The Likeness

9

"Well well well,” Frank said, that night. "You know what today is, right?”

I had no idea. Half my mind was still back at Whitethorn House. After dinner Rafe had dug out a tattered, yellowish songbook from inside the piano stool and kept going with the inter-war theme, Abby was singing along from the spare room—“Oh, Johnny, how you can love”—while she went back to rummaging and Daniel and Justin did the washing up, and the rhythm of it had bounced in my heels, sweet and saucy and tempting, all the way down the lawn and out the back gate. For a second I had actually considered just staying home, leaving Frank and Sam and the mystery pair of eyes to their own devices for one evening. It wasn’t like I was getting anything useful done out here. The night had turned cloudy, needle-fine drizzle was spattering onto the communal jacket, and I didn’t like having the torch on while I was on the phone; I couldn’t see six inches in front of my face. A whole coven of knife-happy stalkers could have been doing the Macarena around the cottage and I would never have known.

“If it’s your birthday,” I said, “you might have to wait for your present.”

“Very funny. It’s Sunday, babe. And unless I’m much mistaken, you’re still in Whitethorn House, snug as a bug in a rug. Which means we’ve won our first battle: you made it through the week without getting caught. Congratulations, Detective. You’re in.”

“I guess I am,” I said. I had stopped counting the days, somewhere along the way. I decided this was a good sign.

“So,” Frank said. I could hear him arranging himself more comfortably, turning down the outraged talk-radio caller in the background: he was at home, wherever home was since Olivia had kicked him out. “Let’s have a summary of Week One.”

I pulled myself up onto a wall and took a second to get my head clear before I answered. Under all the easy messing around, Frank is pure business: he wants reports like any other boss, and he likes them clear, thorough and succinct.

“Week One,” I said. “I’ve inserted myself into Alexandra Madison’s home and her place of study, apparently with success: no one’s shown any sign of suspicion. I’ve searched as much of Whitethorn House as is feasible, but I haven’t found anything to point us in a specific direction.” This was basically true; the diary presumably pointed somewhere, but so far I had no idea where. “I’ve made myself available as much as possible—to known associates, by attempting to be alone on regular occasions during the day and evening, and to unknown ones by ensuring that I’m visible on these walks. I haven’t been approached by anyone who wasn’t already on our radar, but at this stage that doesn’t rule out an unknown assailant; he could be biding his time. I’ve been approached at various times by all the housemates and a number of students and professors, but all of them seemed concerned primarily with how I was feeling, that kind of thing—Brenda Grealey was a little more interested in the details than you’d expect, but I think that’s just ghoulishness. None of the reactions to Lexie’s stabbing or to her return have raised any red flags. The housemates appear to have concealed the full extent of their distress from the investigating officers, but coming from them, I don’t consider that suspicious behavior. They’re very reserved with outsiders.”

“You’re telling me,” Frank said. “What’s your gut say?”

I shifted, trying to find a bit of wall where nothing stuck into my arse. This was a little more complicated than it should have been, since I wasn’t about to tell him, or Sam, about the diary or about my feeling that I was being followed. “I think there’s something we’re missing,” I said, in the end. “Something important. Maybe your mystery guy, maybe a motive, maybe… I don’t know. I just get this very strong sense that there’s something here that hasn’t surfaced yet. I keep feeling like I’m about to put my finger on it, but…”

“Something to do with the housemates? College? The baby? The May-Ruth thing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”

Sofa springs creaking as Frank reached for something—a drink; I heard him swallow. “I can tell you this much: it’s not the great-uncle. You were way off base there. He died of cirrhosis; spent thirty or forty years locked up in that house drinking, then six months in a hospice dying. None of the five of them visited him. As a matter of fact, he and Daniel hadn’t seen each other since Daniel was a kid, as far as I can find out.”

I had seldom been so glad to be wrong, but this left me with that same grabbing-at-mirages feeling I’d had all week. “Why’d he leave Daniel the place, then?”

“Not many options. That family dies young; the only two living relatives were Daniel and his cousin, Edward Hanrahan, old Simon’s daughter’s kid. Eddie’s a good little yuppie, works for an estate agent. Apparently Simon figured Danny Boy was the lesser of two evils. Maybe he liked academic types better than yuppies, or maybe he wanted the house to stay with the family name.”

Good for Simon. “That must’ve got up Eddie’s nose.”

“Oh, yeah. He wasn’t any closer to Granddad than Daniel was, but he tried to fight the will, claimed the drink had sent Simon off his trolley. That’s why probate took so long. It was a stupid thing to do, but then, our Eddie’s not the brightest pixie in the forest. Simon’s doctor confirmed that he was an alcoholic and a horrible old man, but sane as you or me, and that was the end of that. Nothing dodgy there.”

I slumped down on the wall. I shouldn’t have been frustrated, I had never actually thought that the gang had slipped nightshade into Uncle Simon’s denture adhesive; but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something crucial going on around Whitethorn House, something I should be able to put my finger on. “Yeah, well,” I said. “It was just a thought. Sorry for wasting your time.”

Frank sighed. “You didn’t. Anything’s worth checking.” If I heard that sentence one more time, I was going to kill someone myself. “If you think they’re dodgy, then they probably are. Just not that particular way.”

