The Likeness

8

God, that first week. Even thinking about it I want to bite into it like the world’s brightest red apple. In the middle of an all-out murder investigation, while Sam worked his way painstakingly through various shades of scumbag and Frank tried to explain our situation to the FBI without coming across like a lunatic, there was nothing I was supposed to be doing except living Lexie’s life. It gave me a gleeful, lazy, daring feeling right down to my toes, like mitching off school when it’s the best day of spring and you know your class has to dissect frogs.

On Tuesday I went back to college. In spite of the vast number of new opportunities to fuck up, I was looking forward to it. I loved Trinity, the first time round. It still has its centuries of graceful gray stone, red brick, cobblestones; you can feel the layers on layers of lost students streaming through Front Square beside you, feel the print of you being added to the air, archived, saved. If someone hadn’t decided to drive me out of college, I might have turned into an eternal student like these four. Instead—and probably because of that same person—I turned into a cop. I liked the thought that this had brought me full circle, back to reclaim the place I’d lost. It felt like a strange, delayed victory, something salvaged against ridiculous odds.

“You should probably know,” Abby said, in the car, “the rumor mill’s been going mental. Apparently it was a major coke deal gone wrong, also an illegal immigrant—you married him for money and then started blackmailing him—also an abusive ex-boyfriend who just got out of jail for beating you up. Brace yourself.”

“Also, I assume,” Daniel said, maneuvering past an Explorer that was blocking two lanes, “all of us, singly or in various combinations and for various motives. No one’s said so to our faces, of course, but the inference is inevitable. ” He swung into the entrance of the Trinity car park and held up his ID for the security guard. “If people ask questions, what are you going to tell them?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said. “I was thinking about saying I’m the lost heir to some throne and a rival faction came after me, but I couldn’t decide which throne. Do I look like a Romanov?”

“Definitely,” said Rafe. “They were a bunch of chinless weirdos. Go for that.”

“Be nice to me or I’ll tell everyone you came after me with a cleaver in a drug-fueled rage.”

“It’s not funny,” said Justin. He hadn’t brought his car—I got the sense they all wanted to stick close together, just now—so he was in the back with me and Rafe, rubbing flecks of dirt off the windowpane and wiping his fingers on his handkerchief.

“Well,” said Abby, “it wasn’t funny last week, no. But now that you’re back…” She turned to grin at me, over her shoulder. “Four-Boobs Brenda asked me—you know that horrible confidential whisper?—if it was ‘one of those games gone wrong.’ I just froze her out, but now I’m thinking I could have made her day.”

“What amazes me about her,” Daniel said, opening his door, “is that she’s so determined to believe we’re wildly interesting. If only she knew.”

When we got out of the car I got my first real look at what Frank had meant about these four, how they came across to outsiders. As we walked down the long avenue between the sports fields something happened, a change as subtle and definite as water turning to ice: they moved closer, shoulder to shoulder and in step, backs straightening, heads lifting, expressions falling away from their faces. By the time we reached the Arts block the façade was in place, a barricade so impenetrable you could almost see it, cool and glinting like diamond. All that week in college, every time someone started angling for a good stare at me—edging down the library shelves towards the corner where we had our carrels, rubbernecking round a newspaper in the tea queue—that barricade swung around like a Roman shield formation, confronting the intruder with four pairs of impassive, unblinking eyes, till he or she backed off. Collecting gossip was going to be a major problem; even Four-Boobs Brenda stopped midbreath, hovering over my desk, and then asked if she could borrow a pen.

Lexie’s thesis turned out to be a lot more fun than I’d thought. The bits Frank had given me were mainly stuff about the Brontës, Currer Bell as the madwoman in the attic bursting free from demure Charlotte, truth in alias; not exactly comfortable reading, in the circumstances, but more or less what you’d expect. What she’d been working on just before she died was a lot snazzier: Rip Corelli, of She Dressed to Kill fame, turned out to be Bernice Matlock, a librarian from Ohio who had led a blameless life and written lurid pulp masterpieces in her spare time. I was starting to like the way Lexie’s mind had worked.

I’d been worried that her supervisor would want me to come up with something that made academic sense—Lexie had been no idiot, her stuff was smart and original and well thought out, and I was years out of practice. I’d been worried about her supervisor all round, actually. Her tutorial students weren’t going to spot the difference—when you’re eighteen, most people over twenty-five are just generic adult white noise—but someone who’d spent one-on-one time with her was a whole different story. One meeting with him reassured me. He was a bony, gentle, disconnected guy who was so paralyzed by the whole “unfortunate incident” that he could barely look me in the eye, and he told me to take all the recovery time I needed and not to worry about dead-lines. I figured I could handle a few weeks curled up in the library reading about hard-boiled PIs and dames who were nothing but trouble.

And in the evenings there was the house. We put some work into it almost every day, maybe for an hour or two, maybe just for twenty minutes: sand down the stairs, sort through a box from Uncle Simon’s stash, take turns climbing the stepladder to change the ancient brittle fittings on the lightbulbs. The crappiest jobs—scrubbing stains off the toilets—got the same time and care as the interesting ones; the four of them treated the house like some marvelous musical instrument, a Stradivarius or a Bösendorfer, that they had found in a long-lost treasure trove and were restoring with patient, enchanted, absolute love. I think the most relaxed I ever saw Daniel was flat on his stomach on the kitchen floor, wearing battered old trousers and a plaid shirt, painting baseboards and laughing at some story Rafe was telling, while Abby leaned over him to dip her brush, her ponytail whisking paint across his cheek.

