The Likeness

21

It only took Daniel a couple of hours to come up with his next move. I was sitting up in bed, staring at the Brothers Grimm and reading the same sentence over and over without taking in a word of it, when there was a quick, discreet rap on my door.

"Come in,” I called.

Daniel put his head in the door. He was still dressed, spotless in his white shirt and shining shoes. “Do you have a minute?” he inquired politely.

“Of course,” I said, just as politely, putting down the book. There was no way this was a surrender or even a truce, but I couldn’t think of anything either of us could try, not without the others there for weapons.

“I just wanted,” Daniel said, turning to close the door behind him, “a quick word with you. In private.”

My body thought faster than my mind. In that second when his back was to me, before I knew why I was doing it, I grabbed the mike wire through my pajama top, gave it a hard upwards yank and felt the pop as the jack came free. By the time he looked around again, my hands were lying innocently on the book. “About what?” I asked.

“There are a few things,” Daniel said, smoothing the bottom of the duvet and sitting down, “that have been bothering me.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Almost since you… well, let’s say arrived. Small inconsistencies, growing more troubling as time went on. By the time you asked for more onions, the other evening, I had serious questions.”

He left a polite pause, in case I wanted to contribute anything to the conversation. I stared at him. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this one coming.

“And then, of course,” he said, when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to answer, “we come to last night. As you may or may not know, on a few occasions you and I—or, at any rate, Lexie and I—have… Well, suffice it to say that a kiss can be as individual and unmistakable as a laugh. When we kissed, last night, it left me more or less positive that you’re not Lexie.”

He gazed at me blandly, across the bed. He was burning me all over again, every way he knew how: with my boss, with the boyfriend he’d guessed at, with the brass who would not approve of an undercover smooching a suspect. They were his brand-new remote-controlled weapons. If that mike had been plugged in, I would have been a few hours away from a grim trip home and a one-way ticket to a desk in Offaly.

“Absurd though this may sound,” Daniel said tranquilly, “I’d like to see this supposed stab wound. Simply to reassure myself that you’re actually who you’re claiming to be.”

“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “why not?” and saw the startled flicker in his eyes. I pulled up my pajama top and tugged the bandage free to show him the jack and the battery pack, separate.

“Nice shot,” I told him, “but no dice. And if you do get me pulled out, do you think I’ll go quietly? I’ll have nothing to lose. Even if all I’ve got is five minutes, I’ll use them to tell the others who I am and that you’ve known for weeks. How well do you think that’ll go down with, say, Rafe?”

Daniel leaned forwards to inspect the mike. “Ah,” he said. “Well, it was worth a try.”

“My time’s almost up on this case anyway,” I said. I was talking fast: Frank would have started getting suspicious the instant the mike feed died, I had maybe a minute before his head went up in smoke. “I’ve only got a few days left. But I want those few days. If you try to take them away from me, I’ll go down all guns blazing. If you don’t, you still have a good chance that I won’t get anything worthwhile, and we can work it so the others never have to know who I was.”

He watched me, expressionless, those big square hands tidily clasped in his lap. “My friends are my responsibility. I’m not going to stand back and let you sweep them off into corners for interrogation.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough. Try and stop me any way you can; you didn’t have any trouble tonight. Just don’t mess with my last few days. Deal?”

“How many days,” Daniel asked, “exactly?”

I shook my head. “Not in the deal. In about ten seconds I’m going to plug this in again, so it sounds like an accidental disconnect, and we’re going to have a harmless little chat about why I was in a mood at dinner. OK?”

He nodded absently, still examining the mike. “Great,” I said. “Here goes. I don’t feel like”—I plugged the wire back in halfway through the sentence, for an extra touch of realism—“talking about it. My head’s a mess, everything feels sucky, I just want everyone to leave me alone. OK?”

“You’re probably just hungover,” Daniel said, obligingly. “You’ve always had a hard time with red wine, haven’t you?”

Everything sounded like a trap. “Whatever,” I said, giving him an irritable teenager shrug and sticking my bandage back down. “Maybe it was the punch. Rafe probably put meths in it. He’s drinking a lot more these days, have you noticed?”

“Rafe is fine,” Daniel said coolly. “And so will you be, I hope, after a good night’s sleep.”

Quick footsteps downstairs, and a door opening. “Lexie?” Justin called anxiously, up the stairs. “Is everything OK?”

“Daniel’s annoying me,” I shouted back.

“Daniel? How are you annoying her?”

“I’m not.”

“He wants to know why I feel crap,” I called. “I feel crap because I just do, and I want him to leave me alone.”

