The crows have transferred themselves by degrees to lower branches, testing the waters. They’re a dirty ash-gray, with a sheen like a bluebottle’s on their black wings. Their heads twitch back and forth so they can keep tabs on Cal and Trey while evaluating Rushborough possessively. Cal leans over to find a good-sized rock and throws it at them, and they flap lazily up a few branches, unimpressed, prepared to bide their time.
“When you talk to the cops,” he says, “they’ll likely let you have an adult there. I can do it if you want. Or you could have your mama. Or your dad.”
“You,” Trey says promptly.
“OK,” Cal says. And she came to him rather than to Johnny when she found Rushborough, even though Johnny’s interest in this development would be considerably more intense than his. Something has changed for her. Cal would very much like to know what, and whether it’s something to do with the body lying on the stained dirt. He believes the kid that she had nothing to do with it getting there, but the question of what she might know or suspect is smudgier. “Once the Guards get here, we’ll head back to my place. They can come talk to you there, when they’re ready. We’ll make them tea and everything.”
The sheep have stopped cropping and raised their heads, looking up the road towards Trey’s house. Cal straightens up off the car. There’s the crunch of feet on pebbles, and a flash of white between the trees.
It’s Johnny Reddy himself, freshly shaved and shiny, hurrying down the road like a man with important places to be. He sees Cal’s red Pajero first, and stops.
Cal says nothing. Neither does Trey.
“Well, and good morning to the pair of ye, too,” Johnny says, with a whimsical cock of his head, but Cal can see the wariness in his eye. “What’s the story here? Is it me ye’re waiting for?”
“Nope,” Cal says. “We’re waiting with your buddy Rushborough over there.”
Johnny looks. His whole body goes still, and his mouth opens. The shock looks genuine, but Cal doesn’t take anything out of Johnny at face value. Even if it’s real, it could just mean he didn’t expect the body to be where it is, not that he didn’t expect it at all.
“What the fuck,” Johnny says, when the breath goes back into him. He makes an instinctive move towards Rushborough.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to stay where you are, Johnny,” Cal says, in his cop voice. “We don’t want to compromise a crime scene.”
Johnny stays put. “Is he dead?”
“Oh yeah. Someone made good and sure of that.”
“How?”
“I look like a doctor to you?”
Johnny makes an effort to get himself together. He eyes Cal and gauges his chances of convincing him to dump Rushborough in a bog and forget the whole thing. Cal doesn’t feel inclined to help him reach a decision. He gazes blandly back.
Eventually Johnny, genius that he is, concludes that Cal is unlikely to play along. “Go home,” he says sharply to Trey. “Go on. Get home to your mammy and stay there. Say nothing about this to anyone.”
“Trey here’s the one that found the body,” Cal explains, nice and reasonable. “She’s gonna have to give a statement. The police are on their way.”
Johnny looks at him with pure hatred. Cal, after weeks of feeling that way about Johnny and being powerless to do a thing about it, looks back and savors every second.
“You say nothing to the Guards about that gold,” Johnny tells Trey. Trey may not be taking on board the implications here, but Johnny sure is; Cal can practically see his brain cells ricocheting among them all. “D’you hear me? Not a fucking word.”
“Language,” Cal reminds him.
Johnny bares his teeth in what’s supposed to be a smile but lands closer to a grimace. “I don’t need to tell you, sure,” he says to Cal. “You don’t want that hassle either.”
“Gee whiz,” Cal says, scratching his beard. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll take it under advisement.”
Johnny’s grimace tightens. “I’ve somewhere to be. Am I allowed to head over that way, am I? Guard?”
“Be my guest,” Cal says. “I’m sure the police’ll find you when they need you. Don’t you worry about us; we’re just fine here.”
Johnny throws him one more vicious look, then cuts through the trees to give the body a wide berth and heads up the higher path, towards the Dwyers’ places and incidentally towards Rushborough’s holiday home, at a near-run. Cal allows himself the hope that the little fuck will trip and go head over heels into a ravine.
“Bet he’s going to get your camera,” Trey says. “Rushborough took it offa me. I was gonna rob it back, only I didn’t get a chance.”
“Huh,” Cal says. That camera has been on his mind, along with the fact that it stopped being mentioned right around the time Trey got that fat lip. He was blaming Johnny. “What’s on there that Rushborough wanted?”
