Eventually the various authorities decided not to fire me, or even-which would have been far worse-to revert me back to uniform. Again, I don't put this down to any particular feeling on their part that I deserved a second chance; more likely it was simply because firing me could have caught the eye of some journalist and led to all kinds of inconvenient questions and consequences. They kicked me off the squad, of course. Even in my wildest moments of optimism, I had hardly dared to hope they wouldn't. They sent me back to the floater pool, with a hint (beautifully delivered, really, in delicate, steely subtext) that I shouldn't expect to get out of it again for a long time, if at all. Sometimes Quigley, with a more refined sense of cruelty than I gave him credit for, requests me for tip lines or door-to-door.
The whole process was, of course, nowhere near as simple as I'm making it out to be. It took months, months during which I sat around the apartment in a wretched nightmarish daze, with my savings draining away and my mother timidly bringing over macaroni and cheese to make sure I ate, and Heather buttonholing me to explain the underlying character flaw at the root of all my problems (apparently I needed to learn to be more considerate of other people's feelings, hers in particular) and give me her therapist's phone number.
By the time I got back to work, Cassie was gone. I heard, from various sources, that she had been offered a promotion to Detective Sergeant if she would stay; that, conversely, she had quit the force because she was about to be booted off the squad; that someone had seen her in a pub in town, holding hands with Sam; that she had gone back to college and was studying archaeology. The moral of most of the stories, by implication, was that women never really had belonged on the Murder squad.
Cassie had not, as it turned out, left the force at all. She had transferred to Domestic Violence and negotiated time out to finish her psychology degree-hence the college story, I suppose. No wonder there were rumors: Domestic Violence is possibly the single most excruciating job in the force, combining as it does all the worst elements of Murder and Sex Crime with none of the kudos, and the thought of leaving one of the elite squads for that was inconceivable to most people. Her nerve must have gone, the grapevine said.
Personally, I don't believe Cassie's transfer had anything to do with losing her nerve; and, though I'm sure this sounds facile and self-serving, I really doubt that it had anything to do with me, or at least not in the way you might think. If the only problem had been the fact that we couldn't bear to be in the same room, she would have found a new partner and dug in her heels, shown up for work a little thinner and more defiant every day, until we came up with a new way to be around each other or until I put in for a transfer. She was always the stubborn one, of us two. I think she transferred because she had lied to O'Kelly and she had lied to Rosalind Devlin, and both of them had believed her; and because, when she told me the truth, I had called her a liar.
In some ways, I was disappointed that the archaeology story had turned out to be untrue. It was an easy picture to imagine, and one I liked to think about: Cassie on some green hill, with a mattock and combats, her hair blown off her face, brown and muddy and laughing.
I kept a vague eye on the papers for a while, but no scandal concerning the Knocknaree motorway ever surfaced. Uncle Redmond's name showed up, well down the list, in some tabloid's chart of how much taxpayers were spending on various politicians' makeup, but that was all. The fact that Sam was still on the Murder squad tended to make me think that he had done as O'Kelly told him, in the end-although it's possible, of course, that he did in fact take his tape to Michael Kiely, and no newspaper would touch it. I don't know.
Sam didn't sell his house, either. Instead, I heard, he rented it out at a nominal rate to a young widow whose husband had died of a brain aneurysm, leaving her with a toddler, a difficult pregnancy and no life insurance. As she was a freelance cellist, she couldn't even collect unemployment benefit; she had fallen behind on her rent, her landlord had evicted her, and she and the children had been living in a B amp;B provided by a charity organization. I have no idea how Sam found this woman-I'd have thought you would need to go to Victorian London for that level of picturesque, deserving pathos; he had presumably put in a characteristic amount of research. He had moved to a rental flat in Blanchardstown, I think, or some equivalent suburban hell. The main theories were that he was about to leave the force for the priesthood, and that he had a terminal disease.
Sophie and I went out once or twice-I did, after all, owe her dinner and cocktails several times over. I thought we had a good time, and she didn't ask any difficult questions, which I took as a good sign. After a few dates, though, and before the relationship had really progressed enough to merit the name, she dumped me. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. "You should go for younger women," she advised me. "They can't always tell."
Inevitably, sometime during those interminable months in my apartment (hand after hand of late-night solitaire poker, near-lethal quantities of Radiohead and Leonard Cohen), my thoughts turned back to Knocknaree. I had, of course, sworn never to let the place cross my mind again; but human beings can't help being curious, I suppose, as long as the knowledge doesn't come at too high a price.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I realized that there was nothing there. Everything before my first day of boarding school had apparently been excised from my mind, with surgical precision and this time for good. Peter, Jamie, the bikers and Sandra, the wood, every scrap of memory I had retrieved with such laborious care over the course of Operation Vestaclass="underline" gone. I could remember what it had been like to remember these scenes, once upon a time, but now they had the remote, secondhand quality of old films I had watched or stories I had been told, I saw them as if from a vast distance-three brown-skinned kids in battered shorts, spitting on Willy Little's head from the branches and scrambling away, giggling-and I knew with cold certainty that over time even these deracinated images would shrivel up to nothing and blow away. They no longer seemed to belong to me, and I couldn't shake the dark, implacable sense that this was because I had forfeited my right to them, once and for all.
Only one image remained. A summer afternoon, Peter and me sprawled on the grass in his front garden. We had been trying, in a halfhearted kind of way, to make a periscope from instructions in an old comic book, but we were supposed to have a cardboard tube out of a roll of paper towel, and we couldn't ask our mothers for one because we weren't talking to them. We had used rolled-up newspaper instead, but it kept buckling, so all we could see through the periscope was the sports page, backwards.