I think it’s important to reiterate that, no matter what I may have claimed at the time, for most of Operation Vestal I was not in anything resembling a normal frame of mind. This may not be an excuse, but it is a fact. When I went into that wood, for example, I went into it on very little sleep and even less food and a considerable amount of accumulated tension and vodka, and I feel I should point out that it’s entirely possible that the subsequent events were either a dream or some kind of weird hallucination. I have no way of knowing, and I can’t think of an answer, either way, that would be particularly comforting.
Since that night I had, at least, started sleeping again—sleeping, actually, with a level of dedication so intense it made me nervous. By the time I staggered in from work every evening I was practically sleepwalking. I would fall into bed as if drawn by a powerful magnet and find myself in the same position, still in my clothes, when the alarm clock dragged me awake twelve or thirteen hours later. Once I forgot to set my alarm and woke at two o’clock in the afternoon, to the seventh phone call from a very snotty Bernadette.
The memories and the more bizarre side effects had stopped, too; clicked off as sharply and as definitively as a lightbulb burning out. You’d think this would be a relief, and at the time it was: as far as I was concerned, absolutely anything to do with Knocknaree was the worst possible kind of news, and I was a lot better off without it. I should have pretty much figured this out awhile back, I felt, and I could not believe that I had been stupid enough to ignore everything I knew and prance gaily back into that wood. I had never been so angry with myself in my life. It was only much later, when the case was over and the dust had settled on the debris, when I prodded cautiously at the edges of my memory and came up empty; it was only then that I began to think this might be not a deliverance but a vast missed chance, an irrevocable and devastating loss.
18
Sam and I were the first ones in the incident room on Friday morning. I had taken to coming in as early as I could, going through the phone tips to see if I could find an excuse to spend the day elsewhere. It was raining hard; Cassie, somewhere, was presumably swearing and trying to kick-start the Vespa.
“Daily bulletin,” Sam said, waving a couple of tapes at me. “He was feeling chatty last night, six calls, so please God…”
We had been tapping Andrews’s phones for a week now, with results pathetic enough that O’Kelly was beginning to emit ominous, volcanic grumbling noises. During the day Andrews made large numbers of snappy, testosterone-flavored calls on his mobile; in the evenings he ordered overpriced “gourmet” food—“takeaway with notions,” Sam called it, disapprovingly. Once he rang one of those sex chat lines you see advertised on late-night TV; he liked to be spanked, apparently, and “Redden my arse, Celestine” had instantly become a squad catchphrase.
I took off my coat and sat down. “Play it, Sam,” I said. My sense of humor, along with everything else, had deteriorated over the past weeks. Sam gave me a look and threw one of the tapes into our obsolete little tape recorder.
At 8:17 p.m., according to the computer printout, Andrews had ordered lasagna with smoked salmon, pesto and sun-dried tomato sauce. “Jesus Christ,” I said, appalled.
Sam laughed. “Nothing but the best for our boy.”
At 8:23 he had called his brother-in-law to arrange a round of golf for Sunday afternoon, with a few manly jokes thrown in. At 8:41 he had rung the restaurant again, to shout at the order-taker because his food hadn’t arrived. He was starting to sound tipsy. There followed a period of silence; apparently the Lasagna From Hell had, eventually, made it to its destination.
At 12:08 a.m. he rang a London number: “His ex-wife,” Sam said. He was at the maudlin stage and wanted to talk about what had gone wrong. “The biggest mistake I ever made was letting you go, Dolores,” he told her, his voice thick with tears. “But, sure, maybe I did the right thing. You’re a fine woman, do you know that? You’re too good for me. A hundred times too good. Maybe even a thousand. Amn’t I right, Dolores? Don’t you think I did the right thing?”
“I wouldn’t know, Terry,” Dolores said wearily. “You tell me.” She was doing something else at the same time, clearing plates or maybe emptying a dishwasher; I could hear the chink of china in the background. Finally, when Andrews started to cry in earnest, she hung up. Two minutes later he rang her back, snarled, “You don’t hang up on me, you bitch, do you hear me? I hang up on you,” and slammed down the phone.
“A real ladies’ man,” I said.
“Bugger,” Sam said. He slumped in his chair, leaned his head back and put his hands over his face. “Ah, bugger. I’ve only a week left on this. What the hell do I do if it’s all sushi pizza and lonely hearts?”
The tape clicked again. “Hello,” said a deep male voice, furred with sleep.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“Unregistered mobile,” Sam said, through his hands. “Quarter to two.”
“You little fucking scut,” Andrews said, on the tape. He was very drunk. Sam sat up.
There was a brief pause. Then the deep voice said, “Didn’t I tell you not to ring me again?”
“Whoa,” I said.
Sam made a small inarticulate noise. His hand shot out as if to grab the tape recorder, but he caught himself and merely pulled it closer to us on the table. We bent our heads over it, listening. Sam was holding his breath.
