The Likeness

6

Footsteps woke me, thumping downstairs. I had been dreaming, something dark and messy, and it took me a wild second to disentangle my mind and figure out where I was. My gun wasn’t beside my bed and I was grabbing for it, starting to panic, when I remembered.

I sat up in bed. Apparently nothing had been poisoned, after all; I felt fine. The smell of a fry-up was creeping under the door, and I could hear the brisk morning rhythm of voices, somewhere far below. Shit: I had missed cooking breakfast. It had been so long since I’d managed to sleep past six, I hadn’t bothered to set Lexie’s alarm. I stuck the mike-bandage back on, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and a mammoth sweater that looked like it had belonged to one of the lads—the air was freezing—and went downstairs.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it had improved a lot since Lexie’s scary movie. They’d got rid of the mold and the cobwebs and the scummy linoleum; instead there was a flagstoned floor, a scrubbed wooden table, a pot of ragged geraniums on the windowsill behind the sink. Abby, in a red-flannel dressing gown with the hood pulled up, was flipping bacon and sausages. Daniel was at the table, fully dressed, reading a book pinned under the edge of his plate and eating fried eggs with methodical enjoyment. Justin was slicing his toast into triangles and complaining.

“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. Last week only two of them had done the reading; the rest just sat there staring and chewing gum, like a pack of cows. Are you sure you don’t want to swap, just for today? Maybe you could get more out of them—”

“No,” Daniel said, without looking up.

“But yours are doing the sonnets. I know the sonnets. I’m good at the sonnets.”

“No.”

“Morning,” I said, in the doorway.

Daniel nodded at me gravely and went back to his book. Abby waved the spatula. “Morning, you.”

“Sweetie,” Justin said. “Come here. Let me look at you. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” I said. “Sorry, Abby; I slept it out. Here, give me that—”

I reached for the spatula, but she whipped it away. “No, you’re grand; you still count as walking wounded. Tomorrow I’ll come up and haul you out of bed. Sit.”

That split second again—wounded: Daniel and Justin seemed to pause, suspended midbite. Then I sat down at the table and Justin reached for another slice of toast, and Daniel turned a page and shoved a red enamel teapot across to me.

Abby flipped three rashers and two eggs onto a plate, without asking, and came over to put it in front of me. “Oh, brrr,” she said, hurrying back to the cooker. “Jesus. Daniel, I know about you and double-glazing, but seriously, we should at least think about windows that would—”

“Double-glazing is the spawn of Satan. It’s hideous.”

“Yes, but it’s warm. If we’re not getting carpets—”

Justin was nibbling toast, chin on hand, gazing at me closely enough to make me nervous. I concentrated on my food. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked anxiously. “You look pale. You’re not going in today, are you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a full day of this, not yet. And, also, I wanted a chance to check out the house in private; I wanted that diary, or date book, or whatever it was. “I’m supposed to take it easy for another few days. That reminds me, though: what’s been happening with my tutorials?” Tutorials officially end at the Easter holidays, but there are always a few that, for whatever reason, drag on into the summer term. I had two groups left, one on Tuesdays and one on Thursdays. I wasn’t looking forward to them.

“We covered them,” Abby said, loading a plate for herself and joining us at the table, “in a manner of speaking. Daniel did Beowulf with your Thursday bunch. In the original.”

“Beautiful,” I said. “How’d they take it?”

“Not too badly, really,” Daniel said. “At first they were aghast, but eventually one or two of them came up with some intelligent comments. It was quite interesting.”

Rafe stumbled in with his hair sticking up in clumps, wearing a T-shirt and striped pajama bottoms and apparently navigating by radar. He waved at the room in general, fumbled for a mug, poured himself a lot of black coffee, snagged a triangle of Justin’s toast and wandered out again.

“Twenty minutes!” Justin yelled after him. “I’m not waiting for you!” Rafe flipped a hand backwards, over his shoulder, and kept going.

“I don’t know why you bother,” Abby said, slicing sausage. “In five minutes he won’t even remember seeing you. After the coffee. With Rafe, always after the coffee.”

“Yes, but then he moans that I haven’t given him enough time to get ready. I mean it, this time I’m leaving him behind, and if he’s late then that’s his problem. He can get a car of his own or he can walk to town, I don’t care—”

“Every morning,” Abby said to me, across Justin, who was making outraged gestures with his butter knife.

