“We kept all lines of inquiry open,” I said.

He nodded. “As things stand, jail is the least of our worries. But take the situation, for a moment, from the others’ point of view: assume that Lexie is alive and well and safely home again. If she were to find out what happened, it would mean the ruin of everything we’ve worked for. Suppose she were to learn that Rafe, to pick one of us at random, had stabbed her—had almost cost her her life. Do you think she could continue to share that life with him—without being afraid of him, without resenting him, without using this against him?”

“I thought you said she was incapable of thinking about the past,” I said.

“Well, this is in a slightly different league,” Daniel said, a little acidly. “He could hardly assume that she would dismiss this as if it were some spat over whose turn it was to buy milk. And even if she did, do you suppose he could look at her every day without seeing the constant risk she presented—the fact that at any moment, with one phone call to Mackey or O’Neill, she could send him to jail? This is Lexie, remember: she could make that call without realizing for a second the magnitude of that action. How could he treat her as he always has, tease her, argue with her, even disagree with her? And what about the rest of us, walking on eggshells, reading danger into every look and every word that passed between the two of them, always waiting for the tiniest misstep to detonate the land mine and blow everything to smithereens? How long do you think we’d last?”

His voice was very calm and even. Lazy curls of smoke were trickling from his cigarette, and he lifted his head to watch as they spread and wound upwards, through the fluttering bars of light. “We can survive the act itself,” he said. “It’s the shared knowledge of the act that would destroy us. This may sound odd, especially coming from an academic who prizes knowledge above almost anything, but read Genesis, or, even better, read the Jacobeans: they understood how too much knowledge can be lethal. Every time we were in the same room, it would be there among us like a bloody knife, and in the end it would slice us apart. And none of us will allow that to happen. Since the day you came into this house, we’ve put every drop of energy we have into preventing it, into restoring our lives to normality.” He smiled slightly, one eyebrow lifting. “So to speak. And telling Lexie who stabbed her would end any hope of that normality. Believe me, the others won’t do it.”

When you’re too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can’t see them. Unless Daniel was bluffing, he had made one last mistake, the same one he had been making all along. He was seeing the other four not as they were but as they should have been, could have been in some softer-edged and warmer world. He had missed the stark fact that Abby and Rafe and Justin were already disintegrating, they were running on empty; it stared him in the face every day, it passed him on the stairs like a cold breath and slipped into the car with us in the mornings and sat dark and hunched between us at the dinner table, but he had never once seen it. And he had missed the possibility that Lexie had had secret weapons of her own, and that she had willed them to me. He knew his world was falling apart, but somehow he was still seeing the inhabitants untouched amid the wreckage: five faces against drifting snow on a day in December, cool and luminous and pristine, timeless. It was the first time in all those weeks that I remembered he was much younger than me.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’ve got to try.”

Daniel leaned his head back against the stone of the wall and sighed. All of a sudden, he looked terribly tired. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose you do.”

“It’s your call,” I said. “You can tell me what happened right now, while I’m not wired: I’ll be gone by the time the others get home, and if it comes to arrests it’ll be your word against mine. Or I can stay here, and you can take the chance that I’ll get something on tape.”

He ran a hand over his face and straightened up, with an effort. “I’m perfectly aware, you know,” he said, glancing at his cigarette as if he had forgotten he was holding it, “that a return to normality may not be possible for us, at this point. I’m aware, in fact, that our entire plan was probably unfeasible right from the start. But, like you, we have no choice but to try.”

He dropped the smoke on the flagstones and put it out with the toe of his shoe. That frozen detachment was starting to slip into place over his face, the formal mask he used with outsiders, and there was a crisp note of finality in his voice. I was losing him. As long as we were talking like this, I had a chance, no matter how small; but any second now he was going to get up and go back indoors, and that would be the end of that.

If I had thought it would work, I would have got down on my knees on the flagstones and begged him to stay. But this was Daniel; my only chance was logic, cold hard reason. “Look,” I said, keeping my voice even, “you’re raising the stakes a whole lot higher than they need to be. If I get something on tape, then, depending what it is, it could mean jail time for all four of you—one on murder, and three on accessory or even conspiracy. Then what’s left? What have you got to come back to? Given the way Glenskehy feels about you, what are the odds that the house will even be standing when you get out?”

“We’ll have to take that chance.”

“If you tell me what happened, I’ll fight your corner all the way. You’ve got my word.” Daniel would have had every right to give me a sardonic look for that, but he didn’t. He was watching me with what appeared to be mild, polite interest. “Three of you can walk away from this, and the fourth can face manslaughter charges instead of murder. There wasn’t any premeditation here: this happened during an argument, nobody wanted Lexie to die, and I can vouch for the fact that all of you cared about her and that whoever stabbed her was under extreme emotional duress. Manslaughter gets maybe five years, maybe even less. Then it’s over, whoever it is gets out, and you can all four put this whole thing behind you and go back to normal.”

“My knowledge of the law is patchy,” Daniel said, leaning over to pick up his glass, “but as far as I know—and correct me if I’m wrong—nothing said by a suspect during questioning is admissible in evidence unless the suspect has been cautioned to that effect. Out of curiosity, how are you planning to administer a caution to three people who have no idea that you’re a police officer?” He rinsed out the glass again and held it up to the light, squinting, to check that it was clean.

“I’m not,” I said. “I don’t need to. Whatever I get on tape was never going to be admissible in court, but it can be used to get an arrest warrant and it can be used in a formal interview. How long do you think Justin, for example, will hold out if he’s arrested at two in the morning and questioned by Frank Mackey for twenty-four hours, with a tape of him describing Lexie’s murder playing in the background?”

“An interesting question,” Daniel said. He tightened the cap on the whiskey bottle, placed it carefully on the bench beside the glass.

