“Dead right,” I said. “I don’t want them looking through my stuff.”

“They already did,” Abby said. “Sorry. They searched your room.”

“Ah, for fuck’s sake,” I said, indignant. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

“We didn’t get the sense it was optional,” Rafe said dryly.

“What if I’d had love letters, or—or stud-muffin porn, or something private?”

“Presumably that’s exactly what they were looking for.”

“They were fascinating, actually,” Daniel said. “The police. Most of them seemed utterly uninterested: all routine. I would have loved to watch them do the search, but I don’t think it would have been a good idea to ask.”

“They didn’t get what they were after, anyway,” I said with satisfaction. “Where is it, Daniel?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said, mildly surprised. “Wherever you keep it, I assume,” and he went back to his steak.

* * *

The guys cleared the plates away; Abby and I sat at the table, smoking, in a silence that was starting to feel companionable. I heard someone doing something in the sitting room, hidden behind wide sliding double doors, and the smell of wood smoke seeped out to us. “Peaceful one tonight?” Abby asked, watching me over her cigarette. “Just read?”

After dinner was their free time: cards, music, reading, talking, slowly knocking the house into shape. Reading sounded like the easiest option by about a mile. “Perfect,” I said. “I’ve got loads of thesis catching-up to do.”

“Relax,” Abby said—that small one-sided smile again. “You’re only just home. You’ve got all the time in the world.” She stubbed out her smoke and threw open the sliding doors.

The sitting room was huge and, unexpectedly, wonderful. The photos had caught only the shabbiness, missed the atmosphere altogether. High ceiling, with moldings along the edges; wide floorboards, unvarnished and lumpy; horrible flowered wallpaper, peeling in patches to show the old layers underneath—rose and gold stripes, a dull cream-colored sheen like silk. The furniture was mismatched and ancient: a scuffed card table in inlaid rosewood, faded brocade armchairs, a long uncomfortable-looking sofa, bookshelves jammed with tattered leather covers and bright paperbacks. There was no overhead light, just standing lamps and a wood fire crackling in a massive wrought-iron fireplace, throwing wild shadows scudding among the cobwebs in the high corners. The room was a mess, and I fell in love with it before I was through the doorway.

The armchairs looked cozy and I was right on the edge of heading for one of them when my mind slammed on the brakes, hard. I could hear my heart. I had no idea where I was supposed to sit; my head had gone blank. The food, the easy slagging, the comfortable silence with Abby: I had relaxed.

“Back in a sec,” I said, and hid in the bathroom to let the others narrow things down by taking their places, and to let my knees stop shaking. By the time I could breathe right, my brain had come out of neutral and I knew where my seat was: a low Victorian nursing chair to one side of the fireplace. Frank had shown me photos by the handful. I had known that.

It would have been that easy: sitting down in the wrong chair. Barely four hours.

Justin glanced up, with a faint worried furrow between his eyebrows, when I went back into the sitting room, but nobody said anything. My books were spread out on a low table by my chair: thick historical references, a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre open face-down across a lined notepad, a yellowing pulp novel called She Dressed to Kill by Rip Corelli—presumably non-thesis-related, although who knew—with a cover picture of a pneumatic lady wearing a slit skirt and a gun in her garter (“She drew men like honey draws flies . . . and then she swatted them!”). My pen—a blue Biro, the end covered with toothmarks—was still where I had put it down midsentence, that Wednesday night.

I watched the others over my book for any signs of edginess, but they had all settled to reading with an instant, trained concentration that was almost intimidating. Abby, in an armchair with her feet up on a little embroidered footstool—her restoration project, probably—flipped pages briskly and twisted a lock of hair round her finger. Rafe sat across the fire from me in the other armchair; every now and then he put his book down and leaned forwards to poke the fire or add another chunk of wood. Justin lay on the sofa with his notepad propped on his chest, scribbling, occasionally murmuring something or huffing to himself or clicking his tongue disapprovingly. There was a frayed tapestry of a hunting scene on the wall behind him; he should have looked incongruous beneath it, with his corduroys and his little rimless glasses, but somehow he didn’t, not at all. Daniel sat at the card table, his dark head bent under the glow of a tall lamp, only moving to deliberately, unhurriedly turn a page. The heavy green velvet curtains were open and I imagined how we would look, to a watcher in the dark garden beyond; how securely wrapped in our firelight and concentration; how bright and tranquil, like something from a dream. For a sharp, dizzying second I envied Lexie Madison.

Daniel felt me watching; he lifted his head and smiled at me, across the table. It was the first time I’d seen him smile, and it had an immense, grave sweetness to it. Then he bent his head over his book again.

* * *

I went to bed early, around ten, partly as a character choice and partly because Frank had been right, I was wrecked. My brain felt like it had just done a triathlon. I shut Lexie’s bedroom door (smell of lily of the valley, a subtle little eddy swirling up my shoulder and round the neck of my T-shirt, curious and watchful) and leaned back against it. For a second I thought I wasn’t going to make it as far as the bed, I’d just slide down the door and be asleep before I hit the carpet. This was harder than I remembered, and I didn’t think it was because I was getting old or losing my touch or any of the other appealing possibilities O’Kelly would have suggested. Last time I had been the one calling the shots, deciding who I needed to hang out with, for how long, how close I needed to get. This time Lexie had called them all for me and I didn’t have a choice: I had to follow her rules to the letter, listen hard and nonstop like she was on a faint crackly earpiece and let her run me.

I had had this feeling before, on some of my least favorite investigations: Someone else is running this show. Most of them hadn’t ended well. But then it had always been the killer, a smug three steps ahead of us all the way. I had never had a case where that someone else was the victim.

One thing, though, felt easier. Last time, in UCD, every word out of my mouth had left a nasty taste behind, something tainted and wrong, like bread gone moldy. Like I said, I don’t like lying. This time, though, everything I’d said left nothing except the clean-cotton taste of true. The only possible reasons I could come up with were that I was fooling the living bejasus out of myself—rationalization is a major part of the undercover’s skill set—or that, in some tangled way that ran deeper and surer than cold hard fact, I wasn’t lying. As long as I did this right, almost everything I said was the truth, just Lexie’s rather than mine. I decided it would probably be a wise move to peel myself off the door and go to bed before I started thinking too hard about either of those possibilities.

Her room was on the top floor, at the back of the house, across from Daniel and above Justin. It was midsized, low-ceilinged, with plain white curtains and a rickety wrought-iron single bed that screeched like an ancient mangle when I sat down on it—if Lexie had managed to get pregnant in that thing, respect to her. The duvet cover was blue and freshly ironed; someone had changed my sheets. She didn’t have a lot of furniture: a bookshelf, a narrow wooden wardrobe with helpful strips of tin on the shelves to tell you what went where (HATS, STOCKINGS), a crap plastic lamp on a crap bedside table, and a wooden dressing table with dusty scrollwork and a three-way mirror, which reflected my face at confusing angles and gave me the creeps in all the predictable ways. I considered covering it up with a sheet or something, but that would have taken some explaining, and anyway I couldn’t shake the feeling that the reflection would keep doing its own thing behind there, just the same.

I unlocked my bag, keeping a sharp ear out for any noise on the stairs, and dug out my new gun and the roll of surgical tape for my bandages. Even at home, I don’t sleep without my gun handy—old habit, and not one I felt like breaking right at that moment. I taped the gun to the back of the bedside table, out of sight but in easy reach. No cobwebs, not even a film of dust on the back of the table: the Bureau had been there before me.

Before I put on Lexie’s blue pajamas, I peeled off the fake bandage, unclipped the mike and stashed the whole shebang at the bottom of my bag. Somewhere Frank was going into a full-blown conniption about this, but I didn’t care; I had reasons.

Going to sleep on your first night undercover is something you never forget. All day you’ve been pure concentrated control, watching yourself as sharply and ruthlessly as you watch everyone and everything around you; but come night, alone on a strange mattress in a room where the air smells different, you’ve got no choice but to open your hands and let go, fall into sleep and into someone else’s life like a pebble falling through cool green water. Even your first time, you know that in that second something irreversible will start happening, that in the morning you’ll wake up changed. I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters’ children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.

I found a beautiful, illustrated, fragile old edition of the Brothers Grimm in the bookshelf and took it to bed with me. The others had given it to Lexie on her birthday, last year: the flyleaf said, in slanted, flowing fountain pen—Justin’s writing, I was almost sure—“3/1/04. Happy Birthday YOUNG girl (when are you going to grow up??). Love,” and their four names.

I sat in bed with the book on my knees, but I couldn’t read. Every now and then the quick muffled rhythms of conversation seeped up from the sitting room, and outside my window the garden was alive: wind in leaves, a fox barking and an owl on the hunt, rustles and calls and scuffles everywhere. I sat there and looked around Lexie Madison’s strange little room, and listened.

A little before midnight, the stairs creaked and there was a discreet tap on my door. I leaped halfway to the ceiling, grabbed at my bag to make sure it was zipped up all the way and called, “Come in.”

“It’s me,” said Daniel or Rafe or Justin, close behind the door, too soft for me to tell which one it was. “Just saying good night. We’re going to bed.”

My heart was pounding. “Night,” I called. “Sleep tight.”

Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets’ chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams.

* * *

I sleep lightly and I have good ears. Sometime in the night I woke up, instantly and completely. Across the hall, in Daniel’s room, someone was whispering.

I held my breath, but the doors were thick and all I could make out was the flicker of sibilants in the dark; no words, no voices. I reached out my arm from under the covers, carefully, and found Lexie’s phone on the bedside table. 3:17 a.m.

I followed the faint double trail of whispers, weaving between the bat shrills and the rolls of wind, for a long time. It was two minutes to four when I heard the slow grate of a doorknob turning, and then the soft click as Daniel’s door closed. A breath of sound across the landing, almost imperceptible, like a shadow moving against blackness; then nothing.

6

Footsteps woke me, thumping downstairs. I had been dreaming, something dark and messy, and it took me a wild second to disentangle my mind and figure out where I was. My gun wasn’t beside my bed and I was grabbing for it, starting to panic, when I remembered.

I sat up in bed. Apparently nothing had been poisoned, after all; I felt fine. The smell of a fry-up was creeping under the door, and I could hear the brisk morning rhythm of voices, somewhere far below. Shit: I had missed cooking breakfast. It had been so long since I’d managed to sleep past six, I hadn’t bothered to set Lexie’s alarm. I stuck the mike-bandage back on, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and a mammoth sweater that looked like it had belonged to one of the lads—the air was freezing—and went downstairs.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it had improved a lot since Lexie’s scary movie. They’d got rid of the mold and the cobwebs and the scummy linoleum; instead there was a flagstoned floor, a scrubbed wooden table, a pot of ragged geraniums on the windowsill behind the sink. Abby, in a red-flannel dressing gown with the hood pulled up, was flipping bacon and sausages. Daniel was at the table, fully dressed, reading a book pinned under the edge of his plate and eating fried eggs with methodical enjoyment. Justin was slicing his toast into triangles and complaining.

“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. Last week only two of them had done the reading; the rest just sat there staring and chewing gum, like a pack of cows. Are you sure you don’t want to swap, just for today? Maybe you could get more out of them—”

“No,” Daniel said, without looking up.

“But yours are doing the sonnets. I know the sonnets. I’m good at the sonnets.”

“No.”

“Morning,” I said, in the doorway.

Daniel nodded at me gravely and went back to his book. Abby waved the spatula. “Morning, you.”

“Sweetie,” Justin said. “Come here. Let me look at you. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” I said. “Sorry, Abby; I slept it out. Here, give me that—”

I reached for the spatula, but she whipped it away. “No, you’re grand; you still count as walking wounded. Tomorrow I’ll come up and haul you out of bed. Sit.”