They were very tactile, all of them. We never touched in college, but at home, someone was always touching someone: Daniel’s hand on Abby’s head as he passed behind her chair, Rafe’s arm on Justin’s shoulder as they examined some spare-room discovery together, Abby lying back in the swing seat across my lap and Justin’s, Rafe’s ankles crossed over mine as we read by the fire. Frank made predictable snide noises about homosexuality and orgies, but I was on full alert for any kind of sexual vibe—the baby—and that wasn’t what I was picking up. It was stranger and more powerful than that: they didn’t have boundaries, not among themselves, not the way most people do. Your average house share involves a pretty high level of territorial dispute—tense negotiations over the remote control, house meetings about whether bread counts as personal or shared, Rob’s flatmate used to have a three-day snit fit if he used her butter. But these people: as far as I could tell, everything, except thank God underwear, belonged to all of them. The guys pulled clothes out of the airing cupboard at random, anything that would fit; I never did figure out which tops were officially Lexie’s and which ones were Abby’s. They ripped sheets of paper out of each other’s notepads, ate toast off the nearest plate, took sips out of whatever glass was handy.

I didn’t mention this to Frank—he would only have switched from orgy comments to dark warnings about communism, and I liked the blurred boundaries. They reminded me of something warm and solid that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. There was a big green wax jacket, hanging in the coat closet left over from Uncle Simon, that belonged to anyone who was going out in the rain; the first time I put it on for my walk it gave me a strange, intoxicating little thrill, like holding hands with a boy for the very first time.

It was Thursday when I managed to put my finger on the feeling. The days were starting to lengthen towards summer and it was a clear, warm, graceful evening; after dinner we took a bottle of wine and a plate of sponge cake out onto the lawn. I had made a daisy chain and was trying to fasten it around my wrist. By this time I had given up on the not-drinking thing—it felt out of character, it made the others think about the stabbing and tense up, and besides, whatever antibiotics and booze do together could get me out of there when I needed it—so I was mildly, happily tipsy.

“More cake,” Rafe demanded, nudging me with his foot.

“Get it yourself. I’m busy.” I had given up on fastening the daisy chain one-handed and was putting it on Justin instead.

“You’re a lazy object, do you know that?”

“Look who’s talking.” I pulled one of my ankles round the back of my head—all the gymnastics as a kid, I’m flexible—and stuck my tongue out at Rafe from under my knee. “I’m active and healthy, look.”

Rafe raised one eyebrow lazily. “I’m aroused.”

“You’re a pervert,” I told him, with as much dignity as I could from that position.

“Knock it off,” Abby said. “You’ll burst your stitches, and we’re all too drunk to drive you to the emergency room.”

I’d forgotten all about my imaginary stitches. For a second I considered getting wound up about this, but I decided against it. The long evening sunshine and being barefoot and the tickle of grass, and presumably the booze, were making me light-headed and silly. It had been a long time since I’d felt like this, and I liked it. I maneuvered my head round to peer sideways at Abby. “They’re fine. They’re not even sore any more.”

“That’s because up until now you haven’t been tying yourself in knots,” Daniel said. “Behave.”

Normally I’m allergic to bossy, but somehow this felt nice; cozy. “Yes, Dad,” I said, and disentangled my leg, which sent me off balance so I fell over onto Justin.

“Ow, get off me,” he said, flapping a hand at me without much energy. “God, how much do you weigh?” I wriggled myself comfortable and stayed put with my head in his lap, squinting up into the sunset. He tickled my nose with a grass stem.

I looked relaxed, at least I hoped I did, but my mind was going fast. I had just realized—Yes, Dad—what this whole setup reminded me of: a family. Maybe not a real-life family, although what would I know, but a family out of a million children’s-book series and old TV shows, the comforting kind that go on for years without anyone getting any older, to the point where you start to wonder about the actors’ hormone levels. These five had it all: Daniel the distant but affectionate father, Justin and Abby taking turns to be the protective Mammy and the lofty eldest, Rafe the moody teenage middle kid; and Lexie, the late arrival, the capricious little sister to be alternately spoiled and teased.

They probably had no more clue about real-life families than I did. I should have spotted from the beginning that this was one of the things they had in common—Daniel orphaned, Abby fostered out, Justin and Rafe exiled, Lexie Godknowswhat but not exactly close to her parents. I’d skimmed over it because it was my default mode too. Consciously or subconsciously, they had collected every paper—thin scrap they could find and built their own patchwork, makeshift image of what a family was, and then they had made themselves into that.

The four of them had been only eighteen or so when they had met. I looked at them under my lashes—Daniel holding a bottle up to the light to see if there was any wine left, Abby flicking ants off the cake plate—and wondered what they would have been if they had missed each other, along the way.

This gave me a whole bunch of ideas, but they were hazy and fast-moving and I decided I was too comfortable to try and put any shape on them. They could wait a few hours, till my walk. “Me too,” I said to Daniel, and held out my glass for more wine.

“Are you drunk?” Frank demanded, when I rang him. “You sounded langered, earlier.”

“Relax, Frankie,” I said. “I had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. That doesn’t make me drunk.”

“It better not. This may feel like a holiday, but I don’t want you treating it like one. You stay alert.”

