You’re not allowed to go out with anyone on your squad-as O’Kelly elegantly puts it, no shagging on the company copier. “No,” I said. “Sam, no; it doesn’t have to be. Even if O’Kelly’s on for taking me back, there might not be an opening for years, and who knows where we’ll be by then? You could be running a squad of your own.” He didn’t smile. “If it comes down to it, we’ll just stay under the radar. It happens all the time, Sam. You know it does. Barry Norton and Elaine Leahy-” Norton and Leahy have been on Motor Vehicles for ten years and living together for eight of them. They pretend to carpool, and everyone including their super pretends not to know.
Sam shook his head, like a big dog waking up. “That’s not what I want,” he said. “All the best to them, and all, but I want this to be real. Maybe you’d be grand with having what they’ve got-I always figured that was one reason why you didn’t want to tell people about us, sure: so you could maybe come back to Murder, someday. But I’m not after a shag, or a fling, or some half-arsed part-time thing where we have to act like we’re…” He fumbled inside his coat; he was so exhausted that he was pawing at it as if he were drunk. “I’ve been carrying this around with me since two weeks after we started going out. Remember, we went for that walk round Howth Head? It was a Sunday?”
I remembered. A cool gray day, soft rain weightless in the air, wide smell of sea filling my chest; Sam’s mouth tasted of wild salt. We walked on the edges of high cliffs all afternoon and ate fish and chips on a bench for dinner, my legs were killing me, and it was the first time after Operation Vestal that I can remember feeling like me.
“The day after,” Sam said, “I bought this. On my lunch break.” He found what he’d been looking for and dropped it on the coffee table. It was a blue velvet ring box.
“Oh, Sam,” I said. “Oh, Sam.”
“I meant it,” Sam said. “This. You; us. I wasn’t just having a laugh.”
“Neither was I,” I said. That observation room; the look in his eyes. Was. “Never. I just… I got lost along the way, for a while. I’m so sorry, Sam. I fucked up every way there is, and I’m so sorry.”
“I love you, for Christ’s sake. You going off undercover like that, I nearly went mental-and I couldn’t even talk to anyone about it, because no one knew. I can’t…”
He trailed off, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. I knew there had to be some delicate way of asking this, but the edges of my vision kept warping and flicking and I couldn’t think straight. I wondered if there could have been a worse time for this conversation. “Sam,” I said, “I killed a person today. Yesterday; whatever. I don’t have any brain cells left. You’re going to have to spell it out: are you breaking up with me or proposing to me?” I was pretty sure which one it was. All I wanted was to get it over with, do the good-bye routine, and chug the rest of the brandy till I knocked myself out.
Sam gave the ring box a baffled look, as if he wasn’t sure how it had got there. “Jesus,” he said. “I didn’t… I’d it all planned: dinner somewhere nice, with a view, like. And champagne. But I suppose-I mean, now that…”
He picked up the box, opened it. I couldn’t catch up; the only thing that registered was that he didn’t seem to be dumping me, and that the relief was purer and more painful than I could have imagined. Sam disentangled himself from the sofa and got down on one knee, clumsily, on the floor.
“Right,” he said, and held out the box to me. He was white and wide-eyed; he looked as stunned as I was. “Will you marry me?”
The only thing I wanted to do was laugh-not at him, just at the sheer screaming pitch of crazy that day had managed to hit. I was scared that if I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. “I know,” Sam said, and swallowed, “I know it’d mean you couldn’t come back to Murder-not without special permission, and…”
“And neither of us is going to get any special treatment any time soon,” I said. Daniel’s voice brushed along my cheek like dark feathers, like a long night wind coming down from some far mountain. Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
“Yeah. If… God. If you want to think about it…” Another swallow. “You don’t need to decide right now, sure. I know tonight’s not the best moment for… But maybe it needed doing. Sooner or later, I need to know.”