That split second again—wounded: Daniel and Justin seemed to pause, suspended midbite. Then I sat down at the table and Justin reached for another slice of toast, and Daniel turned a page and shoved a red enamel teapot across to me.

Abby flipped three rashers and two eggs onto a plate, without asking, and came over to put it in front of me. “Oh, brrr,” she said, hurrying back to the cooker. “Jesus. Daniel, I know about you and double-glazing, but seriously, we should at least think about windows that would—”

“Double-glazing is the spawn of Satan. It’s hideous.”

“Yes, but it’s warm. If we’re not getting carpets—”

Justin was nibbling toast, chin on hand, gazing at me closely enough to make me nervous. I concentrated on my food. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked anxiously. “You look pale. You’re not going in today, are you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a full day of this, not yet. And, also, I wanted a chance to check out the house in private; I wanted that diary, or date book, or whatever it was. “I’m supposed to take it easy for another few days. That reminds me, though: what’s been happening with my tutorials?” Tutorials officially end at the Easter holidays, but there are always a few that, for whatever reason, drag on into the summer term. I had two groups left, one on Tuesdays and one on Thursdays. I wasn’t looking forward to them.

“We covered them,” Abby said, loading a plate for herself and joining us at the table, “in a manner of speaking. Daniel did Beowulf with your Thursday bunch. In the original.”

“Beautiful,” I said. “How’d they take it?”

“Not too badly, really,” Daniel said. “At first they were aghast, but eventually one or two of them came up with some intelligent comments. It was quite interesting.”

Rafe stumbled in with his hair sticking up in clumps, wearing a T-shirt and striped pajama bottoms and apparently navigating by radar. He waved at the room in general, fumbled for a mug, poured himself a lot of black coffee, snagged a triangle of Justin’s toast and wandered out again.

“Twenty minutes!” Justin yelled after him. “I’m not waiting for you!” Rafe flipped a hand backwards, over his shoulder, and kept going.

“I don’t know why you bother,” Abby said, slicing sausage. “In five minutes he won’t even remember seeing you. After the coffee. With Rafe, always after the coffee.”

“Yes, but then he moans that I haven’t given him enough time to get ready. I mean it, this time I’m leaving him behind, and if he’s late then that’s his problem. He can get a car of his own or he can walk to town, I don’t care—”

“Every morning,” Abby said to me, across Justin, who was making outraged gestures with his butter knife.

I rolled my eyes. Outside the French windows behind her head, a rabbit was nibbling the lawn, leaving little dark scatters of paw prints in the white dew.

* * *

Half an hour later, Rafe and Justin left—Justin pulled up his car in front of the house and sat there, beeping the horn and shouting inaudible threats out the window, until Rafe finally bounded into the kitchen with his coat half on and his knapsack swinging wildly from one hand, grabbed another slice of toast, shoved it between his teeth and dashed out again, slamming the front door hard enough to shake the house. Abby washed up, singing to herself in a rich contralto undertone: “The water is wide, I cannot get o’er . . .” Daniel smoked an unfiltered cigarette, thin plumes curling up through the pale rays of sun from the window. They’d relaxed around me; I was in.

I should have felt a lot better about this than I did. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might like these people. Daniel and Rafe, I wasn’t sure about yet, but Justin had a warmth to him that was even more endearing because it was so fussy and unpracticed, and Frank had been right about Abby: if things had been different, I would have wanted her for a friend.

They had just lost one of their own and they didn’t even know it, and there was still a chance it had been due to me; and I was sitting in their kitchen, eating their fry-up and messing with their heads. Last night’s suspicions—hemlock steak, Jesus—seemed so ridiculous and Gothic that I wanted to cringe.

“Daniel, we should start moving,” Abby said eventually, checking the clock and wiping her hands on the dish towel. “Want anything from the outside world, Lex?”

“Smokes,” I said. “I’m almost out.”

She fished a pack of Marlboro Lights out of her dressing-gown pocket and tossed it to me. “Have these. I’ll pick up more on the way in. What are you going to do all day?”

“Be a sloth on the sofa and read and eat. Are there biscuits?”

“Those vanilla cream ones you like, in the biscuit tin, and chocolate chip in the freezer.” She flipped the dish towel into a neat fold and slung it over the bar of the cooker. “You’re sure you don’t want someone to stay home with you?”

Justin had already asked me about six times. I raised my eyes to the ceiling. “Positive.”

I caught Abby’s quick glance across my head to Daniel, but he was turning a page and paying no attention to us. “Fair enough,” she said. “Don’t faint down the stairs or anything. Five minutes, Daniel?”

Daniel nodded, without looking up. Abby ran upstairs, light in her sock feet; I heard her opening and closing drawers and, after a minute, starting to sing to herself again. “I leaned my back up against an oak, I thought it was a trusty tree . . .”

Lexie smoked more than I did, a pack a day, and she started after breakfast. I took Daniel’s matches and lit up.

Daniel checked the page of his book, closed it and put it aside. “Should you really be smoking?” he asked. “Under the circumstances.”

“No,” I said pertly, and blew a stream of smoke across the table at him. “Should you?”

That made him smile. “You’re looking better this morning,” he said. “Last night you seemed very tired; a little lost, somehow. Which I suppose is only to be expected, but it’s nice to see your energy starting to come back.”

I made a mental note to up the boing level, gradually, over the next few days. “In the hospital they kept saying it would take a while and not to rush myself,” I said, “but they can stick it in their ear. I’m bored of being sick.”

The smile deepened. “Well, so I imagine. I’m sure you were a dream patient.” He leaned over to the cooker, tilted the coffeepot to see if there was anything left. “How much of the incident itself do you actually remember?”

He was pouring himself the last of the coffee and watching me; his face was serene, interested, untroubled. “Bugger-all,” I said. “That whole day’s gone, and bits from before. I thought the cops told you.”

“They did,” Daniel said, “but that didn’t mean it was necessarily the case. You could have had your own reasons for telling them that.”

I looked blank. “Like what?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said, replacing the coffeepot carefully on the stove. “I hope, though, that if you do remember anything and you’re unsure whether to take it to the police, you won’t feel you have to deal with it alone; you’ll come and talk to me, or to Abby. Would you do that?”

He sipped his coffee, one ankle crossed neatly over the opposite knee, watching me calmly. I was starting to see what Frank meant about these four giving away very little. This guy’s expression would have worked equally well whether he had just come from choir practice or from ax-murdering a dozen orphans. “Well, yeah, sure,” I said. “But all I remember is coming home from college on the Tuesday evening and then getting really, really sick in a bedpan, and I already told the police all that.”

“Hmm,” said Daniel. He pushed the ashtray over to my side of the table. “Memory is an odd thing. Let me ask you this: if you were to—” But just then Abby came clattering back down the stairs, still singing, and he shook his head and stood up and started patting at his pockets.

* * *

I waved from the top of the steps while Daniel pulled out of the driveway in a fast expert arc, and the car disappeared among the cherry trees. When I was sure they were gone, I shut the door and stood still in the hallway, listening to the empty house. I could feel it settling, a long whisper like shifting sand, to see what I would do now.

I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. The stair carpet had been taken off, but they hadn’t got around to doing anything instead; there was a wide unvarnished band across each step, dusty and worn down in the middle by generations of feet. I leaned against the newel post, wriggled till I got my back comfortable, and thought about that diary.

If it had been in Lexie’s room, the Bureau gang would have found it. That left the rest of the house, the whole garden, and the question of what was in there that she had wanted to hide even from her best friends. For a second I heard Frank’s voice, in the squad room: her friends close and her secrets closer.

The other possibility was that Lexie had kept it on her, that she had had it in a pocket when she died and the killer had nicked it. That would explain why he had taken the time and the risk to go after her (pulling her into cover, black darkness and his hands moving fast over her limp body, patting down pockets, glazed with rain and blood): if he needed that diary.

That fit with what I knew about Lexie—keep secrets close—but, on a more practical level, it would have had to be pretty small to go into a pocket, and she would have had to swap it over every time she changed clothes. Finding a hiding place would have been simpler and safer. Somewhere it would be safe from rain and from accidental discovery; somewhere she could be sure of privacy, even living with four people; somewhere she could go whenever she wanted, without catching anyone’s attention; not her room.

There was a toilet on the ground floor and a full bathroom on the first. I checked the jacks first, but the room was the size of a coat closet, and once I’d looked in the cistern I had basically exhausted the possibilities. The main bathroom was big: 1930s tiles with a black-and-white checked border, chipped bath, unfrosted windows with tattered net curtains. The door bolted.

Nothing in the cistern, or behind it. I sat down on the floor and pulled out the wooden panel from the side of the bath. It came easily; a scraping sound, but nothing that running water or a flush wouldn’t cover. Underneath there were cobwebs, mouse droppings, sweeps of finger marks in the dust; and, tucked in a corner, a tiny red notebook.

My breath felt like I’d been running. I didn’t like this; didn’t like how, with acres to choose from, I had come homing straight to Lexie’s hiding place as if I had no choice. Around me the house seemed to have tightened and drawn closer, leaning in over my shoulder; watching; focused.

I went up to my room—Lexie’s room—and found my gloves and a nail file. Then I sat back down on the bathroom floor and carefully, holding it by the edges, pulled out the notebook. I used the file to turn the pages. Sooner or later, the Bureau would need to fingerprint this.

I had been hoping for a pour-your-heart-out diary, but I should have known better. This was just a date book, red fake-leather cover, a page for each day. The first few months were covered with appointments and reminders in that quick, rounded writing: Lettuce, Brie, garlic salt; 11 tut Rm 3017; elec bill; ask D Ovid book?? Homey, innocuous stuff, and reading it made me edgier than anything yet. When you’re a detective you get used to invading people’s privacy in every way you can think of, I had slept in Lexie’s bed and I was wearing her clothes, but this; this was the small day-to-day debris of her life, it had been only for herself, and I had no right to it.

In the last few days of March, though, something changed. The shopping lists and tutorial timetables vanished and the pages went bare. There were only three notes, in a hard, dashed-off scribble. The last of March: 10.30 N. The fifth of April: 11.30 N. And the eleventh, two days before she died: 11 N.

No N in January or February; no mention till that appointment on the last of March. The list of Lexie’s KAs wasn’t a long one, and as far as I could remember, no one on it began with N. A nickname? A place? A café? Someone from her old life, just like Frank had said, resurfacing from nowhere and wiping the rest of her world blank?

Across the last two days of April was a list of letters and numbers, in that same furious scrawl. AMS 79, LHR 34, EDI 49, CDG 59, ALC 104. Scores from some game, sums of money she’d lent or borrowed? Abby’s initials were AMS—Abigail Marie Stone—but the others didn’t match anyone on the KA list. I stared at them for a long time, but the only thing they reminded me of was the plate numbers on classic cars, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of a reason why Lexie would be car spotting or why, if she was, it would be a state secret.

Nobody had said one word about her acting tense or odd, her last few weeks. She seemed fine, every single interviewee had told Frank and Sam; she seemed happy; she seemed just like always. The last video clip was from three days before she died and it showed her clambering down a ladder from the attic, a red bandanna tied round her hair and every inch of her powdered gray with dust, sneezing and laughing and holding out something in her free hand: “No, look, Rafe, look! It’s”—explosive sneeze—“it’s opera glasses, I think they’re mother-of-pearl, aren’t they brilliant?” Whatever had been going on, she had hidden it well; too well.

The rest of the book was empty, except for the twenty-second of August: Dad’s bday.

Not a changeling or a collective hallucination, after all. She had a father, somewhere out there, and she hadn’t wanted to forget his birthday. She had kept at least one slender tie to the life where she had started out.

I went through the pages again, slower this time, looking for anything I’d missed. Towards the beginning, a few dates here and there were circled: 2 January, 29 January, 25 February. The first page had a tiny calendar for December 2004, and sure enough, there was a circle around the sixth.