I was loitering along a potholey lane, uphill from the ruined cottage. I had been thinking, a lot, about how Lexie had ended up in that cottage. We had all taken it for granted that she was running for cover and couldn’t make Whitethorn House or the village, either because the killer was blocking her way or because she was fading fast, so she made for the nearest hiding place she knew. N changed that. Assuming N was a person, as opposed to a pub or a radio program or a poker game, they had had to meet somewhere, and the fact that no places were marked in the diary said they had used the same meeting point every time. And if those times were nights rather than mornings, then the cottage made total sense: privacy, convenience, shelter from wind and rain and no way for anyone to sneak up on you. She could have been heading there anyway that night, long before someone jumped her, and just kept going—maybe on autopilot, after N ambushed her on her way; maybe because she hoped N would be there to help her.

It wasn’t the kind of lead detectives dream of, but it was about the best I’d got, so I was spending a lot of my walk lurking in the general area of the cottage and hoping N would help me out by showing up some night. I had found myself a convenient stretch of lane: it had a clear enough view that I could keep an eye on the cottage while I talked to Frank or Sam, enough trees to hide me if I needed it, and enough isolation that no farmer was likely to hear me on the phone and come after me with his trusty shotgun. “I’m alert,” I said. “And I’ve got something to ask you. Remind me: Daniel’s great-uncle died in September?”

I heard Frank moving stuff around, flipping pages; either he had brought the file home with him, or he was still at work. “February third. Daniel got the keys to the house on September tenth. Probate must’ve taken a while. Why?”

“Can you find out how the great-uncle died, and where these five were that day? Also, why probate took so long? When my granny left me a grand, I got it six weeks later.”

Frank whistled. “You’re thinking they bumped off Great-uncle Simon for the house? And then Lexie lost her nerve?”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, trying to work out how to explain. “Not exactly. Actually, not at all. But they’re weird about that house, Frank. All four of them. They all talk about it like they own it, not just Daniel—‘We should get double-glazing, we need to decide about the herb garden, we…’ And they all act like this is a permanent arrangement, like they can spend years doing it up because they’re all going to live here forever.”

“Ah, they’re just young,” Frank said tolerantly. “At that age, everyone thinks college mates and house shares are forever. Give them a few years and it’ll be all semi-ds in the suburbs and Sunday afternoons buying decking at the home-and-garden shop.”

“They’re not that young. And you’ve heard them: they’re way too wrapped up in this house and each other. There’s nothing else in their lives. I don’t really think they knocked off the great-uncle, but I’m shooting in the dark here. We’ve always thought they were hiding something. Anything weird is worth checking out.”

“True,” Frank said. “Will do. Don’t you want to hear what I’ve been doing with my day?”

That undercurrent of excitement in his voice: very few things get Frank that worked up. “Damn straight,” I said.

The undercurrent broke through into a grin so wide I could hear it. “FBI got a hit on our girl’s prints.”

“Shit! Already?” The FBI guys are good about helping us when we need it, but they always have a spectacular backlog.

“I’ve got friends in low places.”

“OK,” I said. “Who is she?” For some reason my knees felt shaky. I got my back up against a tree.

“May-Ruth Thibodeaux, born in North Carolina in 1975, reported missing in October 2000 and wanted for car theft. Prints and photo both match.”

My breath went out with a little rush. “Cassie?” Frank said, after a moment. I heard him draw on a cigarette. “You still there?”

“Yeah. May-Ruth Thibodeaux.” Saying it made my back prickle. “What do we know about her?”

“Not a lot. No info till 1997, when she moved to Raleigh from someplace in the arsehole of nowhere, rented a fleabag apartment in a crap neighborhood and got a job waiting tables in an all-night diner. She had an education somewhere along the way if she was able to jump straight into a postgrad at Trinity, but it’s looking like self-taught or homeschooled; she doesn’t show up on the register at any local college or high school. No criminal record.”

Frank blew out smoke. “On the evening of October tenth 2000, she borrowed her fiancé’s car to get to work, but she never showed up. He filed a missing-person report a couple of days later. The cops didn’t take it too seriously; they figured she’d just taken off. They gave the fiancé a little hassle, just in case he’d killed her and dumped her somewhere, but his alibi was good. The car turned up in New York in December 2000, at long-term parking at Kennedy Airport.”

He was very pleased with himself. “Nice one, Frank,” I said automatically. “Fair play to you.”

“We aim to please,” Frank said, trying to sound modest.

She was only a year younger than me, after all. I was playing marbles in soft rain in a Wicklow garden and she was running wild in some hot small town, barefoot at the soda fountain and jolting down dirt roads in the back of a pickup truck, till one day she got in a car and she just kept driving.

“Cassie?”

“Yeah.”

“My contact’s going to do some more digging, see if she made any serious enemies along the way—anyone who might’ve tracked her here.”

“Sounds good,” I said, trying to pull my head together. “That sounds like the kind of thing I might want to know. What was the fiancé’s name?”

“Brad, Chad, Chet, one of those American yokes…” Papers rustling. “My boy made a couple of phone calls, and the guy hasn’t missed a day of work in months. No way he hopped across the pond to kill off the ex. Chad Andrew Mitchell. Why?”

No N. “I just wondered.”

Frank waited, but I’m good at that game. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “I’ll keep you posted. The ID might take us nowhere, but still, it’s nice to have some kind of handle on this girl. Makes it easier to get your head round the idea of her, no?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

It wasn’t true. After Frank hung up I spent a long time leaning against that tree, watching the broken outline of the cottage slowly fade and reappear as clouds moved across the moon, thinking about May-Ruth Thibodeaux. Somehow, giving her back her own name, her own hometown, her own story, brought it home to me: she had been real, not just a shadow cast by my mind and Frank’s; she had been alive. There had been thirty years in which we could have come face to face.

