Four or five years back: just before the attacks on Whitethorn House began. He was matching my profile immaculately, piece by piece. The thought of Whitethorn House turned into a hotel made me feel a lot better about the state of Naylor’s face, but still: you couldn’t help being pulled in by the passion in his voice, seeing the vibrant vision he was in love with, the village turned bustling and hopeful again, alive.
“But Simon March wouldn’t sell?” Sam asked.
Naylor shook his head, a slow angry roll; winced, touched his swollen jaw. “One man, on his own in a house that could fit dozens. What good was it to him? But he wouldn’t sell. It’s been nothing but bad news since the day it was built, that house, and he held onto it for dear life sooner than let it do anyone a scrap of good. And the same when he died: the young fella hadn’t been near Glenskehy since he was a child, he has no family, he had no need for the place, but he held on. That’s what they are, the Marches. That’s what they’ve been all along. What they want, they keep, and the rest of the world be damned.”
“It’s the family home,” Sam pointed out. “Maybe they love it.”
Naylor’s head came up and he stared at Sam, pale blazing eyes amid the swelling and the dark bruises. “If a man makes something,” he said, “he has a duty to look after it. That’s what a decent man does. If you make a child, it’s yours to care for, as long as it lives; you’ve no right to kill it to suit yourself. If you make a village, it’s yours to look after; you do what it takes to keep that place going. You don’t have the right to stand by and watch it die, just so you can keep hold of a house.”
“I’m actually with him on this one,” Frank said, beside me. “Maybe we’ve got more in common than we thought.”
I barely heard him. I had got one thing wrong in my profile, after all: this man would never have stabbed Lexie for being pregnant with his baby, or even for living in Whitethorn House. I had thought he was an avenger, obsessed with the past, but he was a lot more complicated and more ferocious than that. It was the future he was obsessed with, his home’s future, seeping away like water. The past was the dark conjoined twin wrapped round that future, steering it, shaping it.
“Is that all you wanted from the Marches?” Sam asked quietly. “For them to do the decent thing—sell up, give Glenskehy a chance?”
After a long moment Naylor nodded, a stiff, reluctant jerk.
“And you thought the only way to make them do it was to put the frighteners on them.”
Another nod. Frank whistled, softly, through his teeth. I was holding my breath.
“No better way to frighten them off,” Sam said, thoughtful and matter-of-fact, “than to give one of them a little cut, one night. Nothing serious, not even meant to hurt her. Just to let them know: you’re not welcome here.”
Naylor’s mug went down hard on the table and he shoved his chair back, arms folding tight across his chest. “I never hurt anyone. Never.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Someone handed out a fair old beating to three of the Whitethorn House people, the same night you got those bruises.”
“That was a fight. An honest fight—and they were three to one against me. Do you not see the difference? I could have killed Simon March a dozen times over, if I’d wanted to. I never touched him.”
“Simon March was old, sure. You knew he was bound to die within a few years, and you knew there was a decent chance his heirs would sell up, sooner than move out to Glenskehy. You could afford to wait.”
Naylor started to say something, but Sam kept talking, level and heavy, cutting across him. “But once young Daniel and his mates arrived, it was a whole different story. They’re going nowhere, and a bit of spray paint wasn’t scaring them. So you had to up the stakes, didn’t you?”
“No. I never—”
“You had to tell them, loud and clear: get out, if you know what’s good for you. You’d seen Lexie Madison out walking, late at night—maybe you’d followed her before, had you?”
“I don’t—”
“You were coming out of the pub. You were drunk. You had a knife on you. You thought about the Marches letting Glenskehy die, and you went up there to end it once and for all. Maybe you were just going to threaten her, is that it?”
“No—”
“Then how did it happen, John? You tell me. How?”
Naylor shot forwards, his fists coming up and his lip pulling into a furious snarl; he was on the edge of going for Sam. “You give me the sick. They whistled for you, them up at the house, and you came running like a good dog. They go whining to you about the nasty peasant who doesn’t know his place, and you bring me in here and accuse me of stabbing one of them—That’s shite. I want them out of Glenskehy—and believe you me, they’ll be out—but I never thought about hurting any of them. Never. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. When they pack up their things and go, I want to be there to wave them good-bye.”
It should have been a letdown, but it went like speed through my blood, pounded high up in my throat, took my breath away. It felt—and I shifted against the glass, kept my face angled away from Frank so he wouldn’t see this—it felt like a reprieve.