Twenty-seven days apart. Lexie had been clockwork and she had kept track. By the end of March, with no circle around the twenty-fourth, she had to have suspected she was pregnant. Somewhere—not at home; at Trinity or in some café, where nobody would see the packet in the bin and wonder—she had taken a pregnancy test, and something had changed. Her date book had turned to a fierce secret, N had moved in and everything else had been stripped away.

N. An obstetrician? A clinic? The baby’s father?

“What the hell were you at, girl?” I said softly, into the empty room. There was a whisper behind me and I jumped about a mile, but it was only the breeze riffling the net curtains.

* * *

I thought about taking the date book back to my room, but in the end I figured Lexie had probably had reasons of her own for not leaving it there, and her hiding place had apparently worked fine so far. I copied the good bits into my own notebook, put hers back under the bath and slid the panel into place. Then I went over the house, getting to know the details and doing a quick, not-too-thorough search as I went. Frank would expect to hear that I’d done something useful with my day, and I already knew I wasn’t going to tell him about the date book, at least not yet.

I started at the bottom and worked my way up. If I found anything good, we were going to have a major admissibility battle on our hands. I was a resident of the house, which meant I could look in the common spaces all I wanted but the others’ rooms were basically out of bounds, and I was there under false pretenses to begin with; this is the kind of tangle that buys lawyers new Porsches. Once you know what you’re chasing, though, you can almost always find a legit way to get to it.

The house had the effortlessly off-kilter feel of something out of a storybook—I kept expecting to fall down a secret staircase, or come out of a room into a completely new corridor that only existed on alternate Mondays. I worked fast: I couldn’t make myself slow down, couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere in the attic a huge clock was counting down, great handfuls of seconds tumbling away.

On the ground floor were the double sitting room, the kitchen, the toilet and Rafe’s room. Rafe’s room was a mess—clothes piled in cardboard boxes, sticky glasses and snowdrifts of paper everywhere—but in an assured way; you could tell he usually knew where everything was, even if no one else could work it out. He had been goofing off on one wall with charcoal, dashing off quick, fairly impressive sketches for some kind of mural involving a beech tree, a red setter and a guy in a top hat. On the mantelpiece was—eureka—the Head: a porcelain phrenology bust, staring loftily out over Lexie’s red bandanna. I was starting to like Rafe.

The first floor had Abby’s room and the bathroom at the front, Justin’s and a spare room to the back—either it had been too complicated to clear out, or Rafe liked being on his own downstairs. I started with the spare. The thought of going into either of the others put a small, ridiculous nasty taste in my mouth.

Great-uncle Simon had obviously never, ever thrown anything away. The room had a schizophrenic, dreamlike look, some lost store-cupboard of the mind: three copper kettles with holes in them, a moldy top hat, a broken stick-horse giving me a Godfather leer, what appeared to be half of an accordion. I know nothing about antiques, but none of it looked valuable, definitely not valuable enough to kill for. It looked more like stuff you would leave outside the gate in the hope that drunk students on a kitsch kick would take it home.

Abby and Justin were both neat, in very different ways. Abby went in for knickknacks—a tiny alabaster vase holding a handful of violets, a lead-crystal candlestick, an old sweet tin with a picture of a red-lipped girl in improbable Egyptian getup on the lid, all shiny clean and lined up carefully on just about every flat surface—and color; the curtains were made of strips of old fabric sewn together, red damask, bluebell-sprigged cotton, frail lace, and she had glued patches of fabric over the bald spots in the faded wallpaper. The room felt cozy and quirky and a little unreal, like the den of some kids’-book wood-land creature that would wear a frilly bonnet and make jam tarts.

Justin, sort of unexpectedly, turned out to have minimalist tastes. There was a small nest of books and photocopies and scribbled pages beside his bedside table, and he had covered the back of his door with photos of the gang—arranged symmetrically, in what looked like chronological order, and covered with some kind of clear sealant—but everything else was spare and clean and functional: white bedclothes, white curtains blowing, dark wood furniture polished to a shine, neat rows of balled-up socks in the drawers and glossy shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room smelled, very faintly, of something cypressy and masculine.

There was nothing dodgy in any of the bedrooms, as far as I could see, but something about all three of them kept catching at me. It took me a while to put my finger on it. I was kneeling on Justin’s floor, checking under his bed like a burglar (nothing, not even dust bunnies), when it hit me: they felt permanent. I had never lived in a place where I could mess with the wallpaper or glue things down—my aunt and uncle wouldn’t have objected, exactly, but their house had a tiptoe atmosphere that prevented anything along those lines from even occurring to me, and all my landlords apparently had this idea that they were renting me Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest; it had taken me months to convince my current guy that property values would not plummet if I painted the walls white instead of banana-barf yellow and stuck the LSD-based carpet in the garden shed. None of this had bothered me at the time, but all of a sudden, surrounded by this houseful of happy, cavalier possessiveness—I would have loved a mural; Sam can draw—it seemed like a very strange way to live, on some stranger’s sufferance, asking permission like a little kid before I left any mark.

The top floor: my room, Daniel’s, two more spares. The one beside Daniel was full of old furniture, tumbled in splayed heaps as if an earthquake had hit: those grayish undersized chairs that never actually get used, a display cabinet that looked like the Rococo movement had thrown up on it, and just about everything in between. Bits and pieces had obviously been taken out—drag marks, bare patches—presumably to furnish the rooms when the five of them moved in. What was left was inches deep in trailing, sticky dust. The room next to mine had more wild debris (a cracked stone hot-water bottle, mud-crusted green wellies, a mouse-shredded tapestry cushion involving deer and flowers) and teetering stacks of cardboard boxes and old leather suitcases. Someone had made a start on going through this stuff, not too long ago: layers of bright finger marks on some of the suitcase lids, one even wiped semiclean, mysterious outlines in corners and on boxes where things had been taken away. There were tangles of faint shoe prints on the dusty floorboards.

If you were going to hide something—a murder weapon, or some kind of evidence, or some small priceless antique—this wouldn’t be a bad place. I went through all the cases that had been opened, staying well clear of the finger marks, just in case, but they were stuffed to the lids with pages and pages of crabby fountain-pen scribble. As far as I could tell, someone, presumably Great-uncle Simon, had been writing a history of the March family through the ages. The Marches had been around for a while—the dates went back to 1734, when the house had been built—but had apparently never done anything more interesting than getting married, buying the odd horse and gradually losing most of their estate.

Daniel’s room was locked. The life skills I learned from Frank do include lock picking, and this one looked pretty simple, but I was already antsy from the diary, and that door wound me a notch tighter. I had no way of knowing whether Daniel always locked his room or whether this was specially for me. I was suddenly positive that he had left some trap—a hair across the frame, a glass of water just inside the door—that would give me away if I went in there.

I finished off with Lexie’s room—it had been searched already, but I wanted to do it myself. Unlike Uncle Simon, Lexie had kept sweet fuck-all. The room wasn’t tidy, exactly—the books were tossed onto the shelves rather than lined up, the clothes were mostly in piles on the wardrobe floor; under the bed were three empty smoke packets, half a Caramilk and a crumpled page of notes on Villette—but it was too sparse to be messy. No knickknacks, no old ticket stubs or birthday cards or dried flowers, no photographs; the only mementos she had wanted were the phone videos. I thumbed through every book and turned every pocket inside out, but the room gave me nothing.

It had that same taste of permanence, though. She had been trying out paint colors on the wall beside her bed, in broad fast sweeps: ochre, old rose, china blue. That flick of envy went through me again. Screw you, I told Lexie inside my head; you may have lived here for longer, but I’m getting paid for it.

I sat down on the floor, dug my mobile out of my bag and rang Frank. “Hey, babe,” he said, on the second ring. “Burned already, yeah?”

He was in a good mood. “Yep,” I said. “Sorry about that. Come get me.”

Frank laughed. “How’s it going?”

I stuck him on speakerphone, put the phone on the floor beside me and stuffed my gloves and notebook back into the bag. “OK, I guess. I don’t think any of them suspect anything’s up.”

“Why would they? Nobody in their right mind would think of something this unlikely. Got anything good for me?”

“They’re all at college, so I had a quick look around the house. No bloody knife, no bloody clothes, no Renoirs, no signed confessions. Not even a stash of spliff or a porn mag. They’re awfully pure, for students.” My bandages were in carefully numbered packets, so that the stains would get lighter as the wound supposedly healed, just in case someone with a very weird mind was checking the bin—in this job, you leave room for a fair amount of weirdness. I found the bandage marked “2” and peeled off the wrapper. Whoever had done the staining lived life with enthusiasm.

“Any sign of that diary?” Frank asked. “The famous diary that Daniel saw fit to mention to you, but not to us.”

I leaned back against the bookshelf, hiked up my top and pulled off the old bandage. “If it’s in the house,” I said, “someone’s done a good job of hiding it.”

A noncommittal noise from Frank. “Or else you were right and the killer took it off her body. Either way, though, it’s interesting that Daniel and company felt the need to lie about it. Anyone acting dodgy?”

“No. They were a little awkward around me to start with, but they would be. Basically, the main thing I’m getting is they’re glad to have Lexie back.”

“That’s what I got from the mike feed. Which,” Frank said, “reminds me. What happened last night, after you went up to your room? I heard you talking, but somehow I had trouble catching the exact words.”

There was a different note in his voice, and not a good one. I stopped smoothing down the edges of the new bandage. “Nothing. Everyone said good night.”

“How sweet,” Frank said. “Very Waltons. I’m sorry I missed it. Where was your mike?”

“In my bag. The battery pack sticks into me when I sleep.”

“So sleep on your back. Your door doesn’t lock.”

“I put a chair in front of it.”

“Oh, well, then. That’s all the backup you need. Jesus, Cassie!” I could practically see him raking his free hand furiously through his hair, pacing.

“What’s the big deal, Frank? Last time I never even used the mike unless I was actually doing something interesting. Whether I talk in my sleep isn’t going to make or break this case.”

“Last time you weren’t living with suspects. These four may not be top of our list, but we haven’t eliminated them yet. Unless you’re in the shower, that mike stays on your body. You want to talk about last time? If your mike had been in your bag where we couldn’t hear you, you’d be dead. You’d have bled out before we could get to you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Point taken.”

“Got it? On your body at all times. No fucking about.”

“Got it.”

“OK, then,” Frank said, settling down. “I’ve got a little pressie for you.” There was the edge of a grin in there: he’d saved up something good for after the lecture. "I’ve been tracking down all your KAs from our first Lexie Madison Extravaganza. Remember a girl called Victoria Harding?”

I bit off a piece of surgical tape. “Should I?”

"Tallish, slim, long blond hair? Talks a hundred an hour? Doesn’t blink?”

“Oh God,” I said, taping the bandage down. “Sticky Vicky. There’s a blast from the past.” Sticky Vicky was in UCD with me, studying something nonspecific. She had glassy blue eyes, a lot of matching accessories and a frantic, limitless ability to octopus herself onto anyone who might be useful, mainly rich boys and party girls. For some reason she had decided I was cool enough to be worth it, or maybe she was just hoping for free drugs.

“The very one. When did you last talk to her?”

I locked my bag and shoved it under the bed, trying to think back; Vicky wasn’t the type that leaves a lasting impression. “Maybe a few days before I got pulled out? I’ve seen her around town once or twice since, but I always dodged.”

“That’s funny,” Frank said, with that wolfish grin spreading through his voice, “because she’s talked to you a lot more recently than that. In fact, you and she had a nice long chat in early January of 2002—she knows the date because she’d just been to the winter sales and bought some kind of fancy designer coat, which she showed to you. Apparently it involved, and I quote, ‘the absolute ultimate taupe suede,’ whatever class of animal a taupe may be. Ringing any bells?”

“No,” I said. My heart was going slow and hard; I could feel it right down to the soles of my feet. “That wasn’t me.”

