The Likeness

17

Rafe showed up in the library the next morning, around eleven, with his coat buttoned wrong and his knapsack swinging carelessly from one hand. He stank of cigar smoke and stale Guinness, and he was still pretty unsteady on his feet. "Well,” he said, swaying a little and surveying the four of us. “Hello, hello, hello.”

“Where have you been?” Daniel hissed. His voice had a tense edge of anger, barely suppressed. He had been a lot more worried about Rafe than he’d let on.

“Here and there,” Rafe told him. “Out and about. How are you?”

“We thought something had happened to you.” Justin’s whisper cracked, into something too loud and too sharp. “Why didn’t you ring us? Even text us?”

Rafe turned to look at him. “I was otherwise occupied,” he said, after considering this. “And I didn’t feel like it.” One of the Goon Squad, the mature students who always appoint themselves the Library Noise Vigilantes, looked up over his stack of philosophy books and went, “Shhh!”

“Your timing sucks,” Abby said coldly. “This was not a good moment to take off on a skirt hunt, and even you should have been able to figure that out.”

Rafe rocked backwards on his heels and gave her a deeply miffed look. “Fuck you,” he said, loudly and haughtily. “I’ll decide when I do what I want.”

“Don’t talk to her like that any more,” Daniel said. He didn’t even pretend to care about keeping his voice down. The entire Goon Squad went, “Shhh!” at once.

I tugged at Rafe’s sleeve. “Sit down here and talk to me.”

“Lexie,” Rafe said, managing to focus on me. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair needed washing. “I shouldn’t have left you on your own, should I?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a happy camper. Want to sit down and tell me how your night went?”

He stretched out a hand; his fingers trailed down my cheek, my throat, slipped along the neckline of my top. I saw Abby’s eyes widen behind him, heard a quick rustle from Justin’s carrel. “God, you’re so sweet,” Rafe said. “You’re not as delicate as you look, are you? Sometimes I think the rest of us are the other way around.”

One of the Goon Squad had dug up Attila, who is the narkiest security guard in the known universe. He obviously went into the job in the hope of getting to crack the heads of dangerous criminals, but since these are thin on the ground in your average college library, he gets his kicks by making lost freshers cry. “Is this fella giving you any bother?” he asked me. He was trying to loom over Rafe, but the height difference was giving him trouble.

The wall went up straight away: Daniel and Abby and Justin snapped into attitudes of cool, poised ease, even Rafe straightened up and whipped his hand away from me and managed to look instantly, effortlessly sober. “Everything’s fine,” Abby said.

“I didn’t ask you,” Attila told her. “Do you know this fella?”

He was talking to me. I gave him an angelic smile and said, “Actually, Officer, he’s my husband. I did have a barring order against him, but now I’ve changed my mind and we’re off to shag deliriously in the Ladies.” Rafe started to snicker.

“There’s no fellas allowed in the Ladies,” said Attila ominously. “And yous are causing a disturbance.”

“It’s all right,” Daniel said. He stood up and took Rafe by the upper arm—the grip looked casual, but I could see his fingers digging in hard. “We were just leaving. All of us.”

“Get off me,” Rafe snapped, trying to shrug off Daniel’s hand. Daniel steered him briskly past Attila and down the long aisle of books, without looking back to see if the rest of us were following.

We gathered up our stuff, left in a hurry through Attila’s awful warnings, and found Daniel and Rafe in the foyer. Daniel was swinging his car keys from one finger; Rafe was leaning lopsidedly against a pillar and sulking.

“Well done,” Abby said to Rafe. “Really. That was classy.”

“Don’t start.”

“But what are we doing?” Justin asked Daniel. He was carrying Daniel’s stuff, as well as his own; he looked worried and overloaded. “We can’t just leave.”

“Why not?”

There was a brief, taken-aback silence. Our routine was so ingrained, I think it had stopped occurring to any of us that it wasn’t actually a law of nature, that we could break it if we wanted to. “What’ll we do instead?” I asked.

Daniel threw the car keys into the air and caught them. “We’re going to go home and paint the sitting room,” he said. “We’ve been spending far too much time in that library. A bit of work on the house will do us all good.”

