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.”
What 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.”