I rolled my eyes. Outside the French windows behind her head, a rabbit was nibbling the lawn, leaving little dark scatters of paw prints in the white dew.

Half an hour later, Rafe and Justin left—Justin pulled up his car in front of the house and sat there, beeping the horn and shouting inaudible threats out the window, until Rafe finally bounded into the kitchen with his coat half on and his knapsack swinging wildly from one hand, grabbed another slice of toast, shoved it between his teeth and dashed out again, slamming the front door hard enough to shake the house. Abby washed up, singing to herself in a rich contralto undertone: “The water is wide, I cannot get o’er…” Daniel smoked an unfiltered cigarette, thin plumes curling up through the pale rays of sun from the window. They’d relaxed around me; I was in.

I should have felt a lot better about this than I did. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might like these people. Daniel and Rafe, I wasn’t sure about yet, but Justin had a warmth to him that was even more endearing because it was so fussy and unpracticed, and Frank had been right about Abby: if things had been different, I would have wanted her for a friend.

They had just lost one of their own and they didn’t even know it, and there was still a chance it had been due to me; and I was sitting in their kitchen, eating their fry-up and messing with their heads. Last night’s suspicions—hemlock steak, Jesus—seemed so ridiculous and Gothic that I wanted to cringe.

“Daniel, we should start moving,” Abby said eventually, checking the clock and wiping her hands on the dish towel. “Want anything from the outside world, Lex?”

“Smokes,” I said. “I’m almost out.”

She fished a pack of Marlboro Lights out of her dressing-gown pocket and tossed it to me. “Have these. I’ll pick up more on the way in. What are you going to do all day?”

“Be a sloth on the sofa and read and eat. Are there biscuits?”

“Those vanilla cream ones you like, in the biscuit tin, and chocolate chip in the freezer.” She flipped the dish towel into a neat fold and slung it over the bar of the cooker. “You’re sure you don’t want someone to stay home with you?”

Justin had already asked me about six times. I raised my eyes to the ceiling. “Positive.”

I caught Abby’s quick glance across my head to Daniel, but he was turning a page and paying no attention to us. “Fair enough,” she said. “Don’t faint down the stairs or anything. Five minutes, Daniel?”

Daniel nodded, without looking up. Abby ran upstairs, light in her sock feet; I heard her opening and closing drawers and, after a minute, starting to sing to herself again. “I leaned my back up against an oak, I thought it was a trusty tree…”

Lexie smoked more than I did, a pack a day, and she started after breakfast. I took Daniel’s matches and lit up.

Daniel checked the page of his book, closed it and put it aside. “Should you really be smoking?” he asked. “Under the circumstances.”

“No,” I said pertly, and blew a stream of smoke across the table at him. “Should you?”

That made him smile. “You’re looking better this morning,” he said. “Last night you seemed very tired; a little lost, somehow. Which I suppose is only to be expected, but it’s nice to see your energy starting to come back.”

I made a mental note to up the boing level, gradually, over the next few days. “In the hospital they kept saying it would take a while and not to rush myself,” I said, “but they can stick it in their ear. I’m bored of being sick.”

The smile deepened. “Well, so I imagine. I’m sure you were a dream patient.” He leaned over to the cooker, tilted the coffeepot to see if there was anything left. “How much of the incident itself do you actually remember?”

He was pouring himself the last of the coffee and watching me; his face was serene, interested, untroubled. “Bugger-all,” I said. “That whole day’s gone, and bits from before. I thought the cops told you.”

“They did,” Daniel said, “but that didn’t mean it was necessarily the case. You could have had your own reasons for telling them that.”

I looked blank. “Like what?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said, replacing the coffeepot carefully on the stove. “I hope, though, that if you do remember anything and you’re unsure whether to take it to the police, you won’t feel you have to deal with it alone; you’ll come and talk to me, or to Abby. Would you do that?”

He sipped his coffee, one ankle crossed neatly over the opposite knee, watching me calmly. I was starting to see what Frank meant about these four giving away very little. This guy’s expression would have worked equally well whether he had just come from choir practice or from ax-murdering a dozen orphans. “Well, yeah, sure,” I said. “But all I remember is coming home from college on the Tuesday evening and then getting really, really sick in a bedpan, and I already told the police all that.”

“Hmm,” said Daniel. He pushed the ashtray over to my side of the table. “Memory is an odd thing. Let me ask you this: if you were to—” But just then Abby came clattering back down the stairs, still singing, and he shook his head and stood up and started patting at his pockets.

