The Likeness

7

That night I went for my walk. I needed to phone Sam, and anyway, Frank and I had decided that I was better off getting Lexie back into her normal routine as fast as possible, not playing the trauma card too hard, at least not yet. There were bound to be little differences anyway, and with any luck people would use the stabbing to explain those away; the more I pushed it, the more likely it was that someone would think, Gee, Lexie’s a completely different person now.

We were in the sitting room, after dinner. Daniel and Justin and I were reading; Rafe was playing piano, a lazy Mozart fantasia, breaking off now and then to repeat a phrase he liked or had messed up the first time; Abby was making her doll a new petticoat out of old broderie anglaise, head bent over stitches so tiny they were almost invisible. I didn’t think the doll was creepy, exactly—she wasn’t one of the ones that look like puffy, deformed adults; she had a long dark plait and a wistful, dreamy face, with a tip-tilted nose and tranquil brown eyes—but I could see the guys’ point, all the same. Those big sad eyes, staring at me from an undignified position on Abby’s lap, made me feel guilty in a nonspecific way, and there was something disturbing about the fresh, springy curl of her hair.

Around eleven I went out to the coat closet for my runners—I had wriggled into my supersexy girdle and tucked my phone in there before dinner, so I wouldn’t have to break routine by going up to my room; Frank would be proud of me. I did a wince and a little under-my-breath “Ow” as I sat down on the hearth rug, and Justin’s head snapped up. “Are you all right? Do you need your painkillers?”

“Nah,” I said, disentangling my shoelace. “I just sat down funny.”

“Walk?” Abby asked, glancing up from the doll.

“Yep,” I said, pulling on one of the runners. It had the shape of Lexie’s foot, a fraction narrower than mine, printed on the insole.

That tiny suspension all through the room again, like a caught breath. Rafe’s hands left a chord hanging in the air. “Is that wise?” Daniel inquired, putting a finger in his book to mark his page.

“I feel fine,” I said. “The stitches don’t hurt unless I twist sideways; walking isn’t going to burst them or anything.”

“That’s hardly what I had in mind,” Daniel said. “You’re not concerned?”

They were all looking at me, that unreadable quadruple gaze with the force of a tractor beam. I shrugged, pulling at a shoelace. “No.”

“Why not? If I may ask.”

Rafe moved, threw a taut little trill somewhere in the piano’s upper octaves. Justin flinched.

“’Cause,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Shouldn’t you be? After all, if you have no idea—”

“Daniel,” Rafe said, almost under his breath. “Leave her alone.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go out there,” Justin said. He looked like his stomach hurt. “I really do.”

“We’re worried, Lex,” Abby said quietly. “Even if you’re not.”

The trill was still going, on and on like an alarm bell. “Rafe,” Justin said, pressing a hand to his ear. “Stop.”

Rafe ignored him. “Like she’s not enough of a drama queen without you three encouraging her—”

Daniel didn’t seem to notice. “Do you blame us?” he asked me.

“So you’ll just have to worry,” I said, shoving my other foot into its shoe. “I don’t care. If I get all jumpy now, I’ll be jumpy forever, and I’m not doing that.”

“Well, congratulations,” Rafe said, ending the trill with a neat chord. “Take your torch. See you later.” He turned back to the piano and started flipping pages.

“And your phone,” Justin said. “In case you feel faint, or…” His voice trailed off.

“It doesn’t seem to be raining any more,” Daniel said, peering at the window, “but it might be chilly. Are you going to wear the jacket?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. This walk seemed to be turning into something at the organization level of Operation Desert Storm. “I’ll be fine,” I said.

“Hmm,” Daniel said, considering me. “Maybe I should go with you.”

“No,” Rafe said, abruptly. “I’ll go. You’re working.” He banged the piano lid down and stood up.

“Bloody hell!” I snapped, throwing my hands up and giving the four of them an outraged glare. “It’s a walk. I do it all the time. I’m not taking protective clothing, I’m not taking emergency flares and I’m definitely not taking a bodyguard. Is that OK with everyone?” The thought of a private chat with Rafe or Daniel was interesting, but I could get those some other time. If someone was waiting for me out in the lanes, the last thing I wanted was to scare him off.

“That’s my girl,” said Justin, giving me a faint smile. “You’ll be fine, won’t you?”

“At the very least,” Daniel said, unperturbed, “you should take a different route from the one you took the other night. Will you do that?”

