Title:The Likeness
Author(s): Tana French
Publisher(s): Penguin Books
Pages: 466
Year: 2009
Format: MOBI
Language: English
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It was Tuesday night before the absorbed note came back into Sams voice. I shouldve known better to start with, he said cheerfully. If they wont 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 werent 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 Glenskehys a lunatic asylum. Part of its just what you get between small townsRathowens that bit bigger, theyve got a school and a police station and a few shops, so they call Glenskehy a mad backwater. Its more than just your average rivalry, though. They really do think Glenskehy folk arent right. One fella said he wouldnt go into Regans for all the tea in China.
I was up a tree, wearing my mike sock and having a smoke. Since I had heard about that graffiti, the lanes had started to make me feel edgy, exposed; I didnt like being down there when I was on the phone, with half my attention somewhere else. I had found a nook high up in a big beech tree, just at the start of the branches, where the trunk split in two. My arse fit perfectly into the fork, I had a clear view of the lane in both directions and of the cottage downhill, and if I tucked my legs up I vanished into the leaves. Did they say anything about Whitethorn House?
A small silence. Yeah, Sam said. The house doesnt have a great name, in Rathowen or in Glenskehy. Partly thats to do with Simon Marchhe was a mad old bastard, by all accounts; two of the fellas remembered him firing his gun at them, when they were kids and they went nosing around the Whitethorn House grounds. But it goes back further than that.
The dead baby, I said. The words sent something smooth and cold through the middle of me. Did they know anything about that?
A bit. Im not sure they have all the details rightyoull see what I mean in a minutebut if theyre anywhere near the mark, its not a good story. Not good for the Whitethorn House people, I mean.
He left a pause. So? I said. These people arent my family, Sam. And unless this story happened sometime in the last six months, which Im assuming it didnt or wed have heard about it by now, its got nothing to do with anyone Ive even met. Im not going to be deeply hurt by something Daniels great-granddad did a hundred years ago. Cross my heart.
Grand, so, Sam said. The Rathowen versiontheres some variation, but this is the gist of itis that, a while back, a young fella from Whitethorn House had an affair with a Glenskehy girl, and she was going to have a baby for him. It used to happen often enough, sure. The problem was, this girl wasnt about to disappear into a convent or marry some poor local fella in a mad hurry before anyone noticed she was pregnant.