The Likeness

23

As soon as Justin pulled up in the stables, I jumped out of the car and ran for the house, pebbles flying up under my feet. Nobody called after me. I jammed my key into the lock, left the door swinging open and thumped upstairs to my room.

It felt like ages before I heard the others coming in (door closing, fast overlapping undertones moving into the sitting room), but actually it was less than sixty seconds—I had an eye on my watch. I figured I needed to give them about ten minutes. Any less, and they wouldn’t have time to compare notes—their first chance all day—and work themselves into a full-on panic; any more, and Abby would pull herself together and start bringing the guys back into line.

During those ten minutes I listened to the voices downstairs, taut and muffled and fringed with hysteria, and I got ready. Late-afternoon sun was flooding through my bedroom window and the air blazed so bright that I felt weightless, suspended in amber, every movement I made as clear and rhythmic and measured as part of some ritual that I had been preparing for all my life. My hands felt like they were moving on their own, smoothing out my girdle—it was starting to get grubby by this time, it wasn’t exactly something I could stick in the washing machine-pulling it on, tucking the hem into my jeans, easing my gun into place, as calmly and precisely as if I had forever and a day. I thought about that afternoon a million miles away, in my flat, when I had put on Lexie’s clothes for the first time: how they had felt like armor, like ceremonial robes; how they had made me want to laugh out loud from something like happiness.

When the ten minutes were up I pulled the door closed behind me, on that little room full of light and lily-of-the-valley smell, and listened as the voices downstairs trailed off into silence. I washed my face in the bathroom, dried it carefully and straightened my towel between Abby’s and Daniel’s. My face in the mirror looked very strange, pale and huge-eyed, staring out at me with some crucial, unreadable warning. I tugged my sweater down and checked to make sure the bulge of the gun didn’t show. Then I went downstairs.

They were in the sitting room, all three of them. For a second, before they saw me, I stood in the doorway watching them. Rafe was sprawled on the sofa, snapping a pack of cards from hand to hand in a fast restless arc. Abby, curled in her chair, had her head bent over the doll and her bottom lip caught hard between her teeth; she was trying to sew, but every stitch took her about three stabs. Justin was in one of the wingbacked chairs with a book, and for some reason he was the one who almost broke my heart: those narrow hunched shoulders, the darn in the sleeve of his sweater, those long hands on wrists as thin and vulnerable as a little boy’s. The coffee table was scattered with glasses and bottles—vodka, tonic, orange juice; something had splashed onto the table as they poured, but no one had bothered to clean it up. On the floor, shadows of ivy curled like cut-outs through the sunlight.

Then their heads came up, one by one, and their faces turned towards me, expressionless and watchful as they had been that first day on the steps. “How’re you doing?” Abby asked.

I shrugged.

“Have a drink,” Rafe said, nodding at the table. “If you want anything that’s not vodka, you’ll have to get it yourself.”

“I’m getting bits back,” I said. There was a long slant of sun lying across the floorboards at my feet, making the new varnish shine like water. I kept my eyes on that. “Bits of that night. They said that might happen, the doctors did.”

Trill and snap of the cards, again. “We know,” Rafe said.

“They let us watch,” Abby said softly. “While you talked to Mackey.”

I jerked my head up and stared at them, open-mouthed. “Well, Jesus,” I said, after a moment. “Were you going to tell me that? Ever?”

“We’re telling you now,” said Rafe.

“Fuck you,” I said, and the shake in my voice sounded like I was an inch from more tears. “Fuck the lot of you. How stupid do you think I am? Mackey was a total dickhead to me and I still kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t want to get you into trouble. But you were just going to let me keep being the idiot, for the rest of our lives, while all of you knew—” I pressed the back of my wrist over my mouth.

Abby said, very quietly and very carefully, “You kept your mouth shut.”

“I shouldn’t have,” I said, into my wrist. “I should’ve just told him everything I remember and let you bloody well deal with it.”

“What else,” Abby asked, “what else do you remember?”

My heart felt like it was about to slam straight out of my chest. If I had this wrong, then I was going down in flames, and every second of this month had been for nothing at all-crashing through these four lives, hurting Sam, staking my job: all for nothing. I was throwing every chip I had onto the table, without the slimmest clue how good my hand was. In that instant I thought of Lexie: how she had lived her whole life like this, all in on the blind; what it had cost her, in the end.

“The jacket,” I said. “The note, in the jacket pocket.”

For a second I thought I had lost. Their faces, upturned to me, were so utterly blank, as if what I had said meant nothing at all. I was already whipping through ways to backpedal (coma dream? morphine hallucination?) when Justin whispered, a tiny devastated breath, “Oh God.”

You didn’t usually bring your cigarettes on your walk, Daniel had said. I had been so focused on covering the slipup, it had taken me days to realize: I had burned Ned’s note. If Lexie didn’t have a lighter on her, then—short of eating the notes, which was a little extreme even for her—she had no quick way of getting rid of them. Maybe she had ripped them to tiny pieces on her way home, thrown the bits into hedges as she passed, like a dark Hansel-and-Gretel trail; or maybe she hadn’t wanted to leave even that much trace, maybe she had shoved them into her pocket to flush or burn later, at home.

She had been so fiercely careful, standing guard over her secrets. There was only one mistake I could imagine her making. Just once, hurrying home in the dark and the lashing rain—because it had to have been raining—with the baby already turning the edges of her mind to cotton wool and escape hammering through every vein, she had pushed the note into her pocket without remembering that the jacket she was wearing wasn’t all hers. She had been betrayed by the same thing she was betraying: the closeness of them, how much they had shared.

“Well,” Rafe said, reaching for his glass, one eyebrow arching up. He was trying for his best world-weary look, but his nostrils flared, just slightly, with each breath. “Nicely done, Justin my friend. This should be interesting.”

“What? What are you talking about, nicely done? She already knew—”

“Shut up,” said Abby. She had gone white, freckles standing out like face paint.

Rafe ignored her. “Well, if she didn’t, she does now.”

“It’s not my fault. Why do you always, always blame me for everything?”

Justin was very close to losing it. Rafe raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Do you hear me complaining? As far as I’m concerned, it’s about bloody time we got this over with.”

“We are not discussing this,” Abby said, “until Daniel gets home.”

Rafe started to laugh. “Oh, Abby,” he said. “I do love you, but sometimes I wonder about you. You have to know that, once Daniel gets home, we won’t be discussing this at all.”

“This is about all five of us. We don’t talk about it till we’re all here.”

“That’s crap,” I said. My voice was rising and I let it. “It’s such crap I can’t even listen to it. If this is about all five of us, then why didn’t you tell me weeks ago? If you can talk about it behind my back, then surely to God we can talk about it without Daniel.”

“Oh God,” Justin whispered again. His mouth was open, one hand trembling inches from it.

Abby’s mobile started to ring, in her bag. I had been listening for that sound all the way home, all the time in my room. Frank had let Daniel go.

“Leave it!” I yelled, loud enough to stop her hand midreach. “It’s Daniel, and I know exactly what he’s going to say anyway. He’ll just order you not to tell me anything, and I am so fucking sick of him treating me like I’m six! If anyone has a right to know exactly what happened here, it’s me. If you try to answer that bloody phone I swear I’m going to stamp on it!” I meant it, too. Sunday afternoon, all the traffic was headed into Dublin, not out; if Daniel floored it—and he would—and managed not to get pulled over, he could be home in maybe half an hour. I needed every second of that.

Rafe laughed, a small rough sound. “Attagirl,” he said, raising his glass to me.

Abby stared at me, her hand still halfway to her bag.

“If you guys don’t tell me what’s going on,” I said, “I’m phoning the cops right now and I’m telling them everything I remember. I am.”

“Jesus,” Justin whispered. “Abby…”

The phone stopped ringing.

“Abby,” I said, taking a deep breath. I could feel my nails digging into my hands. “I can’t do this if you guys keep leaving me out. This is important. I can’t… we can’t work this way. Either we’re all in this together or we’re not.”

Justin’s phone rang.

“You don’t even have to tell me who actually did it, if you don’t want to.” I was pretty sure that if I listened hard enough I’d hear Frank banging his head off a wall, somewhere, but I didn’t care: one step at a time. “I just want to know what happened. I’m so sick of everyone knowing but me. I’m so sick of it. Please.”

“She’s got every right to know,” Rafe said. “And personally, I’m also pretty sick of living my life on the basis of ‘Because Daniel said so.’ How well has that been working out for us, so far?”

The ringing stopped. “We should call him back,” Justin said, half out of his chair. “Shouldn’t we? What if he’s been arrested and he needs bail money, or something?”

“He hasn’t been arrested,” Abby said automatically. She dropped back into the chair and ran her hands over her face, blew out a long breath. “I keep telling you, they need evidence to arrest someone. He’s fine. Lexie, sit down.”

I stayed where I was. “Oh, God, sit down,” Rafe said, on a long-suffering sigh. “I’m going to tell you this whole pathetic saga anyway, whether anyone else likes it or not, and you’re getting on my nerves, fidgeting there. And Abby, chill out. We should have done this weeks ago.”

After a moment I went to my chair, by the fireplace. “Much better,” Rafe said, grinning at me. There was a reckless, risky gaiety in his face; he looked happier than he had in weeks. “Have a drink.”

