“What happened?” Daniel asked. “Were you able to identify this man?”

“Nah,” I said, leaning across Abby to get my satchel. “He’s definitely the guy from the other night, though. You should see his face. He looks like he went ten rounds with Muhammad Ali.” Rafe laughed and held up his hand to me for a high-five.

“What are you laughing about?” Abby wanted to know. “The guy could have you charged with assault, if he wanted to. That’s what Justin thought had happened, Lex.”

“He won’t press charges. He told the cops he fell off his bike. Everything’s fine.”

“Nothing jogged your memory?” Daniel inquired.

“Nope.” I tugged Justin’s coat off his chair and waved it at him. “Come on. Can we go to the Buttery? I want proper food. Cops make me hungry.”

“Did you get any sense of what happens now? Do they think he’s the man who attacked you? Did they arrest him?”

“Nah,” I said. “They don’t have enough evidence, or something. And they don’t think he stabbed me.”

I’d been so swept up by the thought that this was good news, I had forgotten that it might look very different from most other perspectives. There was a sudden flat silence, nobody looking at anyone else. Rafe’s eyes closed for a second, like a flinch.

“Why not?” Daniel asked. “As far as I can see, he seems like a logical suspect.”

I shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in their heads? That’s all they told me.”

“For fuck’s sake,” said Abby. She looked suddenly pale and heavy-eyed, in the glare of the fluorescent lights.

“So,” Rafe said, “this whole thing was pointless, after all. We’re back where we started.”

“We don’t know that yet,” said Daniel.

“I think it’s fairly clear. Call me a pessimist.”

“Oh, God,” Justin said softly. “I so hoped this was going to be over.” No one answered him.

* * *

Daniel and Abby, talking late again, out on the patio. This time I didn’t need to feel my way along the walls to the kitchen; I could have moved through that house blindfolded without putting a foot wrong, without creaking a floorboard.

“I don’t know why,” Daniel said. They were sitting on the swing seat, smoking, not touching. “I can’t put my finger on it. Possibly I’m letting all the other tensions cloud my judgment . . . I’m just worried.”

“She’s been through a tough time,” Abby said carefully. “I think all she wants is to settle down and forget it ever happened.”

Daniel watched her, moonlight reflecting off his glasses, screening his eyes. “What is it,” he asked, “that you’re not telling me?”

The baby. I bit down on my lip and prayed that Abby believed in loyalty among the sisterhood.

She shook her head. “You’ll have to trust me on this one.”

Daniel looked away, out over the grass, and I saw a flash of something—exhaustion, or grief—cross his face. “We used to tell one another everything,” he said, “not so long ago. Didn’t we? Or is that simply the way I remember it? The five of us against the world, and no secrets, ever.”

Abby’s eyebrows flicked up. “Did we? I’m not sure anyone tells anyone else everything. You don’t, for example.”

“I’d like to think,” Daniel said, after a moment, “that I do my best. That, unless there’s some pressing reason not to, I tell you and the others everything that really matters.”

“But there’s always some pressing reason, isn’t there? With you.” Abby’s face was pale and shuttered.

“Possibly there is,” Daniel said quietly, on a long sigh. “There didn’t use to be.”

“You and Lexie,” Abby said. “Have you ever . . . ?”

A silence; the two of them watching each other, intent as enemies.

“Because that would matter.”

“Would it? Why?”

Another silence. The moon went in; their faces faded into the night.

“No,” Daniel said, finally. “We haven’t. I would probably say the same thing either way, since I don’t see how it would be important, so I don’t expect you to believe me. But, for what it’s worth, we haven’t.”

Silence, again. The tiny red glow of a cigarette butt, arcing into the dark like a meteor. I stood in the cold kitchen, watching them through the glass, and wished I could tell them: It’ll all be OK now. Everyone will settle; everything will go back to normal, given time, and now we’ve got time. I’m staying.

* * *

A door banging, in the middle of the night; fast, careless footsteps thumping on wood; another slam, heavier this time, the front door.

I listened, sitting up in bed, my heart hammering. There was a shift somewhere in the house, so subtle that I felt it more than heard it, running through walls and floorboards into my bones: someone moving. It could have come from anywhere. It was a still night, no wind in the trees, only the cool deceptive call of an owl hunting far off in the lanes. I pulled my pillow up against the headboard, got comfortable and waited. I thought about having a cigarette, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one sitting upright, senses on full alert for the tiniest thing: the click of a lighter, the smell of smoke twisting in the dark air.

After about twenty minutes the front door opened and closed again, very quietly this time. A pause; then delicate, careful steps going up the stairs, into Justin’s room, and the explosive creak of bedsprings below me.

I gave it five minutes. When nothing interesting happened, I slid out of bed and ran downstairs—there was no point in trying to be quiet. “Oh,” Justin said, when I stuck my head round his door. “It’s you.”

He was sitting on the edge of his bed, half dressed: trousers, shoes but no socks, his shirt untucked and half buttoned. He looked awful.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

Justin ran his hands over his face, and I saw that they were trembling. “No,” he said. “I’m really not.”

“What happened?”

His hands came down and he stared at me, red-eyed. “Go to bed,” he said. “Just go to bed, Lexie.”

“Are you pissed off with me?”

“Not everything in this world is about you, you know,” Justin said coldly. “Believe it or not.”

“Justin,” I said, after a second. “I just wanted to—”

“If you really want to help,” Justin said, “then you can leave me alone.”

He got up and started fussing with the bedsheets, pulling them tight in fast, clumsy little jerks, his back turned to me. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything more, I closed his door gently behind me and went back upstairs. There was no light from Daniel’s room, but I could feel him there, only a few feet away in the darkness, listening and thinking.

* * *

The next day, when I came out of my five o’clock tutorial, Abby and Justin were waiting for me in the corridor. “Have you seen Rafe?” Abby asked.

“Not since lunch,” I said. They were dressed for outdoors—Abby in her long gray coat, Justin’s tweed jacket buttoned—and rain sparkled on their shoulders and in their hair. “Didn’t he have a thesis meeting?”

“That’s what he told us,” said Abby, shifting back against the wall to let a bunch of yelling undergrads tumble by, “but thesis meetings don’t last four hours, and anyway we checked Armstrong’s office. It’s locked. He’s not in there.”

“Maybe he went to the Buttery for a pint,” I suggested. Justin winced. We all knew that Rafe had been drinking a little more than was good for him, but nobody mentioned it, ever.

“We checked there too,” Abby said. “And he wouldn’t go to the Pav, he says it’s full of rugger-bugger wankers and it gives him boarding-school flashbacks. I don’t know where else to look.”

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked, coming out of his tutorial across the corridor.

“We can’t find Rafe.”

“Hmm,” Daniel said, adjusting his armful of books and papers. “Have you tried ringing him?”

“Three times,” said Abby. “The first time he hit Reject Call, and after that he turned his phone off.”

“Are his things still in his carrel?”

“No,” Justin said, slumping against the wall and picking at a cuticle. “Everything’s gone.”

“But that’s a good sign, surely,” Daniel said, giving him a look of mild surprise. “It means nothing unexpected’s happened to him; he hasn’t been hit by a car, or had some kind of health emergency and been taken to hospital. He’s simply gone off on his own somewhere.”

“Yes, but where?” Justin’s voice was rising. “And what are we supposed to do now? He can’t get home without us. Do we just leave him here?”

Daniel gazed down the corridor, over the milling heads. The air smelled of wet carpet; somewhere round the corner a girl shrieked, high and piercing, and Justin and Abby and I all jumped before we realized she was only playing at terrified, the scream had already dissolved into loud flirtatious scolding. Daniel, biting down thoughtfully on his lip, didn’t seem to notice.

After a moment he sighed. “Rafe,” he said, and gave a quick, exasperated shake of his head. “Honestly. Yes, of course we leave him here; there’s really nothing else we can do. If he wants to come home, he can ring one of us, or take a taxi.”

"To Glenskehy ? And I’m not driving all the way back into town for him, just because he feels like being an idiot—”

“Well,” Daniel said, “I’m sure he’ll find a way.” He tucked a stray sheet of paper into the pile he was carrying. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

By the end of dinner—a half-arsed dinner, chicken fillets from the freezer, rice, a bowl of fruit shoved into the middle of the table—Rafe hadn’t rung. He had switched his phone back on, but he was still letting our calls go to voice mail. “It’s not like him,” Justin said. He was scraping compulsively, with one thumbnail, at the pattern on the edge of his plate.

“Sure it is,” said Abby firmly. “He’s gone on a bender and picked up some girl, just like he did that other time, remember? He was gone for two days.”

“That was different. And what are you nodding about?” Justin added, sourly, to me. “You don’t remember that. You weren’t even here for that.”

My adrenaline leaped, but no one looked suspicious; they were all too focused on Rafe to notice a slip that small. “I’m nodding because I’ve heard about it. There’s this thing called communication, you should try it sometime—” Everyone was in a prickly mood, including me. I wasn’t frantic with worry about Rafe, exactly, but the fact that he wasn’t there was making me edgy, and so was the fact that I couldn’t tell whether this was for solid investigative reasons—Frank’s beloved intuition—or just because without him the balance of the room felt all wrong, off-kilter and precarious.

“How was that different?” Abby wanted to know.

Justin shrugged. “We didn’t live together then.”

“So? All the more reason. What’s he supposed to do, if he wants to hook up with someone? Bring her here?”

“He’s supposed to ring us. Or at least leave us a note.”

“Saying what?” I demanded. I was chopping a peach into tiny bits. “ ‘Dear guys, I’m off to get laid. Will talk to you tomorrow, or later tonight if I can’t score, or at three in the morning if she turns out to be a crap shag—’ ”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Justin snapped. “And for God’s sake eat that bloody thing or stop messing about with it.”

“I’m not being vulgar, I’m just saying. And I’ll eat it when I’m ready. Do I tell you how to eat?”

“We should call the police,” Justin said.

“No,” Daniel said, tapping a cigarette on the back of his wrist. “It wouldn’t do any good at this point, anyway. The police wait a certain amount of time after someone goes missing—twenty-four hours, I think, although it may be more—before they set any kind of search in motion. Rafe’s an adult—”

“In theory,” said Abby.

“—and he has every right to stay out for the night.”

“But what if he’s done something stupid?” Justin’s voice was rising towards a wail.

“One of the reasons I dislike euphemisms,” Daniel said, shaking out his match and dropping it neatly into the ashtray, “is that they preclude any real communication. I think it’s a safe bet that Rafe has in fact done something stupid, but that covers such a wide variety of possibilities. I assume you’re worried that he’s busy committing suicide, which frankly I think is extremely unlikely.”

After a moment Justin said, without looking up, “Did he ever tell you about that time when he was sixteen? When his parents made him move school for the tenth time or whatever it was?”

“No pasts,” Daniel said.

“He wasn’t trying to kill himself,” Abby said. “He was trying to get some attention from his dickhead dad, and it didn’t work.”

“I said no pasts.”

“I’m not. I’m just saying this isn’t the same, Justin. Hasn’t Rafe been completely different, these last few months? Hasn’t he been way happier?”

“These last few months,” Justin said. “Not these last few weeks.”

“Yeah, well,” Abby said, and sliced an apple in half with a crisp snap, “we’ve none of us been at our best. It’s still not the same. Rafe knows he’s got a home, he knows he’s got people who care about him, he’s not about to hurt himself. He’s just having a hard time, and he’s gone off to get hammered and chase skirt. He’ll be back when he’s good and ready.”

“What if he’s . . .” Justin’s voice trailed off. “I hate this, you know,” he said softly, to his plate. “I really hate this.”

“Well, so do we all,” said Daniel briskly. “It’s been a trying time for all of us. We need to accept that and have patience with ourselves, and with one another, while we recover.”

“You said to just give it time and it would get better. It’s not getting better, Daniel. It’s getting worse.”

“I was thinking,” Daniel said, “of a little more time than three weeks. If you consider that unreasonable, then do by all means tell me.”

“How can you be so calm?” Justin wasn’t far off tears. “This is Rafe we’re talking about.”

“Whatever he’s doing,” Daniel said, turning his head politely to the side to blow smoke away from the rest of us, “I fail to see how it would make any difference if I became hysterical.”

“I am not hysterical. This is how normal people react when one of their friends vanishes.”

“Justin,” Abby said, gently, “it’s going to be fine,” but Justin didn’t hear her.

“Just because you’re a bloody robot . . . My God, Daniel, just once, just once I’d like to see you act as if you care about the rest of us, about anything—”

“I think you have every reason to be aware,” Daniel said coldly, “that I care very deeply about all four of you.”

“I do not. What reason? I’ve got every reason to think that you don’t give a damn—”

Abby made a small gesture, palm upturned to the ceiling, the room around us, the garden outside. There was something about it, about the way her hand fell back into her lap; something tired, almost resigned.

“That’s right,” Justin said, slumping down in his chair. The light caught him at a cruel angle, hollowing out his cheeks and raking a long vertical groove between his eyebrows, and for a second I saw like a time-slip overlaid on his face what he would look like in fifty years’ time. “Of course. The house. And look where that’s got us.”

There was a tiny, sharp silence. “I have never claimed,” Daniel said, and his voice had a dangerous depth of some emotion that I’d never heard there before, “to be infallible. All I’ve ever claimed is that I try, very hard, to do what’s best for the five of us. If you believe I’m doing such a bad job of it, feel free to make decisions of your own. If you think we shouldn’t be living together, then move out. If you think we need to report Rafe missing, then pick up the phone.”

After a moment Justin shrugged miserably and went back to picking at his plate. Daniel smoked, gazing into the middle distance. Abby ate her apple; I turned my peach into purée. Nobody said anything for a long time.

* * *

“I see you’ve lost the lady boy,” Frank said, when I rang him from my tree. We had apparently inspired him to have a health-food moment: he was eating something with seeds—I could hear him spitting them, attractively, into his hand or wherever. “If he turns up dead, then maybe everyone will start believing me about the mysterious stranger. I should’ve had money on it.”

“Stop being a git, Frankie,” I said.

Frank laughed. “You’re not worried about him, are you? Seriously?”

I shrugged. “I’d rather know where he is, that’s all.”

“You can relax, babe. A lovely young lady of my acquaintance was trying to find out where her friend Martin was this evening, and just happened to dial little Rafe’s number by mistake. Unfortunately, he didn’t mention where he was before the misunderstanding got cleared up, but the background noise gave us a general idea. Abby was bang on: your boy’s in a pub somewhere, getting gee-eyed and chasing the ladies. You’ll get him back safe and sound, except for a five-star hangover.”

So Frank had been worried, too; worried enough to dig out some woman floater with a sexy voice and get her making phone calls. Maybe Naylor hadn’t been just a way for Frank to get at Sam; maybe he had been serious about him as a suspect, all along. I pulled my feet farther up into the branches. “Great,” I said. “That’s good to know.”

“So how come you sound like your cat just died?”

“They’re in bad shape,” I said, and I was glad Frank couldn’t see my face. I thought I was about to fall out of the tree from sheer exhaustion. I grabbed a branch and held on. “For whatever reason—because they can’t handle me getting stabbed, or because they can’t deal with whatever it is they’re not telling us—they’re coming apart at the seams.”