My heart was going like hoofbeats. “Never go all in on a bad hand,” I said, “unless you’re absolutely positive you’re a stronger player than your opponent. How sure are you?”

He gave me a vague look that could have meant anything. “We should go in now,” he told me. “I suggest we tell the others that we spent the afternoon reading and recovering from our hangovers. Does that sound about right to you?”

“Daniel,” I said, and then my throat closed up; I could hardly breathe. Until he glanced down, I didn’t even realize that my hand was on his sleeve.

“Detective,” Daniel said. He was smiling at me, just a little, but his eyes were very steady and very sad. “You can’t have both. Don’t you remember what we were talking about, just a few minutes ago—the inevitability of sacrifice? One of us, or a detective: you can’t be both. If you had ever truly wanted to be one of us, wanted it more than anything else, you never would have made a single one of those mistakes, and we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

He laid his hand over mine, removed it from his sleeve and placed it in my lap, very gently. “In a way, you know,” he said, “strange and impossible though it may seem, I very much wish you had chosen the other way.”

“I’m not trying to ruin you,” I said. “There’s no way I can claim to be on your side, but compared to Detective Mackey, or even Detective O’Neill ... If it’s left up to them—and unless you and I work together, it will be; they’re the ones running the investigation, not me—all four of you will be serving the maximum for murder. Life sentences. I’m doing my best here, Daniel, not to let that happen. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m doing everything I can.”

A leaf had fallen from the ivy into the trickle of water and got caught on one of the little steps, shaking against the current. Daniel picked it out carefully and turned it between his fingers. “I met Abby when I started Trinity,” he said. “Quite literally; it was on registration day. We were in the exam hall, hundreds of students queuing for hours—I should have brought something to read, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it would take so long—shuffling along under all those gloomy old paintings, and everyone whispering for some reason. Abby was in the next queue. She caught my eye, pointed to one of the portraits and said, ‘If you let your eyes go loose, doesn’t he look exactly like one of the old fellas out of the Muppets?’ ”

He shook water off the leaf: droplets flying, bright as fire in the crisscrossing sunbeams. “Even at that age,” he said, “I was aware that people found me unapproachable. I had no problem with that. But Abby didn’t seem to feel that way, and that intrigued me. She told me later that she was almost petrified with shyness, not of me in particular but of everyone and everything there—an inner-city girl from foster homes, thrown in amongst all those middle-class boys and girls who took college and privilege so completely for granted—and she decided that, if she was going to pluck up the courage to talk to someone, it might as well be the most forbidding-looking person she could find. We were very young then, you know.

“Once we’d finally got ourselves registered, she and I went for a coffee together, and then we arranged to meet again the next day—well, when I say arranged, Abby told me, ‘I’m going on the library tour tomorrow at noon, see you there,’ and walked off before I could answer either way. By that time I already knew that I admired her. It was a novel sensation, for me; I don’t admire many people. But she was so determined, so vivid; she made everyone I had met before seem pale and shadowy by comparison. You’ve probably noticed”—Daniel smiled faintly, glancing up at me over his glasses—“that I have a tendency to keep myself at some distance from life. I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living—and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known. Then Abby reached straight through the glass and caught my hand. It was like an electric shock. I remember watching her walk off across Front Square—she was wearing this awful fringed skirt that was much too long for her, she looked drowned in it—and realizing that I was smiling . . .

“Justin was on the library tour the next day. He hung back a step or two behind the group, and I wouldn’t even have noticed him if it hadn’t been for the fact that he had a hideous cold. Every sixty seconds or so he came out with this enormous, explosive, wet sneeze, and everyone would jump and then snicker, and he would turn an extraordinary shade of beetroot and try to disappear into his handkerchief. He was obviously excruciatingly shy. At the end of the tour Abby turned around to him, as if we’d known one another all our lives, and said, ‘We’re going for lunch, are you coming?’ I’ve seldom seen anyone look so startled. His mouth popped open and he mumbled something that could have meant anything, but he went over to the Buttery with us. By the end of lunch he was actually speaking in full sentences—and interesting ones, too. We’d read a lot of the same things, he had some insights into John Donne that had never occurred to me . . . It hit me, that afternoon, that I liked him; that I liked both of them. That, for the first time in my life, I was enjoying the company of others. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’s ever had difficulty making friends; I’m not sure you can understand quite what a revelation that was.

“It took us until classes started, the next week, to find Rafe. The three of us were sitting at the back of a lecture room, waiting for the lecturer to show up, when all of a sudden the door beside us flew open and there was Rafe: dripping with rain, hair plastered to his head, fists clenched, obviously straight out of some traffic mess and in a horrible mood. It was a pretty dramatic entrance. Abby said, ‘Check it out, it’s King Lear,’ and Rafe whipped around on her and snarled—you know how he gets—‘How did you get here, then—in Daddy’s limo? Or on your broomstick?’ Justin and I were taken aback, but Abby just laughed and said, ‘By hot-air balloon,’ and pushed a chair towards him. And after a moment he sat down and muttered, ‘Sorry.’ And that was that.”

Daniel smiled, down at the leaf, a private little smile as tender and amazed as a lover’s. “How did we ever put up with one another? Abby talking nineteen to the dozen to hide her shyness, Justin half smothered under his, Rafe biting people’s heads off right and left; and me. I was terribly serious, I know. It wasn’t until that year, really, that I learned how to laugh . . .”

“And Lexie?” I asked, very softly. “How did you find her?”

“Lexie,” Daniel said. The smile rippled across his face like wind on water, deepened. “Do you know, I can’t even remember the first time we met her? Abby probably can; you should ask her. All I remember is that, by the time we had been postgrads for a few weeks, she seemed to have been there forever.”