It seemed to me suddenly that I should have known; an ocean away, but it seemed like I should have felt her there all along, like every now and then I should have looked up from my marbles or my textbook or my case report as if someone had called my name. She came all those thousands of miles, close enough to slip on my old name like a sister’s hand-me-down coat, she came pulled like a compass needle and she almost made it. She was only an hour’s drive away. and I should have known; I should have known, in time, to take that last step and find her.

The only shadows over that week came from outside. We were playing poker, Friday evening—they played cards a lot, late into the nights; mostly Texas Hold-’em or 110, sometimes piquet if only two people felt like playing. The stakes were just tarnished ten-pence pieces from a huge jar someone had found in the attic, but they took it seriously all the same: everyone started with the same number of coins and when you were out you were out, no borrowing from the stash. Lexie, like me, had been a pretty decent card player; her calls hadn’t always made a lot of sense, but apparently she had learned to make the unpredictability work for her, especially on big hands. The winner got to choose the next day’s dinner menu.

That night we had Louis Armstrong on the record player and Daniel had bought a huge bag of Doritos, along with three different dips to keep everyone happy. We were maneuvering around the various chipped bowls and using the food to try and distract each other—it worked best on Justin, who lost his concentration completely if he thought you were about to get salsa on the mahogany. I had just wiped out Rafe head-to-head-on weak hands he messed around with the dips, if he had something good he shoveled Doritos straight into his mouth by the handful; never play poker with a detective—and I was busy gloating, when his phone rang. He tilted his chair backwards and grabbed the phone off one of the bookshelves.

“Hello,” he said, giving me the finger. Then his chair came down and his face changed; it froze over, into that haughty, unreadable mask he wore in college and around outsiders. “Dad,” he said.

Without an eyeblink, the others drew closer around him; you could feel it in the air, a tightening, a solidifying as they ranged themselves at his shoulders. I was next to him, and I got the full benefit of the bellow coming out of the phone: "… Job opened up… foot on the ladder… changed your mind…?”

Rafe’s nostrils twitched as if he had smelled something foul. “Not interested, ” he said.

The volume of the tirade made his eyes snap shut. I caught enough of it to gather that reading plays all day was for pansies and that someone called Brad—bury had a son who had just made his first million and that Rafe was generally a waste of oxygen. He held the phone between thumb and finger, inches from his ear.

“For God’s sake, hang up,” Justin whispered. His face was pulled into an unconscious, agonized grimace. “Just hang up on him.”

“He can’t,” Daniel said softly. “He should, obviously, but… Someday.”

Abby shrugged. “Well, then…” she said. She sent the cards arcing from hand to hand with a fast, sassy flourish and dealt, five hands. Daniel smiled across at her and pulled his chair up, ready.

The phone was still going strong; the word “arse” came up regularly, in what sounded like a wide variety of contexts. Rafe’s chin was tucked in like he was braced against gale-force wind. Justin touched his arm; his eyes flew open and he stared at us, reddening right up to his hairline.

The rest of us had already thrown in our stakes. I had a hand like a foot—a seven and a nine, not even suited—but I knew exactly what the others were doing. They were pulling Rafe back, and the thought of being part of that sent something intoxicating through me, something so fine it hurt. For a split second I thought of Rob hooking one foot around my ankle, under our desks, when O’Kelly was giving me a bollocking. I waved my cards at Rafe and mouthed, “Ante up.”

He blinked. I cocked one eyebrow, gave him my best cheeky Lexie grin and whispered, “Unless you’re scared I’ll kick your ass again.”

The frozen look dissolved, just a little. He checked his cards; then he put the phone down on the bookshelf beside him, carefully, and tossed ten pence into the middle. “Because I’m happy where I am,” he told the phone. His voice sounded almost normal, but that angry red flush was still covering his face.

Abby gave him a tiny smile, fanned three cards deftly on the table and flipped them over. “Lexie’s drawing to a straight,” said Justin, narrowing his eyes at me. “I know that look.”

The phone had apparently spent a lot of money on Rafe and wasn’t planning to see it flushed down the bog. “She’s not,” Daniel said. “She may have something, but not the makings of a straight. I call.”

I was nowhere near a straight, but that wasn’t the point; none of us were folding, not till Rafe hung up. The phone made a big statement about a Real Job. “In other words, a job in an office,” Rafe informed us. The rigidity was starting to go out of his spine. “Maybe even, someday, if I’m a team player and I think outside the box and work smarter not harder, an office with a window. Or am I aiming a little high?” he asked the phone. “What do you think?” He mimed See your one and raise you two, at Justin.

The phone—it obviously knew it was being insulted, even if it wasn’t sure exactly how—said something belligerent about ambition and how it was about bloody time Rafe grew up and started living in the real world.

“Ah,” Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”

“It’s all jealousy,” Justin said, considering his cards and flipping two more coins into the middle. “Sour grapes.”

“Nobody,” Rafe told the phone, flapping a hand at us to keep our voices down. “The television. I spend my days watching soap operas, eating bonbons and plotting society’s downfall.”

The last card came up a nine, which at least gave me a pair. “Well, certainly in some cases jealousy is a factor,” Daniel said, “but Rafe’s father, if half what he says is true, could afford to live any life he wanted, including ours. What does he have to be jealous of? No, I think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented… But I’ve always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself. Could you put it on speakerphone, Rafe? I’m interested to hear what he has to say.”