After a moment Frank said, very gently, “I know you’re getting on well with them, babe. That’s fine; they’re not my cup of Earl Grey, but I’ve no objection to you feeling differently if it makes your job easier. But they’re not your mates. Their problems aren’t your problems; they’re your opportunities.”

“I know,” I said. “I know that. It’s just hard to watch.”

“No harm in a bit of compassion,” Frank said cheerfully, taking another big bite of whatever he was eating. “As long as it doesn’t get out of hand. I’ve got something to take your mind off their troubles, though. Your Rafe’s not the only one gone missing.”

“What are you talking about?”

He spat out seeds. “I was planning on keeping tabs on Naylor, from a safe distance—get a handle on his routine, his associates, all the rest; give you a little more to work with. But it’s not turning out that way. He didn’t show for work today. His parents haven’t seen him since last night, and they say this is out of character; the father’s in a wheelchair, it’s not like John to leave his mammy to do the heavy lifting on her own. Your Sammy and a couple of floaters are taking turns sitting on his house, and we’ve told Byrne and Doherty to keep an eye out. For whatever that’s worth.”

“He won’t go far,” I said. “This guy wouldn’t leave Glenskehy unless he was dragged away kicking and screaming. He’ll turn up.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figure. As far as the stabbing goes, I don’t think this cuts one way or the other; it’s a myth that only the guilty ones run. But here’s one thing I do know: whatever has Naylor running, it’s not fear. Did he look scared to you?”

“No,” I said. “Not for a second. He looked furious.”

“To me, too. He wasn’t one bit happy about that interview. I watched him leave, afterwards; two steps from the door, he turned around and he spat at it. That’s one very pissed-off bogger, Cassie, and we already know he’s got a temper problem—and, like you said, he’s probably still in the area. I don’t know whether he’s gone missing because he doesn’t want us surveilling him, or because he’s got something up his sleeve, or what; but watch yourself.”

I did. All the way home I kept to the middle of the lanes, with my gun cocked and ready in my hands. I didn’t put it back into my girdle until the back gate had clanged behind me and I was safe in the garden, at the edge of the bright tracks of light from the windows.

I hadn’t rung Sam. This time it wasn’t because I’d forgotten. It was because I had no idea whether he would answer, or what either of us would have to say if he did.

17

Rafe showed up in the library the next morning, around eleven, with his coat buttoned wrong and his knapsack swinging carelessly from one hand. He stank of cigar smoke and stale Guinness, and he was still pretty unsteady on his feet. "Well,” he said, swaying a little and surveying the four of us. “Hello, hello, hello.”

“Where have you been?” Daniel hissed. His voice had a tense edge of anger, barely suppressed. He had been a lot more worried about Rafe than he’d let on.

“Here and there,” Rafe told him. “Out and about. How are you?”

“We thought something had happened to you.” Justin’s whisper cracked, into something too loud and too sharp. “Why didn’t you ring us? Even text us?”

Rafe turned to look at him. “I was otherwise occupied,” he said, after considering this. “And I didn’t feel like it.” One of the Goon Squad, the mature students who always appoint themselves the Library Noise Vigilantes, looked up over his stack of philosophy books and went, “Shhh!”

“Your timing sucks,” Abby said coldly. “This was not a good moment to take off on a skirt hunt, and even you should have been able to figure that out.”

Rafe rocked backwards on his heels and gave her a deeply miffed look. “Fuck you,” he said, loudly and haughtily. “I’ll decide when I do what I want.”

“Don’t talk to her like that any more,” Daniel said. He didn’t even pretend to care about keeping his voice down. The entire Goon Squad went, “Shhh!” at once.

I tugged at Rafe’s sleeve. “Sit down here and talk to me.”

“Lexie,” Rafe said, managing to focus on me. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair needed washing. “I shouldn’t have left you on your own, should I?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a happy camper. Want to sit down and tell me how your night went?”

He stretched out a hand; his fingers trailed down my cheek, my throat, slipped along the neckline of my top. I saw Abby’s eyes widen behind him, heard a quick rustle from Justin’s carrel. “God, you’re so sweet,” Rafe said. “You’re not as delicate as you look, are you? Sometimes I think the rest of us are the other way around.”

One of the Goon Squad had dug up Attila, who is the narkiest security guard in the known universe. He obviously went into the job in the hope of getting to crack the heads of dangerous criminals, but since these are thin on the ground in your average college library, he gets his kicks by making lost freshers cry. “Is this fella giving you any bother?” he asked me. He was trying to loom over Rafe, but the height difference was giving him trouble.

The wall went up straight away: Daniel and Abby and Justin snapped into attitudes of cool, poised ease, even Rafe straightened up and whipped his hand away from me and managed to look instantly, effortlessly sober. “Everything’s fine,” Abby said.

“I didn’t ask you,” Attila told her. “Do you know this fella?”

He was talking to me. I gave him an angelic smile and said, “Actually, Officer, he’s my husband. I did have a barring order against him, but now I’ve changed my mind and we’re off to shag deliriously in the Ladies.” Rafe started to snicker.

“There’s no fellas allowed in the Ladies,” said Attila ominously. “And yous are causing a disturbance.”

“It’s all right,” Daniel said. He stood up and took Rafe by the upper arm—the grip looked casual, but I could see his fingers digging in hard. “We were just leaving. All of us.”

“Get off me,” Rafe snapped, trying to shrug off Daniel’s hand. Daniel steered him briskly past Attila and down the long aisle of books, without looking back to see if the rest of us were following.

* * *

We gathered up our stuff, left in a hurry through Attila’s awful warnings, and found Daniel and Rafe in the foyer. Daniel was swinging his car keys from one finger; Rafe was leaning lopsidedly against a pillar and sulking.

“Well done,” Abby said to Rafe. “Really. That was classy.”

“Don’t start.”

“But what are we doing?” Justin asked Daniel. He was carrying Daniel’s stuff, as well as his own; he looked worried and overloaded. “We can’t just leave.”

“Why not?”

There was a brief, taken-aback silence. Our routine was so ingrained, I think it had stopped occurring to any of us that it wasn’t actually a law of nature, that we could break it if we wanted to. “What’ll we do instead?” I asked.

Daniel threw the car keys into the air and caught them. “We’re going to go home and paint the sitting room,” he said. “We’ve been spending far too much time in that library. A bit of work on the house will do us all good.”

To any outsider this would have sounded deeply weird—I could hear Frank in my head, God, they’re rock ’n’ roll, how do you stand the pace? But everyone nodded, even, after a moment, Rafe. I had already noticed that the house was their safe zone: whenever things got tense, one of them would steer the conversation onto something that needed fixing or rearranging, and everyone would settle down again. We were going to be in big trouble once the house was all sorted out and we didn’t have grouting or floor stains to use as our Happy Place.

It worked, too. Old sheets thrown over the furniture and cold bright air flooding through the open windows, crap clothes and hard work and the smell of paint, ragtime playing in the background, the naughty buzz of ditching college and the house swelling like an approving cat under the attention: it was exactly what we needed. By the time we finished the room, Rafe was starting to look sheepish instead of belligerent, Abby and Justin had relaxed enough to have a long comfortable argument about whether Scott Joplin sucked, and we were all in a much better mood.

“First dibs on the shower,” I said.

“Let Rafe have it,” said Abby. “To each according to his need.” Rafe made a face at her. We were sprawled on the dust sheets, admiring our work and trying to get up the energy to move.

“Once this dries,” Daniel said, “we’ll need to decide what, if anything, we’re putting on the walls.”

“I saw these really old tin signs,” said Abby, “up in the top spare room—”

“I am not living in a 1980s pub,” said Rafe. He had sobered up along the way, or else the paint fumes had got the rest of us high enough that we didn’t notice. “Aren’t there paintings, or something normal ?”

“The ones that are left are all horrible,” Daniel said. He was leaning back against the edge of the sofa, with spatters of white paint in his hair and on his old plaid shirt, looking happier and more at ease than he had in days. “Landscape with Stag and Hounds, that kind of thing, and not particularly well done, either. Some great-great-aunt with artistic pretensions, I think.”

“You’ve got no soul,” Abby told him. “Things with sentimental value aren’t supposed to have artistic merit as well. They’re supposed to be crap. Otherwise, it’s just showing off.”

“Let’s use those old newspapers,” I said. I was flat on my back in the middle of the floor, waving my legs in the air to examine the new paint splashes on Lexie’s work dungarees. “The ancient ones, with the article about the Dionne quintuplets and the ad for the thing that makes you gain weight. We can stick them all over the walls and varnish over them, like the photos on Justin’s door.”

“That’s in my bedroom,” Justin said. “A sitting room should have elegance. Grandeur. Not ads.”

“You know,” Rafe said, out of the blue, propping himself up on one elbow, “I do realize that I owe all of you an apology. I shouldn’t have vanished, especially not without letting you know where I was. My only excuse, and it’s not much of one, is that I was deeply pissed off about that guy getting off scot-free. I’m sorry.”

He was at his most charming, and Rafe could be very charming when he felt like it. Daniel gave him a grave little nod. “You’re an idiot,” I said, “but we love you anyway.”

“You’re OK,” Abby said, stretching up to get her cigarettes off the card table. “I’m not crazy about the idea of that guy running around loose, either.”

“You know what I wonder?” Rafe said. “I wonder if Ned hired him to frighten us off.”

There was an instant of absolute silence, Abby’s hand stopped with a smoke halfway out of the pack, Justin frozen in the middle of sitting up.

Daniel snorted. “I seriously doubt that Ned has the intellect for anything that complex,” he said acidly.

I had opened my mouth to ask, Who’s Ned? but I had shut it again, fast; not just because I was obviously supposed to know this, but because I did. I could have kicked myself for not seeing it earlier. Frank has always thrown diminutives at people he doesn’t like—Danny Boy, our Sammy—and like an idiot I had never considered the possibility that he might have picked the wrong one. They were talking about Slow Eddie. Slow Eddie, who had been wandering around the late-night laneways looking for someone, who had claimed he’d never met Lexie, was N. I was sure Frank could hear my heart punching the mike.

“Probably not,” Rafe said, lying back on his elbows and contemplating the walls. “When we’re done here, we should really invite him over for dinner.”

“Over my dead body,” said Abby. Her voice was tightening up. “You didn’t have to deal with him. We did.”

“And mine,” said Justin. “The man’s a Philistine. He drank Heineken all night, of course, and then he kept belching and naturally he thought that was hilarious, every single time. And all that droning about fitted kitchens and tax breaks and Section Whatever-it-is. Once was enough, thank you very much.”

“You people have no heart,” Rafe told them. “Ned loves this house. He told the judge so. I think we owe him a chance to see that the old family seat is in good hands. Give me a smoke.”

“The only thing Ned loves,” Daniel said, very sharply, “is the thought of six fully fitted executive apartments on extensive grounds with potential for further development. And over my dead body will he ever get a chance to see that.”

Justin made a sudden jerky movement, covered it by reaching for an ashtray and shoving it across to Abby. There was a complicated, sharp-edged silence. Abby lit her smoke, shook out the match and threw the packet to Rafe, who caught it one-handed. Nobody was looking at anybody. An early bumblebee blundered in at the window, hovered over the piano in a slant of sun and eventually bumped back out again.

I wanted to say something—that was my job, defusing moments like this one—but I knew we had veered into some kind of treacherous and complicated swamp where one misstep could get me into big trouble. Ned was sounding like more and more of a wankstain—even if I didn’t have the first clue what an executive apartment was, I got the general idea—but whatever was going on ran a lot deeper and darker than that.

Abby was watching me over her cigarette with cool, curious gray eyes. I shot her an agonized look, which didn’t take much effort. After a moment she stretched for the ashtray and said, “If there’s nothing decent to put up on the walls, maybe we should try something different. Rafe, if we found photos of old murals, do you think you could do something like that?”

Rafe shrugged. An edge of the belligerent don’t-blame-me look was creeping back onto his face. That dark electric cloud had come down over the room again.

Silence was fine with me. My mind was doing cartwheels—not just because Lexie had for some reason been hanging out with the archenemy, but because Ned was clearly a taboo subject. For three weeks his name had never been mentioned, the first reference to him had fried everyone’s heads, and I couldn’t figure out why. He had lost, after all; the house was Daniel’s, both Uncle Simon and a judge had said so, Ned should have triggered nothing more serious than a laugh and a few snide comments. I would have sold a major organ to find out what the hell was going on here, but I knew a lot better than to ask.

* * *

As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Frank’s mind—and I wasn’t at all sure I liked this—had run parallel to mine, parallel and fast.

I went for my walk as early as I could. That cloud hadn’t dissipated; if anything it had got thicker, pressing in from the walls and ceilings. Dinner had been painful. Justin and Abby and I had done our best to be chatty, but Rafe had gone into a sour sulk that you could practically see, and Daniel had withdrawn into himself, answering questions in monosyllables. I needed to get out of that house and think.

Lexie had met up with Ned at least three times, and she had gone to a lot of trouble to do it. The four big Ls of motive: lust, lucre, loathing and love. The chance of lust made my gag reflex kick in; the more I heard about Ned, the more I wanted to believe that Lexie wouldn’t have touched him with someone else’s. Lucre, though . . . She had needed money, fast, and a rich boy like Ned would have made a way better buyer than John Naylor and his crap farm job. If she had been meeting Ned to discuss what knickknacks he might want from Whitethorn House, how much he would be willing to pay, and then something had gone wrong . . .

It was a very strange night: huge and dark and gusty, snaps of wind roaring across the hillsides, a million high stars and no moon. I stuffed my gun back into my girdle, climbed up my tree and spent a long time there, watching the shadowy black surge of the bushes below me, listening hard for any faint sound that didn’t belong; thinking about phoning Sam.

In the end I phoned Frank. “Naylor hasn’t shown up yet,” he said, no hello. “You keeping an eye out?”

“Yeah,” I said. “No sign of him, as far as I can tell.”

“Right.” There was an absent note to his voice that told me his mind wasn’t on Naylor either. “Good. Meanwhile, I’ve got something that might interest you. You know the way your new pals were bitching about Cousin Eddie and his executive apartments, this afternoon?”

For a second all my muscles jolted awake, till I remembered Frank didn’t know about N. “Yep,” I said. “Cousin Eddie sounds like a right little gem.”

“Oh, yeah. One hundred percent pure brain-dead yuppie fuck, never had a thought in his life that didn’t involve his dick or his wallet.”

“You think Rafe was right about him hiring Naylor?”

“Not a chance. Eddie doesn’t hobnob with the lower classes. You should’ve seen his face when he heard my accent; I think he was afraid I was going to mug him. But this afternoon reminded me. Remember how you said the Fantastic Four were weird about the house? Too attached?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” I had almost forgotten that, actually. “I think I overreacted. When you put a lot of work into a place, you do get attached to it. And it’s a nice house.”

“Oh, it is,” Frank said. There was something in his tone that set my alarm bells jingling faintly, a fierce, sardonic grin. “It is that. I was bored today—Naylor’s still in the wind and I’m getting nowhere on Lexie-May-Ruth-Princess-Anastasia-whoever, I’ve drawn a blank in about fourteen countries so far, I’m considering the possibility that she was built in a pod by mad scientists in 1997. So, just to show my homegirl Cassie that I trust her instincts, I put in a call to my mate in the Land Registry office and ask him for a rundown on Whitethorn House. Who loves you, baby?”

