Dear Lexie, been trying 2 get hold of u in refrence 2 that matter we were talking about, Im still v v interested. Please let me know whenever u get a chance. Thanks, Ned.
I was willing to bet that Ned had gone to an insanely expensive private school. Daddy hadn’t exactly got his money’s worth.
Dear Lexie; Thanks, Ned . . .
Lexie must have wanted to kick him for leaving that kind of thing lying around, no matter how well hidden. I took out my lighter, moved over to the road and set the note on fire; when it caught, I dropped it, waited for the quick flare to die down and crushed out the embers with my foot. Then I found my Biro and ripped a page out of my notebook.
By this stage Lexie’s handwriting came easier than my own.
11 Thursday—talk then.
No need for fancy bait: Lexie had done all that for me, this guy was already well hooked. The tin shut with a neat, tiny click and I tucked it back into the long grass, feeling my fingerprints overlaying themselves perfectly on Lexie’s, my feet planted carefully in the precise spots where her footprints had long since washed away.
18
T
he next day lasted about a week. The Arts block was too hot, dry and airless. My tutorial group were bored and fidgety; it was their last session, they hadn’t read the material and couldn’t be bothered to fake it, and I couldn’t be bothered pretending I cared. All I could think about was Ned: whether he would show, what I would say if he did, what I would do if he didn’t; how long I had before Frank caught up with us.
I knew that night was a long shot. Even assuming I was right about the cottage being their meeting place, Ned might easily have given up on Lexie altogether, after a month with no communication—he hadn’t dated his note, it could have been weeks old. And even if he was the persistent type, the odds were against him checking the drop spot in time to make the meeting. A big part of me hoped he wouldn’t. I needed to hear what he had to say, but anything I heard, Frank was going to hear too.
I got to the cottage early, around half past ten. At home, Rafe was playing stormy Beethoven with an awful lot of pedal, Justin was trying to read with his fingers in his ears, everyone was getting snippier by the minute and the whole thing showed every sign of spiralling into a vicious argument.
It was only the third time I had been inside that cottage. I was a little wary about angry farmers—the field had to belong to someone, after all, although apparently he wasn’t too attached to it—but it was a still, bright night, nothing moving for miles around, just pale empty fields and the mountains black silhouettes against the stars. I got my back into a corner, where I could see the field and the road but where the shadows would mask me from anyone watching, and waited.
Just on the off chance that Ned did show up, I had to get this right; I only had one shot. I needed to let him lead, not just on everything I said, but on how I said it. Whatever Lexie had been for him, I needed to be the same. Going on past form, that could have been anything—breathy vamp, brave put-upon Cinderella, enigmatic Mata Hari—and, regardless of what Frank said about Ned’s brainpower, if I hit the wrong note even he would probably notice. All I could do was play it quiet and hope he gave me some cue.
The road was white and mysterious, curling away downhill into deep black hedges. A few minutes before eleven there was a vibration somewhere, too deep or too far away to pinpoint, just a throb tugging at the edge of my hearing. Silence; then the faint crunch of footsteps, away down the lane. I pressed back into the corner and got one hand around my torch and the other up my sweater, on the butt of my gun.
That flash of fair hair, moving among the dark hedges. Ned had made it after all.
I let go of my gun and watched him haul himself awkwardly over the wall, inspect his trousers for contamination, brush off his hands and pick his way across the field with deep distaste. I waited till he was in the cottage, only a few feet away, before I switched on my torch.
“God,”
Ned said peevishly, throwing an arm up to shield his eyes. “Like, go ahead and totally blind me?”
That right there was, like, totally enough time for me to learn everything I needed to know about Ned in one easy lesson. Here I had been all freaked out about having one double; he must have run into a clone of himself on every street corner in south Dublin. He was so exactly like everyone else that there was no way to see him, through all those thousands of reflected images. Standard-issue trendy haircut, standard-issue good looks, standard-issue rugby build, standard-issue overpriced labels; I could have told you his whole life story on that one glance. I hoped to God I never had to pick him out of a lineup.
