The Likeness: A Novel (35 page)

“How does Lexie seem to you?” he asked.
Abby took one of Daniel’s cigarettes and snapped the lighter hard. “She seems fine. A little quiet, and she’s lost some weight, but that’s the least we could expect.”
“Do you think she’s all right?”
“She’s eating. She’s taking her antibiotics.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about Lexie,” Abby said. “She seems pretty settled to me. As far as I can tell, she’s basically forgotten about the whole thing.”
“In a way,” Daniel said, “that’s what’s been bothering me. I worry that she may be bottling everything up and one of these days she’s going to explode. And then what?”
Abby watched him, smoke curling up slowly through the moonlight. “In some ways,” she said carefully, “it might not be the end of the world if Lexie did explode.”
Daniel considered this, swirling his glass meditatively and looking out over the grass. “That would depend very much,” he said, “on the form the explosion took. I think it would be as well to be prepared.”
“Lexie,” Abby said, “is the least of our problems here. Justin—I mean, it was obvious, I knew Justin was going to have trouble, but he’s just so much worse than I expected. He never saw this coming, any more than I did. And Rafe’s not helping. If he doesn’t stop being such a little bollocks, I don’t know what . . .” I saw her lips tighten as she swallowed. “And then there’s this. I am not having an easy time here either, Daniel, and it doesn’t make me feel any better that you don’t seem to give a damn.”
“I do give a damn,” Daniel said. “I care very much, in fact. I thought you knew that. I just don’t see what either of us can do about it.”
“I could leave,” Abby said. She was watching Daniel intently, her eyes round and very grave. “We could leave.”
I fought down the impulse to slap a hand over the mike. I wasn’t at all sure what was going on here, but if Frank heard this, he would be positive that the four of them were planning some dramatic getaway and I was about to find myself bound and gagged in the coat closet while they hopped a plane to Mexico. I wished I had had the sense to test out the mike’s exact range.
Daniel didn’t look at Abby, but his hand tightened around her ankles. “You could, yes,” he said, eventually. “There would be nothing I could do to stop you. But this is my home, you know. As I hope . . .” He took a breath. “As I hope it’s yours. I can’t leave it.”
Abby let her head fall back against the bar of the swing seat. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. Me neither. I just . . . God, Daniel. What do we
do
?”
“We wait,” Daniel said quietly. “We trust that things will eventually fall into place, in their own time. We trust one another. We do our best.”
A draft swept across my shoulders and I whipped round, already opening my mouth on my drink-of-water story. The glass clanged against the tap and I dropped it in the sink; the clatter sounded enormous enough to wake up all of Glenskehy. There was no one there.
Daniel and Abby had frozen, faces turned sharply towards the house. “Hey,” I said, pushing the door open and going out onto the patio. My heart was pounding. “I changed my mind: I’m not sleepy. Are you guys staying up?”
“No,” Abby said. “I’m going to bed.” She swung her feet off Daniel’s lap and brushed past me, into the house. A moment later I heard her running up the stairs, not bothering to skip the creaky one.
I went over to Daniel and sat down on the patio beside his legs, with my back up against the swing seat. Somehow I didn’t want to sit next to him; it would have felt crude, too much like demanding confidences. After a moment he reached out one hand and set it, lightly, on top of my head. His hand was so big that it cupped my skull like a child’s. “Well,” he said quietly, almost to himself.
His glass was on the ground beside him, and I took a sip: whiskey on the rocks, the ice almost melted. “Were you and Abby fighting?” I asked.
“No,” Daniel said. His thumb moved, just a little, across my hair. “Everything’s fine.”
We sat like that for a while. It was a still night, barely a breeze rippling the grass, the moon like an old silver token floating high in the sky. The cool stone of the patio through my pajamas and the toasty smell of Daniel’s unfiltered cigarette felt comforting, safe. I rocked my back just a little against the swing seat, swaying it in a gentle, regular rhythm.
“Smell,” Daniel said softly. “Do you smell that?”
A first faint scent of rosemary drifting over from the herb garden, barely a tint in the air. “Rosemary; that’s for remembrance,” he said. “Soon we’ll have thyme and lemon balm, and mint and tansy, and something that I think must be hyssop—it’s hard to tell from the book, during winter. It’ll be a mess this year, of course, but we’ll trim everything back into shape, replant where we need to. Those old photos will be a great help; they’ll give us some idea of the original design, what belongs where. They’re hardy plants, these, chosen for their endurance as well as for their virtue. By next year . . .”
