I remembered. A cool gray day, soft rain weightless in the air, wide smell of sea filling my chest; Sam’s mouth tasted of wild salt. We walked on the edges of high cliffs all afternoon and ate fish and chips on a bench for dinner, my legs were killing me, and it was the first time after Operation Vestal that I can remember feeling like me.
“The day after,” Sam said, “I bought this. On my lunch break.” He found what he’d been looking for and dropped it on the coffee table. It was a blue velvet ring box.
“Oh, Sam,” I said. “Oh, Sam.”
“I meant it,” Sam said. “This. You; us. I wasn’t just having a laugh.”
“Neither was I,” I said. That observation room; the look in his eyes. Was. “Never. I just . . . I got lost along the way, for a while. I’m so sorry, Sam. I fucked up every way there is, and I’m so sorry.”
“I love you, for Christ’s sake. You going off undercover like that, I nearly went mental—and I couldn’t even talk to anyone about it, because no one knew. I can’t . . .”
He trailed off, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. I knew there had to be some delicate way of asking this, but the edges of my vision kept warping and flicking and I couldn’t think straight. I wondered if there could have been a worse time for this conversation. “Sam,” I said, “I killed a person today. Yesterday; whatever. I don’t have any brain cells left. You’re going to have to spell it out: are you breaking up with me or proposing to me?” I was pretty sure which one it was. All I wanted was to get it over with, do the good-bye routine, and chug the rest of the brandy till I knocked myself out.
Sam gave the ring box a baffled look, as if he wasn’t sure how it had got there. “Jesus,” he said. “I didn’t . . . I’d it all planned: dinner somewhere nice, with a view, like. And champagne. But I suppose—I mean, now that . . .”
He picked up the box, opened it. I couldn’t catch up; the only thing that registered was that he didn’t seem to be dumping me, and that the relief was purer and more painful than I could have imagined. Sam disentangled himself from the sofa and got down on one knee, clumsily, on the floor.
“Right,” he said, and held out the box to me. He was white and wide-eyed; he looked as stunned as I was. “Will you marry me?”
The only thing I wanted to do was laugh—not at him, just at the sheer screaming pitch of crazy that day had managed to hit. I was scared that if I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. “I know,” Sam said, and swallowed, “I know it’d mean you couldn’t come back to Murder—not without special permission, and . . .”
“And neither of us is going to get any special treatment any time soon,” I said. Daniel’s voice brushed along my cheek like dark feathers, like a long night wind coming down from some far mountain. Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
“Yeah. If . . . God. If you want to think about it . . .” Another swallow. “You don’t need to decide right now, sure. I know tonight’s not the best moment for . . . But maybe it needed doing. Sooner or later, I need to know.”
The ring was a simple one, a slim hoop with one round diamond glittering like a dewdrop. I had never in my life pictured an engagement ring on my finger. I thought of Lexie slipping hers off in a dark room, leaving it beside the bed she had shared with Chad, and I felt the difference slide into the crack between us like a narrow blade: I couldn’t put this on without knowing that it would stay on, for good.
“I want you to be happy,” Sam said. That stunned look had faded out of his eyes; they were clear and unfaltering on mine. “Whatever that takes. There’s no point if you’re not going to be . . . If you can’t be happy without coming back on the squad, then tell me.”
There’s so little mercy in this world. Lexie sliced straight through everyone who got between her and the door, people she had laughed with, worked with, lain down with. Daniel, who loved her like his blood, sat beside her and watched her die, sooner than allow a siege on his spellbound castle. Frank took me by the shoulders and steered me straight into something that he knew could eat me alive. Whitethorn House let me into its secret chambers and healed my wounds, and in exchange I set my careful charges and I blew it to smithereens. Rob, my partner, my shieldmate, my closest friend, ripped me out of his life and threw me away because he wanted me to sleep with him and I did it. And when we had all finished clawing chunks off each other, Sam, who had every right to give me the finger and walk away for good, stayed because I held out my hand and asked him to.
“I want to go back to Murder,” I said, “but it doesn’t need to be now. It doesn’t even need to be soon. Someday, sooner or later, one of us will do something brilliant and we’ll have all the brownie points in the world, and then we’ll ask for special permission.”
“And if we don’t? If we never do anything brilliant, or if they say no anyway. Then what?”