“I figured it might not be. Vicky remembers the conversation vividly, though, almost word for word—the girl’s got a memory like a steel trap, she’ll make a dream witness if it ever comes to that. Want to hear what you talked about?”

Vicky always did have that kind of mind: since there was basically no activity going on inside her head, conversations went in there and came back out virtually untouched. It was one of the main reasons I’d spent any time with her. “Refresh my memory,” I said.

“You ran into each other on Grafton Street. According to her, you were ‘totally spacey,’ didn’t remember her at first, weren’t sure when you’d last seen each other. You claimed to have a foul hangover, but she put it down to that awful nervous breakdown she’d heard about.” Frank was enjoying this: his voice had a fast, focused, predator-on-the-move rhythm. I was having a lot less fun than he was. I had known all this already, only the specifics had been missing, and being right wasn’t as satisfying as you might think. “Once you managed to place her, though, you were very friendly. You even suggested going for a coffee, to catch up. Whoever our girl was, she had some nerve.”

“Yeah,” I said. I realized I was crouched like a sprinter, ready to leap. Lexie’s bedroom felt mocking and tricky around me, humming with secret drawers and fake floorboards and spring traps. “She had that, all right.”

“You went to the café in Brown Thomas, she showed you her fashion finds and you both played Do You Remember for a while. You, amazingly enough, were pretty quiet. But get this: at one point Vicky asked you whether you were in Trinity these days. Apparently, not long before you had your nervous breakdown, you’d told her you were sick of UCD. You were thinking of transferring somewhere else, maybe Trinity, maybe abroad. Sound familiar?”

“Yeah,” I said. I sat down, carefully, on Lexie’s bed. “Yeah, it does.”

It had been getting towards the end of term, and Frank hadn’t told me whether the operation was going to continue after the summer; I was setting up an exit, in case I needed one. The other point of Vicky: you could always rely on her to get gossip all round college in no time flat.

My head was spinning, strange-shaped things rearranging themselves and falling into new places with soft little clicks. The coincidence of Trinity—this girl heading straight for my old college, picking up where I had left off—had given me the creeps all along, but this was almost worse. The only coincidence was two girls running into each other, in a small city, and Sticky Vicky spends most of her time hanging around town looking for useful people to run into anyway. Lexie hadn’t ended up in Trinity by chance, or by some dark magnetic pull that had her shadowing me, elbowing her way into my corners. I had suggested it to her. We had worked together seamlessly, she and I. I had drawn her to this house, this life, every bit as neatly and surely as she had drawn me.

Frank was still going. “Our girl said no, she wasn’t in college at the moment, she’d been traveling. She was vague about where—Vicky assumed she’d been in the funny farm. But here’s the good part: Vicky figured it was a funny farm in America, or maybe Canada. Partly that’s because she remembers your imaginary family was living in Canada, but mostly it’s because, somewhere between your time in UCD and that day on Grafton Street, you’d picked up a fairly serious tinge of American accent. So not only do we know how this girl got hold of the Lexie Madison ID, and when, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start looking for her. I think we may owe Sticky Vicky a cocktail or two.”

“Sooner you than me,” I said. I knew my voice sounded weird, but Frank was too hyped-up to notice.

“I’ve put in a call to the FBI boys, and I’m about to e-mail them over prints and photos. There’s a good chance our girl was on the run in one way or another, so they might turn up something.”

Lexie’s face watched me warily, in triplicate, from the dressing-table mirror. “Keep me updated, OK?” I said. “Anything you get.”

“Will do. Want to talk to your fella? He’s here.”

Sam and Frank sharing an incident room. Jesus. “I’ll call him later,” I said.

The deep murmur of Sam’s voice in the background, and for a split second out of nowhere I wanted to talk to him so badly it almost doubled me over. “He says he’s got through your last six months in Murder,” Frank told me, “and all the people you might’ve pissed off are out, one way or another. He’ll keep working backwards and keep you up to speed.”

In other words, this had nothing to do with Operation Vestal. God; Sam. Secondhand and at a distance, he was trying to reassure me: he was quietly, doggedly going after the only threat that he understood. I wondered how much he’d slept, the night before. “Thanks,” I said. “Tell him thanks, Frank. Tell him I’ll talk to him soon.”

* * *

I needed to get outdoors—partly because of eyeball overload, all those strange dusty objects, and partly because the house was starting to do things to the back of my neck; it made the air around me feel too intimate and too knowing, like an eyebrow flick from someone you never could fool. I hit the fridge, made myself a turkey sandwich—this gang believed in good mustard—and a jam sandwich and a thermos of coffee, and took them on a long walk. Sometime very soon, I was going to be navigating Glenskehy in the dark, quite possibly with input from a killer who knew the area like the back of his hand. I figured it might be a good idea to get my bearings.

The place was a maze, dozens of single-file lanes twisting their way among hedges and fields and woods from nowhere much to nowhere much else, but it turned out I knew my way around better than I’d expected; I only got lost twice. I was starting to appreciate Frank on a whole new level. When I got hungry I sat on a wall and had my coffee and sandwiches, looking out over the mountainsides and giving the mental finger to the DV squad room and Maher and his halitosis problem. It was a sunny, snappy day, hazy clouds high in a cool blue sky, but I hadn’t seen a single human being, anywhere along the way. Somewhere far off a dog was barking and someone was whistling to him, but that was it. I was developing a theory that Glenskehy had been wiped out by a millennium death ray and no one had noticed.

On my way back I spent a while checking out the Whitethorn House grounds. The Marches might have lost most of their estate, but what was left was still pretty impressive. Stone walls higher than my head, lined with trees—mostly the hawthorns that had given the house its name, but I spotted oak, ash, an apple just going into bloom. A broken-down stable, discreetly out of smelling range of the house, where Daniel and Justin kept their cars. It would have held six horses, way back when; now it was all piles of dusty tools and tarps, but they didn’t look like they’d been touched in a very long time, so I didn’t poke around.

To the back of the house was that great sweep of grass, maybe a hundred yards long, bordered by a thick rim of trees and stone wall and ivy. At the bottom was a rusty iron gate—the gate Lexie had gone through, that night, when she walked out onto the last edge of her life—and, tucked away in a corner, a wide, semi-organized patch of shrubs. I recognized rosemary and bay: the herb garden Abby had mentioned, the evening before. That already seemed like months ago.

From that distance the house looked delicate and remote, something out of an old watercolor. Then a fast little wind rippled down the grass, lifting the long trails of ivy, and the lawn tilted under my feet. By one of the side walls, only twenty or thirty yards from me, there was someone behind the ivy; someone slight and dark as a shadow, sitting on a throne. The hair on the back of my neck rose, a slow wave.

My gun was still taped to the back of Lexie’s bedside table. I bit down hard on my lip and grabbed a heavy fallen branch out of the herb garden without taking my eyes off the ivy, which had dropped innocently back into place—the breeze was gone, the garden was still and sunny as a dream. I walked along the wall, casually but fast, flattened myself against it, got a good grip on my branch and whipped back the ivy in one sharp move.

There was no one there. The tree trunks and overgrown branches and ivy made an alcove against the wall, a little sun-splashed bubble. In it were two stone benches and, between them, a thread of water trickling through a hole in the wall and down shallow steps to a tiny, murky pond; nothing else. Shadows tangled together and for a second I caught the illusion again, the benches turning high-backed and sweeping, that slim figure sitting upright. Then I let the ivy fall and it was gone.

Apparently it wasn’t just the house that had a personality all its own. I got my breath back and checked out the alcove. The seats had traces of moss in the cracks, but most of it had been scrubbed away: someone knew about this place. I considered its potential as a rendezvous point, one way or another, but it was awfully close to the house to be inviting outsiders around, and the mat of leaves and twigs around the pond looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a while. I brushed at it with the side of my shoe and got wide smooth flagstones. Metal glinted in the dirt and my heart bounced—knife—but it was too small. A button: lion and unicorn, battered and dented. Someone, long ago, had been in the British army.

The hole letting the water in through the garden wall was choked with muck. I stuck the button in my pocket, knelt down on the flagstones and used the branch and my hands to clear it out. It took a long time; the wall was thick. When I was finished there was a miniwaterfall, murmuring happily to itself, and my hands smelled of earth and decaying leaves.

I rinsed them off and sat on one of the benches for a while, having a smoke and listening to the water. It was nice in there; warm and still and secret, like an animal’s den or a kid’s hideout. The pond filled up, tiny insects hovering above the surface. The extra water drained away through a tiny gutter into the ground, I picked out floating leaves, and after a while the pond was clear enough that I could see my reflection, rippling.

Lexie’s watch said half-past four. I had made it through twenty-four hours, and probably knocked a good handful of people out of the incident-room sweepstakes. I put my cigarette butt back in the pack, ducked out through the ivy, and went inside to catch up on thesis notes. The front door opened smoothly to my key, the air inside stirred as I came in and it didn’t feel over-intimate any more; it felt like a slight smile and a cool brief touch on the cheek, like a welcome.

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.

8

God, that first week. Even thinking about it I want to bite into it like the world’s brightest red apple. In the middle of an all-out murder investigation, while Sam worked his way painstakingly through various shades of scumbag and Frank tried to explain our situation to the FBI without coming across like a lunatic, there was nothing I was supposed to be doing except living Lexie’s life. It gave me a gleeful, lazy, daring feeling right down to my toes, like mitching off school when it’s the best day of spring and you know your class has to dissect frogs.

On Tuesday I went back to college. In spite of the vast number of new opportunities to fuck up, I was looking forward to it. I loved Trinity, the first time round. It still has its centuries of graceful gray stone, red brick, cobblestones; you can feel the layers on layers of lost students streaming through Front Square beside you, feel the print of you being added to the air, archived, saved. If someone hadn’t decided to drive me out of college, I might have turned into an eternal student like these four. Instead—and probably because of that same person—I turned into a cop. I liked the thought that this had brought me full circle, back to reclaim the place I’d lost. It felt like a strange, delayed victory, something salvaged against ridiculous odds.

“You should probably know,” Abby said, in the car, “the rumor mill’s been going mental. Apparently it was a major coke deal gone wrong, also an illegal immigrant—you married him for money and then started blackmailing him—also an abusive ex-boyfriend who just got out of jail for beating you up. Brace yourself.”

“Also, I assume,” Daniel said, maneuvering past an Explorer that was blocking two lanes, “all of us, singly or in various combinations and for various motives. No one’s said so to our faces, of course, but the inference is inevitable. ” He swung into the entrance of the Trinity car park and held up his ID for the security guard. “If people ask questions, what are you going to tell them?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said. “I was thinking about saying I’m the lost heir to some throne and a rival faction came after me, but I couldn’t decide which throne. Do I look like a Romanov?”

“Definitely,” said Rafe. “They were a bunch of chinless weirdos. Go for that.”

“Be nice to me or I’ll tell everyone you came after me with a cleaver in a drug-fueled rage.”

“It’s not funny,” said Justin. He hadn’t brought his car—I got the sense they all wanted to stick close together, just now—so he was in the back with me and Rafe, rubbing flecks of dirt off the windowpane and wiping his fingers on his handkerchief.

“Well,” said Abby, “it wasn’t funny last week, no. But now that you’re back . . .” She turned to grin at me, over her shoulder. “Four-Boobs Brenda asked me—you know that horrible confidential whisper?—if it was ‘one of those games gone wrong.’ I just froze her out, but now I’m thinking I could have made her day.”

“What amazes me about her,” Daniel said, opening his door, “is that she’s so determined to believe we’re wildly interesting. If only she knew.”

