The Likeness

16

It was lunchtime when I got back to Trinity, but the others were still in their carrels. As soon as I turned into the long aisle of books that led to our corner they looked up, fast and almost simultaneously, pens going down.

"Well,” Justin said, on a big relieved sigh, as I reached them. “There you are. About time.”

“Jesus,” said Rafe. “What took so long? Justin thought you’d been arrested, but I told him you’d probably just eloped with O’Neill.”

Rafe’s hair was standing up in cowlicks and Abby had pen smudged on one cheekbone and they had no idea how beautiful they looked to me, how close we’d come to losing each other. I wanted to touch all four of them, hug them, grab their hands and hold on hard. “They kept me hanging around for ages,” I said. “Are we going for lunch? I’m starving.”

“What happened?” Daniel asked. “Were you able to identify this man?”

“Nah,” I said, leaning across Abby to get my satchel. “He’s definitely the guy from the other night, though. You should see his face. He looks like he went ten rounds with Muhammad Ali.” Rafe laughed and held up his hand to me for a high-five.

“What are you laughing about?” Abby wanted to know. “The guy could have you charged with assault, if he wanted to. That’s what Justin thought had happened, Lex.”

“He won’t press charges. He told the cops he fell off his bike. Everything’s fine.”

“Nothing jogged your memory?” Daniel inquired.

“Nope.” I tugged Justin’s coat off his chair and waved it at him. “Come on. Can we go to the Buttery? I want proper food. Cops make me hungry.”

“Did you get any sense of what happens now? Do they think he’s the man who attacked you? Did they arrest him?”

“Nah,” I said. “They don’t have enough evidence, or something. And they don’t think he stabbed me.”

I’d been so swept up by the thought that this was good news, I had forgotten that it might look very different from most other perspectives. There was a sudden flat silence, nobody looking at anyone else. Rafe’s eyes closed for a second, like a flinch.

“Why not?” Daniel asked. “As far as I can see, he seems like a logical suspect.”

I shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in their heads? That’s all they told me.”

“For fuck’s sake,” said Abby. She looked suddenly pale and heavy-eyed, in the glare of the fluorescent lights.

“So,” Rafe said, “this whole thing was pointless, after all. We’re back where we started.”

“We don’t know that yet,” said Daniel.

“I think it’s fairly clear. Call me a pessimist.”

“Oh, God,” Justin said softly. “I so hoped this was going to be over.” No one answered him.

Daniel and Abby, talking late again, out on the patio. This time I didn’t need to feel my way along the walls to the kitchen; I could have moved through that house blindfolded without putting a foot wrong, without creaking a floorboard.

“I don’t know why,” Daniel said. They were sitting on the swing seat, smoking, not touching. “I can’t put my finger on it. Possibly I’m letting all the other tensions cloud my judgment… I’m just worried.”

“She’s been through a tough time,” Abby said carefully. “I think all she wants is to settle down and forget it ever happened.”

Daniel watched her, moonlight reflecting off his glasses, screening his eyes. “What is it,” he asked, “that you’re not telling me?”

The baby. I bit down on my lip and prayed that Abby believed in loyalty among the sisterhood.

She shook her head. “You’ll have to trust me on this one.”

Daniel looked away, out over the grass, and I saw a flash of something—exhaustion, or grief—cross his face. “We used to tell one another everything,” he said, “not so long ago. Didn’t we? Or is that simply the way I remember it? The five of us against the world, and no secrets, ever.”

Abby’s eyebrows flicked up. “Did we? I’m not sure anyone tells anyone else everything. You don’t, for example.”

“I’d like to think,” Daniel said, after a moment, “that I do my best. That, unless there’s some pressing reason not to, I tell you and the others everything that really matters.”

“But there’s always some pressing reason, isn’t there? With you.” Abby’s face was pale and shuttered.

“Possibly there is,” Daniel said quietly, on a long sigh. “There didn’t use to be.”

“You and Lexie,” Abby said. “Have you ever…?”

A silence; the two of them watching each other, intent as enemies.

“Because that would matter.”

“Would it? Why?”

Another silence. The moon went in; their faces faded into the night.

“No,” Daniel said, finally. “We haven’t. I would probably say the same thing either way, since I don’t see how it would be important, so I don’t expect you to believe me. But, for what it’s worth, we haven’t.”

Silence, again. The tiny red glow of a cigarette butt, arcing into the dark like a meteor. I stood in the cold kitchen, watching them through the glass, and wished I could tell them: It’ll all be OK now. Everyone will settle; everything will go back to normal, given time, and now we’ve got time. I’m staying.

A door banging, in the middle of the night; fast, careless footsteps thumping on wood; another slam, heavier this time, the front door.

