“No,” I said. I didn’t have to think about this one. “I get the sense that Abby’s very good at minding her own business and letting other people sort out their dramas all by themselves. She brought up the baby so I wouldn’t have to deal with it alone if I didn’t want to, but once she’d made that clear, she was straight out of there—no hints, no probing. She won’t say anything. And, Frank—are you going to be interviewing the guys again?”

“Not sure yet,” Frank said. There was a wary note in his voice; he doesn’t like being pinned down. “Why?”

“If you do, don’t mention the baby. OK? I want to spring that one on them myself. Around you, they’re on their guard; you’ll only get half their reaction. I can get the whole thing.”

“All right,” Frank said, after a moment. He was trying to sound like he was doing me a favor, but I heard the undercurrent of satisfaction: he liked the way I was thinking. It was nice to know someone did. “But make sure you time it right. Get ’em when they’re drunk or something.”

“They don’t get drunk, exactly, just tipsy. I’ll know my moment when I see it.”

“Fair enough. Here’s my point, though: that’s one thing Abby was keeping under wraps, and not just where we’re concerned—she was hiding it from Lexie, too, and she’s still hiding it from the boys. We’ve been talking about them like they’re one big entity with one big secret, but it’s not that simple. There are cracks there. They could all be keeping the same secret, or they could each have secrets of their own, or both. Look for the cracks. And keep me posted.”

He was about to hang up. “Anything new on our girl?” I asked. May-Ruth. Somehow I couldn’t say it out loud; even bringing her up felt strange now, electric. But if he had found out anything more about her, I wanted it.

Frank snorted. “Ever tried rushing the FBI? They’ve got a whole plateful of mother-stabbers and father-rapers of their own; someone else’s little murder case isn’t at the top of their list. Forget about them. They’ll get back to us when they get back to us. You just concentrate on getting me a few answers.”

* * *

Frank was right, at first I think I had seen the four of them as a single unit: The Housemates, shoulder to shoulder, graceful and inseparable as a group in a painting and all with the same fine bloom of light on them, like the luster on old beeswaxed wood. It was only over that first week that they had turned real to me, come into focus as separate individuals with their own little quirks and weaknesses. I knew the cracks had to be there. That kind of friendship doesn’t just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.

Small cracks, at first: slippery as mist, nothing you could put your finger on. We were in the kitchen Monday morning, eating breakfast. Rafe had done his Mongo-want-coffee routine and disappeared to finish waking up. Justin was slicing his fried eggs into neat strips, Daniel was eating sausages one-handed and making notes in the margins of what looked like an Old Norse photocopy, Abby was flipping through a week-old newspaper she had found in the Arts block and I was chattering to no one in particular about nothing very much. I had been ratcheting up the energy level, little by little. This was more complicated than it sounds. The more I talked, the more likely I was to shove my foot in my mouth; but the only way I was going to get anything useful out of these four was if they relaxed around me, and that would only happen once everything went back to normal, which, for Lexie, had not involved a lot of silence. I was telling the kitchen about these four awful girls in my Thursday tutorial, which I figured was safe enough.

“As far as I can tell they’re actually all the same person. They’re all called Orla or Fiona or Aoife or something, and they all have that accent like they’ve had their sinuses surgically removed, and they’ve all got that fake-straight fake-blond hair, and none of them ever, ever do the reading. I don’t know why they’re bothering with college.”

“To meet rich boys,” Abby said, without looking up.

“At least one of them’s found one. Some rugby-looking guy. He was waiting for her after the tutorial last week and I swear, when the four of them came out the door he got this terrified look and then he held out his hand to the wrong girl for a second, before the right one dived on him. He can’t tell them apart either.”

“Look who’s feeling better,” Daniel said, smiling across at me.

“Chatterbox,” said Justin, putting another slice of toast on my plate. “Just out of curiosity, have you ever stayed quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch?”

“I have so. I had laryngitis once, when I was nine, and I couldn’t say a single word for five days. It was awful. Everyone kept bringing me chicken soup and comic books and boring stuff, and I kept trying to explain that I felt totally fine and I wanted to get up, but they just told me to be quiet and rest my throat. When you were little, did you ever—”

“Dammit,” Abby said suddenly, looking up from her paper. “Those cherries. The best-by date was yesterday. Is anyone still hungry? We could put them in pancakes or something.”

“I’ve never heard of cherry pancakes,” Justin said. “It sounds disgusting.”

“I don’t see why. If you can have blueberry pancakes—”

“And cherry scones,” I pointed out, through toast.

“That’s a different principle entirely,” Daniel said. “Candied cherries. The acidity and moisture levels—”

“We could try it. They cost about a million quid; I’m not just leaving them to rot.”

“I’ll try anything,” I said helpfully. “I’d have some cherry pancakes.”

“Oh God, let’s not,” said Justin, with a little shudder of distaste. “Let’s just take the cherries into college and have them with lunch.”

“Rafe’s not getting any,” Abby said, folding the paper away and heading for the fridge. “You know that weird smell off his bag? Half a banana he stuck in the inside pocket and forgot about. From now on we don’t feed him anything we can’t actually watch him eat. Lex, give me a hand wrapping them up?”

It was so smooth, I didn’t even notice anything had happened. Abby and I split the cherries into four bundles and put them in with that day’s sandwiches, Rafe ended up eating most of them, and I forgot the whole thing, until the next evening.

We had washed a few of the less fugly curtains and were putting them up in the spare rooms, to keep the heat in rather than as an aesthetic choice—we had one electric storage heater and the fireplace to heat that whole house, in winter it must have been Arctic. Justin and Daniel were doing the first-floor room, while the rest of us did the top ones. Abby and I were threading curtain hooks for Rafe to hang when we heard a tumble of heavy things falling below us, a thud, a yelp from Justin; then Daniel calling, “It’s all right, I’m fine.”

“What now?” said Rafe. He was balanced precariously on the windowsill, hanging onto the curtain rail with one hand.

“Someone fell off something,” Abby said, through a mouthful of curtain hooks, “or over something. I think they’ll live.”

There was a sudden low exclamation, through the floorboards, and Justin called, “Lexie, Abby, Rafe, come here! Come look!”

We ran downstairs. Daniel and Justin were kneeling on the spare-room floor, surrounded by an explosion of weird old objects, and for a second I thought one of them was hurt after all. Then I saw what they were looking at. There was a stiff, stained leather pouch on the floor between them, and Daniel was holding a revolver.

“Daniel came off the stepladder,” Justin said, “and knocked over all this stuff, and this just fell out, right at his feet. I can’t even work out where it was, in all this mess. God knows what else is in there.”

It was a Webley, a beauty, glowing with patina between the crusted patches of dirt. “My God,” Rafe said, dropping down beside Daniel and reaching out to touch the barrel. “That’s a Webley Mark Six; an old one, too. They were standard issue during the First World War. Your crazy great-uncle or whoever he was, Daniel, the one you look like: this could have been his.”

Daniel nodded. He inspected the gun for a moment, then broke it open: unloaded. “William,” he said. “It could have been his, yes.” He closed the cylinder, fitted his hand carefully, gently, around the grip.

“It’s a mess,” Rafe said, “but it could be cleaned up. All it needs is a couple of days’ soak in a good solvent, and then some work with a brush. I suppose ammo would be too much to ask for.”

Daniel smiled at him, a quick, unexpected flash of a grin. He tipped the leather pouch upside down and a faded cardboard packet of cartridges fell out, onto the floor.

“Oh, beautiful,” Rafe said, picking up the box and giving it a shake. I could tell from the rattle that it was almost full; there had to be nine or ten cartridges in there. “We’ll have this up and running in no time. I’ll buy the solvent.”

“Don’t mess around with that thing unless you know what you’re doing,” said Abby. She was the only one who hadn’t sat down on the floor to have a look, and she didn’t sound all that pleased with this whole idea. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, either. The Webley was a sweetheart and I would have loved a chance to try it out, but an undercover job grows a whole new level when there’s a gun bouncing around. Sam wasn’t going to like this one little bit.

Rafe rolled his eyes. “What makes you think I don’t? My father took me shooting every single year, starting when I was seven. I can hit a pheasant in midair, three shots out of five. One year we went up to Scotland—”

“Is that thing even legal?” Abby wanted to know. “Don’t we need a license, or something?”

“But it’s a family heirloom,” said Justin. “We didn’t buy it, we inherited it.”

Again with that we. “Licenses aren’t for buying a gun, silly,” I said. “They’re for owning it.” I had already decided to let Frank explain to Sam why, even though the gun had probably never been licensed in its existence, we weren’t about to confiscate it.

Rafe raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to hear this? I’m telling you a tender tale of father-son bonding, and all you can talk about is red tape. Once my father found out I could shoot, he used to pull me out of school for a whole week, every time the season came around. Those are the only times in my life when he’s treated me like something other than a living ad for contraception. For my sixteenth birthday he got me—”

“I’m fairly sure we do need a license, officially,” Daniel said, “but I think we should leave it, at least for now. I’ve had enough of the police for a while. When do you think you could get the solvent, Rafe?”

His eyes were on Rafe, ice gray and steady and unblinking. For a second Rafe stared back, but then he shrugged and took the gun out of Daniel’s hands. “Sometime this week, probably. Whenever I find a place that carries it.” He broke the gun open, a lot more expertly than Daniel had, and started peering into the barrel.

That was when I remembered the cherries, me chattering, Abby cutting in. It was the note in Daniel’s voice that reminded me: that same calm, inflexible firmness, like a door closing. It took me a second to remember what I had been talking about, before the others had deftly, expertly diverted the conversation. Something about having laryngitis, being stuck in bed, when I was a kid.

I tested my new theory later that evening, when Daniel had put the revolver away and we had hung the curtains and were curled up in the sitting room. Abby had finished her doll’s petticoat and was starting on a dress; her lap was covered with the scraps of material I’d been sorting on Sunday.

“I used to have dolls, when I was little,” I said. If my theory was right, then this wasn’t risky; the others wouldn’t have heard all that much about Lexie’s childhood. “I had a collection—”

“You?” Justin said, giving me a quirk of a smile. “The only thing you collect is chocolate.”

“Actually,” Abby asked me, “have you got any? Something with nuts?”

Straight in with the diversion. “I did too have a collection,” I said. “I had all four sisters out of Little Women. You could get the mother, too, but she was such a horrible sanctimonious cow that I didn’t want her anywhere near me. I didn’t even want the others, but I had this aunt—”

“Why don’t you get Little Women dolls?” Justin asked Abby, plaintively. “And get rid of that awful poppet?”

“If you keep bitching about her, I swear, one of these mornings you’re going to wake up and find her on your pillow, staring at you.”

Rafe was watching me, hooded golden eyes across his solitaire game. “I kept trying to tell her I didn’t even like dolls,” I said, over Justin’s horrified noises, “but she never got the hint. She—”

Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.

There was a long, not-quite-comfortable silence. The fire spat sparks up the chimney. Abby had gone back to trying bits of fabric against her doll’s dress. Rafe was still watching me; I had my head down over my book (Rip Corelli, She Liked Them Married ), but I could feel his eyes.

For some reason, the past—any of our pasts—was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won’t answer questions beginning with “Where.”

And another thing: Rafe had to know that. He had been nudging at the boundary on purpose. I wasn’t sure whose buttons he had been trying to push, exactly, or why—maybe everyone’s, maybe he was just in that kind of mood—but it was a tiny crack, in that perfect surface.

* * *

Frank’s FBI buddy got back to him on Wednesday. I knew the second Frank picked up the phone that something had happened, something big.

“Where are you?” he demanded.

“Some lane, I don’t know. Why?”

An owl hooted, close behind me; I whipped round in time to see it drifting into the trees only a few feet away, wings spread, light as ash. “What was that?” Frank asked sharply.

“Just an owl. Breathe, Frank.”

“Got your gun?”

I hadn’t. I’d been so wrapped up in Lexie and the Fantastic Four; I’d completely forgotten that what I was supposed to be after was outside Whitethorn House, not inside, and was very likely also after me. That slip, even more than the note in Frank’s voice, sent a sharp warning twist through my stomach: Stay focused.

Frank caught the second I hesitated, and pounced. “Go home. Now.”

“I’ve only been out for ten minutes. The others will wonder—”

“Let ’em wonder all they like. You don’t go wandering around unarmed.”

I turned around and headed back up the lane, under the owl swaying on a branch, silhouetted sharp-eared against the sky. I cut round towards the front of the house—the lanes that way were wider, less cover for an ambush. “What’s happened?”

“You heading home?”

“Yeah. What’s happened?”

Frank blew out a breath. “Brace yourself for this one, babe. My mate in the U.S. tracked down May-Ruth Thibodeaux’s parents—they live somewhere in the mountains in Arsefuck, North Carolina, don’t even have a phone. He sent a guy out there to break the news and see what else he could pick up. And guess what he found out.”

In the instant before I told him to quit playing games and get to the point, I knew. “It’s not her.”

“Bingo. May-Ruth Thibodeaux died of meningitis when she was four. Your man showed the parents the ID shot; they’d never seen our girl before.”

It hit me like a huge breath of pure wild oxygen; I wanted to laugh so badly I was almost dizzy with it, like a teenager in love. She had fooled the hell out of me—pickup trucks and soda fountains, my arse—and all I could think was Fair play to you, girl. Here I had thought I lived light; all of a sudden that felt like an adolescent game, like some rich kid playing at poor while the trust fund piled up, because this girl had been the real thing. She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway. What I hadn’t managed to do even once, she had done easily as brushing her teeth. No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.

“Holy shit,” I said. “How many times did she do this?”

“What I want to know is why. This is all backing up my theory: someone was after her, and he wasn’t giving up. She picks up the May-Ruth ID from somewhere—a graveyard, maybe, or an obituary in an old newspaper—and starts over. He tracks her down and she takes off again, out of the country this time. You don’t do that unless you’re running scared. But he got to her in the end.”

I reached the front gates, got my back against one of the gateposts and took a deep breath. In the moonlight the drive looked very strange, cherry blossom and shadow scattering black and white so thick that the ground blended into the trees without a seam, one great patterned tunnel. “Yeah,” I said. “He got to her in the end.”

“And I don’t want him getting to you.” Frank sighed. “I hate to admit it, but our Sammy may have been right about this one, Cass. If you want out of there, you can start playing sick tonight and I’ll have you out tomorrow morning.”

