“Cassie,” Sam said very gently, leaning forward across the table, “are you sure you’re able for this?” I felt a sudden flare of anger, no less painful for being utterly unjustifiable: it should have been my place, not his, to ask the question.
“I’ll be fine,” Cassie told him, with a little one-sided smile. “Hey, I did undercover for months and never got spotted once. Oscar material, me.”
I didn’t think this was what Sam had been asking. Just telling me about that guy in college had left her practically catatonic, and I could see that same distant, dilated look starting in her eyes again, hear the too-detached note in her voice. I thought of that first evening, across the stalled Vespa: how I had wanted to sweep her under my coat, protect her even from the rain.
“I could do it,” I said, too loudly. “Rosalind likes me.”
“No,” O’Kelly snapped, “you couldn’t.”
Cassie rubbed her eyes with finger and thumb, pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache starting. “No offense,” she said flatly, “but Rosalind Devlin doesn’t like you any more than she likes me. She’s not capable of that emotion. She finds you useful. She knows she has you wrapped around her little finger—or had you; whichever—and she’s sure you’re the one cop who, if it comes to it, will believe she’s been wrongfully accused and fight her corner. Believe me, there’s not a chance in hell she’s going to throw that away by confessing to you. Me, I’m no use to her anyway; she has nothing to lose by talking to me. She knows I dislike her, but that just means she’ll get an extra thrill out of having me at her mercy.”
“All right,” O’Kelly said, shoving his stuff into a pile and pushing back his chair. “Let’s do it. Maddox, I hope to God you know what you’re talking about. First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll get you wired up and you can go have a girly chat with Rosalind Devlin. I’ll make sure they give you something voice-activated, so you can’t forget to hit Record.”
“No,” Cassie said. “No recorder. I want a transmitter, feeding to a backup van less than two hundred yards away.”
“To interview an eighteen-year-old kid?” O’Kelly said contemptuously. “Have some balls, Maddox. This isn’t Al-Qaeda here.”
“To go one-on-one with a psychopath who just murdered her little sister.”
“She’s got no history of violence herself,” I said. I didn’t intend it to sound bitchy, but Cassie’s eyes passed briefly over me, with no expression in them at all, as if I didn’t exist.
“Transmitter and backup,” she repeated.
I didn’t go home that night until three in the morning, when I could be sure that Heather would be asleep. Instead I drove out to Bray, to the seafront, and sat there in the car. It had finally stopped raining and the night was dense with mist; the tide was in, I could hear the slap and rush of the water, but I caught only the odd glimpse of the waves between the swirls of erasing gray. The gay little pavilion drifted in and out of existence like something from Brigadoon. Somewhere a foghorn sounded one melancholy note over and over, and people walking home along the seafront materialized gradually out of nothingness, silhouettes floating in midair like dark messengers.
I thought about a lot of things, that night. I thought of Cassie in Lyons, just a girl in an apron, serving coffee at sunny outdoor tables and bantering in French with the customers. I thought of my parents getting ready to go out dancing: the careful lines my father’s comb left in his Brylcreemed hair, the rousing scent of my mother’s perfume and her flower-patterned dress whisking out the door. I thought of Jonathan and Cathal and Shane, long-limbed and rash and laughing fiercely over their lighter games; of Sam at a big wooden table amid seven noisy brothers and sisters, and of Damien in some hushed college library filling out an application for a job at Knocknaree. I thought of Mark’s reckless eyes—The only things I believe in are out on that there dig—and then of revolutionaries waving ragged, gallant banners, of refugees swimming swift nighttime currents; of all those who hold life so light, or the stakes so dear, that they can walk steady and open-eyed to meet the thing that will take or transform their lives and whose high cold criteria are far beyond our understanding. I tried, for a long time, to remember bringing my mother wildflowers.
24
O’Kelly has always been something of a mystery to me. He disliked Cassie, despised her theory and basically thought she was being an irredeemable pain in the arse; but The Squad has a deep, almost totemistic significance to him, and once he has resigned himself to backing one of its members he backs him, or even her, all the way. He gave Cassie her transmitter and her backup van, even though he considered it a complete waste of time and resources. When I got in the next morning—very early; we wanted to catch Rosalind before she left for school—Cassie was in the incident room, being fitted with the wire.
“And take off the top, please,” the surveillance tech said quietly. He was small and blank-faced, with deft, professional hands. Cassie pulled her sweater over her head obediently, like a child at the doctor’s office. Underneath she was wearing what looked like a boy’s undershirt. She had left off the defiant makeup she had been using for the past few days, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. I wondered whether she’d slept at all; I thought of her sitting on her windowsill with her T-shirt pulled around her knees, the tiny red glow of a cigarette blooming and fading as she drew on it, watching dawn lighten the gardens below. Sam was at the window, his back to us; O’Kelly was fussing with the whiteboard, erasing lines and redrawing them. “And run the wire up under the T-shirt for me, please,” said the tech.