“I never said I thought they were dodgy.”

“A few days ago you thought they’d put a pillow over Uncle Simon’s head.”

I pulled my hood farther over my face—the rain was picking up, fine little stinging needles of it, and I wanted to go home. It was a toss-up which one was more pointless, this stakeout or this conversation. “I didn’t think it. I just asked you to check it out, on the off chance. I can’t see them as a bunch of killers.”

“Hmm,” Frank said. “And you’re positive that’s not just because they’re such lovely people.”

I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was winding me up or testing me—Frank being Frank, probably a little of both. “Come on, Frankie, you know me better than that. You asked me about my instinct; that’s what it says. I’ve spent basically every waking second with these four for a week now, and there’s been no sign of a motive, no indications of guilty consciences—and like we said before, if one of them did it, the other three have to know. By now someone would have cracked, even for a second. I think you’re dead right that they’re hiding something, but I can’t see it being that.”

“Fair enough,” Frank said, noncommittally. “So you’ve got two jobs for Week Two. The first one is to pinpoint whatever it is that’s tingling your spidey sense. The second one is to start pushing the housemates a little, find out what it is they’re not sharing. They’ve been getting an easy ride so far—which is fine, that’s what we planned, but now it’s time to start tightening the screws. And while you’re doing that, here’s something to bear in mind. Remember your girlie chat with Abby, the other night?”

“Yeah,” I said. A flicker of something very strange went through me, at the thought of Frank hearing that conversation; something almost like outrage. I wanted to snap at him, That was private.

“Pajama parties rule. I told you she was a smart kid. What do you think: does she know who the daddy is?”

I hadn’t been able to make up my mind on that. “She could probably make a good guess, but I don’t think she’s sure. And she’s not about to tell me what her guess is.”

“Watch her,” Frank said, taking another swig of his drink. “She’s a little too observant for my taste. You think she’ll tell the guys?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t have to think about this one. “I get the sense that Abby’s very good at minding her own business and letting other people sort out their dramas all by themselves. She brought up the baby so I wouldn’t have to deal with it alone if I didn’t want to, but once she’d made that clear, she was straight out of there—no hints, no probing. She won’t say anything. And, Frank—are you going to be interviewing the guys again?”

“Not sure yet,” Frank said. There was a wary note in his voice; he doesn’t like being pinned down. “Why?”

“If you do, don’t mention the baby. OK? I want to spring that one on them myself. Around you, they’re on their guard; you’ll only get half their reaction. I can get the whole thing.”

“All right,” Frank said, after a moment. He was trying to sound like he was doing me a favor, but I heard the undercurrent of satisfaction: he liked the way I was thinking. It was nice to know someone did. “But make sure you time it right. Get ’em when they’re drunk or something.”

“They don’t get drunk, exactly, just tipsy. I’ll know my moment when I see it.”

“Fair enough. Here’s my point, though: that’s one thing Abby was keeping under wraps, and not just where we’re concerned—she was hiding it from Lexie, too, and she’s still hiding it from the boys. We’ve been talking about them like they’re one big entity with one big secret, but it’s not that simple. There are cracks there. They could all be keeping the same secret, or they could each have secrets of their own, or both. Look for the cracks. And keep me posted.”

He was about to hang up. “Anything new on our girl?” I asked. May-Ruth. Somehow I couldn’t say it out loud; even bringing her up felt strange now, electric. But if he had found out anything more about her, I wanted it.

Frank snorted. “Ever tried rushing the FBI? They’ve got a whole plateful of mother-stabbers and father-rapers of their own; someone else’s little murder case isn’t at the top of their list. Forget about them. They’ll get back to us when they get back to us. You just concentrate on getting me a few answers.”

Frank was right, at first I think I had seen the four of them as a single unit: The Housemates, shoulder to shoulder, graceful and inseparable as a group in a painting and all with the same fine bloom of light on them, like the luster on old beeswaxed wood. It was only over that first week that they had turned real to me, come into focus as separate individuals with their own little quirks and weaknesses. I knew the cracks had to be there. That kind of friendship doesn’t just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.

Small cracks, at first: slippery as mist, nothing you could put your finger on. We were in the kitchen Monday morning, eating breakfast. Rafe had done his Mongo-want-coffee routine and disappeared to finish waking up. Justin was slicing his fried eggs into neat strips, Daniel was eating sausages one-handed and making notes in the margins of what looked like an Old Norse photocopy, Abby was flipping through a week-old newspaper she had found in the Arts block and I was chattering to no one in particular about nothing very much. I had been ratcheting up the energy level, little by little. This was more complicated than it sounds. The more I talked, the more likely I was to shove my foot in my mouth; but the only way I was going to get anything useful out of these four was if they relaxed around me, and that would only happen once everything went back to normal, which, for Lexie, had not involved a lot of silence. I was telling the kitchen about these four awful girls in my Thursday tutorial, which I figured was safe enough.

“As far as I can tell they’re actually all the same person. They’re all called Orla or Fiona or Aoife or something, and they all have that accent like they’ve had their sinuses surgically removed, and they’ve all got that fake-straight fake-blond hair, and none of them ever, ever do the reading. I don’t know why they’re bothering with college.”

