The Likeness

4

Frank and I spent the next week developing Lexie Madison Version 3.0. During the day he pumped people for information about her, her routine, her moods, her relationships; then he came over to my flat and spent the night hammering the day’s crop into my head. I’d forgotten how good at this he was, how systematic and thorough, and how fast he expected me to keep up. Sunday evening, before we left the squad room, he handed me Lexie’s weekly schedule and a sheaf of photocopies of her thesis material. On Monday he had a thick file of her KAs—known associates—complete with photos and voice recordings and background info and smart-arsed commentary, for me to memorize. On Tuesday he brought an aerial map of the Glenskehy area, made me go over every detail till I could draw it from memory, gradually worked his way inwards till we got to floor plans and photos of Whitethorn House. This stuff had taken time to get together. Frank, the fucker, had known long before Sunday night that I was going to say yes.

We watched the phone videos again and again, Frank hitting Pause every few seconds to snap his fingers at some detail: “See that? How her head tilts to the right when she laughs? Show me that angle… See the way she looks at Rafe, and there, at Justin? She’s flirting with them. Daniel and Abby, she looks at straight on; the two lads, it’s sideways and up. Remember that… See her with the cigarette? She doesn’t tuck it into the right-hand side of her mouth, the way you do. Her hand crosses over, and the smoke goes in on the left. Let’s see you do it… See that? Justin starts getting all worked up about the mildew, and straightaway there’s that little glance between Abby and Lexie, and they start talking about the pretty tiles to take his mind off it. There’s an understanding there…” I watched those clips so many times that when I finally went to sleep—five in the morning, mostly, Frank sprawled on the sofa in all his clothes—they slid through my dreams, a constant undercurrent, tugging: the brusque cut of Daniel’s voice against Justin’s light obbligato, the patterns of the wallpaper, the rich tumble of Abby’s laugh.

They lived with a kind of ceremony that startled me. My student life was spur-of-the-moment house parties, frantic bursts of all-night study and non-meals involving crisp sandwiches at weird hours. But this lot: the girls made breakfast at half past seven every morning, they were in college around ten—Daniel and Justin had cars, so they drove the others—whether they had tutorials to give or not, home around half past six and the guys made dinner. On weekends they worked on the house; occasionally, if the weather was good, they took a picnic somewhere. Even their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool. They didn’t own a TV, never mind a computer—Daniel and Justin shared a manual typewriter, the other three were in enough contact with the twenty-first century to use the computers in college. They were like spies from another planet who had got their research wrong and wound up reading Edith Wharton and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie. Frank had to look up piquet on the internet and teach me to play.

All this stuff, of course, got right up Frank’s nose and inspired him to more and more creative flights of bitchery (“I’m thinking this is some weird cult that believes technology is the work of Satan and chants to house plants at the full moon. Don’t worry, if they start gearing up for an orgy, I’ll get you out; by the looks of them, it’s not like you’d enjoy it. Who the hell doesn’t have a television?”). I didn’t tell him this, but the more I thought about it, the less bizarre their lives seemed and the more they enchanted me. Dublin goes fast, these days, fast and jam-packed and jostling, everyone terrified of being left behind and forcing themselves louder and louder to make sure they don’t disappear. I had spent my time since Operation Vestal going fast too, headlong and gritted, anything not to stop, and at first the unabashed, graceful leisure of these four—embroidery, for Christ’s sake—was as shocking as a slap. I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms. That house and that life hung in my mind cool as well water, cool as the shadow under an oak tree on a hot afternoon.

During the day I practiced: Lexie’s handwriting, her walk, her accent—which luckily for me was a light old-fashioned County Dublin, probably picked up from some TV or radio talk-show host, and not all that different from my own—her inflections, her laugh. The first time I got that right—a delighted, helpless bubble of a laugh, running up the scale like a tickled kid’s—it scared the shit out of me.

Her version of Lexie Madison had been, comfortingly, a little different from mine. Way back in UCD, I played Lexie as cheerful, easygoing, sociable, happiest at the center of the action; nothing unpredictable about her, no dark edges, nothing that could make dealers or buyers see her as a risk. At the beginning, at least, Frank and I thought of her as a custom-made precision tool, built to suit our needs and do our bidding, with a very specific goal in mind. The mystery girl’s Lexie had been more mercurial, more volatile, more willful and capricious. She had come up with a Siamese kitten of a girl, all bounce and chatter and little explosions of mischief with her friends, aloof and ice cool with outsiders, and it bothered me that I couldn’t trace that thread backwards and work out what her goal had been, what job she had precision-made this new self to do.

I did consider the possibility that I was making things more complicated than they needed to be, and she had never had a goal at all; that when it came to personality, at least, she was just plain being herself. It isn’t easy, after all, wearing someone else against your skin for months on end; I should know. But the thought of taking her at face value, no pun intended, made me edgy. Something told me that underestimating this girl would be a big, big mistake.

On Tuesday evening Frank and I were sitting on my floor, eating Chinese takeaway off the banged-up wooden chest I use for a coffee table, across a sprawl of maps and photos. It was a wild night, wind slamming at the window in great irregular bursts like some mindless attacker, and we were both in a jittery mood. I had spent the day memorizing KA info and building up enough excess energy that by the time Frank arrived I was doing handstands to keep myself from shooting straight through the ceiling; Frank had come in moving fast, sweeping stuff off the table and talking nonstop while he dealt out maps and food cartons, and I was wondering—there was no point in asking—what was going on, somewhere in the hidden levels of that X-box game he calls a brain, that he wasn’t telling me.

The combination of geography and food calmed us down a little—this was probably why Frank had gone for Chinese; it’s hard to be edgy when you’re full of lemon chicken. “And here,” Frank said, maneuvering the last of his rice onto his fork with one hand and pointing with the other, “that’s the petrol station on the Rathowen road. Open from seven in the morning till three at night, mainly to sell smokes and petrol to locals who’re in no condition to be buying either one. You sometimes do cigarette runs there. Want more food?”

“God, no,” I said. I had startled myself by being starving—normally I eat like a horse, Rob used to be constantly fascinated by how much food I could put away, but Operation Vestal had sort of sidelined my appetite. “Coffee?” I had a pot already going on the cooker; Frank’s eye bags were reaching the point where they would scare small children.

“And lots of it. We’ve got work to do. Gonna be another long night, babe.”

“Surprise, surprise,” I said. “What’s Olivia think of you sleeping over at my place?”

I was fishing, and I knew from the fraction of a pause as Frank pushed his plate away that I had guessed right: undercover strikes again. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah, you did. Olivia got smart and dumped me last year. I get Holly one weekend a month and two weeks in summer. What’s your Sammy think of me sleeping over at your place?”

