The Likeness

19

Unsurprisingly, we all woke up late, with hangovers from hell and a collective foul mood. My head was killing me, even my hair hurt, and my mouth had that walk-of-shame feel, swollen and tender. I pulled a sweater over yesterday’s clothes, checked the mirror for stubble burn—nothing—and dragged myself downstairs.

Abby was in the kitchen, smacking ice cubes into a glass. “Sorry,” I said, in the doorway. “Did I miss breakfast?”

She threw the ice tray back into the freezer and slammed the door. “Nobody’s hungry. I’m having a Bloody Mary. Daniel made coffee; if you want anything else, you can get it yourself.” She brushed past me and went into the sitting room.

I figured if I tried to work out why she was pissed off at me, my head might explode. I poured myself a lot of coffee, buttered a slice of bread—toast felt way too complicated—and took them into the sitting room. Rafe was still unconscious on the sofa, with a cushion pulled over his head. Daniel was sitting on the windowsill, staring out at the garden, with a mug in one hand and a cigarette burning away forgotten in the other. He didn’t look around.

“Can he breathe?” I asked, pointing at Rafe with my chin.

“Who cares?” said Abby. She was slumped in an armchair, with her eyes closed and her glass pressed to her forehead. The air smelled musty and overripe, cigarette butts and sweat and spilled booze. Someone had cleaned the shards of glass off the piano; they were in a corner of the floor, in a small, threatening pile. I sat down, carefully, and tried to eat without moving my head.

The afternoon oozed on, slow and sticky as treacle. Abby played halfhearted solitaire, giving up and starting over every few minutes; I dozed, off and on, curled in the armchair. Justin finally appeared, wrapped in his dressing gown, eyelids fluttering with pain at the light coming through the windows—it was sort of a nice day, if you were in the mood for that kind of thing. “Oh, God,” he said faintly, shielding his eyes. “My head. I think I’m getting the flu; I ache everywhere.”

“Night air,” said Abby, dealing another hand. “Cold, damp, whatever. Not to mention enough punch to float a cruise ship.”

“It is not the punch. My legs hurt; a hangover doesn’t make your legs hurt. Can’t we close the curtains?”

“No,” said Daniel, without turning around. “Have some coffee.”

“Maybe I’m having a brain hemorrhage. Don’t they do things to your eyes?”

“You have a hangover,” Rafe said, from the depths of the sofa. “And if you don’t stop whining, I’m going to come over there and throttle you, even if it kills me too.”

“Oh, great,” Abby said, massaging the bridge of her nose. “It’s alive.” Justin ignored him, with an icy lift of his chin that said last night’s fight wasn’t over, and sank into a chair.

“Maybe we should think about going out, at some point,” Daniel said, finally coming out of his reverie and looking around. “It might help to clear our heads.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Justin said, reaching for Abby’s Bloody Mary. “I have the flu. If I go out I’ll get pneumonia.”

Abby slapped his hand away. “I’m drinking that. Make your own.”

“The ancients would have said,” Daniel told him, “that you were suffering from an imbalance of the humors: an excess of black bile, causing melancholy. Black bile is cold and dry, so to counter it, you need something warm and moist. I don’t remember which foods are associated with sanguinity, but it seems logical that red meat, for example—”

“Sartre was right,” Rafe said, through his cushion. “Hell is other people.”

I felt the same way. All I wanted was for it to be evening so I could go for my walk, get out of this house and away from these people and try to wrap my head around the night before. I had never, in all my life, spent so much of my time surrounded by people. Up until that day it hadn’t even registered, but all of a sudden everything they did—Justin’s dying-swan act, the snap of Abby’s cards—felt like a full-on assault. I pulled my sweater over my head, burrowed into the corner of the armchair and went to sleep.

When I woke up the room was empty. It looked like it had been abandoned fast, in some sudden emergency—lamps on, shades tilted at odd angles; chairs pushed back, half-empty mugs and sticky rings on the table. “Hi,” I called, but my voice soaked away into the shadows and no one answered.

The house felt huge and unwelcoming, the way a house sometimes does when you come back downstairs after you’ve closed up for the night: alien, withdrawn, focused on its own private business. No note anywhere; the others had probably gone for a walk after all, to blow the hangovers away.

I poured myself a mug of cold coffee and drank it leaning against the kitchen sink, looking out the window. The light was just starting to turn gold and syrupy, and swallows were diving and chittering across the lawn. I left my mug in the sink and went up to my room, involuntarily walking quietly and skipping the creaky stair.

As I put my hand on the door handle I felt the house gather itself and tense around me. Even before I opened the door, before I smelt the faint wisp of tobacco smoke on the air and saw his silhouette sitting broad-shouldered and motionless on the bed, I knew Daniel was home.

The light through the curtains glinted blue on his glasses as he turned his head to me. “Who are you?” he asked.

I thought as fast as even Frank could ever want from me, I already had one finger on my mouth to shut him up while my other hand smacked the light switch, and then I called, “Hey, it’s me, I’m out here,” and thanked God Daniel was weird enough that we might just possibly get away with that Who are you? His eyes were intent on my face, and he was between me and my case. “Where is everyone?” I asked him, and ripped open the buttons of my top so he could see the tiny mike clipped to my bra, the wire running down into the white pad of bandage.

Daniel’s eyebrows lifted, just a touch. “They went to see a film in town,” he said calmly. “I had a few things I needed to do here. We decided not to wake you.”

I nodded, gave him the thumbs-up and knelt down slowly to pull my case out from under the bed, not taking my eyes off him. The music box on the bedside table, solid and sharp-cornered and within reach: that should slow him down long enough to get me out of there if I needed it. But Daniel didn’t move. I dialed the combination, opened the case, found my ID and threw it to him.

He inspected it closely. “Did you sleep well?” he asked formally.

He had his head bent over the ID, apparently absorbed in it, and my hand was on the bedside table, inches from my gun. But if I went to slip it into my waistband and he looked up; no. I zipped the case shut and locked it. “Not great,” I said. “My head is still killing me. I’m going to go read for a while and hope it gets better. See you in a bit?” I waved a hand to get Daniel’s attention; then I moved towards the door and beckoned.

He gave my ID one last look, then laid it carefully on the bedside table. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll see you later.” He got up from the bed and followed me downstairs.

He moved very silently, for such a big guy. I could feel him at my back all the way and I knew I should be scared—one push—but I wasn’t: adrenaline was flying through me like wildfire and I’ve never been less afraid in my life. Rapture of the deep, Frank called it once, and warned me not to trust it: undercovers can drown like deep-sea divers on the ecstasy of weightlessness, but I didn’t care.

Daniel stood in the sitting-room doorway, watching me with interest, while I hummed “Oh, Johnny, How You Can Love” under my breath and flipped through the records. I picked out Fauré’s Requiem, stacked it up over the string sonatas—Frank might as well have something good to listen to, broaden his cultural horizons, and I doubted he’d notice the midstream switch—and turned it up to a nice solid volume. I flopped into my chair with a thump, sighed contentedly and flipped a few pages of my notebook. Then, very carefully, I peeled off the bandage strip by strip, unclipped the mike from my bra, and left the whole package on the chair to listen to music for a while.