To any outsider this would have sounded deeply weird—I could hear Frank in my head, God, they’re rock ’n’ roll, how do you stand the pace? But everyone nodded, even, after a moment, Rafe. I had already noticed that the house was their safe zone: whenever things got tense, one of them would steer the conversation onto something that needed fixing or rearranging, and everyone would settle down again. We were going to be in big trouble once the house was all sorted out and we didn’t have grouting or floor stains to use as our Happy Place.

It worked, too. Old sheets thrown over the furniture and cold bright air flooding through the open windows, crap clothes and hard work and the smell of paint, ragtime playing in the background, the naughty buzz of ditching college and the house swelling like an approving cat under the attention: it was exactly what we needed. By the time we finished the room, Rafe was starting to look sheepish instead of belligerent, Abby and Justin had relaxed enough to have a long comfortable argument about whether Scott Joplin sucked, and we were all in a much better mood.

“First dibs on the shower,” I said.

“Let Rafe have it,” said Abby. “To each according to his need.” Rafe made a face at her. We were sprawled on the dust sheets, admiring our work and trying to get up the energy to move.

“Once this dries,” Daniel said, “we’ll need to decide what, if anything, we’re putting on the walls.”

“I saw these really old tin signs,” said Abby, “up in the top spare room—”

“I am not living in a 1980s pub,” said Rafe. He had sobered up along the way, or else the paint fumes had got the rest of us high enough that we didn’t notice. “Aren’t there paintings, or something normal?”

“The ones that are left are all horrible,” Daniel said. He was leaning back against the edge of the sofa, with spatters of white paint in his hair and on his old plaid shirt, looking happier and more at ease than he had in days. “Landscape with Stag and Hounds, that kind of thing, and not particularly well done, either. Some great-great-aunt with artistic pretensions, I think.”

“You’ve got no soul,” Abby told him. “Things with sentimental value aren’t supposed to have artistic merit as well. They’re supposed to be crap. Otherwise, it’s just showing off.”

“Let’s use those old newspapers,” I said. I was flat on my back in the middle of the floor, waving my legs in the air to examine the new paint splashes on Lexie’s work dungarees. “The ancient ones, with the article about the Dionne quintuplets and the ad for the thing that makes you gain weight. We can stick them all over the walls and varnish over them, like the photos on Justin’s door.”

“That’s in my bedroom,” Justin said. “A sitting room should have elegance. Grandeur. Not ads.”

“You know,” Rafe said, out of the blue, propping himself up on one elbow, “I do realize that I owe all of you an apology. I shouldn’t have vanished, especially not without letting you know where I was. My only excuse, and it’s not much of one, is that I was deeply pissed off about that guy getting off scot-free. I’m sorry.”

He was at his most charming, and Rafe could be very charming when he felt like it. Daniel gave him a grave little nod. “You’re an idiot,” I said, “but we love you anyway.”

“You’re OK,” Abby said, stretching up to get her cigarettes off the card table. “I’m not crazy about the idea of that guy running around loose, either.”

“You know what I wonder?” Rafe said. “I wonder if Ned hired him to frighten us off.”

There was an instant of absolute silence, Abby’s hand stopped with a smoke halfway out of the pack, Justin frozen in the middle of sitting up.

Daniel snorted. “I seriously doubt that Ned has the intellect for anything that complex,” he said acidly.

I had opened my mouth to ask, Who’s Ned? but I had shut it again, fast; not just because I was obviously supposed to know this, but because I did. I could have kicked myself for not seeing it earlier. Frank has always thrown diminutives at people he doesn’t like—Danny Boy, our Sammy—and like an idiot I had never considered the possibility that he might have picked the wrong one. They were talking about Slow Eddie. Slow Eddie, who had been wandering around the late-night laneways looking for someone, who had claimed he’d never met Lexie, was N. I was sure Frank could hear my heart punching the mike.

“Probably not,” Rafe said, lying back on his elbows and contemplating the walls. “When we’re done here, we should really invite him over for dinner.”

“Over my dead body,” said Abby. Her voice was tightening up. “You didn’t have to deal with him. We did.”

“And mine,” said Justin. “The man’s a Philistine. He drank Heineken all night, of course, and then he kept belching and naturally he thought that was hilarious, every single time. And all that droning about fitted kitchens and tax breaks and Section Whatever-it-is. Once was enough, thank you very much.”