His eyes were cool and unblinking and he didn’t sound annoyed, just firm, but the message was clear: Back off. “He’s fine with it,” I said, getting up to check the coffee. “Anything for the job.”

“You think? The job didn’t seem to be his main priority on Sunday.”

I changed my mind: he was pissed off with me about the Olivia thing. Apologizing would only make it worse. Before I could think of anything useful to say, my buzzer rang. I managed to keep the jump down to a minimum, had a graceful Inspector Clouseau moment where I whacked myself neatly across the shin with the sofa corner on my way to the door, and caught Frank’s sharp, curious up-glance.

It was Sam. “And there’s your answer,” Frank said, grinning and hoisting himself up off the floor. “You, he’d trust anywhere, but me he’s keeping an eye on. I’ll take care of the coffee; you go canoodle.”

Sam was exhausted; I could feel it in the weight of his body when he kissed me, the way he let out his breath in something like a sigh of relief. “God, it’s good to see you,” he said; then, as he spotted Frank waving from the kitchen, “Oh.”

“Welcome to the Lexie Lab,” Frank said cheerfully. “Coffee? Sweet and sour pork? Prawn cracker?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, blinking. “I mean, no; just coffee, thanks. I won’t stay, if you’re working; I just wanted to… Are you busy?”

“You’re fine,” I told him. “We were having dinner. What’ve you eaten today?”

“I’m grand,” Sam said vaguely, dumping his holdall on the floor and struggling out of his coat. “Could I borrow you for a few minutes? If you’re not in the middle of something.”

He was asking me, but Frank said expansively, “Why not? Have a seat, have a seat,” and waved him to the futon. “Milk? Sugar?”

“No milk, two sugars,” Sam said, collapsing onto the futon. “Thanks.” I was pretty sure that he was starving, that he wasn’t going to touch anything Frank had bought, that the holdall contained all the ingredients for something a lot more evolved than lemon chicken, and that if I could just get my hands on his shoulders I could rub that tension away in five minutes flat. Going undercover was starting to seem like the easy part here.

I sat next to Sam, as close as I could get without touching. “How’s it going?” I asked.

He gave my hand a quick squeeze and reached round to his coat, draped over the back of the futon, to find his notebook. “Ah, sure, all right, I suppose. Just eliminating, mostly. Richard Doyle, your man who found the body, his alibi’s solid. We’ve ruled out all the DV files you flagged; we’re working on the rest and on your murder cases, but nothing yet.” The thought of the Murder squad combing through my files, with the rumors sizzling in their heads and my face for victim, sent a nasty little twitch down between my shoulder blades. “It doesn’t look like she used the internet at all—no internet activity under her log—in on the college computers, no MySpace page or anything like that, the e-mail address Trinity assigned her hasn’t even been used—so no leads there. And not even a sniff of any arguments in college—and the English department is mad for the old rumors. If she’d had problems with anyone, we’d have heard.”

“I hate to say I told you so,” Frank said sweetly, gathering up mugs, “but sometimes, in life, we have to do things we hate.”

“Yeah,” Sam said absently. Frank bent to hand him his coffee with a servile little flourish, and winked at me behind Sam’s back. I ignored him. One of Sam’s rules is that he doesn’t fight with anyone working the same case, but there are always people like Frank who figure he’s just too thick to notice when he’s being messed with. “So I wondered, Cassie… The thing is, eliminating could take forever, but as long as I’ve no motive and no leads, I’ve no other choice; there’s nothing to tell me where to start. I thought, if I just had some idea what I was looking for… Could you profile this for me?”

For a second I felt like the air in the room had gone dark with pure sadness, bitter and ineradicable as smoke. Every murder case I ever pulled, I had done my best to profile right here in my flat: late nights, whiskey, Rob stretched out on the sofa cat’s—cradling an elastic band and testing everything I came up with for holes. On Operation Vestal we’d brought Sam along, Sam smiling shyly at me while music and moths swirled at the windowpane, and all I could think was how happy the three of us had been, in spite of everything, and how fatally, devastatingly innocent. This prickly, crowded place-greasy smell of cold Chinese, my shin hurting like hell, Frank watching with those sidelong amused eyes—this wasn’t the same thing, it was like a mocking reflection in some creepy distorting mirror, and all I could think was, ludicrously, I want to go home.

Sam moved a sheaf of maps to one side—gingerly, glancing up at us to make sure he wasn’t messing anything up—and put down his mug. Frank scooted his arse to the very edge of the sofa, leaned his chin on his interlaced fingers and did enthralled. I kept my eyes down so they wouldn’t see the look on my face. There was a photo of Lexie on the table, half hidden under a carton of rice; Lexie up a ladder in the kitchen of Whitethorn House, wearing dungarees and a man’s shirt and an awful lot of white paint. For the first time ever, the sight of her felt good: that handcuff bite on my wrist jerking me down to earth, that cold-water slap in the face slamming everything else out of my mind. I almost reached out and pressed my hand onto the picture.

“Yeah, sure, I’ll profile,” I said. “You know I can’t give you a lot, though, right? Not on one crime.” Most of profiling is built on patterns. With a stand-alone crime, you have no way of knowing what’s pure chance and what’s a clue, stenciled in by the boundaries of your guy’s life or by the secret jagged outlines of his mind. One murder on a Wednesday evening tells you nothing very much; three more matching ones say that your guy has a window that night, and you might want to look twice when you find a suspect whose wife plays Bingo on Wednesdays. A phrase used in one rape could mean nothing; used in four, it becomes a signature that some girlfriend or wife or ex, somewhere, is going to recognize.

“Anything,” Sam said. He flipped his notebook open, pulled out his pen and leaned forwards, eyes fixed on me, ready. “Anything at all.”

“OK,” I said. I didn’t even need the file. I had spent more than enough time thinking about this, while Frank snored like a water buffalo on the sofa and my window went from black to gray to gold. “The first thing is that it’s probably a man. We can’t rule out a woman for definite—if you get a good female suspect, don’t ignore her—but statistically, stabbing’s usually a male crime. For now, we’ll go with a guy.”

Sam nodded. “That’s what I figured, too. Any ideas on what age he is?”

“This isn’t a teenager; he’s too organized and too controlled. We’re not talking about an old man, either, though. This didn’t take an athlete, but it did take a basic level of fitness—running around lanes, climbing over walls, dragging a body. I’d go with twenty-five to forty, give or take.”

