“Nothing like that. Not a thing taken any of the times, as far as Simon March could tell-although Byrne says the place was a pigsty, he might well not have noticed if something was missing-and no sign that they were looking for anything. They just broke a couple of panes in the back door, walked in and made a mess of the place: slashed some curtains and pissed on the sofa the first time, smashed a load of crockery the second, that kind of thing. That’s not a robbery. That’s a grudge.”
The house-The thought of some little scumbucket knuckle-dragging through the rooms, wrecking what he pleased and whipping out his three inches to piss on the sofa, jolted me with fury so high voltage it startled me; I wanted to punch something. “Charming,” I said. “Sure it wasn’t just kids messing? There’s not much to do in Glenskehy on a Saturday night.”
“Hang on,” Sam said. “There’s more. For about four years before Lexie’s lot moved in, that house was getting vandalized almost every month. Bricks through the windows, bottles thrown at the walls, a dead rat through the letterbox-and graffiti. Some of it said”-flip of notebook pages-“ ‘WEST BRITS OUT,’ ‘KILL THE LANDLORDS,’ ‘UP THE IRA’-”
“You think the IRA stabbed Lexie Madison?” Granted, this case was weird enough that anything was possible, but this was the least likely theory I’d heard yet.
Sam laughed, an open, happy sound. “Ah, God, no. Hardly their style. But someone around Glenskehy still thought of the March family as Brits, landlords, and wasn’t exactly mad about them. And listen to this: two separate bits of graffiti, one back in 2001 and one in 2003, said ‘BABY KILLERS OUT.’ ”
“Baby killers?” I said, completely taken aback-for a wild second the timeline tangled in my mind and I thought of Lexie’s brief, hidden child. “What the hell? Where is there a baby in this?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. Someone’s got a very specific grudge-not against Lexie’s lot, it’s been going on way too long for that, and not against old Simon either. ‘Brits,’ ‘baby killers,’ plural-they’re not talking about one old fella. It’s the whole family they’ve a problem with: Whitethorn House and all who sail in her.”
The lane looked secretive and hostile, too many layers of shadows, remembering too many old things that had happened somewhere along its twists. I moved into the shadow of a tree trunk and got my back up against it. “Why didn’t we hear about any of this before?”
“We didn’t ask. We were focusing on Lexie, or whoever she is, as the target; we never thought she might have been-what’s that they call it?-collateral damage. It’s not Byrne and Doherty’s fault. They’ve never worked a murder before, sure; they don’t know how to go about it. It never even occurred to them we might want to know.”
“What do they say about all this?”
Sam blew out a breath. “Not a lot. They’ve no suspects for any of it, and not a clue about any dead baby, and they told me good luck finding out more. They both say they know no more about Glenskehy than they did the day they arrived. Glenskehy people keep to themselves, don’t like cops, don’t like outsiders; whenever there’s a crime, nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything and they sort it out their own way, in private. According to Byrne and Doherty, even the other villages round about think Glenskehy folk are stone mentallers.”
“So they just ignored the vandalism?” I said. I could hear the edge in my voice. “Took the reports and said, ‘Ah, sure, nothing we can do,’ and let whoever it was keep fucking up Whitethorn House?”
“They did their best,” Sam said, instantly and firmly-all cops, even cops like Doherty and Byrne, count as family to Sam. “After the first break-in, they told Simon March he should get a dog, or an alarm system. He said he hated dogs, alarms were for nancy boys and he was well able to look after himself, thanks very much. Byrne and Doherty got the feeling he had a gun-that’ll be the one ye found. They didn’t think that was such a great idea, specially with him being drunk most of the time, but there wasn’t much they could do about it; when they asked him straight out, he denied it. They could hardly force him to get an alarm if he didn’t want one.”
“What about once he went into the hospice? They knew the house was empty, everyone around must’ve known, they knew it would be a target-”
“They checked it every night on their rounds, sure,” Sam said. “What else could they do?”
He sounded startled, and I realized my voice had gone up. “You said, ‘Until this lot moved in,’ ” I said, softer. “Then what?”
“The vandalism didn’t stop, but it settled a lot. Byrne called in and had a chat with Daniel, let him know what had been going on, Daniel didn’t seem too worried about it. There’s been only two incidents since: a rock through the window in October, and graffiti again, in December-FOREIGNERS FUCK OFF. That’s the other reason Byrne and Doherty said nothing to us. As far as they were concerned it was all over, old news.”
