The Likeness

11

What people tend to forget about Sam is that he has one of the highest solve rates on the Murder squad. Sometimes I wonder if this is for a very simple reason: he doesn’t waste energy. Other detectives, me included, take it personally when things go wrong, they get impatient and frustrated and irritated with themselves and the dead-end leads and the whole fucking case. Sam gives it his best shot, then shrugs and says, “Ah, sure,” and tries something else.

He had been saying, “Ah, sure,” a lot that week, when I asked him how things were going, but not in his usual vague, abstracted way. This time he sounded tense and harassed, wound a notch tighter every day. He had gone door-to-door through most of Glenskehy, asking about Whitethorn House, but he got a smooth slippery wall of tea and biscuits and blank looks: Lovely young people up at the House, keep themselves to themselves, never any trouble out of them, sure why would there be any bad feeling, Detective? Terrible, what happened to that poor girl, I said a rosary for her, must have been someone she met up in Dublin… I know that small-town silence, I’d run into it before, intangible as smoke and solid as stone. We honed it on the British for centuries and it’s ingrained, the instinct for a place to close up like a fist when the police come knocking. Sometimes it means nothing more than that; but it’s a powerful thing, that silence, dark and tricky and lawless. It still hides bones buried somewhere in the hills, arsenals cached in pigsties. The British underestimated it, fell for the practiced half-witted looks, but I knew and Sam knew: it’s dangerous.

It was Tuesday night before the absorbed note came back into Sam’s voice. “I should’ve known better to start with,” he said cheerfully. “If they won’t talk to the local cops, why would they talk to me?” He had backed off, thought it over and then taken a taxi down to Rathowen for an evening in the pub: “Byrne said the people round there weren’t mad about Glenskehy folk, and I figured everyone likes a chance to gossip about the neighbors, so…”

He had been right. Rathowen people were a very different story from the Glenskehy bunch: they made him as a cop inside thirty seconds (“Come here, young fella, are you here about that girl got stabbed down the road?”), and he had spent the rest of the evening surrounded by fascinated farmers buying him pints and happily trying to trick him into giving away something about the investigation.

“Byrne was right: they think Glenskehy’s a lunatic asylum. Part of it’s just what you get between small towns—Rathowen’s that bit bigger, they’ve got a school and a police station and a few shops, so they call Glenskehy a mad backwater. It’s more than just your average rivalry, though. They really do think Glenskehy folk aren’t right. One fella said he wouldn’t go into Regan’s for all the tea in China.”

I was up a tree, wearing my mike sock and having a smoke. Since I had heard about that graffiti, the lanes had started to make me feel edgy, exposed; I didn’t like being down there when I was on the phone, with half my attention somewhere else. I had found a nook high up in a big beech tree, just at the start of the branches, where the trunk split in two. My arse fit perfectly into the fork, I had a clear view of the lane in both directions and of the cottage downhill, and if I tucked my legs up I vanished into the leaves. “Did they say anything about Whitethorn House?”

A small silence. “Yeah,” Sam said. “The house doesn’t have a great name, in Rathowen or in Glenskehy. Partly that’s to do with Simon March—he was a mad old bastard, by all accounts; two of the fellas remembered him firing his gun at them, when they were kids and they went nosing around the Whitethorn House grounds. But it goes back further than that.”

“The dead baby,” I said. The words sent something smooth and cold through the middle of me. “Did they know anything about that?”

“A bit. I’m not sure they have all the details right—you’ll see what I mean in a minute—but if they’re anywhere near the mark, it’s not a good story. Not good for the Whitethorn House people, I mean.”

He left a pause. “So?” I said. “These people aren’t my family, Sam. And unless this story happened sometime in the last six months, which I’m assuming it didn’t or we’d have heard about it by now, it’s got nothing to do with anyone I’ve even met. I’m not going to be deeply hurt by something Daniel’s great-granddad did a hundred years ago. Cross my heart.”