Naylor was still going. “Those dirty bastards used you to put me in my place, just like they’ve been using the police and everyone else for three hundred years. I’ll tell you this much for nothing, Detective, the same as I’d tell whoever gave you that load of old shite about a lynch mob. You can look in Glenskehy all you like, but you’ll find nothing. It was no one from that village stabbed that young one. I know it comes hard to go after the rich instead of the poor, but if it’s a criminal you’re after and not a scapegoat, you look up at Whitethorn House. We don’t breed them round my way.”
He folded his arms, tilted his chair onto its back legs and started singing “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” Frank eased back away from the glass and laughed, quietly, to himself.
* * *
Sam tried for more than an hour. He went through every incident of vandalism, one by one, going back four and a half years; listed the evidence linking Naylor to the rock and the fight, some of it solid—the bruises, my description—and some invented, fingerprints, handwriting analysis; came into the observation room, grabbed the evidence bags without looking at me or at Frank, and tossed them on the table in front of Naylor; threatened to arrest him for burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, everything short of murder. In exchange he got “The Croppy Boy,” “Four Green Fields” and, for a change of pace, “She Moved through the Fair.”
In the end he had to give up. There was a long time between the moment when he left Naylor in the interview room and the moment when he came into the observation room, evidence bags dangling from one hand and the exhaustion back on his face, deeper than ever.
“I thought that went well,” Frank said brightly. “You could even have got a confession on the vandalism, if you hadn’t gone for the big prize.”
Sam ignored him. “What do you think?” he asked me.
There was one off chance left, as far as I could see, one way Naylor could have snapped badly enough to stab Lexie: if he had been the baby’s father, and she had told him she was going to have an abortion. “I don’t know,” I said. “I genuinely don’t.”
“I don’t think he’s our boy,” Sam said. He dropped the evidence bags on the table and leaned heavily against it, head going back.
Frank did amazed. “You’re giving up on him because he held out for one morning? From where I’m standing, he looks good enough to eat: motive, opportunity, mind-set . . . Just because he tells a great story, you’re going to arrest him on some pissant vandalism charge and throw away your chance to have him on murder?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”
“Now,” Frank said, “we try it my way. Fair’s fair; your way got us nowhere. Cut Naylor loose, let Cassie see what she can get out of him on the antiques deal, and
see if that takes us any closer to the stabbing.”
“This man doesn’t give a damn about money,” Sam said, without looking at Frank. “What he cares about is his town, and the damage that’s been done to it by Whitethorn House.”
“So he’s got a cause. There’s nothing in this world more dangerous than a true believer. How far do you think he’d go for that cause?”
This is one of the things about fighting with Frank: he moves the goalposts faster than you can catch up, you keep losing track of what you were originally arguing about. I couldn’t tell whether he actually believed in this antiques caper, or whether it was just that he was ready to try anything, at this stage, to beat Sam.
Sam was starting to look dazed, like a boxer after taking too many punches. “I don’t think he’s a killer,” he said doggedly. “And I don’t see why you think he’s a fence. There’s nothing pointing to that.”
“Let’s ask Cassie,” Frank suggested. He was watching me carefully. Frank’s always been a gambler, but I wished I knew what was making him bet on this one. “What do you think, babe? Any chance I’m right about the antiques scam?”
In that second a million things went through my mind. The observation room I knew by heart, down to the stain on the carpet where I’d dropped a coffee cup two years back, and where I had become a visitor. My Detective Barbie clothes hanging in my wardrobe, Maher’s juicy morning throat-clearing routine. The others, waiting for me in the library. The cool lily-of-the-valley smell of my room in Whitethorn House, wrapping around me soft as gauze.
“You could be,” I said, “yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Sam, who in fairness had had a long day already, finally lost it. “Jesus, Cassie! What the hell? You can’t seriously believe in that mad crap. What side are you on?”
“Let’s try not to think in those terms,” Frank put in, virtuously. He had arranged himself comfortably against a wall, hands in his pockets, to watch the action. “We’re all on the same side here.”
“Back off, Frank,” I said sharply, before Sam could punch his lights out. “And Sam, I’m on Lexie’s side. Not Frank’s, not yours, just hers. OK?”
“That right there is exactly what I was afraid of.” Sam caught the startled look on my face. “What, you thought it was just this tosspot”—Frank, who pointed to his chest and tried to look wounded—“that had me worried? He’s bad enough, God knows, but at least I can keep an eye on him. But this girl—On her side is a bad, bad place to be. Her housemates were on her side all the way, and if Mackey’s right, she was selling the lot of them down the river, not a bother on her. Her fella over in America was on her side, he loved her, and look what she did to him. The poor bastard’s a wreck. Have you seen that letter?”
“Letter?” I said, to Frank. “What letter?”