I waved from the top of the steps while Daniel pulled out of the driveway in a fast expert arc, and the car disappeared among the cherry trees. When I was sure they were gone, I shut the door and stood still in the hallway, listening to the empty house. I could feel it settling, a long whisper like shifting sand, to see what I would do now.

I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. The stair carpet had been taken off, but they hadn’t got around to doing anything instead; there was a wide unvarnished band across each step, dusty and worn down in the middle by generations of feet. I leaned against the newel post, wriggled till I got my back comfortable, and thought about that diary.

If it had been in Lexie’s room, the Bureau gang would have found it. That left the rest of the house, the whole garden, and the question of what was in there that she had wanted to hide even from her best friends. For a second I heard Frank’s voice, in the squad room: her friends close and her secrets closer.

The other possibility was that Lexie had kept it on her, that she had had it in a pocket when she died and the killer had nicked it. That would explain why he had taken the time and the risk to go after her (pulling her into cover, black darkness and his hands moving fast over her limp body, patting down pockets, glazed with rain and blood): if he needed that diary.

That fit with what I knew about Lexie—keep secrets close—but, on a more practical level, it would have had to be pretty small to go into a pocket, and she would have had to swap it over every time she changed clothes. Finding a hiding place would have been simpler and safer. Somewhere it would be safe from rain and from accidental discovery; somewhere she could be sure of privacy, even living with four people; somewhere she could go whenever she wanted, without catching anyone’s attention; not her room.

There was a toilet on the ground floor and a full bathroom on the first. I checked the jacks first, but the room was the size of a coat closet, and once I’d looked in the cistern I had basically exhausted the possibilities. The main bathroom was big: 1930s tiles with a black-and-white checked border, chipped bath, unfrosted windows with tattered net curtains. The door bolted.

Nothing in the cistern, or behind it. I sat down on the floor and pulled out the wooden panel from the side of the bath. It came easily; a scraping sound, but nothing that running water or a flush wouldn’t cover. Underneath there were cobwebs, mouse droppings, sweeps of finger marks in the dust; and, tucked in a corner, a tiny red notebook.

My breath felt like I’d been running. I didn’t like this; didn’t like how, with acres to choose from, I had come homing straight to Lexie’s hiding place as if I had no choice. Around me the house seemed to have tightened and drawn closer, leaning in over my shoulder; watching; focused.

I went up to my room—Lexie’s room—and found my gloves and a nail file. Then I sat back down on the bathroom floor and carefully, holding it by the edges, pulled out the notebook. I used the file to turn the pages. Sooner or later, the Bureau would need to fingerprint this.

I had been hoping for a pour-your-heart-out diary, but I should have known better. This was just a date book, red fake-leather cover, a page for each day. The first few months were covered with appointments and reminders in that quick, rounded writing: Lettuce, Brie, garlic salt; 11 tut Rm 3017; elec bill; ask D Ovid book?? Homey, innocuous stuff, and reading it made me edgier than anything yet. When you’re a detective you get used to invading people’s privacy in every way you can think of, I had slept in Lexie’s bed and I was wearing her clothes, but this; this was the small day-to-day debris of her life, it had been only for herself, and I had no right to it.

In the last few days of March, though, something changed. The shopping lists and tutorial timetables vanished and the pages went bare. There were only three notes, in a hard, dashed-off scribble. The last of March: 10.30 N. The fifth of April: 11.30 N. And the eleventh, two days before she died: 11 N.

No N in January or February; no mention till that appointment on the last of March. The list of Lexie’s KAs wasn’t a long one, and as far as I could remember, no one on it began with N. A nickname? A place? A café? Someone from her old life, just like Frank had said, resurfacing from nowhere and wiping the rest of her world blank?

Across the last two days of April was a list of letters and numbers, in that same furious scrawl. AMS 79, LHR 34, EDI 49, CDG 59, ALC 104. Scores from some game, sums of money she’d lent or borrowed? Abby’s initials were AMS—abigail Marie Stone—but the others didn’t match anyone on the KA list. I stared at them for a long time, but the only thing they reminded me of was the plate numbers on classic cars, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of a reason why Lexie would be car spotting or why, if she was, it would be a state secret.

