thought I was crying, but I wasn’t, not even once.
Sam was the only person I could stand to be around, then. Everyone else was on the other side of a thick, wavy glass wall, they yammered and gestured and pulled faces and it took all the energy I had to work out what they wanted from me and make the right noises back. Sam was the only one I could hear. He has a beautiful voice: a country voice, slow and calm, deep and rich as earth. That voice was the one thing that made it through the glass and felt real.
When we met for coffee that Monday after work, he gave me a long intent look and then said, “You look like you’ve the flu; it’s going around. I’ll bring you home, will I?” He tucked me into bed, went to the shops to buy food, came back and cooked me stew. Every night that week he made me dinner and told terrible jokes till I laughed just at the hopeful look on his face. Six weeks later, I was the one who kissed him first. When those square gentle hands touched my skin I could feel ripped cells healing. I never fell for Sam’s big-thick-bogger act, I was always sure there was more; but it had never once occurred to me-I told you I’m dumber than I look-that he had known, every step of the way, and known to leave it.
“The only bit I need to know,” Sam said, “is whether it’s over, for you; the whole thing. Whether… I can’t be wondering, our whole lives, what would happen if Rob got his head together and came back wanting to… I know how hard it was for you. I tried to-give you space, I suppose they call it; to figure things out. But now, if we’re really engaged… I just need to know.”
The first sunlight was exploding onto his face, turning him grave and clear-eyed as some tired apostle in a window. “It’s over,” I said. “It really is, Sam. It’s all over now.”
I laid a hand on his cheek; it was so bright that for a second I thought it was burning me, a pure painless fire. “Good,” he said, on a sigh, and his hand came up to cup the back of my head and pull me down on his chest. “That’s good,” and his eyes were closing before he finished the sentence.
I slept till two in the afternoon. Sometime in there Sam dragged himself out of bed and kissed me good-bye and closed the door softly behind him, but nobody rang to tell me to get my arse into work, presumably because nobody had managed to disentangle what squad I was on right then or whether I was suspended or whether I still had a job at all. When I finally woke up I considered calling in sick, but I wasn’t sure who to call-Frank, probably, but he was unlikely to be in a conversational mood. I decided to let someone else figure this one out. Instead I headed up to Sandymount village, kept my eyes off the newspaper headlines, bought food, went home and ate most of it, and then took a very long walk on the beach.
It was a sunny, lazy afternoon. The promenade was full of old people wandering along with their faces turned up to the sun, couples leaning into each other, overexcited toddlers tumbling along like big sweet bumblebees. I recognized a lot of people. Sandymount’s still holding onto being that kind of place, where you know faces and swap smiles and buy homemade perfume from the neighbors’ kids; it’s one of the reasons I live there, but that evening it felt strange and disconcerting all the same. I felt like I had been away too long for that, long enough that the shop fronts should all have been different, the houses painted new colors, the familiar faces grown up, grown old, gone.
The tide was out. I took off my shoes, rolled up my jeans and walked out onto the sand till the water was ankle-deep. One moment from the day before fell through my head, over and over: Rafe’s voice, soft and dangerous as snow, saying to Justin, You bastard fuck.
This is what I could have done, in that last second before it all exploded: I could have said, “Justin? You stabbed me?” He would have answered. It would have been there on the tape, and sooner or later Frank or Sam would have found a way to make him say it again, under caution this time.
Probably I’ll never know why I didn’t do it. Mercy, maybe; one drop of it, too little and too late. Or-this is the one Frank would have picked-too much emotional involvement, even then: Whitethorn House and the five of them still dusted over me like pollen, still turning me glittering and defiant, us against the world. Or maybe, and I like to hope it was this one, because the truth is more intricate and less attainable than I used to understand, a bright illusive place reached by twisting back roads as often as by straight avenues, and this was the closest I could come.
When I got home Frank was sitting on my front steps with one leg stretched out, teasing the next-door cat with an untied shoelace and whistling “Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her” through his front teeth. He looked terrible, crumpled and bleary-eyed and in serious need of a shave. When he saw me he folded his leg back under him and stood up, sending the cat whisking off into the bushes.
“Detective Maddox,” he said. “You didn’t show for work today. Is there a problem?”
“I wasn’t sure who I work for right now,” I said. “If anyone. Plus I slept it out. I’m owed a few days’ holiday; I’ll take one of those.”
Frank sighed. “Never mind. I’ll sort something out-you can count as one of mine for another day. Starting tomorrow, though, you’re DV again.” He stood aside to let me open the door. “It’s been very.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That it has.”
He followed me up the stairs into my flat and headed straight for the cooker-there was still half a pot of coffee left over from my unidentified meal earlier on. “That’s what I like to see,” he said, finding a mug on the draining board. “A detective who’s always prepared. You having some?”
“I’ve had loads,” I said. “Go for it.” I couldn’t work out what he was there for: to debrief me, kick my arse, kiss and make up, what. I hung up my jacket and started pulling the sheets off the futon, so we could both sit down without having to get too close.
“So,” Frank said, shoving his mug into the microwave and hitting buttons. “You hear about the house?”
“Sam told me.”
I felt his head turn; I kept my back to him, hauling the futon into its sofa version. After a moment he started the microwave whirring. “Well,” he said. “Easy come, easy go. It was probably insured. You talk to IA yet?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “They’re thorough.”
“They come down hard on you?”
I shrugged. “No more than you’d expect. How about you?”
“We’ve got history,” Frank said, without elaborating. The microwave beeped; he got the sugar bowl out of its cupboard and dumped three spoons in his coffee. Frank doesn’t take sugar; he was fighting hard to stay awake. “The shoot’ll come back good. I had a listen to the tapes: three shots, the first two a fair distance from you-the computer lads will be able to work out exactly how far-and then the third right by the mike, nearly blew my ear- drums. And I had a little chat with my mate in the Bureau, too, once they’d finished with the scene. Apparently the trajectory of one of Daniel’s bullets came up almost a perfect mirror image of yours. No question: you only fired after he’d shot directly at you.”
“I know,” I said. I folded the sheets and threw them in the wardrobe. “I was there.”
He leaned back against the counter, took a mouthful of coffee and watched me. “Don’t let the IA boys rattle you.”
“This was a mess, Frank,” I said. “The media are going to be all over it, and the brass are going to want someone to take the fall.”
“For what? The shoot was textbook. The house is on Byrne: he was warned to look after it, he didn’t follow through. Everything else along the way, we’ve got the ultimate defense: it worked. We got our man, even if we didn’t get a chance to arrest him. Just as long as you don’t do anything stupid-anything else stupid-we should all be able to walk away from this.”
I sat down on the futon and found my smokes. I couldn’t tell whether he was reassuring me or threatening me, or maybe a little of both. “What about you?” I asked, carefully. “If you’ve got history with IA…”
Flick of an eyebrow. “Nice to know you care. I’ve also got leverage, if it comes down to that.”
That tape-me disobeying a direct order, telling him I wasn’t coming in-flashed between us, solid as if he had tossed it onto the table. It wouldn’t get him off the hook-you’re supposed to be able to control your squad-but it would drag me in there with him, and it might muddy the waters enough to let him wriggle away. In that moment I knew that if Frank wanted to pin this whole mess on me, blast me right out of my career, he could do it; and that he probably had every right.
I saw the tiny flash of amusement, in those bloodshot eyes: he knew what I was thinking. “Leverage,” I
