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.
I could have said so; should have. But the thing was that Frank was right on this much: Naylor would do anything that would damage Whitethorn House. He was going insane like a caged cat with his own helplessness, taking on that house charged with centuries of power, with no weapons in his hands but rocks and spray cans. If someone came up to him with a handful of spoils from Whitethorn House, a few bright ideas about where to sell the stuff and a promise of more, there was a good chance—an incredible chance—that he wouldn’t know how to say no.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Frank said. “Have another go at Naylor—just you, this time; he and I aren’t really clicking. Take as long as you need. If he gives you something on the murder—anything at all, even a hint—we arrest him, we forget the whole antiques question, we pull Cassie in and we shut the investigation down. If he gives you nothing . . .”
“Then what?” Sam demanded.
Frank shrugged. “If your way doesn’t work, then you come back out here and we all have a little chat about my way.”
Sam looked at him for a long time. “No tricks,” he said.
“Tricks?”
“Coming in. Knocking on the door when I’m on the edge of getting something. That kind of thing.”
I saw a muscle flick in Frank’s jaw, but all he said was, blandly, “No tricks.”
“OK,” Sam said, on a deep breath. “I’ll give it my best shot. Can you hang on here for a bit?”
He was talking to me. “Sure,” I said.
“I might want to use you—bring you in, maybe. I’ll figure it out as I go.” His eyes went to Naylor, who had switched to singing “Follow Me Up to Carlow,” just loud enough to be distracting. “Wish me luck,” he said, straightening his tie, and he was gone.
“Did your boyfriend just insult my virtue?” Frank wanted to know, when the door of the observation room shut behind Sam.
“You can challenge him to a duel if you want,” I said.
“I play fair. You know that.”
“Don’t we all,” I said. “We’ve just got different ideas about what counts as fair. Sam isn’t sure yours matches up all that well with his.”
“So we won’t buy a time share in the Med together,” Frank said. “I’ll live. What do you think of my little theory?”
I was watching Naylor, through the glass, but I could feel Frank’s eyes raking the side of my head. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t really seen enough of this guy to have an opinion.”
“But you’ve seen plenty of Lexie—secondhand, but still, you know as much about her as anyone does. Think she’d be capable of something like that?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? The whole thing about this girl is that no one has a clue what she was capable of.”
“You were playing your cards very close to the chest, just now. It’s not like you to keep your mouth shut for that long, not when you must have an opinion one way or the other. I’d like to have some idea which side you might be on, if your fella comes out of there with nothing and we have to pick up this argument again.”
The interview-room door opened and Sam came in, juggling two mugs of tea and catching the door with his shoulder. He looked wide awake, almost jaunty: the fatigue falls off you, the second you’re face to face with a suspect. “Shh,” I said. “I want to watch this.”
Sam sat down, with a comfortable grunt, and pushed one of the mugs across the table to Naylor. “Now,” he said. His country accent had magically got a lot stronger: us against the city folk. “I’ve sent Detective Mackey off to do his paperwork. He was only annoying us.”
Naylor stopped singing and considered this. “I don’t like the cut of him,” he said, finally.
I saw the corner of Sam’s mouth twitch. “Neither do I, sure. But we’re stuck with him.” Frank laughed softly, beside me, and moved closer to the glass.
Naylor shrugged. “You are, maybe. I’m not. As long as he’s here, I’ve nothing to say.”
“Grand,” Sam said easily. “He’s gone, and I’m not asking you to talk, just to listen. There’s something that I’ve been told happened in Glenskehy, a while back. As far as I can see, it could explain a lot. All I need you to do is tell me if it’s true.”
Naylor gave him a suspicious look, but he didn’t start the concert again. “Right,” Sam said, and took a swig of his tea. “There was a girl in Glenskehy, around the First World War . . .”
The story he told was a delicate blend of what he’d picked up in Rathowen, what I’d picked up from Uncle Simon’s magnum opus, and something star-ring Lillian Gish. He pulled out all the stops: the girl’s father had thrown her out of the house, she was begging in the streets of Glenskehy, locals spitting on her as they passed, kids throwing stones . . . He topped it all off with a semisubtle hint that the girl had been lynched by an angry mob from the village. The soundtrack here clearly involved a large string section.
By the time he finished his tearjerker, Naylor was rocking the chair back again and giving him a stony, disgusted stare. “No,” he said. “Jesus, no. That’s the biggest load of old shite I’ve heard in my life. Where did you get that?”
“So far,” Sam said, shrugging, “that’s the story I’ve heard. Unless someone else can correct it for me, I’ve no choice but to go on it.”