He was watching me blandly, one finger still caught between the pages of his book. There was nothing in his face except mild concern. “I’d love to,” I said, “if I remembered which way I went. Since I don’t have the first clue, I’ll just have to take my chances, won’t I?”

“Ah,” Daniel said. “Of course. I’m sorry. Ring if you want one of us to come meet you.” He went back to his book. Rafe thumped down onto the piano stool and crashed into the Rondo alla Turca.

It was a bright night, the moon high in a clear cold sky, flicking chips of white off the dark hawthorn leaves; I buttoned Lexie’s suede jacket up to my neck. The torch beam lit up a narrow bar of dirt path and the invisible fields felt suddenly huge around me. The torch made me feel very vulnerable and not very smart, but I kept it on. If anyone was lurking out there, he needed to know where to find me.

No one came. Something shifted off to one side, something heavy, but when I whipped the torch around it was a cow, staring back at me with wide, sorrowful eyes. I kept walking, nice and slow like a good little target, and thought about that exchange back in the sitting room. I wondered what Frank had made of it. Daniel could have been simply trying to jog my memory loose, or he could have had very good reasons for wanting to check whether the amnesia was real, and I had no idea which it was.

I didn’t realize I was heading for the ruined cottage until it rose up in front of me, a smudge of thicker dark against the sky, stars flickering like altar lights in the windows. I switched off the torch: I could find my way across the field without it, and a light in the cottage was likely to make the neighbors very antsy, possibly even antsy enough to come investigating. The long grass swished, a soft steady sound, around my ankles. I reached up and touched the stone lintel, like a salute, before I went through the doorway.

The quality of the silence was different inside: deeper, and so thick I could feel it pressing softly around me. A slip of moonlight caught the crooked stone of the hearth in the inner room.

One wall sloped jaggedly down from the corner where Lexie had curled up to die, and I pulled myself up onto it and settled my back against the gable end. The place should probably have freaked me out—I was so close to her dying, I could have leaned down across ten days and touched her hair—but it didn’t. The cottage had a century and a half of its own stillness stored up, she had taken only an eyeblink; it had already absorbed her and closed over the place where she had been.

I thought about her differently, that night. Before, she had been an invader or a dare, always something that set my back stiffening and my adrenalin racing. But I was the one who had flashed into her life out of nowhere, with Sticky Vicky for a pawn and a wild why-not chance dangling from my fingertips; I was the dare she had taken, years before the flip side of the coin landed in front of me. The moon spun slowly across the sky and I thought of my face blue-gray and empty on steel in the morgue, the long rush and clang of the drawer shutting her into the dark, alone. I imagined her sitting on this same bit of wall on other, lost nights, and I felt so warm and so solid, firm moving flesh overlaid on her faint silvery imprint, it almost broke my heart. I wanted to tell her things she should have known, how her tutorial group had coped with Beowulf and what the guys had made for dinner, what the sky looked like tonight; things I was keeping for her.

In the first few months after Operation Vestal I thought a lot about leaving. It seemed, paradoxically, like the only way I could ever feel like me again: pack my passport and a change of clothes, scribble a note (“Dear everyone, I’m off. Love, Cassie”) and catch the next flight to anywhere, leave behind everything that had changed me into someone I didn’t recognize. Somewhere in there, I never knew the exact moment, my life had slipped through my hands and smashed to smithereens. Everything I had—my job, my friends, my flat, my clothes, my reflection in the mirror—felt like it belonged to someone else, some clear-eyed straight-backed girl I could never find again. I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no right there any more. I moved through my lost life like a ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies about my past.

I don’t know why I stayed. Probably Sam would have called it courage—he always goes for the best angle—and Rob would have called it pure stubbornness, but I don’t flatter myself that it was either one. You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That’s nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best. I think I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.

Lexie had run. When exile somehow hit her out of a clear blue sky, she didn’t fight it the way I did: she reached out for it with both hands, swallowed it whole and made it her own. She had had the sense and the guts to let go of her ruined old self and walk away so simply, start over again, start fresh and clean as morning.

And then, after all that, someone had strutted up to her and whipped that hard-won new life away, casually as plucking a daisy. I felt a sudden zip of outrage—not at her but, for the first time, for her.

“Whatever it is you want,” I said softly, into the dark cottage, “I’m here. You’ve got me.”

There was a tiny shift in the air around me, subtler than a breath; secretive; pleased.

