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 break-in, 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?”
“The vandalism didn’t stop, but it settled a lot. Byrne called in and had a chat with Daniel, let him know what had been going on, Daniel didn’t seem too worried about it. There’s been only two incidents since: a rock through the window in October, and graffiti again, in December—FOREIGNERS FUCK OFF. That’s the other reason Byrne and Doherty said nothing to us. As far as they were concerned it was all over, old news.”
“So maybe it was just a vendetta against Uncle Simon, after all.”
“Could be, but I don’t think so. I’m betting it’s more what you might call a scheduling conflict.” There was a grin in Sam’s voice: having something solid to go on had changed everything. “Sixteen of the reports give the time when the incident happened, and it’s always somewhere between half past eleven and one at night. That’s not coincidence. Whoever’s after Whitethorn House, that’s their window.”
“Pub closing time,” I said.
He laughed. “Great minds. I figure a lad or two out drinking, every now and then they’re on a bad buzz and the old Dutch courage is up, and when the pub throws them out it’s off to Whitethorn House with a couple of bricks or a can of spray paint or whatever they’ve got handy. Old Simon’s schedule suited them down to the ground: by half past eleven he was mostly either unconscious—those are the ones where the report doesn’t give the time of the incident, because he didn’t call it in till he sobered up the next morning—or at least too drunk to go after them. The first two times they broke in, he was home, slept through the whole thing. Lucky he’d a good lock on his bedroom door, or God knows what might have happened.”
“But then we moved in,” I said. A second too late, I heard myself—they had moved in, not we—but Sam didn’t seem to notice. “These days, between half past eleven and one, there’s five people wide awake and moving around the house. Wrecking the gaff doesn’t seem like so much fun when three big strong lads could catch you at it and beat the crap out of you.”
“And two big strong girls,” Sam said, and I caught the grin again. “I bet you and Abby would get a couple of punches in. That’s what almost happened with the rock through the window. They were all in the sitting room, just before midnight, when the rock came flying into the kitchen; as soon as they realized what had happened, the five of them legged it out the back door to go after your man. Because they weren’t in the room, though, it took them a minute to figure out what was going on, and by that time the guy was well gone. Lucky for him, Byrne said. It was forty-five minutes before they called the cops—they went through all the lanes first, looking for the guy—and even then, they were raging. Your man Rafe told Byrne that, if he ever caught this fella, his own mammy wouldn’t recognize him; Lexie said she was planning to, and I’m quoting, ‘kick him in the bollocks so hard he’d have to stick his hand down his throat if he wanted a wank.’ ”
“Good for her,” I said.
Sam laughed. “Yeah, I thought you’d enjoy that one. The others had better sense than to come out with anything like that in front of a cop, but Byrne says they were thinking it, all right. He gave them a lecture about not taking the law into their own hands, but he’s not sure how much of it went in.”
“I don’t blame them,” I said. “It’s not like the cops had been all that useful. What about the graffiti?”
“Lexie’s lot weren’t home. It was a Sunday night, and they’d gone to dinner and the pictures in town. They got home a little after midnight and there it was, across the front of the house. It was the first time they’d been out that late since they moved in. That could be coincidence, but I don’t think so. The thing with the rock put some respect on our vandal—or vandals—but either he was keeping an eye on the house, or he saw the car go through the village and not come back. He saw his chance, and he took it.”
“So you’re thinking it’s not a village-versus-Big-House thing, after all?” I said. “Just some guy with a grudge?”
Sam made a noncommittal sound. “Not exactly. Have you heard what happened when Lexie’s lot tried going into Regan’s?”
“Yeah, Abby said you’d talked to her about that. She mentioned something about them getting frozen out, but she didn’t go into details.”
“It was a couple of days after they moved in. The whole bunch of them go into the pub one evening, they find a table, Daniel goes up to the bar, and the barman doesn’t see him. For ten minutes, from four feet away, with only a handful of people in the pub and Daniel going, ‘Excuse me, can I have two pints of Guinness and . . .’ The barman just stands there, polishing a glass and watching the telly. Finally Daniel gives up, goes back to the others, they have a quiet chat and decide maybe old Simon got thrown out of here too many times and the Marches aren’t popular. So they send Abby up instead—they figure she’s a better bet than the English guy or the Northern boy. Same thing happens. Meanwhile, Lexie starts talking to the old fellas at the next table, trying to find out what the hell’s going on. Nobody answers her, nobody even looks at her; they all turn their backs and keep on with their own conversation.”
“Jesus,” I said. It’s not as easy as it sounds to ignore five people right there in front of you, looking for your attention. It takes a lot of concentration to override all your instincts like that; you need a reason, something hard and cold as bedrock. I tried to keep an eye on the lane in both directions at once.
“Justin’s getting upset and wants to leave, Rafe’s getting angry and wants to stay, Lexie’s getting more and more hyper trying to make these old fellas talk to her—offering them chocolate, telling them lightbulb jokes—and a bunch of younger guys in a corner are starting to throw over dirty looks. Abby wasn’t too keen on backing down herself, but she and Daniel both figured this situation could get out of hand any second. They grabbed the others and left, and they didn’t go back.”
