“Good,” Daniel said. “Then let’s go home.”
* * *
There was no sign of Abby at the back gate; nothing but the hawthorn trees shivering and the lazy, haunted creak of the gate in that small cool breeze. Justin was starting to hyperventilate when Daniel called into the darkness, “Abby, it’s us,” and she materialized out of the shadows, a white oval and a swish of skirt and a streak of bronze. She was holding the poker, in both hands.
“Did you get him?” she whispered, a low fierce hiss. “Did you get him?”
“My God, I’m surrounded by warrior women,” Rafe said. “Remind me never to piss you two off.” His voice sounded muffled, as if he was holding his nose.
“Joan of Arc and Boadicea,” Daniel said, smiling; I felt his hand rest on my shoulder for a second and saw the other one stretch out to Abby’s hair. “Fighting to defend their home. We got him; only temporarily, but I think we made our point clear.”
“I wanted to bring him back and have him stuffed and mounted over the fireplace,” I said, trying to dust muck off my jeans with my wrists, “but he got away.”
“The little fucker,” said Abby. She blew out a long, hard breath and lowered the poker. “I was actually hoping he’d come back.”
“Let’s get inside,” said Justin, glancing over his shoulder.
“What did he throw, anyway?” Rafe wanted to know. “I didn’t even look.”
“A rock,” said Abby. “And there’s something taped to it.”
* * *
“Oh, sweet Jesus in heaven,” Justin said, horrified, the second we got into the kitchen. “Look at the state of you three.”
“Wow,” said Abby, eyebrows going up. “I’m impressed. I’d love to see the one that got away.”
We looked just about as bad as I’d expected: shaking and skittery-eyed, covered in dirt and scrapes, great dramatic smears of blood in weird places. Daniel was leaning heavily on one leg and his shirt was ripped half off, a sleeve hanging loose. One knee was torn out of Rafe’s trousers, I could see glossy red through the hole, and he was going to have a beauty of a shiner in the morning.
“Those cuts,” said Justin. “They’ll have to be disinfected; God only knows what you’d pick up from those lanes. The dirt of them, cows and sheep and all manner of—”
“In a minute,” Daniel said, pushing his hair out of his eyes. He came up holding a twig, gave it a bemused look and laid it carefully on the kitchen counter. “Before we start on anything else, I think we need to see what’s on that rock.”
It was a folded piece of paper, the lined kind, torn out of a kid’s school notebook. “Wait,” Daniel said—Rafe and I had both moved forwards. He found two pens on the table, picked his way delicately through the broken glass to the rock, and used the pens to pull the paper free.
“Now,” Justin said briskly, bustling in with a bowl of water in one hand and a cloth in the other, “let’s see the damage. Ladies first. Lexie, you said your hands?”
“Hang on,” I said. Daniel had carried the piece of paper over to the table and was unfolding it carefully, still using the butts of the pens.
“Oh,” Justin said. “Oh.”
We moved in around Daniel, shoulder to shoulder. His face was bleeding—either a fist or the rim of his glasses had split his cheekbone open—but he didn’t seem to have noticed.
The note was printed in furious block capitals, so hard that in places the pen had dug right through the paper. WE WILL BURN YOU OUT.
There was a second of absolute silence.
“Oh my God,” Rafe said. He collapsed backwards onto the sofa and burst out laughing. “Brilliant. Actual torch-bearing villagers. How cool is that?”
Justin clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “Foolishness,” he said. All his composure had come back now that he was in the house, with the four of us safely around him and something useful to do. “Lexie, your hands.”
I held them out to him. They were a mess, covered with dirt and blood, knuckles split open and half my nails broken down to the quick—so much for my pretty silver manicure. Justin drew in his breath with a little hiss. “Good heavens, what did you do to the poor man? Not that he didn’t deserve it. Come here, where I can see.” He steered me into Abby’s armchair, under the pole lamp, and knelt on the floor beside me. The bowl gave off a cloud of steam and disinfectant, a warm reassuring smell.
“Do we call the cops?” Abby asked Daniel.
“God, no,” said Rafe, dabbing at his nose and checking his fingers for blood. “Are you mad? They’ll just give us the same old spiel: ‘Thanks for reporting it, there’s not a chance in hell we’ll ever catch the perpetrator, get a dog, bye.’ This time they might even arrest us—one look and you can tell we’ve been in a fight. You think Laurel and Hardy will care who started it? Justin, can I have that cloth for a second?”
“In a minute.” Justin was pressing the damp cloth against my knuckles, so gently I could barely feel it. “Does that sting?” I shook my head.
“I’ll bleed on the sofa,” Rafe threatened.
“You will not. Tip your head back and wait.”
