It took so long. Daniel’s free hand coming up in slow motion, a long fluid arc, to brace the gun. An immense underwater silence filling the room, all the sirens had fallen away, Justin’s mouth was stretched wide but I couldn’t hear anything coming out; the only sound in the world was the flat click of Daniel cocking the revolver. Abby’s hands going out to him, starfished, her hair swinging up. I had so much time, time to see Justin’s head going towards his knees and to swing my gun down to the chest shot opening up, time to watch Daniel’s hands tightening around the Webley and to remember what they had felt like on my shoulders, those hands, big and warm and capable. I had time to recognize this feeling from so long ago, remember the acrid smell of panic off Dealer Boy, the steady rush of blood between my fingers; the realization of how easy it was, bleeding to death, how simple, how effortless. Then the world exploded.
I read somewhere that the last word on every crashed airplane’s black box, the last thing the pilot says when he knows he’s about to die, is “Mammy.” When all the world and all your life are ripping away from you at the speed of light, that’s the one thing that stays yours. It terrified me, the thought that if someday a suspect got a knife to my throat, if my life shrank to one split second, there might be nothing left inside me to say, no one to call. But what I said, small in the hair-thin silence between Daniel’s shot and mine, was “Sam.”
Daniel didn’t say a word. The impact sent him staggering backwards and the gun dropped from his hand, hit the floor with an ugly thud. Somewhere broken glass was falling, a sweet impervious tinkle. I thought I saw a hole like a cigarette burn, in his white shirt, but I was looking at his face. There was no pain on it, no fear, nothing like that; he didn’t even look startled. His eyes were focused on something—I’ll never know what—behind my shoulder. He looked like a steeplechaser or a gymnast, landing perfectly out of the final death-defying leap: intent, tranquil, gone past every limit, holding back nothing; certain.
“No,” Abby said, flat and final as an order. Her skirt fluttered, gay in the sunlight, as she leaped for him. Then Daniel blinked and crumpled sideways, slowly, and there was nothing behind Justin except a clean white wall.
25
The next few minutes are shreds of nightmare spliced together with great blank patches. I know I ran, slid on fallen glass and kept running, trying to get to Daniel. I know Abby, crouched over him, fought like a cat to keep me off, wild-eyed, clawing. I remember blood smeared down her T-shirt, the boom echoing through the house as someone broke the front door open, men’s voices shouting, feet pounding. Hands under my arms, pulling me back; I twisted and kicked till they gave me a hard shake and my eyes cleared and I recognized Frank’s face close to mine, Cassie it’s me stop relax it’s over. Sam shoving him away, his hands rough with panic all over me, checking for bullet holes, fingers coming away bloody Is that yours is that yours? I didn’t know. Sam turning me, grabbing at me, his voice finally sagging with relief: You’re grand, you’re OK, he missed . . . Someone said something about the window. Someone sobbing. Too much light, colors so bright you could cut yourself, too many voices, ambulance, get an—
Finally someone steered me out front and into a marked car, slammed the door. I sat there for a long time, looking at the cherry trees, at the quiet sky slowly dimming, at the distant dark curves of the hills. I didn’t think about anything at all.
* * *
There are procedures for this, for officer-involved shootings. There are procedures for everything, in the force, going carefully unmentioned till the day they’re needed at last and the keeper turns the rusty key, blows dust off the file. I had never met a cop who had shot anyone. There was no one who could have told me what to expect, or how to do this, or that it was all going to be OK.
Byrne and Doherty got stuck taking me to headquarters, in Phoenix Park, where Internal Affairs work in showroom offices and a thick puffy cloud of defensiveness. Byrne drove; the slump of his shoulders said, clear as a voice balloon coming out of his head, I knew something like this would happen. I sat in the back like a suspect and Doherty tried to be surreptitious about watching me in the rearview mirror. He was practically drooling: this was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, plus gossip is good currency in our world and he had just won the lottery. My legs were so cold I could barely move them; I was cold right down to my bones, as if I’d fallen into a freezing lake. At every traffic light Byrne stalled the car and swore morosely.
Everyone hates IA—the Rat Squad, people call them, the quislings, various other less flattering things—but they were good to me, that day at least. They were detached and professional and very gentle, like nurses going through their expert rituals around some patient who had been in a terrible, disfiguring accident. They took my badge—“for the duration of the investigation,” someone said soothingly; it felt like they had shaved my head. They peeled off the bandage and unclipped the mike. They took my gun like evidence, which of course it was, careful latex fingers dropping it into an evidence bag, sealing it, labeling it with neat marker strokes. A Bureau tech with her hair in a smooth brown bun like a Victorian maid’s stuck a needle in my arm, deftly, and took a blood sample to test for alcohol and drugs; I remembered, vaguely, Rafe pouring and the smooth cool of the glass, but I couldn’t remember taking even one sip, and I thought this had to be a good thing. She swabbed my hands for gunshot residue and I noticed, as if I were watching someone else from a long way away, that my hands weren’t shaking, they were rock steady, and that a month of Whitethorn House cooking had softened the hollows by my wrist bones. “There,” the tech said comfortingly, “quick and painless,” but I was busy staring at my hands and it wasn’t till hours later, when I was sitting on a neutral-colored lobby sofa under innocuous art waiting for someone to come take me somewhere else, that I realized where I’d heard that tone before: out of my own mouth. Not to victims, not to families; to the others. To men who’d left their wives half blinded, to women who’d scalded their toddlers with boiling water, to killers, in the light-headed disbelieving moments after everything came pouring out, I had said in that infinitely gentle voice, It’s OK, you’re OK. Breathe. The worst part’s over.
