turns fine and taut as a surfer’s, when you spend every second on the shifting edge of a fast risky wave. I told him how afterwards I never shared a spliff with my mates or took E in a club again, because no high could ever compare. I told him how damn good at it I was, a natural, better than I’ll be at DV in a million years.
When I finished, Sam was looking at me with a worried little furrow between his eyebrows. “What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying you want to transfer back into Undercover?”
He had taken his hands off mine. I looked at him, sitting across the sofa with his hair rucked up on one side, frowning at me. “No,” I said, “that’s not it,” and watched his face clear in relief. “That’s not it at all.”
This is the part I didn’t tell Sam: bad stuff happens to undercovers. A few of them get killed. Most lose friends, marriages, relationships. A couple turn feral, cross over to the other side so gradually that they never see it happening till it’s too late, and end up with discreet, complicated early-retirement plans. Some, and never the ones you’d think, lose their nerve-no warning, they just wake up one morning and all at once it hits them what they’re doing, and they freeze like tightrope walkers who’ve looked down. This guy McCall: he’d infiltrated an IRA splinter group and nobody thought he even knew what fear was, till one evening he phoned in from an alleyway outside a pub. He couldn’t go back in there, he said, and he couldn’t walk away because his legs wouldn’t stop shaking. He was crying. Come get me, he said; I want to go home. When I met him, he was working in Records. And some go the other way, the most lethal way of all: when the pressure gets to be too much, it’s not their nerve that breaks, it’s their fear. They lose the capacity to be afraid, even when they should be. These can’t ever go home again. They’re like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were. Some people are undercovers all the way to the bone; the job has taken them whole.
I was never afraid of getting killed and I was never afraid of losing my nerve. My kind of courage holds up best under fire; it’s different dangers, more refined and insidious ones, that shake me. But the other things: I worried about those. Frank told me once-and I don’t know whether he’s right or not, and I didn’t tell Sam this either-that all the best undercovers have a dark thread woven into them, somewhere.
3
So, on Sunday evening, Sam and I went to Dublin Castle for Frank’s council of war. Dublin Castle is where the Murder squad works. I had cleared out my desk there on another long cool evening, in autumn: stacked my paperwork in neat piles and labeled each pile with a Post-it, thrown away the cartoons stuck to my computer and the chewed pens and old Christmas cards and stale M amp;Ms in my desk drawers, turned off the light and closed the door behind me.
Sam picked me up. He was very quiet. He had been up and out early that morning, so early that the flat was still dark when he leaned over to kiss me good-bye. I didn’t ask him about the case. If he had found anything good, even the slimmest lead, he would have told me.
“Don’t let your man pressure you,” he said, in the car. “Into doing anything you don’t want to.”
“Come on,” I said. “When have I ever let anyone pressure me into anything?”
Sam adjusted his rearview mirror, carefully. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
When he unlocked the door, the smell of the building came at me like a shout: an old, elusive smell, damp and smoke and lemon, nothing like the antiseptic tang of DV in the new building up in Phoenix Park. I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories, but every step hit me straight in the gut with something: me running down those stairs with a bunch of files in each hand and an apple caught between my teeth, my partner and me high- fiving each other outside that door after getting our first confession in that interview room; the two of us double- teaming the superintendent down that hallway, one in each ear, trying to hassle him into giving us more overtime. It seemed like the corridors had an Escher look, the walls all tilting in subtle, seasick ways, but I couldn’t focus my eyes enough to figure out exactly how.
“How’re you doing?” Sam asked quietly.
“Starving,” I said. “Whose idea was it to do this at dinnertime?”
Sam smiled, relieved, and gave my hand a quick squeeze. “We don’t have an incident room yet,” he said. “Till we decide… well, how we’re doing this; where we’re working out of.” Then he opened the door of the Murder squad room.
Frank was straddling a backwards chair at the head of the room, in front of the big whiteboard, and all his reassurances about a casual chat between him and me and Sam had been bollocks. Cooper, the state pathologist, and O’Kelly, the superintendent of the Murder squad, were sitting at desks on opposite sides of the room with their arms folded, wearing identical narky looks. This should have been funny-Cooper looks like a heron and O’Kelly looks like a bulldog with a comb-over-but actually it gave me a very bad feeling. Cooper and O’Kelly hate each other; getting them in the same room for any length of time takes a lot of skilled persuasion and a couple of bottles of pretty serious wine. For some cryptic reason of his own, Frank had pulled out all the stops to get them both there. Sam shot me a wary, warning glance. He hadn’t been expecting this either.
“Maddox,” O’Kelly said, managing to make it sound injured. O’Kelly never had any use for me when I was on Murder, but the second I applied for a transfer, I somehow morphed into the serpent’s-tooth protegee who snubbed years of devoted mentoring and buggered off to DV. “How’s life in the minor leagues?”
“All sunshine and flowers, sir,” I said. When I’m tense, I get flippant. “Evening, Dr. Cooper.”
“Always a pleasure, Detective Maddox,” said Cooper. He ignored Sam. Cooper hates Sam, too, and more or less everyone else. I’d stayed in his good books so far, but if he discovered I was going out with Sam, I would shoot down his Christmas-card list at the speed of light.
“At least in Murder,” O’Kelly said, giving my ripped jeans a fishy look-for some reason I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear my nice new appropriate-image clothes, not for this-“most of us can afford decent gear. How’s Ryan getting on?”
I wasn’t sure whether the question was bitchy or not. Rob Ryan used to be my partner, back in Murder. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I hadn’t seen O’Kelly, either, or Cooper; not since I’d transferred out. This was all happening too fast and out of control. “Sends love and kisses,” I said.
“Can’t say I didn’t suspect,” O’Kelly said, and sniggered at Sam, who looked away.
The squad room holds twenty, but it was Sunday-evening empty: computers off, desks scattered with paperwork and fast-food wrappers-the cleaners don’t come in till Monday morning. In the back corner by the window, the desks where Rob and I used to sit were still at right angles, the way we liked them, so we could be shoulder to shoulder. Some other team, maybe the newbies brought in to replace us, had taken them over. Whoever was at my desk had a kid-silver-framed photo of a grinning little boy with his front teeth missing-and a pile of statement sheets, sun falling across them. It always used to get in my eyes, this time of day.
I was having a hard time breathing; the air felt too thick, almost solid. One of the fluorescents was on the fritz and it gave the room a shimmery, epileptic look, something out of a fever dream. A couple of the big binders lined up on the filing cabinets still had my handwriting down the spines. Sam pulled up his chair to his desk and glanced at me with a faint furrow between his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for that. I concentrated on Frank’s face. There were bags under his eyes and he had cut himself shaving, but he looked wide awake, alert and energized. He was looking forward to this.
He caught me watching him. “Glad to be back?”
“Ecstatic,” I said. I wondered, suddenly, if he had got me into this room deliberately, knowing it might throw me. I dropped my satchel on a desk-Costello’s; I knew the handwriting on the paperwork-leaned back against the wall and stuck my hands in my jacket pockets.
“Companionable though this may be,” Cooper said, edging a little farther from O’Kelly, “I, for one, would be delighted to come to the point of this little gathering.”
“Fair enough,” Frank said. “The Madison case-well, the Jane Doe alias Madison case. What’s the official name?”
“Operation Mirror,” Sam said. Obviously the word about the victim’s looks had spread as far as headquarters.