“Grand, so,” Sam said. “The Rathowen version—there’s some variation, but this is the gist of it—is that, a while back, a young fella from Whitethorn House had an affair with a Glenskehy girl, and she was going to have a baby for him. It used to happen often enough, sure. The problem was, this girl wasn’t about to disappear into a convent or marry some poor local fella in a mad hurry before anyone noticed she was pregnant.”

“A woman after my own heart,” I said. There was no way this story was going to end well.

“Shame your man March didn’t feel the same way. He was furious; he was meant to be getting married to some nice rich Anglo-Irish girl, and this could have banjaxed all his plans. He told the girl he didn’t want anything more to do with her or the child. She was already pretty unpopular in the village: not just pregnant outside marriage—that was a big deal, back then—but pregnant for one of the Marches… Not long after, she was found dead. She’d hanged herself.”

There are stories like this scattered all over our history. Most of them are buried deep and quiet as last year’s leaves, long transmuted into old ballads and winter-night stories. I thought of this one lying latent for a century or more, germinating and growing like some slow dark seed, blooming at last with broken glass and knives and poison berries of blood all among the hawthorn hedges. My back prickled against my tree trunk.

I put out my smoke on the sole of my shoe and tucked the butt back into the packet. “Got anything to say this actually happened?” I asked. “Apart from some story they tell in Rathowen to keep kids away from Whitethorn House.”

Sam blew out a breath. “Nothing. I put a couple of floaters onto the records, but they’ve turned up bugger-all. And there’s not a chance anyone in Glenskehy is going to tell me their version. They’d rather everyone forgot it ever happened.”

“Someone’s not forgetting,” I said.

“I should have a better idea who that is, in the next few days—I’m pulling all the info I can get on the people in Glenskehy, to cross-check against your profile. I’d love a clearer idea of what my fella’s problem is, though, before I get talking to him. The thing is, I’ve no clue where to start. One of the Rathowen fellas says all this happened in his great-granny’s time—which isn’t much help, sure: the woman lived to be eighty. Another one swore it was way back in the nineteenth century, ‘sometime after the Famine,’ but… I don’t know. I think he wants it as far away as possible; he’d say it was in Brian Boru’s time if he thought I’d believe him. So I’ve a window from 1847 to about 1950, and no one’s about to help me narrow it down.”

“Actually,” I said, “maybe I can.” It made me feel sticky all over, traitorous. “Give me a couple of days and I’ll see if I can get something more specific.”

A small pause, like a question, till Sam realized I wasn’t going to go into detail. “That’s grand. Anything you can find would be great.” Then, on a different note, almost shyly: “Listen, I was meaning to ask you something, before all this happened. I was thinking… I’ve never been on holiday, except to Youghal once when I was a little fella. How about you?”

“France, for summers.”

“That was to visit family, sure. I meant a proper holiday, like on the telly, with a beach and snorkeling and mad cocktails in a bar with a cheesy lounge singer doing ‘I Will Survive.’ ”

I knew where this was going. “What the hell have you been watching?”

Sam laughed. “Ibiza Uncovered. See what happens to my taste when you’re not here?”

“You’re just looking for topless chicks,” I said. “Emma and Susanna and I have been meaning to go away since we were in school, only we haven’t got round to it yet. Maybe this summer.”

“But now they’ve both got kids, haven’t they? That makes it harder to go off on a girlie break. I was thinking…” That shy note again. “I got a couple of brochures from the travel agencies. Italy, mostly; I know you like the old archaeology. Could I bring you on holiday, when this finishes up?”

I had no idea what I thought about this, and no room to figure it out. “That sounds gorgeous,” I said, “and you’re wonderful to think of it. Can we decide when I get home? The thing is, I’m not sure how long this is going to take.”

There was a tiny silence that made me grimace. I hate hurting Sam; it’s like kicking a dog too gentle to ever bite back. “It’s been more than two weeks already. I thought Mackey said a month max.”

Frank says whatever comes in useful at the time. Undercover investigations can last for years, and although I couldn’t see that happening here—the long operations are aimed at ongoing criminal activity, not once-off crimes—I was pretty sure that a month was something he had made up at random to get Sam off his back. For a second I almost hoped so. The thought of leaving all this, back to DV and Dublin crowds and corporate clothes, was vastly depressing.