When we got out of the car I got my first real look at what Frank had meant about these four, how they came across to outsiders. As we walked down the long avenue between the sports fields something happened, a change as subtle and definite as water turning to ice: they moved closer, shoulder to shoulder and in step, backs straightening, heads lifting, expressions falling away from their faces. By the time we reached the Arts block the façade was in place, a barricade so impenetrable you could almost see it, cool and glinting like diamond. All that week in college, every time someone started angling for a good stare at me—edging down the library shelves towards the corner where we had our carrels, rubbernecking round a newspaper in the tea queue—that barricade swung around like a Roman shield formation, confronting the intruder with four pairs of impassive, unblinking eyes, till he or she backed off. Collecting gossip was going to be a major problem; even Four-Boobs Brenda stopped midbreath, hovering over my desk, and then asked if she could borrow a pen.

Lexie’s thesis turned out to be a lot more fun than I’d thought. The bits Frank had given me were mainly stuff about the Brontës, Currer Bell as the madwoman in the attic bursting free from demure Charlotte, truth in alias; not exactly comfortable reading, in the circumstances, but more or less what you’d expect. What she’d been working on just before she died was a lot snazzier: Rip Corelli, of She Dressed to Kill fame, turned out to be Bernice Matlock, a librarian from Ohio who had led a blameless life and written lurid pulp masterpieces in her spare time. I was starting to like the way Lexie’s mind had worked.

I’d been worried that her supervisor would want me to come up with something that made academic sense—Lexie had been no idiot, her stuff was smart and original and well thought out, and I was years out of practice. I’d been worried about her supervisor all round, actually. Her tutorial students weren’t going to spot the difference—when you’re eighteen, most people over twenty-five are just generic adult white noise—but someone who’d spent one-on-one time with her was a whole different story. One meeting with him reassured me. He was a bony, gentle, disconnected guy who was so paralyzed by the whole “unfortunate incident” that he could barely look me in the eye, and he told me to take all the recovery time I needed and not to worry about dead-lines. I figured I could handle a few weeks curled up in the library reading about hard-boiled PIs and dames who were nothing but trouble.

And in the evenings there was the house. We put some work into it almost every day, maybe for an hour or two, maybe just for twenty minutes: sand down the stairs, sort through a box from Uncle Simon’s stash, take turns climbing the stepladder to change the ancient brittle fittings on the lightbulbs. The crappiest jobs—scrubbing stains off the toilets—got the same time and care as the interesting ones; the four of them treated the house like some marvelous musical instrument, a Stradivarius or a Bösendorfer, that they had found in a long-lost treasure trove and were restoring with patient, enchanted, absolute love. I think the most relaxed I ever saw Daniel was flat on his stomach on the kitchen floor, wearing battered old trousers and a plaid shirt, painting baseboards and laughing at some story Rafe was telling, while Abby leaned over him to dip her brush, her ponytail whisking paint across his cheek.

They were very tactile, all of them. We never touched in college, but at home, someone was always touching someone: Daniel’s hand on Abby’s head as he passed behind her chair, Rafe’s arm on Justin’s shoulder as they examined some spare-room discovery together, Abby lying back in the swing seat across my lap and Justin’s, Rafe’s ankles crossed over mine as we read by the fire. Frank made predictable snide noises about homosexuality and orgies, but I was on full alert for any kind of sexual vibe—the baby—and that wasn’t what I was picking up. It was stranger and more powerful than that: they didn’t have boundaries, not among themselves, not the way most people do. Your average house share involves a pretty high level of territorial dispute—tense negotiations over the remote control, house meetings about whether bread counts as personal or shared, Rob’s flatmate used to have a three-day snit fit if he used her butter. But these people: as far as I could tell, everything, except thank God underwear, belonged to all of them. The guys pulled clothes out of the airing cupboard at random, anything that would fit; I never did figure out which tops were officially Lexie’s and which ones were Abby’s. They ripped sheets of paper out of each other’s notepads, ate toast off the nearest plate, took sips out of whatever glass was handy.

I didn’t mention this to Frank—he would only have switched from orgy comments to dark warnings about communism, and I liked the blurred boundaries. They reminded me of something warm and solid that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. There was a big green wax jacket, hanging in the coat closet left over from Uncle Simon, that belonged to anyone who was going out in the rain; the first time I put it on for my walk it gave me a strange, intoxicating little thrill, like holding hands with a boy for the very first time.

It was Thursday when I managed to put my finger on the feeling. The days were starting to lengthen towards summer and it was a clear, warm, graceful evening; after dinner we took a bottle of wine and a plate of sponge cake out onto the lawn. I had made a daisy chain and was trying to fasten it around my wrist. By this time I had given up on the not-drinking thing—it felt out of character, it made the others think about the stabbing and tense up, and besides, whatever antibiotics and booze do together could get me out of there when I needed it—so I was mildly, happily tipsy.

“More cake,” Rafe demanded, nudging me with his foot.

“Get it yourself. I’m busy.” I had given up on fastening the daisy chain one-handed and was putting it on Justin instead.

“You’re a lazy object, do you know that?”

“Look who’s talking.” I pulled one of my ankles round the back of my head—all the gymnastics as a kid, I’m flexible—and stuck my tongue out at Rafe from under my knee. “I’m active and healthy, look.”

Rafe raised one eyebrow lazily. “I’m aroused.”

“You’re a pervert,” I told him, with as much dignity as I could from that position.

“Knock it off,” Abby said. “You’ll burst your stitches, and we’re all too drunk to drive you to the emergency room.”

I’d forgotten all about my imaginary stitches. For a second I considered getting wound up about this, but I decided against it. The long evening sunshine and being barefoot and the tickle of grass, and presumably the booze, were making me light-headed and silly. It had been a long time since I’d felt like this, and I liked it. I maneuvered my head round to peer sideways at Abby. “They’re fine. They’re not even sore any more.”

“That’s because up until now you haven’t been tying yourself in knots,” Daniel said. “Behave.”

Normally I’m allergic to bossy, but somehow this felt nice; cozy. “Yes, Dad,” I said, and disentangled my leg, which sent me off balance so I fell over onto Justin.

“Ow, get off me,” he said, flapping a hand at me without much energy. “God, how much do you weigh?” I wriggled myself comfortable and stayed put with my head in his lap, squinting up into the sunset. He tickled my nose with a grass stem.

I looked relaxed, at least I hoped I did, but my mind was going fast. I had just realized—Yes, Dad—what this whole setup reminded me of: a family. Maybe not a real-life family, although what would I know, but a family out of a million children’s-book series and old TV shows, the comforting kind that go on for years without anyone getting any older, to the point where you start to wonder about the actors’ hormone levels. These five had it all: Daniel the distant but affectionate father, Justin and Abby taking turns to be the protective Mammy and the lofty eldest, Rafe the moody teenage middle kid; and Lexie, the late arrival, the capricious little sister to be alternately spoiled and teased.

They probably had no more clue about real-life families than I did. I should have spotted from the beginning that this was one of the things they had in common—Daniel orphaned, Abby fostered out, Justin and Rafe exiled, Lexie Godknowswhat but not exactly close to her parents. I’d skimmed over it because it was my default mode too. Consciously or subconsciously, they had collected every paper-thin scrap they could find and built their own patchwork, makeshift image of what a family was, and then they had made themselves into that.

The four of them had been only eighteen or so when they had met. I looked at them under my lashes—Daniel holding a bottle up to the light to see if there was any wine left, Abby flicking ants off the cake plate—and wondered what they would have been if they had missed each other, along the way.

This gave me a whole bunch of ideas, but they were hazy and fast-moving and I decided I was too comfortable to try and put any shape on them. They could wait a few hours, till my walk. “Me too,” I said to Daniel, and held out my glass for more wine.

* * *

“Are you drunk?” Frank demanded, when I rang him. “You sounded langered, earlier.”

“Relax, Frankie,” I said. “I had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. That doesn’t make me drunk.”

“It better not. This may feel like a holiday, but I don’t want you treating it like one. You stay alert.”

I was loitering along a potholey lane, uphill from the ruined cottage. I had been thinking, a lot, about how Lexie had ended up in that cottage. We had all taken it for granted that she was running for cover and couldn’t make Whitethorn House or the village, either because the killer was blocking her way or because she was fading fast, so she made for the nearest hiding place she knew. N changed that. Assuming N was a person, as opposed to a pub or a radio program or a poker game, they had had to meet somewhere, and the fact that no places were marked in the diary said they had used the same meeting point every time. And if those times were nights rather than mornings, then the cottage made total sense: privacy, convenience, shelter from wind and rain and no way for anyone to sneak up on you. She could have been heading there anyway that night, long before someone jumped her, and just kept going—maybe on autopilot, after N ambushed her on her way; maybe because she hoped N would be there to help her.

It wasn’t the kind of lead detectives dream of, but it was about the best I’d got, so I was spending a lot of my walk lurking in the general area of the cottage and hoping N would help me out by showing up some night. I had found myself a convenient stretch of lane: it had a clear enough view that I could keep an eye on the cottage while I talked to Frank or Sam, enough trees to hide me if I needed it, and enough isolation that no farmer was likely to hear me on the phone and come after me with his trusty shotgun. “I’m alert,” I said. “And I’ve got something to ask you. Remind me: Daniel’s great-uncle died in September?”

I heard Frank moving stuff around, flipping pages; either he had brought the file home with him, or he was still at work. “February third. Daniel got the keys to the house on September tenth. Probate must’ve taken a while. Why?”

“Can you find out how the great-uncle died, and where these five were that day? Also, why probate took so long? When my granny left me a grand, I got it six weeks later.”

Frank whistled. “You’re thinking they bumped off Great-uncle Simon for the house? And then Lexie lost her nerve?”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, trying to work out how to explain. “Not exactly. Actually, not at all. But they’re weird about that house, Frank. All four of them. They all talk about it like they own it, not just Daniel—‘We should get double-glazing, we need to decide about the herb garden, we . . .’ And they all act like this is a permanent arrangement, like they can spend years doing it up because they’re all going to live here forever.”

“Ah, they’re just young,” Frank said tolerantly. “At that age, everyone thinks college mates and house shares are forever. Give them a few years and it’ll be all semi-ds in the suburbs and Sunday afternoons buying decking at the home-and-garden shop.”

“They’re not that young. And you’ve heard them: they’re way too wrapped up in this house and each other. There’s nothing else in their lives. I don’t really think they knocked off the great-uncle, but I’m shooting in the dark here. We’ve always thought they were hiding something. Anything weird is worth checking out.”

“True,” Frank said. “Will do. Don’t you want to hear what I’ve been doing with my day?”

That undercurrent of excitement in his voice: very few things get Frank that worked up. “Damn straight,” I said.

The undercurrent broke through into a grin so wide I could hear it. “FBI got a hit on our girl’s prints.”

“Shit! Already?” The FBI guys are good about helping us when we need it, but they always have a spectacular backlog.

“I’ve got friends in low places.”

“OK,” I said. “Who is she?” For some reason my knees felt shaky. I got my back up against a tree.

“May-Ruth Thibodeaux, born in North Carolina in 1975, reported missing in October 2000 and wanted for car theft. Prints and photo both match.”

My breath went out with a little rush. “Cassie?” Frank said, after a moment. I heard him draw on a cigarette. “You still there?”

“Yeah. May-Ruth Thibodeaux.” Saying it made my back prickle. “What do we know about her?”

“Not a lot. No info till 1997, when she moved to Raleigh from someplace in the arsehole of nowhere, rented a fleabag apartment in a crap neighborhood and got a job waiting tables in an all-night diner. She had an education somewhere along the way if she was able to jump straight into a postgrad at Trinity, but it’s looking like self-taught or homeschooled; she doesn’t show up on the register at any local college or high school. No criminal record.”

Frank blew out smoke. “On the evening of October tenth 2000, she borrowed her fiancé’s car to get to work, but she never showed up. He filed a missing-person report a couple of days later. The cops didn’t take it too seriously; they figured she’d just taken off. They gave the fiancé a little hassle, just in case he’d killed her and dumped her somewhere, but his alibi was good. The car turned up in New York in December 2000, at long-term parking at Kennedy Airport.”