“You do,” I said. Frank has always had a spectacular array of mates in unlikely places: my mate down at the docks, my mate on the County Council, my mate who runs the S&M shop. Back when we first began this whole Lexie Madison thing, My Mate At Births Deaths and Marriages made sure she was officially registered, in case anyone got suspicious and started sniffing around, while My Mate With The Van helped me move into her bedsit. I figure I’m happier not knowing about whatever complex barter system is going on there. “You bloody well should, after all this. And?”

“And remember saying they all act like they own the place?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Your instincts hit the jackpot, babe. They do. So do you, actually.”

“Quit being cute, Frankie,” I said. My heart was pounding hard and slow and there was a strange dark shiver through the hedges: something was happening. “What are you on about?”

“Old Simon’s will cleared probate and Daniel took possession of Whitethorn House on the tenth of September. On the fifteenth of December, ownership of the house was transferred into five names: Raphael Hyland, Alexandra Madison, Justin Mannering, Daniel March and Abigail Stone. Happy Christmas.”

It was the sheer blazing courage of it that hit me first: the passion of trust it would take, to put your future where your mouth was, no half measures, scoop up all your tomorrows and put them so deliberately, so simply, in the hands of the people you loved best. I thought of Daniel at the table, broad-backed and solid in his crisp white shirt, the precise flick of his wrist as he turned a page; of Abby flipping bacon in her bathrobe, Justin singing out of tune while he got ready for bed, Rafe sprawled on the grass squinting up into the sun. And all the time, underpinning everything, this. I had had moments of envying them before, but this was something too deep for envy; something like awe.

And then I realized. N, plane fares, Over my dead body will Ned get a chance. Here I had been fucking about with music boxes and tin soldiers and trying to figure out how much your average family photo album was worth; here I had thought she had nothing to sell, this time.

If she had been negotiating with Ned, and the others had somehow found out: holy shit. No wonder his name had turned the room to ice, that afternoon. I couldn’t breathe.

Frank was still going. I could hear him moving, pacing up and down the room, fast steps. “The paperwork on that would take months; Danny Boy must’ve started it almost the same day he got the keys. I know you like these people, Cassie, but you can’t tell me that’s not bizarre as all hell. That house is worth a cool couple of million, easy. What the fuck is he thinking? They’re all going to live there forever in one big happy hippie commune? Actually, never mind what he’s thinking, what the fuck is he smoking?”

He was taking it personally because he had missed it: all that investigation, and the middle-class student wimps had somehow slipped this right past him. “Yeah,” I said, very carefully, “it’s weird. They are weird, Frank. And yeah, it’s going to get complicated down the road, when someone wants to get married or whatever. But, like you said yourself, they’re young. They’re not thinking that way yet.”

“Yeah, well, little Justin won’t be getting married any time soon, not without a major change in the legislation—”

“Stop being a cliché, Frank. What’s the big deal?” This didn’t mean it had to be one of the four of them, not necessarily; the evidence still added up to Lexie being stabbed by someone she had met outside the house. It didn’t even mean she had actually been going to sell. If she had made a deal with Ned and then changed her mind, told him she was backing out; if she had just been playing with him all along—loathing—yanking his chain to pay him back for trying to take the house . . . He had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to spit on his grandfather’s memory; what would he have done if a share of it had been so close he could taste it, and then Lexie had snatched it away? I tried to shove the diary out of my mind: those dates, the first N just a few days after that missing circle; the hard scribble, pen almost digging through the paper, that said she hadn’t been playing.

“Well,” Frank said, with the lazy note to his voice that means he’s at his most dangerous. “If you ask me, this could give us the motive we’ve been looking for. Me, I’d call that a big deal.”

“No,” I said promptly, maybe too promptly, but Frank didn’t comment. “Not a chance. Where’s the motive in that? If they all wanted to sell and she was blocking it, then maybe, but those four would rather pull out their own teeth with rusty pliers than sell that house. What have they got to gain by killing her?”

“One of them dies, his share—or hers—reverts back to the other four. Maybe someone figured a quarter of that lovely big house would be even nicer than a fifth. It more or less lets Danny Boy out—if he wanted the whole thing, he could’ve just kept it to start with. But that still leaves us with three little Indians.”

I wriggled round the other way on my branch. I was very glad that Frank was off target, but, illogically, the extent to which he didn’t get it was pissing me off. "What for ? Like I said, they don’t want to sell it. They want to live in it. They can do that just as well no matter what percentage they own. You think one of them killed her because he liked her bedroom better than his own?”

“Or her own. Abby’s a good kid, but I’m not ruling her out. Or maybe it wasn’t financial, for once; maybe Lexie was just plain driving someone nuts. People share a house, they get on each other’s tits. And remember, there’s a very good chance she was shagging one of the lads, and we all know how nasty that can turn. If you’re renting, no big deal: some yelling, a few tears, a house meeting, one of you moves out. But what do you do if it’s a co-owner? They can’t throw her out, I doubt any of them can afford to buy her out—”

“Sure,” I said, “except I haven’t got one single whiff of any kind of major tension aimed at me. Rafe was pissed off with me at first for not realizing how shaken up they all were, but that’s it. If Lexie had been getting up someone’s nose to the point of murder, there’s no way I could have missed it. These people like each other, Frank. They may be weird, but they like being weird together.”

“So why didn’t they tell us they all own the place? Why are they being so fucking secretive, unless they’re hiding something?”

“They didn’t tell you because you never asked them. If you were in their place, even if you were innocent as a baby, would you give the cops anything you didn’t have to? Would you even spend hours answering questions, the way they have?”

“You know what you’re talking like?” Frank said, after a pause. He had stopped pacing. “You’re talking like a defense attorney.”

I twisted round the other way again, swung my feet up against a branch. I was having a hard time staying still. “Oh, come on, Frank. I’m talking like a detective. And you’re talking like a fucking obsessive. If you don’t like these four, that’s fine. If they twang your antennae, that’s fine too. But it doesn’t mean that every single thing you find is automatically evidence that they’re stone-cold killers.”

“I don’t think you’re in any position to question my objectivity, babe,” Frank said. That lazy drawl had come back into his voice, and it made my back tense up against the tree trunk.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m on the outside, keeping my perspective, while you’re neck-deep in all the action, and I’d like you to keep that in mind. It also means I think there’s a limit to how far ‘Oh, they’re just charmingly eccentric’ will go as an excuse for acting downright bloody squirrely.”

“What brought this on, Frank? You’ve counted them out since the beginning, two days ago you were all over Naylor like a rash—”

“And I still am, or I will be as soon as we find the little bastard again. But I like spreading my bets. I’m not dropping anyone, anyone at all, until they’re definitively ruled out. And these four haven’t been. Don’t forget that.”

It was way past time for me to back off. “Fair enough,” I said. “Until Naylor turns up again, I’ll focus on them.”

“You do that. So will I. And keep watching yourself, Cassie. Not just outside that house; inside, too. Talk tomorrow.” And he was gone.

The fourth big L: love. I thought, suddenly, of the phone videos: a picnic on Bray Head, the summer before, all of them lying on the grass drinking wine out of plastic cups and eating strawberries and arguing lazily over whether Elvis was overrated. Daniel had gone into a long absorbed monologue about sociocultural context, until Rafe and Lexie decided everything was overrated except Elvis and chocolate and started throwing strawberries at him. They had been passing the camera phone around; the clips were disjointed and shaky. Lexie with her head in Justin’s lap and him tucking a daisy behind her ear; Lexie and Abby sitting back to back and looking out at the sea, hair blowing, shoulders lifting in long matching breaths; Lexie laughing up into Daniel’s face as she picked a ladybug out of his hair and held it out, him bending his head over her hand and smiling. I had seen the video so many times that it felt like my own memory, flickering and sweet. They had been happy, that day, all five of them.

There had been love there. It had looked solid and simple as bread; real. And it felt real to live in, a warm element through which we moved easily and which we breathed in with every breath. But Lexie had been ready and willing to blow all that sky-high. More than willing; hell-bent on it—that furious scrawl in the date book, while the phone video showed her climbing down from the attic laughing and covered in dust. If she had lived a couple of weeks longer, the others would have woken up one morning and found her gone, not a note, not a good-bye, not a second thought. It slid through a back corner of my mind that Lexie Madison had been dangerous, under that bright surface, and that maybe she still was.

* * *

I slid off my branch, hanging by my hands, dropped and landed in the lane with a thump. I dug my hands into my pockets and started walking—moving helps me think. The wind pulled at my cap and shoved into the small of my back, almost taking me off my feet.

I needed to talk to Ned, fast. Lexie had neglected to leave me instructions on how the hell they got in touch with each other. Not by mobile: Sam had pulled her phone records first thing, no unidentified numbers in or out. Carrier pigeon? Notes in the hollow tree? Smoke signals?

I didn’t have much time. Frank had no idea that Lexie had ever met Ned and no idea that she had been getting ready to blow town—I knew there would turn out to be a good reason why I didn’t want to tell him about that diary; just like he always says, your instincts work faster than your mind. But he wasn’t about to let go of this. He would worry away at it like a pit bull, and sooner or later he was going to hit on this same possibility. I didn’t know all that much about Ned, but enough to be pretty sure that, if he ended up in an interview room with Frank going at him full throttle, he would spill his guts inside five minutes. It never once occurred to me, not for a second, to sit back and let that happen. Whatever had been going on here, I needed to put my finger on it before Frank did.

If I wanted to make an appointment to meet Ned, without any chance of the others finding out, how would I do it?

No phones. Mobiles keep a call register and they get itemized bills, she wouldn’t have left anything like that lying around, and Whitethorn House didn’t have a landline. There was no pay phone within walking distance, and the ones in college were risky: the Arts block phones were the only ones close enough to use on a fake bathroom break, and if one of the others had happened to walk by at the wrong moment, she would have been fucked—and this was too important for gambles. No calling in to see him, either. Frank had said Ned lived in Bray and worked in Killiney, there was no way she could have got there and back without the others missing her. And no letters or e-mails; she would never, not in a million years, have left a trail.

“How the hell, girl?” I said softly, into the air. I felt her like a shimmer over my shadow on the lane, the tilt of her chin and the mocking sideways flash of her eyes: Not telling.

Somewhere along the way I had stopped noticing just how seamlessly conjoined their five lives were. Into college together, all day in the library together, smoke break at noon with Abby and at four with Rafe, lunch together at one, home together for dinner: the routine of it was choreographed as precisely and tightly as a gavotte, never a minute left unaccounted for and never a minute to myself, except—

Except now. For one hour a night, like some spellbound girl in a fairy tale, I unwound my life from the others’ and it was all my own again. If I were Lexie and I wanted to contact someone I should never have been contacting, I would use my late-night walk.

Not would: had. For weeks now I had been using it to phone Frank, phone Sam, keep my secrets safe. A fox skittered across the lane in front of me and vanished into the hedge, all bones and luminous eyes, and a shiver went down my back. Here I had thought this was my very own bright idea, I was making my own way step by step and alert through the dark. It was only now, when I turned around and looked back down the road, that I realized I had been blithely, blindly putting my feet smack in Lexie’s footprints, all the way.

“So?” I said aloud, like a challenge. “So what?” This was what Frank had sent me in for, to get close to the victim, get into her life, and—duh—I was doing it. A certain amount of creepy was not only beside the point but also pretty much par for the course on a murder investigation; they’re not supposed to be one long round of laughs. I was getting spoiled, all these cozy candlelight dinners and handicrafts, turning jumpy when reality kicked back in.

One hour to get hold of Ned. How?

Notes in the hollow tree . . . I almost laughed out loud. Professional deformation: you’ve got the most esoteric possibilities all worked out, it’s the simple ones that take forever to hit you. The higher the stakes, Frank once told me, the lower the technology. If you want to meet your mate for coffee, you can afford to arrange it by text message or e-mail; if you think the cops or the Mob or the Illuminati are closing in, you signal your contact with a blue towel on the washing line. For Lexie, days ticking away and morning sickness starting to kick in, the stakes must have felt like life and death.

Ned lived in Bray; only a fifteen-minute drive away, outside rush hour. Probably she had taken the risk of phoning him from college, the first time. After that, all she had needed was a safe drop spot, somewhere in these lanes, that both of them could check every couple of days. I must have walked straight past it a dozen times.

That shimmer again, in the corner of my eye: tip of a grin, there and tricky and then gone.

In the cottage? The Bureau gang had been all over it like flies on shite, dusted every inch for prints and found nothing. And he hadn’t been parked anywhere near the cottage, that night I’d followed him. Allowing a little leeway for the fact that God forbid you should drive your Monster Truck on the kind of roads for which it was constructed, he would have parked as close to the drop spot as he could get. He had been on the main Rathowen road, nowhere near any turnoff. Wide verges, long grass and brambles, the dark road dropping away over the brow of the hill; and the milestone, worn and leaning like a tiny grave-marker.

I hardly realized I had turned around and was running hard. The others would be expecting me back any minute and the last thing I wanted was for them to get worried and come looking for me, but this couldn’t wait till tomorrow night. I wasn’t racing some hypothetical, infinitely flexible deadline any more; I was racing against Frank’s mind, and Lexie’s.

After the narrow lanes, the verge felt wide and bare and very exposed, but the road was deserted, not a glimmer of headlights in either direction. When I pulled out my torch, the letters on the stone marker jumped out at me, blurred with time and weather, throwing their own slanted shadows: Glenskehy 1828. The grass swirled and bent around it, in the high wind, with a sound like a long hiss of breath.

I caught the torch under my arm and parted the grass with both hands; it was wet and sharp-edged, tiny serrations pulling at my fingers. At the foot of the stone, something flashed crimson.

For a moment my mind couldn’t take in what I was seeing. Sunk deep in the grass, colors glowed bright as jewels and minute figures scudded away from the torchlight: gloss of a horse’s flank, flick of a red coat, toss of powdered curls and a dog’s head turning as he leaped for cover. Then my hand touched wet, gritty metal and the figures shivered and clicked into place, and I laughed out loud, a small gasp that sounded strange even to me. A cigarette tin, old and rusty and probably nicked from Uncle Simon’s stash; the rich, battered hunting scene was painted with a brush fine as an eyelash. The Bureau and the floaters had done a fingertip search for a mile around the cottage, but this was outside their perimeter. Lexie had beaten them, saved this for me.

The note was on lined paper torn out of some kind of Filofax thing. The handwriting looked like a ten-year-old’s, and apparently Ned hadn’t been able to decide whether he was writing a business letter or a text message: Dear Lexie, been trying 2 get hold of u in refrence 2 that matter we were talking about, Im still v v interested. Please let me know whenever u get a chance. Thanks, Ned. I was willing to bet that Ned had gone to an insanely expensive private school. Daddy hadn’t exactly got his money’s worth.

Dear Lexie; Thanks, Ned . . . Lexie must have wanted to kick him for leaving that kind of thing lying around, no matter how well hidden. I took out my lighter, moved over to the road and set the note on fire; when it caught, I dropped it, waited for the quick flare to die down and crushed out the embers with my foot. Then I found my Biro and ripped a page out of my notebook.