“You people have no heart,” Rafe told them. “Ned loves this house. He told the judge so. I think we owe him a chance to see that the old family seat is in good hands. Give me a smoke.”

“The only thing Ned loves,” Daniel said, very sharply, “is the thought of six fully fitted executive apartments on extensive grounds with potential for further development. And over my dead body will he ever get a chance to see that.”

Justin made a sudden jerky movement, covered it by reaching for an ashtray and shoving it across to Abby. There was a complicated, sharp-edged silence. Abby lit her smoke, shook out the match and threw the packet to Rafe, who caught it one-handed. Nobody was looking at anybody. An early bumblebee blundered in at the window, hovered over the piano in a slant of sun and eventually bumped back out again.

I wanted to say something—that was my job, defusing moments like this one—but I knew we had veered into some kind of treacherous and complicated swamp where one misstep could get me into big trouble. Ned was sounding like more and more of a wankstain—even if I didn’t have the first clue what an executive apartment was, I got the general idea—but whatever was going on ran a lot deeper and darker than that.

Abby was watching me over her cigarette with cool, curious gray eyes. I shot her an agonized look, which didn’t take much effort. After a moment she stretched for the ashtray and said, “If there’s nothing decent to put up on the walls, maybe we should try something different. Rafe, if we found photos of old murals, do you think you could do something like that?”

Rafe shrugged. An edge of the belligerent don’t-blame-me look was creeping back onto his face. That dark electric cloud had come down over the room again.

Silence was fine with me. My mind was doing cartwheels—not just because Lexie had for some reason been hanging out with the archenemy, but because Ned was clearly a taboo subject. For three weeks his name had never been mentioned, the first reference to him had fried everyone’s heads, and I couldn’t figure out why. He had lost, after all; the house was Daniel’s, both Uncle Simon and a judge had said so, Ned should have triggered nothing more serious than a laugh and a few snide comments. I would have sold a major organ to find out what the hell was going on here, but I knew a lot better than to ask.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Frank’s mind—and I wasn’t at all sure I liked this—had run parallel to mine, parallel and fast.

I went for my walk as early as I could. That cloud hadn’t dissipated; if anything it had got thicker, pressing in from the walls and ceilings. Dinner had been painful. Justin and Abby and I had done our best to be chatty, but Rafe had gone into a sour sulk that you could practically see, and Daniel had withdrawn into himself, answering questions in monosyllables. I needed to get out of that house and think.

Lexie had met up with Ned at least three times, and she had gone to a lot of trouble to do it. The four big Ls of motive: lust, lucre, loathing and love. The chance of lust made my gag reflex kick in; the more I heard about Ned, the more I wanted to believe that Lexie wouldn’t have touched him with someone else’s. Lucre, though… She had needed money, fast, and a rich boy like Ned would have made a way better buyer than John Naylor and his crap farm job. If she had been meeting Ned to discuss what knickknacks he might want from Whitethorn House, how much he would be willing to pay, and then something had gone wrong…

It was a very strange night: huge and dark and gusty, snaps of wind roaring across the hillsides, a million high stars and no moon. I stuffed my gun back into my girdle, climbed up my tree and spent a long time there, watching the shadowy black surge of the bushes below me, listening hard for any faint sound that didn’t belong; thinking about phoning Sam.

In the end I phoned Frank. “Naylor hasn’t shown up yet,” he said, no hello. “You keeping an eye out?”

“Yeah,” I said. “No sign of him, as far as I can tell.”

“Right.” There was an absent note to his voice that told me his mind wasn’t on Naylor either. “Good. Meanwhile, I’ve got something that might interest you. You know the way your new pals were bitching about Cousin Eddie and his executive apartments, this afternoon?”

For a second all my muscles jolted awake, till I remembered Frank didn’t know about N. “Yep,” I said. “Cousin Eddie sounds like a right little gem.”

“Oh, yeah. One hundred percent pure brain-dead yuppie fuck, never had a thought in his life that didn’t involve his dick or his wallet.”

“You think Rafe was right about him hiring Naylor?”