He was very pleased with himself. “Nice one, Frank,” I said automatically. “Fair play to you.”

“We aim to please,” Frank said, trying to sound modest.

She was only a year younger than me, after all. I was playing marbles in soft rain in a Wicklow garden and she was running wild in some hot small town, barefoot at the soda fountain and jolting down dirt roads in the back of a pickup truck, till one day she got in a car and she just kept driving.

“Cassie?”

“Yeah.”

“My contact’s going to do some more digging, see if she made any serious enemies along the way—anyone who might’ve tracked her here.”

“Sounds good,” I said, trying to pull my head together. “That sounds like the kind of thing I might want to know. What was the fiancé’s name?”

“Brad, Chad, Chet, one of those American yokes . . .” Papers rustling. “My boy made a couple of phone calls, and the guy hasn’t missed a day of work in months. No way he hopped across the pond to kill off the ex. Chad Andrew Mitchell. Why?”

No N. “I just wondered.”

Frank waited, but I’m good at that game. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “I’ll keep you posted. The ID might take us nowhere, but still, it’s nice to have some kind of handle on this girl. Makes it easier to get your head round the idea of her, no?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

It wasn’t true. After Frank hung up I spent a long time leaning against that tree, watching the broken outline of the cottage slowly fade and reappear as clouds moved across the moon, thinking about May-Ruth Thibodeaux. Somehow, giving her back her own name, her own hometown, her own story, brought it home to me: she had been real, not just a shadow cast by my mind and Frank’s; she had been alive. There had been thirty years in which we could have come face to face.

It seemed to me suddenly that I should have known; an ocean away, but it seemed like I should have felt her there all along, like every now and then I should have looked up from my marbles or my textbook or my case report as if someone had called my name. She came all those thousands of miles, close enough to slip on my old name like a sister’s hand-me-down coat, she came pulled like a compass needle and she almost made it. She was only an hour’s drive away. and I should have known; I should have known, in time, to take that last step and find her.

* * *

The only shadows over that week came from outside. We were playing poker, Friday evening—they played cards a lot, late into the nights; mostly Texas Hold-’em or 110, sometimes piquet if only two people felt like playing. The stakes were just tarnished ten-pence pieces from a huge jar someone had found in the attic, but they took it seriously all the same: everyone started with the same number of coins and when you were out you were out, no borrowing from the stash. Lexie, like me, had been a pretty decent card player; her calls hadn’t always made a lot of sense, but apparently she had learned to make the unpredictability work for her, especially on big hands. The winner got to choose the next day’s dinner menu.

That night we had Louis Armstrong on the record player and Daniel had bought a huge bag of Doritos, along with three different dips to keep everyone happy. We were maneuvering around the various chipped bowls and using the food to try and distract each other—it worked best on Justin, who lost his concentration completely if he thought you were about to get salsa on the mahogany. I had just wiped out Rafe head-to-head—on weak hands he messed around with the dips, if he had something good he shoveled Doritos straight into his mouth by the handful; never play poker with a detective—and I was busy gloating, when his phone rang. He tilted his chair backwards and grabbed the phone off one of the bookshelves.

“Hello,” he said, giving me the finger. Then his chair came down and his face changed; it froze over, into that haughty, unreadable mask he wore in college and around outsiders. “Dad,” he said.

Without an eyeblink, the others drew closer around him; you could feel it in the air, a tightening, a solidifying as they ranged themselves at his shoulders. I was next to him, and I got the full benefit of the bellow coming out of the phone: "... Job opened up . . . foot on the ladder ... changed your mind . . . ?”

Rafe’s nostrils twitched as if he had smelled something foul. “Not interested, ” he said.

The volume of the tirade made his eyes snap shut. I caught enough of it to gather that reading plays all day was for pansies and that someone called Brad-bury had a son who had just made his first million and that Rafe was generally a waste of oxygen. He held the phone between thumb and finger, inches from his ear.

“For God’s sake, hang up,” Justin whispered. His face was pulled into an unconscious, agonized grimace. “Just hang up on him.”

“He can’t,” Daniel said softly. “He should, obviously, but . . . Someday.”

Abby shrugged. “Well, then . . .” she said. She sent the cards arcing from hand to hand with a fast, sassy flourish and dealt, five hands. Daniel smiled across at her and pulled his chair up, ready.

The phone was still going strong; the word “arse” came up regularly, in what sounded like a wide variety of contexts. Rafe’s chin was tucked in like he was braced against gale-force wind. Justin touched his arm; his eyes flew open and he stared at us, reddening right up to his hairline.

The rest of us had already thrown in our stakes. I had a hand like a foot—a seven and a nine, not even suited—but I knew exactly what the others were doing. They were pulling Rafe back, and the thought of being part of that sent something intoxicating through me, something so fine it hurt. For a split second I thought of Rob hooking one foot around my ankle, under our desks, when O’Kelly was giving me a bollocking. I waved my cards at Rafe and mouthed, “Ante up.”

He blinked. I cocked one eyebrow, gave him my best cheeky Lexie grin and whispered, “Unless you’re scared I’ll kick your ass again.”

The frozen look dissolved, just a little. He checked his cards; then he put the phone down on the bookshelf beside him, carefully, and tossed ten pence into the middle. “Because I’m happy where I am,” he told the phone. His voice sounded almost normal, but that angry red flush was still covering his face.

Abby gave him a tiny smile, fanned three cards deftly on the table and flipped them over. “Lexie’s drawing to a straight,” said Justin, narrowing his eyes at me. “I know that look.”

The phone had apparently spent a lot of money on Rafe and wasn’t planning to see it flushed down the bog. “She’s not,” Daniel said. “She may have something, but not the makings of a straight. I call.”

I was nowhere near a straight, but that wasn’t the point; none of us were folding, not till Rafe hung up. The phone made a big statement about a Real Job. “In other words, a job in an office,” Rafe informed us. The rigidity was starting to go out of his spine. “Maybe even, someday, if I’m a team player and I think outside the box and work smarter not harder, an office with a window. Or am I aiming a little high?” he asked the phone. “What do you think?” He mimed See your one and raise you two, at Justin.

The phone—it obviously knew it was being insulted, even if it wasn’t sure exactly how—said something belligerent about ambition and how it was about bloody time Rafe grew up and started living in the real world.

“Ah,” Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”

“It’s all jealousy,” Justin said, considering his cards and flipping two more coins into the middle. “Sour grapes.”

“Nobody,” Rafe told the phone, flapping a hand at us to keep our voices down. “The television. I spend my days watching soap operas, eating bonbons and plotting society’s downfall.”

The last card came up a nine, which at least gave me a pair. “Well, certainly in some cases jealousy is a factor,” Daniel said, “but Rafe’s father, if half what he says is true, could afford to live any life he wanted, including ours. What does he have to be jealous of? No, I think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented . . . But I’ve always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself. Could you put it on speakerphone, Rafe? I’m interested to hear what he has to say.”

Rafe gave him a wide-eyed, are-you-insane stare and shook his head; Daniel looked vaguely puzzled. The rest of us were starting to get the giggles.

“Of course,” Daniel said politely, “if you’d prefer . . . What’s so funny, Lexie?”

“Lunatics,” Rafe told the ceiling in a fervent undertone, spreading his arms to take in the phone and Daniel and the rest of us, who by now had our hands over our mouths. “I’m surrounded by wall-to-wall lunatics. What have I done to deserve this? Did I pick on the afflicted in a previous life?”

The phone, which was obviously working up to a big finish, informed Rafe that he could have a Lifestyle. “Guzzling champagne in the City,” Rafe translated, for us, “and shagging my secretary.”

“What the fuck is wrong with that?” the phone shouted, loud enough that Daniel, startled, reared back in his chair with a look of sheer astounded disapproval. Justin exploded with a noise somewhere between a snort and a yelp; Abby was hanging over the back of her chair with her knuckles stuffed in her mouth, and I was laughing so hard I had to stick my head under the table.

The phone, with a magnificent disregard for basic anatomy, called us all a bunch of limp-dicked hippies. By the time I pulled myself together and came up for air, Rafe had flipped over a pair of jacks and was scooping in the pot, pumping one fist in the air and grinning. I realized something. Rafe’s mobile had gone off about two feet from my ear, and I hadn’t even flinched.

* * *

“You know what it is?” Abby said out of nowhere, a few hands later. “It’s the contentment.”

“Who said which to the what now?” inquired Rafe, narrowing his eyes to examine Daniel’s stack. He had switched his phone off.

“The real-world thing.” She leaned sideways across me to pull the ashtray closer. Justin had put on Debussy, blending with the faint rush of rain on the grass outside. “Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got—specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular—then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on. That’s why Rafe’s dad throws a mickey fit whenever Rafe says he’s happy where he is. The way he sees it, we’re all subversives. We’re traitors.”

“I think you’ve got something there,” said Daniel. “Not jealousy, after all: fear. It’s a fascinating state of affairs. Throughout history—even a hundred years ago, even fifty—it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it’s contentment. What a strange reversal.”

“We’re revolutionaries,” Justin said happily, poking a Dorito around in the salsa jar and looking phenomenally unrevolutionary. “I never realized it was this easy.”

“We’re stealth guerrillas,” I said with relish.

“You’re a stealth chimpanzee,” Rafe told me, flipping three coins into the middle.

“Yes, but a contented one,” said Daniel, smiling across at me. “Aren’t you?”

“If Rafe would just quit hogging the garlic dip, I’d be the most contented stealth chimpanzee in the whole of Ireland.”

“Good,” Daniel said, giving me a little nod. “That’s what I like to hear.”

* * *

Sam never asked. “How’s it going?” he would say, in our late-night phone calls, and when I said, “Fine,” he would move on to something else. At first he told me bits about his side of the investigation—carefully checking out my old cases, the local uniforms’ list of troublemakers, Lexie’s students and professors. The more he got nowhere, though, the less he talked about it. Instead he told me about other things, small homey things. He had been over at my flat a couple of times, to air it out and make sure it didn’t look too obviously empty; the next-door cat had had kittens at the bottom of the garden, he said, and awful Mrs. Moloney downstairs had left a snotty note on his car informing him that Parking was for Residents Only. I didn’t tell him this, but it all seemed a million miles away, off in some long-ago world so chaotic that even thinking about it made me tired. Sometimes it took me a moment to remember who he was talking about.

Only once, on the Saturday night, he asked about the others. I was hanging out in my lurk lane, leaning back into a hawthorn hedge and keeping one eye on the cottage. I had a kneesock of Lexie’s bundled around the mike, which gave me an attractive three-boobed look but meant that Frank and his gang would only pick up about 10 percent of the conversation.

I was keeping my voice down anyway. Almost since I went out the back gate, I’d had the feeling that someone was following me. Nothing concrete, nothing that couldn’t be explained away by the wind and moon shadows and countryside night noises; just that low-level electrical current at the back of your neck, where your skull meets your spine, that only comes from someone’s eyes. It took a lot of willpower not to whip around, but if by any chance there really was someone out there, I didn’t want him knowing he’d been sussed, not till I decided what I was going to do about it.

“Do ye never go to the pub?” Sam asked.

I wasn’t sure what he was asking. Sam knew exactly what I did with my time. According to Frank, he got into work at six every morning to go through the tapes. This made me itch, in small unreasonable ways, but the thought of bringing it up itched even worse. “Rafe and Justin and I went to the Buttery on Tuesday, after tutorials,” I said. “Remember?”

“I meant your local—what’s it called, Regan’s, down in the village. Do they never go there?”

We passed Regan’s in the car, on our way to and from college: a dilapidated little country pub, sandwiched between the butcher’s and the news-agent’s, with bikes leaning unlocked against the wall in the evenings. Nobody had ever suggested going in there.

