“But you don’t really think I will be,” I said. “Do you?”
Frank stopped pacing and gave me a long steady look. “Would I send you in there,” he asked, “if I didn’t think it could be done?”
“Sure you would,” I said. “As long as you thought the results would be interesting either way, you wouldn’t think twice.”
He leaned back against the window frame, apparently considering that; the light was behind him and I couldn’t see his expression. “Possible,” he said, “but irrelevant. Yeah, sure, it’s dicey as all hell. You’ve known that since Day One. But it can be done, as long as you’re careful, you don’t get spooked and you don’t get impatient. Remember what I said last time, about asking questions?”
“Yep,” I said. “Play innocent and ask as many of them as you can get away with.”
“This time is different. You need to do the opposite: don’t ask anything unless you’re absolutely sure you’re not meant to know the answer already. Which means, basically, don’t ask anyone anything at all.”
“So what am I supposed to do, if I can’t ask questions?” I had been wondering about this.
Frank crossed the room fast, shoved paper off the coffee table and sat down, leaning in to me, blue eyes intent. “You keep your eyes and ears wide open. The main problem with this investigation is that we don’t have a suspect. Your job is to identify one. Remember, nothing you get will be admissible anyway, since you can’t exactly caution the suspects, so we’re not gunning for a confession or anything like that. Leave that part to me and our Sammy. We’ll make the case, if you just point us in the right direction. Find out if there’s someone out there who’s managed to stay off our radar—either someone left over from this girl’s past, or someone she took up with more recently and kept a secret. If anyone who isn’t on the KA list approaches you—by phone, in person, whatever—you play them along, find out what they’re after and what the relationship was, and get a phone number and full name if you can.”
“Right,” I said. “Your mystery man.” It sounded plausible enough, but then Frank always does. I was still pretty sure that Sam was right and his main reason for doing this wasn’t because he thought it had a snowball’s chance in hell but because it was such a dazzling, reckless, ridiculous once-off. I decided I didn’t care.
“Exactly. To go with our mystery girl. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the housemates and keep them talking. I don’t rate them as suspects—I know your Sammy has a bee in his bonnet about them, but I’m with you, they don’t add up—but I’m pretty sure there’s something they’re not telling us. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them. It might be something completely irrelevant, maybe they just cheat on their exams or make moonshine in the back garden or know who’s the daddy, but I’d like to decide for myself what’s relevant here and what’s not. They’re never going to talk to cops, but if you go at it right, there’s a good chance they’ll talk to you. Don’t worry too much about her other KAs—we’ve got nothing that points to any of them, and Sammy and I will be on them anyway—but if anyone’s acting even slightly dodgy, obviously, report back to me. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
“One last thing,” said Frank. He unfolded himself from the table, found our coffee mugs and took them over to the kitchen. We had got to the point where there was always, every hour of the day or night, a large pot of strong coffee keeping warm on the cooker; another week and we would probably have been eating the grounds straight from the bag with a spoon. “I’ve been meaning to have a little chat with you for a while now.”
I had felt this one coming for days. I flipped through the photos like flash cards and tried to concentrate on running the names in my head: Cillian Wall, Chloe Nelligan, Martina Lawlor . . . “Hit me,” I said.
Frank put the mugs down and started playing with my saltcellar, turning it carefully between his fingers. “I hate to bring this up,” he said, “but what can you do, sometimes life sucks. You’re aware that you’ve been—how shall I put this—a little jumpy lately, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, keeping my eyes on the photos. Isabella Smythe, Brian Ryan—someone’s parents either hadn’t been thinking too clearly, or had a weird sense of humor—Mark O’Leary ... “I’m aware.”
“I don’t know if it’s because of this case or if it was going on already or what, and I don’t need to know. If it’s just stage fright, it might well vanish as soon as you’re inside that door. But here’s what I wanted to say to you: if it doesn’t,
don’t panic.
Don’t start second-guessing yourself, or you’ll talk yourself into losing your nerve, and don’t try to hide it. Use it. There’s no reason why Lexie shouldn’t be a little shaky right now, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make that work for you. Use what you’ve got, even if it’s not necessarily what you’d have chosen. Everything’s a weapon, Cass. Everything.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. The thought of Operation Vestal actually coming in useful did something complicated inside my chest, made it hard to breathe. I knew if I blinked Frank would notice.