“Actually,” Daniel said, still frowning thoughtfully at the note, “I think calling the police might not be a bad idea, at this point.”
Rafe sat up fast, forgetting all about his nose. “Daniel. Are you serious? They’re petrified of those apes down in the village. They’d do anything to get on Glenskehy’s good side, and arresting us for assault would definitely do that.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of the local police,” Daniel said. “Hardly. I meant Mackey or O’Neill—I’m not sure which would be better. What do you think?” he asked Abby.
“Daniel,” Justin said. His hand had stopped moving on mine and that high, panicky note was seeping back into his voice. “Don’t. I don’t want—They’ve been leaving us alone, since Lexie got back—”
Daniel gave Justin a long, inquisitive look over his glasses. “They have, yes,” he said. “But I seriously doubt that means they’ve dropped the investigation. I’m sure they’re putting a considerable amount of energy into looking for a suspect, I think they would be very interested to hear about this one, and I think we have an obligation to tell them, whether it’s convenient for us or not.”
“I just want to go back to normal.” Justin’s voice was almost a wail.
“Yes, well, so do we all,” Daniel said, a little testily. He winced, kneaded at his thigh muscle, winced again. “And the sooner all this is over and someone’s charged, the sooner we can do exactly that. I’m sure Lexie, for example, would feel a lot better if this man were in custody. Wouldn’t you, Lex?”
“Fuck custody, I’d feel a lot better if the little bastard hadn’t got away so fast,” I said. “I was having fun.” Rafe grinned and leaned over to high-five my free hand.
“Regardless of the Lexie thing,” Abby said, “this is a threat. I don’t know about you, Justin, but I don’t particularly want to be burned out.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, he won’t do it,” Rafe said. “Arson takes a certain level of organizational ability. He’d blow himself up long before he got anywhere near us.”
“You want to bet the house on that?”
The mood in the room had turned. The tight-knit, giddy exhilaration was gone, evaporated with a vicious sizzle like water hitting a hot stove; no one was having fun any more.
“I’d rather bet on this guy’s stupidity than on the cops’ brainpower. We need them like we need a hole in the head. If the moron comes back—and he won’t, not after tonight—we sort him out ourselves.”
“Because so far,” Abby said tautly, “we’ve been doing such a brilliant job of dealing with our own problems by ourselves.” She whipped the popcorn bowl off the floor with a tight, angry movement and squatted down to collect the glass.
“No, leave it; the police will want to see it all in situ,” Daniel said, dropping heavily into an armchair. “Ouch.” He grimaced, fished Uncle Simon’s revolver ou
t of his back pocket and put it on the coffee table.
Justin’s hand froze in midair. Abby, straightening up fast, almost fell backwards.
If it had been anyone else I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But Daniel: something cold as seawater surged over my whole body, whipped the breath out of me. It was like seeing your father drunk or your mother in hysterics: that freefall in your stomach, cables snapping as the elevator gets ready to plummet hundreds of sheer stories, unstoppable, already gone.
“You cannot be serious,” Rafe said. He was on the edge of another fit of laughter.
“What the hell,” Abby inquired, very quietly, “did you think you were going to do with that?”
“Really,” Daniel said, giving the gun a faintly puzzled glance, “I’m not sure. I picked it up purely by instinct. Once we were out there, of course, it was much too dark and too chaotic to do anything sensible with it at all. It would have been dangerous.”
“Heaven forbid,” said Rafe.
“Would you have used it?” Abby demanded. She was staring at Daniel, her eyes huge, and holding the bowl like she was going to throw it.
“I’m not sure,” Daniel said. “I had some vague idea of threatening him with it to prevent him from escaping, but I suppose one never really knows what one is capable of until the situation presents itself.”
That click, in the dark lane.
“Oh God,” Justin whispered, a tremulous breath. “What a mess.”
“Not nearly as much of a mess as it could’ve been,” Rafe pointed out cheerfully. “Blood-and-guts-wise, that is.” He pulled off one of his shoes and shook a trickle of dirt and pebbles onto the floor. Not even Justin looked.
“Shut up,” Abby snapped. “You shut up. This isn’t a fucking joke. This is getting way out of hand. Daniel—”
“It’s all right, Abby,” Daniel said. “Really. Everything’s under control.”
Rafe collapsed back on the sofa and started to laugh again. There was a spiky, brittle edge to it, too near hysteria. “And you say this isn’t a fucking joke?” he asked Abby. “Under control. Is that really the phrase you want, Daniel? Would you really, really say that this situation is under control?”
“I already have,” Daniel said. His eyes on Rafe were watchful and very cold.
