Abby cut her eyes at me, like a cue. I remembered those videos: There’s an understanding there, Frank had said. This was Lexie’s job, breaking tension, coming in with some cheeky comment so everyone could roll their eyes and laugh and move on. “Ah, dammit to hell and blast and nonspecific fornication, ” I said, when the rivet went shooting off into the grass again. “Is everyone OK with that?”
“What’s wrong with nonspecific fornication?” Abby demanded. “I don’t like my fornication specific.”
Even Justin laughed, and Rafe snapped out of his cold sulk and balanced his smoke on the edge of the patio and helped me find the rivet. A shot of happiness went through me: I had got it right.
“That detective showed up outside my tutorial,” Abby said Friday evening, in the car. Justin had gone home early—he had been complaining about a headache all day, but to me it looked more like a sulk, and I got the sense it was aimed at Rafe—so the rest of us were in Daniel’s car, going nowhere on the highway, gridlocked in with thousands of suicidal-looking office workers and underendowed prats in SUVs. I was breathing on my window and playing tic-tac-toe with myself in the steam.
“Which one?” Daniel asked.
"O’Neill.”
“Hmm,” Daniel said. “What did he want this time?”
Abby took his cigarette from between his fingers and used it to light her own. “He was asking why we don’t go into the village,” she said.
“Because they’re all a bunch of six-toed halfwits down there,” Rafe said, to the window. He was next to me, slouching deep in his seat and jiggling one knee in Abby’s back. Traffic always drove Rafe nuts, but this level of bad mood strengthened my feeling that something was up between him and Justin.
“And what did you tell him?” Daniel asked, craning his neck and starting to edge into the next lane; the traffic had moved an inch or two.
Abby shrugged. “I told him. We tried the pub once, they froze us out, we didn’t bother trying again.”
“Interesting,” Daniel said. “I think we may have been underrating Detective O’Neill. Lex, did you discuss the village with him at any stage?”
“Never thought of it.” I won my tic-tac-toe game, so I put my fists in the air and did a little victory bop. Rafe gave me a sour look.
“Well,” Daniel said, “there we are. I have to admit I’d more or less dismissed O’Neill, but if he picked up on that without any help, he’s more perceptive than he looks. I wonder if . . . hmm.”
“He’s more annoying than he looks,” Rafe said. “At least Mackey’s backed off. When are they going to leave us alone?”
“I got stabbed, for fuck’s sake,” I said, injured. “I could’ve died. They want to know who did it. And so do I, by the way. Don’t you?” Rafe shrugged and went back to giving the traffic the evil eye.
“Did you tell him about the graffiti?” Daniel asked Abby. “Or the breakins?”
Abby shook her head. “He didn’t ask, I didn’t volunteer. You think . . . ? I could phone him and tell him.”
Nobody had mentioned anything about graffiti or breakins. “You think someone from the village stabbed me?” I said, abandoning my tic-tac-toe and leaning forwards between the seats. “Seriously?”
“I’m not sure,” Daniel said. I couldn’t tell whether he was answering me or Abby. “I need to think through the possibilities. For now, on the whole, I think the best plan is to leave it. If Detective O’Neill picked up on the tension, he’ll find out about the rest on his own, as well; there’s no need to nudge him.”
“Ow, Rafe,” said Abby, reaching an arm around the back of her seat and smacking Rafe’s knee. “Knock it off.” Rafe sighed noisily and swung his legs over against the door. The traffic had opened up; Daniel pulled into the turn lane, swung us off the highway in a smooth fast arc and hit the accelerator.
By the time I phoned Sam from the lane, that night, he already knew all about the graffiti and the breakins. He had spent the last few days in Rathowen station, working his way backwards through their files, looking for Whitethorn House.
“There’s something going on there, all right. The files are full of that house.” Sam’s voice had the busy, absorbed note that it gets when he’s on a good trail—Rob used to say you could practically see his tail wagging. For the first time since Lexie Madison had appeared with a bang in the middle of our lives, he sounded cheerful. “There’s bugger-all crime in Glenskehy, but over the past three years, there’ve been four burglaries on Whitethorn House—one back in 2002, another in 2003, two while old Simon was in the hospice.”