“To meet rich boys,” Abby said, without looking up.

“At least one of them’s found one. Some rugby-looking guy. He was waiting for her after the tutorial last week and I swear, when the four of them came out the door he got this terrified look and then he held out his hand to the wrong girl for a second, before the right one dived on him. He can’t tell them apart either.”

“Look who’s feeling better,” Daniel said, smiling across at me.

“Chatterbox,” said Justin, putting another slice of toast on my plate. “Just out of curiosity, have you ever stayed quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch?”

“I have so. I had laryngitis once, when I was nine, and I couldn’t say a single word for five days. It was awful. Everyone kept bringing me chicken soup and comic books and boring stuff, and I kept trying to explain that I felt totally fine and I wanted to get up, but they just told me to be quiet and rest my throat. When you were little, did you ever—”

“Dammit,” Abby said suddenly, looking up from her paper. “Those cherries. The best-by date was yesterday. Is anyone still hungry? We could put them in pancakes or something.”

“I’ve never heard of cherry pancakes,” Justin said. “It sounds disgusting.”

“I don’t see why. If you can have blueberry pancakes—”

“And cherry scones,” I pointed out, through toast.

“That’s a different principle entirely,” Daniel said. “Candied cherries. The acidity and moisture levels—”

“We could try it. They cost about a million quid; I’m not just leaving them to rot.”

“I’ll try anything,” I said helpfully. “I’d have some cherry pancakes.”

“Oh God, let’s not,” said Justin, with a little shudder of distaste. “Let’s just take the cherries into college and have them with lunch.”

“Rafe’s not getting any,” Abby said, folding the paper away and heading for the fridge. “You know that weird smell off his bag? Half a banana he stuck in the inside pocket and forgot about. From now on we don’t feed him anything we can’t actually watch him eat. Lex, give me a hand wrapping them up?”

It was so smooth, I didn’t even notice anything had happened. Abby and I split the cherries into four bundles and put them in with that day’s sandwiches, Rafe ended up eating most of them, and I forgot the whole thing, until the next evening.

We had washed a few of the less fugly curtains and were putting them up in the spare rooms, to keep the heat in rather than as an aesthetic choice—we had one electric storage heater and the fireplace to heat that whole house, in winter it must have been Arctic. Justin and Daniel were doing the first-floor room, while the rest of us did the top ones. Abby and I were threading curtain hooks for Rafe to hang when we heard a tumble of heavy things falling below us, a thud, a yelp from Justin; then Daniel calling, “It’s all right, I’m fine.”

“What now?” said Rafe. He was balanced precariously on the windowsill, hanging onto the curtain rail with one hand.

“Someone fell off something,” Abby said, through a mouthful of curtain hooks, “or over something. I think they’ll live.”

There was a sudden low exclamation, through the floorboards, and Justin called, “Lexie, Abby, Rafe, come here! Come look!”

We ran downstairs. Daniel and Justin were kneeling on the spare-room floor, surrounded by an explosion of weird old objects, and for a second I thought one of them was hurt after all. Then I saw what they were looking at. There was a stiff, stained leather pouch on the floor between them, and Daniel was holding a revolver.

“Daniel came off the stepladder,” Justin said, “and knocked over all this stuff, and this just fell out, right at his feet. I can’t even work out where it was, in all this mess. God knows what else is in there.”

It was a Webley, a beauty, glowing with patina between the crusted patches of dirt. “My God,” Rafe said, dropping down beside Daniel and reaching out to touch the barrel. “That’s a Webley Mark Six; an old one, too. They were standard issue during the First World War. Your crazy great-uncle or whoever he was, Daniel, the one you look like: this could have been his.”

Daniel nodded. He inspected the gun for a moment, then broke it open: unloaded. “William,” he said. “It could have been his, yes.” He closed the cylinder, fitted his hand carefully, gently, around the grip.

“It’s a mess,” Rafe said, “but it could be cleaned up. All it needs is a couple of days’ soak in a good solvent, and then some work with a brush. I suppose ammo would be too much to ask for.”

Daniel smiled at him, a quick, unexpected flash of a grin. He tipped the leather pouch upside down and a faded cardboard packet of cartridges fell out, onto the floor.

“Oh, beautiful,” Rafe said, picking up the box and giving it a shake. I could tell from the rattle that it was almost full; there had to be nine or ten cartridges in there. “We’ll have this up and running in no time. I’ll buy the solvent.”

“Don’t mess around with that thing unless you know what you’re doing,” said Abby. She was the only one who hadn’t sat down on the floor to have a look, and she didn’t sound all that pleased with this whole idea. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, either. The Webley was a sweetheart and I would have loved a chance to try it out, but an undercover job grows a whole new level when there’s a gun bouncing around. Sam wasn’t going to like this one little bit.

Rafe rolled his eyes. “What makes you think I don’t? My father took me shooting every single year, starting when I was seven. I can hit a pheasant in midair, three shots out of five. One year we went up to Scotland—”

“Is that thing even legal?” Abby wanted to know. “Don’t we need a license, or something?”