“In theory, yeah,” I said, “but you can’t put an exact time on something like this. It could be less than a month—I could be home any time, if one of us gets something solid. But if I pick up a good lead and it needs following through, I might be here a week or two extra.”

Sam made a furious, frustrated sound. “If I ever talk about doing a joint investigation again, lock me in a closet till I get sense. I need a deadline here. I’ve been holding off on all kinds of stuff—getting DNA off the lads to test against the baby… Till you’re done in there, sure, I can’t even tell anyone we’re dealing with a murder. A few weeks is one thing—”

I had stopped listening to him. Somewhere, down the lane or deep in the trees, there was a sound. Not one of the usual noises, night birds and leaves and small hunting animals, I knew those by now; something else.

“Hang on,” I said, softly, through Sam’s sentence.

I took the phone away from my ear and listened, holding my breath. It was coming from down the lane, towards the main road, faint but getting closer: a slow, rhythmic crunching noise. Footsteps on pebbles.

“Gotta go,” I said into the phone, just above a whisper. “Ring you back later if I can.” I switched the phone off, shoved it into my pocket, tucked up my legs among the branches and sat still.

The footsteps were steady and coming nearer; someone big, from the weight of them. There was nothing up this lane except Whitethorn House. I pulled my sweater up, slowly, to cover the bottom half of my face. In the dark, it’s the flash of white that gives you away.

Night changes your sense of distance, makes things sound closer than they are, and it seemed like forever before someone came into view: just a flick of movement at first, a dappled shadow passing slowly under the leaves. Flash of fair hair, silver as a ghost’s in the pale light. I had to fight the instinct to turn my head away. This was a bad place to wait for something to step out of the dark. There were too many unknown things around me, moving intently along their secret routes on their own private business, and some of them had to be the kind that isn’t safe for us to see.

Then he stepped into a patch of moonlight and I saw that it was just a guy, tall, with a rugby build and a designer-looking leather jacket. He moved like he was unsure, hesitating, glancing off into the trees on either side. When he was only a few yards away he turned his head and looked straight at my tree, and in the instant before I shut my eyes—that’s the other thing that can give you away, that glint, we’re all programmed to spot watching eyes—I saw his face. He was my age, maybe a little younger, good-looking in a forgettable clean-cut way, with a hazy, perplexed frown, and he wasn’t on the KA list. I had never seen him before.

He passed under me, so close I could have dropped a leaf on his head, and vanished up the lane. I stayed put. If he was someone’s friend come to visit, I was going to be up there a long time, but I didn’t think he was. The hesitancy, the confused glances around; he wasn’t looking for the house. He was looking for something, or someone, else.

Three times, in her last weeks, Lexie had met N—or at least planned to meet N—somewhere. And on the night she died, if the other four were telling the truth, she had gone out for that walk and met her killer.

My adrenaline was pumping hard and I was itching to go after the guy, or at least intercept him on his way back, but I knew that was a bad idea. I wasn’t scared—I had a gun, after all, and in spite of his size he didn’t look very formidable—but I only had one shot at this, metaphorically, and I couldn’t afford to fire it while I was completely in the dark. There was probably no way to find out whether or how he was linked to Lexie, I would have to play that one by ear, but it would be nice to at least know his name before we got into conversation.

I slid down from the tree in slow motion—the scrape of the bark pulled up my top and nearly dragged the mike off me, Frank would think I was being run over by a tank—and got behind it to wait. It felt like hours before the guy came wandering back down the lane, rubbing the back of his head and still looking bewildered. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t found it. When he had passed me, I counted thirty footsteps and then followed him, keeping on the grass verge and putting my feet down carefully, staying behind tree trunks.

He had a wankermobile parked on the main road, a hunormous black SUV with depressingly inevitable tinted windows. It was about fifty yards from the turnoff, and the road was bordered by wide open stretches—long grass, ragged nettles, an old milestone sticking up off-kilter—so there was no cover; I couldn’t risk getting close enough to read the plate. My guy whacked the hood affectionately, got in, slammed the door too loudly-sudden cold silence, in the trees all round me—and sat there for a while, contemplating whatever guys like that contemplate, probably his haircut. Then he revved the engine and bulldozed off down the road, towards Dublin.

