“By the time Byrne spotted it, and then by the time the fire service got there . . . It’s miles from anything.”
“I know,” I said. Somehow I was sitting down on the futon. I could feel the map of Whitethorn House branded on my bones: the shape of the newel post printed in my palm, the curves of Lexie’s bedstead down my spine, the slants and turns of the staircase in my feet, my body turned into a shimmering treasure map for a lost island. What Lexie had started, I had finished for her. Between the two of us, we had razed Whitethorn House to rubble and smoking ash. Maybe that was what she had wanted me for, all along.
“Anyway,” Sam said. “I just thought you’d better hear it from me, instead of . . . I don’t know, on the morning news. I know the way you felt about that house.” Even then, there wasn’t a spark of bitterness in his voice, but he didn’t come to me and he didn’t sit down. He still had his coat on.
“The others,” I said. “Do they know?” For a dizzy second, before I remembered how much they hated me now and how much right they had, I thought: I should tell them. They should hear it from me.
“Yeah. I told them. They’re not mad about me, but Mackey . . . I figured I’d better do it. They . . .” Sam shook his head. The tight twist to one corner of his mouth told me how it had gone. “They’ll be all right,” he said. “Sooner or later.”
“They don’t have families,” I said. “They don’t have friends, nothing. Where are they staying?”
Sam sighed. “They’re in custody, sure. Conspiracy to commit murder. It won’t stick—we’ve nothing admissible on them, unless they talk, and they won’t—but . . . well. We have to give it a go. Tomorrow, once they’re released, Victim Support’ll give them a hand finding somewhere to stay.”
“What about Whatsisname?” I asked; I could see the name in my head, but it wouldn’t come out. “For the fire. Did you pull him in yet?”
“Naylor? Byrne and Doherty went looking for him, but he hasn’t shown up yet. No point in chasing after him; he knows those hills like the back of his hand. He’ll come home sooner or later. We’ll pick him up then.”
“What a mess,” I said. The dim, unfocused yellow light made the flat feel underground, suffocating. “What a five-star, twenty-four-carat, all-out mess.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, “well . . .” and hitched vaguely at the shoulders of his coat. He was looking past me, at the last stars fading in the window. “She was bad news from the beginning, that girl. It’ll all sort itself out in the end, I suppose. I’d better head. I’ve to be in early, have another go at those three, for all the good it’ll do. I just thought you should know.”
“Sam,” I said. I couldn’t stand up; it took all the guts I had left just to hold out my hand to him. “Stay.”
I saw him bite down on the inside of his lip. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You should get some sleep too; you must be shattered. And I shouldn’t even be here, sure. IA said . . .”
I couldn’t say to him, When I was sure I was about to be shot, you were what I thought in my last second. I couldn’t even say Please. All I could do was sit there on the futon with my hand stretched out, not breathing, and hope to God that I hadn’t left it too late.
Sam ran a hand over his mouth. “I need to know something,” he said. “Are you transferring back to Undercover?”
“No,” I said. “Jesus, no. Not a chance in hell. This was different, Sam. This was a once-off.”
“Your man Mackey said—” Sam caught himself, shook his head in disgust. “That tosser,” he said.
“What did he say?”
“Ah, a load of old shite.” Sam sat down on the sofa with a thud, as if someone had cut his strings. “Once an undercover, always an undercover; you’d be back, now you’d had a taste of it. That kind of thing. I couldn’t . . . It was bad enough for a few weeks, Cassie. If you went back full-time . . . I can’t handle that. I can’t.”
I was too tired to get properly angry. “Frank was bullshitting,” I said. “It’s what he does best. He wouldn’t have me on his squad even if I wanted to be there—which I don’t. He just didn’t want you trying to get me to come home. He figured, if you thought I was where I belonged . . .”
“Sounds about right,” Sam said, “yeah.” He stared down at the coffee table, rubbed dust off it with his fingertips. “So you’re staying in DV? For definite?”
“If I’ve still got a job after yesterday, you mean?”
“Yesterday was Mackey’s fault,” Sam said, and even through all the exhaustion I saw the hard flare of anger across his face. “Not yours. Every single bloody bit of this is on Mackey. IA aren’t eejits; they’ll see that, same as everyone else does.”
“It wasn’t just Frank’s fault,” I said. “I was there, Sam. I let things get out of control, I let Daniel get his hands on a gun, and then I shot him. I can’t put that on Frank.”
“And I let him run with his lunatic bloody idea, and I’ve to live with that. But he’s the one who was in charge. When you take that on, you have to take responsibility for whatever comes out of it. If he tries to dump this mess on you—”
“He won’t,” I said. “Not his style.”
“Seems to me it’s exactly his style,” Sam said. He shook his head, shaking off the thought of Frank. “We’ll deal with that when it comes. But say you’re right, and he doesn’t shaft you to save his own arse; you’re staying in DV?”
“For now,” I said, “yeah. But down the line . . .” I hadn’t even known I was going to say this, it was the last thing I’d ever expected to come out of my mouth, but once I heard the words it seemed to me that they’d been waiting for me to find them ever since that luminous afternoon with Daniel, under the ivy. “I miss Murder, Sam. I miss it like hell, all the time. I want to come back.”
“Right,” Sam said. His head went back and he took a breath. “Yeah, I thought that, all right. That’s the end of us, then.”
You’re not allowed to go out with anyone on your squad—as O’Kelly elegantly puts it, no shagging on the company copier. “No,” I said. “Sam, no; it doesn’t have to be. Even if O’Kelly’s on for taking me back, there might not be an opening for years, and who knows where we’ll be by then? You could be running a squad of your own.” He didn’t smile. “If it comes down to it, we’ll just stay under the radar. It happens all the time, Sam. You know it does. Barry Norton and Elaine Leahy—” Norton and Leahy have been on Motor Vehicles for ten years and living together for eight of them. They pretend to carpool, and everyone including their super pretends not to know.
Sam shook his head, like a big dog waking up. “That’s not what I want,” he said. “All the best to them, and all, but I want this to be real. Maybe you’d be grand with having what they’ve got—I always figured that was one reason why you didn’t want to tell people about us, sure: so you could maybe come back to Murder, someday. But I’m not after a shag, or a fling, or some half-arsed part-time thing where we have to act like we’re . . .” He fumbled inside his coat; he was so exhausted that he was pawing at it as if he were drunk. “I’ve been carrying this around with me since two weeks after we started going out. Remember, we went for that walk round Howth Head? It was a Sunday?”