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you told me.” Andrews’s voice was rising. “You’ve told me more than enough already. You told me it would all be back on track by now, do you remember that? Instead there’s fucking…injunctions everywhere—”
“I told you to calm the hell down and let me sort it, and I’m telling you the same again. I’ve everything under control.”
“You do in your hole. Don’t you dare talk to me like I’m your emp—your emp—your employee. You’re my fucking employee. I paid you. Fucking…thousands and thousands and…‘Oh, we’ll need another five grand for this, Terry, a few grand for the new councilor, Terry….’ I might as well have flushed it down the bog. If you were my employee you’d be fired. Out on your arse. Like that.”
“I got you everything you paid for. This is just a minor delay. It’ll be sorted. Nothing’s going to change. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sorted, my arse. You double-dealing little cunt, you. You took my money and ran. Now I’ve nothing but a pile of worthless land and the police crawling all over me. How do they…how the fuck do they even know that’s my land? I trusted you.”
There was a slight pause. Sam let his breath out in a small burst, held it again. Then the deep voice said sharply, “What phone are you calling from?”
“That’s none of your bloody business,” Andrews said sulkily.
“What were the police asking you about?”
“Some…just some kid.” Andrews stifled a belch. “That kid who got killed out there. Her father’s the fucker with the fucking injunction…. The thick bastards think I had something to do with it.”
“Get off the phone,” the deep voice said coldly. “Don’t talk to the cops without your lawyer. Don’t worry about the injunction. And don’t ever fucking ring me again.” There was a click as he hung up.
“Well,” I said, after a moment. “That certainly wasn’t sushi pizza and lonely hearts. Congratulations.” It wouldn’t be admissible in court, but it would be enough to put considerable pressure on Andrews. I was trying to be gracious, but a self-pitying part of me felt this was typical: while my investigation degenerated into an unparalleled collection of dead ends and disasters, Sam’s skipped gaily onwards and upwards, success after tidy little success. If I had been the one chasing Andrews, he would probably have made it through the two weeks without calling anyone more sinister than his aging mother. “That should get O’Kelly off your back.”
Sam didn’t answer. I turned to look at him. He was so white he was almost green.
“What?” I said, alarmed. “Are you all right?”
“I’m grand,” he said. “Yeah.” He leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder. His hand shook a little, and I saw a damp, unhealthy sheen on his face.
“Jesus,” I said. “No you’re not.” It struck me suddenly that the excitement of victory could have given him a heart attack or a stroke or something, he could have some weird undiagnosed weakness; there are stories like that in squad lore, detectives pursuing a suspect through epic obstacles only to drop dead as soon as the handcuffs click home. “Do you need a doctor or something?”
“No,” he said sharply. “No.”
“Then what the hell?”
Almost as I said it, the penny dropped. I’m amazed, actually, that I hadn’t already caught on. The timbre of the voice, the accent, the little quirks of inflection: I had heard them all before, every day, every evening; a little softened, lacking that abrasive edge, but the resemblance was there and unmistakable.
“Was that,” I said, “was that by any chance your uncle?”
Sam’s eyes snapped to me and then to the door, but there was no one there. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “It was.” His breathing was fast and shallow.
“Are you sure?”
“I know his voice. I’m sure.”
Regrettable though this may be, my main reaction was an intense desire to laugh. He had been so bloody earnest (Straight as a die, lads), so solemn, like a GI making a speech about the flag in some terrible American war movie. At the time I had found it endearing—that kind of absolute faith is one of those things that, like virginity, can only be lost once, and I had never met anyone who had retained it into his thirties before—but now it seemed to me that Sam had spent much of his life trundling happily along on sheer dumb luck, and I had a hard time working up much sympathy for the fact that he had finally stepped on a banana skin and gone flying.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
His head moved blindly from side to side, under the fluorescent lights. He must have thought of it, surely: we were the only two there, one favor and one push of the Record button and the phone call could have been about that Sunday round of golf, anything.
“Can you give me the weekend?” he said. “I’ll take this to O’Kelly on Monday. I just…not right now. I can’t think straight. I need the weekend.”
“Sure,” I said. “Are you going to talk to your uncle?”
Sam glanced up at me. “If I do, he’ll start covering his tracks, won’t he? Getting rid of the evidence before the investigation starts.”
“I assume he would, yes.”
“If I don’t tell him—if he finds out that I could have given him the heads-up, and I didn’t…”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wondered, fleetingly, where the hell Cassie was.
“Do you know the mad thing?” Sam said, after a while. “If you’d asked me this morning who I’d go to, if something like this happened and I didn’t know what to do, I’d have said Red.”
I could think of nothing to say to this. I looked at his blunt, pleasant features and suddenly felt oddly disengaged from him, from the entire scene; it was a vertiginous sensation, as if I were watching these events unfold in a lighted box hundreds of feet below me. We sat there for a long time, until O’Gorman banged in and started shouting about something to do with rugby, and Sam quietly put the tape in his pocket and gathered up his things and left.