It was a still night, not even a breeze in the cherry trees. A thread of sound came drifting down the drive, very faint and very sweet: a girl’s voice, singing. The steed my true love rides on . . . A tingle ran up my arms. I wondered then and I wonder now whether Frank was bluffing; whether he was actually ready to pull me out, or whether he knew, before he offered, that by this time there was only one answer I could give.

“No,” I said. “I’ll be OK. I’m staying.”

With silver he is shod before . . .

“Fair enough,” Frank said, and he didn’t sound one bit surprised. “Keep that gun on you and keep your eyes open. Anything turns up, anything at all, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, Frank. I’ll check in tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

It was Abby who was singing. Her bedroom window glowed soft with lamplight and she was brushing out her hair, slow, absent strokes. In yon green hill do dwell . . . In the dining room the guys were cleaning the table, Daniel’s sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows, Rafe waving a fork to make some point, Justin shaking his head. I leaned against the broad back of a cherry tree and listened to Abby’s voice, unfurling out under the window sash and up to the huge black sky.

God only knew how many lives this girl had left behind to find her way here, home. I can go in there, I thought. Any time I want, I can run up those steps and open that door and walk in.

* * *

Small cracks. On Thursday evening we were out in the garden again, after dinner—huge mounds of roast pork and roast potatoes and vegetables and then apple pie, no wonder Lexie had weighed more than me. We were drinking wine and trying to work up the energy to do something useful. The strap had come off my watch, so I was sitting on the grass, trying to reattach it with Lexie’s nail file, the same one I had used to turn the pages of her date book. The rivet kept flying out.

“Dammit to hell and blast and buggeration,” I said.

“That’s a highly illogical thing to say,” said Justin lazily, from the swing seat. “What’s wrong with buggeration?”

My antennae went up. I had been wondering if Justin might be gay, but Frank’s research hadn’t turned up anything one way or the other—no boyfriends, no girlfriends—and he could just as easily have been a nice sensitive straight guy with a domestic streak. If he was gay, then there was at least one guy I could cross off the Baby-Daddy list.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Justin, stop flaunting,” Rafe said. He was lying on his back on the grass, with his eyes shut and his arms folded behind his head.

“You’re such a homophobe,” said Justin. “If I said ‘Dammit to fuck’ and Lexie said ‘What’s wrong with fucking?’ you wouldn’t accuse her of flaunting.”

“I would,” said Abby, from beside Rafe. “I’d accuse her of flaunting her love life when the rest of us don’t have one.”

“Speak for yourself,” Rafe said.

“Oh, you,” said Abby. “You don’t count. You never tell us anything. You could be having a torrid affair with the entire Trinity women’s hockey team and none of us would ever know a thing about it.”

“I have never had an affair with anyone on the women’s hockey team, actually, ” Rafe said primly.

“Is there a women’s hockey team?” Daniel wanted to know.

“Don’t go getting ideas,” Abby told him.

“I think that’s Rafe’s secret,” I said. “See, because he keeps up this mysterious silence, we all have this image of him getting up to unspeakable things behind our backs, seducing hockey teams and shagging like a bunny rabbit. I think actually he never tells us anything because he never has anything to tell: he has even less of a love life than the rest of us.” Rafe’s eyes slid sideways and he gave me a tiny, enigmatic grin.

“That wouldn’t be easy,” said Abby.

“Isn’t anyone going to ask me about my torrid affair with the men’s hockey team?” asked Justin.

“No,” said Rafe. “Nobody is going to ask about any of your torrid affairs, because for one thing we know we’re going to hear all about them anyway, and for another they’re always boring as shit.”

“Well,” said Justin, after a moment. “That certainly put me in my place. Although coming from you . . .”

“What?” Rafe demanded, propping himself up on his elbows and giving Justin a cold stare. “Coming from me, what?”

Nobody said anything. Justin took off his glasses and started cleaning them, too thoroughly, on the hem of his shirt; Rafe lit a cigarette.

Abby cut her eyes at me, like a cue. I remembered those videos: There’s an understanding there, Frank had said. This was Lexie’s job, breaking tension, coming in with some cheeky comment so everyone could roll their eyes and laugh and move on. “Ah, dammit to hell and blast and nonspecific fornication, ” I said, when the rivet went shooting off into the grass again. “Is everyone OK with that?”

“What’s wrong with nonspecific fornication?” Abby demanded. “I don’t like my fornication specific.”

Even Justin laughed, and Rafe snapped out of his cold sulk and balanced his smoke on the edge of the patio and helped me find the rivet. A shot of happiness went through me: I had got it right.

* * *

“That detective showed up outside my tutorial,” Abby said Friday evening, in the car. Justin had gone home early—he had been complaining about a headache all day, but to me it looked more like a sulk, and I got the sense it was aimed at Rafe—so the rest of us were in Daniel’s car, going nowhere on the highway, gridlocked in with thousands of suicidal-looking office workers and underendowed prats in SUVs. I was breathing on my window and playing tic-tac-toe with myself in the steam.

“Which one?” Daniel asked.

"O’Neill.”

“Hmm,” Daniel said. “What did he want this time?”

Abby took his cigarette from between his fingers and used it to light her own. “He was asking why we don’t go into the village,” she said.

“Because they’re all a bunch of six-toed halfwits down there,” Rafe said, to the window. He was next to me, slouching deep in his seat and jiggling one knee in Abby’s back. Traffic always drove Rafe nuts, but this level of bad mood strengthened my feeling that something was up between him and Justin.

“And what did you tell him?” Daniel asked, craning his neck and starting to edge into the next lane; the traffic had moved an inch or two.

Abby shrugged. “I told him. We tried the pub once, they froze us out, we didn’t bother trying again.”

“Interesting,” Daniel said. “I think we may have been underrating Detective O’Neill. Lex, did you discuss the village with him at any stage?”

“Never thought of it.” I won my tic-tac-toe game, so I put my fists in the air and did a little victory bop. Rafe gave me a sour look.

“Well,” Daniel said, “there we are. I have to admit I’d more or less dismissed O’Neill, but if he picked up on that without any help, he’s more perceptive than he looks. I wonder if . . . hmm.”

“He’s more annoying than he looks,” Rafe said. “At least Mackey’s backed off. When are they going to leave us alone?”

“I got stabbed, for fuck’s sake,” I said, injured. “I could’ve died. They want to know who did it. And so do I, by the way. Don’t you?” Rafe shrugged and went back to giving the traffic the evil eye.

“Did you tell him about the graffiti?” Daniel asked Abby. “Or the break-ins?”

Abby shook her head. “He didn’t ask, I didn’t volunteer. You think . . . ? I could phone him and tell him.”

Nobody had mentioned anything about graffiti or break-ins. “You think someone from the village stabbed me?” I said, abandoning my tic-tac-toe and leaning forwards between the seats. “Seriously?”

“I’m not sure,” Daniel said. I couldn’t tell whether he was answering me or Abby. “I need to think through the possibilities. For now, on the whole, I think the best plan is to leave it. If Detective O’Neill picked up on the tension, he’ll find out about the rest on his own, as well; there’s no need to nudge him.”

“Ow, Rafe,” said Abby, reaching an arm around the back of her seat and smacking Rafe’s knee. “Knock it off.” Rafe sighed noisily and swung his legs over against the door. The traffic had opened up; Daniel pulled into the turn lane, swung us off the highway in a smooth fast arc and hit the accelerator.

* * *

By the time I phoned Sam from the lane, that night, he already knew all about the graffiti and the break-ins. He had spent the last few days in Rathowen station, working his way backwards through their files, looking for Whitethorn House.

“There’s something going on there, all right. The files are full of that house.” Sam’s voice had the busy, absorbed note that it gets when he’s on a good trail—Rob used to say you could practically see his tail wagging. For the first time since Lexie Madison had appeared with a bang in the middle of our lives, he sounded cheerful. “There’s bugger-all crime in Glenskehy, but over the past three years, there’ve been four burglaries on Whitethorn House—one back in 2002, another in 2003, two while old Simon was in the hospice.”

“Did they take anything? Toss the place?” I had more or less dismissed Sam’s idea about Lexie getting killed over some small precious antique, after seeing the quality of the stuff Uncle Simon had on offer, but if something in that house had been worth four break-ins . . .

“Nothing like that. Not a thing taken any of the times, as far as Simon March could tell—although Byrne says the place was a pigsty, he might well not have noticed if something was missing—and no sign that they were looking for anything. They just broke a couple of panes in the back door, walked in and made a mess of the place: slashed some curtains and pissed on the sofa the first time, smashed a load of crockery the second, that kind of thing. That’s not a robbery. That’s a grudge.”

The house—The thought of some little scumbucket knuckle-dragging through the rooms, wrecking what he pleased and whipping out his three inches to piss on the sofa, jolted me with fury so high voltage it startled me; I wanted to punch something. “Charming,” I said. “Sure it wasn’t just kids messing? There’s not much to do in Glenskehy on a Saturday night.”

“Hang on,” Sam said. “There’s more. For about four years before Lexie’s lot moved in, that house was getting vandalized almost every month. Bricks through the windows, bottles thrown at the walls, a dead rat through the letterbox—and graffiti. Some of it said”—flip of notebook pages—“ ‘WEST BRITS OUT,’ ‘KILL THE LANDLORDS,’ ‘UP THE IRA’—”

“You think the IRA stabbed Lexie Madison?” Granted, this case was weird enough that anything was possible, but this was the least likely theory I’d heard yet.

Sam laughed, an open, happy sound. “Ah, God, no. Hardly their style. But someone around Glenskehy still thought of the March family as Brits, landlords, and wasn’t exactly mad about them. And listen to this: two separate bits of graffiti, one back in 2001 and one in 2003, said ‘BABY KILLERS OUT.’ ”

“Baby killers?” I said, completely taken aback—for a wild second the timeline tangled in my mind and I thought of Lexie’s brief, hidden child. “What the hell? Where is there a baby in this?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. Someone’s got a very specific grudge—not against Lexie’s lot, it’s been going on way too long for that, and not against old Simon either. ‘Brits,’ ‘baby killers,’ plural—they’re not talking about one old fella. It’s the whole family they’ve a problem with: Whitethorn House and all who sail in her.”

The lane looked secretive and hostile, too many layers of shadows, remembering too many old things that had happened somewhere along its twists. I moved into the shadow of a tree trunk and got my back up against it. “Why didn’t we hear about any of this before?”

“We didn’t ask. We were focusing on Lexie, or whoever she is, as the target; we never thought she might have been—what’s that they call it?—collateral damage. It’s not Byrne and Doherty’s fault. They’ve never worked a murder before, sure; they don’t know how to go about it. It never even occurred to them we might want to know.”

“What do they say about all this?”

Sam blew out a breath. “Not a lot. They’ve no suspects for any of it, and not a clue about any dead baby, and they told me good luck finding out more. They both say they know no more about Glenskehy than they did the day they arrived. Glenskehy people keep to themselves, don’t like cops, don’t like outsiders; whenever there’s a crime, nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything and they sort it out their own way, in private. According to Byrne and Doherty, even the other villages round about think Glenskehy folk are stone mentallers.”

“So they just ignored the vandalism?” I said. I could hear the edge in my voice. “Took the reports and said, ‘Ah, sure, nothing we can do,’ and let whoever it was keep fucking up Whitethorn House?”

“They did their best,” Sam said, instantly and firmly—all cops, even cops like Doherty and Byrne, count as family to Sam. “After the first break-in, they told Simon March he should get a dog, or an alarm system. He said he hated dogs, alarms were for nancy boys and he was well able to look after himself, thanks very much. Byrne and Doherty got the feeling he had a gun—that’ll be the one ye found. They didn’t think that was such a great idea, specially with him being drunk most of the time, but there wasn’t much they could do about it; when they asked him straight out, he denied it. They could hardly force him to get an alarm if he didn’t want one.”

“What about once he went into the hospice? They knew the house was empty, everyone around must’ve known, they knew it would be a target—”

“They checked it every night on their rounds, sure,” Sam said. “What else could they do?”

He sounded startled, and I realized my voice had gone up. “You said, ‘Until this lot moved in,’ ” I said, softer. “Then what?”

“The vandalism didn’t stop, but it settled a lot. Byrne called in and had a chat with Daniel, let him know what had been going on, Daniel didn’t seem too worried about it. There’s been only two incidents since: a rock through the window in October, and graffiti again, in December—FOREIGNERS FUCK OFF. That’s the other reason Byrne and Doherty said nothing to us. As far as they were concerned it was all over, old news.”

“So maybe it was just a vendetta against Uncle Simon, after all.”

“Could be, but I don’t think so. I’m betting it’s more what you might call a scheduling conflict.” There was a grin in Sam’s voice: having something solid to go on had changed everything. “Sixteen of the reports give the time when the incident happened, and it’s always somewhere between half past eleven and one at night. That’s not coincidence. Whoever’s after Whitethorn House, that’s their window.”

“Pub closing time,” I said.

He laughed. “Great minds. I figure a lad or two out drinking, every now and then they’re on a bad buzz and the old Dutch courage is up, and when the pub throws them out it’s off to Whitethorn House with a couple of bricks or a can of spray paint or whatever they’ve got handy. Old Simon’s schedule suited them down to the ground: by half past eleven he was mostly either unconscious—those are the ones where the report doesn’t give the time of the incident, because he didn’t call it in till he sobered up the next morning—or at least too drunk to go after them. The first two times they broke in, he was home, slept through the whole thing. Lucky he’d a good lock on his bedroom door, or God knows what might have happened.”

“But then we moved in,” I said. A second too late, I heard myself—they had moved in, not we—but Sam didn’t seem to notice. “These days, between half past eleven and one, there’s five people wide awake and moving around the house. Wrecking the gaff doesn’t seem like so much fun when three big strong lads could catch you at it and beat the crap out of you.”

“And two big strong girls,” Sam said, and I caught the grin again. “I bet you and Abby would get a couple of punches in. That’s what almost happened with the rock through the window. They were all in the sitting room, just before midnight, when the rock came flying into the kitchen; as soon as they realized what had happened, the five of them legged it out the back door to go after your man. Because they weren’t in the room, though, it took them a minute to figure out what was going on, and by that time the guy was well gone. Lucky for him, Byrne said. It was forty-five minutes before they called the cops—they went through all the lanes first, looking for the guy—and even then, they were raging. Your man Rafe told Byrne that, if he ever caught this fella, his own mammy wouldn’t recognize him; Lexie said she was planning to, and I’m quoting, ‘kick him in the bollocks so hard he’d have to stick his hand down his throat if he wanted a wank.’ ”

“Good for her,” I said.