“Not a chance. Eddie doesn’t hobnob with the lower classes. You should’ve seen his face when he heard my accent; I think he was afraid I was going to mug him. But this afternoon reminded me. Remember how you said the Fantastic Four were weird about the house? Too attached?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” I had almost forgotten that, actually. “I think I overreacted. When you put a lot of work into a place, you do get attached to it. And it’s a nice house.”

“Oh, it is,” Frank said. There was something in his tone that set my alarm bells jingling faintly, a fierce, sardonic grin. “It is that. I was bored today—Naylor’s still in the wind and I’m getting nowhere on Lexie-May-Ruth-Princess-Anastasia-whoever, I’ve drawn a blank in about fourteen countries so far, I’m considering the possibility that she was built in a pod by mad scientists in 1997. So, just to show my homegirl Cassie that I trust her instincts, I put in a call to my mate in the Land Registry office and ask him for a rundown on Whitethorn House. Who loves you, baby?”

“You do,” I said. Frank has always had a spectacular array of mates in unlikely places: my mate down at the docks, my mate on the County Council, my mate who runs the S&M shop. Back when we first began this whole Lexie Madison thing, My Mate At Births Deaths and Marriages made sure she was officially registered, in case anyone got suspicious and started sniffing around, while My Mate With The Van helped me move into her bedsit. I figure I’m happier not knowing about whatever complex barter system is going on there. “You bloody well should, after all this. And?”

“And remember saying they all act like they own the place?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Your instincts hit the jackpot, babe. They do. So do you, actually.”

“Quit being cute, Frankie,” I said. My heart was pounding hard and slow and there was a strange dark shiver through the hedges: something was happening. “What are you on about?”

“Old Simon’s will cleared probate and Daniel took possession of Whitethorn House on the tenth of September. On the fifteenth of December, ownership of the house was transferred into five names: Raphael Hyland, Alexandra Madison, Justin Mannering, Daniel March and Abigail Stone. Happy Christmas.”

It was the sheer blazing courage of it that hit me first: the passion of trust it would take, to put your future where your mouth was, no half measures, scoop up all your tomorrows and put them so deliberately, so simply, in the hands of the people you loved best. I thought of Daniel at the table, broad-backed and solid in his crisp white shirt, the precise flick of his wrist as he turned a page; of Abby flipping bacon in her bathrobe, Justin singing out of tune while he got ready for bed, Rafe sprawled on the grass squinting up into the sun. And all the time, underpinning everything, this. I had had moments of envying them before, but this was something too deep for envy; something like awe.

And then I realized. N, plane fares, Over my dead body will Ned get a chance. Here I had been fucking about with music boxes and tin soldiers and trying to figure out how much your average family photo album was worth; here I had thought she had nothing to sell, this time.

If she had been negotiating with Ned, and the others had somehow found out: holy shit. No wonder his name had turned the room to ice, that afternoon. I couldn’t breathe.

Frank was still going. I could hear him moving, pacing up and down the room, fast steps. “The paperwork on that would take months; Danny Boy must’ve started it almost the same day he got the keys. I know you like these people, Cassie, but you can’t tell me that’s not bizarre as all hell. That house is worth a cool couple of million, easy. What the fuck is he thinking? They’re all going to live there forever in one big happy hippie commune? Actually, never mind what he’s thinking, what the fuck is he smoking?”

He was taking it personally because he had missed it: all that investigation, and the middle-class student wimps had somehow slipped this right past him. “Yeah,” I said, very carefully, “it’s weird. They are weird, Frank. And yeah, it’s going to get complicated down the road, when someone wants to get married or whatever. But, like you said yourself, they’re young. They’re not thinking that way yet.”

“Yeah, well, little Justin won’t be getting married any time soon, not without a major change in the legislation—”

“Stop being a cliché, Frank. What’s the big deal?” This didn’t mean it had to be one of the four of them, not necessarily; the evidence still added up to Lexie being stabbed by someone she had met outside the house. It didn’t even mean she had actually been going to sell. If she had made a deal with Ned and then changed her mind, told him she was backing out; if she had just been playing with him all along—loathing—yanking his chain to pay him back for trying to take the house… He had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to spit on his grandfather’s memory; what would he have done if a share of it had been so close he could taste it, and then Lexie had snatched it away? I tried to shove the diary out of my mind: those dates, the first N just a few days after that missing circle; the hard scribble, pen almost digging through the paper, that said she hadn’t been playing.