“And I’m thinking,” Sam said, scribbling, “there’s local knowledge there.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Either he’s local or he’s spent an awful lot of time around Glenskehy, one way or another. He’s very comfortable in the area. He hung around for ages after the stabbing; killers who’re off their turf tend to get uneasy and split as fast as they can. And going by the maps, the place is a maze, but he managed to find her—in the dead of night, with no street lamps—after she got away from him.”

For some reason this was harder than usual. I had analyzed the living bejasus out of every fact we had, gone back over every textbook, but I couldn’t make the killer materialize. Every time I reached out for him, he streamed between my fingers like smoke and slid away over the horizon, left me staring at no silhouette except Lexie’s. I tried to tell myself profiling is like any other skill, doing a backflip, riding a bike: get out of practice and your instinct goes rusty; that doesn’t have to mean it’s gone for good.

I found my cigarettes—I think better if I have something to do with my hands. “He knows Glenskehy, all right, and he almost definitely knew our girl. For one thing, we’ve got the positioning of the body: her face was turned away, towards the wall. Any kind of focus on the victim’s face—covering it, disfiguring it, turning it away—usually means it’s personal; the killer and the victim knew each other.”

“Or,” Frank said, swinging his legs up onto the sofa and balancing his mug on his stomach, “it’s pure coincidence: that’s just the way she landed when he put her down.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But we’ve also got the fact that he found her. That cottage is well off the lane; in the dark, you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were looking for it specifically. The time lag says he wasn’t exactly hot on her trail, so I doubt he actually saw her go in there, and once she was sitting down the wall would hide her from the road. Unless she had her torch on and our guy spotted the light—and why would you switch on a torch if you were trying to hide from a homicidal maniac?—then he had to have a reason for checking there. I think he knew she liked the cottage.”

“None of that says she knew him,” Frank said. “Just that he knew her. If he’d been stalking her for a while, say, he could feel like there was a personal connection, and he’d have a good handle on her habits.”

I shook my head. “I’m not completely ruling out a stalker, but if that’s what we’re dealing with, he was at least an acquaintance of hers. She was stabbed from the front, remember. She wasn’t running away, and she wasn’t jumped from behind; they were face to face, she knew he was there, they could well have been talking for a while. And she didn’t have any defensive wounds. To me, that says she wasn’t on guard. This guy was up close and she was at ease with him, right up until the second he stabbed her. Me, I wouldn’t be all that relaxed with a complete stranger who showed up at that hour in the middle of nowhere.”

“All of which will be a lot more use,” Frank said, “just as soon as we have a clue who this girl knew, exactly.”

“Anything else I can look for?” Sam asked, ignoring him—I could see the effort. “Would you say he’s got a record?”

“He probably has some kind of criminal experience,” I said. “He did a damn good job of cleaning up after himself. There’s a good chance he’s never got caught, if he’s this careful, but maybe he learned the hard way. If you’re going through files, you could try looking for stuff like car theft, burglary, arson—something that would take cleanup skills but wouldn’t involve any direct contact with victims. No assault, including sexual assault. Judging by how crap he is at killing people, he’d had no practice being violent, or practically none.”

“He’s not that crap,” Sam said quietly. “He got the job done.”

“Barely,” I said. “Through dumb luck, more than anything. And I don’t think that’s the job he went there to do. There are elements of this crime that just don’t match up. Like I said on Sunday, the stabbing reads as unplanned, spontaneous; but everything around that moment is a whole lot more organized. Your guy knew where to find her—I don’t buy the idea that he just happened to wander into her, at midnight on some back lane in the middle of nowhere. Either he knew her routine, or they’d arranged to meet. And after the stabbing, he kept his head and he took his time: tracked her down, searched her, erased his footprints and wiped her stuff clean—and that says he wasn’t wearing gloves. Again, he wasn’t planning on a murder.”

“He was carrying a knife,” Frank pointed out. “What was he planning on, whittling?”

I shrugged. “Threatening her, maybe; scaring her, impressing her, I don’t know. But someone this thorough, if he’d gone out there intending to kill her, he wouldn’t have made such a bollocks of it. The attack came out of the blue, there had to be a moment when she was stunned by what had just happened; if he was aiming to finish her off, he could have done it. Instead, she’s the one who reacts first—she takes off running, and gets a good head start, before he can do anything about it. That makes me think he was almost as stunned as she was. I think the meeting was planned for a completely different purpose, and then something went badly wrong.”

“Why follow her?” Sam asked. “After the stabbing. Why not leg it out of there?”

“When he caught up with her,” I said, “he found out she was dead, moved her and went through her pockets. So I’m betting one of those things was his reason for going after her. He didn’t hide or display the body, and you wouldn’t spend half an hour looking for someone just to drag her a few yards for the hell of it, so moving her seems more like a side effect: he got her into shelter in order to conceal the light from a torch, or to be out of the rain, while he achieved his real goal—either to find out for sure whether she was dead, or else to search her.”

“If you’re right about him knowing her,” Sam said, “and about him not meaning to kill her, then couldn’t he have moved her because he cared about her? He felt guilty enough already, didn’t want to leave her out in the rain…”

“I thought about that. But this guy’s smart, he thinks ahead, and he was very serious about not getting caught. Moving her meant getting blood on himself, leaving more footprints, taking more time, maybe leaving hairs or fibers on her… I can’t see him taking that kind of extra risk just out of sentimentality. He had to have a solid reason. Checking whether she was dead wouldn’t take long—less time than moving her, anyway—so my best guess is that he followed her, and moved her, because he needed to search her.”

“What for?” Sam asked. “We know he wasn’t after cash.”

“I can only think of three reasons,” I said. “One is that he was checking for anything on her that might identify him—making sure she hadn’t written down the appointment in a diary, trying to delete his number off her mobile, that kind of thing.”

“She didn’t keep a diary,” Frank said, to the ceiling. “I asked the Fantastic Four.”

“And she’d left her mobile at home, on the kitchen table,” Sam said. “The housemates say that was normal; she always meant to bring it on her walks, but she mostly forgot it. We’re going through it: nothing dodgy so far.”

“He didn’t necessarily know that, though,” I said. “Or he could have been looking for something more specific. Maybe she was supposed to give him something, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind… Either he took it off the body, or she didn’t have it on her in the first place.”

“The map to the hidden treasure?” Frank inquired, helpfully. “The Crown Jewels?”

“That house is full of old bits and bobs,” Sam said. “If there was something valuable in there… Was there an inventory done, when your man inherited?”

“Ha,” Frank said. “You’ve seen it. How would anyone inventory that? Simon March’s will lists the good stuff—mostly antique furniture, a couple of paintings—but that’s all gone. The death duties were massive, anything worth more than a few quid had to go to pay them off. From what I’ve seen, all that’s left is your basic attic tat.”