It was dark, big patches of cloud covering the moon, but I already knew the lane well enough that I barely needed the torch, and my hand went straight to the latch of the back gate, no fumbling. Undercover time works differently; it was hard to remember that I’d only been living there a day and a half.

The house was black on black, only a faint crooked line of stars where the roof ended and the sky began. It seemed bigger and intangible, edges blurring, ready to dissolve into nothing if you came too close. The lit windows looked too warm and gold to be real, tiny pictures beckoning like old peep shows: bright copper frying pans hanging in the kitchen, Daniel and Abby side by side on the sofa with their heads bent over some huge old book.

Then a cloud skated off the moon and I saw Rafe, sitting on the edge of the patio, one arm around his knees and a long glass in the other hand. My adrenaline leaped. There was no way he could have followed me without me seeing him, and I hadn’t done anything dodgy anyway, but still, the look of him made me edgy. The way he was sitting, head up and ready, at the edge of that great spread of grass: he was waiting for me.

I stood under the hawthorn tree by the gate and watched him. Something that had been taking shape in the back of my mind had just made it to the surface. It was the drama-queen comment that had done it: the snide edge to his voice, the irritable eye roll. Now that I thought about it, Rafe had barely said a word to me since I arrived, apart from “pass the sauce” and “good night;” he talked around me, at me, in my general direction, never to me. The day before, he was the only one who hadn’t touched me to welcome me home, just taken my suitcase and gone. He was being subtle about it, nothing overt; but, for some reason, Rafe was pissed off with me.

He saw me as soon as I stepped out from under the hawthorn. He raised his arm—the light from the windows sent long, confusing shadows flying down the grass towards me—and watched, unmoving, as I crossed the lawn and sat down next to him.

It seemed like the simplest thing to go at this head-on. “Are you mad at me?” I asked.

Rafe turned his head away with a disgusted flick, looked out over the grass. “ ‘Mad at me,’ ” he said. “For God’s sake, Lexie, you’re not a child.”

“OK,” I said. “Are you angry with me?”

He stretched out his legs in front of him and examined the toes of his runners. “Has it even occurred to you,” he asked, “to wonder what last week was like for us?”

I considered this for a moment. It sounded a lot like he was in a snot with Lexie for getting stabbed. As far as I could see, this was either deeply suspicious or deeply bizarre. With this gang, it got hard to tell the difference. “I wasn’t exactly having fun either, you know,” I said.

He laughed. “You haven’t even thought about it, have you?”

I stared at him. “That’s why you’re pissed off with me? Because I got hurt? Or because I didn’t ask how you’re feeling about it?” He shot me an oblique look that could have meant anything. “Well, Jesus, Rafe. I didn’t ask for any of this to happen. Why are you being such a dickhead about it?”

Rafe took a long, jerky swallow of his drink—gin and tonic; I could smell it. “Forget it,” he said. “Never mind. Just go inside.”

“Rafe,” I said, hurt. I was only mostly faking it: there was an icy cut to his voice that made me flinch. “Don’t.”

He ignored me. I put a hand on his arm—it was more muscular than I had expected, and warm right through his shirt, almost fever hot. His mouth set in a long hard line, but he didn’t move.

“Tell me what it was like,” I said. “Please. I want to know; honestly, I do. I just didn’t know how to ask.”

Rafe shifted his arm away. “All right,” he said. “Fine. It was horrible beyond belief. Does that answer your question?”

I waited. “We were all hysterical,” he said harshly, after a moment. “We were wrecks. Not Daniel, obviously, he would never do anything as undignified as get upset, he just stuck his head in a book and occasionally came out with some fucking Old Norse quote about arms that remain strong in times of trial, or something. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t sleep all week; no matter what time I got up, his light was still on. And the rest of us… Just to start with, we weren’t sleeping either. We were all having nightmares—it was like some awful farce, every time you managed to get to sleep someone would wake up screaming, and of course that would wake everyone else up… Our sense of time completely disintegrated; half the time I didn’t know what day it was. I couldn’t eat, even the smell of food made me gag. And Abby kept baking—she said she needed to do something, but, God, piles of gooey chocolate things and bloody meat pies all over the house… We had a blazing row about it, Abby and I. She threw a fork at me. I was drinking all the time so the smell wouldn’t make me sick, and then of course Daniel started giving me flak about that… We ended up giving away the chocolate things in the tutorial groups. The meat pies are in the freezer, if you’re interested. None of the rest of us are going to touch them.”