The chair creaked, a monotonous, unsettling noise. “Tell me, Detective,” Naylor said, “why would you be interested in the likes of us and our old stories? We’re plain people around Glenskehy, you know. We’re not used to getting the attention of important men like yourself.”
“That’s what he gave us all the way here, in the car,” Frank told me, getting comfortable with a shoulder against the edge of the window. “Our boy’s got a bit of a persecution complex.”
“Shh.”
“There’s been some hassle up at Whitethorn House,” Sam said. “Sure, I don’t have to tell you that. We’ve received information that there’s bad feeling between the house and the residents of Glenskehy. I need to establish the facts, so I can determine whether there’s any connection.”
Naylor laughed, a hard, humorless crack. “Bad feeling,” he said. “I suppose you could call it that, yeah. Is that what they told you up at the House?”
Sam shrugged. “All they said was that they weren’t welcome at the pub. No reason why they should be, sure. They’re not locals.”
“Lucky for them. They get a bit of hassle, and they’ve detectives crawling out of the woodwork to fix it. When it’s locals getting the hassle, where are ye? Where were ye when that girl was hanged? Filing it as a suicide and heading back to the pub.”
Sam’s eyebrows went up. “It wasn’t suicide?”
Naylor eyed him; those eyes swollen half shut made him look baleful, dangerous. “You want the true story?”
Sam made a small, easy gesture with one hand: I’m listening.
After a moment Naylor brought the chair down, reached out and wrapped his hands—broken nails, dark scabs on the knuckles—around the mug. “The girl worked as a maid up at Whitethorn House,” he said. “And one of the young fellas up there, one of the Marches, he took a fancy to her. Maybe she was stupid enough to think he’d marry her and maybe she wasn’t, but either way, she got into trouble.”
He gave Sam a long bird-of-prey stare, making sure he understood. “There was no throwing her out of the house. I’d say her father was raging, and I’d say he talked about waiting for the March fella in the lanes some dark night, but he’d have been mad to do it. Pure mad. This was before the independence, d’you see? The Marches owned all round Glenskehy. Whoever the girl was, they owned her father’s house; one word out of him, and his family would have been on the side of the road. So he did nothing.”
“That can’t have come easy,” Sam said.
“Easier than you’d think. Most people then wouldn’t deal with Whitethorn House any more than they had to. It had a bad name. Whitethorn’s the fairy tree, d’you see? Belongs to the fairies.” He gave Sam a grim, equivocal little smile. “There’s still people won’t walk under a hawthorn at night, though they wouldn’t be able to tell you why. It’s only leftovers now, scrapings, but back then there was superstition everywhere. It was the dark did it: no electricity and the long winter nights, you could see anything you liked in the shadows. There were plenty believed that them up at Whitethorn House had dealings with the fairies, or the devil, depending on what way your mind worked.” That sideways, cold flick of a smile again. “What do you think, Detective? Were we all mad savages, back then?”
Sam shook his head. “There’s a fairy ring on my uncle’s farm,” he said matter-of-factly. “He doesn’t believe in the fairies, never did, but he plows around it.”
Naylor nodded. “So that’s what people said in Glenskehy, when this girl came up pregnant. They said she lay down with one of the fairy men from up at the House, and she got up with a fairy child. And serve her right.”
“They thought the baby would be a changeling?”
“Yowza,” Frank said. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.” He was shaking with half-suppressed laughter. I wanted to kick him.
“They did, yeah,” Naylor said coldly. “And don’t be giving me that look, Detective. These are my great-grandparents we’re talking about, mine and yours. Can you swear to me you wouldn’t have believed the same, if you’d been born back then?”
“Different times,” Sam said, nodding.
“Not everyone said it, now. Only a few—the older folk, mostly. But enough that, one way or another, it got back to your man, the child’s father. Either he wanted rid of the child all along and he was only waiting for an excuse, or something wasn’t right in his mind to start with. A lot of them were always what you might call a bit odd, up at the House; maybe that’s one reason they got the name for having dealings with the fairies. He believed it, anyway. He thought there was something wrong with him, in his blood, that would wreck the child.”
His broken mouth twisted sideways. “So he arranged to meet the girl one night, before the baby was born. She went along, not a worry on her: he was her lover, wasn’t he? She thought he wanted to arrange to provide for her and the child. And instead he took a rope and he hanged her from a tree. That’s the true story. Everyone in Glenskehy knows. She didn’t kill herself, and no one from the village killed her. The baby’s father killed her, because he was afraid of his own child.”
“Bloody boggers,” Frank said. “I swear to God, you get outside Dublin and it’s a whole different universe. Jerry Springer, eat your heart out.”