He put the leaf down gently on the bench beside him and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief. “It always took my breath away,” he said, “that the five of us could have found one another—against such odds, through all the layers of armored fortifications each of us had set up. A lot of it was Abby, of course; I’ve never known what instinct led her so unerringly, I’m not sure she knows herself, but you can see why I’ve trusted her judgment ever since. But still: it would have been so heart-stoppingly easy for us to miss one another, for me or Abby to show up an hour later for registration, for Justin to refuse our invitation, for Rafe to be just that little bit snippier so that we backed off and left him alone. Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they’re for you; that’s your life, your future, fidgeting in that line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don’t miss it. How else could such a thing have happened?”

He bent down and picked up our butts from the paving stones, one by one. “In all my life,” he said simply, “these are the only four people I have ever loved.” Then he stood up and walked off across the grass towards the house, with the bottle and the glass dangling from one hand and the cigarette butts cupped in the other.

20

The others came back still heavy-eyed and headachy and in a prickly mood. The film had been crap, they said, some awful thing with a random Baldwin brother having endless supposedly comic misunderstandings with someone who looked like Teri Hatcher but wasn’t; the cinema had been full of kids who were clearly below the age limit and who had spent the whole two hours texting each other and eating crackly things and kicking the back of Justin’s seat. Rafe and Justin were still very obviously not talking, and now Rafe and Abby apparently weren’t either. Dinner was leftover lasagna, crunchy on top and scorched on the bottom and eaten in tense silence. No one had bothered to make a salad to go with it, or to light the fire.

Just when I was about ready to scream, Daniel said calmly, glancing up, “By the way, Lexie, I meant to ask you something. I thought I might touch on Anne Finch with my Monday group, but I’m awfully rusty. Would you mind giving me a quick rundown, after dinner?”

Anne Finch wrote a poem from the point of view of a bird, she showed up here and there in Lexie’s thesis notes, and that, since there are only twenty-four hours in a day, was basically all I knew about her. Rafe would have pulled something like this out of pure malicious mischief, yanking my chain just because he could, but Daniel never opened his mouth without a solid reason. That brief, strange alliance in the garden was over. He was showing me, starting with the little things, that if I insisted on sticking around he could make my life very, very awkward.

There was no way I was going to make an eejit of myself by spending my evening babbling about voice and identity to someone who knew I was talking rubbish. Lucky for me Lexie had been an unpredictable brat—although probably luck had nothing to do with it: I was pretty sure she had constructed that side of her personality specifically for moments a lot like this one. “I don’t feel like it,” I said, keeping my head down and jabbing at my crunchy lasagna with my fork.

There was an instant of silence. “Are you OK?” Justin asked.

I shrugged, not looking up. “I guess.”

Something had just hit me. That silence and the fine thread of new tension through Justin’s voice, and quick glances flicking back and forth across the table: the others were, instantly and so easily, worried about me. Here I’d spent weeks trying to get them to relax, drop their guard; I had never thought about how fast I could send them skidding in the opposite direction, and how serious a weapon that might make if I used it right.

“I helped you with Ovid when you needed it,” Daniel reminded me. “Don’t you remember? I spent ages finding you that quote—what was it?”

Obviously I wasn’t about to rise to that one. “I’d only get mixed up and end up telling you about Mary Barber or someone. I can’t think straight today. I keep . . .” I shoved lasagna bits aimlessly around my plate. “Never mind.”

Nobody was eating any more. “You keep what?” Abby asked.

“Leave it,” Rafe said. “God knows I’m not in the mood for Anne bloody Finch. If she’s not either—”

“Is something bothering you?” Daniel asked me, politely.

“Leave her alone.”

“Of course,” Daniel said. “Get some rest, Lexie. We’ll do it another night, when you’re feeling better.”

I risked a quick look up. He had picked up his fork and knife again and was eating steadily, with nothing on his face but thoughtful absorption. This move had backfired; he was calmly, intently considering his next one.

* * *

I went for a preemptive strike. After dinner we were all in the sitting room, reading, or anyway pretending to—no one had even suggested anything as social as a game of cards. The ashes from last night’s fire were still in a dreary pile in the fireplace, and there was a soggy chill in the air; distant bits of the house kept letting out sharp cracks or ominous groans, making us all jump. Rafe was kicking the hearth-rail with the toe of one shoe, in a steady, irritable rhythm, and I was fidgeting, changing position in my chair every few seconds. Between the two of us, we were making both Justin and Abby tenser every second. Daniel, head bent over something with an awful lot of footnotes, didn’t seem to have noticed.

Around eleven, like always, I went out to the hall and put on my outdoor stuff. Then I went back to the sitting room and hung in the doorway, looking unsure.

“Going for a walk?” Daniel asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It might help me relax. Justin, will you come with me?”

Justin started, stared at me like a rabbit in headlights. “Me? Why me?”

“Why anyone?” Daniel inquired, with mild curiosity.

I shrugged, an uneasy twitch. “I don’t know, OK? My head feels weird. I keep thinking . . .” I twisted my scarf round my finger, bit my lip. “Maybe I had bad dreams last night.”

“Nightmares,” Rafe said, without looking up. “Not ‘bad dreams.’ You’re not six.”

“What kind of bad dreams?” Abby asked. There was a tiny, worried furrow between her eyebrows.

I shook my head. “I don’t remember. Not properly. Just . . . I just don’t feel like being out in the lanes alone.”

“But I don’t either,” said Justin. He looked really upset. “I hate it out there—really hate it, not just . . . It’s horrible. Eerie. Can’t someone else go?”

“Or,” Daniel suggested helpfully, “if you’re this anxious about going out, Lexie, why don’t you stay at home?”

“Because. If I sit around in here any longer, I’m going to go crazy.”

“I’ll go with you,” Abby said. “Girl chat.”