“You feel crap because what?” Justin had come out of his room, to the bottom of the stairs; I could picture him, in his striped pyjamas, clutching the banister and peering short-sightedly upwards. Daniel was giving me an intent, thoughtful gaze that made me edgy as hell.

“Shut up!” yelled Abby, furious enough that we could hear her right through her door. “Some of us are trying to sleep here.”

“Lexie? You feel crap because what?”

A thud: Abby had thrown something. “Justin, I said shut up! Jesus! ”

Faintly, from the ground floor, Rafe shouted something irritable that sounded like “What the hell is going on?”

“I’ll come down and explain, Justin,” Daniel called. “Everyone go back to bed.” To me: “Good night.” He stood up and smoothed the duvet again. “Sleep well. I hope you’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. Don’t count on it.”

The steady rhythm of his footsteps going downstairs, then hushed voices below me: at first a lot of Justin and an occasional brief interjection from Daniel, shifting gradually till it was the other way round. I got out of bed, carefully, and put my ear to the floor, but they were talking barely above whispers and I couldn’t make out the words.

It was twenty minutes before Daniel came back upstairs, softly, pausing for a long few seconds on the landing. I didn’t start shaking until his bedroom door closed behind him.

I stayed awake for hours that night, flipping pages and pretending to read, rustling the covers and doing deep breaths and pretending to be asleep, unplugging the mike for a few seconds or a few minutes every now and then. I think I created a pretty good impression of a jack come loose, disconnecting and reconnecting itself as I moved, but it didn’t reassure me. Frank is very far from stupid, and he was in no humor to give me the benefit of any doubts.

Frank to the left of me, Daniel to the right, and here I was, stuck in the middle with Lexie. I passed the time, while I played my mike-jack game, by trying to work out how it was logistically possible for me to have ended up on the opposite side from absolutely everyone else involved in this case, including people who were on opposite sides from each other. Before I finally went to sleep I took the chair from Lexie’s dressing table, for the first time in weeks, and braced it against my door.

Saturday went fast, in a helpless nightmare daze. Daniel had decided—partly because working on the house always settled them all down, presumably, and partly to keep everyone in one room and under his eye—that we needed to spend the day sanding floors: “We’ve been neglecting the dining room,” he told us, at breakfast. “It’s starting to look terribly shabby, next to the sitting room. I think today we should start bringing it up to scratch. What do you think?”

“Good idea,” said Abby, sliding eggs onto his plate and giving him a tired, determinedly positive smile. Justin shrugged and went back to picking at toast; I said, “Whatever,” into the frying pan; Rafe took his coffee and left without a word. “Good,” Daniel said serenely, going back to his book. “That’s a plan, then.”

The rest of the day was just about as excruciating as I’d expected. The Happy Place magic was apparently on its day off. Rafe was in a silent, fuming rage with the whole world; he kept banging the sander into the walls, making everyone jump, till Daniel took it out of his hands without a word and passed him a sheet of sandpaper instead. I turned up my sulk as loud as I could and hoped it would have some effect on someone, and that sooner or later—not too much later—I would find a way to use it.

Outside the windows it was raining, thin petulant rain. We didn’t talk. Once or twice I saw Abby wipe her face, but she always had her back to the rest of us and I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was just the sawdust. It got everywhere: drifting up our noses, down our necks, working its way into the skin of our hands. Justin wheezed ostentatiously and had great dramatic coughing fits into a handkerchief until finally Daniel put down the sander, stalked out, and came back with an ancient, hideous gas mask, which he held out to Justin in silence. No one laughed.

“They’ve got asbestos in them,” Rafe said, scrubbing viciously at an awkward corner of floor. “Are you actually trying to kill him, or do you just want to give that impression?”

Justin gave the mask a horrified look. “I don’t want to breathe asbestos.”

“If you’d prefer to tie your handkerchief around your mouth,” said Daniel, “then do that instead. Just stop moaning.” He shoved the mask into Justin’s hands, went back to the sander and fired it up again.

The gas mask that had sent me and Rafe into a giddy fit, that night on the patio. Daniel can wear it into college, we’ll get Abby to embroider it… Justin dumped it gingerly in a bare corner, where it sat for the rest of the day, staring at us all with huge, empty, desolate eyes.

“And what’s been going on with your mike?” Frank inquired, that night. “Just out of curiosity.”

“Ah, fuck,” I said. “What, it’s doing it again? I thought I’d fixed it.”

A skeptical pause. “Doing what again?”