“Well,” Frank said, with the lazy note to his voice that means he’s at his most dangerous. “If you ask me, this could give us the motive we’ve been looking for. Me, I’d call that a big deal.”

“No,” I said promptly, maybe too promptly, but Frank didn’t comment. “Not a chance. Where’s the motive in that? If they all wanted to sell and she was blocking it, then maybe, but those four would rather pull out their own teeth with rusty pliers than sell that house. What have they got to gain by killing her?”

“One of them dies, his share—or hers—reverts back to the other four. Maybe someone figured a quarter of that lovely big house would be even nicer than a fifth. It more or less lets Danny Boy out—if he wanted the whole thing, he could’ve just kept it to start with. But that still leaves us with three little Indians.”

I wriggled round the other way on my branch. I was very glad that Frank was off target, but, illogically, the extent to which he didn’t get it was pissing me off. "What for? Like I said, they don’t want to sell it. They want to live in it. They can do that just as well no matter what percentage they own. You think one of them killed her because he liked her bedroom better than his own?”

“Or her own. Abby’s a good kid, but I’m not ruling her out. Or maybe it wasn’t financial, for once; maybe Lexie was just plain driving someone nuts. People share a house, they get on each other’s tits. And remember, there’s a very good chance she was shagging one of the lads, and we all know how nasty that can turn. If you’re renting, no big deal: some yelling, a few tears, a house meeting, one of you moves out. But what do you do if it’s a co-owner? They can’t throw her out, I doubt any of them can afford to buy her out—”

“Sure,” I said, “except I haven’t got one single whiff of any kind of major tension aimed at me. Rafe was pissed off with me at first for not realizing how shaken up they all were, but that’s it. If Lexie had been getting up someone’s nose to the point of murder, there’s no way I could have missed it. These people like each other, Frank. They may be weird, but they like being weird together.”

“So why didn’t they tell us they all own the place? Why are they being so fucking secretive, unless they’re hiding something?”

“They didn’t tell you because you never asked them. If you were in their place, even if you were innocent as a baby, would you give the cops anything you didn’t have to? Would you even spend hours answering questions, the way they have?”

“You know what you’re talking like?” Frank said, after a pause. He had stopped pacing. “You’re talking like a defense attorney.”

I twisted round the other way again, swung my feet up against a branch. I was having a hard time staying still. “Oh, come on, Frank. I’m talking like a detective. And you’re talking like a fucking obsessive. If you don’t like these four, that’s fine. If they twang your antennae, that’s fine too. But it doesn’t mean that every single thing you find is automatically evidence that they’re stone-cold killers.”

“I don’t think you’re in any position to question my objectivity, babe,” Frank said. That lazy drawl had come back into his voice, and it made my back tense up against the tree trunk.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m on the outside, keeping my perspective, while you’re neck-deep in all the action, and I’d like you to keep that in mind. It also means I think there’s a limit to how far ‘Oh, they’re just charmingly eccentric’ will go as an excuse for acting downright bloody squirrely.”

“What brought this on, Frank? You’ve counted them out since the beginning, two days ago you were all over Naylor like a rash—”

“And I still am, or I will be as soon as we find the little bastard again. But I like spreading my bets. I’m not dropping anyone, anyone at all, until they’re definitively ruled out. And these four haven’t been. Don’t forget that.”

It was way past time for me to back off. “Fair enough,” I said. “Until Naylor turns up again, I’ll focus on them.”

“You do that. So will I. And keep watching yourself, Cassie. Not just outside that house; inside, too. Talk tomorrow.” And he was gone.