“I don’t want one.”

He swung his legs off the sofa, poured a big sloppy vodka and orange and passed it to me. “Actually, I think we should all have another drink. We’re going to need it.” He topped up glasses with a flourish—Abby and Justin didn’t seem to notice—and raised his to the room. “Here’s to full disclosure.”

“OK,” Abby said, on a deep breath. “OK. If you really want to do this, and it’s coming back to you anyway, then I guess… what the hell.”

Justin opened his mouth, then shut it again and bit his lips.

Abby ran her hands through her hair, smoothing it hard. “Where do you want us to…? I mean, I don’t know how much you remember, or…”

“Bits,” I said. “They don’t fit together or anything. Just go from the beginning. ” All the adrenaline had dissolved out of my blood and I felt so calm, all of a sudden. This was the last thing I would ever do in Whitethorn House. I could feel it all around me, every inch of it singing with sun and dust motes and memory, waiting to hear what came next. I felt like we had all the time in the world.

“You were heading out for your walk,” Rafe said helpfully, flopping back onto the sofa, “around, what, just after eleven? And Abby and I discovered we were both out of smokes. Funny, isn’t it, what little things make all the difference? If we’d been nonsmokers, this might never have happened. When they talk about the evils of tobacco, they never mention this.”

“You said you’d pick some up on your way,” Abby said. She was watching me carefully, hands clasped tight in her lap. “But you’re always gone for at least an hour, so I figured I might as well run out and get them at the petrol station. It looked like it was going to rain, so I threw on the jacket—I mean, it didn’t seem like you wanted it, you were already putting your coat on. I stuck my wallet in the pocket, and…”

Her voice trailed off and she made a small, tense gesture that could have meant anything. I kept my mouth shut. No more leading, if I could help it. The rest of this story had to come from them.

“And she pulled out this piece of paper,” Rafe said, through a cigarette, “and went, ‘What’s this?’ Nobody paid much attention, at first. We were all in the kitchen; we were doing the washing up, me and Justin and Daniel, and arguing about something or other—”

“Stevenson,” Justin said, softly and very sadly. “Remember? Jekyll and Hyde. Daniel was going on about them; something to do with reason and instinct. You were in a silly mood, Lexie, you said you’d had enough shop talk for the night and anyway Jekyll and Hyde would both have been crap in bed, and Rafe said, ‘A one-track mind, and it’s a dirt track…’ We were all laughing.”

“And then Abby said, ‘Lexie, what the hell?’ ” said Rafe. “A whole lot louder. We all stopped messing about and turned around, and she was holding out this ratty bit of paper and looking like someone had slapped her across the face—I’ve never seen her look like that, ever.”

“That’s the part I remember,” I said. My hands felt like they’d been melted onto the arms of the chair by some blast of heat. “Then it goes fuzzy again.”

“Luckily for you,” Rafe said, “we can help you with that. I think the rest of us will remember every second for the rest of our lives. You said, ‘Give me that,’ and grabbed for the piece of paper, but Abby jumped back, fast, and passed it to Daniel.”

“I think,” Justin said, in a low voice, “that was when we started to realize there was something serious happening. I’d been about to say something silly about a love letter—just teasing you, Lexie—but you were so… You lunged at Daniel, trying to get it away from him. He shot out his other hand to hold you off, sort of reflexively, but you were fighting him, really fighting—punching at his arm, trying to kick him, grabbing for that thing. You didn’t make a single sound. That’s what frightened me most, I think: the silence. It seemed like people should be shouting or screaming or something, like then I might be able to do something, but it was so quiet—just you and Daniel breathing hard, and the tap still running…”

“Abby caught hold of your arm,” Rafe said, “but you whipped round, with your fists up; I honestly thought you were about to go for her. Justin and I were standing there gawping like a pair of morons, trying to figure out what the fuck—I mean, two seconds ago we’d been on Jekyll sex, for God’s sake. As soon as you let go of Daniel, he shoved the paper at me, caught your wrists from behind and told me, ‘Read that.’ ”

“I didn’t like it,” Justin said softly. “You were flinging yourself back and forth, trying to pull away from Daniel, but he wouldn’t let go. It was… You tried to bite him, his arm. I thought he shouldn’t be doing that, if it was your paper then he should let you have it, but I just couldn’t catch up enough to say anything.”

I wasn’t surprised. These were not men of action here; their currencies were thoughts and words, and they had been catapulted into something that blew both of those right out of the water. What did surprise me, what set warning lights flashing at the back of my mind, was the speed and ease with which Daniel had snapped into action.

“So,” Rafe said, “I read the thing out loud. It said, ‘Dear Lexie, have thought it over and OK we can talk about 200K. Please get in touch ’cause I know we both want to get this deal wrapped up. Best regards, Ned.’ ”

“Surely to God,” Justin said softly and bitterly, into the airless silence, “you remember that.”

“The spelling was shit,” said Rafe, through his cigarette. “He actually had a number two for ‘to,’ like a fucking fourteen-year-old. What an utter moron. Apart from anything else, I would’ve expected you to have better taste than to mess about making shoddy little deals with someone like that.”

“Would you have?” Abby asked. Her eyes were very steady on mine, searching, and her hands had gone still in her lap. “If none of this had happened, would you really have sold out to Ned?”

When I think about how breathtakingly cruel I was to those four, this is one of the few things that make me feel any better: I could have said yes, then. I could have told them exactly what Lexie was planning to do to them, to everything they had put their hearts and minds and bodies into building. Maybe that would have hurt them less, in the end, than thinking it had all been over nothing; I don’t know. All I know is that the last time I had a choice, and much too late to make any difference, I lied for the right reasons.

“No,” I said. “I just… God. I just needed to know I could. I freaked out, Abby. I started feeling trapped and I panicked. It was never about actually leaving. I just had to know I could leave, if I wanted to.”

“Trapped,” Justin said, and his head moved in a quick, hurt jerk. “With us,” but I saw Abby’s fast blink as she realized: the baby.

“You were going to stay.”

“Oh God, I wanted to stay,” I said, and I still don’t know and never will whether this one was a lie at all. “So much, Abby. I really did.”

After a long moment she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“I told you,” Rafe said, tipping his head back and blowing smoke at the ceiling. “Fucking Daniel. Up until last week he was still practically hysterical with paranoia about that. I told him I’d talked to you and you had no intention of going anywhere, but God forbid he should listen to anyone.”

Abby didn’t react to that, didn’t move; it looked like she wasn’t even breathing. “And now?” she asked me. “Now what?”

For a light-headed second I lost the thread, thought she had made me and was asking if I wanted to stay anyway. “What do you mean?”

“She means,” Rafe said, his voice cool and clipped and very level, “when this conversation is over, are you going to phone Mackey or O’Neill or the village idiots and turn us in. Shop us. Rat us out. Whatever the appropriate expression is, in these circumstances.”

You’d think this would have sent guilt shooting through me like pins and needles, spreading from that mike red-hot against my skin, but the only thing I felt was sad: a huge, final, dragging sadness, like an ebb tide down in my bones. “I’m not going to say anything to anyone,” I said, and felt Frank, off in his little humming circle of electronics, approve. “I don’t want you guys going to jail. No matter what happened.”

“Well,” Abby said softly, almost to herself. She sat back in her chair and smoothed her skirt, absently, with both hands. “Well, then…”

“Well, then,” Rafe said, and drew hard on his smoke, “we made this whole thing an awful lot more complicated than it needed to be. Somehow, I’m not surprised.”

“Then what?” I said. “After the note. Then what happened?”

A small, tense shift through the room. None of them were looking at each other. I searched for some tiny difference between their faces, anything that would hint that this conversation was hitting one of them harder than the others, that someone was protecting, being protected, guilty, defensive: nothing.

“Then,” Abby said, on a big breath. “Lex, I don’t know if you’d thought about what it would mean, if you sold your share to Ned. You don’t always… I don’t know. Think things through.”

A vicious snort from Rafe. “That’s putting it mildly. My God, Lexie, what the hell did you think would happen? You’d sell up, buy yourself a nice little apartment somewhere, and everything would be just ducky? What did you expect to get when you walked into college every morning? Hugs and kisses and your sandwich all ready for you? We would never have spoken to you again. We would have hated your guts.”

“Ned would have been at the rest of us,” Abby said, “all the time, every day, to sell out to some developer and turn this house into apartments or a golf club or whatever the hell it was that he wanted. He could have moved in here, lived with us, and there would’ve been nothing we could do about it. Sooner or later, we would have given up. We would have lost the house. This house.”

Something stirred, subtle and waking: a tiny ripple in the walls, a creak of floorboards upstairs, a draft spinning down the stairwell.

“We all started shouting,” Justin said, low. “Screaming, everyone at once—I don’t even know what I was saying. You got away from Daniel, and Rafe grabbed you, and you hit him—hard, Lexie, you punched him in the stomach—”

“It was a fight,” Rafe said. “We can call it whatever we want, but the fact is we were fighting like a bunch of scumbags on a street corner. Another thirty seconds and we would all have been rolling around on the kitchen floor beating the living shit out of each other. Except that before we got that far—”

“Except,” Abby said, her voice slicing his off clean as a slammed door, “we never got that far.”