Lexie would have given him whatever he wanted to see, and there was no doubt in my mind that Ned liked his girls clichéd: sexy by numbers rather than by nature, humorless, not too bright and ever so slightly bitchy. It was a shame I didn’t have a fake tan. "Ohmy
God,
” I said, matching his peeved tone and doing the same geebag accent I’d used to get Naylor out of his hedge. “Don’t have a thrombo. It’s just a torch.” This conversation wasn’t starting out on a great note, but I was OK with that. There are some social circles where manners are a sign of weakness.
“Where have you been?” Ned demanded. “I’ve been leaving you notes, like, every other
day.
I’ve got better stuff to do than haul my arse down to bogland all the time, yah?”
If Lexie had been shagging this space waste, I was going to head over to the morgue and stab her myself. I rolled my eyes. “Um, hello? I got stabbed? I was in a
coma
?”
“Oh,” Ned said. “Yah. Right.” He gave me a pale-blue, vaguely put-out stare, like I’d done something tasteless. “Still, though. You could have got in touch. This is
business.
”
That, at least, was good news. “Yah, well,” I said. “We’re in touch now, aren’t we?”
“This total fucking low-life detective came and talked to me,” Ned said, suddenly remembering. He looked as outraged as you can get without changing expression. “Like I was a suspect, or something. I told him this was so not my problem. I’m not from Bally
mun.
I don’t
stab
people.”
I decided I was with Frank on this one: Ned was not the brightest little bunny hopping through this forest. He was the type who was basically one big cluster of secondhand reflexes, no actual thought involved. I would have been willing to bet good money that he talked to working-class clients as though they were handicapped and said “Me love you long time” whenever he saw an Asian girl. “Did you tell him about this?” I asked, pulling myself up onto a broken bit of wall.
He gave me a horrified look. “No way. He’d have been all over me like a rash, and I couldn’t be arsed trying to explain myself to him. I just want this sorted, yah?”
And civic-minded, too—not that I was complaining. “Good,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like this has anything to do with what happened to me, right?”
Ned didn’t seem to have an opinion on that. He went to lean against the wall, examined it suspiciously and changed his mind. “So can we, like, move forwards?” he wanted to know.
I ducked my head and threw him a sideways poor-little-me glance, up under the lashes. “The coma totally messed up my memory. So you’ll have to tell me where we were, and stuff?”
Ned stared at me. That impassive face, utterly expressionless, giving away nothing: for the first time I saw a resemblance to Daniel, even if it was Daniel after a frontal lobotomy. “We were on a hundred,” he said, after a moment. “Cash.”
A hundred quid for some family heirloom, a hundred grand for a share of the house? I didn’t have to be sure what we were talking about to know he was lying. “Um, I don’t think so,” I told him, giving him a flirty smirk to soften the blow of being outsmarted by a girl. “The coma messed up my memory, not my
brain.
”
Ned laughed, completely unembarrassed, stuffing his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. “Well, hey, a guy’s gotta try, right?”
I kept the smirk, since he seemed to like it. “Keep trying.”
“OK,” Ned said, sobering up and putting on his business face. “Seriously. So I said one eighty, right? And you told me I’d have to do better than that, which you’re totally breaking my bollocks here but fair enough, and to get back to you. So I left you a note saying we can talk about two hundred K, right, but then you . . .” An uncomfortable shrug. “You know.”
Two hundred K.
For a second all I felt was the pure white high of triumph, the one every detective knows, when the cards turn over and you see that every bet you placed was pinpoint perfect, that flying blind you found your way straight home. Then I realized.
I had assumed Ned was the one holding things up, sorting out paperwork or trying to raise cash. Lexie had never needed serious money to run before. She had reached North Carolina with the deposit for a fleabag apartment and left it with what she got for her beaten-up car; all she had ever asked for was an open road and a few hours’ head start. This time, she had been negotiating six-figure deals with Ned. Not just because she could; with the baby growing and Abby’s sharp eyes in the background and an offer that size on the table, why hang around for weeks over a few grand either way? She would have signed on the dotted line, demanded small bills and been gone, unless she needed every penny she could get.
The more I had learned about Lexie, the more I had taken it for granted that she was planning on having an abortion, as soon as she got to wherever she was going. Abby—and Abby had known her, as well as anyone could—thought the same, after all. But an abortion only costs a few hundred quid. Lexie could have saved that much from her job by this time, nicked it out of the kitty one night, got a bank loan she would never repay; no need to mess around with Ned at all.