By this stage Lexie’s handwriting came easier than my own. 11 Thursday—talk then. No need for fancy bait: Lexie had done all that for me, this guy was already well hooked. The tin shut with a neat, tiny click and I tucked it back into the long grass, feeling my fingerprints overlaying themselves perfectly on Lexie’s, my feet planted carefully in the precise spots where her footprints had long since washed away.

18

The next day lasted about a week. The Arts block was too hot, dry and airless. My tutorial group were bored and fidgety; it was their last session, they hadn’t read the material and couldn’t be bothered to fake it, and I couldn’t be bothered pretending I cared. All I could think about was Ned: whether he would show, what I would say if he did, what I would do if he didn’t; how long I had before Frank caught up with us.

I knew that night was a long shot. Even assuming I was right about the cottage being their meeting place, Ned might easily have given up on Lexie altogether, after a month with no communication—he hadn’t dated his note, it could have been weeks old. And even if he was the persistent type, the odds were against him checking the drop spot in time to make the meeting. A big part of me hoped he wouldn’t. I needed to hear what he had to say, but anything I heard, Frank was going to hear too.

I got to the cottage early, around half past ten. At home, Rafe was playing stormy Beethoven with an awful lot of pedal, Justin was trying to read with his fingers in his ears, everyone was getting snippier by the minute and the whole thing showed every sign of spiralling into a vicious argument.

It was only the third time I had been inside that cottage. I was a little wary about angry farmers—the field had to belong to someone, after all, although apparently he wasn’t too attached to it—but it was a still, bright night, nothing moving for miles around, just pale empty fields and the mountains black silhouettes against the stars. I got my back into a corner, where I could see the field and the road but where the shadows would mask me from anyone watching, and waited.

Just on the off chance that Ned did show up, I had to get this right; I only had one shot. I needed to let him lead, not just on everything I said, but on how I said it. Whatever Lexie had been for him, I needed to be the same. Going on past form, that could have been anything—breathy vamp, brave put-upon Cinderella, enigmatic Mata Hari—and, regardless of what Frank said about Ned’s brainpower, if I hit the wrong note even he would probably notice. All I could do was play it quiet and hope he gave me some cue.

The road was white and mysterious, curling away downhill into deep black hedges. A few minutes before eleven there was a vibration somewhere, too deep or too far away to pinpoint, just a throb tugging at the edge of my hearing. Silence; then the faint crunch of footsteps, away down the lane. I pressed back into the corner and got one hand around my torch and the other up my sweater, on the butt of my gun.

That flash of fair hair, moving among the dark hedges. Ned had made it after all.

I let go of my gun and watched him haul himself awkwardly over the wall, inspect his trousers for contamination, brush off his hands and pick his way across the field with deep distaste. I waited till he was in the cottage, only a few feet away, before I switched on my torch.

“God,” Ned said peevishly, throwing an arm up to shield his eyes. “Like, go ahead and totally blind me?”

That right there was, like, totally enough time for me to learn everything I needed to know about Ned in one easy lesson. Here I had been all freaked out about having one double; he must have run into a clone of himself on every street corner in south Dublin. He was so exactly like everyone else that there was no way to see him, through all those thousands of reflected images. Standard-issue trendy haircut, standard-issue good looks, standard-issue rugby build, standard-issue overpriced labels; I could have told you his whole life story on that one glance. I hoped to God I never had to pick him out of a lineup.

Lexie would have given him whatever he wanted to see, and there was no doubt in my mind that Ned liked his girls clichéd: sexy by numbers rather than by nature, humorless, not too bright and ever so slightly bitchy. It was a shame I didn’t have a fake tan. "OhmyGod,” I said, matching his peeved tone and doing the same geebag accent I’d used to get Naylor out of his hedge. “Don’t have a thrombo. It’s just a torch.” This conversation wasn’t starting out on a great note, but I was OK with that. There are some social circles where manners are a sign of weakness.

“Where have you been?” Ned demanded. “I’ve been leaving you notes, like, every other day. I’ve got better stuff to do than haul my arse down to bogland all the time, yah?”

If Lexie had been shagging this space waste, I was going to head over to the morgue and stab her myself. I rolled my eyes. “Um, hello? I got stabbed? I was in a coma?”

“Oh,” Ned said. “Yah. Right.” He gave me a pale-blue, vaguely put-out stare, like I’d done something tasteless. “Still, though. You could have got in touch. This is business.”

That, at least, was good news. “Yah, well,” I said. “We’re in touch now, aren’t we?”

“This total fucking low-life detective came and talked to me,” Ned said, suddenly remembering. He looked as outraged as you can get without changing expression. “Like I was a suspect, or something. I told him this was so not my problem. I’m not from Ballymun. I don’t stab people.”

I decided I was with Frank on this one: Ned was not the brightest little bunny hopping through this forest. He was the type who was basically one big cluster of secondhand reflexes, no actual thought involved. I would have been willing to bet good money that he talked to working-class clients as though they were handicapped and said “Me love you long time” whenever he saw an Asian girl. “Did you tell him about this?” I asked, pulling myself up onto a broken bit of wall.

He gave me a horrified look. “No way. He’d have been all over me like a rash, and I couldn’t be arsed trying to explain myself to him. I just want this sorted, yah?”

And civic-minded, too—not that I was complaining. “Good,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like this has anything to do with what happened to me, right?”

Ned didn’t seem to have an opinion on that. He went to lean against the wall, examined it suspiciously and changed his mind. “So can we, like, move forwards?” he wanted to know.

I ducked my head and threw him a sideways poor-little-me glance, up under the lashes. “The coma totally messed up my memory. So you’ll have to tell me where we were, and stuff?”

Ned stared at me. That impassive face, utterly expressionless, giving away nothing: for the first time I saw a resemblance to Daniel, even if it was Daniel after a frontal lobotomy. “We were on a hundred,” he said, after a moment. “Cash.”

A hundred quid for some family heirloom, a hundred grand for a share of the house? I didn’t have to be sure what we were talking about to know he was lying. “Um, I don’t think so,” I told him, giving him a flirty smirk to soften the blow of being outsmarted by a girl. “The coma messed up my memory, not my brain.”

Ned laughed, completely unembarrassed, stuffing his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. “Well, hey, a guy’s gotta try, right?”

I kept the smirk, since he seemed to like it. “Keep trying.”

“OK,” Ned said, sobering up and putting on his business face. “Seriously. So I said one eighty, right? And you told me I’d have to do better than that, which you’re totally breaking my bollocks here but fair enough, and to get back to you. So I left you a note saying we can talk about two hundred K, right, but then you . . .” An uncomfortable shrug. “You know.”

Two hundred K. For a second all I felt was the pure white high of triumph, the one every detective knows, when the cards turn over and you see that every bet you placed was pinpoint perfect, that flying blind you found your way straight home. Then I realized.

I had assumed Ned was the one holding things up, sorting out paperwork or trying to raise cash. Lexie had never needed serious money to run before. She had reached North Carolina with the deposit for a fleabag apartment and left it with what she got for her beaten-up car; all she had ever asked for was an open road and a few hours’ head start. This time, she had been negotiating six-figure deals with Ned. Not just because she could; with the baby growing and Abby’s sharp eyes in the background and an offer that size on the table, why hang around for weeks over a few grand either way? She would have signed on the dotted line, demanded small bills and been gone, unless she needed every penny she could get.

The more I had learned about Lexie, the more I had taken it for granted that she was planning on having an abortion, as soon as she got to wherever she was going. Abby—and Abby had known her, as well as anyone could—thought the same, after all. But an abortion only costs a few hundred quid. Lexie could have saved that much from her job by this time, nicked it out of the kitty one night, got a bank loan she would never repay; no need to mess around with Ned at all.

Raising a child costs a whole lot more. The princess of No Man’s Land, the queen of a thousand castles between worlds, had crossed over. She had been about to open her hands and take hold of the biggest commitment of all. The wall felt like it was turning to water underneath me.

I must have been staring like I’d seen a ghost. “Seriously,” Ned said, a little miffed, misreading the look. “I’m not messing you around. Two hundred Gs is my absolute best offer. I mean, I’m taking a major risk here. After we’re sorted, I’ve still got to convince at least two of your mates. I’ll get there in the end, obviously, once I’ve got the leverage, but that could take months and a shitload of hassle.”

I pressed my free hand down on the wall, hard, feeling the rough stone dig into my palm, till my head cleared. “You think?”

Those pale eyes widened. “Oh, God, yah. I don’t know what the fuck their damage is. I know they’re your friends and Daniel’s my cousin and shit, but, like, are they thick? Just the thought of doing something with that house had them squealing like a bunch of nuns at a flasher.”

I shrugged. “They like the place.”

“Why? I mean, it’s a total dive, it doesn’t even have heating, and they act like it’s some kind of palace. Do they not realize what they could get out of it, if they just got a grip? That house has potential.”

Executive apartments on extensive grounds with potential for further development . . . For a second I despised Lexie and me both, for schmoozing this little skid mark for our own ends. “I’m the smart one,” I said. “When you get the place, what are you going to do with all that potential?”

Ned gave me a baffled stare; presumably he and Lexie had already talked about this. I gave him back a blank look, which seemed to make him feel at home. “Depends on planning permission, yah? I mean, ideally, I’ll go for a golf club or a spa hotel, something like that. That’s where the serious long-term profit is, specially if I can get a helipad put in. Otherwise, we’re talking major luxury apartments.”

I considered kicking him in the nads and running. I had gone in there all ready to hate this guy’s guts, and he wasn’t letting me down. Ned didn’t want Whitethorn House; he didn’t give a flying fuck about it, no matter what he had said in court. What had him salivating wasn’t the house but the thought of wrecking it, the chance to rip its throat out, scrape its ribs hollow and lick up every last taste of blood. For a flash I saw John Naylor’s face, swollen and discolored, lit up by those visionary eyes: Do you know what that hotel would have done for Glenskehy? Deep down, deeper and more powerful than the fact that they would loathe each other’s guts, he and Ned were two sides of the same coin. When they pack up their things and go, Naylor had said, I want to be there to wave them good-bye. At least he had been willing to put his body, not just his bank account, on the line for what he wanted.

“Brilliant idea,” I said. “I mean, it’s so important not to let a house just sit there being lived in.”

Ned missed the sarcasm. “Obviously,” he said hastily, in case I started looking for a bigger cut, “it’s going to take, like, a ton of investment cash just to get it off the ground. So two hundred’s the best I can do. Are we good with that? Can I get the paperwork moving?”

I pursed up my mouth and pretended to mull that one over. “I’ll have to have a little think about it.”

“Ah, for fuck’s sake.” Ned raked a hand through his quiff, frustrated, then smoothed it carefully back into shape. “Come on. This has been dragging on for, like, ever.”

“Sor-ry,” I said, shrugging. “If you were in such a major hurry, you should’ve made me a decent offer to start with.”

“Well, I am now, right? I’ve got investors lining up begging to get in on the ground floor of this, but they won’t hang around forever. These are serious guys? With serious money?”

I gave him the smirk, with a bitchy little nose-wrinkle thrown in. “So I’ll seriously let you know the exact second I decide. OK?” And I waved bye-bye.

Ned stayed put for another few seconds, shifting from foot to foot and looking majorly pissed off, but I kept the glassy smirk going. “Right,” he said, finally. “Fine. Whatever. Let me know.”

In the doorway he turned to tell me, impressively, “This could put me on the map, you know. This could have me playing with the big boys. So let’s not fuck it up, OK?”

He was trying for a dramatic exit, but he lost his chance by tripping over something as he turned to flounce off. He tried to save it by breaking into a jaunty little jog across the field, not looking back.

I switched off my torch and waited there, in the cottage, while Ned sloshed through the grass and found his way back to his studmobile and Panzered off towards civilization, the throb of the SUV tiny and meaningless against the huge night hillsides. Then I sat down against the wall of the outer room and felt my heart beat where hers had finished beating. The air was soft and warm as cream; my arse went to sleep; tiny moths whirled around me like petals. There were things growing beside me out of the earth where she had bled, a pale clump of bluebells, a tiny sapling that looked like hawthorn: things made of her.

Even if Frank hadn’t caught the live show, he would hear that conversation in just a few hours, as soon as he got into work the next morning. I should have been on the phone to him or Sam or both, working out the best ways to use this, but I felt like if I moved or tried to talk or breathed too hard my mind would spill over, soak away into the long grass.

I had been so sure. Can you blame me? This girl like a wildcat gnawing off her own limbs sooner than be trapped; I had been positive that forever was the one word she would never say. I tried to tell myself she might have been planning to give the baby up for adoption, ditch the hospital as soon as she could walk and vanish from the parking lot to the next promised land, but I knew: those numbers she had been throwing around with Ned weren’t for any hospital, no matter how fancy. They were for a life; for two lives.

Just like she had let the others sculpt her delicately, unconsciously, into the little sister to round out their strange family, just like she had let Ned shape her into the clichés that were all he understood, she had let me make her into what I was longing to see. A master key to open every slamming door, a neverending freeway to a million clean starts. There’s no such thing. Even this girl who left lives behind like rest stops had found her exit, in the end, and had been ready to take it.

I sat in the cottage for a long time, with my fingers wrapped around the sapling—gently, it was so new, I didn’t want to bruise it. I’m not sure how long it was before I managed to make myself stand up; I barely remember walking home. A part of me was actually hoping John Naylor would leap out of a hedge, blazing with his cause and looking for a screaming match or an all-out brawl, just to give me something I could fight.

* * *

The house was lit up like a Christmas tree, every window blazing, silhouettes flitting and a babble of voices pouring out, and for a moment I couldn’t take it in: had something terrible happened, was someone dying, had the house tilted and sideslipped and tossed up some gay long-gone party, if I stepped onto the lawn would I tumble straight into 1910? Then the gate clanged shut behind me and Abby threw the French doors open, calling, “Lexie!” and came running down the grass, long white skirt streaming.

“I was keeping an eye out for you,” she said. She was breathless and flushed, eyes sparkling and her hair starting to come loose from its clips; she had obviously been drinking. “We’re being decadent. Rafe and Justin made this punch stuff with cognac and rum and I don’t know what else is in it but it’s lethal, and nobody has tutorials or anything tomorrow so fuck it, we’re not going into college, we’re staying up drinking and making eejits of ourselves till we all fall over. Sound good?”

“Sounds brilliant,” I said. My voice came out strange, dislocated—it was taking me a while to pull myself together and catch up—but Abby didn’t seem to notice.

“You think? See, at first I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Rafe and Justin were already making the punch—Rafe set some kind of booze on fire, on purpose, like—and they yelled at me for always worrying about everything. And, I mean, at least for once they’re not bitching at each other, right? So I figured what the hell, we need it. After the last few days—God, after the last few weeks. We’ve all been turning into crazy people, did you realize that? That thing the other night, with the rock and the fight and . . . Jesus.”

Something crossed her face, a dark flicker, but before I could place it, it had vanished and the reckless, tipsy gaiety was back. “So I figure, if we go completely nuts for tonight and get everything out of our systems, then maybe we can all chill out and go back to normal. What do you think?”