Abby slammed the bowl down on the table, popcorn scattering. “That’s bollocks. Rafe’s being a prick but he’s right, Daniel. This is not under control any more. Someone could have got killed. The three of you running around in the dark chasing some psycho arsonist—”
“And when we got back,” Daniel pointed out, “you were holding the poker.”
“That’s not the same thing at all. That was in case he came back; I didn’t go looking for trouble. And what if he had managed to get that thing off you? Then what?”
Any second now someone was going to say the word “gun.” As soon as Frank or Sam found out that Uncle Simon’s revolver had evolved from a quaint little heirloom into Daniel’s weapon of choice, we were into a whole new zone, one involving an Emergency Response Unit team on standby with bulletproof vests and rifles. The thought made my stomach twist. “Doesn’t anyone want to hear what I think?” I demanded, thumping the arm of my chair.
Abby whipped around and stared at me as if she had forgotten I was there. “Why not,” she said heavily, after a moment. “God.” She dropped down on the floor, among the shards of glass, and clasped her hands around the back of her neck.
“I think we definitely tell the cops,” I said. “This time they might actually get the guy. Before, they never had anything to go on, but now all they’ll have to do is find the one who looks like he’s been through a meat grinder.”
“In this place,” Rafe said, “that might not narrow it down very much.”
“Excellent point,” Daniel told me. “I hadn’t thought of that. It would also be useful in a preemptive capacity, in case this man decides to accuse us of assault—which I think is unlikely, but you never know. So we’re agreed? There’s not really much point in dragging the detectives out here at this hour, but we call them in the morning?”
Justin had gone back to cleaning my hand, but his face was drawn and closed. “Anything to get this over with,” he said tightly.
“I think you’re bloody insane,” Rafe said, “but then, I’ve thought that for a while now. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter what I think, does it? You’re going to do exactly what you want to, either way.”
Daniel ignored that. “Mackey or O’Neill?”
“Mackey,” Abby said, without looking up from the floor.
“Interesting,” Daniel said, finding his cigarettes. “My first instinct would have been O’Neill, especially as he’s the one who seems to have been exploring our relationship with Glenskehy, but you may be right. Does anyone have a light?”
“Can I make a suggestion?” Rafe asked sweetly. “When we’re having our little chats with your cop friends, it might be an idea to leave that out.” He nodded at the gun.
“Well, of course,” said Daniel absently. He was still looking around for a lighter; I found Abby’s, on the table beside me, and threw it to him. “It doesn’t actually come into the story at all, anyway; there’s no reason to mention it. I’ll put it away.”
“You do that,” Abby said tonelessly, to the floor. “And then we can all just pretend it never happened.”
Nobody answered. Justin finished cleaning my hands and wrapped Band-Aids around the split knuckles, carefully aligning the edges. Rafe swung his legs off the sofa, went into the kitchen and came back with a handful of wet paper towels, gave his nose a perfunctory scrub and tossed the towels into the fireplace. Abby didn’t move. Daniel smoked meditatively, blood drying on his cheek and his eyes focused on something in the middle distance.
The wind picked up, swirled in the eaves and sent a high wail down the chimney, banked around and came rushing through the sitting room like a long cold ghost train. Daniel put out his cigarette, went upstairs—footsteps overhead, a long scraping noise, a thump—and came back with a scarred, jagged-edged piece of wood, maybe part of an old headboard. Abby held it for him while he hammered it into place over the broken window, the hammer blows echoing harshly through the house and outwards into the night.
14
Frank got there fast, the next morning; I got the feeling he’d been waiting by the phone with his car keys in his hand since dawn, ready to leap into action the second we made the call. He brought Doherty with him, to sit in the kitchen and make sure no one eavesdropped while Frank took our statements, one by one, in the sitting room. Doherty looked fascinated; he couldn’t stop gawping, at the high ceilings, the patches of half-stripped wallpaper, the four of them in their spotless old-fashioned clothes, me. He shouldn’t even have been there. This was Sam’s line of investigation, plus Sam would have been out to the house like a shot if he’d had any idea that I’d been in a fight. Frank hadn’t told him. I was very glad I wasn’t going to be in the incident room when this one came out.
The others did beautifully. Their polished façade had gone up as soon as we heard tires on the drive, but it was a subtly different version from the one they used in college: less chilly, more engaging, a perfect balance between shocked victims and courteous hosts. Abby poured the tea and set out a carefully arranged plate of biscuits, Daniel brought an extra chair into the kitchen for Doherty; Rafe made self-deprecating jokes about his black eye. I was starting to get a taste of what the interviews must have been like, after Lexie died, and why they had driven Frank quite so far up the wall.
He started with me. “So,” he said, when the sitting-room door shut behind us and the voices in the kitchen faded to a pleasant, muffled blur. “You got to see some action at last.”