Naylor shot forwards, his fists coming up and his lip pulling into a furious snarl; he was on the edge of going for Sam. “You give me the sick. They whistled for you, them up at the house, and you came running like a good dog. They go whining to you about the nasty peasant who doesn’t know his place, and you bring me in here and accuse me of stabbing one of them-That’s shite. I want them out of Glenskehy-and believe you me, they’ll be out-but I never thought about hurting any of them. Never. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. When they pack up their things and go, I want to be there to wave them good-bye.”
It should have been a letdown, but it went like speed through my blood, pounded high up in my throat, took my breath away. It felt-and I shifted against the glass, kept my face angled away from Frank so he wouldn’t see this-it felt like a reprieve.
Naylor was still going. “Those dirty bastards used you to put me in my place, just like they’ve been using the police and everyone else for three hundred years. I’ll tell you this much for nothing, Detective, the same as I’d tell whoever gave you that load of old shite about a lynch mob. You can look in Glenskehy all you like, but you’ll find nothing. It was no one from that village stabbed that young one. I know it comes hard to go after the rich instead of the poor, but if it’s a criminal you’re after and not a scapegoat, you look up at Whitethorn House. We don’t breed them round my way.”
He folded his arms, tilted his chair onto its back legs and started singing “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” Frank eased back away from the glass and laughed, quietly, to himself.
Sam tried for more than an hour. He went through every incident of vandalism, one by one, going back four and a half years; listed the evidence linking Naylor to the rock and the fight, some of it solid-the bruises, my description-and some invented, fingerprints, handwriting analysis; came into the observation room, grabbed the evidence bags without looking at me or at Frank, and tossed them on the table in front of Naylor; threatened to arrest him for burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, everything short of murder. In exchange he got “The Croppy Boy,” “Four Green Fields” and, for a change of pace, “She Moved through the Fair.”
In the end he had to give up. There was a long time between the moment when he left Naylor in the interview room and the moment when he came into the observation room, evidence bags dangling from one hand and the exhaustion back on his face, deeper than ever.
“I thought that went well,” Frank said brightly. “You could even have got a confession on the vandalism, if you hadn’t gone for the big prize.”
Sam ignored him. “What do you think?” he asked me.
There was one off chance left, as far as I could see, one way Naylor could have snapped badly enough to stab Lexie: if he had been the baby’s father, and she had told him she was going to have an abortion. “I don’t know,” I said. “I genuinely don’t.”
“I don’t think he’s our boy,” Sam said. He dropped the evidence bags on the table and leaned heavily against it, head going back.
Frank did amazed. “You’re giving up on him because he held out for one morning? From where I’m standing, he looks good enough to eat: motive, opportunity, mind-set… Just because he tells a great story, you’re going to arrest him on some pissant vandalism charge and throw away your chance to have him on murder?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”
“Now,” Frank said, “we try it my way. Fair’s fair; your way got us nowhere. Cut Naylor loose, let Cassie see what she can get out of him on the antiques deal, and see if that takes us any closer to the stabbing.”
“This man doesn’t give a damn about money,” Sam said, without looking at Frank. “What he cares about is his town, and the damage that’s been done to it by Whitethorn House.”
“So he’s got a cause. There’s nothing in this world more dangerous than a true believer. How far do you think he’d go for that cause?”
This is one of the things about fighting with Frank: he moves the goalposts faster than you can catch up, you keep losing track of what you were originally arguing about. I couldn’t tell whether he actually believed in this antiques caper, or whether it was just that he was ready to try anything, at this stage, to beat Sam.
Sam was starting to look dazed, like a boxer after taking too many punches. “I don’t think he’s a killer,” he said doggedly. “And I don’t see why you think he’s a fence. There’s nothing pointing to that.”
“Let’s ask Cassie,” Frank suggested. He was watching me carefully. Frank’s always been a gambler, but I wished I knew what was making him bet on this one. “What do you think, babe? Any chance I’m right about the antiques scam?”