When I was sure he was gone, I climbed back up my tree and thought this over. There was always a chance that this guy had been stalking me for a while now, that the electric feeling at the back of my neck had been coming from him, but I doubted it. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t been particularly covert about it that night, and I didn’t get the sense that slinking through the wilderness was a major part of his skill set. Whatever had been lurking in the corner of my eye, it wasn’t coming into view this easily.

I was clear on one thing: neither Sam nor Frank needed to know about the SUV Prince, not until I had something a whole lot more concrete to tell them. Sam would go ballistic if he found out I was dodging strange men on the same late-night walk where Lexie had failed to dodge her killer. That wouldn’t bother Frank one bit—he always figured I was well able to take care of myself—but if I told him then he would take over, he would find this guy and pull him in and interrogate the bejasus out of him, and I didn’t want that. Something in me said that wasn’t the way to go at this case. And something else, deeper, said that this wasn’t Frank’s business, not really. He had stumbled into it by accident. This was between me and Lexie.

I phoned him anyway. We had already talked that night and it was late, but he answered fast. “Yeah? You OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out. I just wanted to ask you something, before I forget again. Has the investigation turned up a guy about six foot tall, solid build, late twenties, good-looking, fair hair with that trendy quiff thing going on, fancy brown leather jacket?”

Frank yawned, which made me feel guilty but also slightly relieved: it was nice to know he actually slept sometimes. “Why?”

“I passed a guy in Trinity a couple of days ago, and he smiled at me and nodded, like he knew me. He’s not on the KA list. It’s not a big deal—he didn’t act like we were supposed to be bosom buddies or anything—but I thought I’d check. I don’t want to get blindsided if we run into each other again.” This was true, by the way, although the guy in question had been small and skinny and redheaded. It had taken me about ten minutes of racking my brains to figure out how he knew me. His carrel was in our corner of the library.

Frank thought about this; I heard the rustle of sheets as he turned over in bed. “Doesn’t ring any bells,” he said. “The only person I can think of is Slow Eddie—Daniel’s cousin. He’s twenty-nine and blond and wears a brown leather jacket, and I guess he could be good-looking, if you go for big and dumb.”

“Not your type?” Still no N. Why the hell would Slow Eddie be wandering around Glenskehy at midnight?

“I like them with more cleavage. Eddie says he never met Lexie, though. There’s no reason why he would have. He and Daniel don’t get on; it’s not like Eddie’s popping over to the house for tea or joining the gang on nights out. And he lives in Bray, works in Killiney; I can’t see any reason why he’d be in Trinity.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s probably just someone who knows her from around college. Go back to sleep. Sorry for waking you.”

“It’s grand,” Frank said, through another yawn. “Better safe than sorry. Put a report on tape, with a full description—and if you see him again, let me know.” He was already about half asleep.

“Will do. Night.”

I stayed still in my tree for a few minutes, listening for out-of-place noises. Nothing; just the undergrowth below me tossing like ocean in the wind, and that prickle, faint and unignorable, scratching at the top of my spine. I told myself that if anything was going to send my imagination into overdrive, it would be the story Sam had told: the girl stripped of her lover, her family, her future, knotting a rope to one of these dark branches for everything she had left, herself and her baby. I phoned Sam back before I could think too hard about that.

He was still wide awake. “What was that all about? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m really sorry about that. I thought I heard someone coming. I was picturing Frank’s mystery stalker with a hockey mask and a chain saw, but no such luck.” This was also true, obviously, but twisting facts for Sam wasn’t like twisting them for Frank, and doing it made my stomach curl up.

A second of silence. “I worry about you,” Sam said quietly.

“I know, Sam,” I said. “I know you do. I’m grand. I’ll be home soon.”

I thought I heard him sigh, a small resigned breath, too soft for me to be sure. “Yeah,” he said. “We can talk about that holiday then.”

