15
I didn’t get to Dublin Castle till almost eleven, the next morning. I wanted to let the daily routine kick in first—breakfast, the drive to town, everyone getting to work in the library; I figured it would settle the others, make them less likely to want to go with me. It worked. Daniel did ask, when I stood up and started putting on my jacket, “Would you like me to come along, for moral support?” but when I shook my head he nodded and went back to his book. “Do the trembling-finger-point either way,” Rafe told me. "Give O’Neill a thrill.”
Outside the door of the Murder squad’s building, I chickened out. It was the entrance I couldn’t do: checking in at reception like a visitor, making excruciating chirpy small talk with Bernadette the squad admin, waiting under fascinated passing eyes for someone to come steer me through the corridors like I’d never been there before. I phoned Frank and told him to come get me.
“Good timing,” he said, when he stuck his head out the door. “We were just taking a little break, to re-evaluate the situation, shall we say.”
“Re-evaluate what?” I asked.
He held the door open for me, stood back. “You’ll see. It’s been a fun morning all round. You really did a number on our boy’s face, didn’t you?”
He was right. John Naylor was sitting at an interview-room table with his arms folded, wearing the same colorless sweater and old jeans, and he wasn’t good-looking any more. He had two black eyes; one cheek was lopsided, purple and swollen; there was a dark split in his bottom lip; the bridge of his nose had a horrible squashy look. I tried to remember his fingers going for my eyes, his knee in my stomach, but I couldn’t square those with this battered guy rocking his chair on its back legs and humming “The Rising of the Moon” to himself. The sight of him, what we had done to him, made my throat close up.
Sam was in the observation room, leaning against the one-way glass with his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, watching Naylor. “Cassie,” he said, blinking. He looked exhausted. “Hi.”
“Jesus,” I said, nodding at Naylor.
“You’re telling me. He’s saying he came off his bike, face first into a wall. And that’s about all he’s saying.”
“I was just telling Cassie,” Frank said, “we’ve got a bit of a situation on our hands.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes, like he was trying to wake up. “A situation, yeah. We pulled Naylor in around, what, eight o’clock? We’ve been going at him ever since, but he’s giving us nothing; just stares at the wall and sings to himself. Rebel songs, mostly.”
“He made an exception for me,” said Frank. “Stopped the concert long enough to call me a dirty Dub bastard who should be ashamed of myself for licking West Brit arse. I think he fancies me. Here’s the thing, though: we managed to get a warrant to search his place, and the Bureau just brought in what they found. Obviously we were hoping for a bloody knife or bloody clothing or what-have-you, but no such luck. Instead . . . surprise, surprise.”
He picked up a handful of evidence bags from the table in the corner and waved them at me. “Check these out.”
There was a set of ivory dice, a tortoiseshell-backed hand mirror, a small lousy watercolor of a country lane, and a silver sugar bowl. Even before I turned the bowl around and saw the monogram—a delicate, flourished M—I knew where these had come from. Only one place I knew of had this kind of tat variety: Uncle Simon’s hoard.
“They were under Naylor’s bed,” Frank said, “prettily packed away in a shoebox. I guarantee if you have a good look around Whitethorn House you’ll find a cream pitcher to match. Which leaves us with the question: how did this lot end up in Naylor’s bedroom?”
“He broke in,” Sam said. He had gone back to staring at Naylor, who was slouched in his chair gazing at the ceiling. “Four times.”
“Without taking anything.”
“We don’t know that. That’s according to Simon March, who lived like a pig and spent most of his time legless drunk. Naylor could’ve filled up a suitcase with anything he fancied, and March would never have known the difference.”
“Or,” Frank said, “he could have bought it off Lexie.”
“Sure,” Sam said, “or off Daniel or Abby or what’s-their-names, or off old Simon, come to that. Except that there’s not one single speck of evidence to say he did.”
“None of them ended up stabbed and searched half a mile from Naylor’s home.”
They had obviously been having this fight for a while; their voices had that heavy, well-practiced rhythm. I put the evidence bags back on the table, leaned against the wall and stayed well out of it. “Naylor’s working for just over minimum wage and supporting two sick parents,” Sam said. “Where the hell is he going to get the money to buy antique bits and bobs? And why the hell would he want to?”
“He’d want to,” Frank said, “because he hates the March family’s guts and he’d jump at the chance to screw them over—and because, just like you said, he’s skint. He may not have the money himself, but there are plenty of people out there who do.”