Sam laughed. “Yeah, I thought you’d enjoy that one. The others had better sense than to come out with anything like that in front of a cop, but Byrne says they were thinking it, all right. He gave them a lecture about not taking the law into their own hands, but he’s not sure how much of it went in.”

“I don’t blame them,” I said. “It’s not like the cops had been all that useful. What about the graffiti?”

“Lexie’s lot weren’t home. It was a Sunday night, and they’d gone to dinner and the pictures in town. They got home a little after midnight and there it was, across the front of the house. It was the first time they’d been out that late since they moved in. That could be coincidence, but I don’t think so. The thing with the rock put some respect on our vandal—or vandals—but either he was keeping an eye on the house, or he saw the car go through the village and not come back. He saw his chance, and he took it.”

“So you’re thinking it’s not a village-versus-Big-House thing, after all?” I said. “Just some guy with a grudge?”

Sam made a noncommittal sound. “Not exactly. Have you heard what happened when Lexie’s lot tried going into Regan’s?”

“Yeah, Abby said you’d talked to her about that. She mentioned something about them getting frozen out, but she didn’t go into details.”

“It was a couple of days after they moved in. The whole bunch of them go into the pub one evening, they find a table, Daniel goes up to the bar, and the barman doesn’t see him. For ten minutes, from four feet away, with only a handful of people in the pub and Daniel going, ‘Excuse me, can I have two pints of Guinness and . . .’ The barman just stands there, polishing a glass and watching the telly. Finally Daniel gives up, goes back to the others, they have a quiet chat and decide maybe old Simon got thrown out of here too many times and the Marches aren’t popular. So they send Abby up instead—they figure she’s a better bet than the English guy or the Northern boy. Same thing happens. Meanwhile, Lexie starts talking to the old fellas at the next table, trying to find out what the hell’s going on. Nobody answers her, nobody even looks at her; they all turn their backs and keep on with their own conversation.”

“Jesus,” I said. It’s not as easy as it sounds to ignore five people right there in front of you, looking for your attention. It takes a lot of concentration to override all your instincts like that; you need a reason, something hard and cold as bedrock. I tried to keep an eye on the lane in both directions at once.

“Justin’s getting upset and wants to leave, Rafe’s getting angry and wants to stay, Lexie’s getting more and more hyper trying to make these old fellas talk to her—offering them chocolate, telling them lightbulb jokes—and a bunch of younger guys in a corner are starting to throw over dirty looks. Abby wasn’t too keen on backing down herself, but she and Daniel both figured this situation could get out of hand any second. They grabbed the others and left, and they didn’t go back.”

A light rustle of wind swept through the leaves, moving up the lane towards me. “So the bad feeling goes right through Glenskehy,” I said, “but only one or two people are taking it that step further.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. And it’s going to be a right laugh finding out who they are. There’s about four hundred people in Glenskehy, counting the outlying farms, and none of them are about to give me a hand narrowing it down.”

“There,” I said, “I might be able to help out. See, this I can profile. Sort of, anyway: nobody collects psychological data on vandals like they do on serial killers, so it’ll be mostly guesswork, but at least there’s enough of a pattern that I can give you something.”

“I’ll take guesswork,” Sam said cheerfully. I heard pages rustling, a shift of the phone as he got ready to write. “I’ll take anything, sure. Go on.”

“OK,” I said. “You’re looking for someone local, obviously—Glenskehy born and bred. Almost definitely male. I think it’s one person rather than a gang: spontaneous vandalism mostly involves groups, but planned hate campaigns like this one tend to be more private.”

“Anything you can tell me about him?” Sam’s voice had gone blurry: he had the phone caught under his jaw, writing.

“If this started about four years ago, then he’s probably in his midtwenties to early thirties—vandalism’s usually a young man’s crime, but this guy’s too methodical for a teenager. Not much education—Leaving Cert, maybe, but no college. He lives with someone, either his parents or a wife or girlfriend: no attacks in the middle of the night, someone’s expecting him home by a certain time. He’s employed, in a job that keeps him busy all through weekdays, or there would have been incidents during the day, when we’re all out and the coast is clear. The job’s local, too, he doesn’t commute to Dublin or anything; this level of obsession says Glenskehy’s his whole world. And it doesn’t satisfy him. He’s working well below his intellectual or educational level, or he thinks he is, anyway. And he’ll probably have had ongoing problems with other people before, neighbors, ex-girlfriends, maybe employers; this guy won’t play well with authority. It might be worth checking with Byrne and Doherty for any local feuds or harassment complaints.”

“If my fella hassled someone from Glenskehy,” Sam said grimly, “there’s no way they’d go to the cops. They’d just get their mates together and give him a beating some night, sure. And he wouldn’t bring that to the cops, either.”

“No,” I said, “probably not.” A flicker of movement, off in the field across the lane, a dark streak turning the grass. It was way too small for a person, but I moved deeper into the shadow of the tree all the same. “Here’s the other thing. The campaign against Whitethorn House could have been triggered by some run-in with Simon March—he sounds like a narky old git, he could well have pissed someone off—but, in your boy’s mind, it goes way deeper than that. To him, it’s about a dead baby. And Byrne and Doherty don’t have a clue about that, right? How long have they been here?”

“Doherty only two years, but Byrne’s been stuck out here since 1997. He says there was a cot death in the village last spring and a wee girl fell into a slurry pit on one of the farms, a few years back—God rest them—but that’s the lot. Nothing suspicious about either death, and no links to Whitethorn House. And the computer didn’t come up with anything in the area.”

“Then we’re looking for something further back,” I said, “just like you thought. God knows how far. Remember what you told me, about the Purcells round your way?”

A pause. “We’ll never find it, so. The records, sure.”

Most of Ireland’s public records went up in a fire in 1921, in the Civil War. “You don’t need records. People round here know about this, I guarantee you. Whenever that baby died, this guy didn’t get the story out of some old newspaper. He’s way too obsessed with it. To him, that’s not ancient history; it’s a real, fresh, crucial grudge that needs to be avenged.”

“Are you saying he’s mad?”

“No,” I said. “Not the way you mean. He’s way too careful—waiting for safe moments, backing off after he got chased . . . If he were schizophrenic, say, or bipolar, he wouldn’t have that much control. He doesn’t have a mental illness. But he’s obsessed to the point where, yeah, I think you could probably call him a little unbalanced.”

“Could he get violent? Against people, I mean, not just property.” Sam’s voice had sharpened; he was sitting up straighter.

“I’m not sure,” I said, carefully. “It doesn’t seem like his style—I mean, he could have broken down old Simon’s bedroom door and whacked him with a poker any time he wanted to, but he didn’t. But the fact that he only seems to do this stuff when he’s drunk makes me think he’s got an unhealthy relationship with alcohol—one of those guys who grow a whole new personality after four or five pints, and not a nice one. Once you throw booze into the equation, everything gets less predictable. And, like I said, this is an obsession with him. If he got the impression that the enemy was escalating the conflict—by going after him when he threw that rock through the window, for example—he could well have upped his game to match.”

“You know what this sounds exactly like,” Sam said, after a pause, “don’t you. Same age, local, smart, controlled, criminal experience but no violence . . .”

The profile I had given him, back in my flat; the profile of the killer. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“What you’re telling me is that he could be our boy. The murderer.”

That streak of shadow again, quick and silent through the grass and the moonlight: a fox, maybe, after a field mouse. “He could be,” I said. “We can’t rule him out.”

“If this is a family feud,” Sam said, “then Lexie wasn’t the specific target, her life’s nothing to do with anything and there’s no need for you to be there. You can come home.”

The hope in his voice made me flinch. “Yeah,” I said, “maybe. But I don’t think we’re at that stage. We’ve got no concrete link between the vandalism and the stabbing; they could be completely unrelated. And once we pull the plug, we can’t go back.”

A fraction of a pause. Then: “Fair enough,” Sam said. “I’ll get to work on finding that link. And, Cassie . . .”

His voice had gone sober, tense. “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I am being careful.”

“Half past eleven to one o’clock. That fits the time of the stabbing.”

“I know. I haven’t seen anyone dodgy hanging around.”

“Do you have your gun?”

“Whenever I go out. Frank already lectured me about that.”

“Frank,” Sam said, and I heard that remoteness come into his voice. “Right.”

After we hung up I waited in the shadow of the tree for a long time. I heard the crash of long grass and the thin scream as whatever predator was out there finally pounced. When the rustles had faded into the dark and only small things moved, I slipped out into the lane and went home.

I stopped at the back gate and swung on it for a while, listening to the slow creak of the hinge and looking up the long garden at the house. It looked different, that night. The gray stone of the back was flat and defensive as a castle wall, and the golden glow from the windows didn’t feel cozy any more; it had turned defiant, warning, like a small campfire in a savage forest. The moonlight whitened the lawn into a wide fitful sea, with the house tall and still in the middle, exposed on every side; besieged.

10

When you find a crack, you push on it and you see if something breaks. It had taken me about an hour and a half to work out that, if there was something the housemates weren’t telling me, Justin was my best bet. Any detective with a couple of years under his belt can tell you who’s going to break first; back in Murder I once saw Costello, who was installed in the eighties along with the decor, pick the weak link just from watching the gang of suspects get booked in. It’s our version of Name That Tune.

Daniel and Abby were both useless: too controlled and too focused, almost impossible to distract or wrong-foot—I had tried a couple of times to nudge Abby into telling me who she thought the daddy was, got nothing but cool blank looks. Rafe was more suggestible and I knew I could probably get somewhere with him if I had to, but it would be tricky; he was too volatile and contrary, just as likely to storm out in a strop as to tell you what you wanted to know. Justin—gentle, imaginative, easily worried, wanting everyone to be happy—was pretty near to being an interviewer’s dream.

The only thing was that I was never alone with him. In the first week I hadn’t really noticed it, but now that I was looking for a chance, it stood out. Daniel and I drove into college together a couple of times a week, and I saw a lot of Abby—breakfasts, after dinner when the guys were washing up, sometimes she knocked on my door at night with a packet of biscuits and we sat on the bed and talked till we got sleepy—but if I was ever on my own with Rafe or Justin for more than five minutes, one of the others would drift over or call out to us, and we would be effortlessly, invisibly enveloped by the group again. It could have been natural; all five of them did spend an awful lot of time together, and every group has subtle subdivisions, people who never pair off because they only work as part of the whole. But I had to wonder if someone, probably Daniel, had considered all four of them with an interrogator’s assessing eye and come to the same conclusion I had.

It was Monday morning before I got my chance. We were in college; Daniel was giving a tutorial and Abby had a meeting with her supervisor, so it was just Rafe and Justin and me in our corner of the library. When Rafe got up and headed off somewhere, presumably to the bathroom, I counted to twenty and then stuck my head over the barrier into Justin’s carrel.

“Hello, you,” he said, looking up from a page of tiny, fastidious handwriting. Every inch of his desk was heaped with books and looseleaf and photocopies striped with highlighter pen; Justin couldn’t work unless he was snugly nested in the middle of everything he might possibly need.

“I’m bored and it’s sunny,” I said. “Come for lunch.”

He checked his watch. “It’s only twenty to one.”

“Live dangerously,” I said.

Justin looked uncertain. “What about Rafe?”

“He’s big and ugly enough to look after himself. He can wait for Abby and Daniel.” Justin was still looking way too unsure for a decision of this magnitude, and I figured I had about a minute to get him out of there before Rafe came back. “Ah, Justin, come on. I’ll do this till you do.” I drummed “shave and a haircut, two bits” on the barrier with my fingernails.

“Argh,” Justin said, putting his pen down. “Chinese noise torture. You win.”

The obvious place to go was the edge of New Square, but you can see it through the library windows, so I dragged Justin over to the cricket pitch, where it would take Rafe longer to find us. It was a bright, cold day, high blue sky and the air like ice water. Down by the Pavilion a bunch of cricketers were doing earnest stylized things at each other, and up at our end four guys were playing Frisbee and trying to act like they weren’t doing it for the benefit of three industrially groomed girls on a bench, who were trying to look like they weren’t watching. Mating rituals: it was spring.

“So,” Justin said, when we were settled on the grass. “How’s the chapter going?”

“Crap,” I said, rummaging through my book bag for my sandwich. “I’ve written bugger-all since I got back. I can’t concentrate.”

“Well,” Justin said, after a moment. “That’s only to be expected, isn’t it? For a little while.”

I shrugged, not looking at him.

“It’ll wear off. Really, it will. Now that you’re home and everything’s back to normal.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” I found my sandwich, made a face at it and dumped it on the grass: few things worried Justin as much as people not eating. “It just sucks, not knowing what happened. It sucks enormously. I keep wondering . . . The cops kept hinting that they had all these leads and stuff, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. For fuck’s sake, I’m the one who got stabbed here. If anyone has a right to know why, it’s me.”

“But I thought you were feeling better. You said you were fine.”

“I guess. Never mind.”

“We thought . . . I mean, I didn’t expect you to be this bothered. To keep thinking about it. It’s not like you.”

I glanced over at him, but he didn’t look suspicious, just worried. “Yeah, well,” I said. “I never got stabbed before.”

“No,” said Justin. “I suppose not.” He arranged his lunch on the grass: bottle of orange juice on one side, banana on the other, sandwich in the middle. He was biting the edge of his lip.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said abruptly. “My parents.” Saying the words gave me a sharp, giddy little thrill.

Justin’s head snapped up and he stared at me. “What about them?”

“That maybe I should get in touch with them. Tell them what happened.”

“No pasts,” Justin said, instantly, like a quick sign against bad luck. “We agreed.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. Easy for you to say.”

“It isn’t, actually.” Then, when I didn’t answer: “Lexie? Are you serious?”

I did another edgy little shrug. “Not sure yet.”

“But I thought you hated them. You said you never wanted to speak to them again.”

“That’s not the point.” I twisted the strap of my book bag around my finger, pulled it away in a long spiral. “I just keep thinking . . . I could have died there. Actually died. And my parents would never even have known.”