Outside the lab window the sky had gone black, a tainted rusty black smeared orange with city lights, and there was a thin breakable moon riding low among the treetops in the park. A shiver rocked my spine like a long cold wind. Cop cars speeding through Glenskehy and then away again, John Naylor’s eyes pure with rage, and night coming down hard.
I wasn’t supposed to talk to Sam or Frank, not till all of us had been interviewed. I told the tech I had to go to the bathroom and gave her a woman-to-woman look to explain why I was taking my jacket with me. In the cubicle I flushed the jacks and while the water was still running—everything about IA makes you paranoid, the thick carpets, the hush—I texted Frank and Sam, fast. Someone NEEDS to keep an eye on the house.
I set my phone to silent and sat on the toilet lid, smelling sick fake-flower air freshener and waiting, for as long as I could get away with, but neither of them answered. Their phones were probably off; they would be doing furious full-on interviewing of their own, expertly juggling Abby and Rafe and Justin between them, having quick undertone conferences in corridors, asking questions over and over again with relentless, ferocious patience. Maybe—my heart flipped upwards, punched at the base of my throat—maybe one of them was at the hospital, talking to Daniel. White face, IV lines, people in scrubs moving fast. I tried to remember exactly where the bullet had hit him, ran through it over and over in my head, but the film blinked and stuttered and I couldn’t see. That tiny nod; the leap of his gun barrel; recoil slamming up my arms; those grave gray eyes, pupils only a little dilated. Then there was just Abby’s voice flat and adamant No; the blank wall where Daniel had been standing, and silence, huge and roaring in my ears.
The tech handed me back to the IA guys and they told me that if I was feeling a little shaken up I could wait till th
e next day to give my statement, but I said no, thanks, I was fine. They explained to me that I had the right to have a lawyer or a union rep present and I said no, thanks, I was fine. Their interview room was smaller than ours, barely room to push your chair back from the table, and cleaner: no graffiti, no cigarette burns in the carpet, no gouges in the walls where someone had gone alpha gorilla with a chair. Both of the IA guys looked like cartoon accountants: gray suits, bald spots, no lips, matching rimless glasses. One of them leaned against the wall behind my shoulder—even if you know all the tactics inside out, they still work on you—and the other one sat across from me. He adjusted his notebook fussily so that it lined up with the edge of the table, turned on his tape recorder and did the preliminary spiel. “Now,” he said. “In your own words, Detective.”
“Daniel March,” I said; they were the only words that would come out. “Is he going to be all right?” and I knew even before he told me, I knew when his eyelids flickered and his eyes slid away from mine.
The Bureau tech—her name was Gillian—drove me home sometime late that night, when the IA twins had finished taking my statement. I told them what you’d expect: the truth, as well as I could put it into words, nothing but the truth, not the whole truth. No, I didn’t feel that I’d had any option except to fire my weapon. No, I had had no opportunity to attempt a nonlethal disabling shot. Yes, I had believed my life was in danger. No, there had been no prior indication that Daniel was dangerous. No, he hadn’t been our prime suspect, long list of reasons why not—it took me a second to remember them, they felt so long ago and far away, part of a different life. No, I didn’t believe it had been remiss of me or Frank or Sam to leave a gun in the house, it was standard undercover practice to leave illegal materials in place for the duration of the investigation, we had had no way to remove it without blowing the whole operation. Yes, in retrospect that decision did appear to have been unwise. They told me we’d talk again soon—they made it sound like a threat—and set up an appointment for me with the shrink, who was going to just about wet his polyester blend over this one.
Gillian needed my clothes—Lexie’s clothes—to test for gunshot residue. She stood at the door of my flat, hands folded, watching me while I changed: she had to be sure that what she saw was what she got, no switching out the T-shirt for a clean one. My own clothes felt cold and too stiff, like they didn’t belong to me. The flat was cold too, it had a faint dank smell, and there was a thin film of dust on all the surfaces. Sam hadn’t come by in a while.
I gave Gillian my clothes and she folded them away, efficiently, in big evidence bags. At the door she hesitated, hands full; for the first time she looked unsure, and I realized she was probably younger than me. “Are you going to be all right on your own?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. I had said it enough times, that day, that I was thinking of getting a T-shirt printed.