He shrugged. “Chad sent her a letter, care of my FBI friend. Very moving and all, but I’ve been through it with a fine-tooth comb and there’s nothing useful there. You don’t need distractions.”
“Jesus, Frank! If you’ve got something that tells me anything about her, anything at all—”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“Read it,” Sam said. His voice sounded raw at the edges and his face was white, white as it had been that first day at the crime scene. “You read that letter—I’ll give you a copy, if Mackey won’t. That fella Chad is bloody devastated. Four and a half years, it’s been, and he hasn’t gone out with another girl. He’ll probably never trust a woman again. How could he? He woke up one morning with his whole life in bits around him. Everything he dreamed about, gone up in smoke.”
“Unless you want that super of yours in here,” Frank said silkily, “I’d keep it down.”
Sam didn’t even hear him. “And don’t forget, she didn’t fall into North Carolina out of the sky. She was somewhere else before that, and for all we know somewhere else before that. Somewhere out there, there’s more people—God only knows how many—who’ll never be able to stop wondering where she is, whether she’s in a shallow grave in a dozen pieces, whether she went off the rails and ended up on the streets, whether she just never gave a damn about them to start with, what the hell happened to blow up their lives. All of them were on this girl’s side, and look what it did to them. Everyone who’s been on her side has ended up fucked, Cassie, everyone, and you’re going the same way.”
“I’m fine, Sam,” I said. His voice rolled over me like the fine edge of dawn haze, barely there, barely real.
“Let me ask you this. Your last serious boyfriend was just before you first went undercover, am I right? Aidan something?”
"Yeah,” I said. “Aidan O’Donovan.” He was good news, Aidan: smart, high octane, going places, an offbeat sense of humor that could make me laugh no matter how crap my day had been. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time.
“What happened to him?”
“We broke up,” I said. “While I was under.” For a second I saw Aidan’s eyes, the evening he dumped me. I was in a hurry, had to get back to my flat in time for a late-night meeting with the speed-bunny who ended up stabbing me a few months later. Aidan waited with me at my bus stop and when I looked down at him from the top deck of the bus, I think he might have been crying.
“Because you were under. Because that’s what happens.” Sam spun round to Frank: “What about you, Mackey? Have you got a wife? A girlfriend? Anything?”
“Are you asking me out?” Frank inquired. His voice sounded amused, but his eyes had narrowed. “Because I should warn you, I’m not a cheap date.”
“That’s a no. And that’s what I figured.” Sam whipped round to me again: “Just three weeks, Cassie, and look what’s happening to us. Is this what you want? What do you think happens to us if you head off for a year to do this fucked-up joke of an idea?”
“Let’s try this,” Frank said softly, very still against the wall. “You decide if there’s a problem on your side of the investigation, and I’ll decide if there’s a problem on mine. Is that OK with you?”
The look in his eyes had sent superintendents and drug lords scuttling for cover, but Sam didn’t even seem to notice it. “No, it’s not bloody OK. Your side of this investigation is a fucking disaster area, and if you can’t see that, then thank Jesus I can. I’ve got a suspect in that room, whether he’s our fella or not, and I found him through police work. What have you got? Three weeks of this insane bloody carry-on, all for nothing. And instead of cutting our losses, you’re trying to force us to up the ante and do something even more insane—”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything. I’m asking Cassie—who’s on this investigation as my undercover, remember, not your Murder detective—whether she’d be willing to take her assignment a step further.”
Long summer afternoons on the grass, the hum of bees and the lazy creak of the swing seat. Kneeling in the herb garden picking our harvest, soft rain and leaf-smoke in the air, scent of bruised rosemary and lavender on my hands. Wrapping Christmas presents on Lexie’s bedroom floor, snow falling past my window, while Rafe played carols on the piano and Abby harmonized from her room and the smell of gingerbread curled under my door.
Sam’s eyes and Frank’s on me, unblinking. Both of them had shut up; the silence in the room was sudden and deep and peaceful. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Naylor had moved on to “Avondale” and down the corridor Quigley was being aggrieved about something. I thought of me and Rob watching suspects from this observation room, laughing shoulder to shoulder along the corridor, disintegrating like a meteor in Operation Vestal’s poison air, crashing and burning, and I felt nothing at all, nothing except the walls opening up and falling away around me, light as petals. Sam’s eyes were huge and dark as if I had hit him, and Frank was watching me in a way that made me think if I had any sense I’d be scared, but all I could feel was every muscle loosening like I was eight years old and cartwheeling myself dizzy on some green hillside, like I could dive a thousand miles throug
h cool blue water without once needing to breathe. I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.