The fourth big L: love. I thought, suddenly, of the phone videos: a picnic on Bray Head, the summer before, all of them lying on the grass drinking wine out of plastic cups and eating strawberries and arguing lazily over whether Elvis was overrated. Daniel had gone into a long absorbed monologue about sociocultural context, until Rafe and Lexie decided everything was overrated except Elvis and chocolate and started throwing strawberries at him. They had been passing the camera phone around; the clips were disjointed and shaky. Lexie with her head in Justin’s lap and him tucking a daisy behind her ear; Lexie and Abby sitting back to back and looking out at the sea, hair blowing, shoulders lifting in long matching breaths; Lexie laughing up into Daniel’s face as she picked a ladybug out of his hair and held it out, him bending his head over her hand and smiling. I had seen the video so many times that it felt like my own memory, flickering and sweet. They had been happy, that day, all five of them.

There had been love there. It had looked solid and simple as bread; real. And it felt real to live in, a warm element through which we moved easily and which we breathed in with every breath. But Lexie had been ready and willing to blow all that sky-high. More than willing; hell-bent on it—that furious scrawl in the date book, while the phone video showed her climbing down from the attic laughing and covered in dust. If she had lived a couple of weeks longer, the others would have woken up one morning and found her gone, not a note, not a good-bye, not a second thought. It slid through a back corner of my mind that Lexie Madison had been dangerous, under that bright surface, and that maybe she still was.

I slid off my branch, hanging by my hands, dropped and landed in the lane with a thump. I dug my hands into my pockets and started walking—moving helps me think. The wind pulled at my cap and shoved into the small of my back, almost taking me off my feet.

I needed to talk to Ned, fast. Lexie had neglected to leave me instructions on how the hell they got in touch with each other. Not by mobile: Sam had pulled her phone records first thing, no unidentified numbers in or out. Carrier pigeon? Notes in the hollow tree? Smoke signals?

I didn’t have much time. Frank had no idea that Lexie had ever met Ned and no idea that she had been getting ready to blow town—I knew there would turn out to be a good reason why I didn’t want to tell him about that diary; just like he always says, your instincts work faster than your mind. But he wasn’t about to let go of this. He would worry away at it like a pit bull, and sooner or later he was going to hit on this same possibility. I didn’t know all that much about Ned, but enough to be pretty sure that, if he ended up in an interview room with Frank going at him full throttle, he would spill his guts inside five minutes. It never once occurred to me, not for a second, to sit back and let that happen. Whatever had been going on here, I needed to put my finger on it before Frank did.

If I wanted to make an appointment to meet Ned, without any chance of the others finding out, how would I do it?

No phones. Mobiles keep a call register and they get itemized bills, she wouldn’t have left anything like that lying around, and Whitethorn House didn’t have a landline. There was no pay phone within walking distance, and the ones in college were risky: the Arts block phones were the only ones close enough to use on a fake bathroom break, and if one of the others had happened to walk by at the wrong moment, she would have been fucked—and this was too important for gambles. No calling in to see him, either. Frank had said Ned lived in Bray and worked in Killiney, there was no way she could have got there and back without the others missing her. And no letters or e-mails; she would never, not in a million years, have left a trail.

“How the hell, girl?” I said softly, into the air. I felt her like a shimmer over my shadow on the lane, the tilt of her chin and the mocking sideways flash of her eyes: Not telling.

Somewhere along the way I had stopped noticing just how seamlessly conjoined their five lives were. Into college together, all day in the library together, smoke break at noon with Abby and at four with Rafe, lunch together at one, home together for dinner: the routine of it was choreographed as precisely and tightly as a gavotte, never a minute left unaccounted for and never a minute to myself, except—

Except now. For one hour a night, like some spellbound girl in a fairy tale, I unwound my life from the others’ and it was all my own again. If I were Lexie and I wanted to contact someone I should never have been contacting, I would use my late-night walk.

Not would: had. For weeks now I had been using it to phone Frank, phone Sam, keep my secrets safe. A fox skittered across the lane in front of me and vanished into the hedge, all bones and luminous eyes, and a shiver went down my back. Here I had thought this was my very own bright idea, I was making my own way step by step and alert through the dark. It was only now, when I turned around and looked back down the road, that I realized I had been blithely, blindly putting my feet smack in Lexie’s footprints, all the way.

“So?” I said aloud, like a challenge. “So what?” This was what Frank had sent me in for, to get close to the victim, get into her life, and—duh—I was doing it. A certain amount of creepy was not only beside the point but also pretty much par for the course on a murder investigation; they’re not supposed to be one long round of laughs. I was getting spoiled, all these cozy candlelight dinners and handicrafts, turning jumpy when reality kicked back in.