“Is there anyone who could come stay with you?”
“I’ll ring my boyfriend,” I said, “he’ll come over,” even though I wasn’t sure that was true; I wasn’t sure at all.
* * *
When Gillian left carrying the last of Lexie Madison, I sat on my windowsill with a glass of brandy—I hate brandy, but I was pretty sure I was officially in shock in about four different ways, and besides it was the only booze in the flat—and watched the lighthouse beam blinking, serene and regular as a heartbeat, out over the bay. It was some ungodly hour of the night, but I couldn’t imagine sleeping; in the faint yellow light from my bedside lamp the futon looked vaguely threatening, overstuffed with squashy heat and bad dreams. I wanted to ring Sam so badly it was like being dehydrated, but I didn’t have anything left inside me to handle it, not that night, if he didn’t answer.
Somewhere far away a house alarm screamed briefly, till someone switched it off and the silence swelled up again and hissed at me. Off to the south the lights of Dun Laoghaire pier were strung out neat as Christmas lights; beyond them I thought I saw, for a second—trick of the eyes—the silhouette of the Wicklow mountains, against the dark sky. There were only a few stray cars passing down the strand road, that time of night. The smooth sweeps of their headlights grew and faded and I wondered where those people were going, late and solitary, what they were thinking about in the warm bubbles of their cars; what delicate, hard-won, irreplaceable layers of lives were wrapped around them.
I don’t think about my parents much. I’ve only got a handful of memories, and I don’t want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut. That night, though, I spread them all on the windowsill like frail pictures cut from tissue paper and went through them, one by one. My mother a nightlight shadow on the side of my bed, just a slim waist and a ponytailed fall of curls, a hand on my forehead and a smell I’ve never found anywhere else and a low sweet voice singing me to sleep: A la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener, j’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baignée . . . She was younger then than I am now; she never made thirty. My father sitting on a green hill with me and teaching me to tie my shoelaces, his worn brown shoes, his strong hands with a scrape on one knuckle, taste of cherry ice pop on my mouth and both of us giggling at the mess I made. The three of us lying on the sofa under a duvet watching Bagpuss on TV, my father’s arms holding us together in a big warm tangled bundle, my mother’s head nudged under his chin and my ear on his chest so I could feel the buzz of his laugh in my bones. My mother putting on her makeup on her way out to a gig, me sprawled on their bed watching her and twisting the duvet cover around my thumb and asking, How did you find Daddy? And her smiling, in the mirror, a small private smile into her own smoky eyes: I’ll tell you that story when you’re older. When you’ve got a little girl of your own. Someday.
* * *
The sky was just starting to turn gray, far out over the horizon, and I was wishing I had a gun to take to the firing range and wondering whether a really serious swig of brandy would let me doze off on the windowsill, when my buzzer rang; a tiny, tentative flick of a ring, so quick I thought I’d imagined it.
It was Sam. He didn’t take his hands out of his coat pockets and I didn’t touch him. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said, “but I figured, if you were awake anyway . . .”
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “How did it go?”
“Like you’d expect. They’re in bits, they hate our guts and they’ll be giving us nothing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I figured that.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, automatically.
He glanced around the room—too tidy, no plates in the sink, futon still folded up—and blinked hard, like his eyelids were scratchy. “That text you sent me,” he said. “I did get on to Byrne, soon as I found the message. He said he’d keep an eye on the place, but . . . You know what he’s like. All he did was drive by when he got around to it, on his night round.”
Something gauzy and dark swept up behind me, looming, trembling at my shoulder like a great cat ready to pounce. “John Naylor,” I said. “What did he do?”
Sam rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “The firemen think it was petrol. We left crime-scene tape all around the house, but . . . The door was broken in, sure; and that window at the back, the one Daniel shot out. Your man just walked through the tape and straight in.”
A pillar of fire on the mountainside. Abby and Rafe and Justin alone in grimy interview rooms, Daniel and Lexie on cold steel. “Did they save anything?”
“By the time Byrne spotted it, and then by the time the fire service got there . . . It’s miles from anything.”
“I know,” I said. Somehow I was sitting down on the futon. I could feel the map of Whitethorn House branded on my bones: the shape of the newel post printed in my palm, the curves of Lexie’s bedstead down my spine, the slants and turns of the staircase in my fee
t, my body turned into a shimmering treasure map for a lost island. What Lexie had started, I had finished for her. Between the two of us, we had razed Whitethorn House to rubble and smoking ash. Maybe that was what she had wanted me for, all along.
“Anyway,” Sam said. “I just thought you’d better hear it from me, instead of . . . I don’t know, on the morning news. I know the way you felt about that house.” Even then, there wasn’t a spark of bitterness in his voice, but he didn’t come to me and he didn’t sit down. He still had his coat on.
“The others,” I said. “Do they know?” For a dizzy second, before I remembered how much they hated me now and how much right they had, I thought: I should tell them. They should hear it from me.