“But it’s a family heirloom,” said Justin. “We didn’t buy it, we inherited it.”

Again with that we. “Licenses aren’t for buying a gun, silly,” I said. “They’re for owning it.” I had already decided to let Frank explain to Sam why, even though the gun had probably never been licensed in its existence, we weren’t about to confiscate it.

Rafe raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to hear this? I’m telling you a tender tale of father-son bonding, and all you can talk about is red tape. Once my father found out I could shoot, he used to pull me out of school for a whole week, every time the season came around. Those are the only times in my life when he’s treated me like something other than a living ad for contraception. For my sixteenth birthday he got me—”

“I’m fairly sure we do need a license, officially,” Daniel said, “but I think we should leave it, at least for now. I’ve had enough of the police for a while. When do you think you could get the solvent, Rafe?”

His eyes were on Rafe, ice gray and steady and unblinking. For a second Rafe stared back, but then he shrugged and took the gun out of Daniel’s hands. “Sometime this week, probably. Whenever I find a place that carries it.” He broke the gun open, a lot more expertly than Daniel had, and started peering into the barrel.

That was when I remembered the cherries, me chattering, Abby cutting in. It was the note in Daniel’s voice that reminded me: that same calm, inflexible firmness, like a door closing. It took me a second to remember what I had been talking about, before the others had deftly, expertly diverted the conversation. Something about having laryngitis, being stuck in bed, when I was a kid.

I tested my new theory later that evening, when Daniel had put the revolver away and we had hung the curtains and were curled up in the sitting room. Abby had finished her doll’s petticoat and was starting on a dress; her lap was covered with the scraps of material I’d been sorting on Sunday.

“I used to have dolls, when I was little,” I said. If my theory was right, then this wasn’t risky; the others wouldn’t have heard all that much about Lexie’s childhood. “I had a collection—”

“You?” Justin said, giving me a quirk of a smile. “The only thing you collect is chocolate.”

“Actually,” Abby asked me, “have you got any? Something with nuts?”

Straight in with the diversion. “I did too have a collection,” I said. “I had all four sisters out of Little Women. You could get the mother, too, but she was such a horrible sanctimonious cow that I didn’t want her anywhere near me. I didn’t even want the others, but I had this aunt—”

“Why don’t you get Little Women dolls?” Justin asked Abby, plaintively. “And get rid of that awful poppet?”

“If you keep bitching about her, I swear, one of these mornings you’re going to wake up and find her on your pillow, staring at you.”

Rafe was watching me, hooded golden eyes across his solitaire game. “I kept trying to tell her I didn’t even like dolls,” I said, over Justin’s horrified noises, “but she never got the hint. She—”

Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.

There was a long, not-quite-comfortable silence. The fire spat sparks up the chimney. Abby had gone back to trying bits of fabric against her doll’s dress. Rafe was still watching me; I had my head down over my book (Rip Corelli, She Liked Them Married), but I could feel his eyes.

For some reason, the past—any of our pasts—was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won’t answer questions beginning with “Where.”

And another thing: Rafe had to know that. He had been nudging at the boundary on purpose. I wasn’t sure whose buttons he had been trying to push, exactly, or why—maybe everyone’s, maybe he was just in that kind of mood—but it was a tiny crack, in that perfect surface.

Frank’s FBI buddy got back to him on Wednesday. I knew the second Frank picked up the phone that something had happened, something big.

“Where are you?” he demanded.

“Some lane, I don’t know. Why?”

An owl hooted, close behind me; I whipped round in time to see it drifting into the trees only a few feet away, wings spread, light as ash. “What was that?” Frank asked sharply.

“Just an owl. Breathe, Frank.”

“Got your gun?”

I hadn’t. I’d been so wrapped up in Lexie and the Fantastic Four; I’d completely forgotten that what I was supposed to be after was outside Whitethorn House, not inside, and was very likely also after me. That slip, even more than the note in Frank’s voice, sent a sharp warning twist through my stomach: Stay focused.

Frank caught the second I hesitated, and pounced. “Go home. Now.”

“I’ve only been out for ten minutes. The others will wonder—”

“Let ’em wonder all they like. You don’t go wandering around unarmed.”

I turned around and headed back up the lane, under the owl swaying on a branch, silhouetted sharp-eared against the sky. I cut round towards the front of the house—the lanes that way were wider, less cover for an ambush. “What’s happened?”

“You heading home?”

“Yeah. What’s happened?”

Frank blew out a breath. “Brace yourself for this one, babe. My mate in the U.S. tracked down May-Ruth Thibodeaux’s parents—they live somewhere in the mountains in Arsefuck, North Carolina, don’t even have a phone. He sent a guy out there to break the news and see what else he could pick up. And guess what he found out.”

In the instant before I told him to quit playing games and get to the point, I knew. “It’s not her.”

“Bingo. May-Ruth Thibodeaux died of meningitis when she was four. Your man showed the parents the ID shot; they’d never seen our girl before.”