It took me that long to realize what they were fighting about, why the whole room was tight with that hard, bitten-down tension. Art and Antiques may sound like the nerd squad, a bunch of tweedy professors with badges, but what they do is no joke. The black market spreads worldwide, and it gets tangled up with a whole bunch of other kinds of organized crime along the way. People get hurt, in a swap network where the currencies range from Picassos to Kalashnikovs to heroin; people get killed.
Sam made a furious, frustrated noise, shook his head and slumped back against the glass. “All I want,” he said, “is to find out whether this fella’s a killer, and arrest him if he is. I don’t give a damn what else he’s been doing in his spare time. He could have fenced the Mona Lisa and I wouldn’t care. If you seriously think he’s been passing antiques, we can hand him over to A and A once we’re done with him, but for now, he’s a murder suspect. Nothing else.”
Frank raised one eyebrow. “You’re assuming there’s no connection. Look at the pattern. Up until those five move in, Naylor’s brick-throwing and spray-painting his little heart out. Once they’re there, he takes one or two more shots and then, just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“all quiet on the western front. What, he thought those five were cute? He saw them renovating and didn’t want to mess up the new decor?”
“They went after him,” Sam said. The set of his mouth: he was inches from losing his temper. “He didn’t fancy getting the shite kicked out of him.”
Frank laughed. “You think that kind of grudge vanished overnight? Not a chance. Naylor found some other way to do damage to Whitethorn House— otherwise he wouldn’t have quit the vandalism, not in a million years. And look what happens as soon as Lexie’s not there to slip him antiques any more. He gives it a few weeks, in case she gets back in touch, and when she doesn’t, he’s right back to the rock through the window. He wasn’t worried about getting the shite kicked out of him the other night, was he?”
“You want to talk about patterns? Here’s a pattern for you. When the five of them chase him off, back in December, his grudge only gets worse. He’s not going to take on all of them at once, but he keeps spying on them, he finds out that one of them makes a habit of going out walking during his window of opportunity, he stalks her for a while and then he kills her. When he finds out he didn’t even get that right, the rage builds up again, till he loses control and bangs an arson threat through the window. How do you think he feels about what happened the other night? If one of those five keeps wandering around the lanes on her own, what do you think he’s going to do about it?”
Frank ignored that. “The question,” he told me, “is what we do with Little Johnny now. We can arrest him for burglary, vandalism, theft, whatever else we can come up with, and keep our fingers crossed that it loosens him up enough that he gives us something on the stabbing. Or we can stick this lot back under his bed, thank him kindly for helping us with our inquiries, send him home and see where he takes us.”
In a way, this fight had probably been inevitable all along, from the second Frank and Sam showed up at the same crime scene. Murder detectives are single-minded, focused on narrowing the investigation slowly and inexorably till everything extraneous is gone and the only thing left in their sights is the killer. Undercovers thrive on extraneous, on spreading their bets and keeping all their options open: you never know where tangents might lead, what unexpected game might poke its head out of the bushes if you watch every angle for long enough. They light all the fuses they can find, and wait to see what goes boom.
“And then what, Mackey?” Sam demanded. “Just supposing for a second that you’re right, Lexie was slipping the man antiques to sell, and Cassie gets their little operation going again. Then what?”
“Then,” Frank said, “I have a nice chat with A and A, I head down to Francis Street and buy Cassie a handful of lovely shiny widgets, and we take it from there.” He was smiling, but his eyes on Sam were narrow and watchful.
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
A and A uses undercovers all the time, undercovers posing as buyers, as fences, as sellers with nudge-and-a-wink sources, gradually working their way towards the big shots. Their operations last for months; they last for years.
“I’m investigating a fucking murder here,” Sam said. “Remember that? And I can’t arrest anyone for that murder while the victim’s alive and well and messing about with silver sugar bowls.”
“So? Get him after the antiques sting winds up, one way or the other. Best-case scenario, we establish a motive and a link between him and the victim, and we get to use them as leverage towards a confession. Worst-case scenario, we waste a little time. It’s not like our statute of limitations is about to run out.”
There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Lexie had spent the past three months selling John Naylor the contents of Whitethorn House just for kicks and giggles. Once that pregnancy test came up positive, she would have sold whatever it took to get out, but up until then: no.