“The other possibility,” I said, “is that he was looking for ID. God knows there’s enough confusion around this girl’s identity. Say he thought he was talking to me and then had doubts, or say she dropped a hint that Lexie Madison wasn’t her real name: your guy might have gone looking for ID, trying to figure out who he’d just stabbed.”

“Here’s what your scenarios have in common,” Frank said. He was lying back with his arms folded behind his head, watching us, and that glint in his eye had got cockier. “Our guy planned to meet her once, which means he might very well want to meet her again, given the chance. He didn’t plan to kill her, which means it’s highly unlikely that there’s any further danger. And he came from outside Whitethorn House.”

“Not necessarily,” Sam said. “If one of the housemates did it, he—or she—might have taken Lexie’s mobile off her body, to make sure she hadn’t called 999 or recorded anything. We know she used the video camera all the time; they could well have been worried that she’d put the attacker’s name on there.”

“Prints from the phone back yet?” I asked.

“This afternoon,” Frank said. “Lexie and Abby. Both Abby and Daniel say that Abby passed Lexie her mobile that morning, on their way out to college, and the prints back that up. Lexie’s are overlaid on Abby’s in at least two places: she touched the phone after Abby did. Nobody took that phone off Lexie’s body. It was at home on the kitchen table when she died, and any of the housemates could have found that out without needing to chase after her.”

“Or they could’ve taken her diary,” said Sam. “We’ve only their word for it that she didn’t keep one.”

Frank rolled his eyes. “If you want to play that game, we’ve only got their word for it that she even lived there. For all we know, she could have had a row with them a month ago and moved into the penthouse of the Shelbourne as the mistress of a Saudi prince, except there’s not one speck of evidence that points that way. All four of their stories match up perfectly, we haven’t caught any of them in a lie, she got stabbed outside the house—”

“What do you think?” Sam asked me, cutting Frank off. “Do they fit the profile?”

“Yeah, Cassie,” Frank said sweetly. “What do you think?”

Sam so badly wanted it to be one of them. For a moment I actually wished I could say it was, and never mind what that would do to the investigation, just to see the drained look evaporate off his face, a spark come into his eyes. “Statistically,” I said, “sure, close enough. They’re the right age, they’re local, they’re smart, they knew her—not just that: they’re the ones who knew her best, and that’s where you mostly find your killer. None of them has a record, but like I said, one of them could have done stuff we don’t know about, somewhere along the way. At first, yeah, I liked them for it. The more I hear, though…” I ran my hands through my hair and tried to figure out how to say this. “Here’s the one thing I don’t like taking their word for. Do we have any kind of independent confirmation that she normally went for these walks on her own? That none of the housemates went with her?”

“Actually,” Frank said, feeling on the floor for his smokes, “we do. There’s an English postgrad called Brenda Grealey, had the same supervisor as Lexie.” Brenda Grealey was on the KA list: large, with sticking—out gooseberry eyes, plump cheeks already beginning to droop and a lot of ginger curls. “She’s the nosy type. After the five of them moved in together, she asked Lexie if she ever got any privacy, living with all those guys. I get the feeling Brenda meant it as a double entendre, she was hoping for some kind of wild sex gossip, but apparently Lexie just gave her a blank look and said she went for solo walks every evening and that was all the privacy she needed, thanks, she didn’t hang out with people unless she liked their company. Then she walked off. I’m not sure our Brenda realized she’d been bitchslapped.”

“OK,” I said. “In that case, I really can’t see a way to make any of the housemates work. Look at how it would’ve had to play out. One of them needs to talk to Lexie in private, about something big. So, instead of going about it the inconspicuous way, bringing her for coffee in college or whatever, he goes on her walk with her, or follows her out. Either way, he’s breaking the routine—and those five are all about the routine—and telling everyone including Lexie, loud and clear, that something’s up. And then he brings along a knife. These are nice middle-class intellectuals we’ve got here—”

“She means they’re a bunch of nancy boys,” Frank informed Sam, over the click of his lighter.

“Ah, here,” Sam said, putting his pen down. “Hang on. You can’t rule them out just because they’re middle-class. How many cases have we worked where some lovely, respectable—”

“I’m not, Sam,” I said. “The killing’s not the problem. If she’d been choked to death, or had her head smashed off a wall, I’d be fine with one of them as the doer. I don’t even have a problem with the idea of one of them stabbing her, if he happened to be there with the knife in his hand. What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t have the knife on him to begin with—not unless he was actually planning to kill her, and like I said before, that doesn’t fit. I’m willing to bet serious money that those four don’t make a habit of carrying knives around; and if they just wanted to threaten someone, or convince someone, it wouldn’t even occur to them to use a knife to do it. That’s not the world they live in. When they gear up for a big fight, they prepare by thinking out debate points, not picking out knives.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, after a moment. He took a deep breath and picked up his pen again, left it hanging above the page as if he’d forgotten what he meant to write. “I suppose they do, sure.”

“Even if we go with the idea that one of them followed her,” I said, “and brought along a knife to scare her with for some reason, what did he think was going to happen next? Did he seriously expect to get away with it? They’re part of the same social circle. It’s tiny, and it’s intimate. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t agree to anything he wanted, then head straight home and tell the other three exactly what had happened. Cue shock, horror, and quite possibly—unless it’s Daniel—our knife-wielder getting thrown out of Whitethorn House. These are smart people, Sam. They couldn’t overlook something that obvious.”

“In fairness,” Frank said helpfully, switching sides—apparently he was getting bored—“smart people do stupid things all the time.”

“Not like that,” Sam said. He left his pen lying across his notebook and pressed two fingers into the corners of his eyes. “Stupid things, yeah, sure. Not things that make no sense at all.”

I had put that look on his face, and I felt like crap. “Do they do drugs?” I asked. “People on coke, say, don’t always think straight.”

Frank snorted smoke. “I doubt it,” said Sam, without looking up. “They’re straight arrows, this lot. They take a drink, all right, but from the looks of them I wouldn’t say they’d even be into the odd bit of hash, never mind the hard stuff. Our girl’s tox screen came back clean as a whistle, remember?”

The wind hurled itself up against the window with a bang and a rattle, fell away again. “Then, unless we’re missing something huge,” I said, “they just don’t add up.”

After a moment Sam said, “Yeah.” He closed his notebook carefully, clipped the pen onto it. “I’d better start looking for something huge, then.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Frank inquired. “Why do you have such a hard-on for these four?”

