I suppose it could
soften the blow—having the few days to get used to the chance that
she might not make it . . .”
It was shaping up to be a gorgeous day; the sun was drying the
grass and it was so quiet I could hear tiny insects zigzagging in
and out among the wild-flowers. There was something about the green
hillsides that made me edgy, something stubborn and secretive, like
a turned back. It took me a second to figure out what it was: they
were empty. Out of all Glenskehy, not one person had come to see
what was going on.
Out in the lane, screened from the others by trees and hedges, Sam
pulled me tight against him.
“I thought it was you,” he said into my hair. His voice was low and
shaking. “I thought it was you.”
2
I didn’t
actually spend the next three days watching crap telly, the way I’d
said to Frank. I’m not good at sitting still to begin with, and
when I’m edgy I need to move. So—I’m in this job for the thrills,
me—I cleaned. I scrubbed, hoovered and polished every inch of my
flat, down to the baseboards and the inside of the cooker. I took
down the curtains, washed them in the bath and pegged them to the
fire escape to dry. I hung my duvet off the windowsill and whacked
it with a spatula to get the dust out. I would have painted the
walls, if I’d had paint. I actually considered putting on my dork
disguise and finding a DIY shop, but I’d promised Frank, so I
cleaned the back of the cistern instead.
And I thought about what Frank had said to me. You, of all people . . . After Operation Vestal I
transferred out of Murder. DV might not be much of a challenge by
comparison, but God it’s peaceful, although I know that’s a strange
word to choose. Either someone hit someone or he didn’t; it’s as
simple as that, and all you have to do is figure out which one it
is and how to make them knock it off. DV is straightforward and
it’s unequivocally useful, and I wanted that, badly. I was so
bloody tired of high stakes and ethical dilemmas and complications.
You, of all people; have you gone desk on
me? My nice work suit, ironed and hung on the wardrobe door
ready for Monday, made me feel queasy. Finally I couldn’t look at
it any more. I threw it in the wardrobe and slammed the door on it.
And of course I thought, all the time, under everything I did,
about the dead girl. I felt like there must have been some clue in
her face, some secret message in a code only I could read, if I had
just had the wits or the time to spot it. If I’d still been in
Murder I would have nicked a crime-scene shot or a copy of her ID,
taken it home with me to look at in private. Sam would have brought
me one if I’d asked, but I didn’t.
Somewhere out there, sometime in these three days, Cooper would be
doing the autopsy. The idea bent my brain.
I had never seen anyone who looked anything like me before. Dublin
is full of scary girls who I swear to God are actually the same
person, or at least come out of the same fake-tan bottle; me, I may
not be a five-star babe but I am not generic. My mother’s father
was French, and somehow the French and the Irish combined into
something specific and pretty distinctive. I don’t have brothers or
sisters; what I mainly have is aunts, uncles and large cheerful
gangs of second cousins, and none of them look anything like me.
My parents died when I was five. She was a cabaret singer, he was a
journalist, he was driving her home from a gig in Kilkenny one wet
December night and they hit a slick patch of road. Their car
flipped three times—he was probably speeding—and lay upside down in
a field till a farmer saw the lights and went to investigate. He
died the next day; she never made it into the ambulance. I tell
people this early on, to get it out of the way. Everyone always
gets either tongue-tied or gooey (“You must miss them so much”), and the better we know each other, the
longer they feel the gooey stage needs to last. I never know how to
answer, given that I was five and that it was more than twenty-five
years ago; I think it’s safe to say I’m more or less over it. I
wish I remembered them enough to miss them, but all I can miss is
the idea, and sometimes the songs my mother used to sing me, and I
don’t tell people about that.
I was lucky. Thousands of other kids in that situation have slipped
through the cracks, fallen into foster care or nightmare industrial
schools. But on their way to the gig my parents had dropped me off
to spend the night in Wicklow with my father’s sister and her
husband. I remember phones ringing in the middle of the night,
quick footsteps on stairs and urgent murmuring in the corridor, a
car starting, people going in and out for what seemed like days,
and then Aunt Louisa sitting me down in the dim living room and
explaining that I was going to stay there for a while longer,
because my mother and father weren’t coming back.
She was a lot older than my father, and she and Uncle Gerard don’t
have kids. He’s a historian; they play bridge a lot. I don’t think
they ever really got used to the idea that I lived there—they gave
me the spare room, complete with a high double bed and small
breakable ornaments and an inappropriate print of Venus Rising, and looked faintly worried when I got
old enough that I wanted to put up posters of my own. But for
twelve and a half years they fed me, sent me to school and
gymnastics classes and music lessons, patted me vaguely but
affectionately on the head whenever I was within reach, and left me
alone. In exchange, I made sure they didn’t find out when I mitched
off school, fell off things I shouldn’t have been climbing, got
detention or started to smoke.
It was—this always seems to shock people all over again—a happy
childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the
bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words
at neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are
pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse
than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact
that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand
vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my
new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in
the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me
to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you
can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost.