Daniel followed me through the kitchen and out the French doors. I didn’t like the idea of crossing the open lawn—You won’t have visual surveillance, Frank had told me, but he would have said that either way—but we didn’t have a choice. I skirted around the edge and got us in among the trees. Once we were out of view, I relaxed enough to remember my buttons and do them up again. If Frank did have someone watching, that would have given him something to think about.

The alcove was brighter than I had expected; the light slanted long and gold across the grass, slipped between the creepers and glowed in patches on the paving stones. The seat was cold even through my jeans. The ivy swayed back into place to hide us.

“OK,” I said. “We can talk, but keep it down, just in case.”

Daniel nodded. He brushed flecks of dirt off the other seat and sat down. “Lexie is dead, then,” he said.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “I’m sorry.” It sounded ludicrously, insanely inadequate on about a million levels.

“When?”

“The night she was stabbed. She wouldn’t have suffered much, if that’s any comfort.”

He didn’t respond. He clasped his hands in his lap and gazed out through the ivy. At our feet the trickle of water murmured.

“Cassandra Maddox,” Daniel said eventually, trying out the sound of it. “I wondered quite a lot about that, you know: what your real name was. It suits you.”

“I go by Cassie,” I said.

He ignored that. “Why did you take off your microphone?”

With someone else I might have skated around this, parried it—Why do you think?—but not with Daniel. “I want to know what happened to Lexie. I don’t care whether anyone else hears it or not. And I thought you would be more likely to tell me if I gave you a reason to trust me.”

Either out of politeness or out of indifference, he didn’t point out the irony. “And you think I know how she died?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

Daniel considered this. “Shouldn’t you be afraid of me, in that case?”

“Maybe. But I’m not.”

He scrutinized me for a long moment. “You’re very like Lexie, you know,” he said. “Not only physically, but temperamentally as well. At first I wondered if I simply wanted to believe that, to excuse the fact that I had been fooled for so long, but it’s true. Lexie was fearless. She was like an ice skater balanced effortlessly on the edge of her own speed, throwing in joyous, elaborate twirls and leaps just for the hell of it. I always envied her that.” His eyes were in shadow, and I couldn’t read his expression. “Was this just for the hell of it? If I may ask.”

“No,” I said. “At first I didn’t even want to do it. It was Detective Mackey’s idea. He thought it was necessary to the investigation.”

Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “He suspected us from the beginning,” he said, and I realized that he was right; of course he was right. All Frank’s talk about the mysterious foreigner who followed Lexie halfway across the world, that was just a smoke screen: Sam would have thrown a blue fit if he thought I was going to share a roof with the killer. Frank’s famous intuition had kicked in long before we ever got into that squad room. He had known, all along, that the answer was in this house.

“He’s an interesting man, Detective Mackey,” Daniel said. “He’s like one of those charming murderers in Jacobean plays, the ones who get all the best monologues: Bosola, or De Flores. It’s a pity you can’t tell me anything; I would be fascinated to know how much he’s guessed.”

“So would I,” I said. “Believe me.”

Daniel took out his cigarette case, opened it and politely offered it to me. His face, bent over the lighter as I cupped my hand around the flame, was absorbed and untroubled.

“Now,” he said, when he had lit his own smoke and put the case away, “I’m sure you have some questions you’d like to ask me.”

“If I’m so much like Lexie,” I said, “what gave me away?” I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t professional pride or anything; I just needed, badly, to know what that unmissable difference had been.

Daniel turned his head and looked at me. There was an expression on his face that I hadn’t expected: something almost like affection, or sympathy. “You did extraordinarily well, you know,” he said, kindly. “Even now, I don’t think the others suspect anything. We’ll have to decide what to do about that, you and I.”

“I can’t have done all that well,” I said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”

He shook his head. “I think that underrates both of us, don’t you? You were virtually flawless. I did know, almost immediately, that something was wrong—all of us did, just as you would sense something amiss if your partner were replaced by his identical twin. But there were so many possible reasons for that. At first I wondered if you might be faking the amnesia, for reasons of your own, but gradually it became clear that your memory was, in fact, damaged—there seemed to be no reason why you should pretend to forget about finding that photo album, for example, and it was obvious that you were genuinely disturbed by the fact that you didn’t remember it. Once I was satisfied that that wasn’t the problem, I thought perhaps you were planning to leave—which would have been understandable, in the circumstances, but Abby seemed very sure that you weren’t, and I trust Abby’s judgment. And you really did seem…”

His face turned towards me. “You really did seem happy, you know. More than happy: content; settled. Nested back in among us as if you had never been away. Perhaps this was deliberate, and you’re even better at your job than I realize, but I find it hard to believe that both my instincts and Abby’s could have been quite so wrong.”

There was nothing I could say to that. For a split second I wanted to curl up in a ball and howl at the top of my lungs, like a kid devastated by the sheer ruthlessness of this world. I gave Daniel a noncommittal tilt of my chin, drew on my smoke and tapped ash onto the flagstones.

Daniel waited with a grave patience that sent a little warning chill through me. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to answer, he nodded, a tiny, private, thoughtful nod. “At any rate,” he said, “I decided you, or rather Lexie, must simply be traumatized. A profound trauma—and clearly this would qualify—can transform a person’s entire character, you know: turn a strong person into a trembling wreck, a happy nature melancholic, a gentle one vicious. It can shatter you into a million pieces, and rearrange the remains in an utterly unrecognizable form.”

His voice was even, calm; he was looking away from me again, out at the hawthorn flowers white and shivering in the breeze, and I couldn’t see his eyes. “The changes in Lexie were so small, by comparison, so trivial; so easily accounted for. I assume Detective Mackey gave you the information you needed.”

“Detective Mackey and Lexie. The video phone.”

Daniel thought about that for so long that I thought he’d forgotten my question. There was an in—built immobility to his face—that square-cut jaw, maybe—that made it almost impossible to read. “ ‘Everything’s overrated except Elvis and chocolate,’ ” he said, in the end. “That was a nice touch.”

“Was it the onions that did it?” I asked.

He drew in a breath and stirred, coming out of his reverie. “Those onions,” he said, with a faint smile. “Lexie was fanatical about them: onions and cabbage. Fortunately none of the rest of us like cabbage either, but we had to reach a compromise on the onions: once a week. She still complained and picked them out and so on—mainly to tease Rafe and Justin, I think. So, when you ate them without a murmur and asked for more, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what, exactly—you covered it very well—but I couldn’t simply dismiss it. The only alternative explanation I could come up with was that, incredible though it seemed, you weren’t Lexie.”

“So you set a trap for me,” I said. “The Brogan’s thing.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a trap,” Daniel said, with a touch of asperity. “More of a test. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Lexie had no particular feelings about Brogan’s either way—I’m not sure she’d ever been there—which didn’t seem like something an impostor would know; you might have found out her likes and dislikes, but hardly her indifferences. The fact that you got it right, and the Elvis comment, reassured me. But then there was last night. That kiss.”

I went cold all over, till I remembered I didn’t have the mike on me. “Lexie wouldn’t have done that?” I asked coolly, leaning over to put out my smoke on the flagstones.