“If something happens to me,” Justin said, “I don’t want my parents called. I don’t want them there. I don’t want them to know.”

“Why not?” He was picking the seal off his bottle of juice, head down. “Justin?”

“Never mind. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No. Tell me, Justin. Why not?”

After a moment Justin said, “I went back to Belfast for Christmas, our first year of postgrad. Not long after you came. Do you remember?”

“Yeah,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me; he was blinking at the cricketers, white and formal as ghosts against the green, the thwack of the bat reaching us late and faraway.

“I told my father and my stepmother that I’m gay. On Christmas Eve.” A small, humorless snort of a laugh. “God love me, I suppose I thought the holiday spirit—peace and good will to all men . . . And the four of you had taken it so completely in your stride. Do you know what Daniel said, when I told him? He thought it over for a few minutes and then informed me that straight and gay are modern constructs, the concept of sexuality was much more fluid right up through the Renaissance. And Abby rolled her eyes and asked me if I wanted her to act surprised. Rafe was the one I was most worried about—I’m not sure why—but he just grinned and said, ‘Less competition for me.’ Which was sweet of him, actually; it’s not like I was ever much competition to him anyway . . . It was very comforting, you know. I suppose it made me think that telling my family might not be such a huge big deal, after all.”

“I didn’t realize,” I said. “That you’d told them. You never said.”

“Yes, well,” Justin said. He picked the cling-film away from his sandwich delicately, being careful not to get relish on his fingers. “My stepmother’s a dreadful woman, you know. Really dreadful. Her father’s a carpenter, but she tells people he’s an artisan, whatever she thinks that means, and she never invites him to parties. Everything about her is pure faultless middle-class—the accent, the clothes, the hair, the china patterns, it’s as if she ordered herself from a catalogue—but you can see the incredible effort that goes into every second of it. Marrying her boss must have been like attaining the Holy Grail. I’m not saying my father would have been OK with me if it hadn’t been for her—he looked like he was going to be sick—but she made it so, so much worse. She was hysterical. She told my father she wanted me out of the house, right away. For good.”

“Jesus, Justin.”

“She watches a lot of soap operas,” Justin said. “Erring sons get banished all the time. She kept shrieking, actually shrieking, ‘Think of the boys!’—she meant my half brothers. I don’t know if she thought I was going to convert them or molest them or what, but I said—which was nasty of me, but you can see why I was feeling vicious—I said she had nothing to worry about, no self-respecting gay man would touch either of those hideous little Cabbage Patch Kids with a barge pole. It went downhill from there. She threw things, I said things, the Cabbage Patch Kids actually put down their PlayStations to come see what was happening, she tried to drag them out of the room—presumably so I wouldn’t jump them on the spot—they started shrieking . . . Finally my father told me it would be better if I wasn’t in the house—‘for the moment,’ as he put it, but we both knew what he meant. He drove me to the station and gave me a hundred pounds. For Christmas.” He pulled the cling-film straight and laid it on the grass, the sandwich neatly in the middle.

“What did you do?” I asked quietly.

“Over Christmas? Stayed in my flat, mostly. Bought a hundred-quid bottle of whiskey. Felt sorry for myself.” He gave me a wry half smile. “I know: I should have told you I was back in town. But . . . well, pride, I suppose. It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I know none of you would have asked, but you couldn’t have helped wondering, and you’re all too sharp for your own good. Someone would have guessed.”

The way he was sitting—knees pulled up, feet neatly together—rucked up his trousers; he was wearing gray socks worn thin by too much washing, and his ankles were delicate and bony as a boy’s. I reached over and covered one of them with my hand. It was warm and solid and my fingers almost circled it.

“No, it’s all right,” Justin said, and when I looked up I saw that he was smiling at me, properly this time. “Really and truly, it is. At first it did upset me a lot; I felt like I was orphaned, homeless—honestly, if you could have seen the level of melodrama going on in my head . . . But I don’t think about it any more, not since the house. I don’t even know why I brought it up.”

“My fault,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He gave my hand a little fingertip pat. “If you really want to get in touch with your parents, then . . . well, it’s none of my business, is it? All I’m saying is, don’t forget: we’ve all got reasons why we decided no pasts. It’s not just me. Rafe . . . Well, you’ve heard his father.”

I nodded. “He’s a git.”

“Rafe’s been getting that exact same phone call for as long as I’ve known him: you’re pathetic, you’re useless, I’m ashamed to mention you to my friends. I’m pretty sure his whole childhood was like that. His father disliked him almost from the moment he was born—it happens sometimes, you know. He wanted a big oaf of a son who would play rugby and grope his secretary and throw up outside chi-chi nightclubs, and instead he got Rafe. He made his life a misery. You didn’t see Rafe when we first started college: this skinny prickly creature, so defensive that if you teased him the tiniest bit he would absolutely take your head off. I wasn’t even sure I liked him, at first. I just hung around with him because I liked Abby and Daniel, and they obviously thought he was all right.”

“He’s still skinny,” I said. “And he’s still prickly, too. He’s a little bollocks when he feels like it.”

Justin shook his head. “He’s a million times better than he was. And it’s because he doesn’t have to think about those awful parents of his any more, at least not often. And Daniel . . . Have you ever, once, heard him mention his childhood?”

I shook my head.

“Neither have I. I know his parents are dead, but I don’t know when or how, or what happened to him afterwards—where he lived, with who, nothing. Abby and I got awfully drunk together one night and started being silly about that, making up childhoods for Daniel: he was one of those feral children raised by hamsters, he grew up in a brothel in Istanbul, his parents were CIA sleepers who got taken out by the KGB and he escaped by hiding in the washing machine . . . It was funny at the time, but the fact is, his childhood can’t have been too pleasant, can it, for him to be so secretive about it? You’re bad enough . . .” Justin shot me a quick glance. “But at least I know you had chicken pox, and you learned to ride horses. I don’t know anything like that about Daniel. Not a thing.”

I hoped to God we wouldn’t run into a situation where I needed to show off my equestrian skills. “And then there’s Abby,” Justin said. “Has Abby ever talked to you about her mother?”

“Bits,” I said. “I got the idea.”

“It’s worse than she makes it sound. I actually met the woman—you weren’t here yet, it was back in about third year. We were all over at Abby’s flat one evening, and her mother showed up, banging on the door. She was . . . God. The way she was dressed—I don’t know if she’s actually a prostitute, or just . . . well. She was obviously out of it; she kept shouting at Abby, but I barely understood a word she said. Abby shoved something into her hand—money, I’m sure, and you know how broke Abby’s always been—and practically hauled her out of the door. She was white as a ghost, Abby was; I thought she was going to faint.” Justin looked up at me anxiously, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Don’t tell her I told you that.”

“I won’t.”

“She’s never mentioned it since; I doubt she wants to talk about it now. Which is sort of my point. I’m sure you’ve got reasons, too, why you thought the no-pasts thing was a good idea. Maybe what happened changed all that, I don’t know, but . . . just remember you’re still fragile, right now. Just give it a little while before you do anything irrevocable. And if you do decide to get in touch with your parents, maybe the best thing would be not to tell the others. It would . . . Well. It would hurt them.”

I gave him a puzzled look. “You think?”

“Well, of course. We’re . . .” He was still messing with the cling-film; there was a faint pink flush creeping up his cheeks. “We love you, you know. As far as we’re concerned, we’re your family now. All of one another’s family—I mean, that’s not right, but you know what I mean . . .”

I leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Course I do,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Justin’s phone beeped. “That’ll be Rafe,” he said, fishing it out of his pocket. “Yes: wanting to know where we are.”

He started texting Rafe back, peering nearsightedly at the phone, and reached over to squeeze my shoulder with his free hand. “Just have a think about it,” he said. “And eat your lunch.”

* * *

“I see you’ve been playing Who’s the Daddy,” Frank said, that night. He was eating something—a burger, maybe, I could hear paper rustling. “And Justin’s out, in more ways than one. Place your bets: Danny Boy or Pretty Boy?”

“Or neither,” I said. I was on my way to my lurk spot—I was ringing Frank almost as soon as I got out the back gate, these days, rather than wait even a few extra minutes to hear if he had anything new on Lexie. “Our killer knew her, remember; no way to be sure just how well. That’s not what I was after, anyway. I was chasing down the no-pasts thing, trying to work out what these four aren’t sharing.”

“And all you got was a nice collection of sob stories. I grant you the no-pasts thing is fucked up, but we already knew they were a bunch of weirdos. No news there.”

“Mmm,” I said. I wasn’t so sure that afternoon had been useless, even if I didn’t know how it fit in yet. “I’ll keep poking around.”

“It’s been one of those days all round,” Frank said, through a mouthful. “I’ve been chasing our girl and getting zip. You’ve probably noticed: we’ve got a gap a year and a half long in her story. She ditches the May-Ruth ID in late 2000, but she doesn’t show up as Lexie until early 2002. I’m trying to track down where and who she was in between. I doubt she went home, wherever that is, but it’s always a possibility; and even if she didn’t, she might have left us a clue or two along the way.”

“I’d focus on European countries,” I said. “After September 2001, airport security tightened up a lot; she wouldn’t have made it out of the U.S. and into Ireland on a fake passport. She had to be this side of the Atlantic before then.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what name to chase. There’s no record of May-Ruth Thibodeaux ever applying for a passport. I’m thinking she went back to her own identity or bought herself a new one in New York, flew out of JFK on that, switched identity again once she got wherever she was going—”

JFK—Frank was still talking but I’d stopped dead in the middle of the lane, just forgotten to keep walking, because that mysterious page in Lexie’s date book had gone off in my head with a flash-bang like a firecracker. CDG 59 . . . I’d flown into Charles de Gaulle a dozen times, going to spend summers with my French cousins, and fifty-nine quid sounded just about right for a one-way. AMS: not Abigail Marie Stone; Amsterdam. LHR: London Heath-row. I couldn’t remember the others but I knew, sure as steel, that they would turn out to be airport codes. Lexie had been pricing flights.

If all she wanted was an abortion she would have headed to England, no need to mess about with Amsterdam and Paris. And those were one-way prices, not returns. She had been getting ready to run again, right off the edge of her life and out into the wide blue world.

Why?

Three things had changed, in her last few weeks. She had found out she was pregnant; N had materialized; and she had started making plans to take off. I don’t believe in coincidences. There was no way to be sure of the order in which those three things had happened, but by whatever roundabout path, one of them had led to the other two. There was a pattern there, somewhere: tantalizingly close, popping in and out of view like one of those pictures you have to cross your eyes to see, there and gone too quick to catch.

Up until that night, I hadn’t had much time for Frank’s mystery stalker. Very few people are willing to ditch their whole lives and spend years bouncing around the world after some girl who pissed them off. Frank has this tendency to go for the more interesting theory rather than the more likely one, and I’d filed this one somewhere between Outside Chance and Pure Hollywood Melodrama. But this made three times, at least, that something had smashed broadside into her life, left it totaled, irreclaimable. My heart twisted for her.

“Hello? Ground control to Cassie?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Frank, can you do something for me? I want to know anything out of the ordinary that happened in her May-Ruth life in the month or so before she went missing—make it two months, to be on the safe side.”

Running away from N? Running away with N, to start a whole new life somewhere, him and her and their baby?

“You underestimate me, babe. Already done. No strange visitors or phone calls, no arguments with anyone, no odd behavior, nothing.”

“I didn’t mean stuff like that. I want anything that happened, anything at all: if she switched job, switched boyfriend, moved house, got sick, took a course in something. Not ominous stuff, just your basic life events.”

Frank thought about this for a while, chewing his burger or whatever. “Why?” he asked, in the end. “If I’m going to call in more favors from my friendly Fed, I need to give him a reason.”

“Make something up. I don’t have a good reason. Intuition, remember?”

“OK,” Frank said. He sounded disturbingly like he was picking bits out of his teeth. “I’ll do it. If you do something for me in exchange.”

I had started walking again, automatically, towards the cottage. “Hit me.”

“Don’t relax. You’ve started to sound way too much like you’re enjoying yourself in there.”

I sighed. “Me woman, Frank. Woman multitask. I can do my job and have a laugh or two, all at the same time.”

“Good for you. All I know is, undercover relax, undercover in big trouble. There’s a killer out there, probably within a mile or so of wherever you’re standing right now. You’re supposed to be tracking him down, not playing Happy Families with the Fantastic Four.”

Happy Families. I had been taking it for granted that she’d hidden the diary to make sure no one found out about her N appointments, whoever or whatever N was. But this: she had had a whole other secret to keep. If the others had found out that Lexie was about to slash herself straight out of their interlaced world, shed it like a dragonfly shrugging out of its skin and leaving behind nothing but the perfect shape of its absence, they would have been devastated. I was suddenly, almost dizzily glad I hadn’t told Frank about that diary.

“I’m on it, Frank,” I said.

“Good. Stay on it.” Paper crumpling—he had finished his burger—and the beep of him hanging up.

I was almost at my surveillance spot. Snippets of hedge and grass and earth sprang alive in the pale circle of the torch beam, vanished the next moment. I thought of her running hard down this same lane, this same faint circle of light ricocheting wild, the strong door to safety lost forever in the dark behind her and nothing up ahead but that cold cottage. Those streaks of paint on her bedroom wall: she had had a future planned here, in this house, with these people, right up until the moment the bomb dropped. We’re your family, Justin had said, all of one another’s family, and I had been in Whitethorn House long enough to start understanding how much he meant it and how much it meant. What the hell, I thought, what the hell could have been strong enough to blow all that away?

* * *

Now that I was looking, the cracks kept coming. I couldn’t tell whether they had been there all along, or whether they were deepening under my eyes. That night I was reading in bed when I heard voices outside, below my window.

Rafe had gone to bed before I had, and I could hear Justin going through his nighttime ritual downstairs—humming, puttering, the odd mysterious thump. That left Daniel and Abby. I knelt up by the window, held my breath and listened, but they were three stories down and all I could hear through Justin’s cheerful obbligato was a low, fast-paced murmur.

“No,” Abby said, louder and frustrated. “Daniel, that’s not the point . . .” Her voice dropped again. “Moooon river,” Justin sang to himself, hamming it up happily.