Being this drunk made her seem much younger. Somewhere in Frank’s bomber-paced war-game mind she and her three best friends were being lined up and inspected, one by one, inch by inch; he was evaluating them, cool as a surgeon or a torturer, deciding where to make the first test cut, where to insert the first delicate probe. “I would love that,” I said. “God, I’d love that.”

“We started without you,” Abby said, rearing back on her heels to inspect me anxiously. “You don’t mind, do you? That we didn’t wait for you?”

“Course not,” I said. “As long as there’s some left.” Far behind her, shadows crisscrossed on the living-room wall; Rafe bent with a glass in one hand and his hair gold as a mirage against the dark curtains, and Josephine Baker poured out through the open windows, sweet and scratchy and beckoning: “Mon rÄ™ve c’était vous . . .” In all my life I had seldom wanted anything as wildly as I wanted to be in there, get this gun and this phone off me, drink and dance until a fuse blew in my brain and there was nothing left in the world except the music and the blaze of lights and the four of them surrounding me, laughing, dazzling, untouchable.

“Well, of course there’s some left. What do you think we are?” She caught my wrist and headed back towards the house, pulling me behind her, twisting her skirt up off the grass with her free hand. “You have to help me with Daniel. He’s got this big glass, but he’s sipping it. Tonight isn’t about sipping. He’s supposed to be swigging. I mean, I know he’s getting enough into him to do some good, because he went off into this whole long speech about the labyrinth and the Minotaur and something with Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream, so he’s not sober. But still.”

“Well, come on, then,” I said, laughing—I couldn’t wait to see Daniel really hammered—“what are we waiting for?” and we raced up the lawn together and swept into the kitchen hand in hand.

Justin was at the kitchen table, with a ladle in one hand and a glass in the other, bending over a big fruit bowl full of something red and dangerous-looking. “God, you’re gorgeous,” he told us. “You’re like a pair of little wood nymphs, so you are.”

“They are lovely,” Daniel said, smiling at us from the doorway. “Give them some punch, so they’ll think we’re lovely too.”

“We always think you’re lovely,” Abby told him, grabbing a glass from the table. “But we need punch anyway. Lexie needs lots of punch, so she can catch up.”

“I’m lovely too!” Rafe shouted from the sitting room, over Josephine. “Come in here and tell me I’m lovely!”

“You’re lovely!” Abby and I yelled at the top of our lungs, and Justin pushed a glass into my hand and we all headed into the sitting room, kicking off our shoes in the hall and licking off the punch that splashed onto our wrists and laughing.

* * *

Daniel stretched out in one of the armchairs and Justin lay on the sofa, and Rafe and Abby and I ended up sprawled on the floor because chairs felt too complicated. Abby had been right, the punch was lethal: lovely, tricky stuff that went down easy as fresh orange juice and then turned into a sweet wild lightness spreading like helium through every limb. I knew it would be a whole different story if I tried to do anything stupid, like stand up. I could hear Frank somewhere in the back of my head nagging about control, like one of the nuns from school droning on about the demon drink, but I was so bloody sick of Frank and his smart-arsed little sound bites and of being in control all the time. “More,” I demanded, nudging Justin with my foot and waving my glass at him.

I don’t remember big patches of that evening, not in detail. The second glass or maybe the third turned the whole night soft-edged and enchanted, something out of a dream. Somewhere in there I made some excuse to go up to my room and lock away my undercover paraphernalia—gun, phone, girdle—under the bed; someone turned off most of the lights, all that was left was one lamp and candles scattered around like stars. I remember an in-depth argument over who was the best James Bond, leading into an equally intense one over which of the three guys would make the best James Bond; a deeply crap attempt at some drinking game called “Fuzzy Duck” that Rafe had learned in boarding school and that ended when Justin snorted punch down his nose and had to rush out and sneeze booze into the sink; laughing so hard that my stomach hurt and I had to stick my fingers in my ears till I could get my breath back; Rafe’s arm flung out under Abby’s neck, my feet propped on Justin’s ankles, Abby reaching up a hand to take Daniel’s. It was as if none of the jagged edges had ever existed; it was close and warm and shining as that first week again, only better, a hundred times better, because this time I wasn’t on the alert and fighting to get my bearings and stay in place. This time I knew them all by heart, their rhythms, their quirks, their inflections, I knew how to fit in with every one; this time I belonged.

What I remember most is a conversation—just a tangent, off something else, I don’t know what—about Henry V. It didn’t seem important at the time, but afterwards, after everything was over, it came back to me.

“The man was a raving psycho,” Rafe said. He and I and Abby were lying on our backs on the floor again; he had his arm linked through mine. “All that heroic Shakespeare stuff was pure propaganda. Today Henry would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program.”

“I like Henry,” Daniel said through a cigarette. “A king like that is exactly what we need.”

“Monarchist warmonger,” said Abby, to the ceiling. “Come the revolution, you’re up against the wall.”

“Neither monarchy nor war has ever been the real problem,” said Daniel. “Every society has always had war, it’s intrinsic to humanity, and we’ve always had rulers—do you really see so much difference between a medieval king and a modern-day president or prime minister, except that the king was marginally more accessible to his subjects? The real problem comes when the two things, monarchy and war, become dislocated from each other. With Henry, there was no disconnect.”

“You’re babbling,” Justin said. He was trying, with difficulty, to drink his punch without sitting up and without spilling it down his front.

“You know what you need?” Abby told him. “A straw. A bendy one.”

“Yes!” said Justin, delighted. “I do need a bendy straw. Do we have any?”

“No,” said Abby, surprised, which for some reason sent me and Rafe into helpless, undignified giggles.

“I’m not babbling,” Daniel said. “Look at the old wars, centuries ago: the king led his men into battle. Always. That was what the ruler was: both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the sacrifice for their safety. If he had refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart—and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne. The king was the country; how could he possibly expect it to go into battle without him? But now . . . Can you see any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into the war he’s started? And once that physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become mere pawns, to be sacrificed by the thousand for reasons that have no roots in any reality. As soon as rulers mean nothing, war means nothing; human life means nothing. We’re ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go.”

“Do you know something?” I told him, managing to lift my head a few inches off the floor. “I only have maybe a quarter of a clue what you’re talking about. How are you this sober?”

“He’s not sober,” said Abby, with satisfaction. “Rants mean he’s drunk. You should know that by now. Daniel is ossified.”

“It’s not a rant,” Daniel said, but he was smiling at her, a mischievous flash of a grin. “It’s a monologue. If Hamlet can have them, why can’t I?”

“At least I understand the Hamlet rants,” I said plaintively. “Mostly.”

“What’s he saying, basically,” Rafe informed me, turning his head on the hearth rug so that those gold eyes were inches from mine, “is that politicians are overrated.”

That picnic on the hill, months before, Rafe and me throwing strawberries to shut Daniel up in the middle of another rant. I swear I remembered it: the smell of the sea breeze, the ache of my thighs from climbing. “Everything’s overrated except Elvis and chocolate,” I announced, raising my glass precariously above my head, and heard Daniel’s sudden, irresistible laugh.

Drink suited Daniel. It put a vivid flush on his cheekbones and a spark deep in his eyes, loosened his stiffness into a sure, animal grace. Usually Rafe was the resident eye candy, but that night it was Daniel I couldn’t take my eyes off. Leaning back among the candle flames and the rich colors and the faded brocade of the chair, with the glass glowing red in his hand and dark hair falling across his forehead, he looked like some ancient war leader himself: a high king in his banquet hall, shining and reckless, celebrating between battles.

The sash windows flung open to the night garden; moths whirling at the lights, shadows crisscrossing, soft damp breeze playing in the curtains. “But it’s summer,” Justin said suddenly, amazed, shooting up on the sofa. “Feel the wind, it’s warm. It’s summer. Come on, come outside,” and he scrambled up, tugging Abby up by the hand as he went past, and clambered out the window onto the patio.

The garden was dark and scented and alive. I don’t know how long we spent out there, under a huge wild moon. Rafe and me crossing hands and whirling on the lawn till we fell over in a panting giggling heap, Justin tossing a great double handful of hawthorn petals in the air so that they fell like snow onto our hair, Daniel and Abby dancing a slow barefoot waltz under the trees, like ghost lovers from some long-lost ball. I threw flips and cartwheels straight across the grass, fuck my imaginary stitches, fuck whether Lexie had done gymnastics, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this drunk and I loved it. I wanted to dive deeper into it and never come up for air, open my mouth and take a huge breath and drown on this night.

I lost the others, somewhere along the way; I was lying on my back in the herb garden, smelling crushed mint and looking up at a million dizzy stars, on my own. I could hear Rafe calling my name, faintly, at the front of the house. After a while I picked myself up and went to find him, but gravity had somehow gone slippery and it was hard to walk. I felt my way along the wall, keeping one hand on branches and ivy; I heard twigs snap under my bare feet, but there wasn’t even a flicker of pain.

The lawn was white in the moonlight. Music streamed out through the windows and Abby was dancing by herself on the grass, spinning slow circles, her arms outspread and her head back to the enormous night sky. I stood by the alcove, swinging a long trail of ivy with one hand, and watched her: the pale swirl and dip of her skirt, the turn of her wrist holding it up, the arch of her bare foot, the dreamy drunken sway of her neck, in and out of the whispering trees.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” said a voice, softly, behind me. I was way too drunk even to be startled. It was Daniel, on one of the stone seats under the ivy, with a glass in his hand and a bottle on the flagstones beside him. The moon shadows turned him into carved marble. “When we’re all old and gray and starting to slip away, even if I’ve forgotten everything else my life has ever held, I think I’ll remember her like this.”

A swift painful pang went through me, but I couldn’t figure out why; it was much too complicated, too far away. “I want to remember tonight too,” I said. “I want to tattoo it onto me so I don’t forget.”

“Come here,” Daniel said. He put the glass down and moved sideways on the bench to make room, held out a hand to me. “Come here. We’ll have thousands more nights like this. You can forget them by the dozen if you want to; we’ll make more. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

His hand around mine was warm, strong. He pulled me down on the seat and I leaned in against him, that solid shoulder, smell of cedar and clean wool, everything black and silver and shifting and the water murmuring on and on at our feet. “When I thought we’d lost you,” Daniel said, “it was . . .” He shook his head, took a quick breath like a gasp. “I missed you; you have no idea how much. But it’s all right now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

He turned towards me. His hand came up, fingers tangling in my hair, rough and tender, moving down across my cheek, tracing the line of my mouth.

The lights of the house spun blurred and magic as the lights of a carousel, there was a high singing note above the trees and the ivy was whirling with music so sweet I could hardly bear it, and all I wanted in the world was to stay. Strip off the mike and the wire, into an envelope and down the postbox to Frank and gone, skim off my old life light as a bird and home straight here. We didn’t want to lose you, silly thing, the others would be happy, the rest of our lives they would never need to know. I had as much right as the dead girl, I was Lexie Madison as much as she had ever been. My landlord throwing my awful work clothes into bin liners when the rent dried up, there was nothing there I would need now. Cherry blossom falling soft on the drive, quiet smell of old books, firelight sparkling on snow-crystalled windowpanes at Christmastime and nothing would ever change, only the five of us moving through this walled garden, neverending. Somewhere far in the back of my mind a drum was throbbing hard for danger, but I knew like a vision that this was why the dead girl had come a million miles to find me, this was why Lexie Madison all along: to wait for her moment to hold out her hand and take mine, lead me up those stone steps and in by that door, lead me home. Daniel’s mouth tasted of ice and whiskey.

If I had thought about it, I would have expected Daniel to be a fairly crap kisser, in a meticulous kind of way. The fierceness of him took my breath away. When we pulled apart, I don’t know how much later, my heart was running wild.

And now, I thought, with one tiny clear drop of my mind. What happens now?

Daniel’s mouth, the corners curving in a tiny smile, was very close to mine. His hands were on my shoulders, his thumbs moving in long gentle strokes along the line of my collarbone.

Frank wouldn’t have batted an eyelid; I know undercovers who’ve slept with gangsters, given out beatings and shot up heroin, all in the name of the job. I never said anything, not my business, but I knew well that was bollocks. There’s always another way to what you’re after, if you want to find it. They did those things because they wanted to and because the job gave them an excuse.

In that second I saw Sam’s face in front of me, eyes wide and stunned, clear as if he were standing at Daniel’s elbow. It should have made me cringe with shame, but all I felt was a wave of pure frustration, smashing over me so hard I wanted to scream. He was like this enormous feather duvet wrapped all around my life, smothering me to nothing with holidays and protective questions and gentle, inexorable warmth. I wanted to fling him off with one violent buck and take a huge breath of cold air, all my own again.

It was the wire that saved me. Not what it might pick up, I wasn’t thinking that straight, but Daniel’s hands: his thumbs were maybe three inches from the mike, clipped to my bra between my breasts. In one blink I was as sober as I’ve ever been in my life. I was three inches away from burned.

“Well,” I said, stalling, and gave Daniel a little grin. “It’s always the quiet ones.”

He didn’t move. I thought I saw a flick of something in his eyes, but I couldn’t tell what. My brain seemed to have seized up: I had no idea how Lexie would have got herself out of this one. I had a horrible feeling that she wouldn’t have.

There was a crash inside the house, the French doors banged open and someone erupted onto the patio. Rafe was yelling. “—Always have to make such a huge fucking deal out of everything—”

“My God, that’s rich, coming from you. You were the one who wanted to—”

It was Justin, and he was so furious his voice was shaking. I widened my eyes at Daniel, jumped up and peeped out through the ivy. Rafe was pacing up and down the patio and raking a hand through his hair; Justin was slumped against the wall, biting hard at a nail. They were still fighting, but their voices had dropped a notch and all I could hear was the fast, vicious rhythms. The angle of Justin’s head, chin tucked into his chest, looked like he might be crying.

“Shit,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder at Daniel. He was still on the bench. His face blurred into the patterns of leaf shadow; I couldn’t see his expression. “I think they broke something inside. And Rafe looks like he might hit Justin. Maybe we should . . . ?”

He stood up, slowly. The black and white of him seemed to fill the alcove, tall and sharp and strange. “Yes,” he said. “We probably should.”

He moved me out of the way with a gentle, impersonal hand on my shoulder, and went out across the lawn. Abby had collapsed on her back in the grass in a whirl of white cotton, one arm flung out. She looked fast asleep.

Daniel knelt on one knee beside her and carefully hooked a lock of hair off her face; then he straightened up again, brushing bits of grass off his trousers, and went to the patio. Rafe yelled, “Jesus Christ!” spun round and stormed inside, slamming the door behind him. Justin was definitely crying now.

None of it made any sense. The whole incomprehensible scene seemed to be moving in slow, tilting circles, the house reeling helplessly, the garden heaving like water. I realized that I wasn’t sober after all, in fact I was spectacularly drunk. I sat down on the bench and put my head between my knees till things stayed still.

I must have gone to sleep, or passed out, I don’t know. I heard shouting, somewhere, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me and I let it go by.

A crick in my neck woke me. It took me a long time to work out where I was: curled on the stone seat, with my head tilted back against the wall at an undignified angle. My clothes were clammy and cold and I was shivering.

