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 feet, 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.
“Yeah. I told them. They’re not mad about me, but Mackey… I figured I’d better do it. They…” Sam shook his head. The tight twist to one corner of his mouth told me how it had gone. “They’ll be all right,” he said. “Sooner or later.”
“They don’t have families,” I said. “They don’t have friends, nothing. Where are they staying?”
Sam sighed. “They’re in custody, sure. Conspiracy to commit murder. It won’t stick-we’ve nothing admissible on them, unless they talk, and they won’t-but… well. We have to give it a go. Tomorrow, once they’re released, Victim Support’ll give them a hand finding somewhere to stay.”
“What about Whatsisname?” I asked; I could see the name in my head, but it wouldn’t come out. “For the fire. Did you pull him in yet?”
“Naylor? Byrne and Doherty went looking for him, but he hasn’t shown up yet. No point in chasing after him; he knows those hills like the back of his hand. He’ll come home sooner or later. We’ll pick him up then.”