She met Rafe’s eyes calmly, unblinking. After a second he shrugged and slumped back on the sofa, one foot jiggling restlessly.

“It could have been any of us,” Abby said, to me or to Rafe, I couldn’t tell. There was a depth of passion in her voice that startled me. “We were all raging—I’ve never been that angry in my life. The rest was just chance; just the way things happened. Every one of us was ready to kill you, Lexie, and you can’t blame us.”

That stirring again, somewhere off the far edge of my hearing: a whisk across the landing, a humming in the chimneys. “I don’t,” I said. I wondered—I should have known a whole lot better, I must have read too many cheesy ghost stories as a kid—if this was all Lexie had wanted from me: to let them know it was OK. “You had every right to be mad. Even afterwards, you would’ve had every right to throw me out.”

“We talked about it,” Abby said. Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Me and Daniel. Whether we could all still live together, after… But it would have been complicated, and anyway, it was you. No matter what, it was still you.”

“The next thing I remember,” Justin said, very quietly, “is the back door slamming and this knife lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. With blood on it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening.”

“And you just let me go?” I said, to my hands. “You didn’t even bother to find out if—”

“No,” said Abby, leaning forwards, trying to catch my eye. “No, Lex. Of course we bothered. It took us all a minute to catch up with what had happened, but the second we did… It was Daniel, mostly; the rest of us were basically paralyzed. By the time I could move again, he was already getting the torch out. He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages ready—”

“Which would have come in useful,” Rafe said, lighting another cigarette, “if we’d been delivering a baby in Gone With the Wind. What on earth was he picturing? Home surgery on the kitchen table with Abby’s embroidery needle?”

“—and he and Justin went looking for you. Straight away.”

It had been a good call. Daniel had known he could trust Abby to keep it together; if anyone flaked out, it would be Rafe or Justin. He had got them separated, put them both under supervision and come up with a plan that kept them both busy, all within seconds. The guy was wasted on academia.

“I’m not sure we were really as quick off the mark as we think,” Justin said. “We could have been standing there in a daze for a good five or ten minutes, for all I know. I can barely remember that part; my mind’s wiped it out. The first thing I’m clear on is that, by the time Daniel and I got to the back gate, you were gone. We didn’t know if you’d headed for the village to get help, or collapsed somewhere, or—”

“I just ran,” I said quietly. “I just remember running. I didn’t even notice I was bleeding for ages.” Justin flinched.

“I don’t think you were, at first,” Abby said gently. “There wasn’t any blood on the kitchen floor, or on the patio.”

They had checked. I wondered when, and whether that had been Daniel’s idea or Abby’s. “That was the other thing,” Justin said. “We didn’t know… well, how bad it was. You were gone so fast, we hadn’t had a chance to… We thought—I mean, I thought, anyway—since you had got out of sight so quickly, it couldn’t be all that serious, could it? It might have been just a nick, for all we knew.”

“Ha,” said Rafe, reaching for an ashtray.

“We didn’t know. It might have been. I said so to Daniel, but he just gave me a look that could have meant anything. So we… God. We started looking for you. Daniel said the most urgent thing was to find out if you’d gone to the village, but it was all locked up and dark, just the odd light on in bedrooms; there was obviously nothing going on. So we started working our way back towards the house, going back and forth in these big arcs, hoping we’d cross paths with you somewhere along the way.”

He stared down at the glass in his hands. “At least, that’s what I assume we were doing. I was just following Daniel on and on and on through this pitch-black labyrinth of lanes; I had no idea where we were, my sense of direction was completely gone. We were afraid to switch on the torch and afraid to call you—I’m not even sure why, it just seemed too dangerous: in case someone in a farmhouse noticed or in case you hid from us, I suppose, I don’t know which. So Daniel just flicked on the torch for a second every few minutes, cupped his hand around it and did a quick sweep, then switched it off again. The rest of the time we felt our way by the hedges. It was freezing, like winter—we hadn’t even thought of coats. It didn’t seem to bother Daniel, you know what he’s like, but I couldn’t feel my toes; I was sure I was getting frost-bite. We wandered around for hours—”

“You didn’t,” Rafe said. “Trust me. We were stuck here with a bottle of disinfectant and a bloody knife and nothing to do but stare at the clock and go out of our minds. You were only gone about forty-five minutes.”

Justin shrugged, a tense twitch. “Well, it felt like hours. Finally Daniel stopped dead—I bumped straight into the back of him, like something out of Laurel and Hardy—and he said, ‘This is absurd. We’ll never find her like this.’ I asked him what else he suggested we should do, but he ignored me. He just stood there, staring up at the sky like he was waiting for divine inspiration; it was starting to cloud over, but the moon had come up, I could see his profile against it. After a moment he said—perfectly normally, as if we were in the middle of some dinner-table discussion—‘Well, let’s assume she’s headed for a specific place, rather than simply wandering around in the dark. She must have been meeting Ned somewhere. Somewhere sheltered, surely; the weather’s so unpredictable. Is there anywhere nearby that she—’ And then he took off. He was running, flat out, and fast, I didn’t know he could run like that—I don’t think I’d ever seen Daniel run before, have you?”

“He ran the other night,” Rafe said, grinding out his cigarette. “After the torch-bearing villager. He’s fast, all right, when he needs to be.”

“I didn’t have a clue where he was going; all I could think about was trying to keep up. For some reason the idea of being out there by myself sent me into a complete panic—I mean, I know we were only a few hundred yards from home, but that’s not what it felt like. It felt…” Justin shivered. “It felt dangerous, ” he said. “Like something was happening, all round us, and we couldn’t see it, but if I was on my own…”

“That was shock, hon,” Abby said gently. “It’s normal.”

Justin shook his head, still staring down at his glass. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t like that.” He took a quick, hard swig of his drink and grimaced. “Then Daniel switched the torch on and swung it around—it was like a lighthouse beam, I was sure everyone for miles around would come running—and he stopped on that cottage. I only saw it for a second, just a corner of broken-down wall. Then the torch went out again, and Daniel threw himself over the wall into the field. There was all this long wet grass tangling round my ankles, it was like trying to run through porridge…” He blinked at his glass and pushed it away from him on the bookshelf; a little of his drink splashed out, staining someone’s notes with sickly orange splotches. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“You don’t smoke,” Rafe said. “You’re the good one.”

“If I have to tell this story,” said Justin, “I want a fucking cigarette.”

There was a high, precarious wobble in his voice. “Knock it off, Rafe,” Abby said. She stretched over to pass Justin her smoke packet; as he took it, she caught his hand and squeezed.

Justin lit the cigarette clumsily, holding it high up between stiff fingers, inhaled too hard and choked. No one said anything while he coughed, caught his breath, wiped his eyes with a knuckle under his glasses.

“Lexie,” Abby said. “Can’t we just… You’ve got the important part. Can’t we leave it?”

“I want to hear,” I said. I could hardly breathe.

“So do I,” said Rafe. “I’ve never heard this part either, and I’ve got a feeling it might be interesting. Aren’t you curious, Abby? Or do you already know this story?”

Abby shrugged. “All right,” said Justin. His eyes were pressed shut and his jaw was so tense he could barely get the cigarette between his lips. “I’m… Just give me a second. God.”

He took another drag, retched a little, managed to hold it. “OK,” he said. He had his voice under control again. “So we got to the cottage. There was just enough moonlight that I could see outlines—the walls, the doorway. Daniel switched on the torch, with his other hand partway over it, and…”

His eyes opened, skated away from us to the window. “You were sitting in a corner, against the wall. I shouted something—called you, maybe, I don’t know—and I started to run over to you, but Daniel grabbed my arm, hard, he hurt me, and pulled me back. He put his mouth right up against my ear and hissed, ‘Shut up,’ and then, ‘Don’t move. You stay right here. You stay still.’ He shook my arm—I had bruises—and then he let go of me and went over to you. He put his fingers on your throat, like this, checking your pulse—he had the torch on you, and you looked…”

Justin’s eyes were still on the window. “You looked like a wee girl asleep,” he said, and the grief in his voice was soft and relentless as rain. “And then Daniel said, ‘She’s dead.’ That’s what we thought, Lexie. We thought you had died.”

“You must have already been in the coma,” Abby said gently. “The cops told us it would have slowed down your heartbeat, your breathing, stuff like that. If it hadn’t been so cold—”

“Daniel straightened up,” Justin said, “and wiped his hand on the front of his shirt—I’m not sure why, it wasn’t bloody or anything, but that was all I could see: him rubbing his hand down his chest, over and over, as if he didn’t even know he was doing it. I couldn’t—I couldn’t look at you. I went to hold myself up against the wall—I mean, I was hyperventilating, I thought I was going to faint—but he said, very sharply, ‘Don’t touch anything. Put your hands in your pockets. And hold your breath for a count of ten.’ I didn’t understand what he was talking about, none of it made any sense, but I did it anyway.”

“We always do,” Rafe said, in an undertone. Abby gave him a quick glance.