I unfurled myself, in stages, and stood up. Bad move: my head went into a sickening spin, I had to grab at the ivy to stay vertical. Outside the alcove the garden had turned gray, a still, ghostly, predawn gray, not a leaf moving. For a second I was afraid to step out into it; it looked like a place that shouldn’t be disturbed.

Abby was gone from the lawn. The grass was heavy with dew, soaking my feet and the hems of my jeans. Someone’s socks, possibly mine, were tangled on the patio, but I didn’t have the energy to pick them up. The French doors were swinging open and Rafe was asleep on the sofa, snoring, in a puddle of full ashtrays and empty glasses and scattered cushions and the smell of stale booze. The piano was speckled with shards of broken glass, curving and wicked on the glossy wood and the yellowing keys, and there was a deep fresh gouge on the wall above it: someone had thrown something, a glass or an ashtray, and meant it. I tiptoed upstairs and crawled into bed without bothering to take off my clothes. It was a long time before I could stop shivering and fall asleep.

19

Unsurprisingly, we all woke up late, with hangovers from hell and a collective foul mood. My head was killing me, even my hair hurt, and my mouth had that walk-of-shame feel, swollen and tender. I pulled a sweater over yesterday’s clothes, checked the mirror for stubble burn—nothing—and dragged myself downstairs.

Abby was in the kitchen, smacking ice cubes into a glass. “Sorry,” I said, in the doorway. “Did I miss breakfast?”

She threw the ice tray back into the freezer and slammed the door. “Nobody’s hungry. I’m having a Bloody Mary. Daniel made coffee; if you want anything else, you can get it yourself.” She brushed past me and went into the sitting room.

I figured if I tried to work out why she was pissed off at me, my head might explode. I poured myself a lot of coffee, buttered a slice of bread—toast felt way too complicated—and took them into the sitting room. Rafe was still unconscious on the sofa, with a cushion pulled over his head. Daniel was sitting on the windowsill, staring out at the garden, with a mug in one hand and a cigarette burning away forgotten in the other. He didn’t look around.

“Can he breathe?” I asked, pointing at Rafe with my chin.

“Who cares?” said Abby. She was slumped in an armchair, with her eyes closed and her glass pressed to her forehead. The air smelled musty and overripe, cigarette butts and sweat and spilled booze. Someone had cleaned the shards of glass off the piano; they were in a corner of the floor, in a small, threatening pile. I sat down, carefully, and tried to eat without moving my head.

The afternoon oozed on, slow and sticky as treacle. Abby played halfhearted solitaire, giving up and starting over every few minutes; I dozed, off and on, curled in the armchair. Justin finally appeared, wrapped in his dressing gown, eyelids fluttering with pain at the light coming through the windows—it was sort of a nice day, if you were in the mood for that kind of thing. “Oh, God,” he said faintly, shielding his eyes. “My head. I think I’m getting the flu; I ache everywhere.”

“Night air,” said Abby, dealing another hand. “Cold, damp, whatever. Not to mention enough punch to float a cruise ship.”

“It is not the punch. My legs hurt; a hangover doesn’t make your legs hurt. Can’t we close the curtains?”

“No,” said Daniel, without turning around. “Have some coffee.”

“Maybe I’m having a brain hemorrhage. Don’t they do things to your eyes?”

“You have a hangover,” Rafe said, from the depths of the sofa. “And if you don’t stop whining, I’m going to come over there and throttle you, even if it kills me too.”

“Oh, great,” Abby said, massaging the bridge of her nose. “It’s alive.” Justin ignored him, with an icy lift of his chin that said last night’s fight wasn’t over, and sank into a chair.

“Maybe we should think about going out, at some point,” Daniel said, finally coming out of his reverie and looking around. “It might help to clear our heads.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Justin said, reaching for Abby’s Bloody Mary. “I have the flu. If I go out I’ll get pneumonia.”

Abby slapped his hand away. “I’m drinking that. Make your own.”

“The ancients would have said,” Daniel told him, “that you were suffering from an imbalance of the humors: an excess of black bile, causing melancholy. Black bile is cold and dry, so to counter it, you need something warm and moist. I don’t remember which foods are associated with sanguinity, but it seems logical that red meat, for example—”

“Sartre was right,” Rafe said, through his cushion. “Hell is other people.”

I felt the same way. All I wanted was for it to be evening so I could go for my walk, get out of this house and away from these people and try to wrap my head around the night before. I had never, in all my life, spent so much of my time surrounded by people. Up until that day it hadn’t even registered, but all of a sudden everything they did—Justin’s dying-swan act, the snap of Abby’s cards—felt like a full-on assault. I pulled my sweater over my head, burrowed into the corner of the armchair and went to sleep.

* * *

When I woke up the room was empty. It looked like it had been abandoned fast, in some sudden emergency—lamps on, shades tilted at odd angles; chairs pushed back, half-empty mugs and sticky rings on the table. “Hi,” I called, but my voice soaked away into the shadows and no one answered.

The house felt huge and unwelcoming, the way a house sometimes does when you come back downstairs after you’ve closed up for the night: alien, withdrawn, focused on its own private business. No note anywhere; the others had probably gone for a walk after all, to blow the hangovers away.

I poured myself a mug of cold coffee and drank it leaning against the kitchen sink, looking out the window. The light was just starting to turn gold and syrupy, and swallows were diving and chittering across the lawn. I left my mug in the sink and went up to my room, involuntarily walking quietly and skipping the creaky stair.

As I put my hand on the door handle I felt the house gather itself and tense around me. Even before I opened the door, before I smelt the faint wisp of tobacco smoke on the air and saw his silhouette sitting broad-shouldered and motionless on the bed, I knew Daniel was home.

The light through the curtains glinted blue on his glasses as he turned his head to me. “Who are you?” he asked.

I thought as fast as even Frank could ever want from me, I already had one finger on my mouth to shut him up while my other hand smacked the light switch, and then I called, “Hey, it’s me, I’m out here,” and thanked God Daniel was weird enough that we might just possibly get away with that Who are you? His eyes were intent on my face, and he was between me and my case. “Where is everyone?” I asked him, and ripped open the buttons of my top so he could see the tiny mike clipped to my bra, the wire running down into the white pad of bandage.

Daniel’s eyebrows lifted, just a touch. “They went to see a film in town,” he said calmly. “I had a few things I needed to do here. We decided not to wake you.”

I nodded, gave him the thumbs-up and knelt down slowly to pull my case out from under the bed, not taking my eyes off him. The music box on the bedside table, solid and sharp-cornered and within reach: that should slow him down long enough to get me out of there if I needed it. But Daniel didn’t move. I dialed the combination, opened the case, found my ID and threw it to him.

He inspected it closely. “Did you sleep well?” he asked formally.

He had his head bent over the ID, apparently absorbed in it, and my hand was on the bedside table, inches from my gun. But if I went to slip it into my waistband and he looked up; no. I zipped the case shut and locked it. “Not great,” I said. “My head is still killing me. I’m going to go read for a while and hope it gets better. See you in a bit?” I waved a hand to get Daniel’s attention; then I moved towards the door and beckoned.

He gave my ID one last look, then laid it carefully on the bedside table. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll see you later.” He got up from the bed and followed me downstairs.

He moved very silently, for such a big guy. I could feel him at my back all the way and I knew I should be scared—one push—but I wasn’t: adrenaline was flying through me like wildfire and I’ve never been less afraid in my life. Rapture of the deep, Frank called it once, and warned me not to trust it: undercovers can drown like deep-sea divers on the ecstasy of weightlessness, but I didn’t care.

Daniel stood in the sitting-room doorway, watching me with interest, while I hummed “Oh, Johnny, How You Can Love” under my breath and flipped through the records. I picked out Fauré’s Requiem, stacked it up over the string sonatas—Frank might as well have something good to listen to, broaden his cultural horizons, and I doubted he’d notice the midstream switch—and turned it up to a nice solid volume. I flopped into my chair with a thump, sighed contentedly and flipped a few pages of my notebook. Then, very carefully, I peeled off the bandage strip by strip, unclipped the mike from my bra, and left the whole package on the chair to listen to music for a while.

Daniel followed me through the kitchen and out the French doors. I didn’t like the idea of crossing the open lawn—You won’t have visual surveillance, Frank had told me, but he would have said that either way—but we didn’t have a choice. I skirted around the edge and got us in among the trees. Once we were out of view, I relaxed enough to remember my buttons and do them up again. If Frank did have someone watching, that would have given him something to think about.

The alcove was brighter than I had expected; the light slanted long and gold across the grass, slipped between the creepers and glowed in patches on the paving stones. The seat was cold even through my jeans. The ivy swayed back into place to hide us.

“OK,” I said. “We can talk, but keep it down, just in case.”

Daniel nodded. He brushed flecks of dirt off the other seat and sat down. “Lexie is dead, then,” he said.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “I’m sorry.” It sounded ludicrously, insanely inadequate on about a million levels.

“When?”

“The night she was stabbed. She wouldn’t have suffered much, if that’s any comfort.”

He didn’t respond. He clasped his hands in his lap and gazed out through the ivy. At our feet the trickle of water murmured.

“Cassandra Maddox,” Daniel said eventually, trying out the sound of it. “I wondered quite a lot about that, you know: what your real name was. It suits you.”

“I go by Cassie,” I said.

He ignored that. “Why did you take off your microphone?”

With someone else I might have skated around this, parried it—Why do you think?—but not with Daniel. “I want to know what happened to Lexie. I don’t care whether anyone else hears it or not. And I thought you would be more likely to tell me if I gave you a reason to trust me.”

Either out of politeness or out of indifference, he didn’t point out the irony. “And you think I know how she died?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

Daniel considered this. “Shouldn’t you be afraid of me, in that case?”

“Maybe. But I’m not.”

He scrutinized me for a long moment. “You’re very like Lexie, you know,” he said. “Not only physically, but temperamentally as well. At first I wondered if I simply wanted to believe that, to excuse the fact that I had been fooled for so long, but it’s true. Lexie was fearless. She was like an ice skater balanced effortlessly on the edge of her own speed, throwing in joyous, elaborate twirls and leaps just for the hell of it. I always envied her that.” His eyes were in shadow, and I couldn’t read his expression. “Was this just for the hell of it? If I may ask.”

“No,” I said. “At first I didn’t even want to do it. It was Detective Mackey’s idea. He thought it was necessary to the investigation.”

Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “He suspected us from the beginning,” he said, and I realized that he was right; of course he was right. All Frank’s talk about the mysterious foreigner who followed Lexie halfway across the world, that was just a smoke screen: Sam would have thrown a blue fit if he thought I was going to share a roof with the killer. Frank’s famous intuition had kicked in long before we ever got into that squad room. He had known, all along, that the answer was in this house.

“He’s an interesting man, Detective Mackey,” Daniel said. “He’s like one of those charming murderers in Jacobean plays, the ones who get all the best monologues: Bosola, or De Flores. It’s a pity you can’t tell me anything; I would be fascinated to know how much he’s guessed.”

“So would I,” I said. “Believe me.”

Daniel took out his cigarette case, opened it and politely offered it to me. His face, bent over the lighter as I cupped my hand around the flame, was absorbed and untroubled.

“Now,” he said, when he had lit his own smoke and put the case away, “I’m sure you have some questions you’d like to ask me.”

“If I’m so much like Lexie,” I said, “what gave me away?” I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t professional pride or anything; I just needed, badly, to know what that unmissable difference had been.

Daniel turned his head and looked at me. There was an expression on his face that I hadn’t expected: something almost like affection, or sympathy. “You did extraordinarily well, you know,” he said, kindly. “Even now, I don’t think the others suspect anything. We’ll have to decide what to do about that, you and I.”

“I can’t have done all that well,” I said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”

He shook his head. “I think that underrates both of us, don’t you? You were virtually flawless. I did know, almost immediately, that something was wrong—all of us did, just as you would sense something amiss if your partner were replaced by his identical twin. But there were so many possible reasons for that. At first I wondered if you might be faking the amnesia, for reasons of your own, but gradually it became clear that your memory was, in fact, damaged—there seemed to be no reason why you should pretend to forget about finding that photo album, for example, and it was obvious that you were genuinely disturbed by the fact that you didn’t remember it. Once I was satisfied that that wasn’t the problem, I thought perhaps you were planning to leave—which would have been understandable, in the circumstances, but Abby seemed very sure that you weren’t, and I trust Abby’s judgment. And you really did seem . . .”

His face turned towards me. “You really did seem happy, you know. More than happy: content; settled. Nested back in among us as if you had never been away. Perhaps this was deliberate, and you’re even better at your job than I realize, but I find it hard to believe that both my instincts and Abby’s could have been quite so wrong.”

There was nothing I could say to that. For a split second I wanted to curl up in a ball and howl at the top of my lungs, like a kid devastated by the sheer ruthlessness of this world. I gave Daniel a noncommittal tilt of my chin, drew on my smoke and tapped ash onto the flagstones.

Daniel waited with a grave patience that sent a little warning chill through me. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to answer, he nodded, a tiny, private, thoughtful nod. “At any rate,” he said, “I decided you, or rather Lexie, must simply be traumatized. A profound trauma—and clearly this would qualify—can transform a person’s entire character, you know: turn a strong person into a trembling wreck, a happy nature melancholic, a gentle one vicious. It can shatter you into a million pieces, and rearrange the remains in an utterly unrecognizable form.”

His voice was even, calm; he was looking away from me again, out at the hawthorn flowers white and shivering in the breeze, and I couldn’t see his eyes. “The changes in Lexie were so small, by comparison, so trivial; so easily accounted for. I assume Detective Mackey gave you the information you needed.”

“Detective Mackey and Lexie. The video phone.”

Daniel thought about that for so long that I thought he’d forgotten my question. There was an in-built immobility to his face—that square-cut jaw, maybe—that made it almost impossible to read. “ ‘Everything’s overrated except Elvis and chocolate,’ ” he said, in the end. “That was a nice touch.”

“Was it the onions that did it?” I asked.

He drew in a breath and stirred, coming out of his reverie. “Those onions,” he said, with a faint smile. “Lexie was fanatical about them: onions and cabbage. Fortunately none of the rest of us like cabbage either, but we had to reach a compromise on the onions: once a week. She still complained and picked them out and so on—mainly to tease Rafe and Justin, I think. So, when you ate them without a murmur and asked for more, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what, exactly—you covered it very well—but I couldn’t simply dismiss it. The only alternative explanation I could come up with was that, incredible though it seemed, you weren’t Lexie.”

“So you set a trap for me,” I said. “The Brogan’s thing.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a trap,” Daniel said, with a touch of asperity. “More of a test. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Lexie had no particular feelings about Brogan’s either way—I’m not sure she’d ever been there—which didn’t seem like something an impostor would know; you might have found out her likes and dislikes, but hardly her indifferences. The fact that you got it right, and the Elvis comment, reassured me. But then there was last night. That kiss.”

I went cold all over, till I remembered I didn’t have the mike on me. “Lexie wouldn’t have done that?” I asked coolly, leaning over to put out my smoke on the flagstones.