A light rustle of wind swept through the leaves, moving up the lane towards me. “So the bad feeling goes right through Glenskehy,” I said, “but only one or two people are taking it that step further.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. And it’s going to be a right laugh finding out who they are. There’s about four hundred people in Glenskehy, counting the outlying farms, and none of them are about to give me a hand narrowing it down.”
“There,” I said, “I might be able to help out. See, this I can profile. Sort of, anyway: nobody collects psychological data on vandals like they do on serial killers, so it’ll be mostly guesswork, but at least there’s enough of a pattern that I can give you something.”
“I’ll take guesswork,” Sam said cheerfully. I heard pages rustling, a shift of the phone as he got ready to write. “I’ll take anything, sure. Go on.”
“OK,” I said. “You’re looking for someone local, obviously—Glenskehy born and bred. Almost definitely male. I think it’s one person rather than a gang: spontaneous vandalism mostly involves groups, but planned hate campaigns like this one tend to be more private.”
“Anything you can tell me about him?” Sam’s voice had gone blurry: he had the phone caught under his jaw, writing.
“If this started about four years ago, then he’s probably in his midtwenties to early thirties—vandalism’s usually a young man’s crime, but this guy’s too methodical for a teenager. Not much education—Leaving Cert, maybe, but no college. He lives with someone, either his parents or a wife or girlfriend: no attacks in the middle of the night, someone’s expecting him home by a certain time. He’s employed, in a job that keeps him busy all through weekdays, or there would have been incidents during the day, when we’re all out and the coast is clear. The job’s local, too, he doesn’t commute to Dublin or anything; this level of obsession says Glenskehy’s his whole world. And it doesn’t satisfy him. He’s working well below his intellectual or educational level, or he thinks he is, anyway. And he’ll probably have had ongoing problems with other people before, neighbors, ex-girlfriends, maybe employers; this guy won’t play well with authority. It might be worth checking with Byrne and Doherty for any local feuds or harassment complaints.”
“If my fella hassled someone from Glenskehy,” Sam said grimly, “there’s no way they’d go to the cops. They’d just get their mates together and give him a beating some night, sure. And he wouldn’t bring that to the cops, either.”
“No,” I said, “probably not.” A flicker of movement, off in the field across the lane, a dark streak turning the grass. It was way too small for a person, but I moved deeper into the shadow of the tree all the same. “Here’s the other thing. The campaign against Whitethorn House could have been triggered by some run-in with Simon March—he sounds like a narky old git, he could well have pissed someone off—but, in your boy’s mind, it goes way deeper than that. To him, it’s about a dead baby. And Byrne and Doherty don’t have a clue about that, right? How long have they been here?”
“Doherty only two years, but Byrne’s been stuck out here since 1997. He says there was a cot death in the village last spring and a wee girl fell into a slurry pit on one of the farms, a few years back—God rest them—but that’s the lot. Nothing suspicious about either death, and no links to Whitethorn House. And the computer didn’t come up with anything in the area.”
“Then we’re looking for something further back,” I said, “just like you thought. God knows how far. Remember what you told me, about the Purcells round your way?”
A pause. “We’ll never find it, so. The records, sure.”
Most of Ireland’s public records went up in a fire in 1921, in the Civil War. “You don’t need records. People round here know about this, I guarantee you. Whenever that baby died, this guy didn’t get the story out of some old newspaper. He’s way too obsessed with it. To him, that’s not ancient history; it’s a real, fresh, crucial grudge that needs to be avenged.”
“Are you saying he’s mad?”
“No,” I said. “Not the way you mean. He’s way too careful—waiting for safe moments, backing off after he got chased . . . If he were schizophrenic, say, or bipolar, he wouldn’t have that much control. He doesn’t have a mental illness. But he’s obsessed to the point where, yeah, I think you could probably call him a little unbalanced.”
“Could he get violent? Against people, I mean, not just property.” Sam’s voice had sharpened; he was sitting up straighter.
“I’m not sure,” I said, carefully. “It doesn’t seem like his style—I mean, he could have broken down old Simon’s bedroom door and whacked him with a poker any time he wanted to, but he didn’t. But the fact that he only seems to do this stuff when he’s drunk makes me think he’s got an unhealthy relationship with alcohol—one of those guys who grow a whole new personality after four or five pints, and not a nice one. Once you throw booze into the equation, everything gets less predictable. And, like I said, this is an obsession with him. If he got the impression that the enemy was escalating the conflict—by going after him when he threw that rock through the window, for example—he could well have upped his game to match.”
“You know what this sounds exactly like,” Sam said, after a pause, “don’t you. Same age, local, smart, controlled, criminal experience but no violence . . .”
The profile I had given him, back in my flat; the profile of the killer. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“What you’re telling me is that he could be our boy. The murderer.”
That streak of shadow again, quick and silent through the grass and the moonlight: a fox, maybe, after a field mouse. “He could be,” I said. “We can’t rule him out.”
“If this is a family feud,” Sam said, “then Lexie wasn’t the specific target, her life’s nothing to do with anything and there’s no need for you to be there. You can come home.”
The hope in his voice made me flinch. “Yeah,” I said, “maybe. But I don’t think we’re at that stage. We’ve got no concrete link between the vandalism and the stabbing; they could be completely unrelated. And once we
pull the plug, we can’t go back.”