It hit me like a huge breath of pure wild oxygen; I wanted to laugh so badly I was almost dizzy with it, like a teenager in love. She had fooled the hell out of me—pickup trucks and soda fountains, my arse—and all I could think was Fair play to you, girl. Here I had thought I lived light; all of a sudden that felt like an adolescent game, like some rich kid playing at poor while the trust fund piled up, because this girl had been the real thing. She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway. What I hadn’t managed to do even once, she had done easily as brushing her teeth. No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.

“Holy shit,” I said. “How many times did she do this?”

“What I want to know is why. This is all backing up my theory: someone was after her, and he wasn’t giving up. She picks up the May-Ruth ID from somewhere—a graveyard, maybe, or an obituary in an old newspaper—and starts over. He tracks her down and she takes off again, out of the country this time. You don’t do that unless you’re running scared. But he got to her in the end.”

I reached the front gates, got my back against one of the gateposts and took a deep breath. In the moonlight the drive looked very strange, cherry blossom and shadow scattering black and white so thick that the ground blended into the trees without a seam, one great patterned tunnel. “Yeah,” I said. “He got to her in the end.”

“And I don’t want him getting to you.” Frank sighed. “I hate to admit it, but our Sammy may have been right about this one, Cass. If you want out of there, you can start playing sick tonight and I’ll have you out tomorrow morning.”

It was a still night, not even a breeze in the cherry trees. A thread of sound came drifting down the drive, very faint and very sweet: a girl’s voice, singing. The steed my true love rides on… A tingle ran up my arms. I wondered then and I wonder now whether Frank was bluffing; whether he was actually ready to pull me out, or whether he knew, before he offered, that by this time there was only one answer I could give.

“No,” I said. “I’ll be OK. I’m staying.”

With silver he is shod before…

“Fair enough,” Frank said, and he didn’t sound one bit surprised. “Keep that gun on you and keep your eyes open. Anything turns up, anything at all, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, Frank. I’ll check in tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

It was Abby who was singing. Her bedroom window glowed soft with lamplight and she was brushing out her hair, slow, absent strokes. In yon green hill do dwell… In the dining room the guys were cleaning the table, Daniel’s sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows, Rafe waving a fork to make some point, Justin shaking his head. I leaned against the broad back of a cherry tree and listened to Abby’s voice, unfurling out under the window sash and up to the huge black sky.

God only knew how many lives this girl had left behind to find her way here, home. I can go in there, I thought. Any time I want, I can run up those steps and open that door and walk in.

Small cracks. On Thursday evening we were out in the garden again, after dinner—huge mounds of roast pork and roast potatoes and vegetables and then apple pie, no wonder Lexie had weighed more than me. We were drinking wine and trying to work up the energy to do something useful. The strap had come off my watch, so I was sitting on the grass, trying to reattach it with Lexie’s nail file, the same one I had used to turn the pages of her date book. The rivet kept flying out.

“Dammit to hell and blast and buggeration,” I said.

“That’s a highly illogical thing to say,” said Justin lazily, from the swing seat. “What’s wrong with buggeration?”

My antennae went up. I had been wondering if Justin might be gay, but Frank’s research hadn’t turned up anything one way or the other—no boyfriends, no girlfriends—and he could just as easily have been a nice sensitive straight guy with a domestic streak. If he was gay, then there was at least one guy I could cross off the Baby-Daddy list.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Justin, stop flaunting,” Rafe said. He was lying on his back on the grass, with his eyes shut and his arms folded behind his head.

“You’re such a homophobe,” said Justin. “If I said ‘Dammit to fuck’ and Lexie said ‘What’s wrong with fucking?’ you wouldn’t accuse her of flaunting.”

“I would,” said Abby, from beside Rafe. “I’d accuse her of flaunting her love life when the rest of us don’t have one.”

“Speak for yourself,” Rafe said.

“Oh, you,” said Abby. “You don’t count. You never tell us anything. You could be having a torrid affair with the entire Trinity women’s hockey team and none of us would ever know a thing about it.”

“I have never had an affair with anyone on the women’s hockey team, actually, ” Rafe said primly.

“Is there a women’s hockey team?” Daniel wanted to know.

“Don’t go getting ideas,” Abby told him.

“I think that’s Rafe’s secret,” I said. “See, because he keeps up this mysterious silence, we all have this image of him getting up to unspeakable things behind our backs, seducing hockey teams and shagging like a bunny rabbit. I think actually he never tells us anything because he never has anything to tell: he has even less of a love life than the rest of us.” Rafe’s eyes slid sideways and he gave me a tiny, enigmatic grin.

“That wouldn’t be easy,” said Abby.

“Isn’t anyone going to ask me about my torrid affair with the men’s hockey team?” asked Justin.

“No,” said Rafe. “Nobody is going to ask about any of your torrid affairs, because for one thing we know we’re going to hear all about them anyway, and for another they’re always boring as shit.”

“Well,” said Justin, after a moment. “That certainly put me in my place. Although coming from you…”

“What?” Rafe demanded, propping himself up on his elbows and giving Justin a cold stare. “Coming from me, what?”

Nobody said anything. Justin took off his glasses and started cleaning them, too thoroughly, on the hem of his shirt; Rafe lit a cigarette.