“This morning when I went to change my bandage, the jack was out. I think I put the bandage on wrong, after my shower last night, and the jack pulled out when I moved. How much did you miss? Is it working now?” I stuck a hand down my top and tapped the mike. “Can you hear that?”

“Loud and clear,” Frank said dryly. “It popped out a few times during the night, but I doubt I missed anything significant there—I certainly hope not, anyway. I lost a minute or two of your midnight chat with Daniel, though.”

I put a grin in my voice. “Oh, that? He was edgy because of the stroppy-bitch act. He wanted to know what was wrong, so I told him to leave me alone. Then the others heard us and got in on the action, and he gave up and went to bed. I told you it would work, Frankie. They’re going up the walls.”

“Right,” Frank said, after a moment. “So apparently I didn’t miss anything educational. And as long as I’m working this case, I suppose I can’t say I don’t believe in coincidences. But if that wire happens to come loose again, even for one second, I’m coming down there and dragging you in by the scruff of your neck. So get out your Super Glue.” And he hung up.

I walked home trying to work out what I would do next if I were in Daniel’s shoes, but as it turned out he wasn’t the one I should have been worrying about. I knew, even before I got into the house, that something had happened. They were all in the kitchen—the guys had obviously been halfway through the washing up, Rafe was holding a spatula like a weapon and Justin was dripping suds all over the floor—and they were all talking at once.

“—doing their job,” Daniel was saying flatly, as I opened the French doors. “If we don’t let them—”

“But why?” Justin wailed, over him. “Why would they—”

Then they saw me. There was a second of absolute silence, all of them staring at me, voices sliced off in midword.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The cops want us to come in,” said Rafe. He threw the spatula into the sink, with a clang and a splash. Water spattered on Daniel’s shirt, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I can’t go through that again,” Justin said, sagging back against the counter. “I can’t.”

“Come in where? What for?”

“Mackey rang Daniel,” said Abby. “They want us to come talk to them, first thing tomorrow morning. All of us.”

“Why?” That toerag Frank. He had known, when I phoned him, that he was going to pull this crap. He hadn’t even bothered to hint at it.

Rafe shrugged. “He didn’t share. Just that he, quote, wants a chat with us. Unquote.”

“But why there?” Justin demanded frantically. He was staring at Daniel’s phone, on the kitchen table, like it might pounce. “Before, they always came here. Why do we have to—”

“Where does he want us to go?” I asked.

“Dublin Castle,” Abby said. “The Serious Crime office, or squad, or whatever they call it.”

Serious and Organized Crime work downstairs from Murder; all Frank had to do was whisk us up an extra flight of stairs. S&O do not investigate your average stabbing, not unless there’s a crime lord involved, but the others didn’t know that, and it sounded impressive.

“Did you know about this?” Daniel asked me. He was giving me a cold stare that I didn’t like one bit. Rafe raised his eyes to the ceiling and muttered something that included the words “paranoid freak.”

“No. How would I?”

“I thought your friend Mackey might have rung you as well. While you were out.”

“He didn’t. And he’s not my friend.” I didn’t bother hiding the pissed-off look; let Daniel try to figure out whether it was genuine. I had two days left, and Frank was going to eat away one of them with endless pointless nothing questions about what we put in our sandwiches and how we felt about Four-Boobs Brenda. He wanted us first thing in the morning: he was planning to stretch this out for as long as he could, eight hours, twelve. I wondered if it would be in character for Lexie to kick him in the goolies.

“I knew we shouldn’t have rung them about that rock,” Justin said wretchedly. “I knew it. They were leaving us alone.”

“So let’s not go,” I said. Probably Frank would class this as doing something stupid, breaking one of his conditions, but I was too annoyed to care. “They can’t make us.”

A startled pause. “Is that true?” Abby asked Daniel.

“I think so, actually,” Daniel said. He was examining me speculatively; I could almost hear the wheels spinning. “We’re not under arrest. This was a request, not a command, although that’s not how Mackey made it sound. All the same, I think we need to go.”

“Oh, do you?” Rafe inquired, not nicely. “Do you really? And what if I think we should let Mackey go fuck himself?”

Daniel turned to look at him. “I plan to continue cooperating fully with the investigation,” he said calmly. “Partly because I think it’s wise, but mainly because I’d like to know who did this terrible thing. If any of you would prefer to stand in the way and raise Mackey’s suspicions by refusing to cooperate, I can’t stop you; but remember, the person who stabbed Lexie is still out there, and I for one think we should do our best to help catch him.” The smart-arsed bastard: he was using my mike to feed Frank exactly what he wanted him to hear, which apparently was a heap of pious clichés. The two of them were perfect for each other.