Daniel smiled at me, that slow sweet smile that made him suddenly handsome. “Oh, she would have,” he said. “The kiss was very much in character—and very nice, if I may say so.” I didn’t blink. “No, it was your reaction to it. For a split second, you looked stunned; utterly shocked at what you had done. Then you recovered and made some airy comment, and found an excuse to move away—but, you see, Lexie would never have been shaken by that kiss, not even for a second. And she would certainly never have drawn back at that point. She would have been…” He blew thoughtful smoke rings up into the ivy. “She would have been,” he said, “triumphant.”

“Why?” I asked. “Had she been trying to make something like that happen? ” My mind was fast-forwarding through the video clips; there had been flirting with Rafe and Justin but never with Daniel, not a hint, but that could have been a bluff, to mislead the others—

“That,” Daniel said, “is what gave you away.”

I stared at him.

He ground out the cigarette under his foot. “Lexie was both incapable of thinking about the past,” he said, “and incapable of thinking more than one step into the future. This may be one of the few things you overlooked. Not your fault; that level of simplicity is hard to imagine, and also hard to describe. It was as startling as a deformity. I seriously doubt that she would have been able to plan a seduction; but, once something had happened, she would have seen no reason to be shocked by it and certainly no reason to stop there. You, on the other hand, were clearly trying to gauge the consequences this might have. I’d guess that you have a boyfriend, or a partner, in your own life.”

I didn’t say anything. “So,” Daniel said, “I rang the police headquarters this afternoon, once the others had gone out, and asked where I could find Detective Sam O’Neill. The woman I spoke to couldn’t find an extension for him at first, but then she checked some directory and gave me a number to ring. She said, ‘That’s the Murder squad room.’ ”

He sighed, a small, tired, final sound. “Murder,” he said quietly. “So then, you see, I knew.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, again. All day, while we drank coffee and got on each other’s nerves and bitched about our hangovers, while he sent the others off to the pictures and sat in Lexie’s small dimming bedroom waiting for me, he had been carrying this alone.

Daniel nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see that.”

There was a long silence. Finally I said, “You know I need to ask you what happened.”

Daniel took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. Without them his eyes looked blank, blind. “There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. ‘Take what you want and pay for it, says God.’ ”

The words fell into the silence under the ivy like cool pebbles into water, sank without a ripple. “I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could possibly be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”

He put the glasses on and looked at me calmly, tucking the handkerchief back into his shirt pocket. “It seems to me,” he said, “that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only ‘Take what you want, says God’; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone’s outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that’s come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can’t afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture—theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth.”

He didn’t sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. “I don’t consider this anything to become incensed about,” he said, reading my look. “In fact, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising to anyone. We’ve taken what we wanted and we’re paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man—what’s his name? the prime minister—comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television,” he added, a little peevishly. “We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.”

He pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle and blinked at me through the lenses. “I have always accepted,” he said simply, “that there is a price to pay.”

“For what?” I said. “What do you want?”

Daniel considered this—not the answer itself, I think, but how best to explain it to me—in silence. “At first,” he said eventually, “it was more a matter of what I didn’t want. Well before I finished college, it had become clear to me that the standard deal—a modicum of luxury, in exchange for one’s free time and comfort—wasn’t for me. I was happy to live frugally, if that was what it took, in order to avoid the nine-to-five cubicle. I was more than willing to sacrifice the new car and the sun holidays and the—what are those things?—the iPod.”

I was on the edge of my nerves already, and the thought of Daniel on a beach in Torremolinos, drinking a technicolor cocktail and bopping along to his iPod, almost made me lose it. He glanced up at me with a faint smile. “It wouldn’t have been much of a sacrifice, no. But what I failed to take into account is that no man is an island; that I couldn’t simply opt out of the prevailing mode. When a specific deal becomes standard throughout a society—reaches critical mass, so to speak—no alternatives are readily available. Living simply isn’t actually an option these days; either one becomes a worker bee, or one lives on toast in a wretched bedsit with fourteen students directly overhead, and I wasn’t particularly taken with that idea either. I did try it for a while, but it was practically impossible to work with all the noise, and the landlord was this sinister old countryman who kept coming into the flat at the oddest hours and wanting to chat, and… well, anyway. Freedom and comfort are at a high premium just now. If you want those, you have to be willing to pay a correspondingly high price.”

“Didn’t you have other options?” I said. “I thought you had money.”

Daniel gave me a fishy stare; I gave him a bland one back. Eventually he sighed. “I believe I’d like a drink,” he said. “I think I left—Yes, here it is.” He had leaned sideways to feel under the bench, and I was braced and ready before I knew it—there was nothing handy that could make a weapon, but if I whipped ivy in his face, it might give me enough of a start to get to the mike and yell for backup—but he came back up with a half-full whiskey bottle. “I brought it out here last night, and then forgot it in all the excitement. And there should be—Yes.” He brought out a glass. “Will you have some?”

It was good stuff, Jameson’s Crested Ten, and God knows I could have used a drink. “No, thanks,” I said. No unnecessary risks; this guy was a whole lot smarter than your average bear.

Daniel nodded, examined the glass and bent to rinse it in the trickle of water. “Have you ever considered,” he inquired, “the sheer level of fear in this country?”

“Not on a regular basis,” I said. I was having a hard time keeping track of the thread of this conversation, but I knew Daniel well enough to know that he was going somewhere with this and he would get there in his own sweet time. We had maybe forty-five minutes before Fauré ran out, and I’ve always been good at letting the suspect run the show. No matter how strong you are or how controlled, keeping a secret—I should know—gets heavy after a while, heavy and tiring and so lonely it feels lethal. If you let them talk, all you need to do is nudge them now and then, keep them pointing in the right direction; they’ll do the rest.

He shook water droplets off the glass and pulled out his handkerchief again, to dry it. “Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power—governments, employers—exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient—not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who—either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe—are free from fear.”

He poured himself three fingers of whiskey. “I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a hero,” he said, “and I don’t consider myself to be insane. I don’t think any of the others are either of those things. And yet I wanted us all to have that chance at freedom.” He put the bottle down and glanced across at me. “You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.”

The words sent a slim knife of something like homesickness straight through me. “It doesn’t seem like very much to ask,” I said.

“Oh, but it was,” Daniel said, and took a swallow of his drink. There was a rough edge to his voice. “It was a lot to ask. It followed, you see, that what we needed was safety—permanent safety. Which brings us back to your last question. My parents left investments that provide me with a small income—ample in the 1980s, now hardly enough for that bedsit. Rafe’s trust fund gives him roughly the same amount. Justin’s allowance will end as soon as he finishes his PhD; so will Abby’s student grants, and Lexie’s would have too. How many jobs do you think are available, in Dublin, for people who want only to study literature and to be together? In a few months, we would have been in precisely the same situation as the vast majority in this country: caught between poverty and slavery, two paychecks from the street, in thrall to the whims of landlords and employers. Perennially afraid.”

He looked out through the ivy, up the grass to the patio, tilting his wrist slowly so that the whiskey slid circles round the glass. “All we needed,” he said, “was a home.”

“That’s enough safety?” I asked. “A house?”