Nobody had said one word about her acting tense or odd, her last few weeks. She seemed fine, every single interviewee had told Frank and Sam; she seemed happy; she seemed just like always. The last video clip was from three days before she died and it showed her clambering down a ladder from the attic, a red bandanna tied round her hair and every inch of her powdered gray with dust, sneezing and laughing and holding out something in her free hand: “No, look, Rafe, look! It’s”—explosive sneeze—“it’s opera glasses, I think they’re mother-of-pearl, aren’t they brilliant?” Whatever had been going on, she had hidden it well; too well.

The rest of the book was empty, except for the twenty-second of August: Dad’s bday.

Not a changeling or a collective hallucination, after all. She had a father, somewhere out there, and she hadn’t wanted to forget his birthday. She had kept at least one slender tie to the life where she had started out.

I went through the pages again, slower this time, looking for anything I’d missed. Towards the beginning, a few dates here and there were circled: 2 January, 29 January, 25 February. The first page had a tiny calendar for December 2004, and sure enough, there was a circle around the sixth.

Twenty-seven days apart. Lexie had been clockwork and she had kept track. By the end of March, with no circle around the twenty-fourth, she had to have suspected she was pregnant. Somewhere—not at home; at Trinity or in some café, where nobody would see the packet in the bin and wonder—she had taken a pregnancy test, and something had changed. Her date book had turned to a fierce secret, N had moved in and everything else had been stripped away.

N. An obstetrician? A clinic? The baby’s father?

“What the hell were you at, girl?” I said softly, into the empty room. There was a whisper behind me and I jumped about a mile, but it was only the breeze riffling the net curtains.

I thought about taking the date book back to my room, but in the end I figured Lexie had probably had reasons of her own for not leaving it there, and her hiding place had apparently worked fine so far. I copied the good bits into my own notebook, put hers back under the bath and slid the panel into place. Then I went over the house, getting to know the details and doing a quick, not-too-thorough search as I went. Frank would expect to hear that I’d done something useful with my day, and I already knew I wasn’t going to tell him about the date book, at least not yet.

I started at the bottom and worked my way up. If I found anything good, we were going to have a major admissibility battle on our hands. I was a resident of the house, which meant I could look in the common spaces all I wanted but the others’ rooms were basically out of bounds, and I was there under false pretenses to begin with; this is the kind of tangle that buys lawyers new Porsches. Once you know what you’re chasing, though, you can almost always find a legit way to get to it.

The house had the effortlessly off-kilter feel of something out of a storybook—I kept expecting to fall down a secret staircase, or come out of a room into a completely new corridor that only existed on alternate Mondays. I worked fast: I couldn’t make myself slow down, couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere in the attic a huge clock was counting down, great handfuls of seconds tumbling away.

On the ground floor were the double sitting room, the kitchen, the toilet and Rafe’s room. Rafe’s room was a mess—clothes piled in cardboard boxes, sticky glasses and snowdrifts of paper everywhere—but in an assured way; you could tell he usually knew where everything was, even if no one else could work it out. He had been goofing off on one wall with charcoal, dashing off quick, fairly impressive sketches for some kind of mural involving a beech tree, a red setter and a guy in a top hat. On the mantelpiece was—eureka—the Head: a porcelain phrenology bust, staring loftily out over Lexie’s red bandanna. I was starting to like Rafe.

The first floor had Abby’s room and the bathroom at the front, Justin’s and a spare room to the back—either it had been too complicated to clear out, or Rafe liked being on his own downstairs. I started with the spare. The thought of going into either of the others put a small, ridiculous nasty taste in my mouth.

Great-uncle Simon had obviously never, ever thrown anything away. The room had a schizophrenic, dreamlike look, some lost store-cupboard of the mind: three copper kettles with holes in them, a moldy top hat, a broken stick—horse giving me a Godfather leer, what appeared to be half of an accordion. I know nothing about antiques, but none of it looked valuable, definitely not valuable enough to kill for. It looked more like stuff you would leave outside the gate in the hope that drunk students on a kitsch kick would take it home.

Abby and Justin were both neat, in very different ways. Abby went in for knickknacks—a tiny alabaster vase holding a handful of violets, a lead-crystal candlestick, an old sweet tin with a picture of a red-lipped girl in improbable Egyptian getup on the lid, all shiny clean and lined up carefully on just about every flat surface—and color; the curtains were made of strips of old fabric sewn together, red damask, bluebell-sprigged cotton, frail lace, and she had glued patches of fabric over the bald spots in the faded wallpaper. The room felt cozy and quirky and a little unreal, like the den of some kids’—book wood-land creature that would wear a frilly bonnet and make jam tarts.

