5
The drive down to Glenskehy took almost an hour, even with no traffic and Frank driving, and it should have been excruciating. Sam slumped miserably in the back seat, next to the gadgetry; Frank helped the atmosphere by turning up 98FM nice and loud and bopping along, whistling and nodding his head and beating time on the steering wheel. I barely even noticed either of them. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and crisp, I was out of my flat for the first time in a full week, and I had the window rolled all the way down and wind streaking through my hair. That hard black stone of fear had dissolved the second Frank started the car, turned into something sweet and lemon-colored and wildly intoxicating.
“Right,” Frank said, when we hit Glenskehy, “let’s see how well you’ve learned your geography. Give me directions.”
“Straight on through the village, fourth lane to your right, way too narrow, no wonder Daniel and Justin’s cars look like they’ve been drag racing, give me good old dirty Dublin any day,” I told him, doing his accent. “Home, James.” I was on a giddy one. The jacket had been freaking me out all afternoon—it was that lily-of-the-valley smell, right up close, I kept whipping round to see who had come up beside me—and the fact that I was being given the heebiejeebies by a jacket, like something out of Dr. Seuss, was making me want to giggle. Even passing the turnoff to the cottage, where I had met Frank and Sam that first day, didn’t sober me up.
The lane was unpaved and potholey. Trees gone shapeless with years of ivy, hedge branches rattling along the sides of the car and flicking in at my window; and then huge wrought-iron gates, flaking with rust and hanging drunkenly off their hinges. The stone pillars were half drowned in hawthorn grown wild. “Here,” I said.
Frank nodded and turned, and we were looking down an endless, graceful sweep of avenue, between cherry trees crowded with exploded balls of flowers. “Fuck me,” I said. “Why did I have doubts about this, again? Can I sneak Sam in with me in my suitcase, and we can just live here forever?”
“Get it out of your system,” Frank said. “By the time we reach that door, you need to be blasé about all this. Anyway, the house is still shitty, so you can calm down.”
“You told me they’d redone it. I expect cashmere curtains and white roses in my dressing room, or I’m calling my agent.”
“I said they were doing it up. I didn’t say they were magic.”
Then the drive gave a little twist and opened up into a great semicircular carriage sweep, white pebbles speckled through with weeds and daisies, and I saw Whitethorn House for the first time. The photos hadn’t done it justice. You see Georgian houses all over Dublin, mostly turned into offices and undermined by the depressing fluorescents you can see through the windows, but this one was special. Every proportion was balanced so perfectly that the house looked like it had grown there, nested in with its back to the mountains and all Wicklow dropping away rich and gentle in front of it, poised between the pale arc of the carriage sweep and the blurred dark-and-green curves of the hills like a treasure held out in a cupped palm.
I heard Sam take a fast hard breath. “Home sweet home,” said Frank, turning the radio off.
They were waiting for me outside the door, ranged at the top of the steps. In my mind I still see them like that, lacquered gold by the evening sun and glowing vivid as a vision, every fold of their clothes and curve of their faces pristine and achingly clear. Rafe leaning against the railing with his hands in his jeans pockets; Abby in the middle, swayed forwards on her toes, one arm crooked to shade her eyes; Justin, his feet precisely together and his hands clasped behind his back. And behind them, Daniel, framed between the columns of the door, his head up and the light splintering off his glasses.
None of them moved as Frank pulled up and braked, pebbles scattering. They were like figures on a medieval frieze, self-contained, mysterious, spelling out a message in some lost and arcane code. Only Abby’s skirt fluttered, fitfully, in the breeze.
Frank glanced at me over his shoulder. “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Good girl,” he said. “Good luck. And we’re go.” He got out of the car and went round to the boot to get my case.
“Mind yourself,” Sam said. He didn’t look at me. “I love you.”
“I’ll be home soon,” I said. There was no way even to touch his arm, under all those unblinking eyes. “I’ll try to ring you tomorrow.”
He nodded. Frank slammed the boot—the sound was wild, enormous, bouncing off the house front and setting crows scattering from the trees—and opened the car door for me.
I got out, putting my hand to my side for a second as I straightened up. “Thanks, Detective,” I said to Frank. “Thanks for everything.”
We shook hands. “My pleasure,” Frank said. “And don’t worry, Miss Madison: we’ll get this guy.”
He pulled out the handle of the case with a neat snap and passed it to me, and I dragged it across the carriage sweep towards the steps and the others.
Still none of them moved. As I got closer I realized, with a shift of focus like a shock. Those straight backs, the lifted heads: there was some tension stretched between the four of them, so tight it hummed high in the silence. The wheels of my case, grating across the pebbles, sounded loud as machine-gun fire.