I listened, sitting up in bed, my heart hammering. There was a shift somewhere in the house, so subtle that I felt it more than heard it, running through walls and floorboards into my bones: someone moving. It could have come from anywhere. It was a still night, no wind in the trees, only the cool deceptive call of an owl hunting far off in the lanes. I pulled my pillow up against the headboard, got comfortable and waited. I thought about having a cigarette, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one sitting upright, senses on full alert for the tiniest thing: the click of a lighter, the smell of smoke twisting in the dark air.

After about twenty minutes the front door opened and closed again, very quietly this time. A pause; then delicate, careful steps going up the stairs, into Justin’s room, and the explosive creak of bedsprings below me.

I gave it five minutes. When nothing interesting happened, I slid out of bed and ran downstairs—there was no point in trying to be quiet. “Oh,” Justin said, when I stuck my head round his door. “It’s you.”

He was sitting on the edge of his bed, half dressed: trousers, shoes but no socks, his shirt untucked and half buttoned. He looked awful.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

Justin ran his hands over his face, and I saw that they were trembling. “No,” he said. “I’m really not.”

“What happened?”

His hands came down and he stared at me, red-eyed. “Go to bed,” he said. “Just go to bed, Lexie.”

“Are you pissed off with me?”

“Not everything in this world is about you, you know,” Justin said coldly. “Believe it or not.”

“Justin,” I said, after a second. “I just wanted to—”

“If you really want to help,” Justin said, “then you can leave me alone.”

He got up and started fussing with the bedsheets, pulling them tight in fast, clumsy little jerks, his back turned to me. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything more, I closed his door gently behind me and went back upstairs. There was no light from Daniel’s room, but I could feel him there, only a few feet away in the darkness, listening and thinking.

The next day, when I came out of my five o’clock tutorial, Abby and Justin were waiting for me in the corridor. “Have you seen Rafe?” Abby asked.

“Not since lunch,” I said. They were dressed for outdoors—abby in her long gray coat, Justin’s tweed jacket buttoned—and rain sparkled on their shoulders and in their hair. “Didn’t he have a thesis meeting?”

“That’s what he told us,” said Abby, shifting back against the wall to let a bunch of yelling undergrads tumble by, “but thesis meetings don’t last four hours, and anyway we checked Armstrong’s office. It’s locked. He’s not in there.”

“Maybe he went to the Buttery for a pint,” I suggested. Justin winced. We all knew that Rafe had been drinking a little more than was good for him, but nobody mentioned it, ever.

“We checked there too,” Abby said. “And he wouldn’t go to the Pav, he says it’s full of rugger—bugger wankers and it gives him boarding-school flashbacks. I don’t know where else to look.”

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked, coming out of his tutorial across the corridor.

“We can’t find Rafe.”

“Hmm,” Daniel said, adjusting his armful of books and papers. “Have you tried ringing him?”

“Three times,” said Abby. “The first time he hit Reject Call, and after that he turned his phone off.”

“Are his things still in his carrel?”

“No,” Justin said, slumping against the wall and picking at a cuticle. “Everything’s gone.”

“But that’s a good sign, surely,” Daniel said, giving him a look of mild surprise. “It means nothing unexpected’s happened to him; he hasn’t been hit by a car, or had some kind of health emergency and been taken to hospital. He’s simply gone off on his own somewhere.”

“Yes, but where?” Justin’s voice was rising. “And what are we supposed to do now? He can’t get home without us. Do we just leave him here?”

Daniel gazed down the corridor, over the milling heads. The air smelled of wet carpet; somewhere round the corner a girl shrieked, high and piercing, and Justin and Abby and I all jumped before we realized she was only playing at terrified, the scream had already dissolved into loud flirtatious scolding. Daniel, biting down thoughtfully on his lip, didn’t seem to notice.

After a moment he sighed. “Rafe,” he said, and gave a quick, exasperated shake of his head. “Honestly. Yes, of course we leave him here; there’s really nothing else we can do. If he wants to come home, he can ring one of us, or take a taxi.”

"To Glenskehy? And I’m not driving all the way back into town for him, just because he feels like being an idiot—”

“Well,” Daniel said, “I’m sure he’ll find a way.” He tucked a stray sheet of paper into the pile he was carrying. “Let’s go home.”

By the end of dinner—a half-arsed dinner, chicken fillets from the freezer, rice, a bowl of fruit shoved into the middle of the table—Rafe hadn’t rung. He had switched his phone back on, but he was still letting our calls go to voice mail. “It’s not like him,” Justin said. He was scraping compulsively, with one thumbnail, at the pattern on the edge of his plate.