I did what nosy kids have done since the dawn of time: I decided I needed a very quiet drink of water. Justin didn’t even pause in his humming as I moved across the landing; on the ground floor, there was no light under Rafe’s door. I felt my way along the walls and slipped into the kitchen. The French window was open, just a thumb’s width. I went to the sink—slowly, not even a rustle from my pajamas—and held a glass under the tap, ready to turn the water on if anyone caught me.

They were on the swing seat. The patio was bright with moonlight; they would never see me, behind glass in the dark kitchen. Abby was sitting sideways, her back against the arm of the seat and her feet on Daniel’s lap; he had a glass in one hand and was covering her ankles casually with the other. The moonlight poured down Abby’s hair, whitened the curve of her cheek and pooled in the folds of Daniel’s shirt. Something fast and needle-fine darted through me, a shot of pure distilled pain. Rob and I used to sit like that on my sofa, through long late nights. The floor bit cold at my bare feet and the kitchen was so silent, it hurt my ears.

“For good,” Abby said. There was a high note of disbelief in her voice. “Just keep on going, like this, for good. Pretend nothing ever happened.”

“I don’t see,” Daniel said, “that we have any other option. Do you?”

“Jesus, Daniel!” Abby ran her hands through her hair, head going back, flash of white throat. “How is this an option? This is insane. Is this seriously what you want? You want to do this for the rest of our lives?”

Daniel turned to look at her; I could only see the back of his head. “In an ideal world,” he said gently, “no. I’d like things to be different; several things.”

“Oh, God,” Abby said, rubbing at her eyebrows as if she had a headache starting. “Let’s not even go there.”

“One can’t have everything, you know,” Daniel said. “We knew, when we first decided to live here, that there would be sacrifices involved. We expected that.”

“Sacrifices,” Abby said, “yes. This, no. This I did not see coming, Daniel, no. None of it.”

“Didn’t you?” Daniel asked, surprised. “I did.”

Abby’s head jerked up and she stared at him. “This? Come on. You saw this coming? Lexie, and—”

“Well, not Lexie,” Daniel said. “Hardly. Although perhaps . . .” He checked himself, sighed. “But the rest: yes, I thought it was a distinct possibility. Human nature being what it is. I assumed you’d considered it too.”

Nobody had told me there was a rest of this, never mind sacrifices. I realized I had been holding my breath for so long that my head was starting to spin; I let it out, carefully.

“Nope,” Abby said wearily, to the sky. “Call me stupid.”

“I would never do that,” Daniel said, smiling a little sadly out over the lawn. “Heaven knows, I’m the last person in the world who has any right to judge you for missing the obvious.” He took a sip of his drink—glitter of pale amber as the glass tilted—and in that moment, in the fall of his shoulders and the way his eyes closed as he swallowed, it hit me. I had seen these four as safe in their own enchanted fort, with everything they wanted within arm’s reach. I had liked that thought, a lot. But something had blindsided Abby, and for some reason Daniel was getting used to being terribly, constantly unhappy.

“How does Lexie seem to you?” he asked.

Abby took one of Daniel’s cigarettes and snapped the lighter hard. “She seems fine. A little quiet, and she’s lost some weight, but that’s the least we could expect.”

“Do you think she’s all right?”

“She’s eating. She’s taking her antibiotics.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about Lexie,” Abby said. “She seems pretty settled to me. As far as I can tell, she’s basically forgotten about the whole thing.”

“In a way,” Daniel said, “that’s what’s been bothering me. I worry that she may be bottling everything up and one of these days she’s going to explode. And then what?”

Abby watched him, smoke curling up slowly through the moonlight. “In some ways,” she said carefully, “it might not be the end of the world if Lexie did explode.”

Daniel considered this, swirling his glass meditatively and looking out over the grass. “That would depend very much,” he said, “on the form the explosion took. I think it would be as well to be prepared.”

“Lexie,” Abby said, “is the least of our problems here. Justin—I mean, it was obvious, I knew Justin was going to have trouble, but he’s just so much worse than I expected. He never saw this coming, any more than I did. And Rafe’s not helping. If he doesn’t stop being such a little bollocks, I don’t know what . . .” I saw her lips tighten as she swallowed. “And then there’s this. I am not having an easy time here either, Daniel, and it doesn’t make me feel any better that you don’t seem to give a damn.”

“I do give a damn,” Daniel said. “I care very much, in fact. I thought you knew that. I just don’t see what either of us can do about it.”

“I could leave,” Abby said. She was watching Daniel intently, her eyes round and very grave. “We could leave.”

I fought down the impulse to slap a hand over the mike. I wasn’t at all sure what was going on here, but if Frank heard this, he would be positive that the four of them were planning some dramatic getaway and I was about to find myself bound and gagged in the coat closet while they hopped a plane to Mexico. I wished I had had the sense to test out the mike’s exact range.

Daniel didn’t look at Abby, but his hand tightened around her ankles. “You could, yes,” he said, eventually. “There would be nothing I could do to stop you. But this is my home, you know. As I hope . . .” He took a breath. “As I hope it’s yours. I can’t leave it.”

Abby let her head fall back against the bar of the swing seat. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. Me neither. I just . . . God, Daniel. What do we do?”

“We wait,” Daniel said quietly. “We trust that things will eventually fall into place, in their own time. We trust one another. We do our best.”

A draft swept across my shoulders and I whipped round, already opening my mouth on my drink-of-water story. The glass clanged against the tap and I dropped it in the sink; the clatter sounded enormous enough to wake up all of Glenskehy. There was no one there.

Daniel and Abby had frozen, faces turned sharply towards the house. “Hey,” I said, pushing the door open and going out onto the patio. My heart was pounding. “I changed my mind: I’m not sleepy. Are you guys staying up?”

“No,” Abby said. “I’m going to bed.” She swung her feet off Daniel’s lap and brushed past me, into the house. A moment later I heard her running up the stairs, not bothering to skip the creaky one.

I went over to Daniel and sat down on the patio beside his legs, with my back up against the swing seat. Somehow I didn’t want to sit next to him; it would have felt crude, too much like demanding confidences. After a moment he reached out one hand and set it, lightly, on top of my head. His hand was so big that it cupped my skull like a child’s. “Well,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

His glass was on the ground beside him, and I took a sip: whiskey on the rocks, the ice almost melted. “Were you and Abby fighting?” I asked.

“No,” Daniel said. His thumb moved, just a little, across my hair. “Everything’s fine.”

We sat like that for a while. It was a still night, barely a breeze rippling the grass, the moon like an old silver token floating high in the sky. The cool stone of the patio through my pajamas and the toasty smell of Daniel’s unfiltered cigarette felt comforting, safe. I rocked my back just a little against the swing seat, swaying it in a gentle, regular rhythm.

“Smell,” Daniel said softly. “Do you smell that?”

A first faint scent of rosemary drifting over from the herb garden, barely a tint in the air. “Rosemary; that’s for remembrance,” he said. “Soon we’ll have thyme and lemon balm, and mint and tansy, and something that I think must be hyssop—it’s hard to tell from the book, during winter. It’ll be a mess this year, of course, but we’ll trim everything back into shape, replant where we need to. Those old photos will be a great help; they’ll give us some idea of the original design, what belongs where. They’re hardy plants, these, chosen for their endurance as well as for their virtue. By next year . . .”

He told me about old herb gardens: how carefully they were arranged to make sure that each plant had everything it needed to flourish, how perfectly they balanced sight and scent and use, practicality and beauty, without ever allowing one to be compromised for another’s sake. Hyssop to loosen chest colds or cure toothaches, he said, chamomile in a poultice to reduce inflammation or in a tea to prevent nightmares; lavender and lemon balm for strewing to make the house smell sweet, rue and burnet in salads. “We’ll have to try that sometime,” he said, “a Shakespearean salad. Tansy tastes like pepper, did you know that? I thought it had died off long ago, it was all brown and brittle, but when I cut right back to the roots, there it was: just a tinge of green. It’ll be all right now. It’s amazing, how stubbornly things survive against incredible odds; how irresistibly strong it is, the drive to live and grow . . .”

The rhythms of his voice washed over me, even and soothing as waves; I barely heard the words. “Time,” I think he said somewhere behind me, or maybe it was “thyme,” I’ve never been sure. “Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.”

11

What people tend to forget about Sam is that he has one of the highest solve rates on the Murder squad. Sometimes I wonder if this is for a very simple reason: he doesn’t waste energy. Other detectives, me included, take it personally when things go wrong, they get impatient and frustrated and irritated with themselves and the dead-end leads and the whole fucking case. Sam gives it his best shot, then shrugs and says, “Ah, sure,” and tries something else.

He had been saying, “Ah, sure,” a lot that week, when I asked him how things were going, but not in his usual vague, abstracted way. This time he sounded tense and harassed, wound a notch tighter every day. He had gone door-to-door through most of Glenskehy, asking about Whitethorn House, but he got a smooth slippery wall of tea and biscuits and blank looks: Lovely young people up at the House, keep themselves to themselves, never any trouble out of them, sure why would there be any bad feeling, Detective? Terrible, what happened to that poor girl, I said a rosary for her, must have been someone she met up in Dublin . . . I know that small-town silence, I’d run into it before, intangible as smoke and solid as stone. We honed it on the British for centuries and it’s ingrained, the instinct for a place to close up like a fist when the police come knocking. Sometimes it means nothing more than that; but it’s a powerful thing, that silence, dark and tricky and lawless. It still hides bones buried somewhere in the hills, arsenals cached in pigsties. The British underestimated it, fell for the practiced half-witted looks, but I knew and Sam knew: it’s dangerous.

It was Tuesday night before the absorbed note came back into Sam’s voice. “I should’ve known better to start with,” he said cheerfully. “If they won’t talk to the local cops, why would they talk to me?” He had backed off, thought it over and then taken a taxi down to Rathowen for an evening in the pub: “Byrne said the people round there weren’t mad about Glenskehy folk, and I figured everyone likes a chance to gossip about the neighbors, so . . .”

He had been right. Rathowen people were a very different story from the Glenskehy bunch: they made him as a cop inside thirty seconds (“Come here, young fella, are you here about that girl got stabbed down the road?”), and he had spent the rest of the evening surrounded by fascinated farmers buying him pints and happily trying to trick him into giving away something about the investigation.

“Byrne was right: they think Glenskehy’s a lunatic asylum. Part of it’s just what you get between small towns—Rathowen’s that bit bigger, they’ve got a school and a police station and a few shops, so they call Glenskehy a mad backwater. It’s more than just your average rivalry, though. They really do think Glenskehy folk aren’t right. One fella said he wouldn’t go into Regan’s for all the tea in China.”

I was up a tree, wearing my mike sock and having a smoke. Since I had heard about that graffiti, the lanes had started to make me feel edgy, exposed; I didn’t like being down there when I was on the phone, with half my attention somewhere else. I had found a nook high up in a big beech tree, just at the start of the branches, where the trunk split in two. My arse fit perfectly into the fork, I had a clear view of the lane in both directions and of the cottage downhill, and if I tucked my legs up I vanished into the leaves. “Did they say anything about Whitethorn House?”

A small silence. “Yeah,” Sam said. “The house doesn’t have a great name, in Rathowen or in Glenskehy. Partly that’s to do with Simon March—he was a mad old bastard, by all accounts; two of the fellas remembered him firing his gun at them, when they were kids and they went nosing around the Whitethorn House grounds. But it goes back further than that.”

“The dead baby,” I said. The words sent something smooth and cold through the middle of me. “Did they know anything about that?”

“A bit. I’m not sure they have all the details right—you’ll see what I mean in a minute—but if they’re anywhere near the mark, it’s not a good story. Not good for the Whitethorn House people, I mean.”

He left a pause. “So?” I said. “These people aren’t my family, Sam. And unless this story happened sometime in the last six months, which I’m assuming it didn’t or we’d have heard about it by now, it’s got nothing to do with anyone I’ve even met. I’m not going to be deeply hurt by something Daniel’s great-granddad did a hundred years ago. Cross my heart.”

“Grand, so,” Sam said. “The Rathowen version—there’s some variation, but this is the gist of it—is that, a while back, a young fella from Whitethorn House had an affair with a Glenskehy girl, and she was going to have a baby for him. It used to happen often enough, sure. The problem was, this girl wasn’t about to disappear into a convent or marry some poor local fella in a mad hurry before anyone noticed she was pregnant.”

“A woman after my own heart,” I said. There was no way this story was going to end well.

“Shame your man March didn’t feel the same way. He was furious; he was meant to be getting married to some nice rich Anglo-Irish girl, and this could have banjaxed all his plans. He told the girl he didn’t want anything more to do with her or the child. She was already pretty unpopular in the village: not just pregnant outside marriage—that was a big deal, back then—but pregnant for one of the Marches . . . Not long after, she was found dead. She’d hanged herself.”

There are stories like this scattered all over our history. Most of them are buried deep and quiet as last year’s leaves, long transmuted into old ballads and winter-night stories. I thought of this one lying latent for a century or more, germinating and growing like some slow dark seed, blooming at last with broken glass and knives and poison berries of blood all among the hawthorn hedges. My back prickled against my tree trunk.

I put out my smoke on the sole of my shoe and tucked the butt back into the packet. “Got anything to say this actually happened?” I asked. “Apart from some story they tell in Rathowen to keep kids away from Whitethorn House.”

Sam blew out a breath. “Nothing. I put a couple of floaters onto the records, but they’ve turned up bugger-all. And there’s not a chance anyone in Glenskehy is going to tell me their version. They’d rather everyone forgot it ever happened.”

“Someone’s not forgetting,” I said.

“I should have a better idea who that is, in the next few days—I’m pulling all the info I can get on the people in Glenskehy, to cross-check against your profile. I’d love a clearer idea of what my fella’s problem is, though, before I get talking to him. The thing is, I’ve no clue where to start. One of the Rathowen fellas says all this happened in his great-granny’s time—which isn’t much help, sure: the woman lived to be eighty. Another one swore it was way back in the nineteenth century, ‘sometime after the Famine,’ but . . . I don’t know. I think he wants it as far away as possible; he’d say it was in Brian Boru’s time if he thought I’d believe him. So I’ve a window from 1847 to about 1950, and no one’s about to help me narrow it down.”

“Actually,” I said, “maybe I can.” It made me feel sticky all over, traitorous. “Give me a couple of days and I’ll see if I can get something more specific.”