“Think you can do that?”
Lexie,
I thought,
Lexie wouldn’t tell him to mind his own business and let her mind hers,
which was my main instinct here,
and she sure as hell wouldn’t answer. Lexie would yawn in his face, or tell him to quit nagging and lecturing like someone’s granny, or demand ice cream.
“We’re out of biscuits,” I said, stretching—the photos slid off my stomach, all over the floor. “Go get some. Lemon creams,” and then I laughed out loud at the look on Frank’s face.
* * *
Frank graciously gave me Saturday night off—heart of gold, our Frankie—so Sam and I could say our good-byes. Sam made chicken tikka for dinner; for dessert I tried an incongruous tiramisu, which turned out looking ridiculous but tasting OK. We talked about small stuff, unimportant stuff, touching hands across the table and swapping the little things that new couples pass back and forth and save like beach finds: stories from when we were kids, the dumbest things we’d done as teenagers. Lexie’s clothes, hanging on the wardrobe door, shimmered in the corner like hard sun on sand, but we didn’t mention them, not once.
After dinner we curled up on the sofa. I had lit a fire, Sam had put music on the CD player; it could have been any evening, it could have been all ours, except for those clothes and for the fast ready beat of my pulse, waiting.
“How’re you doing?” Sam asked.
I had been starting to hope we could make it through the night without talking about tomorrow, but realistically this was probably too much to ask. “OK,” I said.
“Are you nervous?”
I thought this over. This situation was totally bananas on about a dozen different levels. I probably should have been petrified. “No,” I said. “Excited.”
I felt Sam nod, against the top of my head. He was running one hand over my hair in a slow, soothing rhythm, but his chest felt rigid as a board against mine, like he was holding his breath.
“You hate this idea, don’t you?” I said.
“Yeah,” Sam said quietly. “I do.”
“Why didn’t you stop it? It’s your investigation. You could have put your foot down, any time you felt like it.”
Sam’s hand stopped still. “Do you want me to?”
“No,” I said. That, at least, I knew for sure. “No way.”
“It wouldn’t be easy, at this stage. Now that the undercover operation’s up and running, it’s Mackey’s baby; I’ve no authority there. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’ll find a way to—”
“I haven’t, Sam. Seriously. I just wondered why you gave the OK to start with.”
He shrugged. “Mackey has a point, sure: we’ve nothing else on the case. This could be the only way to solve it.”
Sam has unsolveds with his name on them, every detective has, and I was pretty sure he could survive another one, as long as he was sure the guy hadn’t been after me. “You didn’t have anything last Saturday, either,” I said, “and you were dead against it then.”
His hand started moving again, absently. “That first day,” he said, after a while. “When you came down to the scene. You were messing with Mackey, do you remember? He was slagging you about your clothes and you were slagging back, almost like the way you used to with . . . when you were on Murder.”
He meant with Rob. Rob was probably the closest friend I’ve ever had, but then we had this huge complicated vicious fight and that was the end of that. I twisted round and propped myself on Sam’s chest so I could see him, but he was looking up at the ceiling. “I hadn’t seen you like that in a while,” he said. “That much bounce to you.”
“I’ve probably been pretty crap company, these last few months,” I said.
He smiled, just a little. “I’m not complaining.”
I tried to remember ever hearing Sam complain about anything. “No,” I said. “I know.”
“Then Saturday,” he said. “I know we were fighting and all”—he gave me a quick squeeze, dropped a kiss on my forehead—“but still. I realized afterwards: that was because we were both really into it, this case. Because you cared. It felt . . .” He shook his head, looking for the words. “DV’s not the same,” he said, “is it?”
I had mostly kept my mouth shut about DV. It hadn’t occurred to me, till then, that all that silence could have been plenty revealing, in its own way. “It needs doing,” I said. “Nothing’s the same as Murder, but DV’s fine.”
Sam nodded, and for a second his arms tightened around me. “And that meeting,” he said. “Right up until then, I’d been wondering should I pull rank and tell Mackey to bugger off for himself. This started off as a murder case, I’m down as lead detective, if I said no . . . But the way you were talking, all interested, thinking it out . . . I just thought, why would I wreck that?”