I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less
addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing
what I had never had. When my new mates and I bought Curly Wurly
bars at the shop, I saved half of mine for my imaginary sister (I
kept them at the bottom of my wardrobe, where they turned into
sticky puddles and got in my shoes); I left room in the double bed
for her, when Emma or someone wasn’t sleeping over. When horrible
Billy MacIntyre who sat behind me in school wiped snots on my
plaits, my imaginary brother beat him up till I learned to do it
myself. In my mind adults looked at us, three matching dark heads
all in a row, and said, Ah, God, you’d know
they’re family, aren’t they the spit of each other?
It wasn’t affection I was after, nothing like that. What I wanted
was someone I belonged with, beyond any doubt or denial; someone
where every glance was a guarantee, solid proof that we were stuck
to each other for life. In photographs I can see a resemblance to
my mother; nobody else, ever. I don’t know if you can imagine this.
Every one of my school friends had the family nose or her father’s
hair or the same eyes as her sisters. Even this girl Jenny Bailey,
who was adopted, looked like she was probably the rest of the
class’s cousin—this was the eighties, everyone in Ireland was
related one way or another. When I was a kid looking for things to
get angsty about, being without this felt like having no
reflection. There was nothing to prove I had a right to be here. I
could have come from anywhere, dropped by aliens, swapped by elves,
built in a test tube by the CIA, and if they showed up one day to
take me back there would be nothing in the world to hold me here.
If this mystery girl had walked into my classroom one morning, back
then, it would have made my year. Since she didn’t, I grew up, got
a grip and stopped thinking about it. Now, all of a sudden, I had
the best reflection on the block, and I didn’t like it one bit. I
had got used to being just me, no links to anyone. This girl was a
link like a handcuff, slapped on my wrist out of nowhere and
tightened till it bit to the bone.
And I knew how she had picked up the Lexie Madison ID. It was in my
head bright and hard as broken glass, clear as if it had happened
to me, and I didn’t like this either. Somewhere in town, at the bar
in a crowded pub or flipping through clothes in a shop, and behind
her: Lexie? Lexie Madison? God, I haven’t seen
you in ages! And after that it would have been just a matter of
playing it carefully and asking the right casual questions
(It’s been so long, I can’t even remember, what
was I doing last time I saw you?), picking her way delicately
to everything she needed to know. She had been no dummy, this girl.
Plenty of murder cases turn into knock-down-drag-out battles of
wits, but this was different. This was the first time I had felt
like my real opponent wasn’t the murderer but the victim: defiant,
clenching her secrets white-knuckle tight, and evenly, perfectly
matched against me in every way, too close to call.
By Saturday lunchtime I had made myself nuts enough that I climbed
up on the kitchen counter, took down my Official Stuff shoebox from
the top of a cupboard, dumped the documents on the floor and went
through them for my birth cert. Maddox, Cassandra Jeanne, female,
six pounds ten ounces. Type of birth: single.
“Idiot,” I said, out loud, and climbed back up on the counter.
Frank’s always had a knack for knowing exactly when to leave it.
After he’d gone, I sat on the windowsill for a long time, staring
out over the rooftops without seeing them. It was only when I got
up for another glass of wine that I realized he had left something
on my coffee table.
It was the photo of Lexie and her mates in front of Whitethorn
House. I stood there, with the wine bottle in one hand and my glass
in the other, and thought about turning it face down and leaving it
there till Frank gave up and came back for it; thought, for a
minute, about sticking it in an ashtray and burning it. Then I
picked it up and brought it back to the windowsill with me.
She could have been any age. She had been passing for twenty-six,
but I would have believed nineteen, or thirty. There wasn’t a mark
on her face, not a line or a scar or a chicken-pox blemish.
Whatever life had thrown at her before Lexie Madison fell into her
lap, it had rolled over her and burned off like mist, left her
untouched and pristine, sealed without a crack. I looked older than
her: Operation Vestal gave me my first lines around my eyes, and
shadows that don’t go away with a good night’s sleep. I could
practically hear Frank: You lost a shitload of
blood and you’ve been in a coma for days, the eye bags are perfect,
don’t go using night cream.
At her shoulders the housemates watched me, poised and smiling,
long dark coats billowing and Rafe’s scarf a flash of crimson. The
angle of the shot was a little off-kilter; they had propped the
camera on something, used a timer. There was no photographer on the
other side telling them to say cheese. Those smiles were private
things, just for one another, for their someday selves looking
back, for me.
And behind them, almost filling the shot, Whitethorn House. It was
a simple house: a wide gray Georgian, three stories, with the sash
windows getting smaller as they went up, to give the illusion of
even more height. The door was deep blue, paint peeling away in big
patches; a flight of stone steps led up to it on either side. Three
neat rows of chimney pots, thick drifts of ivy sweeping up the
walls almost to the roof. The door had fluted columns and a
peacock’s-tail fanlight, but apart from that there was no
decoration; just the house.