“You’ve phone tips waiting for you,” O’Kelly told me.
“I want to go with you,” I said. Sam’s shoulders shifted; Cassie, head bent over the microphone, didn’t look up.
“When hell freezes over and the camels come skating home,” O’Kelly said.
I was so tired that I was seeing everything through a fine, seething white mist. “I want to go,” I repeated. This time everyone ignored me.
The tech clipped the battery pack to Cassie’s jeans, made a tiny incision in the neck hem of her undershirt and slid the mike inside. He had her put her sweater back on—Sam and O’Kelly turned around—and then told her to talk. When she looked at him blankly, O’Kelly said impatiently, “Just say whatever comes into your head, Maddox, tell us your plans for the weekend if you want,” but instead she recited a poem. It was an old-fashioned little poem, the kind of thing one might learn off by heart in school. Long afterwards, flicking through pages in a dusty bookshop, I came across these lines:
About your easy heads my prayers
I said with syllables of clay.
What gift, I asked, shall I bring now
Before I weep and walk away?
Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.
Take our fortune of tears and live
Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask
Is the one gift you cannot give.
Her voice was low and even, expressionless. The speakers hollowed it out, underlaid it with a whispery echo, and in the background there was a rushing sound like some faraway high wind. I thought of those ghost stories where the voices of the dead come to their loved ones from crackly radios or down telephone lines, borne on some lost wavelength across the laws of nature and the wild spaces of the universe. The tech fiddled delicately with mysterious little dials and sliders.
“Thank you for that, Maddox, that was very moving,” O’Kelly said, when the tech was satisfied. “Right: here’s the estate.” He slapped Sam’s map with the back of his hand. “We’ll be in the van, parked in Knocknaree Crescent, first left inside the front entrance. Maddox, you’ll go in on that motorbike whatsit, park in front of the Devlins’ and get the girl to come out for a walk. You’ll go out the back gate of the estate and turn right, away from the dig, then right again along the side wall, to come out on the main road, and right again towards the front entrance. If you deviate from this route at any point, say so for the mike. Give your location as often as you can. When—Jesus, if—you’ve cautioned her and got enough for an arrest, arrest her. If you think she’s sussed you or you’re not going to get anywhere, wind it up and get out. If you need backup at any point, say so and we’ll come in. If she has a weapon, identify it for the mike—‘Put the knife down,’ whatever. You don’t have eyewitnesses, so don’t pull your weapon unless you’ve no choice.”
“I’m not taking my gun,” Cassie said. She unbuckled her holster, handed it to Sam and held out her arms. “Check me.”
“For what?” Sam said, puzzled, looking down at the gun in his hands.
“Weapons.” Her eyes slid away, unfocused, over his shoulder. “If she says anything, she’s going to claim I had her at gunpoint. Check my scooter, too, before I get on it.”
To this day I’m not sure how I managed to get myself into that van. Possibly it was because, even in disgrace, I was still Cassie’s partner, a relationship for which almost every detective has a reflexive, deeply ingrained respect. Possibly it was because I bombarded O’Kelly with the first technique every toddler learns: if you ask someone often enough for long enough when he is trying to do enough other things, sooner or later he will say yes just to shut you up. I was too desperate to care about the humiliation of this. Possibly he realized that, if he had refused, I would have taken the Land Rover and gone down there on my own.
The van was one of those blind, sinister-looking white things that regularly show up in police reports, with the name and logo of a fictitious tile company on the side. Inside it was even creepier: thick black cables coiling everywhere and the equipment blinking and hissing, ineffectual little overhead light, the soundproofing giving it the unsettling look of a padded cell. Sweeney drove; Sam, O’Kelly, the tech and I sat in the back compartment, swaying on uncomfortable low benches, not talking. O’Kelly had brought along a thermos of coffee and some kind of glutinous pastry, which he ate in huge methodical bites with no evidence of enjoyment. Sam scraped at an imaginary stain on the knee of his trousers. I cracked my knuckles, until I realized how irritating this was, and tried to ignore the intensity with which I wanted a cigarette. The tech did the Irish Times crossword.
We parked in Knocknaree Crescent and O’Kelly rang Cassie’s mobile. She was within range of the equipment; her voice, over the speakers, was cool and steady. “Maddox.”
“Where are you?” O’Kelly demanded.
“Just coming up to the estate. I didn’t want to be hanging around.”
“We’re in position. Go ahead.”