I had not seen this coming. Sam has one of those faces that fool you even when you know better: a countryman’s face, all ruddy cheeks and clear gray eyes and crow’s-feet starting, so simple and open that there couldn’t possibly be anything hidden behind it. “Thanks, Sam,” I said. “Thank you.”
I felt his chest lift and fall as he sighed. “It might turn out to be a good thing, this case. You never know.”
“But you still wish this girl had picked just about anywhere else to get herself killed,” I said.
Sam thought about that for a minute, twisting a finger delicately through one of my curls. “Yeah,” he said, “I do, of course. But there’s no point in wishing. Once you’re stuck with something, all you can do is make the best of it.”
He looked down at me. He was still smiling, but there was something else, something almost sad, around his eyes. “You’ve looked happy, this week,” he said simply. “It’s nice to see you looking happy again.”
I wondered how the hell this man put up with me. “Plus you knew I would kick your arse if you started making decisions for me,” I said.
Sam grinned and flicked the end of my nose with his finger. “That too,” he said, “my little vixen,” but there was still that shadow behind his eyes.
* * *
Sunday moved fast, after those long ten days, fast as a tidal wave built to bursting point and finally crashing down. Frank was coming over at three, to wire me up and get me to Whitethorn House by half past four. All the time Sam and I were going through our Sunday-morning routine—the newspapers and leisurely cups of tea in bed, the shower, the toast and eggs and bacon—that was hanging over our heads, a huge alarm clock ticking, waiting for its moment to explode into life. Somewhere out there, the housemates were getting ready to welcome Lexie home.
After brunch, I put on the clothes. I got dressed in the bathroom; Sam was still there, and I wanted to do this in private. The clothes felt like something more: fine chain-mail armor handmade to fit me, or robes laid out ready for some fiercely secret ceremony. They made my palms tingle when I touched them.
Plain white cotton underwear with the Penney’s tags still on; faded jeans, worn soft and fraying at the hems; brown socks, brown ankle boots; a long-sleeved white T-shirt; a pale-blue suede jacket, scuffed but clean. The collar of it smelled of lilies of the valley and something else, a warm note almost too faint to catch: Lexie’s skin. In one of the pockets there was a Dunne’s Stores receipt from a few weeks back, for chicken fillets, shampoo, butter and a bottle of ginger ale.
When I was dressed I checked myself out, in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. For a second I didn’t know what I was seeing. Then, ridiculously, all I wanted was to laugh. It was the irony of it: I had spent months dressing up as Executive Barbie, and now that I was being someone else, I finally got to go to work dressed a lot like me. “You look nice,” Sam said, with a faint smile, when I came out. “Comfortable.”
My stuff was packed and waiting by the door, as if I were off on some voyage; I felt like I should be checking my passport and tickets. Frank had bought me a nice new traveling case, the hard kind, with discreet reinforcement and a solid combination lock; it would take a safecracker to get in there. Inside were Lexie’s things—wallet, keys, phone, all dead ringers for the real things; the stuff from the housemates; a plastic tub of vitamin C tablets with a pharmacist’s label that said AMOXICILLIN TABS TAKE ONE THREE TIMES DAILY, to go somewhere prominent. My gear was in a separate compartment: latex gloves, my mobile, spare battery packs for the mike, a supply of artistically stained bandages to go in the bathroom bin every morning and evening, my notebook, my ID and my new gun—Frank had got me a .38 snub-nose that felt good in my hand and was a lot easier to hide than my regulation Smith & Wesson. There was also—seriously—a girdle, the industrial-strength elastic kind that’s supposed to give you a smooth silhouette in your Little Black Dress. It’s a lot of undercovers’ version of a holster. It’s not comfortable—after an hour or two you feel like there’s a gun-shaped dent in your liver—but it does a good job of hiding the outline. Just the thought of Frank going into the Marks & Sparks lingerie department and picking it out made this whole thing worthwhile.
“You look like shite,” he said, examining me approvingly, when he arrived at the door of my flat. He was carrying a double armful of Bond-looking black electronics, cables and speakers and God knows what: the setup for the wire. “The eye bags are to die for.”
“She’s had three hours’ sleep a night,” Sam said tightly, behind me. “Same as yourself and myself. And we’re not exactly looking the best either.”
“Hey, I’m not giving her hassle,” Frank told him, heading past us and dumping the armful on the coffee table. “I’m delighted with her. She looks like she’s been in intensive care for ten days. Hi, babe.”