Daniel glanced inquiringly around the kitchen. No one answered. Rafe started to say something, checked himself and shook his head in disgust.

“Good,” said Daniel. “In that case, let’s finish up here and get to bed. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.” And he picked up the dishcloth.

I was in the sitting room with Abby, pretending to read and thinking up creative new words for Frank and listening to the tense silence coming from the kitchen, when I realized something. Given the choice, Daniel had decided he’d prefer to spend one of my last few days with Frank, rather than with me. I figured, in its own dangerous way, that was probably a compliment.

What I remember most about Sunday morning is that we did the whole breakfast routine, every step of it. Abby’s quick tap on my door; the two of us making breakfast side by side, her face flushed from the heat of the stove. We moved easily around each other, passing things back and forth without having to ask. I remembered that first evening, the pang as I’d seen how closely woven together they were: somehow, along the way, I had become part of that. Justin frowning at his toast as he sliced it into triangles, Rafe’s autopilot maneuver with the coffee, Daniel with the edge of a book caught under the corner of his plate. I didn’t let myself think, even for a splinter of a second, about the fact that in thirty-six hours I would be gone; the fact that, even if I were to see them again, someday, it would never be like this.

We took our time. Even Rafe resurfaced once he’d finished his coffee, nudging me sideways with his hip so he could share my chair and nick bites of my toast. Dew ran down the windowpanes, and the rabbits—they were getting cheekier and closer every day—were nibbling the grass outside.

Something had changed, during the night. The jagged cutting edges between the four of them had melted away; they were gentle with one another, careful, almost tender. Sometimes I wonder if they took such care with that breakfast because, at some level deeper and surer than logic, they knew.

“We should go,” Daniel said, finally. He closed his book, reached to put it on the counter. I felt a breath, something between a catch and a sigh, ripple around the table. Rafe’s chest rose, quickly, against my shoulder.

“Right,” Abby said softly, almost to herself. “Let’s do this.”

“There’s something I’d like to discuss with you, Lexie,” Daniel said. “Why don’t you and I ride into town together?”

“Discuss what?” Rafe asked sharply. His fingers dug into my arm.

“If it were any of your business,” Daniel said, taking his plate to the sink, “I would have invited you to join us.” The jagged edges crystallized again, out of nowhere, fine and slicing the air.

“So,” Daniel said, when he had pulled up his car in front of the house and I got in beside him, “here we are.”

Something smoky curled through me: a warning. It was the way he was looking not at me but out the car window, at the house in cool morning mist, at Justin rubbing his windscreen fussily with a folded rag and Rafe slumping down the stairs with his chin tucked deep into his scarf; it was the expression on his face, intent and thoughtful and just a touch sad.

I had no way of knowing what this guy’s limits were, or if he had any. My gun was behind Lexie’s bedside table—Murder has a metal detector. The only time you’ll be out of coverage, Frank had said, is on the drive to and from town.

Daniel smiled, a small private smile up at the hazy blue sky. “It’s going to be a beautiful day,” he said.

I was about to slam out of the car, stamp over to Justin and tell him Daniel was being horrible and demand to ride with him and the others—it seemed to be the week for complicated vicious spats, nobody would be suspicious of one more—when the door behind me flew open and Abby slid into the back seat, flushed and tangle-haired, in a tumble of gloves and hat and coat. “Hey,” she said, slamming the door. “Can I come with you guys?”

“Sure,” I said. I’d seldom been that glad to see anyone.

Daniel turned to look at her over his shoulder. “I thought we said you were going with Justin and Rafe.”

“You must be joking. The mood they’re in? It’d be like riding with Stalin and Pol Pot, only less cheerful.”

Unexpectedly, Daniel smiled at her, a real smile, warm and amused. “They are being ridiculous. Yes, let’s leave them to it; an hour or two stuck in a car together might be exactly what they need.”

“Maybe,” Abby said, sounding unconvinced. “That or they’ll just kill each other.” She pulled a folding hairbrush out of her bag and attacked her hair. In front of us, Justin got his car off to a jerky, irritable start and peeled off down the drive, way too fast.

Daniel put his hand back over his shoulder, palm up, towards Abby. He wasn’t looking at her, or at me; he was gazing out the windscreen, unseeing, at the cherry trees. Abby lowered her brush and laid her hand in his, squeezed his fingers. She didn’t let go until Daniel sighed and detached his hand from hers, gently, and started the car.