A tiny pause; then Cassie said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up. I heard the buzz of the Vespa starting up again, then the weird stereo effect as, a minute later, it passed the end of the Crescent, only a few yards from us. The tech folded away his newspaper and made a minuscule adjustment to something; O’Kelly, across from me, pulled a plastic bag of sweets out of his pocket and settled back on the bench.
Footsteps jolting the mike, the faint tasteful ding-dong of the doorbell. O’Kelly waved the bag of sweets at the rest of us; when there were no takers, he shrugged and fished out an iced caramel.
The click of the door opening. “Detective Maddox,” Rosalind said, not sounding pleased. “I’m afraid we’re all very busy at the moment.”
“I know,” Cassie said. “I’m really sorry to bother you. But could I…Is there any chance I could talk to you for a minute?”
“You had your chance to talk to me the other night. Instead, you insulted me and ruined my evening. I really don’t feel like wasting any more of my time on you.”
“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t—I shouldn’t have done that. But this isn’t about the case. I just…I need to ask you something.”
Silence, and I pictured Rosalind holding the door open and staring at her, gauging; Cassie’s face upturned and tense, her hands deep in the pockets of her suede jacket. In the background someone—Margaret—called something. Rosalind snapped, “It’s for me, Mother,” and the door slammed shut.
“Well?” Rosalind inquired.
“Could we…” A rustle: Cassie shifting nervously. “Could we maybe go for a walk or something? This is pretty private.”
That must have piqued Rosalind’s interest, but her voice didn’t change. “I’m actually getting ready to go out.”
“Just five minutes. We can walk round the back of the estate, or something…. Please, Miss Devlin. It’s important.”
Finally she sighed. “All right. I suppose I can give you a few minutes.”
“Thanks,” Cassie said, “I really appreciate it,” and we heard them going down the pathway again, the swift decisive taps of Rosalind’s heels.
It was a sweet morning, a soft morning; the sun was skimming off last night’s mist, but there had still been wispy layers, over the grass and hazing the high cool sky, when we got into the van. The speakers magnified the twitter of blackbirds, the creak and clank of the estate’s back gate, then Cassie’s and Rosalind’s feet swishing through the wet grass along the edge of the wood. I thought of how beautiful they would look, to some early watcher: Cassie windblown and easy, Rosalind fluttering white and slender as something from a poem; two girls in the September morning, glossy heads under the turning leaves and rabbits scampering away from their approach.
“Can I ask you something?” Cassie said.
“Well, I did think that was why we were here,” Rosalind said, with a delicate inflection implying that Cassie was wasting her valuable time.
“Yeah. Sorry.” Cassie took a breath. “OK. I was wondering: how did you know about…”
“Yes?” Rosalind prompted politely.
“About me and Detective Ryan.” Silence. “That we were…having an affair.”
“Oh, that!” Rosalind laughed: a tinkling little sound, emotionless, barely even a speck of triumph. “Oh, Detective Maddox. How do you think?”
“I thought probably you guessed. Or something. That maybe we didn’t hide it as well as we thought. But it just seemed…I couldn’t stop wondering.”
“Well, you were a little bit obvious, weren’t you?” Mischievous, chiding. “But no. Believe it or not, Detective Maddox, I don’t spend a lot of my time thinking about you and your love life.”
Silence again. O’Kelly picked caramel out of his teeth. “Then how?” Cassie asked finally, with an awful note of dread.
“Detective Ryan told me, of course,” Rosalind said sweetly. I felt Sam’s eyes and O’Kelly’s flicking to me, and bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself denying it.
This is not an easy thing to admit, but until that moment I had held out some craven speck of hope that this had all been a hideous misunderstanding. A boy who would say anything he thought you wanted to hear, a girl made vicious by trauma and grief and my rejection on top of it all; we could have misinterpreted in any one of a hundred ways. It was only in that moment, in the ease of that gratuitous lie, that I understood that Rosalind—the Rosalind I had known, the bruised, captivating, unpredictable girl with whom I had laughed in the Central and held hands on a bench—had never existed. Everything she had ever shown me had been constructed for effect, with the absorbed, calculating care that goes into an actor’s costume. Underneath the myriad shimmering veils, this was something as simple and deadly as razor wire.
“That’s bollocks!” Cassie’s voice cracked. “He would never fucking tell—”
“Don’t you dare swear at me,” Rosalind snapped.
“Sorry,” Cassie said, subdued, after a moment. “I was just—I just didn’t expect that. I never thought he would tell anyone. Ever.”
“Well, he did. You should be more careful about who you trust. Is that all you wanted to ask me?”
“No. I need to ask you a favor.” Movement: Cassie running a hand through her hair, or across her face. “It’s against the rules to—to fraternize with your partner. If our boss finds out, we could both get fired, or reverted back to uniform. And this job…this job means a lot to us. To both of us. We worked like crazy to get onto this squad. It would break our hearts to be thrown off it.”