“God rest,” Sam said quietly.
“Yeah,” Naylor said. “God rest. Your lot called it a suicide, sooner than arrest one of the gentry from the Big House. She went into unconsecrated ground, her and the child.”
It could have been true. Any of the versions we’d heard could have been the true one, any or none; there was no way to tell, across a hundred years. What mattered was that Naylor believed what he was saying, every word. He wasn’t acting like a guilty man, but this means less than you might think. He was consumed enough—that bitter intensity in his voice—that he might well believe he had nothing to feel guilty about. My heart was going fast and heavy. I thought of the others, heads bent in the library, expecting me to come back.
“Why would no one in the village tell me this?” Sam asked.
“Because it’s none of your business. We don’t want to be known for that: the mad village where the lunatic killed his bastard for being a fairy. We’re decent people, in Glenskehy. We’re plain people, but we’re not savages and we’re not eejits, and we’re no one’s freak show, d’you get me? We just want to be left alone.”
“Someone’s not leaving this alone, though,” Sam pointed out. “Someone painted BABY KILLERS on Whitethorn House, twice. Someone put a rock through their window, two nights ago, and fought them like hell when they went after him. Someone doesn’t want to leave that child to rest in peace.”
A long silence. Naylor shifted in his chair, touched his split lip with a finger and checked for blood. Sam waited.
“It was never just the baby,” he said, in the end. “That was bad enough, sure; but it only showed the way they are, that family. The cut of them. I didn’t know what other way to say it.”
He was halfway to putting his hand up for the graffiti, but Sam let that slide: he was after bigger game. “What way are they?” he asked. He was leaning back with his mug balanced on his knee, easy and interested, like a man settled in for a good long night at his local.
Naylor dabbed at his lip again, absently. He was thinking hard, searching for words. “All your detective work about Glenskehy. Did you find out where it came from?”
Sam grinned. “My Irish is after getting awful rusty. Glen of the hawthorn, is it?”
Naylor gave a fast, impatient head-shake. “Ah, no, no, not the name. The place. The village. Glenskehy. Where d’you think it came from?”
Sam shook his head.
“The Marches. They made it, to suit themselves. When they were given the land and they built that house, they brought people in to work for them—maids, gardeners, stable hands, gamekeepers . . . They wanted their servants on their land, under their thumb, so they could keep them in line, but not too nearby; they didn’t want to be smelling the stink of the peasants.” There was a vicious, disgusted twist to the corner of his mouth. “So they built a village for the servants to live in. Like someone having a swimming pool put in, or a conservatory, or a stable full of ponies: just a little luxury, to make life more comfortable.”
“That’s no way to look at human beings,” Sam agreed. “It’s a long time ago, though.”
“A long time ago, yeah. Back when the Marches had a use for Glenskehy. And now that it’s not serving their pleasure any more, they’re standing by and watching it die.” There was something building in Naylor’s voice, something volatile and dangerous, and for the first time they came together in my mind, this man talking local history with Sam and the wild creature that had tried to gouge my eyes out in a dark lane. “It’s falling to bits, that village. Another few years and there’ll be nothing left of it. The only ones who stay are the ones trapped there, like myself, while the place dies and takes them along with it. Do you know why I never went to college?”
Sam shook his head.
“I’m no fool. I had the points for it. But I had to stay in Glenskehy, to look after my parents, and there’s no work there that needs an education. There’s nothing but farming. What did I need a degree for, to dig muck on another man’s farm? I started doing that the day after I left school. I’d no other choice. And there’s dozens more like me.”
“That’s not the Marches’ fault, sure,” Sam said reasonably. “What could they do about it?”
That hard bark of a laugh again. “There’s plenty they could do. Plenty. Four or five years back there was a fella came looking around the village, a Galway man, same as yourself. A property developer. He wanted to buy Whitethorn House, turn it into a fancy hotel. He was going to build it up—add new wings, new buildings round the grounds, a golf course, all the rest; he’d big plans, this fella. Do you know what that would have done for Glenskehy?”
Sam nodded. “A load of new jobs.”
“More than that. Tourists coming through, new businesses coming in to look after them, people moving in to work for the new businesses. Young people staying on, instead of clearing out to Dublin as soon as they’re able. New houses being built, and decent roads. A school of our own again, instead of sending the children up to Rathowen. Work for teachers, for a doctor, for estate agents maybe—educated people. Not all at once, like, it would’ve taken years, but once the ball starts rolling . . . That was all we needed: just tha
t one push. That one chance. We’d have had Glenskehy coming back to life.”