Rafe gave him a wide-eyed, are-you-insane stare and shook his head; Daniel looked vaguely puzzled. The rest of us were starting to get the giggles.

“Of course,” Daniel said politely, “if you’d prefer… What’s so funny, Lexie?”

“Lunatics,” Rafe told the ceiling in a fervent undertone, spreading his arms to take in the phone and Daniel and the rest of us, who by now had our hands over our mouths. “I’m surrounded by wall-to-wall lunatics. What have I done to deserve this? Did I pick on the afflicted in a previous life?”

The phone, which was obviously working up to a big finish, informed Rafe that he could have a Lifestyle. “Guzzling champagne in the City,” Rafe translated, for us, “and shagging my secretary.”

“What the fuck is wrong with that?” the phone shouted, loud enough that Daniel, startled, reared back in his chair with a look of sheer astounded disapproval. Justin exploded with a noise somewhere between a snort and a yelp; Abby was hanging over the back of her chair with her knuckles stuffed in her mouth, and I was laughing so hard I had to stick my head under the table.

The phone, with a magnificent disregard for basic anatomy, called us all a bunch of limp-dicked hippies. By the time I pulled myself together and came up for air, Rafe had flipped over a pair of jacks and was scooping in the pot, pumping one fist in the air and grinning. I realized something. Rafe’s mobile had gone off about two feet from my ear, and I hadn’t even flinched.

“You know what it is?” Abby said out of nowhere, a few hands later. “It’s the contentment.”

“Who said which to the what now?” inquired Rafe, narrowing his eyes to examine Daniel’s stack. He had switched his phone off.

“The real-world thing.” She leaned sideways across me to pull the ashtray closer. Justin had put on Debussy, blending with the faint rush of rain on the grass outside. “Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got—specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular—then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on. That’s why Rafe’s dad throws a mickey fit whenever Rafe says he’s happy where he is. The way he sees it, we’re all subversives. We’re traitors.”

“I think you’ve got something there,” said Daniel. “Not jealousy, after all: fear. It’s a fascinating state of affairs. Throughout history—even a hundred years ago, even fifty—it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it’s contentment. What a strange reversal.”

“We’re revolutionaries,” Justin said happily, poking a Dorito around in the salsa jar and looking phenomenally unrevolutionary. “I never realized it was this easy.”

“We’re stealth guerrillas,” I said with relish.

“You’re a stealth chimpanzee,” Rafe told me, flipping three coins into the middle.

“Yes, but a contented one,” said Daniel, smiling across at me. “Aren’t you?”

“If Rafe would just quit hogging the garlic dip, I’d be the most contented stealth chimpanzee in the whole of Ireland.”

“Good,” Daniel said, giving me a little nod. “That’s what I like to hear.”

Sam never asked. “How’s it going?” he would say, in our late-night phone calls, and when I said, “Fine,” he would move on to something else. At first he told me bits about his side of the investigation—carefully checking out my old cases, the local uniforms’ list of troublemakers, Lexie’s students and professors. The more he got nowhere, though, the less he talked about it. Instead he told me about other things, small homey things. He had been over at my flat a couple of times, to air it out and make sure it didn’t look too obviously empty; the next-door cat had had kittens at the bottom of the garden, he said, and awful Mrs. Moloney downstairs had left a snotty note on his car informing him that Parking was for Residents Only. I didn’t tell him this, but it all seemed a million miles away, off in some long-ago world so chaotic that even thinking about it made me tired. Sometimes it took me a moment to remember who he was talking about.

Only once, on the Saturday night, he asked about the others. I was hanging out in my lurk lane, leaning back into a hawthorn hedge and keeping one eye on the cottage. I had a kneesock of Lexie’s bundled around the mike, which gave me an attractive three-boobed look but meant that Frank and his gang would only pick up about 10 percent of the conversation.

I was keeping my voice down anyway. Almost since I went out the back gate, I’d had the feeling that someone was following me. Nothing concrete, nothing that couldn’t be explained away by the wind and moon shadows and countryside night noises; just that low-level electrical current at the back of your neck, where your skull meets your spine, that only comes from someone’s eyes. It took a lot of willpower not to whip around, but if by any chance there really was someone out there, I didn’t want him knowing he’d been sussed, not till I decided what I was going to do about it.

“Do ye never go to the pub?” Sam asked.

I wasn’t sure what he was asking. Sam knew exactly what I did with my time. According to Frank, he got into work at six every morning to go through the tapes. This made me itch, in small unreasonable ways, but the thought of bringing it up itched even worse. “Rafe and Justin and I went to the Buttery on Tuesday, after tutorials,” I said. “Remember?”

“I meant your local—what’s it called, Regan’s, down in the village. Do they never go there?”

We passed Regan’s in the car, on our way to and from college: a dilapidated little country pub, sandwiched between the butcher’s and the news-agent’s, with bikes leaning unlocked against the wall in the evenings. Nobody had ever suggested going in there.

“It’s simpler to have a few drinks at home, if we want them,” I said. “It’s a walk to the village, and everyone but Justin smokes.” Pubs have always been the heart of Irish social life, but when the smoking ban came in, a lot of people moved to drinking at home. The ban doesn’t bother me, although I’m confused by the idea that you shouldn’t go into a pub and do anything that might be bad for you, but the level of obedience does. To the Irish, rules always used to count as challenges—see who can come up with the best way round this one—and this sudden switch to sheep mode makes me worry that we’re turning into someone else, possibly Switzerland.