A small pause, like a question, till Sam realized I wasn’t going to go into detail. “That’s grand. Anything you can find would be great.” Then, on a different note, almost shyly: “Listen, I was meaning to ask you something, before all this happened. I was thinking . . . I’ve never been on holiday, except to Youghal once when I was a little fella. How about you?”

“France, for summers.”

“That was to visit family, sure. I meant a proper holiday, like on the telly, with a beach and snorkeling and mad cocktails in a bar with a cheesy lounge singer doing ‘I Will Survive.’ ”

I knew where this was going. “What the hell have you been watching?”

Sam laughed. “Ibiza Uncovered. See what happens to my taste when you’re not here?”

“You’re just looking for topless chicks,” I said. “Emma and Susanna and I have been meaning to go away since we were in school, only we haven’t got round to it yet. Maybe this summer.”

“But now they’ve both got kids, haven’t they? That makes it harder to go off on a girlie break. I was thinking . . .” That shy note again. “I got a couple of brochures from the travel agencies. Italy, mostly; I know you like the old archaeology. Could I bring you on holiday, when this finishes up?”

I had no idea what I thought about this, and no room to figure it out. “That sounds gorgeous,” I said, “and you’re wonderful to think of it. Can we decide when I get home? The thing is, I’m not sure how long this is going to take.”

There was a tiny silence that made me grimace. I hate hurting Sam; it’s like kicking a dog too gentle to ever bite back. “It’s been more than two weeks already. I thought Mackey said a month max.”

Frank says whatever comes in useful at the time. Undercover investigations can last for years, and although I couldn’t see that happening here—the long operations are aimed at ongoing criminal activity, not once-off crimes—I was pretty sure that a month was something he had made up at random to get Sam off his back. For a second I almost hoped so. The thought of leaving all this, back to DV and Dublin crowds and corporate clothes, was vastly depressing.

“In theory, yeah,” I said, “but you can’t put an exact time on something like this. It could be less than a month—I could be home any time, if one of us gets something solid. But if I pick up a good lead and it needs following through, I might be here a week or two extra.”

Sam made a furious, frustrated sound. “If I ever talk about doing a joint investigation again, lock me in a closet till I get sense. I need a deadline here. I’ve been holding off on all kinds of stuff—getting DNA off the lads to test against the baby . . . Till you’re done in there, sure, I can’t even tell anyone we’re dealing with a murder. A few weeks is one thing—”

I had stopped listening to him. Somewhere, down the lane or deep in the trees, there was a sound. Not one of the usual noises, night birds and leaves and small hunting animals, I knew those by now; something else.

“Hang on,” I said, softly, through Sam’s sentence.

I took the phone away from my ear and listened, holding my breath. It was coming from down the lane, towards the main road, faint but getting closer: a slow, rhythmic crunching noise. Footsteps on pebbles.

“Gotta go,” I said into the phone, just above a whisper. “Ring you back later if I can.” I switched the phone off, shoved it into my pocket, tucked up my legs among the branches and sat still.

The footsteps were steady and coming nearer; someone big, from the weight of them. There was nothing up this lane except Whitethorn House. I pulled my sweater up, slowly, to cover the bottom half of my face. In the dark, it’s the flash of white that gives you away.

Night changes your sense of distance, makes things sound closer than they are, and it seemed like forever before someone came into view: just a flick of movement at first, a dappled shadow passing slowly under the leaves. Flash of fair hair, silver as a ghost’s in the pale light. I had to fight the instinct to turn my head away. This was a bad place to wait for something to step out of the dark. There were too many unknown things around me, moving intently along their secret routes on their own private business, and some of them had to be the kind that isn’t safe for us to see.

Then he stepped into a patch of moonlight and I saw that it was just a guy, tall, with a rugby build and a designer-looking leather jacket. He moved like he was unsure, hesitating, glancing off into the trees on either side. When he was only a few yards away he turned his head and looked straight at my tree, and in the instant before I shut my eyes—that’s the other thing that can give you away, that glint, we’re all programmed to spot watching eyes—I saw his face. He was my age, maybe a little younger, good-looking in a forgettable clean-cut way, with a hazy, perplexed frown, and he wasn’t on the KA list. I had never seen him before.

He passed under me, so close I could have dropped a leaf on his head, and vanished up the lane. I stayed put. If he was someone’s friend come to visit, I was going to be up there a long time, but I didn’t think he was. The hesitancy, the confused glances around; he wasn’t looking for the house. He was looking for something, or someone, else.

Three times, in her last weeks, Lexie had met N—or at least planned to meet N—somewhere. And on the night she died, if the other four were telling the truth, she had gone out for that walk and met her killer.

My adrenaline was pumping hard and I was itching to go after the guy, or at least intercept him on his way back, but I knew that was a bad idea. I wasn’t scared—I had a gun, after all, and in spite of his size he didn’t look very formidable—but I only had one shot at this, metaphorically, and I couldn’t afford to fire it while I was completely in the dark. There was probably no way to find out whether or how he was linked to Lexie, I would have to play that one by ear, but it would be nice to at least know his name before we got into conversation.

I slid down from the tree in slow motion—the scrape of the bark pulled up my top and nearly dragged the mike off me, Frank would think I was being run over by a tank—and got behind it to wait. It felt like hours before the guy came wandering back down the lane, rubbing the back of his head and still looking bewildered. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t found it. When he had passed me, I counted thirty footsteps and then followed him, keeping on the grass verge and putting my feet down carefully, staying behind tree trunks.

He had a wankermobile parked on the main road, a hunormous black SUV with depressingly inevitable tinted windows. It was about fifty yards from the turnoff, and the road was bordered by wide open stretches—long grass, ragged nettles, an old milestone sticking up off-kilter—so there was no cover; I couldn’t risk getting close enough to read the plate. My guy whacked the hood affectionately, got in, slammed the door too loudly—sudden cold silence, in the trees all round me—and sat there for a while, contemplating whatever guys like that contemplate, probably his haircut. Then he revved the engine and bulldozed off down the road, towards Dublin.

* * *

When I was sure he was gone, I climbed back up my tree and thought this over. There was always a chance that this guy had been stalking me for a while now, that the electric feeling at the back of my neck had been coming from him, but I doubted it. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t been particularly covert about it that night, and I didn’t get the sense that slinking through the wilderness was a major part of his skill set. Whatever had been lurking in the corner of my eye, it wasn’t coming into view this easily.

I was clear on one thing: neither Sam nor Frank needed to know about the SUV Prince, not until I had something a whole lot more concrete to tell them. Sam would go ballistic if he found out I was dodging strange men on the same late-night walk where Lexie had failed to dodge her killer. That wouldn’t bother Frank one bit—he always figured I was well able to take care of myself—but if I told him then he would take over, he would find this guy and pull him in and interrogate the bejasus out of him, and I didn’t want that. Something in me said that wasn’t the way to go at this case. And something else, deeper, said that this wasn’t Frank’s business, not really. He had stumbled into it by accident. This was between me and Lexie.

I phoned him anyway. We had already talked that night and it was late, but he answered fast. “Yeah? You OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out. I just wanted to ask you something, before I forget again. Has the investigation turned up a guy about six foot tall, solid build, late twenties, good-looking, fair hair with that trendy quiff thing going on, fancy brown leather jacket?”

Frank yawned, which made me feel guilty but also slightly relieved: it was nice to know he actually slept sometimes. “Why?”

“I passed a guy in Trinity a couple of days ago, and he smiled at me and nodded, like he knew me. He’s not on the KA list. It’s not a big deal—he didn’t act like we were supposed to be bosom buddies or anything—but I thought I’d check. I don’t want to get blindsided if we run into each other again.” This was true, by the way, although the guy in question had been small and skinny and redheaded. It had taken me about ten minutes of racking my brains to figure out how he knew me. His carrel was in our corner of the library.

Frank thought about this; I heard the rustle of sheets as he turned over in bed. “Doesn’t ring any bells,” he said. “The only person I can think of is Slow Eddie—Daniel’s cousin. He’s twenty-nine and blond and wears a brown leather jacket, and I guess he could be good-looking, if you go for big and dumb.”

“Not your type?” Still no N. Why the hell would Slow Eddie be wandering around Glenskehy at midnight?

“I like them with more cleavage. Eddie says he never met Lexie, though. There’s no reason why he would have. He and Daniel don’t get on; it’s not like Eddie’s popping over to the house for tea or joining the gang on nights out. And he lives in Bray, works in Killiney; I can’t see any reason why he’d be in Trinity.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s probably just someone who knows her from around college. Go back to sleep. Sorry for waking you.”

“It’s grand,” Frank said, through another yawn. “Better safe than sorry. Put a report on tape, with a full description—and if you see him again, let me know.” He was already about half asleep.

“Will do. Night.”

I stayed still in my tree for a few minutes, listening for out-of-place noises. Nothing; just the undergrowth below me tossing like ocean in the wind, and that prickle, faint and unignorable, scratching at the top of my spine. I told myself that if anything was going to send my imagination into overdrive, it would be the story Sam had told: the girl stripped of her lover, her family, her future, knotting a rope to one of these dark branches for everything she had left, herself and her baby. I phoned Sam back before I could think too hard about that.

He was still wide awake. “What was that all about? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m really sorry about that. I thought I heard someone coming. I was picturing Frank’s mystery stalker with a hockey mask and a chain saw, but no such luck.” This was also true, obviously, but twisting facts for Sam wasn’t like twisting them for Frank, and doing it made my stomach curl up.

A second of silence. “I worry about you,” Sam said quietly.

“I know, Sam,” I said. “I know you do. I’m grand. I’ll be home soon.”

I thought I heard him sigh, a small resigned breath, too soft for me to be sure. “Yeah,” he said. “We can talk about that holiday then.”

I walked back home thinking about Sam’s vandal, about that prickling feeling, and about Slow Eddie. All I knew about him was that he worked for an estate agent, he and Daniel didn’t get on, Frank didn’t think much of his brainpower, and he had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to call his grandfather a lunatic. I bounced a few scenarios around in my head—Homicidal Maniac Eddie picking off the occupants of Whitethorn House one by one, Casanova Eddie having a dangerous liaison with Lexie and then flipping out when he found out about the baby—but all of them seemed pretty far-fetched, and anyway I liked to think that Lexie had had better taste than to boink some dumb yuppie in the back of an SUV.

If he’d wandered around the house once and not found what he was looking for, the chances were that he would come back—unless he’d just been taking a last look at the place he had loved and lost, and he didn’t strike me as the sentimental type. I filed him under Things to Worry About Some Other Time. Right then, he wasn’t at the top of my list.

The part I wasn’t telling Sam, the new dark thing unfurling and fluttering in a corner of my mind: someone was holding a high-octane grudge against Whitethorn House; someone had been meeting Lexie in these lanes, someone faceless who began with an N; and someone had helped her make that baby. If all three of those had been the same person . . . Sam’s vandal wasn’t too tightly wrapped, but he could well be smart enough—sober, anyway—to hide that; he could be gorgeous, charming, all kinds of good stuff, and we already knew that Lexie’s decision-making process had worked a little differently from most people’s. Maybe she had gone for the angst boys. I thought of a chance meeting somewhere in the lanes, long walks together under a high winter moon and branches filigreed with frost; of that smile slanting up under her lashes; of the ruined cottage, and shelter behind the curtain of brambles.

If the guy I was picturing had found himself with a chance at getting a Whitethorn House girl pregnant, it would have seemed to him like a God-given thing, a perfect, blinding symmetry: a golden ball dropped into his hands by angels, not to be refused. And he would have killed her.

* * *

The next morning someone spat on our car. We were on our way to college, Justin and Abby up front, me and Rafe in the back—Daniel had left early, no explanation, while the rest of us were halfway through breakfast. It was a cool gray morning, dawn hush left in the air and soft drizzle misting the windows; Abby was flipping through notes and humming along to Mahler on the CD player, switching octaves dramatically in midphrase, and Rafe was in his sock feet, trying to disentangle a massive knot in his shoelace. As we went through Glenskehy Justin braked, outside the newsagent’s, to let someone cross the road: an old guy, hunched and wiry, in a farmer’s tired tweed suit and flat cap. He raised his walking stick in a kind of salute as he shuffled past, and Justin waved back.

Then the man caught Justin’s eye. He stopped in the middle of the road and stared through the windscreen at us. For a split second his face contorted into a tight mask of pure fury and disgust; then he brought down his stick on the hood, with a flat clang that split the morning wide open. We all shot upright, but before any of us could do anything sensible the old man hawked, spat on the windscreen—straight at Justin’s face—and hobbled on across the road, at the same deliberate pace.

“What the—” Justin said, breathless. “What the hell? What was that?”

“They don’t like us,” Abby said evenly, reaching over to switch on the windscreen wipers. The street was long and deserted, little pastel houses closed down tight against the rain, dark blur of hills rising behind them. Nothing moved anywhere, only the old man’s slow mechanical shuffle and the flick of a lace curtain down the street. “Drive, hon.”

“That little fuck,” Rafe said. He was clutching his shoe like a weapon, knuckles white. “You should have floored it, Justin. You should have splattered whatever he’s got instead of a brain across this wretched street.” He started to roll down his window.

“Rafe,” Abby said sharply. “Roll that up. Now.”

“Why? Why should we let him get away with—”

“Because,” I said, in a small voice. “I want to go for my walk tonight.”

That stopped Rafe in his tracks, just like I had known it would; he stared at me, one hand still on the window handle. Justin stalled the car with a horrible grinding sound, managed to jam it into gear and hit the accelerator hard. “Charming,” he said. There was a brittle edge to his voice: any kind of nastiness always upset him. “That was really charming. I mean, I realize they don’t like us, but that was completely unnecessary. I didn’t do anything to that man. I braked to let him cross. What did he do that for?”

I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that one. Sam had been busy in Glenskehy, the last few days. A detective swanning down from Dublin in his city-boy suit, walking into their sitting rooms asking questions, patiently digging for their buried stories; and all because a girl from the Big House had got herself stabbed. Sam would have done his job gently and deftly, he always does; it wasn’t him they would hate.

“Nothing,” said Rafe. He and I were twisted around in our seats to watch the old man, who was standing on the pavement outside the newsagent’s, leaning on his stick and staring after us. “He did it because he’s a knuckle-dragging bog monster and he loathes anyone who isn’t actually his wife or his sister or both. It’s like living in the middle of bloody Deliverance.”