Raising a child costs a whole lot more. The princess of No Man’s Land, the queen of a thousand castles between worlds, had crossed over. She had been about to open her hands and take hold of the biggest commitment of all. The wall felt like it was turning to water underneath me.
I must have been staring like I’d seen a ghost. “Seriously,” Ned said, a little miffed, misreading the look. “I’m not messing you around. Two hundred Gs is my absolute best offer. I mean, I’m taking a major risk here. After we’re sorted, I’ve still got to convince at least two of your mates. I’ll get there in the end, obviously, once I’ve got the leverage, but that could take months and a shitload of hassle.”
I pressed my free hand down on the wall, hard, feeling the rough stone dig into my palm, till my head cleared. “You think?”
Those pale eyes widened. “Oh, God, yah. I don’t know what the fuck their damage is. I know they’re your friends and Daniel’s my cousin and shit, but, like, are they thick? Just the thought of doing something with that house had them squealing like a bunch of nuns at a flasher.”
I shrugged. “They like the place.”
“
Why?
I mean, it’s a total dive, it doesn’t even have
heating,
and they act like it’s some kind of
palace.
Do they not realize what they could get out of it, if they just got a grip? That house has
potential.
”
Executive apartments on extensive grounds with potential for further development . . .
For a second I despised Lexie and me both, for schmoozing this little skid mark for our own ends. “I’m the smart one,” I said. “When you get the place, what are you going to do with all that potential?”
Ned gave me a baffled stare; presumably he and Lexie had already talked about this. I gave him back a blank look, which seemed to make him feel at home. “Depends on planning permission, yah? I mean, ideally, I’ll go for a golf club or a spa hotel, something like that. That’s where the serious long-term profit is, specially if I can get a helipad put in. Otherwise, we’re talking major luxury apartments.”
I considered kicking him in the nads and running. I had gone in there all ready to hate this guy’s guts, and he wasn’t letting me down. Ned didn’t want Whitethorn House; he didn’t give a flying fuck about it, no matter what he had said in court. What had him salivating wasn’t the house but the thought of wrecking it, the chance to rip its throat out, scrape its ribs hollow and lick up every last taste of blood. For a flash I saw John Naylor’s face, swollen and discolored, lit up by those visionary eyes:
Do you know what that hotel would have done for Glenskehy?
Deep down, deeper and more powerful than the fact that they would loathe each other’s guts, he and Ned were two sides of the same coin.
When they pack up their things and go,
Naylor had said,
I want to be there to wave them good-bye.
At least he had been willing to put his body, not just his bank account, on the line for what he wanted.
“Brilliant idea,” I said. “I mean, it’s so important not to let a house just sit there being lived in.”
Ned missed the sarcasm. “Obviously,” he said hastily, in case I started looking for a bigger cut, “it’s going to take, like, a ton of investment cash just to get it off the ground. So two hundred’s the best I can do. Are we good with that? Can I get the paperwork moving?”
I pursed up my mouth and pretended to mull that one over. “I’ll have to have a little think about it.”
“Ah, for fuck’s
sake.
” Ned raked a hand through his quiff, frustrated, then smoothed it carefully back into shape. “Come on. This has been dragging on for, like, ever.”
“Sor-
ry,
” I said, shrugging. “If you were in such a major hurry, you should’ve made me a decent offer to start with.”
“Well, I am now, right? I’ve got investors lining up begging to get in on the ground floor of this, but they won’t hang around forever. These are serious guys? With serious money?”
I gave him the smirk, with a bitchy little nose-wrinkle thrown in. “So I’ll seriously let you know the exact second I decide. OK?” And I waved bye-bye.
Ned stayed put for another few seconds, shifting from foot to foot and looking majorly pissed off, but I kept the glassy smirk going. “Right,” he said, finally. “Fine. Whatever. Let me know.”
In the doorway he turned to tell me, impressively, “This could put me on the
map,
you know. This could have me playing with the
big
boys. So let’s not fuck it up, OK?”
He was trying for a dramatic exit, but he lost his chance by tripping over something as he turned to flounce off. He tried to save it by breaking into a jaunty little jog across the field, not looking back.