Sam laughed. “You’ve been up in the big city too long. I’ll guarantee you Regan’s doesn’t stop anyone smoking. And it’s less than a mile by the back roads. Do you not think it’s odd, them never going in there?”

I shrugged. “They are odd. They’re not all that sociable, in case you haven’t noticed. And maybe Regan’s sucks.”

“Maybe,” Sam said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “You went to Dunne’s in the Stephen’s Green Centre when it was your turn to buy food, am I right? Where do the others go?”

“How would I know? Justin went to Marks and Sparks yesterday; I haven’t a clue about the others. Frank said Lexie shopped at Dunne’s, so I shop at Dunne’s.”

“What about the newsagent’s in the village? Anyone been there?”

I thought about that. Rafe had done a cigarette run one evening, but he had gone out the back gate, towards the late-night petrol station on the Rathowen road, not towards Glenskehy. “Not since I got here. What are you thinking?”

“I was just wondering,” Sam said, slowly. “About the village. You’re up at the Big House, you know. Daniel’s from the Big House family. In most places nobody cares about that, any more; but every now and then, depending on history… I was just wondering if there’s any bad feeling there.”

Right up into living memory, the British ran Ireland on the feudal system: handed out villages to Anglo-Irish families like party favors, then left them to use the land and the locals however they saw fit, which varied just as much as you’d expect. After independence the system collapsed in on itself; a few faded, obsolete eccentrics are still hanging in there, mostly living out of four rooms and opening the rest of the estate to the public to pay the roofing bills, but a lot of the Big Houses have been bought by corporations and turned into hotels or spas or whatever, and everyone’s half forgotten what they used to be. Here and there, though, where history scarred a place deeper than most: people remember.

And this was Wicklow. For hundreds of years, rebellions had been planned within a day’s walk of where I was sitting. These hills had fought on the guerrillas’ side, hidden them from stumbling soldiers through dark tangled nights; cottages like Lexie’s had been left hollow and bloody when the British shot everyone in sight till they found their one cached rebel. Every family has stories.

Sam was right, I had been up in the big city way too long. Dublin is modern to the point of hysteria, anything before broadband has become a quaint, embarrassing little joke; I had forgotten even what it was like to live in a place that had memory. Sam is from the country, from Galway; he knows. The cottage’s last windows were lit up with moonlight and it looked like a ghost house, secretive and wary.

“There could be,” I said. “I don’t see what it could have to do with our case, though. It’s one thing to give the Big House kids hairy looks till they quit coming into the newsagent’s; it’s a whole other thing to stab one of them because the landlord was mean to your great-granny in 1846.”

“Probably. I’ll look into it, though, on the off chance. Anything’s worth checking.”

I thumped back against the hedge, felt a quick vibration through the branches as something scurried away. “Come on. How crazy do you think these people are?”

A brief silence. “I’m not saying they’re crazy,” Sam said eventually.

“You’re saying one of them might have killed Lexie for something that a completely unrelated family did a hundred years ago. And I’m saying that’s someone who at the very least needs to get out a whole lot more, and find himself a girlfriend who doesn’t get sheared every summer.” I wasn’t sure why the idea got up my nose so badly, or for that matter why I was being such a snippy little bitch. Something to do with the house, I think. I had put a lot of work into that house—we had spent half the evening stripping the moldy wallpaper in the sitting room—and I was getting attached to it. The idea of it as the target of that kind of focused hatred made something hot flare up in my stomach.

“There’s a family round where I grew up,” Sam said. “The Purcells. Their great-granda or whatever was a rent agent, back in the day. One of the bad ones—used to lend the rent money to families who didn’t have it, then take the interest out of the wives and daughters, then throw them all out onto the roads once he got bored. Kevin Purcell grew up with the rest of us, not a bother, no grudge; but when we all got a bit older and he started going out with one of the local girls, a bunch of lads got together and beat the shite out of him. They weren’t crazy, Cassie. They’d nothing against Kevin; he was a grand young fella, never did that girl any harm. Just… some things aren’t OK, no matter how long you leave them. Some things don’t go away.”

The leaves of the hedge prickled and twisted against my back, like something was moving in there, but when I whipped around it was still as a picture. “That’s different, Sam. This Kevin guy made the first move: he started going out with that girl. These five didn’t do a thing. They’re just living here.”

Another pause. “And that could be enough, all depending. I’m only saying.”

There was a bewildered note in his voice. “Fair enough,” I said, more calmly. “You’re right, it’s worth a look—we did say our guy was probably local. Sorry for being a snotty cow.”

“I wish you were here,” Sam said suddenly, softly. “On the phone, it’s too easy to get mixed up. Get things wrong.”

“I know, Sam,” I said. “I miss you too.” It was true. I tried not to—that kind of thing just distracts you, and getting distracted can do anything from wreck your case to get you killed—but when I was on my own and tired, trying to read in bed after a long day, it got difficult. “Only a few weeks left.”

Sam sighed. “Less, if I find something. I’ll talk to Doherty and Byrne, see what they can tell me. Meanwhile… just look after yourself, OK? Just in case.”

“I will,” I said. “You can update me tomorrow. Sleep tight.”

“Sleep tight. I love you.”