“You know something?” Abby said coldly, without turning around. “I’m getting really, really sick of your colonial attitude. Just because he didn’t go to some fancy English prep school, that doesn’t necessarily make him your inferior. And if Glenskehy isn’t good enough for you, you’re free to find somewhere that is.”

Rafe opened his mouth, then shrugged disgustedly and closed it again. He gave his shoelace a vicious jerk; it broke, and he swore under his breath.

If the man had been thirty or forty years younger, I would have been memorizing his description to pass on to Sam. The fact that he wasn’t a viable suspect—this guy had not outrun five students out for blood—sent a nasty little ripple across my shoulders. Abby turned up the volume; Rafe tossed his shoe on the floor and shoved up two fingers at the back windscreen. This, I thought, is going to be trouble.

* * *

“OK,” Frank said, that night. “I got my FBI friend to have his boys do some more digging. I told him we have reason to believe that our girl took off because she had a nervous breakdown, so we’re looking for signs and possible causes. Is that what we think, just out of interest?”

“I have no idea what you think, Frankie boy. Don’t ask me to climb into that black hole.” I was up my tree. I wriggled my back up against one half of the trunk and braced my feet against the other, so I could lean my notebook on my thigh. There was just enough moonlight, between the branches, that I could see the page. “Hang on a sec.” I clamped the phone under my jaw and hunted for my pen.

“You sound cheerful,” Frank said, suspiciously.

“I just had a gorgeous dinner and a laugh. What’s not to be cheerful about?” I managed to extract the pen from my jacket pocket without falling out of the tree. “OK, shoot.”

Frank made an exasperated noise. “Lovely for some. Just don’t get too chummy. There’s always a chance you may have to arrest one of these people.”

“I thought you were gunning for the mysterious stranger in the black cape.”

“I’m keeping an open mind. And the cape’s optional. OK, here’s everything we’ve got—you did say you wanted ordinary stuff, so don’t blame me. On the sixteenth of August 2000, Lexie-May-Ruth switched mobile-phone providers to get cheaper local minutes. On the twenty-second, she got a raise at the diner, seventy-five cents extra an hour. On the twenty-eighth, Chad proposed to her, and she said yes. The first weekend of September, the two of them drove to Virginia so she could meet Chad’s parents, who said she was a very sweet girl and brought them a potted plant.”

“The engagement ring,” I said, keeping my voice easy. This was setting ideas exploding in my head like popcorn, but I didn’t want Frank to know that. “Did she take it with her when she split?”

“No. The cops asked Chad at the time. She left it on her bedside table, but that was normal. She always left it there when she went to work, in case it got lost or fell in the hash browns or whatever. It wasn’t a big fancy rock or anything. Chad’s the bassist in a grunge band called Man From Nantucket, and they have yet to get their big break, so he makes a living as a carpenter. He’s skint.”

My notes were scrawly and went at a funny angle, on account of the light and the tree, but I could just about read them. “Then what?”

"On the twelfth of September she and Chad bought a PlayStation on their joint credit, which I suppose is as good a statement of commitment as any, these days. On the eighteenth, she sold her car, an ’86 Ford, for six hundred bucks—she told Chad she wanted to get something a little less beat-up, now that she had the extra money from the raise. On the twenty-seventh, she went to her doctor with an ear infection, probably contracted from swimming; he gave her antibiotics and it cleared up. And on the tenth of October, she’s gone. Is that what you were looking for?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly the kind of stuff I had in mind. Thanks, Frank. You’re a gem.”

“I’m thinking,” he said, “something happened between the twelfth and the eighteenth of September. Up through the twelfth, everything says she’s planning on staying put: she’s getting engaged, she’s meeting the parents, she and Chad are buying stuff as a couple. But on the eighteenth she sells her car, which tells me she’s getting together the money to split. That the way you’re thinking?”

“Makes sense,” I said, but I knew Frank was wrong. That shifting pattern had slid into focus with a soft, final click, and I knew why Lexie had taken off running from North Carolina; knew it as clear as if she were sitting weightless on a branch beside me, swinging her legs in the moonlight and whispering in my ear. And I knew why she had been about to take off running from Whitethorn House. Someone had tried to hold her.

“I’ll try and find out more about that week, maybe get someone to re-interview poor old Chad. If we can figure out what changed her plans, we should be able to put our finger on the mystery man.”

“Sounds good. Thanks, Frank. Let me know how you get on.”

“Don’t do anyone I wouldn’t do,” he said, and hung up.

I angled the screen of my mobile towards the page, so I could read over my notes. The PlayStation meant nothing; it’s easy to buy on credit with no plans to pay it off, no plans to be anywhere within reach. The last solid thing that said she intended to stay put was the phone-provider switch, back in August. You don’t care about cheaper minutes unless you’re going to be around to use them. On August 16, she had been tucked snugly into her May-Ruth life and going nowhere.

And then, less than two weeks later, poor grunge Chad had proposed. After that, not one thing said Lexie was staying. She had said yes, smiled and bided her time till she got the money together, and then run as far and as fast as she could and never once looked behind. It hadn’t been Frank’s mystery stalker after all, it hadn’t been some masked menace slinking out of the shadows with a glinting blade. It had been as simple as a cheap ring.

And this time, there had been the baby: a lifelong tie to some man, somewhere. She could have got rid of it, just like she could have turned Chad down, but that had been beside the point. Just the thought of that tie had sent her slamming off the walls, frantic as a trapped bird.

The missed period and the flight prices; and, somewhere in there, N. N was either the trap trying to hold her here or, in some way I needed to find, her way out.

* * *

The others were sprawled on the sitting-room floor in front of the fire, like kids, rummaging through a wrecked traveling case that Justin had found somewhere. Rafe had his legs flung companionably across Abby’s—they had apparently made up their fight from that morning. The rug was strewn with mugs and a plate of ginger biscuits and a medley of small battered things: pockmarked marbles, tin soldiers, half of a clay pipe. “Cool,” I said, dropping my jacket on the sofa and flopping down between Daniel and Justin. “What’ve we got?”

“Odd oddments,” Rafe said. “Here. For you.” He wound up a moth-eaten clockwork mouse and sent it ticking along the floor towards me. It ground to a halt halfway, with a depressed scraping sound.

“Have one of these instead,” Justin said, stretching to pull the biscuits across to us. “Tastier.”

I got a biscuit in one hand, dipped the other into the traveling case and found something hard and heavy. I came up holding what looked like a beaten-up wooden box; the lid had said “EM” once upon a time, in mother-of-pearl inlay, but there were only a few bits left. “Ah, excellent,” I said, opening the lid. “This is like the world’s best lucky dip.”

It was a music box, tarnished cylinder and splitting blue silk lining, and after a whirring second it plucked out a tune: “Greensleeves,” rusty and sweet. Rafe put a hand over the clockwork mouse, which was still fizzing halfheartedly. There was a long silence, just the crackle of the fire, while we listened.

“Beautiful,” Daniel said softly, closing the box, when the tune ended. “That’s beautiful. Next Christmas . . .”

“Can I have this in my room, to send me to sleep?” I asked. “Till Christmas?”

“Now you need lullabies?” Abby asked, but she was grinning at me. “Course you can.”

“I’m glad we didn’t find it before,” Justin said. “This must be valuable; they’d only have made us sell it, towards the taxes.”

“Not that valuable,” Rafe said, taking the box from me and examining it. “Basic ones like this go for about a hundred quid—a lot less in this condition. My grandmother used to collect them. Dozens of them, on every surface, just waiting to fall off and smash and send her into a fit if you walked too hard.”

“Knock it off,” Abby said, kicking his ankle—no pasts—but she didn’t sound seriously upset. For some reason, maybe just the mysterious alchemy you get among friends, all the tension of the last few days seemed to have vanished; we were happy together again, shoulders touching, Justin tugging down Abby’s sweater where it had slid up her back. “Sooner or later, though, we could find something valuable, in all this mess.”

“What would you do with the money?” Rafe asked, reaching for the biscuits. “A few grand, say.” In that second I heard Sam’s voice, close against my ear: That house is full of old bits and bobs, if there was something valuable in there . . .

“Get an Aga stove,” Abby said promptly. “The ones that heat the whole house. Warmth and a cooker that doesn’t crumble into lumps of rust if you look at it funny. Two birds, one stone.”

“You wild woman,” Justin said. “What about designer dresses and weekends in Monte Carlo?”

“I’d settle for no more frozen toes.”

Maybe she was supposed to give him something, I had said, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind . . . I realized I had my hand pressed down on the music box as if someone was trying to take it away. “I’d get the roof redone, I think,” Daniel said. “It shouldn’t disintegrate for another few years, but it would be nice not to wait that long.”

“You?” Rafe asked, giving him a sideways grin and winding the clockwork mouse again. “I’d have thought you’d never sell the thing, whatever it was; just frame it and hang it on the wall. Family history over filthy lucre.”

Daniel shook his head and held out a hand to me for his coffee mug—I had been dipping my biscuit in it. “What matters is the house,” he said, taking a sip and passing the mug back to me. “All the other things are just icing, really; I’m fond of them, but I’d sell them all in a heartbeat if we needed the money for roofing bills or something like that. The house carries enough history all by itself; and after all, we’re making our own, every day.”

“What would you do with it, Lex?” Abby asked.

That right there was, of course, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, the one that was banging at the inside of my head like a tiny vicious hammer. Sam and Frank hadn’t followed up on the antique-deal-gone-wrong idea because, basically, nothing pointed that way. Death duties had cleared the good stuff out of the house, Lexie hadn’t been linked to any antique dealers or fences, and nothing had said she needed money; until now.

She had had eighty-eight quid in her bank account—barely enough to get her out of Ireland, never mind get her started anywhere else—and only a couple of months before the baby started showing, the father started noticing and it was too late. Last time she had sold her car; this time, she had had nothing to sell.

It’s amazing how cheaply you can ditch your life and get a new one, if you don’t ask for much and you’re willing to do any work that’s going. After Operation Vestal I spent a lot of predawn time online, checking hostel prices and job ads in various languages and doing the maths. There are plenty of cities where you can get a crap flat for three hundred quid a month, or a hostel bed for a tenner a night; figure in your flight, and enough cash to feed you for a few weeks while you answer ads for bar staff or sandwich makers or tour guides, and you’re talking a brand-new life for the price of a secondhand car. I had two grand saved up: more than enough.

And Lexie knew all that better than I did; she had done it before. She wouldn’t have needed to find a lost Rembrandt in the back of her wardrobe. All she would have needed was the right little trinket—a good bit of jewelry, a rare piece of porcelain, I’ve heard of teddy bears going for hundreds—and the right buyer; and the willingness to sell bits of this house, out from under the others.

She had run off in Chad’s car, but I would have been willing to swear on just about anything that that was different. This had been her home.

“I’d get us all new bed frames,” I said. “The springs in mine stick into me straight through the mattress, like the princess and the pea, and I can hear every time Justin turns over,” and I flipped the music box open again, to end this conversation.

Abby sang along, softly, turning the clay pipe in her hands: “Greensleeves is all my joy, Greensleeves is my delight . . .” Rafe turned the clockwork mouse over and started examining the gears. Justin flicked one of the marbles expertly into another, which rolled across the floor and clicked neatly against Daniel’s mug; he glanced up from a tin soldier, smiling, his hair falling across his forehead. I watched them and ran my fingers over the old silk and hoped to God I had been telling the truth.

12

The next evening, after dinner, I went fishing in Uncle Simon’s epic masterpiece for information about a dead Glenskehy girl. It would have been a lot simpler to do this on my own, but that would have meant throwing a sickie from college, and I didn’t want to worry the others unless I really needed to; so Rafe and Daniel and I were sitting on the spare-room floor, with the Marches’ family tree spread out between us. Abby and Justin were downstairs, playing piquet.

The family tree was a huge sheet of thick, tattered paper covered with a wild variety of handwritings, from delicate, browning ink at the top—James March, born ca. 1598, m. Elizabeth Kempe 1619—to Uncle Simon’s spider scrawl at the bottom: Edward Thomas Hanrahan, born 1975, and last of all Daniel James March, born 1979. “This is the only thing in this room that’s intelligible,” Daniel said, picking a bit of cobweb off the corner, “presumably because Simon didn’t write it himself. The rest . . . we can try having a look, Lexie, if you’re really that interested, but as far as I can tell he wrote most of it when he was very, very drunk.”

“Hey,” I said, leaning over to point. “There’s your William. The black sheep.”

“William Edward March,” Daniel said, putting a finger gently on the name. “Born 1894, died 1983. Yes; that’s him. I wonder where he ended up.” William was one of only a handful that had made it past forty. Sam had been right, the Marches died young.

“Let’s see if we can find him in here,” I said, pulling a box towards me. “I’m getting curious about this guy. I want to know what the big scandal was.”

“Girls,” Rafe said loftily, “always sniffing for gossip,” but he reached for another box.

Daniel was right, most of the saga was almost illegible—Uncle Simon went in for lots of underlining and no space between lines, Victorian-style. I didn’t need to read it; I was only scanning for the tall curves of a capital W and M. I’m not sure what I was hoping we’d find. Nothing, maybe; or something that whacked the Rathowen story right out of court, proved that the girl had moved to London with her baby and set up a successful dressmaking business and lived happily ever after.

Downstairs I could hear Justin saying something and Abby laughing, faint and faraway. The three of us didn’t talk; the only sound was the soft, steady rustle of paper. The room was cool and dim, a blurred moon hanging outside the window, and the pages left a dry film of dust on my fingers.

“Oh, here we go,” Rafe said suddenly. “ ‘William March was the subject of much unjust and—sensational?—something, which finally cost him both his health and . . .’ Jesus, Daniel. Your uncle must have been trolleyed. Is this even in English?”

“Let me see,” Daniel said, leaning across to look. “ ‘Both his health and his rightful place in society,’ I think.” He took the sheaf of pages from Rafe and pushed his glasses up his nose. “ ‘The facts,’ ” he read slowly, running a finger under the line, “ ‘stripped of rumormongering, are as follows: from 1914 through 1915 William March served in the Great War, where he’—that has to be ‘acquitted’—‘himself well, later being awarded the Military Cross for his acts of bravery. This alone should—something—all low gossip. In 1915 William March was discharged, suffering from a shrapnel wound to the shoulder and from severe shell-shock—’ ”

“Post-traumatic stress,” Rafe said. He was leaning back against the wall, hands behind his head, to listen. “Poor bastard.”