“No offense,” Daniel said, with a slight, affectionate smile at Abby, “but I think a homicidal maniac might be less intimidated by the two of you than he should be. If you’re feeling nervous, Lexie, you should have someone large with you. Why don’t you and I go?”

Rafe raised his head. “If you’re going,” he told Daniel, “then so am I.”

There was a small, tight silence. Rafe stared coldly at Daniel, unblinking; Daniel gazed calmly back. “Why?” he asked.

“Because he’s a moron,” Abby said, to her book. “Ignore him and maybe he’ll go away, or at least shut up. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“I don’t want you guys,” I said. I was all ready for this, Daniel trying to join the party. I hadn’t counted on Justin having some weird unexplained phobia of country lanes, though. “All you’ll do is bitch at each other, and I’m not in the mood. I want Justin. I never see him any more.”

Rafe snorted. “You see him all day, every day. How much Justin can one person take?”

“That’s different. We haven’t talked in ages, not properly.”

“I can’t go out there in the middle of the night, Lexie,” Justin said. He looked like he was actually in pain. “I would, honestly, but I just can’t.”

“Well,” Daniel said to me and Rafe, putting his book down. There was a glint in his eye, something like a wry, tired triumph: one all. “Shall we go?”

“Forget it,” I said, giving them all a disgusted glare. “Just forget it. Never mind. You can all stay here and bitch and complain, I’ll go by myself, and if I get stabbed again, I hope you’ll be happy.”

Just before I slammed the kitchen door, panes of glass trembling, I heard Rafe starting to say something and Abby’s voice cutting across his, low and fierce: “Shut up.” When I turned back at the bottom of the garden, all four of them had their heads bent over their books again, in their pools of lamplight; glowing, enclosed, untouchable.

* * *

The night had turned cloudy, the air thick and immovable as a wet duvet dumped over the hills. I walked fast, trying to wear myself out, aiming for the point where I could fool myself that it was the exercise making my heart race. I thought of that great imaginary clock I’d felt somewhere in the background, my first couple of days, urging me faster. Sometime after that it had faded away into nothing, left me swaying to Whitethorn House’s own sweet slow rhythms, with all the time in the world. Now it was back, ticking savagely and getting louder every minute, speeding towards some huge shadowy zero hour.

I rang Frank from down in one of the lanes—even the thought of climbing my tree, having to stay in one place, made me itch all over. “There you are,” he said. “What were you doing, running a marathon?”

I leaned against a tree trunk and tried to get my breathing back to normal. “Trying to walk off my hangover. Clear my head.”

“Always a good idea,” Frank agreed. “First off, babe, well done last night. I’ll buy you a fancy cocktail for that one, when you get home. I think you may just have got us the break we needed.”

“Maybe. I’m not counting chickens. For all we know, Ned could be bullshitting me about the whole thing. He tries to buy Lexie’s share of the house, she blows him off, he decides to give it one more go, then I mention the memory loss and he sees his chance to convince me we had a deal all along . . . He’s no Einstein, but he’s no idiot either, not when it comes to wheeling and dealing.”

“Maybe not,” Frank said. “Maybe not. How’d you manage to hook up with him, anyway?”

I had my answer to that one all ready. “I’ve been keeping an eye on that cottage, every night. I figured Lexie went there for a reason—and if she was meeting someone, that would be the logical place. So I thought there was a decent chance whoever it was would show up there again.”

“And Slow Eddie wanders in,” Frank said blandly, “just when I’d told you about the house, given the two of you something to talk about. He’s got good timing. Why didn’t you ring me, after he left?”

“My head was buzzing, Frankie. All I could think about was how this changes the case, how I can use it, what I do next, how to find out if Ned’s bullshitting . . . I meant to phone you, but it went straight out of my head.”

“Better late than never. So how was your day?”

His voice was pleasant, absolutely neutral, giving away nothing. “I know, I know, I’m a lazy cow,” I said, giving it an apologetic cringe. “I should’ve tried to get something out of Daniel, while I had him to myself, but I just couldn’t face it. My head was killing me, and you know what Daniel’s like; he’s not exactly light entertainment. Sorry.”

“Hmm,” said Frank, not very reassuringly. “And what’s with the stroppy-bitch act? I’m assuming it was an act.”

“I want to unsettle them,” I said, which was true. “We’ve tried relaxing them into talking, and it hasn’t worked. What with the new info, I think it’s time to kick it up a gear.”

“It didn’t occur to you to talk that over with me before you swung into action?”

I left a small, startled pause. “I just figured you’d guess what I was at.”

“OK,” Frank said, in a mild voice that started sirens rising in my head. “You’ve done a great job, Cass. I know you didn’t want to get involved, and I appreciate the fact that you did it anyway. You’re a good cop.”

It felt like something had hit me in the stomach. “What, Frank,” I said, but I already knew.

He laughed. “Relax; it’s good news. Time to wind it up, babe. I want you to go home and start complaining that you feel like you’re getting the flu—dizzy, feverish, achy. Don’t mention the wound hurting, or they’ll want to look at it; just feel crap all over. Maybe wake one of them up during the night—Justin’s the worrier, isn’t he?—and tell him it’s getting worse. If they haven’t taken you to the emergency room by morning, make them. I’ll handle it from there.”

My nails were cutting into my hand. “Why?”

“I thought you’d be delighted,” Frank said, doing taken aback and a little miffed. “You didn’t want—”

“I didn’t want to go in to start with. I know. But I’m in now, and I’m getting close. Why the hell would you want to pull the plug? Because I didn’t ask you before I rattled these guys’ cage?”