“Well, of course,” he said, a little surprised. “Psychologically, the difference it makes is almost inexpressible. Once you own your home, free and clear, what is there left for anyone—landlords, employers, banks—to threaten you with? What hold does anyone have over you? One can do without practically anything else, if necessary. We would always be able to scrape together enough money for food, between us, and there is no other material fear as primal or as paralyzing as the thought of losing one’s home. With that fear eliminated, we would be free. I’m not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.”

He must have read the look on my face. “We’re in Ireland, for heaven’s sake,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “If you know any history at all, what could possibly be clearer? The one crucial thing the British did was to claim the land as their own, to turn the Irish from owners into tenants. Once that was done, then everything else followed naturally: confiscation of crops, abuse of tenants, eviction, emigration, famine, the whole litany of wretchedness and serfdom, all inflicted casually and unstoppably because the dispossessed had no solid ground on which to stand and fight. I’m sure my own family was as guilty as any. There may well be an element of poetic justice in the fact that I found myself looking at the other side of the coin. But I didn’t feel the need simply to accept it as my just deserts.”

“I rent,” I said. “I’m probably two paychecks from the street. It doesn’t bother me.”

Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “Possibly you’re braver than I am,” he said. “Or possibly—forgive me—you simply haven’t decided what you want from life yet; you haven’t found anything that you truly want to hold onto. That changes everything, you know. Students and very young people can rent with no damage to their intellectual freedom, because it puts them under no threat: they have nothing, yet, to lose. Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It’s because they’re held here so lightly: they haven’t yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. All of a sudden you’re playing for keeps, as children say, and it changes the very fabric of you.”

The adrenaline, or the strange trembling light through the ivy, or the spirals of Daniel’s mind, or just the sheer bizarreness of the situation, was making me feel as if I actually had been drinking. I thought of Lexie speeding through the night in poor Chad’s stolen car, of Sam’s face wearing that look of terrible patience, of the squad room in evening light with some other team’s paperwork scattered across our desks; of my flat, empty and silent, dust starting to build up on the bookshelves and the standby light on the CD player glowing green in the darkness. I like my flat a lot, but it hit me that in all these weeks I hadn’t missed it for a second, and that felt somehow horribly, horribly sad.

“I would venture to guess,” Daniel said, “that you still have that first freedom—that you haven’t yet found anything or anyone that you want for keeps.”

Steady gray eyes and the hypnotic gold shimmer of the whiskey, sound of water, leaf shadows swaying like a darker wreath on his dark hair. “I used to have a partner,” I said, “at work. Nobody you’ve met; he’s not working this case. We were like you guys: we matched. People talked about us the way you do about twins, like we were one person—‘That’s MaddoxandRyan’s case, get MaddoxandRyan to do it…’ If anyone had asked me, I’d have said this was it: the two of us, for the rest of our careers, we’d retire on the same day so neither of us would ever have to work with anyone else and the squad would give us one gold watch between us. I didn’t think about any of that at the time, mind. I just took it for granted. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”

I had never said this to anyone. Sam and I had never mentioned Rob, not once since he was transferred out, and when people asked how he was doing I gave them my sweetest smile and my best vague answers. Daniel and I were strangers and we were on opposite sides, under the civilized chitchat we were fighting each other tooth and nail and both of us knew it, but I said it to him. Now I think that should have been my first warning.

Daniel nodded. “But that was in another country,” he said, “and besides, that wench is dead.”

“That about sums it up,” I said, “yeah.” He was looking at me with something in his eyes that went beyond kindness, beyond compassion: understanding. I think in that moment I loved him. If I could have dropped the whole case and stayed, I would have done it then.

“I see,” Daniel said. He held out the glass to me. I started to shake my head automatically, but then I changed my mind and took it: what the hell. The whiskey was rich and smooth and it burned trails of light right down to my fingertips.

“Then you understand the difference it made to me,” he said, “meeting the others. The world transformed itself around me: the stakes shot up, colors were so beautiful they hurt, life became almost unimaginably sweet and almost unimaginably frightening. It’s so fragile, you know; things are so easily broken. I suppose this may be what it’s like to fall in love, or to have a child, and to know that this could be taken from you at any moment. We were racing at breakneck speed towards the day when everything we had would be at the mercy of a merciless world, and every second was so beautiful and so precarious, it took my breath away.”

He held out his hand for the glass and took a sip. “And then,” he said, raising a palm towards the house, “this came along.”

“Like a miracle,” I said. I wasn’t being snide; I meant it. For a second I felt the old wood of the banister under my palm, warm and sinuous as a muscle, as a living thing.

Daniel nodded. “Improbably,” he said, “I believe in miracles, in the possibility of the impossible. Certainly the house has always felt like a miracle to me, materializing just at the moment when we needed it most. I saw straight away, the second my uncle’s lawyer rang me with the news, what this could mean to us. The others had doubts, plenty of them; we argued for months. Lexie was—I suppose there’s a kind of tragic irony in this—the only one who seemed perfectly happy with the idea. Abby was the hardest to convince—in spite of the fact that she was the one who most craved a home, or perhaps because of it, I don’t know—but even she came round at last. I suppose, in the end, it came down to the fact that, if you are absolutely sure of something, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually persuade people who aren’t sure one way or the other. And I was sure. I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

“Is that why you made the others co-owners?”

Daniel glanced sharply across at me, but I kept my face blandly interested and after a moment he went back to looking out through the ivy. “Well, not to win them over, or anything like that, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Hardly. It was absolutely essential to what I had in mind. It wasn’t the house itself I wanted—much as I love it. It was security, for all of us; a safe haven. If I had been the sole owner, then the crude truth of it is that I would have been the others’ landlord, and they would have had no more safety than before. They would have been dependent on my whims, always waiting for me to decide to move or get married or sell up. This way it was all of our home, forever.”

He lifted a hand and hooked the curtain of ivy aside. The stone of the house was rosy amber in the sunset light, glowing and sweet; the windows blazed like the inside was on fire. “It seemed like such a beautiful idea,” he said. “Almost unthinkably so. The day we moved in, we cleaned the fireplace and washed up in freezing water and lit a fire, and sat in front of it drinking cold lumpy cocoa and trying to make toast—the cooker didn’t work, the water heater didn’t work, there were only two functioning lightbulbs in the whole house. Justin was wearing his entire wardrobe and complaining that we were all going to die of pneumonia or mold inhalation or both, and Rafe and Lexie were teasing him by claiming they’d heard rats in the attic; Abby threatened to make the pair of them sleep up there if they didn’t behave. I kept burning the toast or dropping it into the fire, and we all found that ridiculously funny; we laughed until we could barely breathe. I’ve never been so happy in my life.”

His gray eyes were calm, but the note in his voice, like a deep bell tolling, hurt me somewhere under my breastbone. I had known for weeks that Daniel was unhappy, but that was the moment when I understood that, whatever had happened with Lexie, it had broken his heart. He had staked everything on this one shining idea, and he had lost. No matter what anyone says, a part of me believes that, on that day under the ivy, I should have seen everything that was coming, the pattern unrolling in front of me clean and quick and relentless, and I should have known how to stop it.

“What went wrong?” I asked quietly.

“The idea was flawed, of course,” he said irritably. “Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race’s greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”

He finished his drink in one long swallow and grimaced. “This is foul. I wish we had ice.”

I waited while he poured himself another one, gave it a look of faint distaste and set it down on the bench. “Can I ask you something?” I said.