“After a minute Daniel said, ‘If she had gone for her walk as usual, she would have her keys and wallet on her, and that torch she uses. One of us needs to go home and get them. The other one should stay here. It’s unlikely that anyone will pass by, at this hour, but we don’t know the full extent of her arrangements with Ned, and if someone does happen to pass, we need to know about it. Which would you prefer to do?’ ”

Justin made a tentative move to stretch out a hand to me, took it back and clasped it tightly around his other elbow. “I told him I couldn’t stay there. I’m sorry, Lexie. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have been… I mean, it was you; it was still you, even if you had been… But I couldn’t. I was—I was shaking all over, I think I must have been gibbering at him… Finally he said—and he didn’t even seem upset, not any more, just impatient—he said, ‘For heaven’s sake, shut up. I’ll stay. Get home as fast as you can. Put your gloves on and get Lexie’s keys, her wallet and her torch. Tell the others what’s happened. They’ll want to come back with you; don’t let them, whatever you do. The last thing we need is more people trampling all over the place, and anyway there’s no point in giving them more to forget. Come straight back here. Take the torch with you, but don’t use it unless you really need to, and try to be quiet. Can you remember all that?’ ”

He drew hard on the cigarette. “I said yes—I’d have said yes if he’d asked me whether I could fly home, as long as it meant getting out of there. He made me repeat it all back to him. Then he sat down on the ground, beside you—not too close, I suppose in case he got… you know. Blood on his trousers. And he looked up at me and said, ‘Well? Go on. Hurry.’

“So I went home. It was horrible. It took—well, if Rafe’s right, it can’t have actually taken that long. I don’t know. I got lost. There were places where I knew I should have been able to see the lights from the house, but I couldn’t; just black, for miles around. I knew for sure, like a fact, that the house wasn’t even there any more; there was nothing left but hedges and lanes, on and on, this huge maze and I would never get out of it, it would never be daylight again. That there were things watching me, up in the trees and hidden in the hedges—I don’t know what kind of things, but… watching me, and laughing. I was terrified. When I finally saw the house—just this faint gold glow, over the bushes—it was such a relief I almost screamed. The next thing I remember is pushing the back door open—”

“He looked like The Scream,” Rafe said, “only muddier. And he was making absolutely no sense; half what came out of his mouth was pure gibberish, like he was speaking in tongues. All we could make out was that he had to go back, and that Daniel said we should stay where we were. Personally, I thought fuck that, I wanted to go find out what the hell was going on, but when I started getting my coat, Justin and Abby both went into such hysterics that I gave up.”

“And a good thing too,” Abby said coolly. She had gone back to the doll; her hair fell across her face, hiding it, and even from across the room I could tell that her stitches were huge and sloppy and useless. “What possible use do you think you could have been?”

Rafe shrugged. “We’ll never know, will we? I know that cottage; if Justin had just told me where he was going, I could have gone instead, and he could have stayed here and pulled himself together. But apparently that’s not what Daniel had in mind.”

“Presumably he had reasons.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Rafe said. “I’m sure he did. So Justin flapped around for a bit, grabbing things and babbling at us, and then he dashed out again.”

“I don’t remember getting back to the cottage,” Justin said. “Afterwards I was absolutely covered in mud, up to my knees—maybe I fell over, I don’t know—and I had all these little scratches on my hands; I think I must have been holding onto the hedges to stay standing. Daniel was still sitting beside you; I’m not sure he’d moved since I left. He looked up at me—there was rain on his glasses—and do you know what he said? He said, ‘This rain should come in useful. If it keeps up, any blood or footprints will be gone by the time the police arrive.’ ”

Rafe moved, a sudden restless shift that made the sofa springs grate.

“I just stood there staring at him. All I heard was ‘police’ and I honestly couldn’t think what the police had to do with anything, but it terrified me just the same. He looked me up and down and then he said, ‘You’re not wearing gloves.’ ”

“With Lexie right there beside him,” Rafe said, to nobody in particular. “Lovely.”

“I’d forgotten all about the gloves. I mean, I was… well, you get the idea. Daniel sighed and got up—he didn’t even seem to be in a hurry—and wiped his glasses on his handkerchief. Then he held out the handkerchief to me and I tried to take it, I thought he meant for me to clean my glasses as well, but he whipped it away and said, sort of irritably, ‘Keys?’ So I brought them out, and he took them and wiped them off—that was when I finally figured out what the handkerchief was all about. Then he…” Justin moved in the chair, as if he was looking for something but wasn’t sure what. “Do you really not remember any of this?”

“I don’t know,” I said, giving a convulsive little shrug. I still wasn’t looking at him, except out of the corner of my eye, and it was making him nervous. “If I remembered, I wouldn’t have to ask you, would I?”

“OK. OK.” Justin pushed his glasses up his nose. “Well. Then Daniel… Your hands were sort of in your lap, and they were all… He picked one of your arms up by the sleeve, so he could get the keys into your coat pocket. Then he let go, and your arm—it just fell, Lexie, like a rag doll’s, with this awful thud… I couldn’t watch any more after that, I really couldn’t. I kept the torch on—on you, so he could see, but I turned around and looked out at the field—I hoped maybe Daniel would think I was watching in case anyone came. He said, ‘Wallet’ and then ‘torch’ and I passed them back to him, but I don’t know what he did with them—I heard scuffly noises, but I was trying not to picture…”

He took a deep, shaky breath. “It took him forever. The wind was getting up and there were noises everywhere, rustles and creaks and little skittering sounds… I don’t know how you do it, wandering around there at night. The rain was coming down harder but only in patches, there were these huge clouds blowing fast, and every time the moon came out the whole field looked alive. Maybe it was just shock, like Abby says, but I think… I don’t know. Maybe there are some places that just aren’t right. They’re not good for you. For your mind.”

He was staring somewhere in the middle of the room, eyes unfocused, remembering. I thought of that small unmistakable shot of current up the back of my neck and I wondered, for the first time, how often John Naylor had really been following me.

“Finally Daniel straightened up and said, ‘That should do it. Let’s go.’ So I turned around, and…” Justin swallowed. “I still had the torch on you. Your head had sort of fallen on one shoulder, and it was raining on you, there was rain on your face; it looked like you were crying in your sleep, like you’d had a bad dream… I couldn’t—God. I couldn’t stand the thought of just leaving you there like that. I wanted to stay with you till it got light, or at least till it stopped raining, but when I said that to Daniel he looked at me like I had lost my mind. So I told him at least, at the very least, we had to get you out of the rain. At first he said no to that, too; but when he realized that I wasn’t going to leave otherwise, that he’d have to physically drag me all the way home, he gave in. He was absolutely furious—all this stuff about how it would be my fault if we all ended up in jail—but I didn’t care. So we…”

Wetness shone on Justin’s cheek, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You were so heavy,” he said. “You’re such a little slip of a thing, I’ve picked you up a million times; I thought… But it was like dragging a huge sack of wet sand. And you were so cold, and so… your face felt like something else; like that doll. I couldn’t believe it was really you.

“We got you into that room with the roof, and I tried to make you—make it less… It was so cold. I wanted to put my cardigan over you, but I knew Daniel would do something if I tried; hit me, I don’t know. He was rubbing things off with his handkerchief—even your face, where I’d touched you, and your neck where he’d felt for… He broke off a branch from those bushes at the door, and he swept out the whole place. Footprints, I suppose. He looked… God. Grotesque. Walking backwards in that awful eerie room, hunched over with this branch, sweeping. The torch shining through his fingers, and these huge shadows swinging on the walls…”

He wiped his face, stared down at his fingertips. “I said a prayer over you, before we left. I know that’s not much, but…” His face was wet again. “May perpetual light shine upon her,” he said.

“Justin,” Abby said, gently. “She’s right here.”

Justin shook his head. “Then,” he said, “we went home.”

After a moment Rafe clicked his lighter, hard—all three of us jumped. “They showed up on the patio,” he said. “Looking like something out of Night of the Living Dead.”

“We were both practically screaming at them, trying to find out what had happened,” Abby said, “but Daniel just stared past us; he had this terrible glassy look, I don’t think he really saw us. He put out one arm to stop Justin going inside, and he said, ‘Does anyone have any washing to do?’ ”

“I don’t think any of us had the foggiest clue what he was talking about,” Rafe said. “It was not a good moment to go all cryptic. I tried to grab him, to make him tell us what the fuck had happened out there, but he jumped back and snapped, ‘Don’t touch me.’ The way he said it—I almost fell over backwards. It wasn’t that he shouted at me or anything, he was practically whispering, but his face… He didn’t look like Daniel any more; he didn’t even look human. He was snarling at me.”

“He was covered with blood,” Abby said bluntly, “and he didn’t want you to get it on yourself. And he was traumatized. You and I had it easy that night, Rafe. No”—as Rafe snorted—“we did. Would you have wanted to be in that cottage?”

“It might not have been a bad idea.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Justin said, with an edge to his voice. “Believe me. Abby’s right: you had it easy.” Rafe shrugged elaborately.

“Anyway,” said Abby, after a tense second. “Daniel took a deep breath and rubbed his hand over his forehead and said, ‘Abby, get us each a full change of clothes and a towel, please. Rafe, get me a plastic bag, a big one. Justin, take your clothes off.’ He was already unbuttoning his shirt—”

“By the time I got back with the bag, he and Justin were both standing on the patio in their boxers,” Rafe said, brushing ash off his shirt. “Not a pretty sight.”

