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.