He told me about old herb gardens: how carefully they were arranged to make sure that each plant had everything it needed to flourish, how perfectly they balanced sight and scent and use, practicality and beauty, without ever allowing one to be compromised for another’s sake. Hyssop to loosen chest colds or cure toothaches, he said, chamomile in a poultice to reduce inflammation or in a tea to prevent nightmares; lavender and lemon balm for strewing to make the house smell sweet, rue and burnet in salads. “We’ll have to try that sometime,” he said, “a Shakespearean salad. Tansy tastes like pepper, did you know that? I thought it had died off long ago, it was all brown and brittle, but when I cut right back to the roots, there it was: just a tinge of green. It’ll be all right now. It’s amazing, how stubbornly things survive against incredible odds; how irresistibly strong it is, the drive to live and grow . . .”
The rhythms of his voice washed over me, even and soothing as waves; I barely heard the words. “Time,” I think he said somewhere behind me, or maybe it was “thyme,” I’ve never been sure. “Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.”

11

W
hat people tend to forget about Sam is that he has one of the highest solve rates on the Murder squad. Sometimes I wonder if this is for a very simple reason: he doesn’t waste energy. Other detectives, me included, take it personally when things go wrong, they get impatient and frustrated and irritated with themselves and the dead-end leads and the whole fucking case. Sam gives it his best shot, then shrugs and says, “Ah, sure,” and tries something else.
He had been saying, “Ah, sure,” a lot that week, when I asked him how things were going, but not in his usual vague, abstracted way. This time he sounded tense and harassed, wound a notch tighter every day. He had gone door-to-door through most of Glenskehy, asking about Whitethorn House, but he got a smooth slippery wall of tea and biscuits and blank looks:
Lovely young people up at the House, keep themselves to themselves, never any trouble out of them, sure why would there be any bad feeling, Detective? Terrible, what happened to that poor girl, I said a rosary for her, must have been someone she met up in Dublin . . .
I know that small-town silence, I’d run into it before, intangible as smoke and solid as stone. We honed it on the British for centuries and it’s ingrained, the instinct for a place to close up like a fist when the police come knocking. Sometimes it means nothing more than that; but it’s a powerful thing, that silence, dark and tricky and lawless. It still hides bones buried somewhere in the hills, arsenals cached in pigsties. The British underestimated it, fell for the practiced half-witted looks, but I knew and Sam knew: it’s dangerous.
It was Tuesday night before the absorbed note came back into Sam’s voice. “I should’ve known better to start with,” he said cheerfully. “If they won’t talk to the local cops, why would they talk to me?” He had backed off, thought it over and then taken a taxi down to Rathowen for an evening in the pub: “Byrne said the people round there weren’t mad about Glenskehy folk, and I figured everyone likes a chance to gossip about the neighbors, so . . .”
He had been right. Rathowen people were a very different story from the Glenskehy bunch: they made him as a cop inside thirty seconds (“Come here, young fella, are you here about that girl got stabbed down the road?”), and he had spent the rest of the evening surrounded by fascinated farmers buying him pints and happily trying to trick him into giving away something about the investigation.
“Byrne was right: they think Glenskehy’s a lunatic asylum. Part of it’s just what you get between small towns—Rathowen’s that bit bigger, they’ve got a school and a police station and a few shops, so they call Glenskehy a mad backwater. It’s more than just your average rivalry, though. They really do think Glenskehy folk aren’t right. One fella said he wouldn’t go into Regan’s for all the tea in China.”
I was up a tree, wearing my mike sock and having a smoke. Since I had heard about that graffiti, the lanes had started to make me feel edgy, exposed; I didn’t like being down there when I was on the phone, with half my attention somewhere else. I had found a nook high up in a big beech tree, just at the start of the branches, where the trunk split in two. My arse fit perfectly into the fork, I had a clear view of the lane in both directions and of the cottage downhill, and if I tucked my legs up I vanished into the leaves. “Did they say anything about Whitethorn House?”
A small silence. “Yeah,” Sam said. “The house doesn’t have a great name, in Rathowen or in Glenskehy. Partly that’s to do with Simon March—he was a mad old bastard, by all accounts; two of the fellas remembered him firing his gun at them, when they were kids and they went nosing around the Whitethorn House grounds. But it goes back further than that.”