I walked back home thinking about Sam’s vandal, about that prickling feeling, and about Slow Eddie. All I knew about him was that he worked for an estate agent, he and Daniel didn’t get on, Frank didn’t think much of his brainpower, and he had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to call his grandfather a lunatic. I bounced a few scenarios around in my head—Homicidal Maniac Eddie picking off the occupants of Whitethorn House one by one, Casanova Eddie having a dangerous liaison with Lexie and then flipping out when he found out about the baby—but all of them seemed pretty far-fetched, and anyway I liked to think that Lexie had had better taste than to boink some dumb yuppie in the back of an SUV.

If he’d wandered around the house once and not found what he was looking for, the chances were that he would come back—unless he’d just been taking a last look at the place he had loved and lost, and he didn’t strike me as the sentimental type. I filed him under Things to Worry About Some Other Time. Right then, he wasn’t at the top of my list.

The part I wasn’t telling Sam, the new dark thing unfurling and fluttering in a corner of my mind: someone was holding a high-octane grudge against Whitethorn House; someone had been meeting Lexie in these lanes, someone faceless who began with an N; and someone had helped her make that baby. If all three of those had been the same person… Sam’s vandal wasn’t too tightly wrapped, but he could well be smart enough—sober, anyway—to hide that; he could be gorgeous, charming, all kinds of good stuff, and we already knew that Lexie’s decision-making process had worked a little differently from most people’s. Maybe she had gone for the angst boys. I thought of a chance meeting somewhere in the lanes, long walks together under a high winter moon and branches filigreed with frost; of that smile slanting up under her lashes; of the ruined cottage, and shelter behind the curtain of brambles.

If the guy I was picturing had found himself with a chance at getting a Whitethorn House girl pregnant, it would have seemed to him like a God-given thing, a perfect, blinding symmetry: a golden ball dropped into his hands by angels, not to be refused. And he would have killed her.

The next morning someone spat on our car. We were on our way to college, Justin and Abby up front, me and Rafe in the back—Daniel had left early, no explanation, while the rest of us were halfway through breakfast. It was a cool gray morning, dawn hush left in the air and soft drizzle misting the windows; Abby was flipping through notes and humming along to Mahler on the CD player, switching octaves dramatically in midphrase, and Rafe was in his sock feet, trying to disentangle a massive knot in his shoelace. As we went through Glenskehy Justin braked, outside the newsagent’s, to let someone cross the road: an old guy, hunched and wiry, in a farmer’s tired tweed suit and flat cap. He raised his walking stick in a kind of salute as he shuffled past, and Justin waved back.

Then the man caught Justin’s eye. He stopped in the middle of the road and stared through the windscreen at us. For a split second his face contorted into a tight mask of pure fury and disgust; then he brought down his stick on the hood, with a flat clang that split the morning wide open. We all shot upright, but before any of us could do anything sensible the old man hawked, spat on the windscreen—straight at Justin’s face—and hobbled on across the road, at the same deliberate pace.

“What the—” Justin said, breathless. “What the hell? What was that?”

“They don’t like us,” Abby said evenly, reaching over to switch on the windscreen wipers. The street was long and deserted, little pastel houses closed down tight against the rain, dark blur of hills rising behind them. Nothing moved anywhere, only the old man’s slow mechanical shuffle and the flick of a lace curtain down the street. “Drive, hon.”

“That little fuck,” Rafe said. He was clutching his shoe like a weapon, knuckles white. “You should have floored it, Justin. You should have splattered whatever he’s got instead of a brain across this wretched street.” He started to roll down his window.

“Rafe,” Abby said sharply. “Roll that up. Now.”

“Why? Why should we let him get away with—”

“Because,” I said, in a small voice. “I want to go for my walk tonight.”

That stopped Rafe in his tracks, just like I had known it would; he stared at me, one hand still on the window handle. Justin stalled the car with a horrible grinding sound, managed to jam it into gear and hit the accelerator hard. “Charming,” he said. There was a brittle edge to his voice: any kind of nastiness always upset him. “That was really charming. I mean, I realize they don’t like us, but that was completely unnecessary. I didn’t do anything to that man. I braked to let him cross. What did he do that for?”