This country’s passion for property is built into the blood, a
current as huge and primal as desire. Centuries of being turned out
on the roadside at a landlord’s whim, helpless, teach your bones
that everything in life hangs on owning your home. This is why
house prices are what they are: property developers know they can
charge half a million for a one-bedroom dive, if they band together
and make sure there’s no other choice the Irish will sell a kidney,
work hundred-hour weeks and pay it. Somehow—maybe it’s the French
blood—that gene missed me. The thought of a mortgage round my neck
makes me edgy. I like the fact that my flat is rented, four weeks’
notice and a couple of bin liners and I could be gone any time I
choose.
If I had ever wanted a house, though, it would have been a lot like
this one. This had nothing in common with the characterless
pseudohouses all my friends were buying, shrunken middle-of-nowhere
shoeboxes that come with great spurts of sticky euphemisms
(“architect-designed bijou residence in brand-new luxury
community”) and sell for twenty times your income and are built to
last just till the developer can get them off his hands. This was
the real thing, one serious do-not-fuck-with-me house with the
strength and pride and grace to outlast everyone who saw it. Tiny
swirling flecks of snow blurred the ivy and hung in the dark
windows, and the silence of it was so huge that I felt like I could
put my hand straight through the glossy surface of the photo and
down into its cool depths.
I could find out who this girl was and what had happened to her
without ever going in there. Sam would tell me when they got an ID
or a suspect; probably he would even let me watch the
interrogation. But right at the bottom of me I knew that was all he
would ever get, her name and her killer, and I would be left to
wonder about everything else for the rest of my life. That house
shimmered in my mind like some fairy fort that appeared for one day
in a lifetime, tantalizing and charged, with those four cool
figures for guardians and inside secrets too hazy to be named. My
face was the one pass that would unbar the door. Whitethorn House
was ready and waiting to whisk itself away to nothing, the instant
I said no.
I realized the photo was about three inches from my nose; I had
been sitting there long enough that it was getting dark, the owls
doing their warm-up exercises above the ceiling. I finished off the
wine and watched the sea turn thunder-colored, the blink of the
lighthouse far off on the horizon. When I figured I was drunk
enough not to care if he gloated, I texted Frank: What time is that meeting?
My phone beeped about ten seconds later: 7
sharp, see you there. He had had his mobile ready to hand,
waiting for me to say yes.
* * *
That evening Sam and I had our first fight. This was probably
overdue, given that we had been going out for three months without
even a mild disagreement, but the timing sucked all round.
Sam and I got together a few months after I left Murder. I’m not
sure exactly how that happened. I don’t remember a whole lot about
that period; I appear to have bought a couple of truly depressing
sweaters, the kind you only wear when all you really want is to
curl up under the bed for several years, which occasionally made me
wonder about the wisdom of any relationship I had acquired around
the same time. Sam and I had got close on Operation Vestal, stayed
that way after the walls came tumbling down—the nightmare cases do
that to you, that or the opposite—and long before the case ended I
had decided he was pure gold, but a relationship, with anyone, was
the last thing I had in mind.
He got to my place around nine. “Hi, you,” he said, giving me a
kiss and a full-on hug. His cheek was cold from the wind outside.
“Something smells good.”
The flat smelled of tomatoes and garlic and herbs. I had a
complicated sauce simmering and water boiling and a huge packet of
ravioli at the ready, going by the same principle women have
followed since the dawn of time: if you have something to tell him
that he doesn’t want to hear, make sure there is food. “I’m being
domesticated,” I told him. “I cleaned and everything. Hi, honey,
how was your day?”
“Ah, sure,” Sam said vaguely. “We’ll get there in the end.” As he
pulled off his coat, his eyes went to the coffee table: wine
bottles, corks, glasses. “Have you been seeing fancy men behind my
back?”
“Frank,” I said. “Not very fancy.”
The laughter went out of Sam’s face. “Oh,” he said. “What did he
want?”
I had been hoping to save this for after dinner. For a detective,
my crime-scene cleanup skills suck. “He wanted me to come to your
case meeting tomorrow night,” I said, as casually as I could,
heading over to the kitchenette to check the garlic bread. “He went
at it sideways, but that’s what he was after.”
Slowly Sam folded his coat, draped it over the back of the sofa.
“What did you say?”
“I thought about it a lot,” I said. “I want to go.”
“He’d no right,” Sam said, quietly. A red flush was starting high
on his cheekbones. “Coming here behind my back, putting pressure on
you when I wasn’t there to—”
“I would’ve decided exactly the same way if you’d been standing
right here,” I said. “I’m a big girl, Sam. I don’t need
protecting.”
“I don’t like that fella,” Sam said sharply. “I don’t like the way
he thinks and I don’t like the way he works.”
I slammed the oven door. “He’s trying to solve this case. Maybe you
don’t agree with the way he’s doing it—”
Sam shoved hair out of his eyes, hard, with his forearm. “No,” he
said. “No, he’s not. It’s not about solving the case. That fella
Mackey—this case has bugger-all to do with him, no more than any
other murder I’ve worked, and I didn’t see him showing up on those
ones pulling strings right and left to get in on the action. He’s
here for the crack, so he is. He thinks it’ll be a great
laugh—throwing you into the middle of a bunch of murder suspects,
just because he can, and then waiting to see what happens. The
man’s bloody mad.”
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. “Like 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.