“Sure it is,” said Abby firmly. “He’s gone on a bender and picked up some girl, just like he did that other time, remember? He was gone for two days.”

“That was different. And what are you nodding about?” Justin added, sourly, to me. “You don’t remember that. You weren’t even here for that.”

My adrenaline leaped, but no one looked suspicious; they were all too focused on Rafe to notice a slip that small. “I’m nodding because I’ve heard about it. There’s this thing called communication, you should try it sometime—” Everyone was in a prickly mood, including me. I wasn’t frantic with worry about Rafe, exactly, but the fact that he wasn’t there was making me edgy, and so was the fact that I couldn’t tell whether this was for solid investigative reasons—Frank’s beloved intuition—or just because without him the balance of the room felt all wrong, off-kilter and precarious.

“How was that different?” Abby wanted to know.

Justin shrugged. “We didn’t live together then.”

“So? All the more reason. What’s he supposed to do, if he wants to hook up with someone? Bring her here?”

“He’s supposed to ring us. Or at least leave us a note.”

“Saying what?” I demanded. I was chopping a peach into tiny bits. “ ‘Dear guys, I’m off to get laid. Will talk to you tomorrow, or later tonight if I can’t score, or at three in the morning if she turns out to be a crap shag—’ ”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Justin snapped. “And for God’s sake eat that bloody thing or stop messing about with it.”

“I’m not being vulgar, I’m just saying. And I’ll eat it when I’m ready. Do I tell you how to eat?”

“We should call the police,” Justin said.

“No,” Daniel said, tapping a cigarette on the back of his wrist. “It wouldn’t do any good at this point, anyway. The police wait a certain amount of time after someone goes missing—twenty-four hours, I think, although it may be more—before they set any kind of search in motion. Rafe’s an adult—”

“In theory,” said Abby.

“—and he has every right to stay out for the night.”

“But what if he’s done something stupid?” Justin’s voice was rising towards a wail.

“One of the reasons I dislike euphemisms,” Daniel said, shaking out his match and dropping it neatly into the ashtray, “is that they preclude any real communication. I think it’s a safe bet that Rafe has in fact done something stupid, but that covers such a wide variety of possibilities. I assume you’re worried that he’s busy committing suicide, which frankly I think is extremely unlikely.”

After a moment Justin said, without looking up, “Did he ever tell you about that time when he was sixteen? When his parents made him move school for the tenth time or whatever it was?”

“No pasts,” Daniel said.

“He wasn’t trying to kill himself,” Abby said. “He was trying to get some attention from his dickhead dad, and it didn’t work.”

“I said no pasts.”

“I’m not. I’m just saying this isn’t the same, Justin. Hasn’t Rafe been completely different, these last few months? Hasn’t he been way happier?”

“These last few months,” Justin said. “Not these last few weeks.”

“Yeah, well,” Abby said, and sliced an apple in half with a crisp snap, “we’ve none of us been at our best. It’s still not the same. Rafe knows he’s got a home, he knows he’s got people who care about him, he’s not about to hurt himself. He’s just having a hard time, and he’s gone off to get hammered and chase skirt. He’ll be back when he’s good and ready.”

“What if he’s…” Justin’s voice trailed off. “I hate this, you know,” he said softly, to his plate. “I really hate this.”

“Well, so do we all,” said Daniel briskly. “It’s been a trying time for all of us. We need to accept that and have patience with ourselves, and with one another, while we recover.”

“You said to just give it time and it would get better. It’s not getting better, Daniel. It’s getting worse.”

“I was thinking,” Daniel said, “of a little more time than three weeks. If you consider that unreasonable, then do by all means tell me.”

“How can you be so calm?” Justin wasn’t far off tears. “This is Rafe we’re talking about.”

“Whatever he’s doing,” Daniel said, turning his head politely to the side to blow smoke away from the rest of us, “I fail to see how it would make any difference if I became hysterical.”

“I am not hysterical. This is how normal people react when one of their friends vanishes.”

“Justin,” Abby said, gently, “it’s going to be fine,” but Justin didn’t hear her.

“Just because you’re a bloody robot… My God, Daniel, just once, just once I’d like to see you act as if you care about the rest of us, about anything—”

“I think you have every reason to be aware,” Daniel said coldly, “that I care very deeply about all four of you.”

“I do not. What reason? I’ve got every reason to think that you don’t give a damn—”

Abby made a small gesture, palm upturned to the ceiling, the room around us, the garden outside. There was something about it, about the way her hand fell back into her lap; something tired, almost resigned.