Sam rubbed his hands down his face and blinked hard, like he was trying to focus. “Because they’re there,” he said, after a moment. “And no one else is, at least not so’s you’d notice. Because if it’s not them, what’ve we got?”

“You’ve got that lovely profile,” Frank reminded him.

“I know,” Sam said, heavily. “And I appreciate it, Cassie; I do, honest. But right now I’ve got no one that matches it. I’ve plenty of local fellas—women as well—in the right age group, some of them have records and I’d say there’s a good few are smart and organized, but there’s no sign that any of them ever met our girl. I’ve plenty of acquaintances from college, and a few of them tick just about all the boxes, except as far as I can find out they’ve never so much as been to Glenskehy, never mind knowing their way around the place. There’s no one who matches right across the board.”

Frank arched an eyebrow. “Not to labor the point,” he said, “but that’s what Detective Maddox and I are going after.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, without looking at him. “And if I find him fast enough, you won’t need to.”

“Better get a move on,” Frank said. He was still lying back on the sofa, watching Sam through lazy, narrowed eyes across the curls of smoke. “I’m aiming to go in Sunday.”

There was a second of absolute silence; even the wind outside seemed to have skidded to a stop. Frank had never mentioned a definite date before. In the corner of my eye the maps and photos on the table twitched and crystallized, unfurling into sun-glossed leaves, rippled glass, smooth-worn stone; turning real.

“This Sunday?” I said.

“Don’t give me that gobsmacked look,” Frank told me. “You’ll be fine, babe. And think of it this way: you won’t have to look at my ugly mug any more.” Right at that moment, this actually did feel like a pretty big plus.

“Right,” Sam said. He drained his coffee in long gulps and winced. “I’d better head.” He stood up and patted vaguely at his pockets.

Sam lives on one of those creepy housing estates out in the middle of nowhere, he was dropping with fatigue and the wind was picking up again, ripping at the roof tiles. “Don’t drive all that way, Sam,” I said. “Not in this weather. Stay here. We’ll be working pretty late, but—”

“Yeah, stick around,” Frank said, spreading his arms and grinning up at him. “We can make it a pajama party. Toast marshmallows. Play Truth or Dare.”

Sam took his coat off the back of the futon and stared at it as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it. “Ah, no; I’m not going home, sure. I’ll head into the squad for a bit, pull a few records. I’ll be grand.”

“Fair enough,” Frank said cheerfully, waving good-bye. “Have fun. Be sure and ring us if you find a prime suspect.”

I walked Sam downstairs and kissed him good night at the front door and he headed doggedly off towards his car, hands in his pockets and head bent hard against the wind. Maybe it was just the blast that funneled back up the stairwell with me, but without him my flat felt colder, barer somehow, a thin sharp edge in the air. “He was leaving anyway, Frank,” I said. “You didn’t have to be such a wankstain about it.”

“Possibly not,” Frank said, swinging himself vertical and starting to stack up the Chinese cartons. “But, as far as I can tell from the phone videos, Lexie didn’t use the term ‘wankstain.’ In the relevant circumstances, she used ‘git’—occasionally ‘big smelly git’—or ‘prat’ or ‘dickhead.’ Just something to bear in mind. I’ll do the washing up if you can tell me, without peeking, how to get from the house to the cottage.”

Sam didn’t try to make me dinner again, after that. He came in and out at weird hours, slept at his own place and said nothing when he found Frank on my sofa. Mostly he stayed just long enough to give me a kiss, a bag of supplies and a fast update. There wasn’t a lot to tell. The Bureau and the floaters had combed every inch of the lanes where Lexie took her late-night walks: no blood trail, no identifiable footprints, no sign of a struggle or a hiding place—they were blaming the rain—and no weapon. Sam and Frank had called in a couple of favors to keep the media from jumping all over this one; they gave the press a carefully generic statement about an assault in Glenskehy, dropped vague hints that the victim had been taken to Wicklow Hospital, and set up discreet surveillance, but no one came looking for her, not even the housemates. The phone company came back with nothing good on Lexie’s mobile. The door-to-door turned up blank shrugs, unprovable alibis (“… and then when Winning Streak was over the wife and I went to bed”), a few snotty comments about the rich kids up at Whitethorn House, an awful lot of snotty comments about Byrne and Doherty and their sudden burst of interest in Glenskehy, and no useful info at all.

Given their relationship with the locals and their general enthusiasm level, Doherty and Byrne had been assigned to go through a bazillion hours of closed-circuit TV footage, looking for regular unexplained visitors to Glenskehy, but the cameras hadn’t been positioned with this in mind and the best they could come up with was that they were fairly sure no one had driven into or out of Glenskehy by a direct route between ten and two on the night of the murder. This made Sam start talking about the housemates again, which made Frank point out the multiple ways someone could have got to Glenskehy without being picked up on CCTV, which made Byrne get snippy about suits who swanned down from Dublin and wasted everyone’s time with pointless busywork. I got the sense that the incident room was blanketed by a dense, electric cloud of dead ends and turf wars and that nasty sinking feeling.

Frank had told the housemates that Lexie was coming home. They had sent her things: a get-well card and half a dozen Caramilk bars, pale-blue pajamas, clothes to wear home, moisturizer—that had to be Abby—two Barbara Kingsolver books, a Walkman and a pile of mix tapes. Even aside from the fact that I hadn’t seen a mix tape since I was about twenty, these were kind of hard to put your finger on—there was Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, music for late-night jukeboxes on long strange highways, in with Edith Piaf and the Guillemots and some woman called Amalia singing in throaty Portuguese. At least they were all good stuff; if there had been any Eminem on there, I would have had to pull the plug. The card said “Love” and the four names, nothing else; the briefness made it feel secretive, fizzing with messages I couldn’t read. Frank ate the Caramilks.

The official story was that the coma had knocked out Lexie’s short-term memory: she remembered nothing about the attack, very little about the days before. “Which has side benefits,” Frank pointed out. “If you fuck up some detail, you can just look upset and murmur something helpless about the coma, and everyone’ll be too embarrassed to push you.” Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had told my aunt and uncle and my friends that I was going off to do a training course—I kept it vague—and wouldn’t be around for a few weeks. Sam had smoothed over my exit from work by having a chat with Quigley, the Murder squad’s resident mistake, and telling him in confidence that I was taking a career break to finish my degree, which meant I would be covered if anyone spotted me hanging around town looking studenty. Quigley basically consists of a large arse and a large mouth, and he never liked me much. Within twenty-four hours it would be all over the grapevine that I was taking time out, probably with a few flourishes (pregnancy, psychosis, crack addiction) thrown in for good measure.