That feeling of being watched was still pinching at the back of my neck, stronger now, closer. Maybe it was just the conversation with Sam getting to me, but all of a sudden I wanted to know for sure. This electric ripple from somewhere in the dark, Sam’s stories, Rafe’s father, all these things pressing in on us from every side, looking for weak spots, for their moment to attack: for a second I forgot I was one of the invaders, I just wanted to yell Leave us alone. I unwound my mike sock and tucked it into my girdle, along with my phone. Then I switched on my torch for maximum visibility and started walking, a casual, jaunty stroll, heading for home.

I know a variety of ways to shake off a tail, catch him in the act or turn the tables; most of them were designed for city streets, not for the middle of nowhere, but they’re adaptable. I kept my eyes front and picked up the pace, till there was no way for anyone to stay too close without breaking cover or making an awful lot of noise in the underbrush. Then I did a sudden swerve onto a cross-lane, switched off the torch, ran fifteen or twenty yards and squished myself, as quietly as I could, through a hedge into a field left to run wild. I stayed still, crouching down close against the bushes, and waited.

Twenty minutes of nothing, not a pebble crunching, not a leaf rustling. If there was actually someone following me, he or she was smart and patient: not a nice thought. Finally I eased myself back through the hedge. There was no one on the lane in either direction, as far as I could see. I picked most of the leaves and twigs out of my clothes and headed home, fast. Lexie’s walks had averaged an hour; I didn’t have long before the others started worrying. Over the tops of the hedges I could see a glow against the sky: the light from Whitethorn House, faint and golden and shot through with whirls of wood smoke like mist.

That night, when I was reading in bed, Abby knocked on my door. She was in red-and-white-checked flannel pajamas, her face scrubbed shiny and her hair loose on her shoulders; she looked about twelve. She closed the door behind her and sat down cross-legged on the end of my bed, tucking her bare feet into the crooks of her knees for warmth. “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

“Sure,” I said, hoping to God I knew the answer.

“OK.” Abby tucked her hair behind her ears, glanced back at the door. “I don’t know how to put this, so I’m just going to come straight out and ask, and you can tell me to mind my own business if you want. Is the baby OK?”

I must have looked gobsmacked. One corner of her mouth twisted upwards in a wry little smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I guessed. We’re always in sync, but last month you never bought the chocolate… and then when you threw up that day, I just figured.”

My mind was racing. “Do the guys know?”

Abby shrugged, a little flip of one shoulder. “I doubt it. They haven’t said anything, anyway.”

This didn’t rule out the chance that one of them did know, that Lexie had told the father—either that she was having a baby or that she was having an abortion—and he had flipped out, but it went some way towards it: Abby didn’t miss much. She waited, watching me. “The baby didn’t make it,” I said; which was, after all, true.

Abby nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry, Lexie. Or…?” She raised one eyebrow discreetly.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it, anyway. This sort of makes things simpler.”

She nodded again, and I realized I had called it right: she wasn’t surprised. “Are you going to tell the guys? Because I can do it, if you want me to.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want them knowing.” Info is ammo, Frank always said. That pregnancy could come in useful sometime; I wasn’t about to throw it away. I think it was only in that moment, the moment when I realized I was saving up a dead baby like a hand grenade, that I understood what I had got myself into.

“Fair enough.” Abby stood up and hitched at her pajama bottoms. “If you ever want to talk about it or anything, you know where I am.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me who the father was?” I said. If it was common knowledge who Lexie was sleeping with, then I was in big trouble, but somehow I didn’t think it was; Lexie appeared to have lived most of her life on a need-to-know basis. Abby, though; if anyone had guessed, it would be her.

She turned, at the door, and gave that one-shouldered shrug. “I figure,” she said, her voice carefully neutral, “if you want to tell me, you probably will.”

When she was gone—quick arpeggio of bare feet, almost soundless, down the stairs—I left my book where it was and sat there listening to the others getting ready for bed: someone running water in the bathroom, Justin singing tunelessly to himself below me (“Gooooldfinger…”), the creak of floorboards as Daniel moved quietly around his room. Gradually the noises wound down, grew softer and intermittent, faded to silence. I turned off my bedside lamp: Daniel would see it under his door if I kept it on, and I had had enough private little chats for one evening. Even after my eyes adjusted, all I could see was the looming mass of the wardrobe, the hunch of the dressing table, the barely there flicker in the mirror when I moved.

I had been putting a fair amount of energy into not thinking about the baby; Lexie’s baby. Four weeks, Cooper had said, not quite a quarter of an inch: a tiny gemstone, a single spark of color slipping between your fingers and through the cracks and gone. A heart the size of a fleck of glitter and vibrating like a hummingbird, seeded with a billion things that would never happen now.

When you threw up that day… A strong-willed baby, wide awake and not to be ignored, already reaching out filament fingers to tug at her. For some reason it wasn’t a silky newborn I pictured: it was a toddler, compact and naked, with a head of dark curls; faceless, running away from me down the lawn on a summer day, trailing a yell of laughter. Maybe she had sat in this bed just a couple of weeks ago, picturing the same thing.

Or maybe not. I was starting to get a sense that Lexie’s will had been denser than mine and obsidian hard, built for resistance, not combat. If she hadn’t wanted to imagine the baby, that tiny jewel-colored comet would never for a second have flashed across her mind.