That wing brush again, along the line of my jaw. To go consenting.
“Then,” I said, “I’ll survive. And you’ll have to put up with me bitching about Maher for the rest of our lives.” I stretched out my hand to Sam and I saw the look that was dawning in his eyes, and as he reached over to put the ring on my finger I realized there was no jagged black terror falling through me this time, no wild scream at the irrevocable thing inches away and rising, I wasn’t frightened at all; the only thing I felt was sure.
Later, when we were cocooned in the duvet and the sky outside was turning salmon-colored, Sam said, “There’s one more thing I need to ask you, and I’m not sure how to do it.”
“Ask away,” I said. “Comes with the territory.” I waved my left hand at him. The ring looked good on there. It even fit.
“No,” Sam said. “Something serious.”
I figured at this point I was ready for anything. I turned over on my stomach and propped myself up so I could look at him properly.
“Rob,” he said. “You and Rob. I saw the way you were together, the two of ye; how close you were. I always expected . . . I never thought I had a look in.”
This one I had not been ready for.
“I don’t know what went wrong between ye,” Sam said, “and I’m not asking. I’ve no right to know. Just . . . I’ve some idea what you went through, during Operation Vestal. And after. I wasn’t trying to be nosy, nothing like that; but I was there.”
He looked up at me, steady gray eyes, unblinking. There was nothing I could say; my breath was gone.
It was that night with the headlights, the night I went to get Rob at the crime scene. I knew him well enough to know that otherwise he would disintegrate, just smash into a million pieces, but not well enough to guess that he would do it anyway, and that all I had done was draw the flak my way. We did something good; I thought that meant no damage could come of it. It’s occurred to me since that I may be a lot dumber than I look. If I learned one thing in Murder, it’s that innocence isn’t enough.
I’m not Lexie, I’m not clockwork, specially not when I’m wrecked and stressed and wretched. By the time the terrible sinking feeling kicked in, I had moved to DV, Rob had been bounced into bureaucratic limbo somewhere and all our bridges were burned to bitter ash; he had gone so far away I couldn’t even see him on the other side. I didn’t tell anyone. I got the boat to England before dawn one sleety Saturday and was back in my dark flat that night—the plane would have been faster but I couldn’t take it, the thought of sitting still for an hour each way, squashed elbow to elbow between strangers. I walked up and down the deck of the boat instead. On the way back the sleet came down harder, soaked me to the bone; if there had been anyone else on deck they would have thought I was crying, but I wasn’t, not even once.
Sam was the only person I could stand to be around, then. Everyone else was on the other side of a thick, wavy glass wall, they yammered and gestured and pulled faces and it took all the energy I had to work out what they wanted from me and make the right noises back. Sam was the only one I could hear. He has a beautiful voice: a country voice, slow and calm, deep and rich as earth. That voice was the one thing that made it through the glass and felt real.
When we met for coffee that Monday after work, he gave me a long intent look and then said, “You look like you’ve the flu; it’s going around. I’ll bring you home, will I?” He tucked me into bed, went to the shops to buy food, came back and cooked me stew. Every night that week he made me dinner and told terrible jokes till I laughed just at the hopeful look on his face. Six weeks later, I was the one who kissed him first. When those square gentle hands touched my skin I could feel ripped cells healing. I never fell for Sam’s big-thick-bogger act, I was always sure there was more; but it had never once occurred to me—I told you I’m dumber than I look—that he had known, every step of the way, and known to leave it.
“The only bit I need to know,” Sam said, “is whether it’s over, for you; the whole thing. Whether . . . I can’t be wondering, our whole lives, what would happen if Rob got his head together and came back wanting to . . . I know how hard it was for you. I tried to—give you space, I suppose they call it; to figure things out. But now, if we’re really engaged . . . I just need to know.”
The first sunlight was exploding onto his face, turning him grave and clear-eyed as some tired apostle in a window. “It’s over,” I said. “It really is, Sam. It’s all over now.”
I laid a hand on his cheek; it was so bright that for a second I thought it was burning me, a pure painless fire. “Good,” he said, on a sigh, and his hand came up to cup the back of my head and pull me down on his chest. “That’s good,” and his eyes were closing before he finished the sentence.