One hour to get hold of Ned. How?

Notes in the hollow tree… I almost laughed out loud. Professional deformation: you’ve got the most esoteric possibilities all worked out, it’s the simple ones that take forever to hit you. The higher the stakes, Frank once told me, the lower the technology. If you want to meet your mate for coffee, you can afford to arrange it by text message or e-mail; if you think the cops or the Mob or the Illuminati are closing in, you signal your contact with a blue towel on the washing line. For Lexie, days ticking away and morning sickness starting to kick in, the stakes must have felt like life and death.

Ned lived in Bray; only a fifteen-minute drive away, outside rush hour. Probably she had taken the risk of phoning him from college, the first time. After that, all she had needed was a safe drop spot, somewhere in these lanes, that both of them could check every couple of days. I must have walked straight past it a dozen times.

That shimmer again, in the corner of my eye: tip of a grin, there and tricky and then gone.

In the cottage? The Bureau gang had been all over it like flies on shite, dusted every inch for prints and found nothing. And he hadn’t been parked anywhere near the cottage, that night I’d followed him. Allowing a little leeway for the fact that God forbid you should drive your Monster Truck on the kind of roads for which it was constructed, he would have parked as close to the drop spot as he could get. He had been on the main Rathowen road, nowhere near any turnoff. Wide verges, long grass and brambles, the dark road dropping away over the brow of the hill; and the milestone, worn and leaning like a tiny grave-marker.

I hardly realized I had turned around and was running hard. The others would be expecting me back any minute and the last thing I wanted was for them to get worried and come looking for me, but this couldn’t wait till tomorrow night. I wasn’t racing some hypothetical, infinitely flexible deadline any more; I was racing against Frank’s mind, and Lexie’s.

After the narrow lanes, the verge felt wide and bare and very exposed, but the road was deserted, not a glimmer of headlights in either direction. When I pulled out my torch, the letters on the stone marker jumped out at me, blurred with time and weather, throwing their own slanted shadows: Glenskehy 1828. The grass swirled and bent around it, in the high wind, with a sound like a long hiss of breath.

I caught the torch under my arm and parted the grass with both hands; it was wet and sharp-edged, tiny serrations pulling at my fingers. At the foot of the stone, something flashed crimson.

For a moment my mind couldn’t take in what I was seeing. Sunk deep in the grass, colors glowed bright as jewels and minute figures scudded away from the torchlight: gloss of a horse’s flank, flick of a red coat, toss of powdered curls and a dog’s head turning as he leaped for cover. Then my hand touched wet, gritty metal and the figures shivered and clicked into place, and I laughed out loud, a small gasp that sounded strange even to me. A cigarette tin, old and rusty and probably nicked from Uncle Simon’s stash; the rich, battered hunting scene was painted with a brush fine as an eyelash. The Bureau and the floaters had done a fingertip search for a mile around the cottage, but this was outside their perimeter. Lexie had beaten them, saved this for me.

The note was on lined paper torn out of some kind of Filofax thing. The handwriting looked like a ten-year-old’s, and apparently Ned hadn’t been able to decide whether he was writing a business letter or a text message: Dear Lexie, been trying 2 get hold of u in refrence 2 that matter we were talking about, Im still v v interested. Please let me know whenever u get a chance. Thanks, Ned. I was willing to bet that Ned had gone to an insanely expensive private school. Daddy hadn’t exactly got his money’s worth.

Dear Lexie; Thanks, Ned… Lexie must have wanted to kick him for leaving that kind of thing lying around, no matter how well hidden. I took out my lighter, moved over to the road and set the note on fire; when it caught, I dropped it, waited for the quick flare to die down and crushed out the embers with my foot. Then I found my Biro and ripped a page out of my notebook.

By this stage Lexie’s handwriting came easier than my own. 11 Thursday-talk then. No need for fancy bait: Lexie had done all that for me, this guy was already well hooked. The tin shut with a neat, tiny click and I tucked it back into the long grass, feeling my fingerprints overlaying themselves perfectly on Lexie’s, my feet planted carefully in the precise spots where her footprints had long since washed away.