Justin, sort of unexpectedly, turned out to have minimalist tastes. There was a small nest of books and photocopies and scribbled pages beside his bedside table, and he had covered the back of his door with photos of the gang—arranged symmetrically, in what looked like chronological order, and covered with some kind of clear sealant—but everything else was spare and clean and functional: white bedclothes, white curtains blowing, dark wood furniture polished to a shine, neat rows of balled-up socks in the drawers and glossy shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room smelled, very faintly, of something cypressy and masculine.

There was nothing dodgy in any of the bedrooms, as far as I could see, but something about all three of them kept catching at me. It took me a while to put my finger on it. I was kneeling on Justin’s floor, checking under his bed like a burglar (nothing, not even dust bunnies), when it hit me: they felt permanent. I had never lived in a place where I could mess with the wallpaper or glue things down—my aunt and uncle wouldn’t have objected, exactly, but their house had a tiptoe atmosphere that prevented anything along those lines from even occurring to me, and all my landlords apparently had this idea that they were renting me Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest; it had taken me months to convince my current guy that property values would not plummet if I painted the walls white instead of banana-barf yellow and stuck the LSD-based carpet in the garden shed. None of this had bothered me at the time, but all of a sudden, surrounded by this houseful of happy, cavalier possessiveness—I would have loved a mural; Sam can draw—it seemed like a very strange way to live, on some stranger’s sufferance, asking permission like a little kid before I left any mark.

The top floor: my room, Daniel’s, two more spares. The one beside Daniel was full of old furniture, tumbled in splayed heaps as if an earthquake had hit: those grayish undersized chairs that never actually get used, a display cabinet that looked like the Rococo movement had thrown up on it, and just about everything in between. Bits and pieces had obviously been taken out—drag marks, bare patches—presumably to furnish the rooms when the five of them moved in. What was left was inches deep in trailing, sticky dust. The room next to mine had more wild debris (a cracked stone hot-water bottle, mud-crusted green wellies, a mouse-shredded tapestry cushion involving deer and flowers) and teetering stacks of cardboard boxes and old leather suitcases. Someone had made a start on going through this stuff, not too long ago: layers of bright finger marks on some of the suitcase lids, one even wiped semiclean, mysterious outlines in corners and on boxes where things had been taken away. There were tangles of faint shoe prints on the dusty floorboards.

If you were going to hide something—a murder weapon, or some kind of evidence, or some small priceless antique—this wouldn’t be a bad place. I went through all the cases that had been opened, staying well clear of the finger marks, just in case, but they were stuffed to the lids with pages and pages of crabby fountain-pen scribble. As far as I could tell, someone, presumably Great-uncle Simon, had been writing a history of the March family through the ages. The Marches had been around for a while—the dates went back to 1734, when the house had been built—but had apparently never done anything more interesting than getting married, buying the odd horse and gradually losing most of their estate.

Daniel’s room was locked. The life skills I learned from Frank do include lock picking, and this one looked pretty simple, but I was already antsy from the diary, and that door wound me a notch tighter. I had no way of knowing whether Daniel always locked his room or whether this was specially for me. I was suddenly positive that he had left some trap—a hair across the frame, a glass of water just inside the door—that would give me away if I went in there.

I finished off with Lexie’s room—it had been searched already, but I wanted to do it myself. Unlike Uncle Simon, Lexie had kept sweet fuck-all. The room wasn’t tidy, exactly—the books were tossed onto the shelves rather than lined up, the clothes were mostly in piles on the wardrobe floor; under the bed were three empty smoke packets, half a Caramilk and a crumpled page of notes on Villette—but it was too sparse to be messy. No knickknacks, no old ticket stubs or birthday cards or dried flowers, no photographs; the only mementos she had wanted were the phone videos. I thumbed through every book and turned every pocket inside out, but the room gave me nothing.

It had that same taste of permanence, though. She had been trying out paint colors on the wall beside her bed, in broad fast sweeps: ochre, old rose, china blue. That flick of envy went through me again. Screw you, I told Lexie inside my head; you may have lived here for longer, but I’m getting paid for it.

I sat down on the floor, dug my mobile out of my bag and rang Frank. “Hey, babe,” he said, on the second ring. “Burned already, yeah?”

He was in a good mood. “Yep,” I said. “Sorry about that. Come get me.”

Frank laughed. “How’s it going?”