I wanted, as intensely as if this were somehow the key that would unlock the whole story, to know whether she had been going to keep it. Our abortion ban doesn’t change anything: a long silent litany of women every year take the ferry or the plane to England, home again before anyone even notices they’re gone. There was no one in the world who could tell me what Lexie had been planning; probably even she hadn’t been sure. I almost got out of bed and sneaked downstairs to have another look at the diary, just in case I had missed something—a tiny pen dot hidden in a corner of December, on the due date—but that would have been a dumb thing to do, and anyway I already knew there was nothing there. I sat in bed in the dark with my arms around my knees, listening to the rain and feeling the battery pack dig into me where the stab wound should have been, for a very long time.

There was this one evening; Sunday, I think it was. The guys had pushed back the furniture in the sitting room and were attacking the floor with a sander and a polisher and a certain amount of machismo, so Abby and I had left them to it and headed up to the top spare room, the one next to me, to pick at the edges of Uncle Simon’s hoard. I was sitting on the floor, half covered in ancient scraps of material, sorting out the ones that weren’t mainly moth holes; Abby was flipping through a huge pile of fugly curtains, murmuring, “Bin, bin, bin—these might be worth washing—bin, bin, oh God bin, who bought this crap?” The sander was humming noisily downstairs and the house had a busy, settled feel that reminded me of the Murder squad room on a quiet day.

“Whoa,” Abby said suddenly, sitting back on her heels. “Check this out.”

She was holding up a dress: robin’s-egg blue with white polka dots and a white collar and sash, little cap sleeves and a full skirt made to fly up when you twirled, pure lindy hop. “Wow,” I said, disentangling myself from my puddle of fabric and going over to check it out. “Think it was Uncle Simon’s?”

“I don’t think he had the figure for it, but we’ll check the photo album.” Abby held the dress at arm’s length and examined it. “Want to try it on? I don’t think it has moths.”

“Go for it. You found it.”

“It’d never fit me. Look—” Abby got to her feet and held the dress against herself. “It’s for someone taller. The waist would be down around my arse.”

Abby was maybe five foot two, but I kept forgetting; it was hard to think of her as small. “And it’s for someone skinnier than me,” I said, trying the waist against mine, “or wearing a serious corset. I’d burst it.”

“Maybe not. You lost weight when you were sick.” Abby threw the dress over my shoulder. “Try it.”

She gave me a quizzical look when I headed for my bedroom to change: it was obviously out of character, but I couldn’t do much about that, except hope she would put it down to self-consciousness about the bandage or something. The dress actually did fit, more or less—it was tight enough that the bandage left a bulge, but there was nothing dodgy about that. I did a quick check to make sure the wire didn’t show. In the mirror I looked breathless and mischievous and daring, ready for anything.

“Told you,” Abby said, when I came out. She spun me round, retied the sash in a bigger bow. “Let’s go wow the boys.”

We ran downstairs calling, “Look what we found!” and by the time we got down to the sitting room the sander was off and the guys were waiting for us. “Oh, look at you!” Justin cried. “Our little jazz baby!”

“Perfect,” Daniel said, smiling at me. “It’s perfect.”

Rafe swung one leg over the piano stool and swept a finger up the keys in a great, expert flourish. Then he started to play, something lazy and tempting with a sideways swing to it. Abby laughed. She gave the bow of my sash another tug, tightening it; then she went to the piano and started to sing.

“Of all the boys I’ve known and I’ve known some, until I first met you I was lonesome…”

I had heard Abby sing before, but only to herself when she thought no one was listening, never like this. That voice: it was the kind you don’t hear these days, a magnificent, full-blown contralto straight out of old war films, a voice for smoky nightclubs and marcel-waved hair, red lipstick and a blue saxophone. Justin put the sander down, clicked his heels together neatly and bowed. “May I have the honor of this dance?” he asked, and held out his hand to me.

For a second I wasn’t sure. What if Lexie had had two left feet, what if she hadn’t had two left feet and my new clumsiness gave me away, what if he held me too close and felt the battery pack hard under the bandage… But I always loved dancing and it seemed like forever since I had danced or wanted to, so long ago I couldn’t remember the last time. Abby winked at me without missing a note and Rafe threw in an extra little riff, and I caught Justin’s hand and let him pull me out of the doorway.

He knew what he was doing: smooth steps and his hand steady in mine as he spun me in slow circles around the room, floorboards soft and warm and dusty under my feet. And I hadn’t lost the knack, after all, I wasn’t stepping on Justin’s feet or tripping over my own; my body swayed with his sure and agile as if I had never walked into a chair in my life, I couldn’t have put a foot wrong if I had tried. Ribs of sunlight flashing across my eyes, Daniel leaning against the wall and smiling with a crumple of sandpaper forgotten in his hand, my skirt whirling up like a bell as Justin swung me away from him and then in again. “And so I rack my brain trying to explain all the things that you do to me…” Smell of polish, and the sawdust spinning lazy curls through the long columns of light. Abby with one palm lifting and her head thrown back, throat exposed and the song tossed up through the empty rooms and battered ceilings to the whole blazing sunset sky.

For a second it came back to me, when I had last danced like this: me and Rob, on the roof of the extension below my flat, the night before everything went horribly wrong. Somehow it didn’t even hurt. It was so far away; I was buttoned tight and untouchable in my blue dress and that was a sweet sad thing that had happened to some other girl, a long time ago. Rafe was picking up the rhythm and Abby was swaying faster, snapping her fingers: “I could say bella, bella, even say wunderbar, each language only helps me tell you how grand you are…” Justin caught me by the waist and spun me off the floor in a great flying circle, his face flushed and laughing close to mine. The wide bare room tossed Abby’s voice back and forth as if there were someone harmonizing in every corner and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.