The ring was a simple one, a slim hoop with one round diamond glittering like a dewdrop. I had never in my life pictured an engagement ring on my finger. I thought of Lexie slipping hers off in a dark room, leaving it beside the bed she had shared with Chad, and I felt the difference slide into the crack between us like a narrow blade: I couldn’t put this on without knowing that it would stay on, for good.
“I want you to be happy,” Sam said. That stunned look had faded out of his eyes; they were clear and unfaltering on mine. “Whatever that takes. There’s no point if you’re not going to be… If you can’t be happy without coming back on the squad, then tell me.”
There’s so little mercy in this world. Lexie sliced straight through everyone who got between her and the door, people she had laughed with, worked with, lain down with. Daniel, who loved her like his blood, sat beside her and watched her die, sooner than allow a siege on his spellbound castle. Frank took me by the shoulders and steered me straight into something that he knew could eat me alive. Whitethorn House let me into its secret chambers and healed my wounds, and in exchange I set my careful charges and I blew it to smithereens. Rob, my partner, my shieldmate, my closest friend, ripped me out of his life and threw me away because he wanted me to sleep with him and I did it. And when we had all finished clawing chunks off each other, Sam, who had every right to give me the finger and walk away for good, stayed because I held out my hand and asked him to.
“I want to go back to Murder,” I said, “but it doesn’t need to be now. It doesn’t even need to be soon. Someday, sooner or later, one of us will do something brilliant and we’ll have all the brownie points in the world, and then we’ll ask for special permission.”
“And if we don’t? If we never do anything brilliant, or if they say no anyway. Then what?”
That wing brush again, along the line of my jaw. To go consenting.
“Then,” I said, “I’ll survive. And you’ll have to put up with me bitching about Maher for the rest of our lives.” I stretched out my hand to Sam and I saw the look that was dawning in his eyes, and as he reached over to put the ring on my finger I realized there was no jagged black terror falling through me this time, no wild scream at the irrevocable thing inches away and rising, I wasn’t frightened at all; the only thing I felt was sure.
Later, when we were cocooned in the duvet and the sky outside was turning salmon-colored, Sam said, “There’s one more thing I need to ask you, and I’m not sure how to do it.”
“Ask away,” I said. “Comes with the territory.” I waved my left hand at him. The ring looked good on there. It even fit.
“No,” Sam said. “Something serious.”
I figured at this point I was ready for anything. I turned over on my stomach and propped myself up so I could look at him properly.
“Rob,” he said. “You and Rob. I saw the way you were together, the two of ye; how close you were. I always expected… I never thought I had a look in.”
This one I had not been ready for.
“I don’t know what went wrong between ye,” Sam said, “and I’m not asking. I’ve no right to know. Just… I’ve some idea what you went through, during Operation Vestal. And after. I wasn’t trying to be nosy, nothing like that; but I was there.”
He looked up at me, steady gray eyes, unblinking. There was nothing I could say; my breath was gone.
It was that night with the headlights, the night I went to get Rob at the crime scene. I knew him well enough to know that otherwise he would disintegrate, just smash into a million pieces, but not well enough to guess that he would do it anyway, and that all I had done was draw the flak my way. We did something good; I thought that meant no damage could come of it. It’s occurred to me since that I may be a lot dumber than I look. If I learned one thing in Murder, it’s that innocence isn’t enough.
I’m not Lexie, I’m not clockwork, specially not when I’m wrecked and stressed and wretched. By the time the terrible sinking feeling kicked in, I had moved to DV, Rob had been bounced into bureaucratic limbo somewhere and all our bridges were burned to bitter ash; he had gone so far away I couldn’t even see him on the other side. I didn’t tell anyone. I got the boat to England before dawn one sleety Saturday and was back in my dark flat that night-the plane would have been faster but I couldn’t take it, the thought of sitting still for an hour each way, squashed elbow to elbow between strangers. I walked up and down the deck of the boat instead. On the way back the sleet came down harder, soaked me to the bone; if there had been anyone else on deck they would have