Daniel smiled at me, that slow sweet smile that made him suddenly handsome. “Oh, she would have,” he said. “The kiss was very much in character—and very nice, if I may say so.” I didn’t blink. “No, it was your reaction to it. For a split second, you looked stunned; utterly shocked at what you had done. Then you recovered and made some airy comment, and found an excuse to move away—but, you see, Lexie would never have been shaken by that kiss, not even for a second. And she would certainly never have drawn back at that point. She would have been . . .” He blew thoughtful smoke rings up into the ivy. “She would have been,” he said, “triumphant.”

“Why?” I asked. “Had she been trying to make something like that happen? ” My mind was fast-forwarding through the video clips; there had been flirting with Rafe and Justin but never with Daniel, not a hint, but that could have been a bluff, to mislead the others—

“That,” Daniel said, “is what gave you away.”

I stared at him.

He ground out the cigarette under his foot. “Lexie was both incapable of thinking about the past,” he said, “and incapable of thinking more than one step into the future. This may be one of the few things you overlooked. Not your fault; that level of simplicity is hard to imagine, and also hard to describe. It was as startling as a deformity. I seriously doubt that she would have been able to plan a seduction; but, once something had happened, she would have seen no reason to be shocked by it and certainly no reason to stop there. You, on the other hand, were clearly trying to gauge the consequences this might have. I’d guess that you have a boyfriend, or a partner, in your own life.”

I didn’t say anything. “So,” Daniel said, “I rang the police headquarters this afternoon, once the others had gone out, and asked where I could find Detective Sam O’Neill. The woman I spoke to couldn’t find an extension for him at first, but then she checked some directory and gave me a number to ring. She said, ‘That’s the Murder squad room.’ ”

He sighed, a small, tired, final sound. “Murder,” he said quietly. “So then, you see, I knew.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, again. All day, while we drank coffee and got on each other’s nerves and bitched about our hangovers, while he sent the others off to the pictures and sat in Lexie’s small dimming bedroom waiting for me, he had been carrying this alone.

Daniel nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see that.”

There was a long silence. Finally I said, “You know I need to ask you what happened.”

Daniel took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. Without them his eyes looked blank, blind. “There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. ‘Take what you want and pay for it, says God.’ ”

The words fell into the silence under the ivy like cool pebbles into water, sank without a ripple. “I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could possibly be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”

He put the glasses on and looked at me calmly, tucking the handkerchief back into his shirt pocket. “It seems to me,” he said, “that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only ‘Take what you want, says God’; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone’s outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that’s come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can’t afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture—theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth.”

He didn’t sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. “I don’t consider this anything to become incensed about,” he said, reading my look. “In fact, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising to anyone. We’ve taken what we wanted and we’re paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man—what’s his name? the prime minister—comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television,” he added, a little peevishly. “We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.”

He pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle and blinked at me through the lenses. “I have always accepted,” he said simply, “that there is a price to pay.”

“For what?” I said. “What do you want?”

Daniel considered this—not the answer itself, I think, but how best to explain it to me—in silence. “At first,” he said eventually, “it was more a matter of what I didn’t want. Well before I finished college, it had become clear to me that the standard deal—a modicum of luxury, in exchange for one’s free time and comfort—wasn’t for me. I was happy to live frugally, if that was what it took, in order to avoid the nine-to-five cubicle. I was more than willing to sacrifice the new car and the sun holidays and the—what are those things?—the iPod.”

I was on the edge of my nerves already, and the thought of Daniel on a beach in Torremolinos, drinking a technicolor cocktail and bopping along to his iPod, almost made me lose it. He glanced up at me with a faint smile. “It wouldn’t have been much of a sacrifice, no. But what I failed to take into account is that no man is an island; that I couldn’t simply opt out of the prevailing mode. When a specific deal becomes standard throughout a society—reaches critical mass, so to speak—no alternatives are readily available. Living simply isn’t actually an option these days; either one becomes a worker bee, or one lives on toast in a wretched bedsit with fourteen students directly overhead, and I wasn’t particularly taken with that idea either. I did try it for a while, but it was practically impossible to work with all the noise, and the landlord was this sinister old countryman who kept coming into the flat at the oddest hours and wanting to chat, and . . . well, anyway. Freedom and comfort are at a high premium just now. If you want those, you have to be willing to pay a correspondingly high price.”

“Didn’t you have other options?” I said. “I thought you had money.”

Daniel gave me a fishy stare; I gave him a bland one back. Eventually he sighed. “I believe I’d like a drink,” he said. “I think I left—Yes, here it is.” He had leaned sideways to feel under the bench, and I was braced and ready before I knew it—there was nothing handy that could make a weapon, but if I whipped ivy in his face, it might give me enough of a start to get to the mike and yell for backup—but he came back up with a half-full whiskey bottle. “I brought it out here last night, and then forgot it in all the excitement. And there should be—Yes.” He brought out a glass. “Will you have some?”

It was good stuff, Jameson’s Crested Ten, and God knows I could have used a drink. “No, thanks,” I said. No unnecessary risks; this guy was a whole lot smarter than your average bear.

Daniel nodded, examined the glass and bent to rinse it in the trickle of water. “Have you ever considered,” he inquired, “the sheer level of fear in this country?”

“Not on a regular basis,” I said. I was having a hard time keeping track of the thread of this conversation, but I knew Daniel well enough to know that he was going somewhere with this and he would get there in his own sweet time. We had maybe forty-five minutes before Fauré ran out, and I’ve always been good at letting the suspect run the show. No matter how strong you are or how controlled, keeping a secret—I should know—gets heavy after a while, heavy and tiring and so lonely it feels lethal. If you let them talk, all you need to do is nudge them now and then, keep them pointing in the right direction; they’ll do the rest.

He shook water droplets off the glass and pulled out his handkerchief again, to dry it. “Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power—governments, employers—exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient—not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who—either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe—are free from fear.”

He poured himself three fingers of whiskey. “I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a hero,” he said, “and I don’t consider myself to be insane. I don’t think any of the others are either of those things. And yet I wanted us all to have that chance at freedom.” He put the bottle down and glanced across at me. “You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.”

The words sent a slim knife of something like homesickness straight through me. “It doesn’t seem like very much to ask,” I said.

“Oh, but it was,” Daniel said, and took a swallow of his drink. There was a rough edge to his voice. “It was a lot to ask. It followed, you see, that what we needed was safety—permanent safety. Which brings us back to your last question. My parents left investments that provide me with a small income—ample in the 1980s, now hardly enough for that bedsit. Rafe’s trust fund gives him roughly the same amount. Justin’s allowance will end as soon as he finishes his PhD; so will Abby’s student grants, and Lexie’s would have too. How many jobs do you think are available, in Dublin, for people who want only to study literature and to be together? In a few months, we would have been in precisely the same situation as the vast majority in this country: caught between poverty and slavery, two paychecks from the street, in thrall to the whims of landlords and employers. Perennially afraid.”

He looked out through the ivy, up the grass to the patio, tilting his wrist slowly so that the whiskey slid circles round the glass. “All we needed,” he said, “was a home.”

“That’s enough safety?” I asked. “A house?”

“Well, of course,” he said, a little surprised. “Psychologically, the difference it makes is almost inexpressible. Once you own your home, free and clear, what is there left for anyone—landlords, employers, banks—to threaten you with? What hold does anyone have over you? One can do without practically anything else, if necessary. We would always be able to scrape together enough money for food, between us, and there is no other material fear as primal or as paralyzing as the thought of losing one’s home. With that fear eliminated, we would be free. I’m not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.”

He must have read the look on my face. “We’re in Ireland, for heaven’s sake,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “If you know any history at all, what could possibly be clearer? The one crucial thing the British did was to claim the land as their own, to turn the Irish from owners into tenants. Once that was done, then everything else followed naturally: confiscation of crops, abuse of tenants, eviction, emigration, famine, the whole litany of wretchedness and serfdom, all inflicted casually and unstoppably because the dispossessed had no solid ground on which to stand and fight. I’m sure my own family was as guilty as any. There may well be an element of poetic justice in the fact that I found myself looking at the other side of the coin. But I didn’t feel the need simply to accept it as my just deserts.”

“I rent,” I said. “I’m probably two paychecks from the street. It doesn’t bother me.”

Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “Possibly you’re braver than I am,” he said. “Or possibly—forgive me—you simply haven’t decided what you want from life yet; you haven’t found anything that you truly want to hold onto. That changes everything, you know. Students and very young people can rent with no damage to their intellectual freedom, because it puts them under no threat: they have nothing, yet, to lose. Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It’s because they’re held here so lightly: they haven’t yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. All of a sudden you’re playing for keeps, as children say, and it changes the very fabric of you.”

The adrenaline, or the strange trembling light through the ivy, or the spirals of Daniel’s mind, or just the sheer bizarreness of the situation, was making me feel as if I actually had been drinking. I thought of Lexie speeding through the night in poor Chad’s stolen car, of Sam’s face wearing that look of terrible patience, of the squad room in evening light with some other team’s paperwork scattered across our desks; of my flat, empty and silent, dust starting to build up on the bookshelves and the standby light on the CD player glowing green in the darkness. I like my flat a lot, but it hit me that in all these weeks I hadn’t missed it for a second, and that felt somehow horribly, horribly sad.

“I would venture to guess,” Daniel said, “that you still have that first freedom—that you haven’t yet found anything or anyone that you want for keeps.”

Steady gray eyes and the hypnotic gold shimmer of the whiskey, sound of water, leaf shadows swaying like a darker wreath on his dark hair. “I used to have a partner,” I said, “at work. Nobody you’ve met; he’s not working this case. We were like you guys: we matched. People talked about us the way you do about twins, like we were one person—‘That’s MaddoxandRyan’s case, get MaddoxandRyan to do it . . .’ If anyone had asked me, I’d have said this was it: the two of us, for the rest of our careers, we’d retire on the same day so neither of us would ever have to work with anyone else and the squad would give us one gold watch between us. I didn’t think about any of that at the time, mind. I just took it for granted. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”

I had never said this to anyone. Sam and I had never mentioned Rob, not once since he was transferred out, and when people asked how he was doing I gave them my sweetest smile and my best vague answers. Daniel and I were strangers and we were on opposite sides, under the civilized chitchat we were fighting each other tooth and nail and both of us knew it, but I said it to him. Now I think that should have been my first warning.

Daniel nodded. “But that was in another country,” he said, “and besides, that wench is dead.”

“That about sums it up,” I said, “yeah.” He was looking at me with something in his eyes that went beyond kindness, beyond compassion: understanding. I think in that moment I loved him. If I could have dropped the whole case and stayed, I would have done it then.

“I see,” Daniel said. He held out the glass to me. I started to shake my head automatically, but then I changed my mind and took it: what the hell. The whiskey was rich and smooth and it burned trails of light right down to my fingertips.

“Then you understand the difference it made to me,” he said, “meeting the others. The world transformed itself around me: the stakes shot up, colors were so beautiful they hurt, life became almost unimaginably sweet and almost unimaginably frightening. It’s so fragile, you know; things are so easily broken. I suppose this may be what it’s like to fall in love, or to have a child, and to know that this could be taken from you at any moment. We were racing at breakneck speed towards the day when everything we had would be at the mercy of a merciless world, and every second was so beautiful and so precarious, it took my breath away.”

He held out his hand for the glass and took a sip. “And then,” he said, raising a palm towards the house, “this came along.”

“Like a miracle,” I said. I wasn’t being snide; I meant it. For a second I felt the old wood of the banister under my palm, warm and sinuous as a muscle, as a living thing.

Daniel nodded. “Improbably,” he said, “I believe in miracles, in the possibility of the impossible. Certainly the house has always felt like a miracle to me, materializing just at the moment when we needed it most. I saw straight away, the second my uncle’s lawyer rang me with the news, what this could mean to us. The others had doubts, plenty of them; we argued for months. Lexie was—I suppose there’s a kind of tragic irony in this—the only one who seemed perfectly happy with the idea. Abby was the hardest to convince—in spite of the fact that she was the one who most craved a home, or perhaps because of it, I don’t know—but even she came round at last. I suppose, in the end, it came down to the fact that, if you are absolutely sure of something, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually persuade people who aren’t sure one way or the other. And I was sure. I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

“Is that why you made the others co-owners?”

Daniel glanced sharply across at me, but I kept my face blandly interested and after a moment he went back to looking out through the ivy. “Well, not to win them over, or anything like that, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Hardly. It was absolutely essential to what I had in mind. It wasn’t the house itself I wanted—much as I love it. It was security, for all of us; a safe haven. If I had been the sole owner, then the crude truth of it is that I would have been the others’ landlord, and they would have had no more safety than before. They would have been dependent on my whims, always waiting for me to decide to move or get married or sell up. This way it was all of our home, forever.”

He lifted a hand and hooked the curtain of ivy aside. The stone of the house was rosy amber in the sunset light, glowing and sweet; the windows blazed like the inside was on fire. “It seemed like such a beautiful idea,” he said. “Almost unthinkably so. The day we moved in, we cleaned the fireplace and washed up in freezing water and lit a fire, and sat in front of it drinking cold lumpy cocoa and trying to make toast—the cooker didn’t work, the water heater didn’t work, there were only two functioning lightbulbs in the whole house. Justin was wearing his entire wardrobe and complaining that we were all going to die of pneumonia or mold inhalation or both, and Rafe and Lexie were teasing him by claiming they’d heard rats in the attic; Abby threatened to make the pair of them sleep up there if they didn’t behave. I kept burning the toast or dropping it into the fire, and we all found that ridiculously funny; we laughed until we could barely breathe. I’ve never been so happy in my life.”

His gray eyes were calm, but the note in his voice, like a deep bell tolling, hurt me somewhere under my breastbone. I had known for weeks that Daniel was unhappy, but that was the moment when I understood that, whatever had happened with Lexie, it had broken his heart. He had staked everything on this one shining idea, and he had lost. No matter what anyone says, a part of me believes that, on that day under the ivy, I should have seen everything that was coming, the pattern unrolling in front of me clean and quick and relentless, and I should have known how to stop it.

“What went wrong?” I asked quietly.

“The idea was flawed, of course,” he said irritably. “Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race’s greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”

He finished his drink in one long swallow and grimaced. “This is foul. I wish we had ice.”

I waited while he poured himself another one, gave it a look of faint distaste and set it down on the bench. “Can I ask you something?” I said.

Daniel inclined his head. “You talked about paying for what you want,” I said. “How did you have to pay for this house? It looks to me like you got exactly what you wanted, for free.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think so? You’ve been living here for several weeks now. Surely you have a fair idea of the price involved.”

I did, of course I did, but I wanted to hear it from him. “No pasts,” I said. “For a start.”

“No pasts,” Daniel repeated, almost to himself. After a moment he shrugged. “That was part of it, certainly—this needed to be a fresh start for all of us, together—but it was the easy part. As you’ve probably gathered, none of us has the kind of past that one would want to retain in any case. The main difficulties there have been practical ones, really, rather than psychological: getting Rafe’s father to stop ringing up and abusing him, Justin’s father to stop accusing him of joining a cult and threatening to call the police, Abby’s mother to stop showing up outside the library high as a kite on whatever it is she takes. But these were small problems, comparatively; technical difficulties that would have sorted themselves out, given time. The real price . . .”