I stuck him on speakerphone, put the phone on the floor beside me and stuffed my gloves and notebook back into the bag. “OK, I guess. I don’t think any of them suspect anything’s up.”

“Why would they? Nobody in their right mind would think of something this unlikely. Got anything good for me?”

“They’re all at college, so I had a quick look around the house. No bloody knife, no bloody clothes, no Renoirs, no signed confessions. Not even a stash of spliff or a porn mag. They’re awfully pure, for students.” My bandages were in carefully numbered packets, so that the stains would get lighter as the wound supposedly healed, just in case someone with a very weird mind was checking the bin—in this job, you leave room for a fair amount of weirdness. I found the bandage marked “ 2” and peeled off the wrapper. Whoever had done the staining lived life with enthusiasm.

“Any sign of that diary?” Frank asked. “The famous diary that Daniel saw fit to mention to you, but not to us.”

I leaned back against the bookshelf, hiked up my top and pulled off the old bandage. “If it’s in the house,” I said, “someone’s done a good job of hiding it.”

A noncommittal noise from Frank. “Or else you were right and the killer took it off her body. Either way, though, it’s interesting that Daniel and company felt the need to lie about it. Anyone acting dodgy?”

“No. They were a little awkward around me to start with, but they would be. Basically, the main thing I’m getting is they’re glad to have Lexie back.”

“That’s what I got from the mike feed. Which,” Frank said, “reminds me. What happened last night, after you went up to your room? I heard you talking, but somehow I had trouble catching the exact words.”

There was a different note in his voice, and not a good one. I stopped smoothing down the edges of the new bandage. “Nothing. Everyone said good night.”

“How sweet,” Frank said. “Very Waltons. I’m sorry I missed it. Where was your mike?”

“In my bag. The battery pack sticks into me when I sleep.”

“So sleep on your back. Your door doesn’t lock.”

“I put a chair in front of it.”

“Oh, well, then. That’s all the backup you need. Jesus, Cassie!” I could practically see him raking his free hand furiously through his hair, pacing.

“What’s the big deal, Frank? Last time I never even used the mike unless I was actually doing something interesting. Whether I talk in my sleep isn’t going to make or break this case.”

“Last time you weren’t living with suspects. These four may not be top of our list, but we haven’t eliminated them yet. Unless you’re in the shower, that mike stays on your body. You want to talk about last time? If your mike had been in your bag where we couldn’t hear you, you’d be dead. You’d have bled out before we could get to you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Point taken.”

“Got it? On your body at all times. No fucking about.”

“Got it.”

“OK, then,” Frank said, settling down. “I’ve got a little pressie for you.” There was the edge of a grin in there: he’d saved up something good for after the lecture. "I’ve been tracking down all your KAs from our first Lexie Madison Extravaganza. Remember a girl called Victoria Harding?”

I bit off a piece of surgical tape. “Should I?”

"Tallish, slim, long blond hair? Talks a hundred an hour? Doesn’t blink?”

“Oh God,” I said, taping the bandage down. “Sticky Vicky. There’s a blast from the past.” Sticky Vicky was in UCD with me, studying something nonspecific. She had glassy blue eyes, a lot of matching accessories and a frantic, limitless ability to octopus herself onto anyone who might be useful, mainly rich boys and party girls. For some reason she had decided I was cool enough to be worth it, or maybe she was just hoping for free drugs.

“The very one. When did you last talk to her?”

I locked my bag and shoved it under the bed, trying to think back; Vicky wasn’t the type that leaves a lasting impression. “Maybe a few days before I got pulled out? I’ve seen her around town once or twice since, but I always dodged.”

“That’s funny,” Frank said, with that wolfish grin spreading through his voice, “because she’s talked to you a lot more recently than that. In fact, you and she had a nice long chat in early January of 2002—she knows the date because she’d just been to the winter sales and bought some kind of fancy designer coat, which she showed to you. Apparently it involved, and I quote, ‘the absolute ultimate taupe suede,’ whatever class of animal a taupe may be. Ringing any bells?”

“No,” I said. My heart was going slow and hard; I could feel it right down to the soles of my feet. “That wasn’t me.”

“I figured it might not be. Vicky remembers the conversation vividly, though, almost word for word—the girl’s got a memory like a steel trap, she’ll make a dream witness if it ever comes to that. Want to hear what you talked about?”

Vicky always did have that kind of mind: since there was basically no activity going on inside her head, conversations went in there and came back out virtually untouched. It was one of the main reasons I’d spent any time with her. “Refresh my memory,” I said.