“Did they take anything? Toss the place?” I had more or less dismissed Sam’s idea about Lexie getting killed over some small precious antique, after seeing the quality of the stuff Uncle Simon had on offer, but if something in that house had been worth four breakins . . .
“Nothing like that. Not a thing taken any of the times, as far as Simon March could tell—although Byrne says the place was a pigsty, he might well not have noticed if something was missing—and no sign that they were looking for anything. They just broke a couple of panes in the back door, walked in and made a mess of the place: slashed some curtains and pissed on the sofa the first time, smashed a load of crockery the second, that kind of thing. That’s not a robbery. That’s a grudge.”
The house—The thought of some little scumbucket knuckle-dragging through the rooms, wrecking what he pleased and whipping out his three inches to piss on the sofa, jolted me with fury so high voltage it startled me; I wanted to punch something. “Charming,” I said. “Sure it wasn’t just kids messing? There’s not much to do in Glenskehy on a Saturday night.”
“Hang on,” Sam said. “There’s more. For about four years before Lexie’s lot moved in, that house was getting vandalized almost every month. Bricks through the windows, bottles thrown at the walls, a dead rat through the letterbox—and graffiti. Some of it said”—flip of notebook pages—“ ‘WEST BRITS OUT,’ ‘KILL THE LANDLORDS,’ ‘UP THE IRA’—”
“You think the IRA stabbed Lexie Madison?” Granted, this case was weird enough that anything was possible, but this was the least likely theory I’d heard yet.
Sam laughed, an open, happy sound. “Ah, God, no. Hardly their style. But someone around Glenskehy still thought of the March family as Brits, landlords, and wasn’t exactly mad about them. And listen to this: two separate bits of graffiti, one back in 2001 and one in 2003, said ‘BABY KILLERS OUT.’ ”
“Baby killers?” I said, completely taken aback—for a wild second the timeline tangled in my mind and I thought of Lexie’s brief, hidden child. “What the hell? Where is there a baby in this?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. Someone’s got a very specific grudge—not against Lexie’s lot, it’s been going on way too long for that, and not against old Simon either. ‘Brits,’ ‘baby killers,’ plural—they’re not talking about one old fella. It’s the whole family they’ve a problem with: Whitethorn House and all who sail in her.”
The lane looked secretive and hostile, too many layers of shadows, remembering too many old things that had happened somewhere along its twists. I moved into the shadow of a tree trunk and got my back up against it. “Why didn’t we hear about any of this before?”
“We didn’t ask. We were focusing on Lexie, or whoever she is, as the target; we never thought she might have been—what’s that they call it?—collateral damage. It’s not Byrne and Doherty’s fault. They’ve never worked a murder before, sure; they don’t know how to go about it. It never even occurred to them we might want to know.”
“What do they say about all this?”
Sam blew out a breath. “Not a lot. They’ve no suspects for any of it, and not a clue about any dead baby, and they told me good luck finding out more. They both say they know no more about Glenskehy than they did the day they arrived. Glenskehy people keep to themselves, don’t like cops, don’t like outsiders; whenever there’s a crime, nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything and they sort it out their own way, in private. According to Byrne and Doherty, even the other villages round about think Glenskehy folk are stone mentallers.”
“So they just ignored the vandalism?” I said. I could hear the edge in my voice. “Took the reports and said, ‘Ah, sure, nothing we can do,’ and let whoever it was keep fucking up Whitethorn House?”
“They did their best,” Sam said, instantly and firmly—all cops, even cops like Doherty and Byrne, count as family to Sam. “After the first breakin, they told Simon March he should get a dog, or an alarm system. He said he hated dogs, alarms were for nancy boys and he was well able to look after himself, thanks very much. Byrne and Doherty got the feeling he had a gun—that’ll be the one ye found. They didn’t think that was such a great idea, specially with him being drunk most of the time, but there wasn’t much they could do about it; when they asked him straight out, he denied it. They could hardly force him to get an alarm if he didn’t want one.”
“What about once he went into the hospice? They knew the house was empty, everyone around must’ve known, they knew it would be a target—”
“They checked it every night on their rounds, sure,” Sam said. “What else could they do?”
He sounded startled, and I realized my voice had gone up. “You said, ‘Until this lot moved in,’ ” I said, softer. “Then what?”