By Thursday Frank was firing questions at me: where do you sit for breakfast? where do you keep the salt? who gives you a lift into college on Wednesday mornings? what room is your supervisor’s office? If I missed one, he zeroed in on that area, worked around it from every angle he had—photos, anecdotes, phone video, audio footage of interviews—till it felt like my own set of memories and the answer rolled off my tongue automatically. Then he went back to the question barrage: where did you spend the Christmas before last? what day of the week is your turn to buy food? It was like having a human tennis-ball machine on my sofa.

I didn’t tell Sam this—it made me feel guilty, somehow—but I enjoyed that week. I like a challenge. It did occasionally occur to me that I was in a deeply weird situation and that it was only likely to get weirder. This case had a level of Möbius strip that made it hard to keep things straight: Lexies everywhere, sliding into each other at the edges till you started to lose track of which one you were talking about. Every now and then I had to catch myself back from asking Frank how she was doing.

Frank’s sister Jackie was a hairdresser, so on Friday evening he brought her over to the flat, to cut my hair. Jackie was skinny, bleached blonde and totally unimpressed by her big brother. I liked her.

“Ah, yeah, you could do with a trim all right,” she told me, giving my fringe a professional riffle with long purple nails. “How do you want it?”

“Here,” Frank said, fishing out a crime-scene shot and passing it to her. “Can you do it to match this?”

Jackie held the photo between thumb and fingertip and gave it a suspicious look. “Here,” she said. “Is your woman dead?”

“That’s confidential,” Frank said.

“Confidential, me arse. Is that your sister, love?”

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “This is Frank’s gig. I’m only getting dragged along for the ride.”

“You wouldn’t want to mind him. Here—” She took another look at the photo and held it out to Frank at arm’s length. “That’s bleeding disgusting, so it is. Would you not think of doing something decent, Francis? Sorting out the traffic, something useful like that. Took me two hours to get into town from—”

“Would you ever just cut, Jackie?” Frank demanded, raking his hair exasperatedly so that it stood up in tufts. “And stop wrecking my head?” Jackie’s eyes slid sideways to mine and we shared a tiny, mischievous, female grin.

“And remember,” Frank said belligerently, noticing, “keep your mouth shut about this. Clear? It’s crucial.”

“Ah, yeah,” Jackie said, pulling a comb and scissors out of her bag. “Crucial. Go and make us a cup of tea, will you? That’s if you don’t mind, love,” she added, to me.

Frank shook his head and stamped off to the sink. Jackie combed my hair down over my eyes and winked at me.

When she was finished I looked different. I had never had my fringe cropped that short before; it was a subtle thing, but it made my face younger and barer, gave it the big-eyed, deceptive innocence of a model’s. The longer I stared in the bathroom mirror, that night while I got ready for bed, the less it looked like me. When I hit the point where I couldn’t remember what I had looked like to begin with, I gave up, gave the mirror the finger and went to bed.

On Saturday afternoon Frank said, “I think we’re just about good to go.”

I was lying back on the sofa with my knees hooked over the arm, going through the photos of Lexie’s tutorial groups one last time and trying to look blasé about this whole thing. Frank was pacing: the closer you get to the start of an operation, the less he sits down.

“Tomorrow,” I said. The word burned in my mouth, a wild clean burn like snow, taking my breath away.

“Tomorrow afternoon—we’ll start you off with a half day, ease you into it. I’ll let the housemates know this evening, make sure they’re all there to give you a nice warm welcome. Think you’re ready?”

I couldn’t imagine what, on an operation like this, could possibly constitute “ready.” “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

“Let’s hear it once more: what’s your goal for Week One?”

“Not to get caught, mainly,” I said. “And not to get killed.”

“Not mainly; only.” Frank snapped his fingers in front of my eyes on his way past. “Hey. Concentrate. This is important.”

I put the photos down on my stomach. “I’m concentrating. What?”

“If someone’s going to suss you, it’ll be in the first few days, while you’re still finding your feet and everyone’s looking at you. So for Week One, all you do is ease your way in. This is hard work, it’ll be tiring at first, and if you overdo it you’ll start slipping—and all it takes is one slip. So go easy. Take time out if you can: go to bed early, read a book while the others play cards. If you make it to next weekend, you’ll be into the swing of things, everyone else will have got used to having you back, they’ll barely be looking at you any more, and you’ll have a lot more leeway. Until then, though, you keep your head down: no risks, no sleuthing, nothing that could raise a single eyebrow. Don’t even think about the case. I don’t care if this time next week you don’t have one single piece of useful info for me, as long as you’re still in that house. If you are, we’ll reassess and take it from there.”

“But you don’t really think I will be,” I said. “Do you?”

Frank stopped pacing and gave me a long steady look. “Would I send you in there,” he asked, “if I didn’t think it could be done?”

“Sure you would,” I said. “As long as you thought the results would be interesting either way, you wouldn’t think twice.”

He leaned back against the window frame, apparently considering that; the light was behind him and I couldn’t see his expression. “Possible,” he said, “but irrelevant. Yeah, sure, it’s dicey as all hell. You’ve known that since Day One. But it can be done, as long as you’re careful, you don’t get spooked and you don’t get impatient. Remember what I said last time, about asking questions?”

“Yep,” I said. “Play innocent and ask as many of them as you can get away with.”

“This time is different. You need to do the opposite: don’t ask anything unless you’re absolutely sure you’re not meant to know the answer already. Which means, basically, don’t ask anyone anything at all.”

“So what am I supposed to do, if I can’t ask questions?” I had been wondering about this.

Frank crossed the room fast, shoved paper off the coffee table and sat down, leaning in to me, blue eyes intent. “You keep your eyes and ears wide open. The main problem with this investigation is that we don’t have a suspect. Your job is to identify one. Remember, nothing you get will be admissible anyway, since you can’t exactly caution the suspects, so we’re not gunning for a confession or anything like that. Leave that part to me and our Sammy. We’ll make the case, if you just point us in the right direction. Find out if there’s someone out there who’s managed to stay off our radar—either someone left over from this girl’s past, or someone she took up with more recently and kept a secret. If anyone who isn’t on the KA list approaches you—by phone, in person, whatever—you play them along, find out what they’re after and what the relationship was, and get a phone number and full name if you can.”

“Right,” I said. “Your mystery man.” It sounded plausible enough, but then Frank always does. I was still pretty sure that Sam was right and his main reason for doing this wasn’t because he thought it had a snowball’s chance in hell but because it was such a dazzling, reckless, ridiculous once-off. I decided I didn’t care.