I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that one. Sam had been busy in Glenskehy, the last few days. A detective swanning down from Dublin in his city-boy suit, walking into their sitting rooms asking questions, patiently digging for their buried stories; and all because a girl from the Big House had got herself stabbed. Sam would have done his job gently and deftly, he always does; it wasn’t him they would hate.

“Nothing,” said Rafe. He and I were twisted around in our seats to watch the old man, who was standing on the pavement outside the newsagent’s, leaning on his stick and staring after us. “He did it because he’s a knuckle-dragging bog monster and he loathes anyone who isn’t actually his wife or his sister or both. It’s like living in the middle of bloody Deliverance.”

“You know something?” Abby said coldly, without turning around. “I’m getting really, really sick of your colonial attitude. Just because he didn’t go to some fancy English prep school, that doesn’t necessarily make him your inferior. And if Glenskehy isn’t good enough for you, you’re free to find somewhere that is.”

Rafe opened his mouth, then shrugged disgustedly and closed it again. He gave his shoelace a vicious jerk; it broke, and he swore under his breath.

If the man had been thirty or forty years younger, I would have been memorizing his description to pass on to Sam. The fact that he wasn’t a viable suspect—this guy had not outrun five students out for blood—sent a nasty little ripple across my shoulders. Abby turned up the volume; Rafe tossed his shoe on the floor and shoved up two fingers at the back windscreen. This, I thought, is going to be trouble.

“OK,” Frank said, that night. “I got my FBI friend to have his boys do some more digging. I told him we have reason to believe that our girl took off because she had a nervous breakdown, so we’re looking for signs and possible causes. Is that what we think, just out of interest?”

“I have no idea what you think, Frankie boy. Don’t ask me to climb into that black hole.” I was up my tree. I wriggled my back up against one half of the trunk and braced my feet against the other, so I could lean my notebook on my thigh. There was just enough moonlight, between the branches, that I could see the page. “Hang on a sec.” I clamped the phone under my jaw and hunted for my pen.

“You sound cheerful,” Frank said, suspiciously.

“I just had a gorgeous dinner and a laugh. What’s not to be cheerful about?” I managed to extract the pen from my jacket pocket without falling out of the tree. “OK, shoot.”

Frank made an exasperated noise. “Lovely for some. Just don’t get too chummy. There’s always a chance you may have to arrest one of these people.”

“I thought you were gunning for the mysterious stranger in the black cape.”

“I’m keeping an open mind. And the cape’s optional. OK, here’s everything we’ve got—you did say you wanted ordinary stuff, so don’t blame me. On the sixteenth of August 2000, Lexie—May-Ruth switched mobile-phone providers to get cheaper local minutes. On the twenty-second, she got a raise at the diner, seventy-five cents extra an hour. On the twenty-eighth, Chad proposed to her, and she said yes. The first weekend of September, the two of them drove to Virginia so she could meet Chad’s parents, who said she was a very sweet girl and brought them a potted plant.”

“The engagement ring,” I said, keeping my voice easy. This was setting ideas exploding in my head like popcorn, but I didn’t want Frank to know that. “Did she take it with her when she split?”

“No. The cops asked Chad at the time. She left it on her bedside table, but that was normal. She always left it there when she went to work, in case it got lost or fell in the hash browns or whatever. It wasn’t a big fancy rock or anything. Chad’s the bassist in a grunge band called Man From Nantucket, and they have yet to get their big break, so he makes a living as a carpenter. He’s skint.”

My notes were scrawly and went at a funny angle, on account of the light and the tree, but I could just about read them. “Then what?”

"On the twelfth of September she and Chad bought a PlayStation on their joint credit, which I suppose is as good a statement of commitment as any, these days. On the eighteenth, she sold her car, an ’86 Ford, for six hundred bucks—she told Chad she wanted to get something a little less beat-up, now that she had the extra money from the raise. On the twenty-seventh, she went to her doctor with an ear infection, probably contracted from swimming; he gave her antibiotics and it cleared up. And on the tenth of October, she’s gone. Is that what you were looking for?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly the kind of stuff I had in mind. Thanks, Frank. You’re a gem.”