“The dead baby,” I said. The words sent something smooth and cold through the middle of me. “Did they know anything about that?”
“A bit. I’m not sure they have all the details right—you’ll see what I mean in a minute—but if they’re anywhere near the mark, it’s not a good story. Not good for the Whitethorn House people, I mean.”
He left a pause. “So?” I said. “These people aren’t my
family,
Sam. And unless this story happened sometime in the last six months, which I’m assuming it didn’t or we’d have heard about it by now, it’s got nothing to do with anyone I’ve even
met.
I’m not going to be deeply hurt by something Daniel’s great-granddad did a hundred years ago. Cross my heart.”
“Grand, so,” Sam said. “The Rathowen version—there’s some variation, but this is the gist of it—is that, a while back, a young fella from Whitethorn House had an affair with a Glenskehy girl, and she was going to have a baby for him. It used to happen often enough, sure. The problem was, this girl wasn’t about to disappear into a convent or marry some poor local fella in a mad hurry before anyone noticed she was pregnant.”
“A woman after my own heart,” I said. There was no way this story was going to end well.
“Shame your man March didn’t feel the same way. He was furious; he was meant to be getting married to some nice rich Anglo-Irish girl, and this could have banjaxed all his plans. He told the girl he didn’t want anything more to do with her or the child. She was already pretty unpopular in the village: not just pregnant outside marriage—that was a big deal, back then—but pregnant for one of the Marches . . . Not long after, she was found dead. She’d hanged herself.”
There are stories like this scattered all over our history. Most of them are buried deep and quiet as last year’s leaves, long transmuted into old ballads and winter-night stories. I thought of this one lying latent for a century or more, germinating and growing like some slow dark seed, blooming at last with broken glass and knives and poison berries of blood all among the hawthorn hedges. My back prickled against my tree trunk.
I put out my smoke on the sole of my shoe and tucked the butt back into the packet. “Got anything to say this actually happened?” I asked. “Apart from some story they tell in Rathowen to keep kids away from Whitethorn House.”
Sam blew out a breath. “Nothing. I put a couple of floaters onto the records, but they’ve turned up bugger-all. And there’s not a chance anyone in Glenskehy is going to tell me their version. They’d rather everyone forgot it ever happened.”
“Someone’s not forgetting,” I said.
“I should have a better idea who that is, in the next few days—I’m pulling all the info I can get on the people in Glenskehy, to cross-check against your profile. I’d love a clearer idea of what my fella’s problem is, though, before I get talking to him. The thing is, I’ve no clue where to start. One of the Rathowen fellas says all this happened in his great-granny’s time—which isn’t much help, sure: the woman lived to be eighty. Another one swore it was way back in the nineteenth century, ‘sometime after the Famine,’ but . . . I don’t know. I think he wants it as far away as possible; he’d say it was in Brian Boru’s time if he thought I’d believe him. So I’ve a window from 1847 to about 1950, and no one’s about to help me narrow it down.”
“Actually,” I said, “maybe I can.” It made me feel sticky all over, traitorous. “Give me a couple of days and I’ll see if I can get something more specific.”
A small pause, like a question, till Sam realized I wasn’t going to go into detail. “That’s grand. Anything you can find would be great.” Then, on a different note, almost shyly: “Listen, I was meaning to ask you something, before all this happened. I was thinking . . . I’ve never been on holiday, except to Youghal once when I was a little fella. How about you?”
“France, for summers.”
“That was to visit family, sure. I meant a proper holiday, like on the telly, with a beach and snorkeling and mad cocktails in a bar with a cheesy lounge singer doing ‘I Will Survive.’ ”
I knew where this was going. “What the hell have you been watching?”
Sam laughed. “
Ibiza Uncovered
. See what happens to my taste when you’re not here?”
“You’re just looking for topless chicks,” I said. “Emma and Susanna and I have been meaning to go away since we were in school, only we haven’t got round to it yet. Maybe this summer.”
“But now they’ve both got kids, haven’t they? That makes it harder to go off on a girlie break. I was thinking . . .” That shy note again. “I got a couple of brochures from the travel agencies. Italy, mostly; I know you like the old archaeology. Could I bring you on holiday, when this finishes up?”