“God, no,” said Frank, still all bland surprise. “Nothing to do with that. You went in to find a direction for this investigation, and you’ve done that beautifully. Congratulations, babe. Your work here is done.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not. You sent me in to find a suspect, those were your exact words, and so far all I’ve found is a possible motive with four possible suspects attached—five, if you take into account that Ned could be lying his little head off. How does that move the investigation forwards, exactly? The four of them will stick to their story, just like you said at the beginning, and you’re right back where you started. Let me do my fucking job.”

“I’m looking out for you. That’s my job. With what you’ve found out, you could be at risk here, and I can’t just ignore—”

“Bullshit, Frank. If one of those four killed her, I’ve been in danger since Day One, and it never bothered you one bit till now—”

“Keep your voice down. Is that it? You’re pissed off because I haven’t been protective enough?”

I could practically see his hands flying up in outrage, the wide offended blue eyes. “Give me a break, Frank. I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself, and you’ve never had a problem with that idea before. So why the fuck are you pulling me out?”

There was a silence. Finally Frank sighed. “Fine,” he said. “You want to know why, fine. I no longer feel that you’re maintaining the objectivity required to serve this investigation.”

“What are you talking about?” My heart was hammering. If he had surveillance on the house after all, or if he’d guessed that I’d taken off the mike—I should never have left it for so long, I thought wildly, stupid, I should’ve gone back inside every few minutes and made some kind of noise—

“You’re way too emotionally involved. I’m not stupid, Cassie. I have a fair idea what happened last night, and I know there’s shit you’re not telling me. Those are warning signs, and I’m not going to ignore them.”

He’d fallen for the Fauré; he didn’t know I’d been burned. My heart rate went down a notch.

“You’re losing your boundaries. Maybe I should never have pressured you to do this. I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened to you on Murder and I’m not asking, but it clearly wrecked your head, and you obviously weren’t ready for something like this just yet.”

I have a flash-bang temper, and if I lost it now, the argument was over; I would have proved Frank’s point. That was probably exactly what he was angling for. I kicked the tree trunk instead, hard enough that for a second I thought I’d broken my toe. When I could talk I said, coolly, “My head is doing just fine, Frank, and so are my boundaries. Every one of my actions has been directed towards achieving the goal of this investigation and finding a prime suspect in the murder of Lexie Madison. And I’d like to finish the job.”

“Sorry, Cassie,” Frank said, gently but very firmly. “Not this time.”

There’s one thing about undercover that no one mentions, ever. The rule is, the handler holds the brake: he’s the one who decides when you need to pull back or come out. He’s the one with the overview, after all, he may well have info that you don’t, and you do what he says if you value either your life or your career. But here’s the part we never talk about, the grenade you carry with you always: he can’t make you. I had never known anyone to throw that grenade before, but every one of us knows it’s there. If you were to say no, there would be—for a little while, at least, and that might be all you needed—fuck-all your handler could do about it.

That kind of breach of trust can’t be repaired. In that second I saw the airport codes in Lexie’s date book, that hard, ruthless scrawl.

“I’m staying,” I said. A sharp wave of wind ran through the woods and I felt my tree shiver, a deep judder going up into my bones.

“No,” Frank said, “you’re not. Don’t give me hassle on this, Cassie. The decision’s been made; there’s no point in us fighting about it. Go home, pack your stuff and start playing sick. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You put me in here to do a job,” I said. “I’m not leaving till I get it done. I’m not fighting about it, Frank. I’m just telling you.”

This time Frank understood. His voice didn’t sharpen, but it had an undertow that made my shoulders go up. “Do you want me to pick you up off the street, find drugs on you and throw you in jail till you pull yourself together? Because I’ll do it.”

“No you won’t. The others know Lexie doesn’t do drugs, and if she gets dragged in on a bogus charge and then dies while in police custody, they’ll kick up such a stink that this whole operation will go up in flames and you’ll be cleaning up the mess for years.”

There was a silence, while Frank evaluated the situation. “You know this could end your career, don’t you?” he said eventually. “You’re disobeying a direct order from a superior officer. You know I could haul you in, take your badge and your gun, and fire you on the spot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” But he wouldn’t do it, not Frank, and I knew I was taking advantage of that. I knew something else, too, I’m not sure how; maybe from the lack of shock in his voice. Sometime in his career, he had done this same thing himself.

“And you know you’re making me miss my weekend with Holly. It’s her birthday tomorrow. You want to explain to her why Daddy can’t be there after all?”

I winced, but I reminded myself that this was Frank, Holly’s birthday was probably months away. “So go. Let someone else monitor the mike feed.”

“Not a chance. Even if I wanted to, I don’t have anyone else. The budget’s run out on this one. The brass are sick of paying officers to sit around listening to you drink wine and strip wallpaper.”

“I don’t blame them,” I said. “What you do with the mike feed is your call; leave it to monitor itself, if you want. That’s your half of the gig. I’m just doing mine.”

“OK,” Frank said, on a long-suffering sigh, “OK. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’ve got forty-eight hours, starting now, to wind this up—”

“Seventy-two.”

“Seventy-two, on three conditions: you don’t do anything stupid, you keep calling in, and you keep that mike on you at all times. I want your word.”

Something prickled inside me. Maybe he did know, after all; with Frank you can never be sure. “Got it,” I said. “I promise.”

“Three days from now, even if you’re an inch away from breaking the case, you come in. By”—watch check—“quarter to midnight on Monday, you’re out of that house and in an emergency room, or at least on your way there. Until then, I’m going to hang on to this tape. If you stick to those conditions and you come in on time, I’ll erase it, and no one else ever needs to know about this conversation. If you give me one more iota of hassle, I will haul your arse in, whatever that takes and whatever consequences it has, and I will fire you. We clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re crystal clear. I’m not trying to fuck you around, Frank. It’s not about that.”

“This, Cassie,” Frank said, “was a really, really bad idea. I hope you know that.”

There was a beep and then nothing, just waves of static in my ear. My hands were shaking so hard that I dropped the phone twice before I managed to hit End.