“That’s right,” Justin said, slumping down in his chair. The light caught him at a cruel angle, hollowing out his cheeks and raking a long vertical groove between his eyebrows, and for a second I saw like a time-slip overlaid on his face what he would look like in fifty years’ time. “Of course. The house. And look where that’s got us.”

There was a tiny, sharp silence. “I have never claimed,” Daniel said, and his voice had a dangerous depth of some emotion that I’d never heard there before, “to be infallible. All I’ve ever claimed is that I try, very hard, to do what’s best for the five of us. If you believe I’m doing such a bad job of it, feel free to make decisions of your own. If you think we shouldn’t be living together, then move out. If you think we need to report Rafe missing, then pick up the phone.”

After a moment Justin shrugged miserably and went back to picking at his plate. Daniel smoked, gazing into the middle distance. Abby ate her apple; I turned my peach into purée. Nobody said anything for a long time.

“I see you’ve lost the lady boy,” Frank said, when I rang him from my tree. We had apparently inspired him to have a health-food moment: he was eating something with seeds—I could hear him spitting them, attractively, into his hand or wherever. “If he turns up dead, then maybe everyone will start believing me about the mysterious stranger. I should’ve had money on it.”

“Stop being a git, Frankie,” I said.

Frank laughed. “You’re not worried about him, are you? Seriously?”

I shrugged. “I’d rather know where he is, that’s all.”

“You can relax, babe. A lovely young lady of my acquaintance was trying to find out where her friend Martin was this evening, and just happened to dial little Rafe’s number by mistake. Unfortunately, he didn’t mention where he was before the misunderstanding got cleared up, but the background noise gave us a general idea. Abby was bang on: your boy’s in a pub somewhere, getting gee-eyed and chasing the ladies. You’ll get him back safe and sound, except for a five-star hangover.”

So Frank had been worried, too; worried enough to dig out some woman floater with a sexy voice and get her making phone calls. Maybe Naylor hadn’t been just a way for Frank to get at Sam; maybe he had been serious about him as a suspect, all along. I pulled my feet farther up into the branches. “Great,” I said. “That’s good to know.”

“So how come you sound like your cat just died?”

“They’re in bad shape,” I said, and I was glad Frank couldn’t see my face. I thought I was about to fall out of the tree from sheer exhaustion. I grabbed a branch and held on. “For whatever reason—because they can’t handle me getting stabbed, or because they can’t deal with whatever it is they’re not telling us—they’re coming apart at the seams.”

After a moment Frank said, very gently, “I know you’re getting on well with them, babe. That’s fine; they’re not my cup of Earl Grey, but I’ve no objection to you feeling differently if it makes your job easier. But they’re not your mates. Their problems aren’t your problems; they’re your opportunities.”

“I know,” I said. “I know that. It’s just hard to watch.”

“No harm in a bit of compassion,” Frank said cheerfully, taking another big bite of whatever he was eating. “As long as it doesn’t get out of hand. I’ve got something to take your mind off their troubles, though. Your Rafe’s not the only one gone missing.”

“What are you talking about?”

He spat out seeds. “I was planning on keeping tabs on Naylor, from a safe distance—get a handle on his routine, his associates, all the rest; give you a little more to work with. But it’s not turning out that way. He didn’t show for work today. His parents haven’t seen him since last night, and they say this is out of character; the father’s in a wheelchair, it’s not like John to leave his mammy to do the heavy lifting on her own. Your Sammy and a couple of floaters are taking turns sitting on his house, and we’ve told Byrne and Doherty to keep an eye out. For whatever that’s worth.”

“He won’t go far,” I said. “This guy wouldn’t leave Glenskehy unless he was dragged away kicking and screaming. He’ll turn up.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figure. As far as the stabbing goes, I don’t think this cuts one way or the other; it’s a myth that only the guilty ones run. But here’s one thing I do know: whatever has Naylor running, it’s not fear. Did he look scared to you?”

“No,” I said. “Not for a second. He looked furious.”

“To me, too. He wasn’t one bit happy about that interview. I watched him leave, afterwards; two steps from the door, he turned around and he spat at it. That’s one very pissed-off bogger, Cassie, and we already know he’s got a temper problem—and, like you said, he’s probably still in the area. I don’t know whether he’s gone missing because he doesn’t want us surveilling him, or because he’s got something up his sleeve, or what; but watch yourself.”

I did. All the way home I kept to the middle of the lanes, with my gun cocked and ready in my hands. I didn’t put it back into my girdle until the back gate had clanged behind me and I was safe in the garden, at the edge of the bright tracks of light from the windows.

I hadn’t rung Sam. This time it wasn’t because I’d forgotten. It was because I had no idea whether he would answer, or what either of us would have to say if he did.