“I was freezing,” Justin said. He sounded a lot better, now that the worst part was over: shaky, drained, released. “It was lashing rain, it was about seven million degrees below zero, the wind was like ice and we were standing on the patio in our underwear. I had no idea why we were doing this; my mind had gone numb, I was just doing whatever I was told. Daniel threw all our clothes into the bag and said something about lucky we weren’t wearing coats—I started to put my shoes in, I was trying to help, but he said, ‘No, leave those here; I’ll deal with them later.’ Sometime around then Abby got back with the towels and the clothes, and we dried off and got dressed—”

“I tried again to ask what was going on,” said Rafe, “from a safe distance this time. Justin gave me this deer-in-headlights stare and Daniel didn’t even look at me; he just tucked his shirt into his trousers and said, ‘Rafe, Abby, bring your washing, please. If you don’t have any dirty clothes, clean ones will do.’ Then he scooped up the bag in his arms and marched off into the kitchen, barefoot, with Justin tagging after him like a puppy. For some reason I actually went and got my washing.”

“He was right,” Abby said. “If the police had got there before we had the washing done, it needed to look like a normal load, not getting rid of evidence.”

Rafe gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Whatever. Daniel got the washing machine started and stood there frowning at it, like it was some fascinating mystery object. We were all in the kitchen, standing around like a bunch of spare pricks, waiting for I don’t know what; for Daniel to say something, I suppose, although—”

“All I could see was the knife,” Justin said, low. “Rafe and Abby had just left it there, on the kitchen floor—”

Rafe raised his eyes to the ceiling, jerked his head at Abby. “Yeah,” she said, “that was me. I figured we’d better not touch anything, not until the others came back and we knew what the plan was.”

“Because of course,” Rafe told me, in a drawling pseudo-undertone, “there was bound to be a plan. With Daniel, isn’t there always a plan? Isn’t it nice to know there’s a plan?”

“Abby yelled at us,” said Justin. “She shouted, ‘Where the hell is Lexie?’ In my ear. I almost fainted.”

“Daniel turned around and stared,” Rafe said, “like he had no idea who we were. Justin tried to say something and made this awful choking noise, and Daniel jumped about a mile and blinked at him. Then he said, ‘Lexie is in that ruined cottage she likes. She’s dead. I assumed Justin had told you.’ And he started putting his socks on.”

“Justin had told us,” Abby said quietly, “but I guess we had been hoping he’d got it wrong, somehow…”

A long silence. Upstairs the clock on the landing was ticking, slow and heavy. Somewhere Daniel had his foot on the accelerator and I thought I could feel him out there, coming closer every second, the dizzying speed of the road under his tyres.

"And then?” I asked. “Did you just go to bed?”

They looked at each other. Justin started to laugh, a high, helpless sound, and after a moment the others joined in.

“What?” I said.

“I don’t know what we’re laughing about,” Abby said, wiping her eyes and trying to compose herself and look stern, which sent them all into fresh spurts of giggles. “Oh, God… It wasn’t funny; really, it wasn’t. It’s just…”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Rafe said. “We played poker.”

“We did. We sat at that table—”

“—practically having heart attacks every time the rain hit the window—”

“Justin’s teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, it was like sitting next to a maraca player—”

“And when the wind did that thing with the door? And Daniel knocked his chair over?”

“Look who’s talking. About ninety percent of the time I could see every card in your hand. You’re lucky I was in no mood for cheating, I could’ve cleaned you out—”

They were talking over each other, chattering like a bunch of teenagers bursting out of some huge exam, giddy with relief. “Oh, my God,” Justin said, closing his eyes and pressing his glass against his temple. “That fucking, fucking card game. My jaw still drops when I think about it. Daniel kept saying, ‘The only reliable alibi is an actual sequence of events—’ ”

“The rest of us could barely talk in sentences,” said Rafe, “and he’s waxing philosophical about the art of the alibi. I couldn’t have said ‘reliable alibi.’ ”

“—so he made us turn all the clocks back to eleven, just before it all went horrible, and go back into the kitchen and finish the washing up, and then he made us come in here and play cards. As if nothing had happened.”

“He played your hand as well as his,” Abby told me. “The first time you had a decent hand and he had a better one, he went all in for you and then knocked you out. It was surreal.”

“And he kept narrating,” Rafe said. He stretched for the vodka bottle and topped up his glass. In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling in his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night’s dancing. “ ‘Lexie’s raising, Lexie folds, Lexie would need another drink at this point, could someone please pass her the wine…’ He was like some nutcase who sits next to you in the park and feeds bites of sandwich to his imaginary friend. Once he’d got you out of the game he made us act out this little scene, you heading off on your walk and all of us waving bye-bye to thin air… I thought we were losing our minds. I remember sitting there, in that chair, politely saying good-bye to the door and thinking very clearly and calmly, So this is what insanity feels like.”

“It must have been three in the morning by then,” Justin said, “but Daniel wouldn’t let us go to bed. We had to sit there and keep playing Texas bloody Hold-’em, to the bitter end—Daniel won, of course, he was the only one who could concentrate, but it took him forever to wipe the rest of us out. Honestly, the cops must think we’re the worst poker players in history, I was folding on flush draws and raising on a ten high… I was so exhausted I was seeing double, and it all felt like a hideous nightmare, I kept thinking I had to wake up. We hung the clothes in front of the fire to dry and the room was like something out of The Fog, clothes steaming and the fire spitting and everyone chain-smoking Daniel’s horrible unfiltered things—”

“He wouldn’t let me go get normal ones,” said Abby. “He said we all needed to stay together, and anyway the cameras at the petrol station would show what time I’d come in and it would mess everything up… He was like a general.” Rafe snorted. “He was. The rest of us were shaking so much we could barely hold our cards—”

“Justin got sick at one stage,” Rafe said through a cigarette, waving out the match. “In the kitchen sink, charmingly enough.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Justin said. “All I could think of was you, lying there in the dark, all by yourself—” He reached out and squeezed my arm. I put up a hand to cover his for a second; his was cool and bony and trembling hard.

“That was all any of us could think about,” Abby said, “but Daniel… I could see how much it was taking out of him—his face had fallen in under the cheekbones, like he’d lost a stone since dinner, and his eyes looked wrong, all huge and black—but he was so calm, as if nothing had happened. Justin started cleaning up the sink—”

“He was still gagging,” Rafe said. “I could hear him. Out of the five of us, Lexie, I think you may have had the nicest evening.”

“—but Daniel told him to leave it; he said it would skew the timeline in our minds.”

“Apparently,” Rafe informed me, “the essence of the alibi is simplicity; the fewer steps one has to omit or invent, the less likely one is to make a mistake. He kept saying, ‘As it stands, all we need to do is remember that we went from the washing up to the card game, and eliminate the intervening events from our minds. They never happened.’ In other words, get back here and play your hand, Justin. The poor bastard was green.”

Daniel had been right, about the alibi. He was good at this; too good. In that second I thought of my flat, Sam scribbling and the air outside the windows dimming to purple and me profiling the killer: someone with previous criminal experience.

Sam had run background checks on every one of them, found nothing worse than a couple of speeding tickets. I had no way of knowing what checks Frank might have run, in his private, complex, off-the-record world; how much he had found and kept to himself, and how much had slipped past even him; who, out of all the contenders, was the best secret keeper of us all.

“He wouldn’t even let us move the knife,” Justin said. “It was there the whole time we were playing cards. I had my back to the kitchen and I swear I could feel it behind me, like something out of Poe, or the Jacobeans. Rafe was across from me, and he kept doing this little jump and blink, like a tic—”

Rafe threw him an incredulous grimace. “I did not.”

“You did. You were twitching, every minute, like clockwork. It looked exactly like you had seen something terrifying over my shoulder, and every time you did it I was too afraid to turn around in case the knife was hanging there in midair, glowing or throbbing or I don’t know what—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Bloody Lady Macbeth—”

“Jesus,” I said suddenly. “The knife. Is it still—I mean, have we been eating with…” I flipped a hand vaguely towards the kitchen, then shoved a knuckle in my mouth and bit down. I wasn’t faking; the thought of every meal I’d eaten here streaked with invisible traces of Lexie’s blood did slow somersaults across my mind.

“No,” Abby said quickly. “God, no. Daniel got rid of it. After we’d all gone to bed, or anyway to our bedrooms—”

“Good night, Mary Ellen,” said Rafe. “Good night, Jim Bob. Sleep tight. Jesus.”

“—he went straight down again—I heard him on the stairs. I don’t know exactly what he did down there, but next morning the clocks were back to normal, the sink was spotless, the kitchen floor was clean—it looked like it had been scrubbed, the whole thing, not just that one patch. The shoes, Daniel’s and Justin’s that they’d left on the patio, they were in the coat closet and they were clean too—not squeaky clean, just the way we always do them—and dry, like he’d put them by the fire. The clothes were all ironed and folded, and the knife was gone.”

“What one was it?” I asked, a little shakily, around my knuckle.

“It was just one of those manky old steak knives with the wooden handles,” Abby said gently. “It’s OK, Lex. It’s gone.”