Daniel inclined his head. “You talked about paying for what you want,” I said. “How did you have to pay for this house? It looks to me like you got exactly what you wanted, for free.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think so? You’ve been living here for several weeks now. Surely you have a fair idea of the price involved.”

I did, of course I did, but I wanted to hear it from him. “No pasts,” I said. “For a start.”

“No pasts,” Daniel repeated, almost to himself. After a moment he shrugged. “That was part of it, certainly—this needed to be a fresh start for all of us, together—but it was the easy part. As you’ve probably gathered, none of us has the kind of past that one would want to retain in any case. The main difficulties there have been practical ones, really, rather than psychological: getting Rafe’s father to stop ringing up and abusing him, Justin’s father to stop accusing him of joining a cult and threatening to call the police, Abby’s mother to stop showing up outside the library high as a kite on whatever it is she takes. But these were small problems, comparatively; technical difficulties that would have sorted themselves out, given time. The real price…”

He moved one finger absently around the rim of the glass, watching the gold of the whiskey bloom and dim as his shadow passed across it. “I suppose some people might call it a state of suspended animation,” he said, at last. “Although I would consider that a highly simplistic definition. Marriage and children, for example, were no longer possibilities for any of us. The odds of finding an outsider who would be able to fit into what is, frankly, an unusual setup, even if he or she should want to, were negligible. And, although I won’t deny that there have been elements of intimacy among us, for any two of us to enter into a serious romance would almost definitely have damaged our balance beyond repair.”

“Elements of intimacy?” I asked. Lexie’s baby—“Between who?”

“Well, really,” Daniel said, with a touch of impatience, “I don’t think that’s the issue. The point is that, in order to make this house our shared home, we had to forfeit the possibility of many things that other people consider to be essential goals. We had to forfeit everything that Rafe’s father would call the real world.”

Maybe it was the whiskey, on a hangover and a half-empty stomach. Strange things spun in my mind, sprayed showers of light like prisms. I thought of ancient stories: battered travelers stumbling out of the storm into glowing banquet halls, losing hold of their old lives at the first taste of bread or honey wine; of that first night, the four of them smiling at me across the laden table and the lifted wineglasses and the curls of ivy, smooth-skinned and beautiful, with candlelight in their eyes. I remembered the second before Daniel and I kissed, how the five of us had risen up in front of me breathtaking and eternal as ghosts, hanging sweet and gauzy over the drifts of grass; and that danger drum, somewhere behind my ears.

“This isn’t as sinister as it sounds, you know,” he added, catching something in my expression. “Regardless of what the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”

“And you did,” I said. I felt like the stone bench was rocking underneath me, swaying with the ivy in a slow dizzying rhythm. “You went consenting.”

“I did, yes,” Daniel said. “I understood all of the implications, very clearly. I had thought it all out before I ever embarked on this, and I had decided it was a price well worth paying—I doubt I would ever have wanted children in any case, and I’ve never placed much stock in the concept of one perfect soul mate. I assumed the others had done the same: weighed up the stakes and found the sacrifice worth making.” He brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. “That,” he said, “was my first mistake.”

He was so calm. I didn’t even hear it at the time, it wasn’t until much later, when I went over the conversation in my head looking for clues, that I caught it: was, would have. Daniel used the past tense, all the way through. He understood that it was over, whether anyone else had noticed or not. He sat there under the ivy with a glass in his hand, serene as the Buddha, watching as the bow of his ship tilted and slid under the waves.

“They hadn’t thought it through?” I asked. My mind was still sliding, weightless, everything was smooth as glass and I couldn’t get a grip. For a second I wondered crazily if the whiskey had been drugged, but Daniel had had a lot more than me and he seemed fine—“Or they changed their minds?”

Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb. “Really,” he said, a little wearily, “when I think about it, I made an astounding number of mistakes along the way. The hypothermia story, for instance: I should never have fallen for that. Initially, in fact, I didn’t. I know very little about medicine, but when your colleague—Detective Mackey—told me that story, I didn’t believe a word of it. I assumed he was hoping we’d be more likely to talk if we thought that it was a matter of assault, rather than murder, and that Lexie might at any minute tell him everything. All that week, I took it for granted that he was bluffing. But then…” He lifted his head and looked at me, blinking, as if he had almost forgotten I was there. “But then, you see,” he said, “you arrived.”

His eyes moved over my face. “The resemblance really is extraordinary. Are you—were you—related to Lexie?”

“No,” I said. “Not as far as I know.”

“No.” Daniel went through his pockets methodically, took out his cigarette case and lighter. “She told us she had no family. This may be why the possibility of you didn’t occur to me. The inherent unlikeliness of the situation was in your favor all along: any suspicion that you weren’t Lexie would have had to be predicated on the improbable hypothesis of your existence. I should have remembered Conan Doyle: ‘whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

He flicked the lighter and tilted his head to the flame. “I knew, you see,” he said, “that it was impossible Lexie should be alive. I checked her pulse myself.”

The garden dumbstruck, in the fading gold light. The birds hushed, the branches caught in midsway; the house, a great silence poised over us, listening. I had stopped breathing. Lexie blew down the grass like a silver shower of wind, she rocked in the hawthorn trees and balanced light as a leaf on the wall beside me, she slipped along my shoulder and blazed down my back like fox fire.

“What happened?” I asked, very quietly.

“Well, really,” Daniel said, “you know I can’t tell you that. As you probably suspected, Lexie was stabbed in Whitethorn House; in the kitchen, to be exact. You won’t find any blood—there was none at the time, although I know she bled later—and you won’t find the knife. There was no premeditation and no intent to kill. We went after her, but by the time we found her it was already too late. I think that’s all I can say.”

“OK,” I said, “OK.” I pressed my feet down hard on the flagstones and tried to pull my head together. I wanted to dip a hand in the pond and splash cold water down the back of my neck, but I couldn’t let Daniel see that, and anyway I doubted it would help. “Can I tell you what I think happened?”

Daniel inclined his head and made a small, courteous gesture with one hand: Please do.

“I think Lexie was planning to sell her share of the house.”

He didn’t rise to that, didn’t even blink. He was watching me blandly, like a professor at an oral exam, flicking the ash off his cigarette, aiming it carefully into the water where it would wash away.

“And I’m pretty sure I know why.”

I was sure he would bite on that one, positive—for a month now, he had to have been wondering—but he shook his head. “I don’t need to know,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter, at this stage—if it ever did. I think, you know, that all five of us have a ruthless streak, in our different ways. Possibly it goes with the territory; with having crossed that river, into being sure of what you want. Certainly Lexie was capable of great ruthlessness. But not of cruelty. When you think of her, please, remember that. She was never cruel.”

“She was going to sell up to your cousin Ned,” I said. “Mr. Executive Apartments himself. That sounds a lot like cruelty to me.”