“I can’t read this bit,” Daniel said. “Something about what he had seen—in battle, I assume; that word’s ‘cruel.’ Then it says: ‘He dissolved his engagement to Miss Alice West and took no part in the amusements of his set, preferring to spend his time among the common people of Glenskehy village, much to the anxiety of all parties. All concerned realized that this’—unnatural, I think—‘connection could not have a happy result.’ ”

“Snobs,” said Rafe.

“Look who’s talking,” I said, scooting across the floor to rest my chin on Daniel’s shoulder and try to make out the words. So far, no surprises, but I knew—could not have a happy result—this was it.

“ ‘About this time,’ ” Daniel read, tilting the page so I could see, “ ‘a young girl of the village found herself in an unfortunate situation, and named William March as the father of her unborn child. Whatever the truth may have been, the people of Glenskehy, who were then well trained in morals unlike these present times’ ”—“morals” was underlined twice—“ ‘were shocked at her loose conduct. It was the strong—belief ?—of all the village that the girl should remove her shame from their midst by entering a Magdalen convent, and till this should come about they made her an outcast among themselves.’ ”

No happy ending, no little dress shop in London. Some girls never escaped the Magdalen laundries. They stayed slaves—for getting pregnant, getting raped, being orphaned, being too pretty—till they went to nameless graves.

Daniel kept reading, quiet and even. I could feel the vibration of his voice against my shoulder. “ ‘The girl, however, either despairing of her soul or unwilling to perform the prescribed penance, took her life. William March—whether because he had in fact been her partner in sin, or because he had already witnessed too much bloodshed—was greatly affected by this. His health failed him, and when he recovered he abandoned family, friends and home to begin anew elsewhere. Little is known of his later life. These events may be taken as a lesson in the dangers of lust, or of mixing outside the boundaries of one’s natural level in society, or of . . .’ ” Daniel broke off. “I can’t read the rest. That’s all there is about William, anyway; the next paragraph is about a racehorse.”

“Jesus,” I said softly. The room felt cold all of a sudden, cold and too airy, as if the window had slammed open behind us.

“They treated her like a leper till she cracked,” Rafe said. There was a taut little twist to one corner of his mouth. “And till William had a breakdown and left town. So it’s not just a recent development, then, Glenskehy being Lunatic Central.”

I felt a slight shudder run down Daniel’s back. “That’s a nasty little story,” he said. “It really is. Sometimes I wonder if the best thing would be for ‘no pasts’ to apply to the house, as well. Although . . .” He glanced around, at the room full of dusty battered things, the ragged-papered walls; the dark-spotted mirror, down the corridor, reflecting the three of us in blues and shadows through the open door. “I’m not sure,” he said, almost to himself, “that that’s an option.”

He tapped the edges of the pages straight and put them carefully back in their case, closed the lid. “I don’t know about you two,” he said, “but I think I’ve had enough for tonight. Let’s go back to the others.”

* * *

“I think I’ve seen every piece of paperwork in the country that has the word ‘Glenskehy’ on it,” Sam said, when I phoned him later. He sounded wrecked and blurry—paper fatigue; I knew the note well—but satisfied. “I know a lot more about it than anyone needs to, and I’ve got three guys that fit your profile.”

I was in my tree, with my feet tucked up tight into the branches. The feeling of being watched had intensified to the point where I was actually hoping that whatever it was would jump me, just so I could get some kind of fix on it. I hadn’t mentioned this to Frank or, God forbid, Sam. As far as I could see, the main possibilities were my imagination, the ghost of Lexie Madison and a homicidal stalker with procrastination issues, and none of those was something I felt like sharing. During the day I figured it was imagination, maybe with some help from the resident wildlife, but at night it was harder to be sure. “Only three? Out of four hundred people?”

“Glenskehy’s dying,” Sam said flatly. “Almost half the population is over sixty-five. As soon as the kids are old enough, they pack up and move to Dublin, Cork, Wicklow town, anywhere that has a bit of life to it. The only ones who stay put are the ones who have a family farm or a family business to take over. There’s less than thirty fellas between twenty-five and thirty-five. I cut out the ones who commute for work, the unemployed ones, the ones who live alone and the ones who could get away during the day if they wanted to—night-shifters, fellas who work alone. That left me with three.”

“Jesus,” I said. I thought of the old man hobbling across an empty street, the tired houses where only one lace curtain had twitched.

“I suppose that’s progress for you. At least there’s jobs for them to go to.” Flick of paper: “Right, here’s my three lads. Declan Bannon, thirty-one, runs a small farm just outside Glenskehy with his wife and two young kids. John Naylor, twenty-nine, lives in the village with his parents and works on another man’s farm. And Michael McArdle, twenty-six, lives with his parents and does the day shift in the petrol station up on the Rathowen road. No known links to Whitethorn House anywhere. Any of the names ring a bell?”

“Not offhand,” I said, “sorry,” and then I almost fell out of my tree. “Ah, sure,” Sam was saying philosophically, “that would’ve been too much to expect,” but I barely heard him. John Naylor: finally, and about bloody time, I had someone who began with an N.

“Which one do you like?” I asked. I made sure I didn’t skip a beat. Of all the detectives I know, Sam is the best at pretending he’s missed things. It comes in useful more often than you might expect.

“It’s early days, but for now Bannon’s my favorite. He’s the only one with any kind of history. Five years ago, a couple of American tourists parked their car blocking one of Bannon’s gates while they went for a walk in the lanes. When Bannon turned up and couldn’t move his sheep, he kicked a pretty serious dent in the side of the car. Criminal damage and not playing nicely with outsiders; this vandalism could be right up his street.”

“The others are clean?”

“Byrne says he’s seen both of them a little the worse for wear, at one time or another, but not enough that he could be bothered pulling them in for public drunkenness or anything like that. Any of them could have criminal activity we don’t know about, Glenskehy being what it is, but to look at, yeah, they’re clean.”

“Have you talked to them yet?” Somehow, I had to get a look at this John Naylor. Going down to the pub was out, obviously, and wandering innocently onto the farm where he worked was probably a bad idea, but if I could find a way to sit in on an interview—

Sam laughed. “Give me time. I’m only after narrowing it down this afternoon. I’m aiming to have chats with all of them tomorrow morning. I wanted to ask you—would you be able to come in for that? Just to give them the once-over, see if you pick up anything?”

I could have kissed him. “God, yeah. Where? When?”

“Yeah, I thought you might want a look.” He was smiling. “I’m thinking Rathowen station. Their homes would be best, not to spook them, but I couldn’t exactly bring you along there.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Sounds great, actually.”

The smile in Sam’s voice deepened. “To me, too. Will you be able to get away from the others?”

“I’ll tell them I’ve got a hospital appointment, to get my stitches checked. I should be doing that anyway.” The thought of the others gave me a strange little pang. If Sam got anything solid on one of these guys—it wouldn’t even have to be enough for an arrest—then it was over; I was out, back to Dublin and DV.

“Will they not want to come in with you?”

“Probably, but I won’t let them. I’ll get Justin or Daniel to drop me off at Wicklow Hospital. Can you pick me up there, or will I get a taxi to Rathowen?”

He laughed. “You think I’d miss the chance? Say half past ten?”

“Perfect,” I said. “And, Sam—I don’t know how much depth you’re planning to go into with these three guys, but before you start chatting to them, I’ve got a bit more info for you. About that girl with the baby.” That sticky traitorous feeling clamped round me again, but I reminded myself that Sam wasn’t Frank, it wasn’t like he would show up at Whitethorn House with a search warrant and a bunch of deliberately obnoxious questions. “It looks like the whole thing happened sometime in 1915. No name on the girl, but her lover was William March, born 1894.”

An instant of amazed silence; then: “Ah, you gem,” Sam said, delighted. “How’d you do that?”

So he wasn’t listening in on the mike feed—not all the time, anyway. It startled me, how much of a relief that was. “Uncle Simon was writing a family history. This girl got a mention. The details don’t exactly match up, but it’s the same story, all right.”

“Hang on,” Sam said; I heard him finding a blank page in his notebook. “Now. Off you go.”

“According to Simon, William went off to the First World War in 1914, came back a year later deeply messed up. He broke off his engagement to some nice suitable girl, cut off contact with all his old friends and started hanging around the village. Reading between the lines, the Glenskehy people weren’t too pleased about that.”

“Not a lot they could do,” Sam said dryly. “One of the landlord’s family . . . He could do whatever he liked, sure.”

“Then this girl got pregnant,” I said. “She claimed William was the father—Simon sounded a little skeptical about that, but either way, Glenskehy was horrified. They treated her like dirt; the general opinion was that she belonged in a Magdalen laundry. Before anyone could send her off, she hanged herself.”

Brush of wind through the trees, small raindrops flicking leaves.

“So,” Sam said, after a moment, “Simon’s version takes the responsibility right off the Marches and puts it on those mad peasants down the village.”

The flare of anger caught me off guard; I almost bit his head off. “William March didn’t get off scot-free either,” I said, hearing the edge in my voice. “He had some kind of nervous breakdown—I don’t have specifics, but he ended up in what sounds like a mental institution. And it might not even have been his kid to start with.”

Another silence, longer this time. “Right,” Sam said. “True enough. I’m not about to argue over anything tonight, anyway. I’m too happy about seeing you again.”

I swear it took me a second to catch up. I had been so focused on the chance of seeing the mysterious N, it hadn’t even hit me that I would be seeing Sam. “Less than twelve hours,” I said. “I’ll be the one looking like Lexie Madison and wearing nothing but white lace underwear.”

“Ah, don’t be doing that to me,” Sam said. “This is business, woman,” but I could still hear the grin in his voice when we hung up.

* * *

Daniel was in one of the armchairs by the fire, reading T. S. Eliot; the other three were playing poker. “Oof,” I said, flopping down on the hearth rug. The butt of my gun jammed itself neatly under my ribs; I didn’t try to hide the wince. “What are you doing out? You never get knocked out first.”

“I kicked his arse,” Abby called across, raising her wineglass.

“Don’t gloat,” Justin said. He sounded like he was losing. “It’s so unattractive.”

“She did, actually,” Daniel said. “She’s getting very good at bluffing. Are your stitches hurting again?”

A fraction of a pause, from the table, in the sound of Rafe flipping his stack of coins through his fingers. “It’s just ’cause I’m thinking about them,” I said. “I’ve got this follow-up appointment tomorrow, so the doctors can poke me some more and tell me I’m fine, which I already knew anyway. Give me a lift?”

“Of course,” Daniel said, putting his book down on his lap. “What time?”

“Wicklow Hospital, ten o’clock. I’ll get the train into college afterwards.”

“But you can’t go in there alone,” Justin said. He was twisted around in his seat, the card game forgotten. “Let me take you. I’ve got nothing else to do tomorrow. I’ll come in with you, and then we’ll go into college together.”

He sounded really worried. If I couldn’t get him to back off, I was in serious trouble. “I don’t want anyone to come with me,” I said. “I want to go on my own.”

“But hospitals are awful. And they always make you wait for hours, like cattle, jammed into those hideous waiting rooms—”

I kept my head down and rummaged in my jacket pocket for my smokes. “So I’ll bring a book. I don’t even want to be there to begin with; the last thing I need is someone breathing down my neck the whole time. I just want to get this over with and forget the whole thing, OK? Can I do that?”

“It’s her choice,” Daniel said. “Let us know if you change your mind, Lexie.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m a grown-up, you know. I can show the doctor my stitches all by myself.”

Justin shrugged and went back to his cards. I knew I had hurt his feelings, but there was nothing I could do about that. I lit a cigarette; Daniel passed me the ashtray that had been balancing on the arm of his chair. “Are you smoking more these days?” he inquired.

My face must have been totally blank, but my mind was going like crazy. If anything, I’d been smoking less than I should have—I’d been keeping it at fifteen or sixteen a day, halfway between my normal ten and Lexie’s twenty, and hoping the drop would be put down to me still feeling weak. It had never occurred to me that Frank had only the others’ word for that twenty. Daniel hadn’t fallen for the coma story; God only knew how much more he had suspected. It would have been so easy, terrifyingly easy, for him to slip just one or two bits of disinformation into his interviews with Frank, sit back—those calm gray eyes, watching me without any trace of impatience—and wait to see if they found their way home.

“Not sure,” I said, puzzled. “I haven’t thought about it. Am I?”

“You didn’t usually take your cigarettes on your walk,” Daniel said. “Before the incident. Now you do.”

The relief almost punched the breath out of me. I should have caught that—no smokes on the body—but a research glitch was a whole lot easier to deal with than the thought of Daniel playing, blank-faced, a hand full of wild cards held close against his chest. “I always meant to,” I said. “I just kept forgetting them. Now that you guys make me remember my mobile, I remember my smokes too. Anyway”—I sat up and gave Daniel an offended look—“why are you giving me hassle? Rafe smokes like two packs a day and you never say anything to him.”

“I’m not giving you hassle,” Daniel said. He was smiling across at me, over his book. “I just believe that vices should be enjoyed; otherwise what’s the point in having them? If you’re smoking because of tension, then you’re not enjoying it.”

“I’m not tense,” I told him. I collapsed back on my elbows, to prove it, and propped the ashtray on my stomach. “I’m fine.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being tense just now,” Daniel said. “It’s very understandable. But you should find another way of releasing stress, rather than wasting a perfectly good vice.” That hint of a smile again. “If you should feel the need to talk to someone . . .”

“You mean like a therapist?” I asked. “Ewww. They said that in hospital, but I told them to fuck off.”

“Well, yes,” Daniel said. “So I imagine. I think that was a good choice. I’ve never understood the logic behind paying a stranger of undetermined intelligence to listen to your troubles; surely that’s why one has friends. If you do want to talk about it, all of us are—”

“Holy Jesus Christ almighty,” Rafe said, his voice rising. He slapped his cards down on the table, hard, and shoved them away. “Someone pass me a sick bag. Oh, I validate your feelings, let’s all talk about this—Did I miss something? Did we move to fucking California and no one told me?”

“What the hell is your problem?” Justin demanded, in a vicious undertone.

“I don’t like touchy-feely bollocks. Lexie’s fine. She said so. Is there any particular reason why we can’t all just bloody leave it alone?”