“I don’t want it to be in the house,” I said.

“I know. Me neither. I’m pretty sure Daniel got rid of it, though. I’m not positive how many we had to start with, but I heard the front door, so I figure he must have been taking it outside.”

“Where to? I don’t want it in the garden either. I don’t want it anywhere around.” My voice was shaking harder. Frank, somewhere, listening and whispering, Go girl go.

Abby shook her head. “I’m not sure. He was gone a few minutes, and I don’t think he’d have left it in the grounds, but do you want me to ask? I can tell him to move it if it’s anywhere nearby.”

I twitched one shoulder. “Whatever. Yeah, I guess. Tell him.” Daniel would never in a million years do it, but I had to go through the motions, and he would have a lot of fun leading surveillance on wild-goose chases; if things ever got that far.

“I didn’t even hear him go downstairs,” Justin said. “I was… Christ. I don’t even want to think about it. I was sitting on the edge of my bed with the lights out, rocking. All through the card game I wanted to get away so badly I could have screamed, I just wanted to be by myself, but as soon as I was, it was even worse. The house kept creaking—all that wind and rain—but I swear to God it sounded exactly like you were moving around upstairs, getting ready for bed. Once”—he swallowed, jaw muscles clenching—“once I heard you humming. ‘Black Velvet Band,’ of all things. It was that clear. I wanted to—If I look out my window I can see whether your light is on, it shines onto the lawn, and I wanted to check, just to reassure myself—oh God, I don’t mean reassure, you know what I mean—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself stand up. I was absolutely positive that if I pulled that curtain I would see your light on the grass. And then what? Then what could I do?”

He was shaking. “Justin,” Abby said gently. “It’s OK.”

Justin pressed his fingers across his mouth, hard, and took a deep breath. “Well,” he said. “Anyway. Daniel could have been thundering up and down those stairs and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

“I heard him,” Rafe said. “I think I heard every single thing for a mile around, that night; even the tiniest noise somewhere down at the bottom of the garden practically made me jump out of my skin. The joy of criminal activity is that it gives you ears like a bat’s.” He shook his smoke packet, tossed it into the fireplace—Justin opened his mouth automatically and then closed it again—and took Abby’s off the coffee table. “Some of it made for very interesting listening.”

Abby’s eyebrows went up. She stuck her needle carefully into a hem, put the doll down and gave Rafe a long cool look. “Do you really want to go there?” she inquired. “Because I can’t stop you, but if I were you I’d think very, very hard before I opened that particular Pandora’s box.”

There was a long, fizzing silence. Abby folded her hands in her lap and watched Rafe calmly.

“I was drunk,” Rafe said, suddenly and sharply, into the silence. “Banjoed.”

After a second Justin said, to the coffee table, “You weren’t that drunk.”

“I was. I was legless. I don’t think I’ve ever been that drunk in my life.”

“No you weren’t. If you had been that drunk—”

“We had all been drinking pretty solidly for most of the night,” Abby said evenly, cutting him off. “Not surprisingly. It didn’t help; I don’t think any of us got much sleep. The next morning was pure nightmare. We were so upset and wrecked and hungover that we were practically dizzy, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t even see straight. We couldn’t decide whether to call the cops and report you missing, or what. Rafe and Justin wanted to do it—”

“Rather than leave you lying in a rat-infested hovel till some local yokel happened to stumble on you,” Rafe said through a cigarette, shaking Abby’s lighter. “Call us crazy.”

“—but Daniel said it would look weird; you were old enough to go for an early-morning walk or even skive off college for the day if you wanted to. He phoned your mobile—it was right there in the kitchen, obviously, but still, he figured there should be a call on it.”

“He made us have breakfast,” Justin said.

“Justin managed to get as far as the bathroom, that time,” said Rafe.

“We couldn’t stop fighting,” Abby said. She had picked up the doll again and was methodically, unconsciously plaiting its hair, over and over. “Whether we had to eat breakfast, whether to call the cops, whether we should leave for college like normal or wait for you to come back—I mean, the natural thing would have been for Daniel or Justin to wait for you while the rest of us headed in, but we couldn’t do it. The thought of splitting up—I don’t know if I can explain it, how badly that idea freaked us out. We were ready to kill each other—Rafe and I were screaming at each other, actually screaming—but the second someone suggested doing separate stuff, I literally went weak at the knees.”

“Do you know what I thought?” Justin said, very quietly. “I was standing there, listening to you three argue and looking out the window waiting for the police or someone to come, and I realized: it could be days. It could be weeks; this could go on for weeks, the waiting. Lexie could be there for… I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I could get through that day at college, never mind weeks. And I thought what we should really do was stop fighting and get a duvet and curl up under it, all four of us together, and turn the gas on. That was what I wanted to do.”

“We don’t even have gas,” Rafe snapped. “Don’t be such a bloody drama queen.”

“I think that was on all our minds—what we would do if you weren’t found right away—but nobody wanted to mention it,” Abby said. “It was actually a huge relief when the police showed up. Justin saw them first, out the window; he said, ‘Someone’s here,’ and we all froze, right in the middle of yelling at each other. Rafe and I started to go for the window, but Daniel said, ‘Everyone sit down. Now.’ So we all sat at the kitchen table, like we had just finished breakfast, and waited for the bell to ring.”

“Daniel answered it,” Rafe said, “of course. He was cool as ice. I could hear him out in the hall: Yes, Alexandra Madison lives here, and no we haven’t seen her since last night, and no there’s been no argument, and no we’re not worried about her, just unsure whether she’s coming to college today, and is there a problem, Officers, and this note of concern gradually seeping into his voice… He was perfect. It was absolutely terrifying.”

Abby’s eyebrows went up. “Would you have preferred him to be a babbling mess?” she inquired. “What do you think would have happened if you had answered that door?”

Rafe shrugged. He had started fiddling with the cards again.

“In the end,” Abby said, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, “I realized we could go out there—actually, it would look weird if we didn’t. It was Mackey and O’Neill—Mackey was leaning up against the wall and O’Neill was taking notes—and they scared the living shit out of me. The plain clothes, these expressions that told you absolutely nothing, the way they talked—like there was no hurry, they could take all the time they wanted… I’d been expecting those two eejits from Rathowen, and it was obvious straight away that these guys were not the same thing at all. They were so much smarter and so, so much more dangerous. I’d been thinking the worst was over, nothing could ever be as bad as that night. When I saw those two, that was when it hit me that this was only just beginning.”

“They were cruel,” Justin said suddenly. “Horribly, horribly cruel. They stretched it out forever, before they told us. We kept asking what had happened, and they just stared at us with these smug blank faces and wouldn’t give a straight answer—”

“ ‘What makes you think something might have happened to her?’ ” Rafe put in, doing a viciously accurate send—up of Frank’s lazy Dublin. “ ‘Did someone have a reason to hurt her? Was she afraid of someone?’ ”

“—and even when they did, the bastards didn’t tell us you were alive. Mackey just said something like, ‘She was found a few hours ago, not far from here. Sometime last night, she was stabbed.’ He deliberately made it sound like you were dead.”

“Daniel was the only one who kept his head,” Abby said. “I was about a second from bursting into tears; I’d been holding it back all morning in case it made my eyes look funny, and it was such a relief to finally be allowed to know what had happened… But Daniel said straight off, like a shot, ‘Is she alive?’ ”

“And they just left it,” Justin said. “They didn’t say a word, for what felt like forever; just stood there watching us, and waiting. I told you they were cruel.”

“Finally,” Rafe said, “Mackey shrugged and said, ‘Barely.’ It was like all of our heads had exploded. I mean, we had been primed for… well, the worst; we just wanted to get it over with, so we could go have our nervous breakdowns in peace. We were not ready for this. God knows what we might have come out with—we could have blown the whole thing right there—except that Abby, with impeccable timing, threw a fainting fit. I’ve been meaning to ask you, actually, was that real? Or was it all part of the plan?”

“Very little of this was part of anyone’s plan,” Abby said tartly, “and I did not faint. I got dizzy for a second. If you remember, I hadn’t had a lot of sleep.” Rafe laughed, nastily.

“Everyone jumped to catch her and sit her down and get water,” said Justin, “and by the time she was all right, we had pulled ourselves together—”

“Oh, we had, had we?” Rafe inquired, eyebrows going up. “You were still standing there opening and shutting your mouth like a goldfish. I was so terrified you would say something idiotic, I was babbling, the cops must have thought I was a total moron: where did you find her, where is she, when can we see her… Not that they answered, but at least I tried.”

“I did my best,” said Justin. His voice was rising; he was starting to get upset again. “It was easy for you, getting your head around it: oh, she’s alive, isn’t that lovely. You weren’t there. You weren’t remembering that awful cottage—”

“Where, as far as I can see, you were about as much use as tits on a bull. Again.”

“You’re drunk,” Abby said coldly.

“Do you know,” Rafe said, like a kid pleased at shocking the grown-ups, “I think I am. And I think I might just keep getting drunker. Unless anyone has a problem with that?”

No one answered. He stretched for the bottle, eyes sliding sideways to me: “You missed some night, Lexie. If you were wondering why Abby thinks everything Daniel says is the Word of God—”

Abby didn’t move. “I’ve warned you once, Rafe. This is twice. You don’t get a third chance.”