Daniel startled me by laughing, a hard, humorless little snort. “Ned,” he said, with a wry twist to the corner of his mouth. “My God. I was far more worried about him than about Lexie. Lexie—like you—was strong-willed: if she decided to tell the police what had happened, then she would, but if she didn’t want to talk, no amount of questioning would get anything out of her. Ned, on the other hand…”

He sighed, an exasperated puff that blew smoke out of his nose, and shook his head. “It’s not just that Ned has a weak character,” he said, “but that he has no character at all; he’s essentially a cipher, composed entirely of the jumbled reflections of what he thinks other people want to see. We were talking earlier about knowing what you want… Ned was all fired up about this plan to turn the house into luxury apartments or a golf club, he had sheaves of complex financial projections showing how many hundreds of thousands we could each make over how many years, but he had no idea why he wanted to do it. Not a clue. When I asked him what on earth he wanted to do with all that money—it’s not as though he’s exactly on the breadline as it is—he stared at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. The question was completely unintelligible to him, light-years outside his frame of reference. It wasn’t that he had some deep longing to travel the world, say, or to quit his job and focus on painting the Great Irish Masterwork. He wanted the money purely because everything around him has told him that it’s what he should want. And he was utterly incapable of understanding that the five of us might have different priorities, priorities that we had established all by ourselves.”

He stubbed out his cigarette. “So,” he said, “you can see why I was worried about him. He had every reason in the world to keep his mouth shut about his dealings with Lexie—talking would blow any possibility of a sale right out of the water, and besides, he lives alone, as far as I know he doesn’t have an alibi; even he must realize that there’s nothing to prevent him from becoming the prime suspect. But I knew that if Mackey and O’Neill were to give him anything more than a cursory interrogation, all that would fly straight out the window. He would become exactly what they wanted him to be: the helpful witness, the concerned citizen doing his duty. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world, of course—he doesn’t have anything to offer that would constitute solid evidence—but he could cause us an awful lot of trouble and tension, and that was the last thing we needed. And it wasn’t as though I could gauge him, get some sense of what he was thinking, try to steer him away from disaster. Lexie—you—I could at least keep an eye on, to some extent, but Ned… I knew that getting in contact with him would be the worst thing I could possibly do, but, my God, it took everything I had not to do it anyway.”

Ned was dangerous territory. I didn’t want Daniel thinking too much about him, about my walks, about the possibilities. “You must have been raging, ” I said. “All of you, at both of them. I’m not surprised someone stabbed her.” I meant it. In a lot of ways, the amazing thing was that Lexie had made it this far.

Daniel considered this; his face looked like it did in the evenings, in the sitting room, when he was deep in a book, lost to the world. “We were angry,” he said, “at first. Furious; devastated; sabotaged, from within our own gates. But in a way, you know, the same thing that betrayed you in the end worked for you in the beginning: that crucial difference between Lexie and you. Only someone like Lexie—someone with no conception of action and consequence—would have been able to come home and settle back in as if nothing had ever happened. If she had been a slightly different kind of person, then none of us could ever have forgiven her, and you would never have made it in the door. But Lexie… We all knew that she had never for a moment intended to hurt us, and so it had never really occurred to her that we could be hurt; the devastation she was about to cause had truly never seemed like a reality to her. And so…” He drew in a long, tired breath. “And so,” he said, “she could come home.”

“As if nothing had ever happened,” I said.

“I thought so. She never meant to hurt us; none of us ever meant to hurt her, let alone kill her. I still believe that should count for something.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “That it just happened. She had been negotiating with Ned for a while, but before they could finalize anything, the four of you somehow found out.” Actually, I had the beginnings of an idea how that part had gone down, too, but there was no reason to share that with Daniel. I was saving that one for when it would make the loudest bang. “I think there was a blazing row, and in the middle of it, someone stabbed Lexie. Probably no one, not even the two of them, was sure exactly what had happened; Lexie could well have thought she had just been punched. She slammed out and ran for the cottage—maybe she was supposed to meet Ned that night, maybe it was just blind instinct, I don’t know. Either way, Ned never showed up. The ones who found her were you guys.”

Daniel sighed. “Roughly,” he said, “yes. In every essential, that’s what happened. Can’t you leave it at that? You know the gist of it; the other details would do no one the slightest bit of good and would do several people considerable harm. She was lovely, she was complicated and she is dead. What else is there that matters, now?”

“Well,” I said. “There’s the question of who killed her.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Daniel asked, and there was an undercurrent of some intense emotion building in his voice, “to wonder whether Lexie herself would want you to pursue this? No matter what she was considering doing, she loved us. Do you think she would want you setting out specifically to destroy us?”

Something still bending the air, rippling the stones under my feet; something high as a needle against the sky and shivering just behind each leaf. “She found me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for her. She came for me.”

“Possibly she did,” said Daniel. He was leaning towards me across the water, close, his elbows on his knees; behind the glasses his eyes were magnified, gray and bottomless. “But are you really so sure that what she wanted was revenge? She could so easily have run for the village, after all: knocked on a door, got someone to call an ambulance and the police. The villagers may not like us very much, but I doubt they would have denied help to an obviously wounded woman. Instead, she went straight to the cottage and simply stayed there, waiting. Haven’t you ever wondered if she may have been a willing participant in her own death and in the concealment of her killer—if she went consenting, one of us to the end? Haven’t you ever wondered if perhaps, for her sake, you should respect that?”

The air tasted strange, sweet, honey and salt. “Yeah,” I said. It was hard to talk, the thoughts seemed to take forever moving between my mind and my tongue. “I have. I’ve wondered all the time. But I’m not doing this for Lexie. I’m doing this because it’s my job.”

It’s such a cliché, and I said it so automatically; but the words seemed to whipcrack through the air startling and potent as electricity, rocketing down the ivy trails, burning white on the water. For a split second I was back in that first reeking stairwell with my hands in my pockets, looking up at that young junkie’s dead bewildered face. I was stone cold sober again, that dreamlike dazzle had dissolved out of the air and the bench was solid and clammy under my arse. Daniel was watching me with a new alertness in his eyes, watching me like he had never seen me before. It was only in that second that it hit me: it was true, what I had said to him, and maybe it had been true all along.

“Well,” he said, quietly. “In that case…”

He leaned back, slowly, away from me, against the wall. There was a long, humming silence.

“Where,” Daniel said. He stopped for an instant, but his voice stayed perfectly even: “Where is Lexie now?”

“In the morgue,” I said. “We haven’t been able to reach her next of kin.”

“We’ll do whatever needs to be done. I think she would prefer that.”

“The body is evidence in an open homicide case,” I said. “I doubt anyone’s going to release it to you. Until the investigation’s closed, she’ll have to stay where she is.”

There was no need for me to get graphic. I knew what he was seeing; my mind had a full-color slide show of the same images ready and waiting to play. Something rippled over Daniel’s face, a tiny spasm tightening his nose and lips.

“As soon as we know who did this to her,” I said, “I can argue that the body should be released to the rest of you. That you count as her next of kin.”

For a second his eyelids flickered; then his face turned blank. Looking back, I think—not that this is any excuse—that it was the easiest thing to miss about Daniel: how ruthlessly, lethally pragmatic he was, under the vague ivory-tower haze. An officer on the battlefield will leave his own dead brother behind without a second look, while the enemy’s still circling, to get his live men safe away.

“Obviously,” Daniel said, “I’d like you to leave this house. The others won’t be back for an hour or so; that should give you ample time to pack your things and make any necessary arrangements.”