Shaken up, Frank had said, but no one had mentioned this level of hysteria. Now that Rafe had started talking, he didn’t know how to stop. The words were tumbling out hard and involuntary as vomiting. “And Justin,” he said. “Jesus. He was the worst by a long shot. He couldn’t stop shaking, I mean really shaking—some little smart-arse first-year asked him if he had Parkinson’s. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was incredibly unnerving; every time you looked at him, even for a second, it set your teeth on edge. And he kept dropping things, and every time he did it the rest of us nearly had heart attacks. Abby and I would yell at him, and then he would start crying, like that was going to help anything. Abby wanted him to go to Student Health and get Valium or something, but Daniel said that was ridiculous, Justin had to learn to cope like the rest of us—which was obviously completely insane, because we weren’t coping. The biggest optimist in the world couldn’t have said we were coping. Abby was sleepwalking—one night she ran herself a bath at four in the morning and got into it in her pajamas, fast asleep. If Daniel hadn’t found her, she could have drowned.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded strange, high and shaky. Every word he said had hit me straight in the stomach with a kick like a horse’s. I had argued this with Frank and talked it through with Sam, I’d thought I had my head around it, but it had never been real to me till that moment: what I was doing to these people. “Oh, God, Rafe, I’m so sorry.”

Rafe gave me a long, dark, unreadable look. “And the police,” he said. He took another swig of his drink, made a face as if it tasted bitter. “Have you ever had to deal with cops?”

“Not like that,” I said. I still sounded wrong, breathless, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“They’re bloody scary. These weren’t uniformed cops fresh out of the bog; these were detectives. They have the best poker faces I’ve ever seen, you don’t have a clue what they’re thinking or what they want from you, and they were all over us. They questioned us for hours, almost every single day. And they make even the most innocent question—what time do you normally go to bed?—sound like a trap, like they’re just waiting to whip out the handcuffs if you give the wrong answer. You feel like you have to be on your guard, every second, it’s fucking exhausting—and we were exhausted already. That guy who dropped you off, Mackey, he was the worst. All smiles and sympathy, but he obviously hated our guts right from the word go.”

“He was nice to me,” I said. “He brought me chocolate biscuits.”

“Well, isn’t that charming,” Rafe said. “I’m sure that won your heart. Meanwhile, he was showing up here at all hours of the day and night, giving us the third degree about every single detail of your entire life and making bitchy little comments about how the other half live, which is complete bollocks anyway. Just because we’ve got the house and we go to college… The man’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Bolivia. He would have loved a reason to lock us all up. And of course that got Justin even more hysterical, he was positive we were all going to be arrested any minute. Daniel told him that was crap and to pull himself together, but actually Daniel wasn’t all that much help, seeing as he thought…”

He broke off and stared away down the garden, his eyes hooded. “If you hadn’t pulled through when you did,” he said, “I think we would have killed each other.”

I reached out one finger and touched the back of his hand, just for a second. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am, Rafe. I don’t know how else to say it. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” Rafe said, but the anger had drained out of his voice and he just sounded very, very tired. “Well.”

“What did Daniel think?” I asked, after a moment.

“Don’t ask me,” Rafe said. He threw back most of his drink with a neat flick of his wrist. “I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re mostly better off not knowing.”

“No, you said Daniel told Justin to chill out, but he wasn’t much help because he thought something. What did he think?”

Rafe jiggled his glass and watched the ice cubes clink off the sides. He obviously wasn’t planning to answer, but silence is the oldest cop-trick in the book, and I’m even better at it than most. I leaned my chin on my arms, watched him and waited. In the sitting-room window behind his head, Abby pointed to something in the book and both she and Daniel burst out laughing, faint and clear through the glass.

“One night,” Rafe said at last. He still wasn’t looking at me. The moonlight silvered his profile and lay along his cheekbone, turned him into something off a worn coin. “A couple of days after… It might have been Saturday, I’m not sure. I came out here and sat on the swing seat and listened to the rain. I thought that might help me sleep, for some reason, but it didn’t. I heard an owl kill something—a mouse, probably. It was horrible; it screamed. You could hear the second when it died.”

He went silent. I wondered if this was somehow the end of the story. “Owls have to eat too,” I offered.