After a moment Rafe shrugged and buried his face in his glass. In the silence I realized Justin had flushed deep red, right up to his hairline.

“The next few days,” Abby said, “were pure hell. They told us you were in intensive care in a coma, the doctors weren’t sure whether you were going to make it, but they wouldn’t let us go see you—even getting them to tell us how you were doing was like pulling teeth. The most we could get out of them was that you weren’t dead yet, which wasn’t exactly comforting.”

“The place was swarming with cops,” said Rafe. “Cops searching your room, searching the lanes, pulling out bits of the carpet… They interviewed us so many times that I started repeating myself, I couldn’t remember what I’d already said to who. Even when they weren’t there, we were on guard all the time—Daniel said they couldn’t bug the house, not legally, but Mackey doesn’t strike me as the type to worry too much about technicalities; and anyway, having cops is like having rats, or fleas, or something. Even when you can’t see them, you can feel them somewhere, crawling.”

“It was awful,” Abby said. “And Rafe can bitch all he wants about that poker game, but it’s a damn good thing Daniel made us do it. If I’d even thought about it before, I would’ve figured giving an alibi took about five minutes: I was here, everyone else says the same thing, the end. But the cops grilled us for hours, over and over, about every single tiny detail—what time did you start the game? Who sat where? How much money did you each start with? Who dealt first? Were you drinking? Who drank what? Which ashtray were you using?”

“And they kept trying to trap us,” Justin said. He reached for the bottle; his hand shook, just a little. “I’d give a perfectly simple answer—we started playing around quarter past eleven, that kind of thing—and Mackey or O’Neill or whoever it was that day would get this worried look and say, ‘Are you sure about that? Because I think one of your friends said it was at quarter past ten,’ and start rummaging through notes, and I would just freeze. I mean, I didn’t know whether one of the others had made a mistake—it would have been easy to do, we were all such a mess we could barely think straight—and whether I should back them up, say, ‘Oh, that’s right, I must have got mixed up,’ or something. In the end I always stuck to the story, which turned out to be the right thing to do—nobody had made any mistakes, the cops were just bluffing—but that was sheer luck: I was too paralyzed with terror to do anything else. If it had gone on any longer, I think we would all have lost our minds.”

“And all for what?” Rafe demanded. He sat up suddenly, almost spilling the cards off his lap, and plucked his cigarette out of the ashtray. “Here’s the part that still amazes me: we took Daniel’s word for it. He has all the medical knowledge of a cheese soufflé, but he told us Lexie was dead and we just assumed he was right. Why do we always believe him?”

“Habit,” said Abby. “He usually is right.”

“You think so?” Rafe asked. He was lounging back against the arm of the sofa again, but there was an edge to his voice, something dangerous and spiraling. “He certainly wasn’t right this time. We could have simply phoned for an ambulance like normal people and everything would have been fine. Lexie would never press charges or whatever they call it, and if any of us had thought about it for a single second, we’d have known that. But no, we let Daniel call all the shots; we had to sit here having the Mad Hatter’s tea party—”

“He didn’t know everything would be fine,” Abby said sharply. “What do you think he should have done? He thought Lexie was dead, Rafe.”

Rafe shrugged, one-shouldered. “So he says.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying. Remember when that wanker showed up to tell us she was out of the coma? The three of us,” he told me, “we were so relieved we almost collapsed; I thought Justin was actually going to faint.”

“Thank you for that, Rafe,” Justin said, reaching for the bottle.

“But did Daniel look relieved to you? Like hell he did. He looked like someone had hit him in the gut with a bat. Even the cop noticed, for God’s sake. Remember?” Abby shrugged coldly and bent her head over the doll, fumbled for her needle.

“Hey,” I said, kicking the sofa to get Rafe’s attention. “I don’t remember. What happened?”

“It was that prat Mackey,” Rafe said. He took the vodka bottle from Justin and topped up his glass, not bothering with tonic. “Bright and early on the Monday morning, he’s at the door, telling us he’s got news and asking if he can come in. Personally I would have told him to fuck himself, I’d seen enough cops that weekend to last me a lifetime, but Daniel answered the door and he had this crackpot theory that we shouldn’t do anything that might antagonize the police—I mean, Mackey was already antagonized, he hated us all on sight, what was the point of cozying up to him?—so he let him in. I came out of my room to see what the story was, and Justin and Abby were coming out of the kitchen, and Mackey stood there in the hall looking round at us all and said, ‘Your friend’s going to make it. She’s awake and asking for breakfast.’ ”

“And we were all overjoyed,” Abby said. She had found the needle and was stabbing at the doll’s dress with short, angry stitches.

“Well,” Rafe said. “Some of us were. Justin was clutching onto the door handle grinning like an idiot and sagging as if his knees had gone out from under him, and Abby started laughing and jumped on him and gave him this huge hug, and I think I made some kind of weird whooping noise. But Daniel… he just stood there. He looked—”

“He looked young,” Justin said suddenly. “He looked really young and really scared.”

“You,” Abby told him sharply, “were in no state to notice anything.”

“I was. I was looking at him specifically. He was so white he looked sick.”

“Then he turned round and walked in here,” Rafe said, “and leaned on the window frame, looking out at the garden. Not a word. Mackey gave the rest of us the eyebrow and asked, ‘What’s up with your mate? Isn’t he pleased?’ ”

Frank had never mentioned any of this. I should have been annoyed—he was one to talk about playing dirty—but he seemed like some half-forgotten person from another world, a million miles away.

“Abby disentangled herself from Justin and said something about Daniel being all emotional—”

“Which he was,” Abby said, and bit off a thread with a snap.

“—but Mackey just smiled this cynical little smirk and then left. As soon as I was sure he was actually gone—he’s the type who would hang around eavesdropping in shrubberies—I went in to Daniel and asked him what the fuck his problem was. He was still at the window, he hadn’t moved. He pushed his hair off his face—he was sweating—and he said, ‘There isn’t a problem. He’s lying, of course; I should have realized that immediately, but he caught me off guard.’ I just stared at him. I thought he had finally lost it.”

“Or you have,” Abby said crisply. “I don’t remember any of this.”

“You and Justin were busy dancing around hugging each other and making squeaky noises, like a pair of Teletubbies. Daniel gave me this irritated look and said, ‘Don’t be naďve, Rafe. If Mackey were telling the truth, do you honestly believe that would be unadulterated good news? Hasn’t it even occurred to you just how serious the consequences could have been?’ ”

He took a long swallow of his drink. “You tell me, Abby. Does that sound overjoyed to you?”

“Jesus Christ, Rafe,” Abby said. She was sitting up straight, eyes snapping: she was getting angry. “What are you babbling about? Are you losing your mind? Nobody wanted Lexie to die.”

“You didn’t, I didn’t, Justin didn’t. Maybe Daniel didn’t. All I’m saying is that I’ve got no way of knowing what he felt when he checked Lexie’s pulse; I wasn’t there. And I can’t swear I know what he’d have done if he realized she was alive. Can you, Abby? After these last few weeks, can you swear, hand on heart, that you’re absolutely positive what Daniel would have done?”

Something cold slipped across the back of my neck, riffled the curtains, spiraled off to nose delicately in corners. All Cooper and the Bureau had been able to tell us was that she had been moved after she died; not how long after. For at least twenty minutes they had been alone together in the cottage, Lexie and Daniel. I thought of her fists, clenched tight—extreme emotional stress, Cooper had said—and then of Daniel sitting quietly beside her, carefully tapping ash into his smoke packet, droplets of soft rain catching in his dark hair. If there had been anything more than that—a hand twitching, a gasp; wide brown eyes staring up at him, a whisper almost too faint to hear—no one would ever know.

Long night wind sweeping across the hillside, owl calls fading. The other thing Cooper had said: doctors could have saved her.

Daniel could have made Justin stay in the cottage, if he had really wanted to. It would have been the logical thing to do. The one who stayed had nothing to do, if Lexie was dead, except keep still and not touch anything; the one who went back to the house had to break the news to the others, find the wallet and the keys and the Maglite, stay calm and work fast. Daniel had sent Justin, who could barely stand up.

“Right up until the night before you came home,” Rafe told me, “he insisted you were dead. According to him, the cops were just bluffing, claiming you were alive so we’d think you were talking to them. He said all we had to do was keep our heads and they’d back down sooner or later, they’d come up with some story about how you’d relapsed and died in hospital. It wasn’t until Mackey phoned to ask if he could drop you off the next day, if we’d be home—that was when it hit Daniel that, duh, there might not actually be some huge conspiracy going on; this might actually be as simple as it looked. Lightbulb moment.”

He took another big swig of his drink. “Overjoyed, my shiny white arse. I’ll tell you what he was: he was petrified. All he could think about was whether Lexie had really lost her memory or whether she’d just said that to the cops, and what she might do about it once she got home.”

“So?” Abby demanded. “Big deal. We were all worried about that, if we’re honest. Why not? If she did remember, she’d have had every right to be raging with the lot of us. That evening you came home, Lex, we’d been like a bunch of cats on hot bricks all day. Once we realized you weren’t angry or anything, we were OK—but when you got out of that cop car… Jesus. I thought my head was going to explode.” For one last second, I saw them again the way I had that evening: a golden apparition on the front steps, shining and poised like young warriors stepped out of some lost myth, heads lifted, too bright to be real.