This should hardly have come as a surprise, but it still felt like he’d slapped me straight across the face. He felt for his cigarette case. “I’d prefer that the others not find out who you are. I think you can imagine how badly it would upset them. I admit I’m not sure how to accomplish this, but surely you and Detective Mackey have a get-out clause in place, no? Some story you worked out to extricate you without raising any suspicions?”

It was the obvious thing to do, the only thing. You get burned, you get out, fast. And I had everything a girl could ask for. I had narrowed our suspects down to four; Sam and Frank would be well able to take it from there. I could get around the fact that this wasn’t on tape: disconnect the mike wire and claim it was accidental—Frank might not believe me, exactly, but he wouldn’t care—report back the bits of this conversation that suited me, bounce back home immaculate and triumphant and take a bow.

I never even considered doing it. “We do, yeah,” I said. “I can get out of here on a couple of hours’ notice without blowing my cover. I’m not going to, though. Not till I find out who killed Lexie, and why.”

Daniel turned his head and looked at me, and in that second I smelled danger, clear and cold as snow. Why not? I had invaded his home, his family, and I was trying to wreck them both for good. Either he or one of his own had already killed a woman for doing the same thing on a lesser scale. He was strong enough to do it and very possibly smart enough to get away with it, and I had left my gun in my bedroom. The trickle of water sang on at our feet and electricity fizzed through my back, down into the palms of my hands. I held his eyes and didn’t move, didn’t blink.

After a long moment his shoulders shifted, almost imperceptibly, and I saw his gaze turn inwards, abstracted. He had rejected that idea: he was moving towards some other plan, his mind clicking through options, sorting, classifying, connecting, faster than I could guess. “You won’t do it, you know,” he said. “You assume that my reluctance to hurt the others gives you an advantage—that, as they’ll continue to believe you’re Lexie, you have a chance at getting them to talk to you. But believe me, they’re all very well aware of what’s at stake. I’m not talking about the possibility of one or all of us going to jail; you have no evidence pointing towards any one of us in particular, no case against us either individually or collectively, or you’d have made your arrests long ago and this charade would never have been necessary. In fact, I’m willing to bet that, until a few minutes ago, you weren’t actually certain that your target was within Whitethorn House.”

“We kept all lines of inquiry open,” I said.

He nodded. “As things stand, jail is the least of our worries. But take the situation, for a moment, from the others’ point of view: assume that Lexie is alive and well and safely home again. If she were to find out what happened, it would mean the ruin of everything we’ve worked for. Suppose she were to learn that Rafe, to pick one of us at random, had stabbed her—had almost cost her her life. Do you think she could continue to share that life with him—without being afraid of him, without resenting him, without using this against him?”

“I thought you said she was incapable of thinking about the past,” I said.

“Well, this is in a slightly different league,” Daniel said, a little acidly. “He could hardly assume that she would dismiss this as if it were some spat over whose turn it was to buy milk. And even if she did, do you suppose he could look at her every day without seeing the constant risk she presented—the fact that at any moment, with one phone call to Mackey or O’Neill, she could send him to jail? This is Lexie, remember: she could make that call without realizing for a second the magnitude of that action. How could he treat her as he always has, tease her, argue with her, even disagree with her? And what about the rest of us, walking on eggshells, reading danger into every look and every word that passed between the two of them, always waiting for the tiniest misstep to detonate the land mine and blow everything to smithereens? How long do you think we’d last?”

His voice was very calm and even. Lazy curls of smoke were trickling from his cigarette, and he lifted his head to watch as they spread and wound upwards, through the fluttering bars of light. “We can survive the act itself,” he said. “It’s the shared knowledge of the act that would destroy us. This may sound odd, especially coming from an academic who prizes knowledge above almost anything, but read Genesis, or, even better, read the Jacobeans: they understood how too much knowledge can be lethal. Every time we were in the same room, it would be there among us like a bloody knife, and in the end it would slice us apart. And none of us will allow that to happen. Since the day you came into this house, we’ve put every drop of energy we have into preventing it, into restoring our lives to normality.” He smiled slightly, one eyebrow lifting. “So to speak. And telling Lexie who stabbed her would end any hope of that normality. Believe me, the others won’t do it.”

When you’re too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can’t see them. Unless Daniel was bluffing, he had made one last mistake, the same one he had been making all along. He was seeing the other four not as they were but as they should have been, could have been in some softer-edged and warmer world. He had missed the stark fact that Abby and Rafe and Justin were already disintegrating, they were running on empty; it stared him in the face every day, it passed him on the stairs like a cold breath and slipped into the car with us in the mornings and sat dark and hunched between us at the dinner table, but he had never once seen it. And he had missed the possibility that Lexie had had secret weapons of her own, and that she had willed them to me. He knew his world was falling apart, but somehow he was still seeing the inhabitants untouched amid the wreckage: five faces against drifting snow on a day in December, cool and luminous and pristine, timeless. It was the first time in all those weeks that I remembered he was much younger than me.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’ve got to try.”

Daniel leaned his head back against the stone of the wall and sighed. All of a sudden, he looked terribly tired. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose you do.”

“It’s your call,” I said. “You can tell me what happened right now, while I’m not wired: I’ll be gone by the time the others get home, and if it comes to arrests it’ll be your word against mine. Or I can stay here, and you can take the chance that I’ll get something on tape.”

He ran a hand over his face and straightened up, with an effort. “I’m perfectly aware, you know,” he said, glancing at his cigarette as if he had forgotten he was holding it, “that a return to normality may not be possible for us, at this point. I’m aware, in fact, that our entire plan was probably unfeasible right from the start. But, like you, we have no choice but to try.”

He dropped the smoke on the flagstones and put it out with the toe of his shoe. That frozen detachment was starting to slip into place over his face, the formal mask he used with outsiders, and there was a crisp note of finality in his voice. I was losing him. As long as we were talking like this, I had a chance, no matter how small; but any second now he was going to get up and go back indoors, and that would be the end of that.

If I had thought it would work, I would have got down on my knees on the flagstones and begged him to stay. But this was Daniel; my only chance was logic, cold hard reason. “Look,” I said, keeping my voice even, “you’re raising the stakes a whole lot higher than they need to be. If I get something on tape, then, depending what it is, it could mean jail time for all four of you—one on murder, and three on accessory or even conspiracy. Then what’s left? What have you got to come back to? Given the way Glenskehy feels about you, what are the odds that the house will even be standing when you get out?”

“We’ll have to take that chance.”

“If you tell me what happened, I’ll fight your corner all the way. You’ve got my word.” Daniel would have had every right to give me a sardonic look for that, but he didn’t. He was watching me with what appeared to be mild, polite interest. “Three of you can walk away from this, and the fourth can face manslaughter charges instead of murder. There wasn’t any premeditation here: this happened during an argument, nobody wanted Lexie to die, and I can vouch for the fact that all of you cared about her and that whoever stabbed her was under extreme emotional duress. Manslaughter gets maybe five years, maybe even less. Then it’s over, whoever it is gets out, and you can all four put this whole thing behind you and go back to normal.”

“My knowledge of the law is patchy,” Daniel said, leaning over to pick up his glass, “but as far as I know—and correct me if I’m wrong—nothing said by a suspect during questioning is admissible in evidence unless the suspect has been cautioned to that effect. Out of curiosity, how are you planning to administer a caution to three people who have no idea that you’re a police officer?” He rinsed out the glass again and held it up to the light, squinting, to check that it was clean.