He moved one finger absently around the rim of the glass, watching the gold of the whiskey bloom and dim as his shadow passed across it. “I suppose some people might call it a state of suspended animation,” he said, at last. “Although I would consider that a highly simplistic definition. Marriage and children, for example, were no longer possibilities for any of us. The odds of finding an outsider who would be able to fit into what is, frankly, an unusual setup, even if he or she should want to, were negligible. And, although I won’t deny that there have been elements of intimacy among us, for any two of us to enter into a serious romance would almost definitely have damaged our balance beyond repair.”

“Elements of intimacy?” I asked. Lexie’s baby—“Between who?”

“Well, really,” Daniel said, with a touch of impatience, “I don’t think that’s the issue. The point is that, in order to make this house our shared home, we had to forfeit the possibility of many things that other people consider to be essential goals. We had to forfeit everything that Rafe’s father would call the real world.”

Maybe it was the whiskey, on a hangover and a half-empty stomach. Strange things spun in my mind, sprayed showers of light like prisms. I thought of ancient stories: battered travelers stumbling out of the storm into glowing banquet halls, losing hold of their old lives at the first taste of bread or honey wine; of that first night, the four of them smiling at me across the laden table and the lifted wineglasses and the curls of ivy, smooth-skinned and beautiful, with candlelight in their eyes. I remembered the second before Daniel and I kissed, how the five of us had risen up in front of me breathtaking and eternal as ghosts, hanging sweet and gauzy over the drifts of grass; and that danger drum, somewhere behind my ears.

“This isn’t as sinister as it sounds, you know,” he added, catching something in my expression. “Regardless of what the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”

“And you did,” I said. I felt like the stone bench was rocking underneath me, swaying with the ivy in a slow dizzying rhythm. “You went consenting.”

“I did, yes,” Daniel said. “I understood all of the implications, very clearly. I had thought it all out before I ever embarked on this, and I had decided it was a price well worth paying—I doubt I would ever have wanted children in any case, and I’ve never placed much stock in the concept of one perfect soul mate. I assumed the others had done the same: weighed up the stakes and found the sacrifice worth making.” He brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. “That,” he said, “was my first mistake.”

He was so calm. I didn’t even hear it at the time, it wasn’t until much later, when I went over the conversation in my head looking for clues, that I caught it: was, would have. Daniel used the past tense, all the way through. He understood that it was over, whether anyone else had noticed or not. He sat there under the ivy with a glass in his hand, serene as the Buddha, watching as the bow of his ship tilted and slid under the waves.

“They hadn’t thought it through?” I asked. My mind was still sliding, weightless, everything was smooth as glass and I couldn’t get a grip. For a second I wondered crazily if the whiskey had been drugged, but Daniel had had a lot more than me and he seemed fine—“Or they changed their minds?”

Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb. “Really,” he said, a little wearily, “when I think about it, I made an astounding number of mistakes along the way. The hypothermia story, for instance: I should never have fallen for that. Initially, in fact, I didn’t. I know very little about medicine, but when your colleague—Detective Mackey—told me that story, I didn’t believe a word of it. I assumed he was hoping we’d be more likely to talk if we thought that it was a matter of assault, rather than murder, and that Lexie might at any minute tell him everything. All that week, I took it for granted that he was bluffing. But then . . .” He lifted his head and looked at me, blinking, as if he had almost forgotten I was there. “But then, you see,” he said, “you arrived.”

His eyes moved over my face. “The resemblance really is extraordinary. Are you—were you—related to Lexie?”

“No,” I said. “Not as far as I know.”

“No.” Daniel went through his pockets methodically, took out his cigarette case and lighter. “She told us she had no family. This may be why the possibility of you didn’t occur to me. The inherent unlikeliness of the situation was in your favor all along: any suspicion that you weren’t Lexie would have had to be predicated on the improbable hypothesis of your existence. I should have remembered Conan Doyle: ‘whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

He flicked the lighter and tilted his head to the flame. “I knew, you see,” he said, “that it was impossible Lexie should be alive. I checked her pulse myself.”

The garden dumbstruck, in the fading gold light. The birds hushed, the branches caught in midsway; the house, a great silence poised over us, listening. I had stopped breathing. Lexie blew down the grass like a silver shower of wind, she rocked in the hawthorn trees and balanced light as a leaf on the wall beside me, she slipped along my shoulder and blazed down my back like fox fire.

“What happened?” I asked, very quietly.

“Well, really,” Daniel said, “you know I can’t tell you that. As you probably suspected, Lexie was stabbed in Whitethorn House; in the kitchen, to be exact. You won’t find any blood—there was none at the time, although I know she bled later—and you won’t find the knife. There was no premeditation and no intent to kill. We went after her, but by the time we found her it was already too late. I think that’s all I can say.”

“OK,” I said, “OK.” I pressed my feet down hard on the flagstones and tried to pull my head together. I wanted to dip a hand in the pond and splash cold water down the back of my neck, but I couldn’t let Daniel see that, and anyway I doubted it would help. “Can I tell you what I think happened?”

Daniel inclined his head and made a small, courteous gesture with one hand: Please do.

“I think Lexie was planning to sell her share of the house.”

He didn’t rise to that, didn’t even blink. He was watching me blandly, like a professor at an oral exam, flicking the ash off his cigarette, aiming it carefully into the water where it would wash away.

“And I’m pretty sure I know why.”

I was sure he would bite on that one, positive—for a month now, he had to have been wondering—but he shook his head. “I don’t need to know,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter, at this stage—if it ever did. I think, you know, that all five of us have a ruthless streak, in our different ways. Possibly it goes with the territory; with having crossed that river, into being sure of what you want. Certainly Lexie was capable of great ruthlessness. But not of cruelty. When you think of her, please, remember that. She was never cruel.”

“She was going to sell up to your cousin Ned,” I said. “Mr. Executive Apartments himself. That sounds a lot like cruelty to me.”

Daniel startled me by laughing, a hard, humorless little snort. “Ned,” he said, with a wry twist to the corner of his mouth. “My God. I was far more worried about him than about Lexie. Lexie—like you—was strong-willed: if she decided to tell the police what had happened, then she would, but if she didn’t want to talk, no amount of questioning would get anything out of her. Ned, on the other hand . . .”

He sighed, an exasperated puff that blew smoke out of his nose, and shook his head. “It’s not just that Ned has a weak character,” he said, “but that he has no character at all; he’s essentially a cipher, composed entirely of the jumbled reflections of what he thinks other people want to see. We were talking earlier about knowing what you want . . . Ned was all fired up about this plan to turn the house into luxury apartments or a golf club, he had sheaves of complex financial projections showing how many hundreds of thousands we could each make over how many years, but he had no idea why he wanted to do it. Not a clue. When I asked him what on earth he wanted to do with all that money—it’s not as though he’s exactly on the breadline as it is—he stared at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. The question was completely unintelligible to him, light-years outside his frame of reference. It wasn’t that he had some deep longing to travel the world, say, or to quit his job and focus on painting the Great Irish Masterwork. He wanted the money purely because everything around him has told him that it’s what he should want. And he was utterly incapable of understanding that the five of us might have different priorities, priorities that we had established all by ourselves.”

He stubbed out his cigarette. “So,” he said, “you can see why I was worried about him. He had every reason in the world to keep his mouth shut about his dealings with Lexie—talking would blow any possibility of a sale right out of the water, and besides, he lives alone, as far as I know he doesn’t have an alibi; even he must realize that there’s nothing to prevent him from becoming the prime suspect. But I knew that if Mackey and O’Neill were to give him anything more than a cursory interrogation, all that would fly straight out the window. He would become exactly what they wanted him to be: the helpful witness, the concerned citizen doing his duty. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world, of course—he doesn’t have anything to offer that would constitute solid evidence—but he could cause us an awful lot of trouble and tension, and that was the last thing we needed. And it wasn’t as though I could gauge him, get some sense of what he was thinking, try to steer him away from disaster. Lexie—you—I could at least keep an eye on, to some extent, but Ned . . . I knew that getting in contact with him would be the worst thing I could possibly do, but, my God, it took everything I had not to do it anyway.”

Ned was dangerous territory. I didn’t want Daniel thinking too much about him, about my walks, about the possibilities. “You must have been raging, ” I said. “All of you, at both of them. I’m not surprised someone stabbed her.” I meant it. In a lot of ways, the amazing thing was that Lexie had made it this far.

Daniel considered this; his face looked like it did in the evenings, in the sitting room, when he was deep in a book, lost to the world. “We were angry,” he said, “at first. Furious; devastated; sabotaged, from within our own gates. But in a way, you know, the same thing that betrayed you in the end worked for you in the beginning: that crucial difference between Lexie and you. Only someone like Lexie—someone with no conception of action and consequence—would have been able to come home and settle back in as if nothing had ever happened. If she had been a slightly different kind of person, then none of us could ever have forgiven her, and you would never have made it in the door. But Lexie . . . We all knew that she had never for a moment intended to hurt us, and so it had never really occurred to her that we could be hurt; the devastation she was about to cause had truly never seemed like a reality to her. And so . . .” He drew in a long, tired breath. “And so,” he said, “she could come home.”

“As if nothing had ever happened,” I said.

“I thought so. She never meant to hurt us; none of us ever meant to hurt her, let alone kill her. I still believe that should count for something.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “That it just happened. She had been negotiating with Ned for a while, but before they could finalize anything, the four of you somehow found out.” Actually, I had the beginnings of an idea how that part had gone down, too, but there was no reason to share that with Daniel. I was saving that one for when it would make the loudest bang. “I think there was a blazing row, and in the middle of it, someone stabbed Lexie. Probably no one, not even the two of them, was sure exactly what had happened; Lexie could well have thought she had just been punched. She slammed out and ran for the cottage—maybe she was supposed to meet Ned that night, maybe it was just blind instinct, I don’t know. Either way, Ned never showed up. The ones who found her were you guys.”

Daniel sighed. “Roughly,” he said, “yes. In every essential, that’s what happened. Can’t you leave it at that? You know the gist of it; the other details would do no one the slightest bit of good and would do several people considerable harm. She was lovely, she was complicated and she is dead. What else is there that matters, now?”

“Well,” I said. “There’s the question of who killed her.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Daniel asked, and there was an undercurrent of some intense emotion building in his voice, “to wonder whether Lexie herself would want you to pursue this? No matter what she was considering doing, she loved us. Do you think she would want you setting out specifically to destroy us?”

Something still bending the air, rippling the stones under my feet; something high as a needle against the sky and shivering just behind each leaf. “She found me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for her. She came for me.”

“Possibly she did,” said Daniel. He was leaning towards me across the water, close, his elbows on his knees; behind the glasses his eyes were magnified, gray and bottomless. “But are you really so sure that what she wanted was revenge? She could so easily have run for the village, after all: knocked on a door, got someone to call an ambulance and the police. The villagers may not like us very much, but I doubt they would have denied help to an obviously wounded woman. Instead, she went straight to the cottage and simply stayed there, waiting. Haven’t you ever wondered if she may have been a willing participant in her own death and in the concealment of her killer—if she went consenting, one of us to the end? Haven’t you ever wondered if perhaps, for her sake, you should respect that?”

The air tasted strange, sweet, honey and salt. “Yeah,” I said. It was hard to talk, the thoughts seemed to take forever moving between my mind and my tongue. “I have. I’ve wondered all the time. But I’m not doing this for Lexie. I’m doing this because it’s my job.”

It’s such a cliché, and I said it so automatically; but the words seemed to whipcrack through the air startling and potent as electricity, rocketing down the ivy trails, burning white on the water. For a split second I was back in that first reeking stairwell with my hands in my pockets, looking up at that young junkie’s dead bewildered face. I was stone cold sober again, that dreamlike dazzle had dissolved out of the air and the bench was solid and clammy under my arse. Daniel was watching me with a new alertness in his eyes, watching me like he had never seen me before. It was only in that second that it hit me: it was true, what I had said to him, and maybe it had been true all along.

“Well,” he said, quietly. “In that case . . .”

He leaned back, slowly, away from me, against the wall. There was a long, humming silence.

“Where,” Daniel said. He stopped for an instant, but his voice stayed perfectly even: “Where is Lexie now?”

“In the morgue,” I said. “We haven’t been able to reach her next of kin.”

“We’ll do whatever needs to be done. I think she would prefer that.”

“The body is evidence in an open homicide case,” I said. “I doubt anyone’s going to release it to you. Until the investigation’s closed, she’ll have to stay where she is.”

There was no need for me to get graphic. I knew what he was seeing; my mind had a full-color slide show of the same images ready and waiting to play. Something rippled over Daniel’s face, a tiny spasm tightening his nose and lips.

“As soon as we know who did this to her,” I said, “I can argue that the body should be released to the rest of you. That you count as her next of kin.”

For a second his eyelids flickered; then his face turned blank. Looking back, I think—not that this is any excuse—that it was the easiest thing to miss about Daniel: how ruthlessly, lethally pragmatic he was, under the vague ivory-tower haze. An officer on the battlefield will leave his own dead brother behind without a second look, while the enemy’s still circling, to get his live men safe away.

“Obviously,” Daniel said, “I’d like you to leave this house. The others won’t be back for an hour or so; that should give you ample time to pack your things and make any necessary arrangements.”

This should hardly have come as a surprise, but it still felt like he’d slapped me straight across the face. He felt for his cigarette case. “I’d prefer that the others not find out who you are. I think you can imagine how badly it would upset them. I admit I’m not sure how to accomplish this, but surely you and Detective Mackey have a get-out clause in place, no? Some story you worked out to extricate you without raising any suspicions?”

It was the obvious thing to do, the only thing. You get burned, you get out, fast. And I had everything a girl could ask for. I had narrowed our suspects down to four; Sam and Frank would be well able to take it from there. I could get around the fact that this wasn’t on tape: disconnect the mike wire and claim it was accidental—Frank might not believe me, exactly, but he wouldn’t care—report back the bits of this conversation that suited me, bounce back home immaculate and triumphant and take a bow.

I never even considered doing it. “We do, yeah,” I said. “I can get out of here on a couple of hours’ notice without blowing my cover. I’m not going to, though. Not till I find out who killed Lexie, and why.”

Daniel turned his head and looked at me, and in that second I smelled danger, clear and cold as snow. Why not? I had invaded his home, his family, and I was trying to wreck them both for good. Either he or one of his own had already killed a woman for doing the same thing on a lesser scale. He was strong enough to do it and very possibly smart enough to get away with it, and I had left my gun in my bedroom. The trickle of water sang on at our feet and electricity fizzed through my back, down into the palms of my hands. I held his eyes and didn’t move, didn’t blink.

After a long moment his shoulders shifted, almost imperceptibly, and I saw his gaze turn inwards, abstracted. He had rejected that idea: he was moving towards some other plan, his mind clicking through options, sorting, classifying, connecting, faster than I could guess. “You won’t do it, you know,” he said. “You assume that my reluctance to hurt the others gives you an advantage—that, as they’ll continue to believe you’re Lexie, you have a chance at getting them to talk to you. But believe me, they’re all very well aware of what’s at stake. I’m not talking about the possibility of one or all of us going to jail; you have no evidence pointing towards any one of us in particular, no case against us either individually or collectively, or you’d have made your arrests long ago and this charade would never have been necessary. In fact, I’m willing to bet that, until a few minutes ago, you weren’t actually certain that your target was within Whitethorn House.”