Abby cut her eyes at me, like a cue. I remembered those videos: There’s an understanding there, Frank had said. This was Lexie’s job, breaking tension, coming in with some cheeky comment so everyone could roll their eyes and laugh and move on. “Ah, dammit to hell and blast and nonspecific fornication, ” I said, when the rivet went shooting off into the grass again. “Is everyone OK with that?”

“What’s wrong with nonspecific fornication?” Abby demanded. “I don’t like my fornication specific.”

Even Justin laughed, and Rafe snapped out of his cold sulk and balanced his smoke on the edge of the patio and helped me find the rivet. A shot of happiness went through me: I had got it right.

“That detective showed up outside my tutorial,” Abby said Friday evening, in the car. Justin had gone home early—he had been complaining about a headache all day, but to me it looked more like a sulk, and I got the sense it was aimed at Rafe—so the rest of us were in Daniel’s car, going nowhere on the highway, gridlocked in with thousands of suicidal-looking office workers and underendowed prats in SUVs. I was breathing on my window and playing tic-tac-toe with myself in the steam.

“Which one?” Daniel asked.

"O’Neill.”

“Hmm,” Daniel said. “What did he want this time?”

Abby took his cigarette from between his fingers and used it to light her own. “He was asking why we don’t go into the village,” she said.

“Because they’re all a bunch of six-toed halfwits down there,” Rafe said, to the window. He was next to me, slouching deep in his seat and jiggling one knee in Abby’s back. Traffic always drove Rafe nuts, but this level of bad mood strengthened my feeling that something was up between him and Justin.

“And what did you tell him?” Daniel asked, craning his neck and starting to edge into the next lane; the traffic had moved an inch or two.

Abby shrugged. “I told him. We tried the pub once, they froze us out, we didn’t bother trying again.”

“Interesting,” Daniel said. “I think we may have been underrating Detective O’Neill. Lex, did you discuss the village with him at any stage?”

“Never thought of it.” I won my tic-tac-toe game, so I put my fists in the air and did a little victory bop. Rafe gave me a sour look.

“Well,” Daniel said, “there we are. I have to admit I’d more or less dismissed O’Neill, but if he picked up on that without any help, he’s more perceptive than he looks. I wonder if… hmm.”

“He’s more annoying than he looks,” Rafe said. “At least Mackey’s backed off. When are they going to leave us alone?”

“I got stabbed, for fuck’s sake,” I said, injured. “I could’ve died. They want to know who did it. And so do I, by the way. Don’t you?” Rafe shrugged and went back to giving the traffic the evil eye.

“Did you tell him about the graffiti?” Daniel asked Abby. “Or the break-ins?”

Abby shook her head. “He didn’t ask, I didn’t volunteer. You think…? I could phone him and tell him.”

Nobody had mentioned anything about graffiti or break-ins. “You think someone from the village stabbed me?” I said, abandoning my tic-tac-toe and leaning forwards between the seats. “Seriously?”

“I’m not sure,” Daniel said. I couldn’t tell whether he was answering me or Abby. “I need to think through the possibilities. For now, on the whole, I think the best plan is to leave it. If Detective O’Neill picked up on the tension, he’ll find out about the rest on his own, as well; there’s no need to nudge him.”

“Ow, Rafe,” said Abby, reaching an arm around the back of her seat and smacking Rafe’s knee. “Knock it off.” Rafe sighed noisily and swung his legs over against the door. The traffic had opened up; Daniel pulled into the turn lane, swung us off the highway in a smooth fast arc and hit the accelerator.

By the time I phoned Sam from the lane, that night, he already knew all about the graffiti and the break-ins. He had spent the last few days in Rathowen station, working his way backwards through their files, looking for Whitethorn House.

“There’s something going on there, all right. The files are full of that house.” Sam’s voice had the busy, absorbed note that it gets when he’s on a good trail—Rob used to say you could practically see his tail wagging. For the first time since Lexie Madison had appeared with a bang in the middle of our lives, he sounded cheerful. “There’s bugger-all crime in Glenskehy, but over the past three years, there’ve been four burglaries on Whitethorn House—one back in 2002, another in 2003, two while old Simon was in the hospice.”

“Did they take anything? Toss the place?” I had more or less dismissed Sam’s idea about Lexie getting killed over some small precious antique, after seeing the quality of the stuff Uncle Simon had on offer, but if something in that house had been worth four break-ins…

“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.”

“So maybe it was just a vendetta against Uncle Simon, after all.”

“Could be, but I don’t think so. I’m betting it’s more what you might call a scheduling conflict.” There was a grin in Sam’s voice: having something solid to go on had changed everything. “Sixteen of the reports give the time when the incident happened, and it’s always somewhere between half past eleven and one at night. That’s not coincidence. Whoever’s after Whitethorn House, that’s their window.”

“Pub closing time,” I said.

He laughed. “Great minds. I figure a lad or two out drinking, every now and then they’re on a bad buzz and the old Dutch courage is up, and when the pub throws them out it’s off to Whitethorn House with a couple of bricks or a can of spray paint or whatever they’ve got handy. Old Simon’s schedule suited them down to the ground: by half past eleven he was mostly either unconscious—those are the ones where the report doesn’t give the time of the incident, because he didn’t call it in till he sobered up the next morning—or at least too drunk to go after them. The first two times they broke in, he was home, slept through the whole thing. Lucky he’d a good lock on his bedroom door, or God knows what might have happened.”