“I’m thinking,” he said, “something happened between the twelfth and the eighteenth of September. Up through the twelfth, everything says she’s planning on staying put: she’s getting engaged, she’s meeting the parents, she and Chad are buying stuff as a couple. But on the eighteenth she sells her car, which tells me she’s getting together the money to split. That the way you’re thinking?”

“Makes sense,” I said, but I knew Frank was wrong. That shifting pattern had slid into focus with a soft, final click, and I knew why Lexie had taken off running from North Carolina; knew it as clear as if she were sitting weightless on a branch beside me, swinging her legs in the moonlight and whispering in my ear. And I knew why she had been about to take off running from Whitethorn House. Someone had tried to hold her.

“I’ll try and find out more about that week, maybe get someone to re-interview poor old Chad. If we can figure out what changed her plans, we should be able to put our finger on the mystery man.”

“Sounds good. Thanks, Frank. Let me know how you get on.”

“Don’t do anyone I wouldn’t do,” he said, and hung up.

I angled the screen of my mobile towards the page, so I could read over my notes. The PlayStation meant nothing; it’s easy to buy on credit with no plans to pay it off, no plans to be anywhere within reach. The last solid thing that said she intended to stay put was the phone-provider switch, back in August. You don’t care about cheaper minutes unless you’re going to be around to use them. On August 16, she had been tucked snugly into her May-Ruth life and going nowhere.

And then, less than two weeks later, poor grunge Chad had proposed. After that, not one thing said Lexie was staying. She had said yes, smiled and bided her time till she got the money together, and then run as far and as fast as she could and never once looked behind. It hadn’t been Frank’s mystery stalker after all, it hadn’t been some masked menace slinking out of the shadows with a glinting blade. It had been as simple as a cheap ring.

And this time, there had been the baby: a lifelong tie to some man, somewhere. She could have got rid of it, just like she could have turned Chad down, but that had been beside the point. Just the thought of that tie had sent her slamming off the walls, frantic as a trapped bird.

The missed period and the flight prices; and, somewhere in there, N. N was either the trap trying to hold her here or, in some way I needed to find, her way out.

The others were sprawled on the sitting-room floor in front of the fire, like kids, rummaging through a wrecked traveling case that Justin had found somewhere. Rafe had his legs flung companionably across Abby’s—they had apparently made up their fight from that morning. The rug was strewn with mugs and a plate of ginger biscuits and a medley of small battered things: pockmarked marbles, tin soldiers, half of a clay pipe. “Cool,” I said, dropping my jacket on the sofa and flopping down between Daniel and Justin. “What’ve we got?”

“Odd oddments,” Rafe said. “Here. For you.” He wound up a moth-eaten clockwork mouse and sent it ticking along the floor towards me. It ground to a halt halfway, with a depressed scraping sound.

“Have one of these instead,” Justin said, stretching to pull the biscuits across to us. “Tastier.”

I got a biscuit in one hand, dipped the other into the traveling case and found something hard and heavy. I came up holding what looked like a beaten-up wooden box; the lid had said “EM” once upon a time, in mother-of-pearl inlay, but there were only a few bits left. “Ah, excellent,” I said, opening the lid. “This is like the world’s best lucky dip.”

It was a music box, tarnished cylinder and splitting blue silk lining, and after a whirring second it plucked out a tune: “Greensleeves,” rusty and sweet. Rafe put a hand over the clockwork mouse, which was still fizzing halfheartedly. There was a long silence, just the crackle of the fire, while we listened.

“Beautiful,” Daniel said softly, closing the box, when the tune ended. “That’s beautiful. Next Christmas…”

“Can I have this in my room, to send me to sleep?” I asked. “Till Christmas?”

“Now you need lullabies?” Abby asked, but she was grinning at me. “Course you can.”

“I’m glad we didn’t find it before,” Justin said. “This must be valuable; they’d only have made us sell it, towards the taxes.”

“Not that valuable,” Rafe said, taking the box from me and examining it. “Basic ones like this go for about a hundred quid—a lot less in this condition. My grandmother used to collect them. Dozens of them, on every surface, just waiting to fall off and smash and send her into a fit if you walked too hard.”