“You ran into each other on Grafton Street. According to her, you were ‘totally spacey,’ didn’t remember her at first, weren’t sure when you’d last seen each other. You claimed to have a foul hangover, but she put it down to that awful nervous breakdown she’d heard about.” Frank was enjoying this: his voice had a fast, focused, predator-on-the-move rhythm. I was having a lot less fun than he was. I had known all this already, only the specifics had been missing, and being right wasn’t as satisfying as you might think. “Once you managed to place her, though, you were very friendly. You even suggested going for a coffee, to catch up. Whoever our girl was, she had some nerve.”

“Yeah,” I said. I realized I was crouched like a sprinter, ready to leap. Lexie’s bedroom felt mocking and tricky around me, humming with secret drawers and fake floorboards and spring traps. “She had that, all right.”

“You went to the café in Brown Thomas, she showed you her fashion finds and you both played Do You Remember for a while. You, amazingly enough, were pretty quiet. But get this: at one point Vicky asked you whether you were in Trinity these days. Apparently, not long before you had your nervous breakdown, you’d told her you were sick of UCD. You were thinking of transferring somewhere else, maybe Trinity, maybe abroad. Sound familiar?”

“Yeah,” I said. I sat down, carefully, on Lexie’s bed. “Yeah, it does.”

It had been getting towards the end of term, and Frank hadn’t told me whether the operation was going to continue after the summer; I was setting up an exit, in case I needed one. The other point of Vicky: you could always rely on her to get gossip all round college in no time flat.

My head was spinning, strange-shaped things rearranging themselves and falling into new places with soft little clicks. The coincidence of Trinity—this girl heading straight for my old college, picking up where I had left off—had given me the creeps all along, but this was almost worse. The only coincidence was two girls running into each other, in a small city, and Sticky Vicky spends most of her time hanging around town looking for useful people to run into anyway. Lexie hadn’t ended up in Trinity by chance, or by some dark magnetic pull that had her shadowing me, elbowing her way into my corners. I had suggested it to her. We had worked together seamlessly, she and I. I had drawn her to this house, this life, every bit as neatly and surely as she had drawn me.

Frank was still going. “Our girl said no, she wasn’t in college at the moment, she’d been traveling. She was vague about where—Vicky assumed she’d been in the funny farm. But here’s the good part: Vicky figured it was a funny farm in America, or maybe Canada. Partly that’s because she remembers your imaginary family was living in Canada, but mostly it’s because, somewhere between your time in UCD and that day on Grafton Street, you’d picked up a fairly serious tinge of American accent. So not only do we know how this girl got hold of the Lexie Madison ID, and when, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start looking for her. I think we may owe Sticky Vicky a cocktail or two.”

“Sooner you than me,” I said. I knew my voice sounded weird, but Frank was too hyped-up to notice.

“I’ve put in a call to the FBI boys, and I’m about to e-mail them over prints and photos. There’s a good chance our girl was on the run in one way or another, so they might turn up something.”

Lexie’s face watched me warily, in triplicate, from the dressing-table mirror. “Keep me updated, OK?” I said. “Anything you get.”

“Will do. Want to talk to your fella? He’s here.”

Sam and Frank sharing an incident room. Jesus. “I’ll call him later,” I said.

The deep murmur of Sam’s voice in the background, and for a split second out of nowhere I wanted to talk to him so badly it almost doubled me over. “He says he’s got through your last six months in Murder,” Frank told me, “and all the people you might’ve pissed off are out, one way or another. He’ll keep working backwards and keep you up to speed.”

In other words, this had nothing to do with Operation Vestal. God; Sam. Secondhand and at a distance, he was trying to reassure me: he was quietly, doggedly going after the only threat that he understood. I wondered how much he’d slept, the night before. “Thanks,” I said. “Tell him thanks, Frank. Tell him I’ll talk to him soon.”

I needed to get outdoors—partly because of eyeball overload, all those strange dusty objects, and partly because the house was starting to do things to the back of my neck; it made the air around me feel too intimate and too knowing, like an eyebrow flick from someone you never could fool. I hit the fridge, made myself a turkey sandwich—this gang believed in good mustard—and a jam sandwich and a thermos of coffee, and took them on a long walk. Sometime very soon, I was going to be navigating Glenskehy in the dark, quite possibly with input from a killer who knew the area like the back of his hand. I figured it might be a good idea to get my bearings.