“But then we moved in,” I said. A second too late, I heard myself—they had moved in, not we—but Sam didn’t seem to notice. “These days, between half past eleven and one, there’s five people wide awake and moving around the house. Wrecking the gaff doesn’t seem like so much fun when three big strong lads could catch you at it and beat the crap out of you.”

“And two big strong girls,” Sam said, and I caught the grin again. “I bet you and Abby would get a couple of punches in. That’s what almost happened with the rock through the window. They were all in the sitting room, just before midnight, when the rock came flying into the kitchen; as soon as they realized what had happened, the five of them legged it out the back door to go after your man. Because they weren’t in the room, though, it took them a minute to figure out what was going on, and by that time the guy was well gone. Lucky for him, Byrne said. It was forty-five minutes before they called the cops—they went through all the lanes first, looking for the guy—and even then, they were raging. Your man Rafe told Byrne that, if he ever caught this fella, his own mammy wouldn’t recognize him; Lexie said she was planning to, and I’m quoting, ‘kick him in the bollocks so hard he’d have to stick his hand down his throat if he wanted a wank.’ ”

“Good for her,” I said.

Sam laughed. “Yeah, I thought you’d enjoy that one. The others had better sense than to come out with anything like that in front of a cop, but Byrne says they were thinking it, all right. He gave them a lecture about not taking the law into their own hands, but he’s not sure how much of it went in.”

“I don’t blame them,” I said. “It’s not like the cops had been all that useful. What about the graffiti?”

“Lexie’s lot weren’t home. It was a Sunday night, and they’d gone to dinner and the pictures in town. They got home a little after midnight and there it was, across the front of the house. It was the first time they’d been out that late since they moved in. That could be coincidence, but I don’t think so. The thing with the rock put some respect on our vandal—or vandals—but either he was keeping an eye on the house, or he saw the car go through the village and not come back. He saw his chance, and he took it.”

“So you’re thinking it’s not a village-versus-Big-House thing, after all?” I said. “Just some guy with a grudge?”

Sam made a noncommittal sound. “Not exactly. Have you heard what happened when Lexie’s lot tried going into Regan’s?”

“Yeah, Abby said you’d talked to her about that. She mentioned something about them getting frozen out, but she didn’t go into details.”

“It was a couple of days after they moved in. The whole bunch of them go into the pub one evening, they find a table, Daniel goes up to the bar, and the barman doesn’t see him. For ten minutes, from four feet away, with only a handful of people in the pub and Daniel going, ‘Excuse me, can I have two pints of Guinness and…’ The barman just stands there, polishing a glass and watching the telly. Finally Daniel gives up, goes back to the others, they have a quiet chat and decide maybe old Simon got thrown out of here too many times and the Marches aren’t popular. So they send Abby up instead—they figure she’s a better bet than the English guy or the Northern boy. Same thing happens. Meanwhile, Lexie starts talking to the old fellas at the next table, trying to find out what the hell’s going on. Nobody answers her, nobody even looks at her; they all turn their backs and keep on with their own conversation.”

“Jesus,” I said. It’s not as easy as it sounds to ignore five people right there in front of you, looking for your attention. It takes a lot of concentration to override all your instincts like that; you need a reason, something hard and cold as bedrock. I tried to keep an eye on the lane in both directions at once.

“Justin’s getting upset and wants to leave, Rafe’s getting angry and wants to stay, Lexie’s getting more and more hyper trying to make these old fellas talk to her—offering them chocolate, telling them lightbulb jokes—and a bunch of younger guys in a corner are starting to throw over dirty looks. Abby wasn’t too keen on backing down herself, but she and Daniel both figured this situation could get out of hand any second. They grabbed the others and left, and they didn’t go back.”

A light rustle of wind swept through the leaves, moving up the lane towards me. “So the bad feeling goes right through Glenskehy,” I said, “but only one or two people are taking it that step further.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. And it’s going to be a right laugh finding out who they are. There’s about four hundred people in Glenskehy, counting the outlying farms, and none of them are about to give me a hand narrowing it down.”

“There,” I said, “I might be able to help out. See, this I can profile. Sort of, anyway: nobody collects psychological data on vandals like they do on serial killers, so it’ll be mostly guesswork, but at least there’s enough of a pattern that I can give you something.”

“I’ll take guesswork,” Sam said cheerfully. I heard pages rustling, a shift of the phone as he got ready to write. “I’ll take anything, sure. Go on.”

“OK,” I said. “You’re looking for someone local, obviously—Glenskehy born and bred. Almost definitely male. I think it’s one person rather than a gang: spontaneous vandalism mostly involves groups, but planned hate campaigns like this one tend to be more private.”

“Anything you can tell me about him?” Sam’s voice had gone blurry: he had the phone caught under his jaw, writing.