“Worried,” Rafe said, “yes. But Daniel was a lot more than worried. He was so hysterically nervous that it was making me nervous too. Finally I cornered him—I had to sneak up to his room late at night, like we were having an affair or something; he was bloody careful not to let me get him alone—and I asked him what the hell was up. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘We have to accept the fact that this may not be over so easily. I think I have a plan that should cover all eventualities, but a few of the details are still unclear. Try not to worry about it for the moment; it may never come to that.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“Not being a mind reader,” Abby said crisply, “I haven’t a clue. I assume he was trying to reassure you.”

A dark lane and a tiny click, and that note in Daniel’s voice: focused, absorbed, so calm. I could feel my hair lifting. It had never occurred to me, not once, that the gun might not have been pointing at Naylor.

Rafe snorted. “Oh, please. Daniel didn’t give a damn about how any of us felt—including Lexie. All he cared about was finding out whether she remembered anything and what she was going to do next. He wasn’t even subtle about it; he was blatantly pumping her for information, every chance he got. Do you remember what route you took that night, are you taking the jacket or would you rather not, oh Lexie do you want to talk about it… It made me sick.”

“He was trying to protect you, Rafe. Us.”

“I don’t need protecting, thanks very much. I’m not a bloody child. And I definitely, definitely don’t need protecting by Daniel.”

“Well, good for you,” said Abby. “Congratulations, big man. Whether you feel you needed it or not, he was doing his best. If that’s not good enough for you—”

Rafe gave a jerky, one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe he was. Like I said, I’ve got no way to know for sure. But if he was, then his best is pretty crap, for such a smart guy. These last few weeks have been hell, Abby, living hell, and they didn’t need to be. If Daniel had just listened to us, instead of doing his best… We wanted to tell you,” he said, swinging round to me. “All three of us. When we found out you were coming home.”

“We really did, Lexie,” said Justin, leaning over the arm of his chair towards me. “You don’t know how many times I almost… God. I thought I was going to explode, or disintegrate or something, if I didn’t tell you.”

“But Daniel,” Rafe said, “wouldn’t let us. And look how well that’s turned out. Look how well every single one of his ideas has turned out. Look at us; where he’s got us.” His hand flying up to all of us, to the room, bright and desperate and cracking at the seams. “None of this needed to happen. We could’ve called an ambulance, we could’ve told Lexie straight off—”

“No,” Abby said. “No. You could have called an ambulance. You could have told Lexie. Or I could have, or Justin. Don’t you dare put this all on Daniel. You’re a grown man, Rafe. Nobody held a gun to your head and made you keep your mouth shut. You did it all by yourself.”

“Maybe. But I did it because Daniel told me to, and so did you. You and I were on our own here for how long, that night? An hour? More? And the only thing you could talk about was how badly you wanted to get help. But when I said yeah, OK, let’s do it, you said no. Daniel said not to do anything. Daniel had a plan. Daniel would handle it.”

“Because I trust him. I owe him that, that much at least, and so do you. This—everything we’ve got—it’s because of Daniel. If it weren’t for him, I’d be on my own in a scary underground bedsit right this minute. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you—”

Rafe laughed, a loud, harsh, startling sound. “This fucking house,” he said. “Every time anyone hints that your precious Daniel might not be perfect, you throw the house in our faces. I’ve been keeping my mouth shut because I thought maybe you were right, maybe I owed him, but now… I’ve just about had it up to my tits with this house. Another of Daniel’s brilliant ideas, and how well has this one worked out? Justin’s a wreck, you’re six feet deep in denial, I’m drinking like my father, Lexie almost died, and most of the time we all hate one another’s guts. All because of this fucking house.”

Abby’s head came up and she stared at him. “That’s not Daniel’s fault. He just wanted—”

“Wanted what, Abby? What? Why do you think he gave us all shares in the house to start with?”

“Because,” Abby said, low and dangerous, “he cares about us. Because, right or wrong, he figured this was the best way to make sure all five of us were happy.”

I expected Rafe to laugh out loud at that, too, but he didn’t. “You know,” he said after a moment, staring down into his glass, “I thought that too, at first. I really did. That he was doing it because he loved us.” The vicious edge had fallen out of his voice; all that was left was a simple, tired melancholy. “It made me happy, thinking that. There was a time when I would’ve done anything for Daniel. Anything.”

“And then you saw the light,” Abby said. Her voice was hard and brittle, but she couldn’t keep the shake out of it. She was more upset than I’d ever seen her, more upset even than when I’d brought up the note in the jacket. “Someone who gives his best friends most of a seven-figure house is obviously doing it for purely selfish reasons. Paranoid much?”

“I thought about that. I’ve thought about this a lot, the last few weeks. I didn’t want to—God… But I couldn’t help it. Like picking at a scab.” Rafe looked up at Abby, shaking his hair out of his face; the booze was soaking in and his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, as if he’d been crying. “Say we’d all ended up in different colleges, Abby. Say we’d never met. What do you think we’d be doing now?”

“I don’t have the foggiest clue what you’re talking about.”

“We’d be OK, the four of us. Maybe we would’ve had a tough first few months, maybe it would’ve taken us a while to get to know people, but we’d have done it. I know none of us were the outgoing type, but we’d have learned. That’s what people do, in college: they learn to function in the big scary world. By now we’d have friends, social lives—”

“I wouldn’t,” Justin said, quietly and definitely. “I wouldn’t be OK. Not without you guys.”

“Yes you would, Justin. You would. You’d have a boyfriend—you too, Abby. Not just someone who shares a bed with you occasionally, when the day’s been too much to take. A boyfriend. A partner.” He gave me a sad little smile. “You, silly thing, I’m not so sure. But you’d be having a lot of fun, either way.”

“Thanks for sorting out our love lives,” Abby said coldly, “you patronizing prick. The fact that Justin doesn’t have a fella doesn’t make Daniel the Antichrist.”

Rafe didn’t rise to that, and for some reason that frightened me. “No,” he said. “But think about this for a second. If we’d never met, what do you think Daniel would be doing now?”

Abby gave him a blank stare. “Climbing the Matterhorn. Running for office. Living right here. How the hell do I know?”

“Can you see him going to the Freshers’ Ball? Joining college societies? Chatting up some girl in American Poetry class? Seriously, Abby. I’m asking. Can you?”

“I don’t know. It’s all if, Rafe. If doesn’t mean anything. I’ve got no idea what would have happened if everything had gone differently, because I’m not bloody clairvoyant, and neither are you.”

“Maybe not,” Rafe said, “but I know this much. Daniel would never, no matter what, never have learned how to deal with the outside world. I don’t know if he was born this way or if he was dropped on his head as a baby or what, but he’s just not capable of living a normal human life.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Daniel,” Abby said, cold fine syllables like chips of ice splintering. “Nothing.”

“There is, Abby. I love him—yes, I do, I still do—but there’s always been something wrong with him. Always. You have to know that.”

“He’s right,” Justin said, softly. “There has. I never told you, but back when we first met, back in first year—”

“Shut up,” Abby snapped viciously, whirling on him. “You shut your mouth. What makes you any different? If Daniel’s fucked up, then you’re just as fucked up as he is, and you, Rafe—”

“No,” Rafe said. He stared down at his finger tracing patterns in the condensation on his glass. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The rest of us—when we want to, we can hold conversations with other people, for God’s sake. I picked up a girl, the other night. Your tutorial brats love you. Justin flirts with that blond guy who works in the library—you do, Justin, I’ve seen you; Lexie had a laugh with the people in that awful café. We can connect with the rest of the world, if we put in the effort. But Daniel… There are only four people on the planet who don’t think he’s a full-on freak show, and all four of them are in this room. We’d have been OK without him, one way or another, but he wouldn’t have been OK without us. If it weren’t for us, Daniel would be lonelier than God.”

“So?” Abby demanded, after a long second. “So what?”

“So,” Rafe said, “if you ask me, that’s why he gave us shares in the house. Not to make our lives all sunshiny. To have company, here in his private universe. To keep us, for good.”

“You,” Abby said. She was breathless. “You nasty-minded little piece of work. Where you get the sheer brass neck—”

“It was never us he was protecting, Abby. Never. It was this: his own ready-made little world. Tell me this: why did you ride in to the cop shop with Daniel, this morning? Why didn’t you want him to be alone with Lexie?”

“I didn’t want to be anywhere near you. The way you’ve been acting, you make me sick—”

“Bullshit. What do you think he was going to do to Lexie, if she even hinted that she might still sell up, or talk to the cops? You keep saying I could have told her any time, but what do you think Daniel would have done to me, if he thought I was going to step out of line? He had a plan, Abby. He told me he had a plan to cover all eventualities. What the hell do you think his plan was?”

Justin gasped, a terrified, childlike sound. The light in the room had changed; the air had tilted, pressure shifting, all those little eddies gathering themselves together and whirling around some huge focal point.

Daniel filled the doorway, tall and unmoving, hands in the pockets of his long dark coat. “All I ever wanted,” he said quietly, “was here in this house.”