Rafe shot me a quick, oblique glance. “Then,” he said. “I don’t know what time, it was just starting to get light. I heard your voice, under the rain. It sounded like you were right there, leaning out.”

He turned and pointed up, at my dark window above us. “You said, ‘Rafe, I’m on my way home. Wait up for me.’ You didn’t sound eerie or anything, just matter-of-fact; in a hurry, sort of. Like that time you rang me because you’d forgotten your keys. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.” A light cool breeze drifted across my hair and I shivered, a fast, uncontrollable jerk. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but this story was something different, pressing like a cold knife blade against my skin. It was way too late, more than a week too late, to worry about whatever damage I was doing to these four.

“ ‘I’m on my way home,’ ” Rafe said. “ ‘Wait up for me.’ ” He stared into the bottom of his glass. I realized that he was probably fairly drunk.

“What did you do?” I asked.

He shook his head. “ ‘Echo, I will not talk with thee,’ ” he said, with a faint wry smile, “ ‘for thou art a dead thing.’ ”

The breeze had moved off down the garden, sifting the leaves and fingering delicately through the ivy. In the moonlight the grass looked soft and white as mist, like you could put your hand right through it. That shiver went over me again.

“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t that tell you I was going to be OK?”

“No,” Rafe said. “Actually, no, it didn’t. I was sure you had just died, that second. Laugh if you want, but I’ve told you what kind of state we were all in. I spent the whole next day waiting for Mackey to appear at the door being grave and sympathetic and tell us the doctors had done everything they could but blah blah blah. When he turned up on Monday, all smiley, and told us you’d regained consciousness, at first I didn’t believe him.”

“That’s what Daniel thought, isn’t it?” I said. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. “He thought I was dead.”

After a moment Rafe sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he did. Right from the start. He thought you’d never made it to hospital.”

Watch your step around that one, Frank had said. Either Daniel was a lot smarter than I wanted to tangle with—that little exchange, before I went out, was starting to worry me again—or he had had reasons of his own for thinking Lexie wasn’t coming back. “Why?” I demanded, doing offended. “I’m not a wimp. It’d take more than one little cut to get rid of me.”

I felt Rafe flinch, a tiny half-hidden twitch. “God only knows,” he said. “He had some bizarro convoluted theory about the cops claiming you were alive to mess with people’s heads—I can’t remember the details, I didn’t want to hear it and he was being cryptic about it anyway.” He shrugged. “Daniel.”

For several reasons, I figured it was time to change the tone of this conversation. “Mmm… conspiracy theories,” I said. “Let’s make him a tinfoil hat, in case the cops start trying to scramble his brain waves.”

I had caught Rafe off guard: before he could help it, he gave a startled snort of laughter. “He does get paranoid, doesn’t he,” he said. “Remember when we found the gas mask? Him giving it that thoughtful look and saying, ‘I wonder if this would be effective against the avian flu?’ ”

I had started giggling as well. “It’ll look gorgeous with the tinfoil hat. He can wear them both into college—”

“We’ll get him a biohazard suit—”

“Abby can needlepoint pretty patterns on it—”

It wasn’t all that funny, but we were both helpless with laughter, like a pair of giddy teenagers. “Oh, God,” Rafe said, wiping his eyes. “You know, the whole thing would probably have been hysterical, if it hadn’t been so Godawful. It was like one of those terrible sub-Ionesco plays that third-years always write: great piles of meat pies popping out of the woodwork and Justin dropping them everywhere, me gagging in the corner, Abby asleep in the bath in her pajamas like some post-modern Ophelia, Daniel surfacing to tell us what Chaucer thought of us all and then disappearing again, your friend Officer Krupke showing up at the door every ten minutes to ask what color M&Ms you like best…”

He let out a long, shaky breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Without looking at me, he stretched an arm over and rumpled my hair. “We missed you, silly thing,” he said, almost roughly. “We don’t want to lose you.”

“Well, I’m right here,” I said. “I’m going nowhere.”

I meant it lightly, but in that wide dark garden the words seemed to flutter with a life of their own, skim down the grass and disappear in among the trees. Slowly Rafe’s face turned towards me; the glow from the sitting room was behind him and I couldn’t see his expression, only a faint white glitter of moonlight in his eyes.

“No?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I like it here.”

Rafe’s silhouette moved, briefly, as he nodded. “Good,” he said.

To my utter surprise, he reached out and ran the backs of his fingers, lightly and deliberately, down my cheek. The moonlight caught the tip of a smile.