“It’s simpler to have a few drinks at home, if we want them,” I said. “It’s a walk to the village, and everyone but Justin smokes.” Pubs have always been the heart of Irish social life, but when the smoking ban came in, a lot of people moved to drinking at home. The ban doesn’t bother me, although I’m confused by the idea that you shouldn’t go into a pub and do anything that might be bad for you, but the level of obedience does. To the Irish, rules always used to count as challenges—see who can come up with the best way round this one—and this sudden switch to sheep mode makes me worry that we’re turning into someone else, possibly Switzerland.

Sam laughed. “You’ve been up in the big city too long. I’ll guarantee you Regan’s doesn’t stop anyone smoking. And it’s less than a mile by the back roads. Do you not think it’s odd, them never going in there?”

I shrugged. “They are odd. They’re not all that sociable, in case you haven’t noticed. And maybe Regan’s sucks.”

“Maybe,” Sam said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “You went to Dunne’s in the Stephen’s Green Centre when it was your turn to buy food, am I right? Where do the others go?”

“How would I know? Justin went to Marks and Sparks yesterday; I haven’t a clue about the others. Frank said Lexie shopped at Dunne’s, so I shop at Dunne’s.”

“What about the newsagent’s in the village? Anyone been there?”

I thought about that. Rafe had done a cigarette run one evening, but he had gone out the back gate, towards the late-night petrol station on the Rathowen road, not towards Glenskehy. “Not since I got here. What are you thinking?”

“I was just wondering,” Sam said, slowly. “About the village. You’re up at the Big House, you know. Daniel’s from the Big House family. In most places nobody cares about that, any more; but every now and then, depending on history . . . I was just wondering if there’s any bad feeling there.”

Right up into living memory, the British ran Ireland on the feudal system: handed out villages to Anglo-Irish families like party favors, then left them to use the land and the locals however they saw fit, which varied just as much as you’d expect. After independence the system collapsed in on itself; a few faded, obsolete eccentrics are still hanging in there, mostly living out of four rooms and opening the rest of the estate to the public to pay the roofing bills, but a lot of the Big Houses have been bought by corporations and turned into hotels or spas or whatever, and everyone’s half forgotten what they used to be. Here and there, though, where history scarred a place deeper than most: people remember.

And this was Wicklow. For hundreds of years, rebellions had been planned within a day’s walk of where I was sitting. These hills had fought on the guerrillas’ side, hidden them from stumbling soldiers through dark tangled nights; cottages like Lexie’s had been left hollow and bloody when the British shot everyone in sight till they found their one cached rebel. Every family has stories.

Sam was right, I had been up in the big city way too long. Dublin is modern to the point of hysteria, anything before broadband has become a quaint, embarrassing little joke; I had forgotten even what it was like to live in a place that had memory. Sam is from the country, from Galway; he knows. The cottage’s last windows were lit up with moonlight and it looked like a ghost house, secretive and wary.

“There could be,” I said. “I don’t see what it could have to do with our case, though. It’s one thing to give the Big House kids hairy looks till they quit coming into the newsagent’s; it’s a whole other thing to stab one of them because the landlord was mean to your great-granny in 1846.”

“Probably. I’ll look into it, though, on the off chance. Anything’s worth checking.”

I thumped back against the hedge, felt a quick vibration through the branches as something scurried away. “Come on. How crazy do you think these people are?”

A brief silence. “I’m not saying they’re crazy,” Sam said eventually.

“You’re saying one of them might have killed Lexie for something that a completely unrelated family did a hundred years ago. And I’m saying that’s someone who at the very least needs to get out a whole lot more, and find himself a girlfriend who doesn’t get sheared every summer.” I wasn’t sure why the idea got up my nose so badly, or for that matter why I was being such a snippy little bitch. Something to do with the house, I think. I had put a lot of work into that house—we had spent half the evening stripping the moldy wallpaper in the sitting room—and I was getting attached to it. The idea of it as the target of that kind of focused hatred made something hot flare up in my stomach.

“There’s a family round where I grew up,” Sam said. “The Purcells. Their great-granda or whatever was a rent agent, back in the day. One of the bad ones—used to lend the rent money to families who didn’t have it, then take the interest out of the wives and daughters, then throw them all out onto the roads once he got bored. Kevin Purcell grew up with the rest of us, not a bother, no grudge; but when we all got a bit older and he started going out with one of the local girls, a bunch of lads got together and beat the shite out of him. They weren’t crazy, Cassie. They’d nothing against Kevin; he was a grand young fella, never did that girl any harm. Just . . . some things aren’t OK, no matter how long you leave them. Some things don’t go away.”

The leaves of the hedge prickled and twisted against my back, like something was moving in there, but when I whipped around it was still as a picture. “That’s different, Sam. This Kevin guy made the first move: he started going out with that girl. These five didn’t do a thing. They’re just living here.”

Another pause. “And that could be enough, all depending. I’m only saying.”

There was a bewildered note in his voice. “Fair enough,” I said, more calmly. “You’re right, it’s worth a look—we did say our guy was probably local. Sorry for being a snotty cow.”

“I wish you were here,” Sam said suddenly, softly. “On the phone, it’s too easy to get mixed up. Get things wrong.”

“I know, Sam,” I said. “I miss you too.” It was true. I tried not to—that kind of thing just distracts you, and getting distracted can do anything from wreck your case to get you killed—but when I was on my own and tired, trying to read in bed after a long day, it got difficult. “Only a few weeks left.”

Sam sighed. “Less, if I find something. I’ll talk to Doherty and Byrne, see what they can tell me. Meanwhile . . . just look after yourself, OK? Just in case.”

“I will,” I said. “You can update me tomorrow. Sleep tight.”

“Sleep tight. I love you.”

That feeling of being watched was still pinching at the back of my neck, stronger now, closer. Maybe it was just the conversation with Sam getting to me, but all of a sudden I wanted to know for sure. This electric ripple from somewhere in the dark, Sam’s stories, Rafe’s father, all these things pressing in on us from every side, looking for weak spots, for their moment to attack: for a second I forgot I was one of the invaders, I just wanted to yell Leave us alone. I unwound my mike sock and tucked it into my girdle, along with my phone. Then I switched on my torch for maximum visibility and started walking, a casual, jaunty stroll, heading for home.

I know a variety of ways to shake off a tail, catch him in the act or turn the tables; most of them were designed for city streets, not for the middle of nowhere, but they’re adaptable. I kept my eyes front and picked up the pace, till there was no way for anyone to stay too close without breaking cover or making an awful lot of noise in the underbrush. Then I did a sudden swerve onto a cross-lane, switched off the torch, ran fifteen or twenty yards and squished myself, as quietly as I could, through a hedge into a field left to run wild. I stayed still, crouching down close against the bushes, and waited.

Twenty minutes of nothing, not a pebble crunching, not a leaf rustling. If there was actually someone following me, he or she was smart and patient: not a nice thought. Finally I eased myself back through the hedge. There was no one on the lane in either direction, as far as I could see. I picked most of the leaves and twigs out of my clothes and headed home, fast. Lexie’s walks had averaged an hour; I didn’t have long before the others started worrying. Over the tops of the hedges I could see a glow against the sky: the light from Whitethorn House, faint and golden and shot through with whirls of wood smoke like mist.

* * *

That night, when I was reading in bed, Abby knocked on my door. She was in red-and-white-checked flannel pajamas, her face scrubbed shiny and her hair loose on her shoulders; she looked about twelve. She closed the door behind her and sat down cross-legged on the end of my bed, tucking her bare feet into the crooks of her knees for warmth. “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

“Sure,” I said, hoping to God I knew the answer.

“OK.” Abby tucked her hair behind her ears, glanced back at the door. “I don’t know how to put this, so I’m just going to come straight out and ask, and you can tell me to mind my own business if you want. Is the baby OK?”

I must have looked gobsmacked. One corner of her mouth twisted upwards in a wry little smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I guessed. We’re always in sync, but last month you never bought the chocolate . . . and then when you threw up that day, I just figured.”

My mind was racing. “Do the guys know?”

Abby shrugged, a little flip of one shoulder. “I doubt it. They haven’t said anything, anyway.”

This didn’t rule out the chance that one of them did know, that Lexie had told the father—either that she was having a baby or that she was having an abortion—and he had flipped out, but it went some way towards it: Abby didn’t miss much. She waited, watching me. “The baby didn’t make it,” I said; which was, after all, true.

Abby nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry, Lexie. Or . . . ?” She raised one eyebrow discreetly.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it, anyway. This sort of makes things simpler.”

She nodded again, and I realized I had called it right: she wasn’t surprised. “Are you going to tell the guys? Because I can do it, if you want me to.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want them knowing.” Info is ammo, Frank always said. That pregnancy could come in useful sometime; I wasn’t about to throw it away. I think it was only in that moment, the moment when I realized I was saving up a dead baby like a hand grenade, that I understood what I had got myself into.

“Fair enough.” Abby stood up and hitched at her pajama bottoms. “If you ever want to talk about it or anything, you know where I am.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me who the father was?” I said. If it was common knowledge who Lexie was sleeping with, then I was in big trouble, but somehow I didn’t think it was; Lexie appeared to have lived most of her life on a need-to-know basis. Abby, though; if anyone had guessed, it would be her.

She turned, at the door, and gave that one-shouldered shrug. “I figure,” she said, her voice carefully neutral, “if you want to tell me, you probably will.”

* * *

When she was gone—quick arpeggio of bare feet, almost soundless, down the stairs—I left my book where it was and sat there listening to the others getting ready for bed: someone running water in the bathroom, Justin singing tunelessly to himself below me (“Gooooldfinger . . .”), the creak of floorboards as Daniel moved quietly around his room. Gradually the noises wound down, grew softer and intermittent, faded to silence. I turned off my bedside lamp: Daniel would see it under his door if I kept it on, and I had had enough private little chats for one evening. Even after my eyes adjusted, all I could see was the looming mass of the wardrobe, the hunch of the dressing table, the barely there flicker in the mirror when I moved.

I had been putting a fair amount of energy into not thinking about the baby; Lexie’s baby. Four weeks, Cooper had said, not quite a quarter of an inch: a tiny gemstone, a single spark of color slipping between your fingers and through the cracks and gone. A heart the size of a fleck of glitter and vibrating like a hummingbird, seeded with a billion things that would never happen now.

When you threw up that day . . . A strong-willed baby, wide awake and not to be ignored, already reaching out filament fingers to tug at her. For some reason it wasn’t a silky newborn I pictured: it was a toddler, compact and naked, with a head of dark curls; faceless, running away from me down the lawn on a summer day, trailing a yell of laughter. Maybe she had sat in this bed just a couple of weeks ago, picturing the same thing.

Or maybe not. I was starting to get a sense that Lexie’s will had been denser than mine and obsidian hard, built for resistance, not combat. If she hadn’t wanted to imagine the baby, that tiny jewel-colored comet would never for a second have flashed across her mind.

I wanted, as intensely as if this were somehow the key that would unlock the whole story, to know whether she had been going to keep it. Our abortion ban doesn’t change anything: a long silent litany of women every year take the ferry or the plane to England, home again before anyone even notices they’re gone. There was no one in the world who could tell me what Lexie had been planning; probably even she hadn’t been sure. I almost got out of bed and sneaked downstairs to have another look at the diary, just in case I had missed something—a tiny pen dot hidden in a corner of December, on the due date—but that would have been a dumb thing to do, and anyway I already knew there was nothing there. I sat in bed in the dark with my arms around my knees, listening to the rain and feeling the battery pack dig into me where the stab wound should have been, for a very long time.