“Exactly. To go with our mystery girl. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the housemates and keep them talking. I don’t rate them as suspects—I know your Sammy has a bee in his bonnet about them, but I’m with you, they don’t add up—but I’m pretty sure there’s something they’re not telling us. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them. It might be something completely irrelevant, maybe they just cheat on their exams or make moonshine in the back garden or know who’s the daddy, but I’d like to decide for myself what’s relevant here and what’s not. They’re never going to talk to cops, but if you go at it right, there’s a good chance they’ll talk to you. Don’t worry too much about her other KAs—we’ve got nothing that points to any of them, and Sammy and I will be on them anyway—but if anyone’s acting even slightly dodgy, obviously, report back to me. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said.

“One last thing,” said Frank. He unfolded himself from the table, found our coffee mugs and took them over to the kitchen. We had got to the point where there was always, every hour of the day or night, a large pot of strong coffee keeping warm on the cooker; another week and we would probably have been eating the grounds straight from the bag with a spoon. “I’ve been meaning to have a little chat with you for a while now.”

I had felt this one coming for days. I flipped through the photos like flash cards and tried to concentrate on running the names in my head: Cillian Wall, Chloe Nelligan, Martina Lawlor… “Hit me,” I said.

Frank put the mugs down and started playing with my saltcellar, turning it carefully between his fingers. “I hate to bring this up,” he said, “but what can you do, sometimes life sucks. You’re aware that you’ve been—how shall I put this—a little jumpy lately, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said, keeping my eyes on the photos. Isabella Smythe, Brian Ryan—someone’s parents either hadn’t been thinking too clearly, or had a weird sense of humor—Mark O’Leary… “I’m aware.”

“I don’t know if it’s because of this case or if it was going on already or what, and I don’t need to know. If it’s just stage fright, it might well vanish as soon as you’re inside that door. But here’s what I wanted to say to you: if it doesn’t, don’t panic. Don’t start second-guessing yourself, or you’ll talk yourself into losing your nerve, and don’t try to hide it. Use it. There’s no reason why Lexie shouldn’t be a little shaky right now, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make that work for you. Use what you’ve got, even if it’s not necessarily what you’d have chosen. Everything’s a weapon, Cass. Everything.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. The thought of Operation Vestal actually coming in useful did something complicated inside my chest, made it hard to breathe. I knew if I blinked Frank would notice.

“Think you can do that?”

Lexie, I thought, Lexie wouldn’t tell him to mind his own business and let her mind hers, which was my main instinct here, and she sure as hell wouldn’t answer. Lexie would yawn in his face, or tell him to quit nagging and lecturing like someone’s granny, or demand ice cream. “We’re out of biscuits,” I said, stretching—the photos slid off my stomach, all over the floor. “Go get some. Lemon creams,” and then I laughed out loud at the look on Frank’s face.

Frank graciously gave me Saturday night off—heart of gold, our Frankie—so Sam and I could say our good-byes. Sam made chicken tikka for dinner; for dessert I tried an incongruous tiramisu, which turned out looking ridiculous but tasting OK. We talked about small stuff, unimportant stuff, touching hands across the table and swapping the little things that new couples pass back and forth and save like beach finds: stories from when we were kids, the dumbest things we’d done as teenagers. Lexie’s clothes, hanging on the wardrobe door, shimmered in the corner like hard sun on sand, but we didn’t mention them, not once.

After dinner we curled up on the sofa. I had lit a fire, Sam had put music on the CD player; it could have been any evening, it could have been all ours, except for those clothes and for the fast ready beat of my pulse, waiting.

“How’re you doing?” Sam asked.

I had been starting to hope we could make it through the night without talking about tomorrow, but realistically this was probably too much to ask. “OK,” I said.

“Are you nervous?”

I thought this over. This situation was totally bananas on about a dozen different levels. I probably should have been petrified. “No,” I said. “Excited.”

I felt Sam nod, against the top of my head. He was running one hand over my hair in a slow, soothing rhythm, but his chest felt rigid as a board against mine, like he was holding his breath.

“You hate this idea, don’t you?” I said.

“Yeah,” Sam said quietly. “I do.”

“Why didn’t you stop it? It’s your investigation. You could have put your foot down, any time you felt like it.”

Sam’s hand stopped still. “Do you want me to?”

“No,” I said. That, at least, I knew for sure. “No way.”

“It wouldn’t be easy, at this stage. Now that the undercover operation’s up and running, it’s Mackey’s baby; I’ve no authority there. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’ll find a way to—”

“I haven’t, Sam. Seriously. I just wondered why you gave the OK to start with.”

He shrugged. “Mackey has a point, sure: we’ve nothing else on the case. This could be the only way to solve it.”

Sam has unsolveds with his name on them, every detective has, and I was pretty sure he could survive another one, as long as he was sure the guy hadn’t been after me. “You didn’t have anything last Saturday, either,” I said, “and you were dead against it then.”

His hand started moving again, absently. “That first day,” he said, after a while. “When you came down to the scene. You were messing with Mackey, do you remember? He was slagging you about your clothes and you were slagging back, almost like the way you used to with… when you were on Murder.”

He meant with Rob. Rob was probably the closest friend I’ve ever had, but then we had this huge complicated vicious fight and that was the end of that. I twisted round and propped myself on Sam’s chest so I could see him, but he was looking up at the ceiling. “I hadn’t seen you like that in a while,” he said. “That much bounce to you.”

“I’ve probably been pretty crap company, these last few months,” I said.

He smiled, just a little. “I’m not complaining.”

I tried to remember ever hearing Sam complain about anything. “No,” I said. “I know.”

“Then Saturday,” he said. “I know we were fighting and all”—he gave me a quick squeeze, dropped a kiss on my forehead—“but still. I realized afterwards: that was because we were both really into it, this case. Because you cared. It felt…” He shook his head, looking for the words. “DV’s not the same,” he said, “is it?”

I had mostly kept my mouth shut about DV. It hadn’t occurred to me, till then, that all that silence could have been plenty revealing, in its own way. “It needs doing,” I said. “Nothing’s the same as Murder, but DV’s fine.”

Sam nodded, and for a second his arms tightened around me. “And that meeting,” he said. “Right up until then, I’d been wondering should I pull rank and tell Mackey to bugger off for himself. This started off as a murder case, I’m down as lead detective, if I said no… But the way you were talking, all interested, thinking it out… I just thought, why would I wreck that?”

I had not seen this coming. Sam has one of those faces that fool you even when you know better: a countryman’s face, all ruddy cheeks and clear gray eyes and crow’s-feet starting, so simple and open that there couldn’t possibly be anything hidden behind it. “Thanks, Sam,” I said. “Thank you.”