* * *

The irony of it: he was millimeters from right. Even twenty-four hours earlier, I hadn’t been working this case; I’d been letting it work me, free-falling into it, full fathom five and swimming deeper. There were a thousand tiny phrases and glances and objects that had been scattered through this case like bread crumbs, going overlooked and unconnected because I had wanted—or thought I wanted—to be Lexie Madison so much more than I wanted to solve her murder. What Frank didn’t know, and what I couldn’t tell him, was that Ned of all people, without ever having a clue he was doing it, had pulled me back. I wanted to close this case, and I was ready—and this isn’t something I say lightly—to do whatever it took.

Probably you could say I came back fighting because I had been suckered, almost fatally, and this was my last chance to make up for that; or because the only way I would ever get my career back—It’s my job, I had said to Daniel, before I knew the words were going to come out—was if I got a solve here; or because our lost Operation Vestal had poisoned the air around me, and I needed an antidote. Maybe a little of all three. But this was the one I couldn’t get away from: no matter what this woman had been or done, we had been built into each other since we were born. We had led each other to this life, this place. I knew things about her that no one else knew, in all the world. I couldn’t leave her now. There was no one else to look through her eyes and read her mind, trace the silvery lines of runes she had left trailing behind her, tell the only story she had ever finished.

All I knew was that I needed the end of that story, that I needed to be the one who brought it home, and that I was frightened. I don’t scare easy, but just like Daniel, I’ve always known that there’s a price to pay. What Daniel didn’t know, or didn’t mention, is what I said right at the beginning: the price is a wildfire shape-changing thing, and you’re not always the one who chooses, you’re not always allowed to know in advance, what it’s going to be.

The other thing hitting me over and over, with a horrible sick lurch every time: this could have been why she had come looking for me, this could have been what she had wanted all along. Someone to change places with her. Someone longing for the chance to toss away her own battered life, let it evaporate like morning mist over grass; someone who would gladly fade to a scent of bluebells and a green shoot, while this girl strengthened and bloomed and turned solid again, and lived.

I think it was only in that moment I believed she was dead, this girl I had never seen alive. I’ll never be free of her. I wear her face; as I get older it’ll stay her changing mirror, the one glimpse of all the ages she never had. I lived her life, for a few strange bright weeks; her blood went into making me what I am, the same way it went to make the bluebells and the hawthorn tree. But when I had the chance to take that final step over the border, lie down with Daniel among the ivy leaves and the sound of water, let go of my own life with all its scars and all its wreckage and start new, I turned it down.

The air was so still. Any minute now, I would have to go back to Whitethorn House and do my best to wreck it.

Out of nowhere I wanted to talk to Sam so badly it was like being hit in the stomach. It felt like the most urgent thing in the world, to tell him, before it was too late, that I was coming home; that, in the ways that mattered most, I was already back; that I was scared, terrified as a kid in the dark, and that I needed to hear his voice.

His phone was off. All I got was the voice-mail woman telling me, archly, to leave a message. Sam was working: taking his turn surveilling Naylor’s house, going through statement sheets for the dozenth time in case he had missed something. If I’d been the crying type, I would have cried then.

Before I understood that I was doing it, I set my phone number to Private and dialed Rob’s mobile. I pressed my free hand flat over the mike and felt my heart going slow and hard under my palm. I knew this was very possibly the stupidest thing I’d done in my life, but I didn’t know how not to do it.

“Ryan,” he said on the second ring, wide awake; Rob always had trouble sleeping. When I couldn’t answer, he said, with a sudden new alertness in his voice, “Hello?”

I hung up. In the second before my thumb hit the button I thought I heard him say, fast and urgent, “Cassie?” but my hand was already moving and it was too late for me to pull it back even if I had wanted to. I slid down the side of the tree and sat there, with my arms wrapped tight around myself, for a long time.

There was this night, during our last case. At three in the morning I got on my Vespa and went down to the crime scene to pick Rob up. On the way back the roads were all ours, that late, and I was going fast; Rob leaned into the turns with me and the bike barely seemed to feel the extra weight. Two high beams came at us around a bend, brilliant and growing till they filled the whole road: a lorry, half over the center line and coming straight for us, but the bike swayed out of the way light as a stalk of grass and the lorry was past in a great whack of wind and dazzle. Rob’s hands on my waist shook every now and then, a quick violent tremor, and I was thinking of home and warmth and whether I had anything in the fridge.

Neither of us knew it, but we were speeding through the last few hours we had. I leaned on that friendship loose and unthinking as if it were a wall six foot thick, but less than a day later it started to crumble and avalanche and there was nothing in the world I could do to hold it together. In the nights afterwards I used to wake up with my mind full of those headlights, brighter and deeper than the sun. I saw them again behind my eyelids in that dark lane, and I understood then that I could have just kept driving. I could have been like Lexie. I could have hit full speed and taken us soaring up off the road, into the vast silence at the heart of those lights and out on the other side where nothing could touch us, ever.

21

It only took Daniel a couple of hours to come up with his next move. I was sitting up in bed, staring at the Brothers Grimm and reading the same sentence over and over without taking in a word of it, when there was a quick, discreet rap on my door.

"Come in,” I called.

Daniel put his head in the door. He was still dressed, spotless in his white shirt and shining shoes. “Do you have a minute?” he inquired politely.

“Of course,” I said, just as politely, putting down the book. There was no way this was a surrender or even a truce, but I couldn’t think of anything either of us could try, not without the others there for weapons.

“I just wanted,” Daniel said, turning to close the door behind him, “a quick word with you. In private.”

My body thought faster than my mind. In that second when his back was to me, before I knew why I was doing it, I grabbed the mike wire through my pajama top, gave it a hard upwards yank and felt the pop as the jack came free. By the time he looked around again, my hands were lying innocently on the book. “About what?” I asked.