“You and them lads putting the gold in the river.”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Didja know I was there?”
“Nope,” Cal says, carefully. She’s not looking at him; she’s watching the path where her father vanished, eyes narrowed against the sun. “I half wondered, but nope, I didn’t know. How come you filmed it?”
“To show Rushborough. So’s he’d fuck off.”
“Right,” Cal says. He adjusts his ideas. Trey wasn’t just doing her filming behind Johnny’s back; she was doing it, with preparation and care, to fuck him over. This leaves Cal even more baffled about what she was doing waving Johnny’s cute little gold nugget around the pub.
“I didn’t know you’d be there,” Trey says. “At the river. You never told me.”
She’s turning the water bottle between her knees, head bent over it. If she’s watching Cal out of the corner of her eye, he can’t tell.
“You figure I should’ve,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“I was planning to. The day before, when I lent you that camera. Only then your dad showed up and took you off home, and I didn’t get a chance.”
“How come you went with them? To the river?”
Cal is moved by the fact that she’s asking: she knows him well enough to take for granted that he wasn’t there to rip off some damn fool tourist. “I wanted to keep an eye on things,” he says. “Rushborough always looked squirrelly to me, and the situation seemed like it could get messy. I like having a handle on what’s going on around me.”
“You shoulda said it to me from the start. I’m not a fuckin’ kid. I keep telling you.”
“I know that,” Cal says. He’s still picking his way with every bit of care and delicacy he has. He knows better than to lie to her, but he also knows better than to tell her he needs to look out for her. “I wasn’t thinking you were too little to understand, or anything. All’s I was thinking is that Johnny’s your dad.”
“He’s a fuckin’ tosspot.”
“I’m not denying that,” Cal says. “But I didn’t want to put you in the middle of anything by sounding like I was bad-mouthing him or his big idea, and I didn’t want to go pumping you for information. I figured I oughta leave you to make your own calls. I just wanted to stay clear on what was going on.”
Trey thinks that over, turning the bottle. Cal wonders whether to bring up the fact, while they’re on the subject, that there’s plenty she hasn’t been telling him. He decides against it. He knows, by everything about her, that she’s not done keeping things to herself yet. She still feels unreachable. If he tries to reach her now, and she lies, she’ll be even further away. He waits.
In the end she looks up at Cal and nods. “Sorry I got your camera took,” she says. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cal says. All his muscles loosen a notch. He may not have fixed things, but this time, apparently, he’s at least managed not to make them worse. “Your dad might have you give it back to me. Once he’s wiped some stuff off the memory card.”
Trey blows air out of the side of her mouth. “Throw it in the bog, more like.”
“Nah,” Cal says. “He won’t want me kicking up a fuss, drawing attention to it. He’ll delete that footage, send back the rest. It’ll be fine.”
Trey turns her head at the sound of a car behind them. Through the trees and the road twists they can see flashes of it: chunky, white and blue, a marked car.
“Guards,” she says.
“Yep,” Cal says. “They were pretty quick.”
He turns to take one last look at the silent thing under the stripes of shadow. It looks skimpy and easily dismissed, something that’s in the way for now but that’ll be blown to nowhere by the next good wind. Cal understands what Trey doesn’t: the magnitude of the change, far-reaching and unstoppable, that the car is bringing.
The two uniforms could be brothers: young, beefy, healthy, with identical neat haircuts and identical raw sunburns. Both of them look like this moment is unprecedented in their careers, and they’re being extra official to show each other they can handle it. They take names and details from Cal and Trey, ask Trey what time she found the body—which gets them a blank shrug and “Early”—and whether she touched it. They take Rushborough’s name, too—Cal has his doubts on this, but he keeps them to himself—and where he was staying. Cal figures, with mixed feelings, that by the time they get there Johnny will be long gone.
The uniforms start stringing crime-scene tape between trees. One of them shoos away a couple of sheep that have drifted closer to investigate. “Is it OK if we head back to my place, Officer?” Cal asks the other one. “Trey here helps me out with some carpentry, and we’ve got a job to finish.”
“That’s grand,” the uniform says, with a formal nod. “The detectives’ll need to take statements. They’ll be able to reach ye both at that number, will they?”
“That’s right,” Cal says. “We’ll be at my place most of the day.” He glances at Trey, who nods. The crows, single-minded and in no hurry, have started to work their way down the branches again.