* * *

There was this one evening; Sunday, I think it was. The guys had pushed back the furniture in the sitting room and were attacking the floor with a sander and a polisher and a certain amount of machismo, so Abby and I had left them to it and headed up to the top spare room, the one next to me, to pick at the edges of Uncle Simon’s hoard. I was sitting on the floor, half covered in ancient scraps of material, sorting out the ones that weren’t mainly moth holes; Abby was flipping through a huge pile of fugly curtains, murmuring, “Bin, bin, bin—these might be worth washing—bin, bin, oh God bin, who bought this crap?” The sander was humming noisily downstairs and the house had a busy, settled feel that reminded me of the Murder squad room on a quiet day.

“Whoa,” Abby said suddenly, sitting back on her heels. “Check this out.”

She was holding up a dress: robin’s-egg blue with white polka dots and a white collar and sash, little cap sleeves and a full skirt made to fly up when you twirled, pure lindy hop. “Wow,” I said, disentangling myself from my puddle of fabric and going over to check it out. “Think it was Uncle Simon’s?”

“I don’t think he had the figure for it, but we’ll check the photo album.” Abby held the dress at arm’s length and examined it. “Want to try it on? I don’t think it has moths.”

“Go for it. You found it.”

“It’d never fit me. Look—” Abby got to her feet and held the dress against herself. “It’s for someone taller. The waist would be down around my arse.”

Abby was maybe five foot two, but I kept forgetting; it was hard to think of her as small. “And it’s for someone skinnier than me,” I said, trying the waist against mine, “or wearing a serious corset. I’d burst it.”

“Maybe not. You lost weight when you were sick.” Abby threw the dress over my shoulder. “Try it.”

She gave me a quizzical look when I headed for my bedroom to change: it was obviously out of character, but I couldn’t do much about that, except hope she would put it down to self-consciousness about the bandage or something. The dress actually did fit, more or less—it was tight enough that the bandage left a bulge, but there was nothing dodgy about that. I did a quick check to make sure the wire didn’t show. In the mirror I looked breathless and mischievous and daring, ready for anything.

“Told you,” Abby said, when I came out. She spun me round, retied the sash in a bigger bow. “Let’s go wow the boys.”

We ran downstairs calling, “Look what we found!” and by the time we got down to the sitting room the sander was off and the guys were waiting for us. “Oh, look at you!” Justin cried. “Our little jazz baby!”

“Perfect,” Daniel said, smiling at me. “It’s perfect.”

Rafe swung one leg over the piano stool and swept a finger up the keys in a great, expert flourish. Then he started to play, something lazy and tempting with a sideways swing to it. Abby laughed. She gave the bow of my sash another tug, tightening it; then she went to the piano and started to sing.

“Of all the boys I’ve known and I’ve known some, until I first met you I was lonesome . . .”

I had heard Abby sing before, but only to herself when she thought no one was listening, never like this. That voice: it was the kind you don’t hear these days, a magnificent, full-blown contralto straight out of old war films, a voice for smoky nightclubs and marcel-waved hair, red lipstick and a blue saxophone. Justin put the sander down, clicked his heels together neatly and bowed. “May I have the honor of this dance?” he asked, and held out his hand to me.

For a second I wasn’t sure. What if Lexie had had two left feet, what if she hadn’t had two left feet and my new clumsiness gave me away, what if he held me too close and felt the battery pack hard under the bandage . . . But I always loved dancing and it seemed like forever since I had danced or wanted to, so long ago I couldn’t remember the last time. Abby winked at me without missing a note and Rafe threw in an extra little riff, and I caught Justin’s hand and let him pull me out of the doorway.

He knew what he was doing: smooth steps and his hand steady in mine as he spun me in slow circles around the room, floorboards soft and warm and dusty under my feet. And I hadn’t lost the knack, after all, I wasn’t stepping on Justin’s feet or tripping over my own; my body swayed with his sure and agile as if I had never walked into a chair in my life, I couldn’t have put a foot wrong if I had tried. Ribs of sunlight flashing across my eyes, Daniel leaning against the wall and smiling with a crumple of sandpaper forgotten in his hand, my skirt whirling up like a bell as Justin swung me away from him and then in again. “And so I rack my brain trying to explain all the things that you do to me . . .” Smell of polish, and the sawdust spinning lazy curls through the long columns of light. Abby with one palm lifting and her head thrown back, throat exposed and the song tossed up through the empty rooms and battered ceilings to the whole blazing sunset sky.

For a second it came back to me, when I had last danced like this: me and Rob, on the roof of the extension below my flat, the night before everything went horribly wrong. Somehow it didn’t even hurt. It was so far away; I was buttoned tight and untouchable in my blue dress and that was a sweet sad thing that had happened to some other girl, a long time ago. Rafe was picking up the rhythm and Abby was swaying faster, snapping her fingers: “I could say bella, bella, even say wunderbar, each language only helps me tell you how grand you are . . .” Justin caught me by the waist and spun me off the floor in a great flying circle, his face flushed and laughing close to mine. The wide bare room tossed Abby’s voice back and forth as if there were someone harmonizing in every corner and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.

9

"Well well well,” Frank said, that night. "You know what today is, right?”

I had no idea. Half my mind was still back at Whitethorn House. After dinner Rafe had dug out a tattered, yellowish songbook from inside the piano stool and kept going with the inter-war theme, Abby was singing along from the spare room—“Oh, Johnny, how you can love”—while she went back to rummaging and Daniel and Justin did the washing up, and the rhythm of it had bounced in my heels, sweet and saucy and tempting, all the way down the lawn and out the back gate. For a second I had actually considered just staying home, leaving Frank and Sam and the mystery pair of eyes to their own devices for one evening. It wasn’t like I was getting anything useful done out here. The night had turned cloudy, needle-fine drizzle was spattering onto the communal jacket, and I didn’t like having the torch on while I was on the phone; I couldn’t see six inches in front of my face. A whole coven of knife-happy stalkers could have been doing the Macarena around the cottage and I would never have known.

“If it’s your birthday,” I said, “you might have to wait for your present.”

“Very funny. It’s Sunday, babe. And unless I’m much mistaken, you’re still in Whitethorn House, snug as a bug in a rug. Which means we’ve won our first battle: you made it through the week without getting caught. Congratulations, Detective. You’re in.”

“I guess I am,” I said. I had stopped counting the days, somewhere along the way. I decided this was a good sign.

“So,” Frank said. I could hear him arranging himself more comfortably, turning down the outraged talk-radio caller in the background: he was at home, wherever home was since Olivia had kicked him out. “Let’s have a summary of Week One.”

I pulled myself up onto a wall and took a second to get my head clear before I answered. Under all the easy messing around, Frank is pure business: he wants reports like any other boss, and he likes them clear, thorough and succinct.

“Week One,” I said. “I’ve inserted myself into Alexandra Madison’s home and her place of study, apparently with success: no one’s shown any sign of suspicion. I’ve searched as much of Whitethorn House as is feasible, but I haven’t found anything to point us in a specific direction.” This was basically true; the diary presumably pointed somewhere, but so far I had no idea where. “I’ve made myself available as much as possible—to known associates, by attempting to be alone on regular occasions during the day and evening, and to unknown ones by ensuring that I’m visible on these walks. I haven’t been approached by anyone who wasn’t already on our radar, but at this stage that doesn’t rule out an unknown assailant; he could be biding his time. I’ve been approached at various times by all the housemates and a number of students and professors, but all of them seemed concerned primarily with how I was feeling, that kind of thing—Brenda Grealey was a little more interested in the details than you’d expect, but I think that’s just ghoulishness. None of the reactions to Lexie’s stabbing or to her return have raised any red flags. The housemates appear to have concealed the full extent of their distress from the investigating officers, but coming from them, I don’t consider that suspicious behavior. They’re very reserved with outsiders.”

“You’re telling me,” Frank said. “What’s your gut say?”

I shifted, trying to find a bit of wall where nothing stuck into my arse. This was a little more complicated than it should have been, since I wasn’t about to tell him, or Sam, about the diary or about my feeling that I was being followed. “I think there’s something we’re missing,” I said, in the end. “Something important. Maybe your mystery guy, maybe a motive, maybe . . . I don’t know. I just get this very strong sense that there’s something here that hasn’t surfaced yet. I keep feeling like I’m about to put my finger on it, but . . .”

“Something to do with the housemates? College? The baby? The May-Ruth thing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”

Sofa springs creaking as Frank reached for something—a drink; I heard him swallow. “I can tell you this much: it’s not the great-uncle. You were way off base there. He died of cirrhosis; spent thirty or forty years locked up in that house drinking, then six months in a hospice dying. None of the five of them visited him. As a matter of fact, he and Daniel hadn’t seen each other since Daniel was a kid, as far as I can find out.”

I had seldom been so glad to be wrong, but this left me with that same grabbing-at-mirages feeling I’d had all week. “Why’d he leave Daniel the place, then?”

“Not many options. That family dies young; the only two living relatives were Daniel and his cousin, Edward Hanrahan, old Simon’s daughter’s kid. Eddie’s a good little yuppie, works for an estate agent. Apparently Simon figured Danny Boy was the lesser of two evils. Maybe he liked academic types better than yuppies, or maybe he wanted the house to stay with the family name.”

Good for Simon. “That must’ve got up Eddie’s nose.”

“Oh, yeah. He wasn’t any closer to Granddad than Daniel was, but he tried to fight the will, claimed the drink had sent Simon off his trolley. That’s why probate took so long. It was a stupid thing to do, but then, our Eddie’s not the brightest pixie in the forest. Simon’s doctor confirmed that he was an alcoholic and a horrible old man, but sane as you or me, and that was the end of that. Nothing dodgy there.”

I slumped down on the wall. I shouldn’t have been frustrated, I had never actually thought that the gang had slipped nightshade into Uncle Simon’s denture adhesive; but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something crucial going on around Whitethorn House, something I should be able to put my finger on. “Yeah, well,” I said. “It was just a thought. Sorry for wasting your time.”

Frank sighed. “You didn’t. Anything’s worth checking.” If I heard that sentence one more time, I was going to kill someone myself. “If you think they’re dodgy, then they probably are. Just not that particular way.”

“I never said I thought they were dodgy.”

“A few days ago you thought they’d put a pillow over Uncle Simon’s head.”

I pulled my hood farther over my face—the rain was picking up, fine little stinging needles of it, and I wanted to go home. It was a toss-up which one was more pointless, this stakeout or this conversation. “I didn’t think it. I just asked you to check it out, on the off chance. I can’t see them as a bunch of killers.”

“Hmm,” Frank said. “And you’re positive that’s not just because they’re such lovely people.”

I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was winding me up or testing me—Frank being Frank, probably a little of both. “Come on, Frankie, you know me better than that. You asked me about my instinct; that’s what it says. I’ve spent basically every waking second with these four for a week now, and there’s been no sign of a motive, no indications of guilty consciences—and like we said before, if one of them did it, the other three have to know. By now someone would have cracked, even for a second. I think you’re dead right that they’re hiding something, but I can’t see it being that.”

“Fair enough,” Frank said, noncommittally. “So you’ve got two jobs for Week Two. The first one is to pinpoint whatever it is that’s tingling your spidey sense. The second one is to start pushing the housemates a little, find out what it is they’re not sharing. They’ve been getting an easy ride so far—which is fine, that’s what we planned, but now it’s time to start tightening the screws. And while you’re doing that, here’s something to bear in mind. Remember your girlie chat with Abby, the other night?”

“Yeah,” I said. A flicker of something very strange went through me, at the thought of Frank hearing that conversation; something almost like outrage. I wanted to snap at him, That was private.

“Pajama parties rule. I told you she was a smart kid. What do you think: does she know who the daddy is?”

I hadn’t been able to make up my mind on that. “She could probably make a good guess, but I don’t think she’s sure. And she’s not about to tell me what her guess is.”

“Watch her,” Frank said, taking another swig of his drink. “She’s a little too observant for my taste. You think she’ll tell the guys?”