“There are a few things,” Daniel said, smoothing the bottom of the duvet and sitting down, “that have been bothering me.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Almost since you . . . well, let’s say arrived. Small inconsistencies, growing more troubling as time went on. By the time you asked for more onions, the other evening, I had serious questions.”

He left a polite pause, in case I wanted to contribute anything to the conversation. I stared at him. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this one coming.

“And then, of course,” he said, when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to answer, “we come to last night. As you may or may not know, on a few occasions you and I—or, at any rate, Lexie and I—have . . . Well, suffice it to say that a kiss can be as individual and unmistakable as a laugh. When we kissed, last night, it left me more or less positive that you’re not Lexie.”

He gazed at me blandly, across the bed. He was burning me all over again, every way he knew how: with my boss, with the boyfriend he’d guessed at, with the brass who would not approve of an undercover smooching a suspect. They were his brand-new remote-controlled weapons. If that mike had been plugged in, I would have been a few hours away from a grim trip home and a one-way ticket to a desk in Offaly.

“Absurd though this may sound,” Daniel said tranquilly, “I’d like to see this supposed stab wound. Simply to reassure myself that you’re actually who you’re claiming to be.”

“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “why not?” and saw the startled flicker in his eyes. I pulled up my pajama top and tugged the bandage free to show him the jack and the battery pack, separate.

“Nice shot,” I told him, “but no dice. And if you do get me pulled out, do you think I’ll go quietly? I’ll have nothing to lose. Even if all I’ve got is five minutes, I’ll use them to tell the others who I am and that you’ve known for weeks. How well do you think that’ll go down with, say, Rafe?”

Daniel leaned forwards to inspect the mike. “Ah,” he said. “Well, it was worth a try.”

“My time’s almost up on this case anyway,” I said. I was talking fast: Frank would have started getting suspicious the instant the mike feed died, I had maybe a minute before his head went up in smoke. “I’ve only got a few days left. But I want those few days. If you try to take them away from me, I’ll go down all guns blazing. If you don’t, you still have a good chance that I won’t get anything worthwhile, and we can work it so the others never have to know who I was.”

He watched me, expressionless, those big square hands tidily clasped in his lap. “My friends are my responsibility. I’m not going to stand back and let you sweep them off into corners for interrogation.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough. Try and stop me any way you can; you didn’t have any trouble tonight. Just don’t mess with my last few days. Deal?”

“How many days,” Daniel asked, “exactly?”

I shook my head. “Not in the deal. In about ten seconds I’m going to plug this in again, so it sounds like an accidental disconnect, and we’re going to have a harmless little chat about why I was in a mood at dinner. OK?”

He nodded absently, still examining the mike. “Great,” I said. “Here goes. I don’t feel like”—I plugged the wire back in halfway through the sentence, for an extra touch of realism—“talking about it. My head’s a mess, everything feels sucky, I just want everyone to leave me alone. OK?”

“You’re probably just hungover,” Daniel said, obligingly. “You’ve always had a hard time with red wine, haven’t you?”

Everything sounded like a trap. “Whatever,” I said, giving him an irritable teenager shrug and sticking my bandage back down. “Maybe it was the punch. Rafe probably put meths in it. He’s drinking a lot more these days, have you noticed?”

“Rafe is fine,” Daniel said coolly. “And so will you be, I hope, after a good night’s sleep.”

Quick footsteps downstairs, and a door opening. “Lexie?” Justin called anxiously, up the stairs. “Is everything OK?”

“Daniel’s annoying me,” I shouted back.

“Daniel? How are you annoying her?”

“I’m not.”

“He wants to know why I feel crap,” I called. “I feel crap because I just do, and I want him to leave me alone.”

“You feel crap because what?” Justin had come out of his room, to the bottom of the stairs; I could picture him, in his striped pyjamas, clutching the banister and peering short-sightedly upwards. Daniel was giving me an intent, thoughtful gaze that made me edgy as hell.

“Shut up!” yelled Abby, furious enough that we could hear her right through her door. “Some of us are trying to sleep here.”

“Lexie? You feel crap because what?”

A thud: Abby had thrown something. “Justin, I said shut up! Jesus! ”

Faintly, from the ground floor, Rafe shouted something irritable that sounded like “What the hell is going on?”

“I’ll come down and explain, Justin,” Daniel called. “Everyone go back to bed.” To me: “Good night.” He stood up and smoothed the duvet again. “Sleep well. I hope you’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. Don’t count on it.”

The steady rhythm of his footsteps going downstairs, then hushed voices below me: at first a lot of Justin and an occasional brief interjection from Daniel, shifting gradually till it was the other way round. I got out of bed, carefully, and put my ear to the floor, but they were talking barely above whispers and I couldn’t make out the words.

It was twenty minutes before Daniel came back upstairs, softly, pausing for a long few seconds on the landing. I didn’t start shaking until his bedroom door closed behind him.

I stayed awake for hours that night, flipping pages and pretending to read, rustling the covers and doing deep breaths and pretending to be asleep, unplugging the mike for a few seconds or a few minutes every now and then. I think I created a pretty good impression of a jack come loose, disconnecting and reconnecting itself as I moved, but it didn’t reassure me. Frank is very far from stupid, and he was in no humor to give me the benefit of any doubts.

Frank to the left of me, Daniel to the right, and here I was, stuck in the middle with Lexie. I passed the time, while I played my mike-jack game, by trying to work out how it was logistically possible for me to have ended up on the opposite side from absolutely everyone else involved in this case, including people who were on opposite sides from each other. Before I finally went to sleep I took the chair from Lexie’s dressing table, for the first time in weeks, and braced it against my door.