On the way down the mountain, Trey asks, “What’ll they do?”
“Who?”
“The detectives. How’ll they find out who kilt him?”
“Well,” Cal says. He shifts the car down a gear and taps the brake. He learned to drive in the hills of North Carolina, but the grade of this mountain still sometimes sets his teeth on edge. No one was taking cars into account when this road was made. “They’ll have a crime-scene team to collect forensic evidence. Like take whatever random hairs and fibers they find on the body, so they can try and match them to a suspect or his house or his car. Take Rushborough’s hair and fibers, in case some got on the suspect; samples of his blood, ’cause there’s gonna be plenty of that wherever he was killed. Scrape under his fingernails and take samples of the bloodstains, in case he fought his attacker and got some DNA on him. Look for any tracks to tell them how he got there, and from what direction. And they’ll have technical guys go through his phone, see who he was talking to, if he had any hassle with anyone.”
“What about the detectives? What do they do?”
“Talk to people, mostly. Ask around here to find out who saw him last, where he was headed, if he pissed anyone off. Get in touch with his family, his friends, his associates, look for any problems—love life, money, business, whatever. Any enemies.”
Trey says, “He seemed like he’d have enemies. Not just here.”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “To me, too.” He edges his way past a side road, craning his neck to make sure no one’s blithely speeding down it. He wishes he was sure Trey’s interest in police procedure was purely academic. “He give you that fat lip a few days back?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, like her mind is doing other things. She disappears into a silence that lasts her all the way back to Cal’s.
While he’s frying up a fresh batch of bacon and eggs, and Trey is setting the table, Cal texts Lena: Someone killed Rushborough. Up on the mountain.
He can see that she’s read it, but it takes a minute before she texts back. I’ll be over after work. Trey, done with the table and sitting on the floor abstractedly stroking the dogs, doesn’t react to the phone’s beep. Cal sends Lena a thumbs-up and goes back to his frying pan.
They eat in more silence. By the time they move into the workshop, Cal has made the decision that he’s not going to tell the detectives anything about gold, at least not yet. He wants to keep himself clear of this tangle, leaving himself free to step into any role Trey needs him to play, once he figures out what that might be.
This should be doable. The Guards are bound to find out at least the surface layer or two of the gold story, but when it comes to details, they’re going to run into trouble. Cal has experience of the impressive thoroughness with which Ardnakelty, when it’s motivated, can generate confusion. The detectives will be lucky if they ever get a solid sense of what the fuck was going on, let alone who was involved. And Cal, as an outsider, has every right to be oblivious to local business. In the ordinary run of things, he would have heard some vague bullshit story about gold, mixed in with Mossie’s fairy hill and what-have-you, and paid it no particular heed. He misses the ordinary run of things.
It’s almost lunchtime, and they’re drilling dowel holes, when Banjo’s ears prick up, Rip lets out a furious cascade of howls, and both dogs head for the door. “Cops,” Trey says, her head going straight up like she’s been waiting for this. She gets up off the floor and takes a breath and a quick shake, like a boxer going into the ring.
Cal is hit by the sudden, urgent sense that he’s missed something. He wants to stop her, call her back, but it’s too late. All he can do is dust himself down and follow her.
Sure enough, when they reach the front door, there’s an obtrusively discreet unmarked car aligning itself tidily next to the Pajero. Two men are sitting up front.
“They’re just gonna want to hear how you found him,” Cal says, blocking the dogs’ exit with a foot. “For now. Talk clearly, take your time if you need to think back. If you don’t remember something or you’re not sure, just say so. That’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried,” Trey says. “It’s grand.”
Cal doesn’t know whether, or how, to tell her that that’s not necessarily true. “This guy’s gonna be from Homicide,” he says, “or whatever they call it here. He’s not gonna be like that uniform from town who gives you shit when you play hooky too often.”
“Good,” Trey says, with feeling. “Your man’s a fuckin’ dildo.”
“Language,” Cal says, but he’s saying it automatically. His eyes are on the man getting out of the passenger door. The guy is around Cal’s age, squat and short-legged enough that he must have to get his suit pants taken up, with a bouncy, cheerful walk. He’s brought along one of the beefcake twins, presumably to take notes and leave his full attention free.