In the Woods

I switched off the TV and handed him a glass. He looked at it with something like surprise, then threw half of it back with one clumsy jerk of his wrist. It occurred to me that he might be a little drunk already. He wasn't unsteady or slurring or anything like that, but both his movements and his voice seemed different, rough-edged and heavy.

"So," I said inanely, "what's the story?"

Sam took another swallow of his drink. The pole lamp beside him trapped him half in, half out of a pool of light. "You know that thing on Friday?" he said. "That tape?"

I relaxed a little. "Yes?"

"I didn't talk to my uncle," he said.

"No?"

"No. I thought about it all weekend. But I didn't ring him." He cleared his throat. "I went to O'Kelly," he said, and cleared it again. "This afternoon. With the tape. I played it for him, and then I told him it was my uncle on the other end."

"Wow," I said. To tell the truth, I don't think I had expected him to go through with it. I was, in spite of myself, impressed.

"No," Sam said. He blinked at the glass in his hand, put it down on the coffee table. "Do you know what he said to me?"

"What?"

"He asked me was I off my fucking head." He laughed, a little wildly. "Christ, I think the man's got a point… He told me to erase the tape, call off the phone tap and leave Andrews the hell alone. 'That's an order,' that's what he said. He said I hadn't an iota of evidence that Andrews had anything to do with the murder, and if this went any further we would be back in uniform, him and me both-not right away, and not for any reason that had anything to do with this, but someday soon we'd wake up and find ourselves on patrol in the arse end of nowhere for the rest of our lives. He said, 'This conversation never happened, because this tape never happened.'"

His voice was rising. Heather's bedroom backs onto the sitting room, and I was pretty sure she had one ear pressed against the wall. "He wants you to cover it up?" I asked, keeping my voice down and hoping Sam would take the hint.

"I'd say that's what he was driving at, yeah," he said, with heavy sarcasm. It didn't come naturally to him, and rather than sounding tough and cynical it made him seem terribly young, like a miserable teenager. He slumped back in the armchair and raked his hair out of his face. "I never expected that, you know? Of all the things I worried about…I never even thought of it."

I suppose, if I'm honest, I had never been able to take Sam's whole line of investigation very seriously. International holding companies, rogue property developers and hush-hush land deals: it had always seemed impossibly remote and crude and almost laughable, some cheesy blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, not something that could ever affect anyone in any real way. The look on Sam's face caught me off guard. He hadn't been drinking, nothing like that; the double whammy-his uncle, O'Kelly-had hit him like a pair of buses. Being Sam, he had never even seen them coming. For a moment, in spite of everything, I wished I could find the right words to comfort him; to tell him that there comes a time when this happens to everyone and that he would survive it, as almost everyone does.

"What'll I do?" he asked.

"I have no idea," I said, startled. Granted, Sam and I had been spending a lot of time together recently, but this hardly made us bosom buddies, and anyway I was in no position to give anyone sage advice. "I don't mean to sound unfeeling, but why are you asking me?"

"Who else?" Sam said quietly. When he looked up at me I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. "I can't go to any of my family with this, can I? It'd kill them. And my friends are great, but they're not cops, and this is police business. And Cassie…I'd rather not bring her into this. Sure, she's got enough on her plate already. She's looking awful stressed these days. You already knew about it, and I just needed to talk to someone, before I decide."

I was fairly confident that I had been looking pretty stressed myself, these past few weeks, though I was pleased by the implication that I had been hiding it better than I thought. "Decide?" I said. "It doesn't really sound as if you have a lot of options here."

"I've Michael Kiely," Sam said. "I could give him the tape."

"Jesus. You'd lose your job before the article hit the presses. It might even be illegal, I'm not sure."

"I know." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Do you think that's what I should do?"

"I haven't the foggiest," I said. The whiskey, on a near-empty stomach, was making me feel slightly ill. I had used ice cubes from the back of the freezer, the only ones left, and they tasted stale and tainted.

"What would happen if I did, do you know?"

"Well, you'd be fired. Maybe prosecuted." He said nothing. "They might have to have a tribunal, I suppose. If they decided your uncle had done something wrong, they'd tell him not to do it again, he'd be backbenched for a couple of years and then everything would go back to normal."