One of the sitting-room windows shot up and Justin’s head popped out. “What are you two laughing about?”

Rafe’s hand dropped away. “Nothing,” we called back, in unison.

“If you sit out there in the cold you’ll both get earaches. Come look at this.”

They had found an old photo album somewhere: the March family, Daniel’s ancestors, starting in about 1860 with vein-popping corsets and top hats and unamused expressions. I squeezed onto the sofa next to Daniel—close, touching; for a second I almost flinched, till I realized the mike and the phone were on my other side. Rafe sat on the arm beside me, and Justin disappeared into the kitchen and brought out tall glasses of hot port, neatly wrapped in thick soft napkins so we wouldn’t burn our hands. “So you won’t catch your death,” he told me. “You need to take care of yourself. Running around in the freezing cold…”

“Check out the clothes,” Abby said. The album was bound in cracked brown leather and big enough that it took up both her lap and Daniel’s. The photos, tucked into little paper corners, were spotted and browning at the edges. “I want this hat. I think I’m in love with this hat.”

It was an architectural fringed thing, topping off a large lady with a mono-bosom and a fishy stare. “Isn’t that the lampshade in the dining room?” I said. “I’ll get it down for you if you promise to wear it to college tomorrow.”

“Good Lord,” Justin said, perching on the other arm of the sofa and peering over Abby’s shoulder, “they all seem terribly depressed, don’t they? You don’t look a thing like any of them, Daniel.”

“Thank God for small mercies,” Rafe said. He was blowing on his hot port, with his free arm draped across my back; he had apparently forgiven me for whatever it was that I, or Lexie, had done. “I’ve never seen such a goggle-eyed bunch. Maybe they all have thyroid problems, and that’s why they’re depressed.”

“Actually,” Daniel said, “both the protruding eyes and the sombre expressions are characteristic of photographs from that period. I wonder if it had anything to do with the long exposure time. The Victorian camera—” Rafe pretended to have a narcoleptic attack on my shoulder, Justin produced a huge yawn, and Abby and I—I was only a second behind her—stuck our free hands over our ears and started singing.

“All right, all right,” Daniel said, smiling. I had never been this close to him before. He smelled good, cedar and clean wool. “I’m just defending my ancestors. In any case, I think I do look like one of them—where is he? This one here.”

Going by the clothes, the photo had been taken somewhere around a hundred years ago. The guy was younger than Daniel, twenty at most, and standing on the front steps of a younger, brighter Whitethorn House—no ivy on the walls, glossy new paint on the door and the railings, the stone steps sharper-edged and scrubbed pale. There was a resemblance there, all right—he had Daniel’s square jaw and broad forehead, although his looked even broader because the dark hair was slicked back fiercely, and the same straight-cut mouth. But this guy was leaning against the railing with a lazy, dangerous ease that was nothing like Daniel’s tidy, symmetrical poise, and his wide-set eyes had a different look to them, something restless and haunted.

“Wow,” I said. The resemblance, that face passed across a century, was doing strange things to me; I would have envied Daniel, in some unreasonable way, if it hadn’t been for Lexie. “You do look like him.”

“Only less messed up,” Abby said. “That’s not a happy man.”

“But look at the house,” Justin said softly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It is, yes,” Daniel said, smiling down at it. “It really is. We’ll get there.”

Abby slipped a fingernail under the photo, flicked it out of its corners and turned it over. On the back it said, in watery fountain pen, “William, May 1914.”

“The First World War was coming up,” I said quietly. “Maybe he died in it.”

“Actually,” Daniel said, taking the photo from Abby and examining it more closely, “I don’t think he did. Good heavens. If this is the same William—and it may not be, of course, my family has always been singularly unimaginative when it comes to names—then I’ve heard about him. My father and my aunts mentioned him every now and then, when I was a child. He’s my grandfather’s uncle, I think, although I may have that wrong. William was—well, not a black sheep, exactly; more like a skeleton in the cupboard.”

“Definitely a resemblance,” Rafe said; then, “Ow!” as Abby reached across and swatted his arm.

“He did fight in the war, in fact,” Daniel said, “but he came back, with some kind of infirmity. Nobody ever mentioned what, exactly, which makes me think it may have been psychological rather than physical. There was some scandal—I’m hazy on the details, it was all kept very hush-hush, but he spent a while in some kind of sanatorium, which at the time might well have been a delicate way of saying a lunatic asylum.”