The place was a maze, dozens of single-file lanes twisting their way among hedges and fields and woods from nowhere much to nowhere much else, but it turned out I knew my way around better than I’d expected; I only got lost twice. I was starting to appreciate Frank on a whole new level. When I got hungry I sat on a wall and had my coffee and sandwiches, looking out over the mountainsides and giving the mental finger to the DV squad room and Maher and his halitosis problem. It was a sunny, snappy day, hazy clouds high in a cool blue sky, but I hadn’t seen a single human being, anywhere along the way. Somewhere far off a dog was barking and someone was whistling to him, but that was it. I was developing a theory that Glenskehy had been wiped out by a millennium death ray and no one had noticed.

On my way back I spent a while checking out the Whitethorn House grounds. The Marches might have lost most of their estate, but what was left was still pretty impressive. Stone walls higher than my head, lined with trees—mostly the hawthorns that had given the house its name, but I spotted oak, ash, an apple just going into bloom. A broken-down stable, discreetly out of smelling range of the house, where Daniel and Justin kept their cars. It would have held six horses, way back when; now it was all piles of dusty tools and tarps, but they didn’t look like they’d been touched in a very long time, so I didn’t poke around.

To the back of the house was that great sweep of grass, maybe a hundred yards long, bordered by a thick rim of trees and stone wall and ivy. At the bottom was a rusty iron gate—the gate Lexie had gone through, that night, when she walked out onto the last edge of her life—and, tucked away in a corner, a wide, semi-organized patch of shrubs. I recognized rosemary and bay: the herb garden Abby had mentioned, the evening before. That already seemed like months ago.

From that distance the house looked delicate and remote, something out of an old watercolor. Then a fast little wind rippled down the grass, lifting the long trails of ivy, and the lawn tilted under my feet. By one of the side walls, only twenty or thirty yards from me, there was someone behind the ivy; someone slight and dark as a shadow, sitting on a throne. The hair on the back of my neck rose, a slow wave.

My gun was still taped to the back of Lexie’s bedside table. I bit down hard on my lip and grabbed a heavy fallen branch out of the herb garden without taking my eyes off the ivy, which had dropped innocently back into place—the breeze was gone, the garden was still and sunny as a dream. I walked along the wall, casually but fast, flattened myself against it, got a good grip on my branch and whipped back the ivy in one sharp move.

There was no one there. The tree trunks and overgrown branches and ivy made an alcove against the wall, a little sun-splashed bubble. In it were two stone benches and, between them, a thread of water trickling through a hole in the wall and down shallow steps to a tiny, murky pond; nothing else. Shadows tangled together and for a second I caught the illusion again, the benches turning high-backed and sweeping, that slim figure sitting upright. Then I let the ivy fall and it was gone.

Apparently it wasn’t just the house that had a personality all its own. I got my breath back and checked out the alcove. The seats had traces of moss in the cracks, but most of it had been scrubbed away: someone knew about this place. I considered its potential as a rendezvous point, one way or another, but it was awfully close to the house to be inviting outsiders around, and the mat of leaves and twigs around the pond looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a while. I brushed at it with the side of my shoe and got wide smooth flagstones. Metal glinted in the dirt and my heart bounced—knife—but it was too small. A button: lion and unicorn, battered and dented. Someone, long ago, had been in the British army.

The hole letting the water in through the garden wall was choked with muck. I stuck the button in my pocket, knelt down on the flagstones and used the branch and my hands to clear it out. It took a long time; the wall was thick. When I was finished there was a miniwaterfall, murmuring happily to itself, and my hands smelled of earth and decaying leaves.

I rinsed them off and sat on one of the benches for a while, having a smoke and listening to the water. It was nice in there; warm and still and secret, like an animal’s den or a kid’s hideout. The pond filled up, tiny insects hovering above the surface. The extra water drained away through a tiny gutter into the ground, I picked out floating leaves, and after a while the pond was clear enough that I could see my reflection, rippling.

Lexie’s watch said half-past four. I had made it through twenty-four hours, and probably knocked a good handful of people out of the incident-room sweepstakes. I put my cigarette butt back in the pack, ducked out through the ivy, and went inside to catch up on thesis notes. The front door opened smoothly to my key, the air inside stirred as I came in and it didn’t feel over-intimate any more; it felt like a slight smile and a cool brief touch on the cheek, like a welcome.