“Knock it off,” Abby said, kicking his ankle—no pasts—but she didn’t sound seriously upset. For some reason, maybe just the mysterious alchemy you get among friends, all the tension of the last few days seemed to have vanished; we were happy together again, shoulders touching, Justin tugging down Abby’s sweater where it had slid up her back. “Sooner or later, though, we could find something valuable, in all this mess.”

“What would you do with the money?” Rafe asked, reaching for the biscuits. “A few grand, say.” In that second I heard Sam’s voice, close against my ear: That house is full of old bits and bobs, if there was something valuable in there…

“Get an Aga stove,” Abby said promptly. “The ones that heat the whole house. Warmth and a cooker that doesn’t crumble into lumps of rust if you look at it funny. Two birds, one stone.”

“You wild woman,” Justin said. “What about designer dresses and weekends in Monte Carlo?”

“I’d settle for no more frozen toes.”

Maybe she was supposed to give him something, I had said, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind… I realized I had my hand pressed down on the music box as if someone was trying to take it away. “I’d get the roof redone, I think,” Daniel said. “It shouldn’t disintegrate for another few years, but it would be nice not to wait that long.”

“You?” Rafe asked, giving him a sideways grin and winding the clockwork mouse again. “I’d have thought you’d never sell the thing, whatever it was; just frame it and hang it on the wall. Family history over filthy lucre.”

Daniel shook his head and held out a hand to me for his coffee mug—I had been dipping my biscuit in it. “What matters is the house,” he said, taking a sip and passing the mug back to me. “All the other things are just icing, really; I’m fond of them, but I’d sell them all in a heartbeat if we needed the money for roofing bills or something like that. The house carries enough history all by itself; and after all, we’re making our own, every day.”

“What would you do with it, Lex?” Abby asked.

That right there was, of course, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, the one that was banging at the inside of my head like a tiny vicious hammer. Sam and Frank hadn’t followed up on the antique-deal-gone-wrong idea because, basically, nothing pointed that way. Death duties had cleared the good stuff out of the house, Lexie hadn’t been linked to any antique dealers or fences, and nothing had said she needed money; until now.

She had had eighty-eight quid in her bank account—barely enough to get her out of Ireland, never mind get her started anywhere else—and only a couple of months before the baby started showing, the father started noticing and it was too late. Last time she had sold her car; this time, she had had nothing to sell.

It’s amazing how cheaply you can ditch your life and get a new one, if you don’t ask for much and you’re willing to do any work that’s going. After Operation Vestal I spent a lot of predawn time online, checking hostel prices and job ads in various languages and doing the maths. There are plenty of cities where you can get a crap flat for three hundred quid a month, or a hostel bed for a tenner a night; figure in your flight, and enough cash to feed you for a few weeks while you answer ads for bar staff or sandwich makers or tour guides, and you’re talking a brand-new life for the price of a secondhand car. I had two grand saved up: more than enough.

And Lexie knew all that better than I did; she had done it before. She wouldn’t have needed to find a lost Rembrandt in the back of her wardrobe. All she would have needed was the right little trinket—a good bit of jewelry, a rare piece of porcelain, I’ve heard of teddy bears going for hundreds—and the right buyer; and the willingness to sell bits of this house, out from under the others.

She had run off in Chad’s car, but I would have been willing to swear on just about anything that that was different. This had been her home.

“I’d get us all new bed frames,” I said. “The springs in mine stick into me straight through the mattress, like the princess and the pea, and I can hear every time Justin turns over,” and I flipped the music box open again, to end this conversation.

Abby sang along, softly, turning the clay pipe in her hands: “Greensleeves is all my joy, Greensleeves is my delight…” Rafe turned the clockwork mouse over and started examining the gears. Justin flicked one of the marbles expertly into another, which rolled across the floor and clicked neatly against Daniel’s mug; he glanced up from a tin soldier, smiling, his hair falling across his forehead. I watched them and ran my fingers over the old silk and hoped to God I had been telling the truth.