“Maybe he had a passionate affair with Wilfred Owen,” Justin suggested, “in the trenches.” Rafe sighed noisily.

“I got the impression it was more along the lines of a suicide attempt,” said Daniel. “When he got out he emigrated, I think. He lived to a ripe old age—he only died when I was a child—but still, not necessarily the ancestor one would choose to resemble. You’re right, Abby: not a happy man.” He tucked the photo back into place and touched it gently, with one long square fingertip, before he turned the page.

The hot port was rich and sweet, with quarters of lemon stuck full of cloves, and Daniel’s arm was warm and solid against mine. He flipped pages slowly: mustaches the size of house pets, lacy Edwardians walking in the flowering herb garden (“My God,” Abby said on a long breath, “that’s what it’s supposed to look like”), flappers with carefully droopy shoulders. A few people were built along the same lines as Daniel and William—tall and solid, with jawlines that worked better on the men than on the women—but most of them were small and upright and made up mainly of sharp angles, jutting chins and elbows and noses. “This thing is brilliant,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

A sudden, startled silence. Oh God, I thought, oh, God, not now, not just when I was starting to feel like— “But you found it,” Justin said, his glass going down on his knee. “In the top spare room. Don’t you…” He let the sentence drop. No one picked it up.

Never, Frank had told me, no matter what, never backpedal. If you fuck up, blame it on the coma, PMS, the full moon, anything you want; just hold your ground. “No,” I said. “I’d remember if I’d seen this before.”

They were all looking at me; Daniel’s eyes, only inches away, were intent and curious and huge behind his glasses. I knew I had gone white, he couldn’t miss it. He thought you’d never made it, he had some bizarro convoluted theory— “You did, Lexie,” Abby said softly, leaning forwards so she could see me. “You and Justin were rummaging around, after dinner, and you came up with this. It was the same night that…” She made a small, formless gesture, glanced fast at Daniel.

“It was just a few hours before the incident,” said Daniel. I thought I felt something move through his body, something like a tiny suppressed shudder, but I couldn’t be sure; I was too busy trying to hide my own rush of pure relief. “No wonder you don’t remember.”

“Well,” Rafe said, one notch too loudly and too heartily, “there you go.”

“But that sucks,” I said. “Now I feel like an idiot. I didn’t mind losing the sore bits, but I don’t want to go around wondering what else is missing. What if I bought the winning Lotto ticket and hid it somewhere?”

“Shhh,” Daniel said. He was smiling at me, that extraordinary smile. “Don’t worry. We forgot all about the album as well, until tonight. We never even looked at it.” He took my hand, opened my fingers gently—I hadn’t even realized my fists were clenched—and drew it through the crook of his elbow. “I’m glad you found it. This house has enough history for a whole village; it shouldn’t be lost. Look at this one: the cherry trees, just planted.”

“And check him out,” said Abby, pointing to a guy wearing full hunting gear and sitting on a rangy chestnut horse, beside the front gate. “He’d have a mickey fit if he knew we were keeping motoring cars in his stables.” Her voice sounded fine—easy, cheerful, not even a sliver of a pause—but her eyes, flicking to me across Daniel, were anxious.

“If I’m not mistaken,” Daniel said, “that’s our benefactor.” He flipped out the photo and checked the back. “Yes: ‘Simon on Highwayman, November 1949.’ He would have been twenty-one or so.”

Uncle Simon was from the main branch of the family tree: short and wiry, with an arrogant nose and a fierce look. “Another unhappy man,” Daniel said. “His wife died young, and apparently he never really recovered. That’s when he began drinking. As Justin said, not a cheerful bunch.”

He started to fit the photo back into its corners, but Abby said, “No,” and took it out of his hand. She passed her glass to Daniel, went to the fireplace and propped the picture in the middle of the mantelpiece. “There.”

“Why?” Rafe inquired.

“Because,” Abby said. “We owe him. He could have left this place to the Equine Society, and I’d still be living in a scary basement bedsit with no windows and hoping that the nutbar upstairs wouldn’t decide to break in some night. As far as I’m concerned, this guy deserves a place of honor.”

“Oh, Abby, sweetie,” Justin said, holding out an arm. “Come here.”

Abby adjusted a candlestick to hold the photo in place. “There,” she said, and went to Justin. He fitted his arm around her and pulled her against him, her back leaning against his chest. She took back her glass from Daniel. “Here’s to Uncle Simon,” she said.

