A moment’s pause. “The others are there, right?”
“More or less.”
“I’ll keep it short. We sent Byrne to watch Naylor’s house, have a look at him when he came home from work this evening, and the man’s face is in bits—the three of ye did a good job, by the sound of things. He’s my fella, all right. I’m pulling him in tomorrow morning—into the Murder squad, this time. I don’t care about spooking him, not any more. If he gets itchy feet, I can hold him on breaking and entering. Do you want to come in, have a look?”
“Sure,” I said. A big part of me wanted to wuss out: spend tomorrow in the library with the others around me, eat lunch in the Buttery watching rain fall outside the windows, forget all about what might be happening just up the road, while I still could. But whatever this interview turned out to be, I needed to be there for it. “What time?”
“I’ll catch him before he goes to work, have him in here from about eight. Come whenever you like. Are you . . . You’re OK with coming into the squad?”
I’d forgotten even to worry about that. “No problem.”
“He fits the profile, doesn’t he? Bang on.”
“I guess,” I said, “yeah.” In the sitting room there was a comical groan from Rafe—he had obviously just made a mess of his hand—and a burst of laughter from the others. “You bastard,” Rafe was saying, but he was laughing too, “you sly bastard, I fall for it every time . . .” Sam is a good interrogator. If there was something to get out of Naylor, odds were he would get it.
“This could be it,” Sam said. The hope in his voice made me flinch, the intensity of it. “If I play my cards right tomorrow, this could be the end of it. You could be coming home.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I love you,” Sam said, keeping his voice down, right before he hung up. I stood there in the cool hallway for a long moment, biting down on my thumbnail and listening to the sounds from the sitting room—voices and the snap of cards, clink of glass, the crackle and whoosh of the fire—before I went back inside.
“Who was that?” Daniel asked, looking up from his hand.
“That detective,” I said. “He wants me to come in to them.”
“Which one?”
“The cute blond one. O’Neill.”
“Why?”
Everyone was looking at me, motionless as startled animals; Abby had stopped with a card pulled halfway out of her hand. “They’ve found some guy,” I said, sliding back into my chair. “About last night. They’re going to question him tomorrow.”
“You’re joking,” Abby said. “Already?”
“Go on, get it over with,” Rafe told Daniel. “Say I told you so. You know you want to.”
Daniel paid no attention. “But why you? What do they want?”
I shrugged. "They just want me to have a look at him. And O’Neill asked if I remembered anything more, about that night. I think he’s hoping I’ll take one look at this guy and point a trembling finger and go, ‘That’s him! The man who stabbed me!’ ”
“One of you has seen way too many made-for-TV movies,” said Rafe.
“Have you?” Daniel asked. “Remembered anything more?”
“Sweet fuck-all,” I said. My imagination, or did some wire-fine tension drop out of the air? Abby changed her mind about her hand, tucked the card back in and pulled out another; Justin reached for the wine bottle. “Maybe he’ll get someone to hypnotize me—do they do that in real life?”
“Get him to program you to get some work done every once in a while,” Rafe said.
“Oo. Could he? Program me to get my thesis done faster?”
“Possibly he could, but I doubt he will,” Daniel said. “I’m not sure evidence obtained under hypnosis is admissible in court. Where are you meeting O’Neill?”
“His work,” I said. “I would have tried to get him to meet up in the pub, come for a pint in Brogan’s, or something, but I don’t think he’d go for it.”
“I thought you hated Brogan’s,” Daniel said, surprised.
I was opening my mouth for a fast backpedal—Duh, course I do, I was only messing . . . It was nothing about Daniel that saved me; he was looking at me over his cards with calm, unblinking, owlish eyes. It was the puzzled little drop of Justin’s eyebrows, the cock of Abby’s head: they had no idea what he was talking about. Something was wrong.
“Me?” I said, puzzled. “I don’t mind Brogan’s. I never really think about it; I only said it ’cause it’s right across from where he works.”
Daniel shrugged. “I must have confused it with somewhere else,” he said. He was smiling at me, that extraordinary sweet smile, and I felt it again: that sudden slackening in the air, the sigh of release. “You and your quirks; I can’t keep track.” I made a face at him.
“What are you doing flirting with cops, anyway?” Rafe demanded. “That’s just wrong on so many levels.”
“What? He’s cute.” My hands were shaking; I didn’t dare pick up my cards. It had taken a second to sink in: Daniel had tried to trap me. I had been a fraction of a second from bouncing happily down his false trail.
“You’re incorrigible,” Justin said, topping up my wine. “Anyway, the other one is much more attractive, in a bastard-y kind of way. Mackey.”
“Oh, ewww,” I said. Those fucking onions—I was sure, from that smile, that I had called this one right, but whether it had been enough to reassure Daniel; with him you could never tell . . . “No way. Bet you anything he’s got a hairy back. Back me up here, Abby.”
“Different strokes,” Abby said comfortably. “And you’re both incorrigible.”
"Mackey’s a prat,” Rafe said. “And O’Neill’s a yokel. And it’s diamonds and it’s Abby’s go.”
I managed to pick up my cards and tried to work out what the hell to do with them. I watched Daniel all evening, as carefully as I could without getting caught, but he was the same as always: gentle, polite, distant; paying no more attention to me than to anyone else. When I put my hand on his shoulder, on my way past to get another bottle of wine, he reached up and covered it with his own hand, squeezed hard.
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 limitatio
ns is about to run out.”