I felt his chest lift and fall as he sighed. “It might turn out to be a good thing, this case. You never know.”

“But you still wish this girl had picked just about anywhere else to get herself killed,” I said.

Sam thought about that for a minute, twisting a finger delicately through one of my curls. “Yeah,” he said, “I do, of course. But there’s no point in wishing. Once you’re stuck with something, all you can do is make the best of it.”

He looked down at me. He was still smiling, but there was something else, something almost sad, around his eyes. “You’ve looked happy, this week,” he said simply. “It’s nice to see you looking happy again.”

I wondered how the hell this man put up with me. “Plus you knew I would kick your arse if you started making decisions for me,” I said.

Sam grinned and flicked the end of my nose with his finger. “That too,” he said, “my little vixen,” but there was still that shadow behind his eyes.

Sunday moved fast, after those long ten days, fast as a tidal wave built to bursting point and finally crashing down. Frank was coming over at three, to wire me up and get me to Whitethorn House by half past four. All the time Sam and I were going through our Sunday-morning routine—the newspapers and leisurely cups of tea in bed, the shower, the toast and eggs and bacon—that was hanging over our heads, a huge alarm clock ticking, waiting for its moment to explode into life. Somewhere out there, the housemates were getting ready to welcome Lexie home.

After brunch, I put on the clothes. I got dressed in the bathroom; Sam was still there, and I wanted to do this in private. The clothes felt like something more: fine chain-mail armor handmade to fit me, or robes laid out ready for some fiercely secret ceremony. They made my palms tingle when I touched them.

Plain white cotton underwear with the Penney’s tags still on; faded jeans, worn soft and fraying at the hems; brown socks, brown ankle boots; a long-sleeved white T-shirt; a pale-blue suede jacket, scuffed but clean. The collar of it smelled of lilies of the valley and something else, a warm note almost too faint to catch: Lexie’s skin. In one of the pockets there was a Dunne’s Stores receipt from a few weeks back, for chicken fillets, shampoo, butter and a bottle of ginger ale.

When I was dressed I checked myself out, in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. For a second I didn’t know what I was seeing. Then, ridiculously, all I wanted was to laugh. It was the irony of it: I had spent months dressing up as Executive Barbie, and now that I was being someone else, I finally got to go to work dressed a lot like me. “You look nice,” Sam said, with a faint smile, when I came out. “Comfortable.”

My stuff was packed and waiting by the door, as if I were off on some voyage; I felt like I should be checking my passport and tickets. Frank had bought me a nice new traveling case, the hard kind, with discreet reinforcement and a solid combination lock; it would take a safecracker to get in there. Inside were Lexie’s things—wallet, keys, phone, all dead ringers for the real things; the stuff from the housemates; a plastic tub of vitamin C tablets with a pharmacist’s label that said AMOXICILLIN TABS TAKE ONE THREE TIMES DAILY, to go somewhere prominent. My gear was in a separate compartment: latex gloves, my mobile, spare battery packs for the mike, a supply of artistically stained bandages to go in the bathroom bin every morning and evening, my notebook, my ID and my new gun—Frank had got me a .38 snub-nose that felt good in my hand and was a lot easier to hide than my regulation Smith & Wesson. There was also—seriously—a girdle, the industrial-strength elastic kind that’s supposed to give you a smooth silhouette in your Little Black Dress. It’s a lot of undercovers’ version of a holster. It’s not comfortable—after an hour or two you feel like there’s a gun-shaped dent in your liver—but it does a good job of hiding the outline. Just the thought of Frank going into the Marks & Sparks lingerie department and picking it out made this whole thing worthwhile.

“You look like shite,” he said, examining me approvingly, when he arrived at the door of my flat. He was carrying a double armful of Bond-looking black electronics, cables and speakers and God knows what: the setup for the wire. “The eye bags are to die for.”

“She’s had three hours’ sleep a night,” Sam said tightly, behind me. “Same as yourself and myself. And we’re not exactly looking the best either.”

“Hey, I’m not giving her hassle,” Frank told him, heading past us and dumping the armful on the coffee table. “I’m delighted with her. She looks like she’s been in intensive care for ten days. Hi, babe.”

The mike was tiny, the size of a shirt button. It clipped onto the front of my bra, between my breasts: “Lucky our girl didn’t go in for low-cut tops,” Frank said, glancing at his watch. “Go lean over in front of the mirror, check the view.” The battery pack went where the knife wound should have been, surgical-taped to my side under a thick pad of white gauze, just an inch or two below the scar Dealer Boy had left on Lexie Madison the First. The sound quality, once Frank had done small complicated things to the equipment, was crystal clear: “Only the best for you, babe. Transmission radius is seven miles, depending on conditions. We’ve got receivers set up at Rathowen station and at the Murder squad, so you’ll be covered at home and in Trinity. The only time you’ll go out of coverage is on the drive to and from town, and I don’t anticipate anyone shoving you out of a moving car. You won’t have visual surveillance, so any visuals that we should know about, tell us. If the shit hits the fan and you need a subtle way to yell for help, say ‘My throat hurts’ and you’ll have big-time backup on the scene inside a few minutes—don’t go getting a sore throat for real, or if you do, don’t complain about it. You need to check in with me as often as possible, ideally every day.”

“And with me,” Sam said, not turning around from the sink. Frank, squatting on the floor and squinting at some dial on his receiver, didn’t even bother to throw me a mocking look.

Sam finished the washing up and started drying things too thoroughly. I sorted the Lexie material into some kind of order—that high-wire final-exam feeling, taking your hands off your notes at last, If I don’t know it now—stacked it in bundles and packed it into plastic bags, to leave in Frank’s car. “And that,” Frank said, unplugging the speakers with a flourish, “should do it. Are we good to go?”

“Ready when you are,” I said, picking up the plastic bags. Frank swept up his equipment one-armed, grabbed my case and headed for the door.

“I’ll take that,” Sam said brusquely. “You’ve enough to carry,” and he took the case from Frank’s hand and headed down the stairs, the wheels hitting each step with a hard dull thump.

On the landing Frank turned and looked back over his shoulder, waiting for me. My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone falling fast. I’d felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt’s house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it’s crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror, I don’t want to do this any more.

All you can do with that moment is bite down and wait for it to be over. The thought of what Frank would have to say, if I actually pulled out now, helped a lot. I took one more look around my flat—lights off, water heater off, bins emptied, window locked; the room was already closing in on itself, silence seeping into the spaces where we had been, drifting up like dust in the corners. Then I shut the door.