Uncle Simon gave us all a baleful, unimpressed glare. “Why not,” Rafe said, raising his glass high. “Uncle Simon.”

The port glowing deep and strong as blood, Daniel’s arm and Rafe’s holding me snug in place between them, a gust of wind rattling the windows and swaying the cobwebs in the high corners. “To Uncle Simon,” we said, all of us.

Later, in my room, I sat on the windowsill and went through my various new bits of information. All four of the housemates had deliberately hidden how upset they were, and hidden it well. Abby threw kitchen utensils when she got angry enough; Rafe, at least, somehow blamed Lexie for getting stabbed; Justin had been sure they were going to be arrested; Daniel hadn’t fallen for the coma story. And Rafe had heard Lexie telling him she was coming home, the day before I said yes.

Here’s one of the more disturbing things about working Murder: how little you think about the person who’s been killed. There are some who move into your mind—children, battered pensioners, girls who went clubbing in their sparkly hopeful best and ended the night in bog drains—but mostly the victim is only your starting point; the gold at the end of the rainbow is the killer. It’s scarily easy to slip to the point where the victim becomes incidental, half forgotten for days on end, just a prop wheeled out for the prologue so that the real show can start. Rob and I used to stick a photo smack in the middle of the whiteboard, on every case—not a crime-scene shot or a posed portrait; a snapshot, the candidest candid we could find, a bright snippet from the time when this person was something more than a murder victim—to keep us reminded.

This isn’t just callousness, or self-preservation. The cold fact is that every murder I’ve worked was about the killer. The victim—and imagine explaining this to families who have nothing left but the hope of a reason—the victim was just the person who happened to wander into the sights when the gun was loaded and cocked. The control freak was always going to kill his wife the first time she refused to follow orders; your daughter happened to be the one who married him. The mugger was hanging around the alleyway with a knife, and your husband happened to be the next person who walked by. We go through victims’ lives with a fine-tooth comb, but we’re doing it to learn more not about them but about the murderer: if we can figure out the exact point where someone walked into those crosshairs, we can go to work with our dark, stained geometries and draw a line straight back to the barrel of the gun. The victim can tell us how, but almost never why. The only reason, the beginning and the end, the closed circle, is the killer.

This case had been different from the first moment. I had never been in any danger of forgetting about Lexie; and not just because I carried the reminder photo around with me, there every time I brushed my teeth or washed my hands. From the second I walked into that cottage, before I ever saw her face, this had been about her. For the first time ever, the murderer was the one I kept forgetting.

The possibility hit me like a wrecking ball: suicide. I felt like I had fallen off the windowsill, straight through the glass and down into cold air. If this killer had never been anything but invisible, if Lexie had been the core of the case all along, maybe it was because there had never been a killer at all: she was all there was. In that split second I saw it as clearly as if it were unfolding on the dark lawn below me, in all its slow sickening horror. The others putting away the cards and stretching, Where’s Lexie got to? And then the worry winding tighter and tighter, till finally they put on coats and went out into the night to look for her, torches, rain gusting hard, Lexie! Lex! The four of them crammed in the wrecked cottage, gasping for breath. Shaking hands feeling for a pulse, pressing harder; moving her into shelter and laying her out so gently, reaching for the knife, fumbling in her pockets for some note, some explanation, some word. Maybe—Jesus—maybe they had even found one.

A moment later, of course, my head cleared, my breath came back and I knew that was rubbish. It would explain a lot—Rafe’s snit fit, Daniel’s suspicions, Justin’s nerves, the moved body, the searched pockets—and we’ve all heard about cases where people staged everything from improbable accidents through murders, rather than let their loved ones be branded as suicides. But I couldn’t think of a single reason why they would have left her there all night for someone else to find, and anyway women generally don’t commit suicide by knifing themselves in the chest. And, above all that, there was the immovable fact that Lexie—even if whatever went down in March had somehow wrecked all this for her, this house, these friends, this life—was about the last person in the world who would have killed herself. Suicides are people who can’t see any other way out. From what we had learned, Lexie had had no trouble finding escape routes when she wanted them.

Downstairs Abby was humming to herself; Justin sneezed, a chain of small fastidious yelps; someone slammed a drawer. I was in bed and halfway asleep when I realized: I had forgotten all about ringing Sam.