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.”