“If this started about four years ago, then he’s probably in his midtwenties to early thirties—vandalism’s usually a young man’s crime, but this guy’s too methodical for a teenager. Not much education—Leaving Cert, maybe, but no college. He lives with someone, either his parents or a wife or girlfriend: no attacks in the middle of the night, someone’s expecting him home by a certain time. He’s employed, in a job that keeps him busy all through weekdays, or there would have been incidents during the day, when we’re all out and the coast is clear. The job’s local, too, he doesn’t commute to Dublin or anything; this level of obsession says Glenskehy’s his whole world. And it doesn’t satisfy him. He’s working well below his intellectual or educational level, or he thinks he is, anyway. And he’ll probably have had ongoing problems with other people before, neighbors, ex-girlfriends, maybe employers; this guy won’t play well with authority. It might be worth checking with Byrne and Doherty for any local feuds or harassment complaints.”

“If my fella hassled someone from Glenskehy,” Sam said grimly, “there’s no way they’d go to the cops. They’d just get their mates together and give him a beating some night, sure. And he wouldn’t bring that to the cops, either.”

“No,” I said, “probably not.” A flicker of movement, off in the field across the lane, a dark streak turning the grass. It was way too small for a person, but I moved deeper into the shadow of the tree all the same. “Here’s the other thing. The campaign against Whitethorn House could have been triggered by some run-in with Simon March—he sounds like a narky old git, he could well have pissed someone off—but, in your boy’s mind, it goes way deeper than that. To him, it’s about a dead baby. And Byrne and Doherty don’t have a clue about that, right? How long have they been here?”

“Doherty only two years, but Byrne’s been stuck out here since 1997. He says there was a cot death in the village last spring and a wee girl fell into a slurry pit on one of the farms, a few years back—God rest them—but that’s the lot. Nothing suspicious about either death, and no links to Whitethorn House. And the computer didn’t come up with anything in the area.”

“Then we’re looking for something further back,” I said, “just like you thought. God knows how far. Remember what you told me, about the Purcells round your way?”

A pause. “We’ll never find it, so. The records, sure.”

Most of Ireland’s public records went up in a fire in 1921, in the Civil War. “You don’t need records. People round here know about this, I guarantee you. Whenever that baby died, this guy didn’t get the story out of some old newspaper. He’s way too obsessed with it. To him, that’s not ancient history; it’s a real, fresh, crucial grudge that needs to be avenged.”

“Are you saying he’s mad?”

“No,” I said. “Not the way you mean. He’s way too careful—waiting for safe moments, backing off after he got chased… If he were schizophrenic, say, or bipolar, he wouldn’t have that much control. He doesn’t have a mental illness. But he’s obsessed to the point where, yeah, I think you could probably call him a little unbalanced.”

“Could he get violent? Against people, I mean, not just property.” Sam’s voice had sharpened; he was sitting up straighter.

“I’m not sure,” I said, carefully. “It doesn’t seem like his style—I mean, he could have broken down old Simon’s bedroom door and whacked him with a poker any time he wanted to, but he didn’t. But the fact that he only seems to do this stuff when he’s drunk makes me think he’s got an unhealthy relationship with alcohol—one of those guys who grow a whole new personality after four or five pints, and not a nice one. Once you throw booze into the equation, everything gets less predictable. And, like I said, this is an obsession with him. If he got the impression that the enemy was escalating the conflict—by going after him when he threw that rock through the window, for example—he could well have upped his game to match.”

“You know what this sounds exactly like,” Sam said, after a pause, “don’t you. Same age, local, smart, controlled, criminal experience but no violence…”

The profile I had given him, back in my flat; the profile of the killer. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“What you’re telling me is that he could be our boy. The murderer.”

That streak of shadow again, quick and silent through the grass and the moonlight: a fox, maybe, after a field mouse. “He could be,” I said. “We can’t rule him out.”

“If this is a family feud,” Sam said, “then Lexie wasn’t the specific target, her life’s nothing to do with anything and there’s no need for you to be there. You can come home.”

The hope in his voice made me flinch. “Yeah,” I said, “maybe. But I don’t think we’re at that stage. We’ve got no concrete link between the vandalism and the stabbing; they could be completely unrelated. And once we pull the plug, we can’t go back.”

A fraction of a pause. Then: “Fair enough,” Sam said. “I’ll get to work on finding that link. And, Cassie…”

His voice had gone sober, tense. “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I am being careful.”

“Half past eleven to one o’clock. That fits the time of the stabbing.”

“I know. I haven’t seen anyone dodgy hanging around.”

“Do you have your gun?”

“Whenever I go out. Frank already lectured me about that.”

“Frank,” Sam said, and I heard that remoteness come into his voice. “Right.”

After we hung up I waited in the shadow of the tree for a long time. I heard the crash of long grass and the thin scream as whatever predator was out there finally pounced. When the rustles had faded into the dark and only small things moved, I slipped out into the lane and went home.

I stopped at the back gate and swung on it for a while, listening to the slow creak of the hinge and looking up the long garden at the house. It looked different, that night. The gray stone of the back was flat and defensive as a castle wall, and the golden glow from the windows didn’t feel cozy any more; it had turned defiant, warning, like a small campfire in a savage forest. The moonlight whitened the lawn into a wide fitful sea, with the house tall and still in the middle, exposed on every side; besieged.