I slept till two in the afternoon. Sometime in there Sam dragged himself out of bed and kissed me good-bye and closed the door softly behind him, but nobody rang to tell me to get my arse into work, presumably because nobody had managed to disentangle what squad I was on right then or whether I was suspended or whether I still had a job at all. When I finally woke up I considered calling in sick, but I wasn’t sure who to call—Frank, probably, but he was unlikely to be in a conversational mood. I decided to let someone else figure this one out. Instead I headed up to Sandymount village, kept my eyes off the newspaper headlines, bought food, went home and ate most of it, and then took a very long walk on the beach.
It was a sunny, lazy afternoon. The promenade was full of old people wandering along with their faces turned up to the sun, couples leaning into each other, overexcited toddlers tumbling along like big sweet bumblebees. I recognized a lot of people. Sandymount’s still holding onto being that kind of place, where you know faces and swap smiles and buy homemade perfume from the neighbors’ kids; it’s one of the reasons I live there, but that evening it felt strange and disconcerting all the same. I felt like I had been away too long for that, long enough that the shop fronts should all have been different, the houses painted new colors, the familiar faces grown up, grown old, gone.
The tide was out. I took off my shoes, rolled up my jeans and walked out onto the sand till the water was ankle-deep. One moment from the day before fell through my head, over and over: Rafe’s voice, soft and dangerous as snow, saying to Justin, You bastard fuck.
This is what I could have done, in that last second before it all exploded: I could have said, “Justin? You stabbed me?” He would have answered. It would have been there on the tape, and sooner or later Frank or Sam would have found a way to make him say it again, under caution this time.
Probably I’ll never know why I didn’t do it. Mercy, maybe; one drop of it, too little and too late. Or—this is the one Frank would have picked—too much emotional involvement, even then: Whitethorn House and the five of them still dusted over me like pollen, still turning me glittering and defiant, us against the world. Or maybe, and I like to hope it was this one, because the truth is more intricate and less attainable than I used to understand, a bright illusive place reached by twisting back roads as often as by straight avenues, and this was the closest I could come.
When I got home Frank was sitting on my front steps with one leg stretched out, teasing the next-door cat with an untied shoelace and whistling “Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her” through his front teeth. He looked terrible, crumpled and bleary-eyed and in serious need of a shave. When he saw me he folded his leg back under him and stood up, sending the cat whisking off into the bushes.
“Detective Maddox,” he said. “You didn’t show for work today. Is there a problem?”
“I wasn’t sure who I work for right now,” I said. “If anyone. Plus I slept it out. I’m owed a few days’ holiday; I’ll take one of those.”
Frank sighed. “Never mind. I’ll sort something out—you can count as one of mine for another day. Starting tomorrow, though, you’re DV again.” He stood aside to let me open the door. “It’s been very.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That it has.”
He followed me up the stairs into my flat and headed straight for the cooker—there was still half a pot of coffee left over from my unidentified meal earlier on. “That’s what I like to see,” he said, finding a mug on the draining board. “A detective who’s always prepared. You having some?”
“I’ve had loads,” I said. “Go for it.” I couldn’t work out what he was there for: to debrief me, kick my arse, kiss and make up, what. I hung up my jacket and started pulling the sheets off the futon, so we could both sit down without having to get too close.
“So,” Frank said, shoving his mug into the microwave and hitting buttons. “You hear about the house?”
“Sam told me.”
I felt his head turn; I kept my back to him, hauling the futon into its sofa version. After a moment he started the microwave whirring. “Well,” he said. “Easy come, easy go. It was probably insured. You talk to IA yet?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “They’re thorough.”
“They come down hard on you?”
I shrugged. “No more than you’d expect. How about you?”
“We’ve got history,” Frank said, without elaborating. The microwave beeped; he got the sugar bowl out of its cupboard and dumped three spoons in his coffee. Frank doesn’t take sugar; he was fighting hard to stay awake. “The shoot’ll come back good. I had a listen to the tapes: three shots, the first two a fair distance from you—the computer lads will be able to work out exactly how far—and then the third right by the mike, nearly blew my ear-drums. And I had a little chat with my mate in the Bureau, too, once they’d finished with the scene. Apparently the trajectory of one of Daniel’s bullets came up almost a perfect mirror image of yours. No question: you only fired after he’d shot directly at you.”
“I know,” I said. I folded the sheets and threw them in the wardrobe. “I was there.”