“I’m not,” I said. “I don’t need to. Whatever I get on tape was never going to be admissible in court, but it can be used to get an arrest warrant and it can be used in a formal interview. How long do you think Justin, for example, will hold out if he’s arrested at two in the morning and questioned by Frank Mackey for twenty-four hours, with a tape of him describing Lexie’s murder playing in the background?”

“An interesting question,” Daniel said. He tightened the cap on the whiskey bottle, placed it carefully on the bench beside the glass.

My heart was going like hoofbeats. “Never go all in on a bad hand,” I said, “unless you’re absolutely positive you’re a stronger player than your opponent. How sure are you?”

He gave me a vague look that could have meant anything. “We should go in now,” he told me. “I suggest we tell the others that we spent the afternoon reading and recovering from our hangovers. Does that sound about right to you?”

“Daniel,” I said, and then my throat closed up; I could hardly breathe. Until he glanced down, I didn’t even realize that my hand was on his sleeve.

“Detective,” Daniel said. He was smiling at me, just a little, but his eyes were very steady and very sad. “You can’t have both. Don’t you remember what we were talking about, just a few minutes ago—the inevitability of sacrifice? One of us, or a detective: you can’t be both. If you had ever truly wanted to be one of us, wanted it more than anything else, you never would have made a single one of those mistakes, and we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

He laid his hand over mine, removed it from his sleeve and placed it in my lap, very gently. “In a way, you know,” he said, “strange and impossible though it may seem, I very much wish you had chosen the other way.”

“I’m not trying to ruin you,” I said. “There’s no way I can claim to be on your side, but compared to Detective Mackey, or even Detective O’Neill… If it’s left up to them—and unless you and I work together, it will be; they’re the ones running the investigation, not me—all four of you will be serving the maximum for murder. Life sentences. I’m doing my best here, Daniel, not to let that happen. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m doing everything I can.”

A leaf had fallen from the ivy into the trickle of water and got caught on one of the little steps, shaking against the current. Daniel picked it out carefully and turned it between his fingers. “I met Abby when I started Trinity,” he said. “Quite literally; it was on registration day. We were in the exam hall, hundreds of students queuing for hours—I should have brought something to read, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it would take so long-shuffling along under all those gloomy old paintings, and everyone whispering for some reason. Abby was in the next queue. She caught my eye, pointed to one of the portraits and said, ‘If you let your eyes go loose, doesn’t he look exactly like one of the old fellas out of the Muppets?’ ”

He shook water off the leaf: droplets flying, bright as fire in the crisscrossing sunbeams. “Even at that age,” he said, “I was aware that people found me unapproachable. I had no problem with that. But Abby didn’t seem to feel that way, and that intrigued me. She told me later that she was almost petrified with shyness, not of me in particular but of everyone and everything there—an inner-city girl from foster homes, thrown in amongst all those middle-class boys and girls who took college and privilege so completely for granted—and she decided that, if she was going to pluck up the courage to talk to someone, it might as well be the most forbidding-looking person she could find. We were very young then, you know.

“Once we’d finally got ourselves registered, she and I went for a coffee together, and then we arranged to meet again the next day—well, when I say arranged, Abby told me, ‘I’m going on the library tour tomorrow at noon, see you there,’ and walked off before I could answer either way. By that time I already knew that I admired her. It was a novel sensation, for me; I don’t admire many people. But she was so determined, so vivid; she made everyone I had met before seem pale and shadowy by comparison. You’ve probably noticed”—Daniel smiled faintly, glancing up at me over his glasses—“that I have a tendency to keep myself at some distance from life. I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living—and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known. Then Abby reached straight through the glass and caught my hand. It was like an electric shock. I remember watching her walk off across Front Square—she was wearing this awful fringed skirt that was much too long for her, she looked drowned in it—and realizing that I was smiling…

“Justin was on the library tour the next day. He hung back a step or two behind the group, and I wouldn’t even have noticed him if it hadn’t been for the fact that he had a hideous cold. Every sixty seconds or so he came out with this enormous, explosive, wet sneeze, and everyone would jump and then snicker, and he would turn an extraordinary shade of beetroot and try to disappear into his handkerchief. He was obviously excruciatingly shy. At the end of the tour Abby turned around to him, as if we’d known one another all our lives, and said, ‘We’re going for lunch, are you coming?’ I’ve seldom seen anyone look so startled. His mouth popped open and he mumbled something that could have meant anything, but he went over to the Buttery with us. By the end of lunch he was actually speaking in full sentences—and interesting ones, too. We’d read a lot of the same things, he had some insights into John Donne that had never occurred to me… It hit me, that afternoon, that I liked him; that I liked both of them. That, for the first time in my life, I was enjoying the company of others. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’s ever had difficulty making friends; I’m not sure you can understand quite what a revelation that was.

“It took us until classes started, the next week, to find Rafe. The three of us were sitting at the back of a lecture room, waiting for the lecturer to show up, when all of a sudden the door beside us flew open and there was Rafe: dripping with rain, hair plastered to his head, fists clenched, obviously straight out of some traffic mess and in a horrible mood. It was a pretty dramatic entrance. Abby said, ‘Check it out, it’s King Lear,’ and Rafe whipped around on her and snarled—you know how he gets—‘How did you get here, then—in Daddy’s limo? Or on your broomstick?’ Justin and I were taken aback, but Abby just laughed and said, ‘By hot-air balloon,’ and pushed a chair towards him. And after a moment he sat down and muttered, ‘Sorry.’ And that was that.”

Daniel smiled, down at the leaf, a private little smile as tender and amazed as a lover’s. “How did we ever put up with one another? Abby talking nineteen to the dozen to hide her shyness, Justin half smothered under his, Rafe biting people’s heads off right and left; and me. I was terribly serious, I know. It wasn’t until that year, really, that I learned how to laugh…”

“And Lexie?” I asked, very softly. “How did you find her?”

“Lexie,” Daniel said. The smile rippled across his face like wind on water, deepened. “Do you know, I can’t even remember the first time we met her? Abby probably can; you should ask her. All I remember is that, by the time we had been postgrads for a few weeks, she seemed to have been there forever.”

He put the leaf down gently on the bench beside him and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief. “It always took my breath away,” he said, “that the five of us could have found one another—against such odds, through all the layers of armored fortifications each of us had set up. A lot of it was Abby, of course; I’ve never known what instinct led her so unerringly, I’m not sure she knows herself, but you can see why I’ve trusted her judgment ever since. But still: it would have been so heart-stoppingly easy for us to miss one another, for me or Abby to show up an hour later for registration, for Justin to refuse our invitation, for Rafe to be just that little bit snippier so that we backed off and left him alone. Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they’re for you; that’s your life, your future, fidgeting in that line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don’t miss it. How else could such a thing have happened?”

He bent down and picked up our butts from the paving stones, one by one. “In all my life,” he said simply, “these are the only four people I have ever loved.” Then he stood up and walked off across the grass towards the house, with the bottle and the glass dangling from one hand and the cigarette butts cupped in the other.