* * *

Saturday went fast, in a helpless nightmare daze. Daniel had decided—partly because working on the house always settled them all down, presumably, and partly to keep everyone in one room and under his eye—that we needed to spend the day sanding floors: “We’ve been neglecting the dining room,” he told us, at breakfast. “It’s starting to look terribly shabby, next to the sitting room. I think today we should start bringing it up to scratch. What do you think?”

“Good idea,” said Abby, sliding eggs onto his plate and giving him a tired, determinedly positive smile. Justin shrugged and went back to picking at toast; I said, “Whatever,” into the frying pan; Rafe took his coffee and left without a word. “Good,” Daniel said serenely, going back to his book. “That’s a plan, then.”

The rest of the day was just about as excruciating as I’d expected. The Happy Place magic was apparently on its day off. Rafe was in a silent, fuming rage with the whole world; he kept banging the sander into the walls, making everyone jump, till Daniel took it out of his hands without a word and passed him a sheet of sandpaper instead. I turned up my sulk as loud as I could and hoped it would have some effect on someone, and that sooner or later—not too much later—I would find a way to use it.

Outside the windows it was raining, thin petulant rain. We didn’t talk. Once or twice I saw Abby wipe her face, but she always had her back to the rest of us and I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was just the sawdust. It got everywhere: drifting up our noses, down our necks, working its way into the skin of our hands. Justin wheezed ostentatiously and had great dramatic coughing fits into a handkerchief until finally Daniel put down the sander, stalked out, and came back with an ancient, hideous gas mask, which he held out to Justin in silence. No one laughed.

“They’ve got asbestos in them,” Rafe said, scrubbing viciously at an awkward corner of floor. “Are you actually trying to kill him, or do you just want to give that impression?”

Justin gave the mask a horrified look. “I don’t want to breathe asbestos.”

“If you’d prefer to tie your handkerchief around your mouth,” said Daniel, “then do that instead. Just stop moaning.” He shoved the mask into Justin’s hands, went back to the sander and fired it up again.

The gas mask that had sent me and Rafe into a giddy fit, that night on the patio. Daniel can wear it into college, we’ll get Abby to embroider it . . . Justin dumped it gingerly in a bare corner, where it sat for the rest of the day, staring at us all with huge, empty, desolate eyes.

* * *

“And what’s been going on with your mike?” Frank inquired, that night. “Just out of curiosity.”

“Ah, fuck,” I said. “What, it’s doing it again? I thought I’d fixed it.”

A skeptical pause. “Doing what again?”

“This morning when I went to change my bandage, the jack was out. I think I put the bandage on wrong, after my shower last night, and the jack pulled out when I moved. How much did you miss? Is it working now?” I stuck a hand down my top and tapped the mike. “Can you hear that?”

“Loud and clear,” Frank said dryly. “It popped out a few times during the night, but I doubt I missed anything significant there—I certainly hope not, anyway. I lost a minute or two of your midnight chat with Daniel, though.”

I put a grin in my voice. “Oh, that? He was edgy because of the stroppy-bitch act. He wanted to know what was wrong, so I told him to leave me alone. Then the others heard us and got in on the action, and he gave up and went to bed. I told you it would work, Frankie. They’re going up the walls.”

“Right,” Frank said, after a moment. “So apparently I didn’t miss anything educational. And as long as I’m working this case, I suppose I can’t say I don’t believe in coincidences. But if that wire happens to come loose again, even for one second, I’m coming down there and dragging you in by the scruff of your neck. So get out your Super Glue.” And he hung up.

* * *

I walked home trying to work out what I would do next if I were in Daniel’s shoes, but as it turned out he wasn’t the one I should have been worrying about. I knew, even before I got into the house, that something had happened. They were all in the kitchen—the guys had obviously been halfway through the washing up, Rafe was holding a spatula like a weapon and Justin was dripping suds all over the floor—and they were all talking at once.

“—doing their job,” Daniel was saying flatly, as I opened the French doors. “If we don’t let them—”

“But why?” Justin wailed, over him. “Why would they—”

Then they saw me. There was a second of absolute silence, all of them staring at me, voices sliced off in midword.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The cops want us to come in,” said Rafe. He threw the spatula into the sink, with a clang and a splash. Water spattered on Daniel’s shirt, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I can’t go through that again,” Justin said, sagging back against the counter. “I can’t.”

“Come in where? What for?”

“Mackey rang Daniel,” said Abby. “They want us to come talk to them, first thing tomorrow morning. All of us.”

“Why?” That toerag Frank. He had known, when I phoned him, that he was going to pull this crap. He hadn’t even bothered to hint at it.

Rafe shrugged. “He didn’t share. Just that he, quote, wants a chat with us. Unquote.”

“But why there?” Justin demanded frantically. He was staring at Daniel’s phone, on the kitchen table, like it might pounce. “Before, they always came here. Why do we have to—”

“Where does he want us to go?” I asked.

“Dublin Castle,” Abby said. “The Serious Crime office, or squad, or whatever they call it.”

Serious and Organized Crime work downstairs from Murder; all Frank had to do was whisk us up an extra flight of stairs. S&O do not investigate your average stabbing, not unless there’s a crime lord involved, but the others didn’t know that, and it sounded impressive.

“Did you know about this?” Daniel asked me. He was giving me a cold stare that I didn’t like one bit. Rafe raised his eyes to the ceiling and muttered something that included the words “paranoid freak.”

“No. How would I?”

“I thought your friend Mackey might have rung you as well. While you were out.”

“He didn’t. And he’s not my friend.” I didn’t bother hiding the pissed-off look; let Daniel try to figure out whether it was genuine. I had two days left, and Frank was going to eat away one of them with endless pointless nothing questions about what we put in our sandwiches and how we felt about Four-Boobs Brenda. He wanted us first thing in the morning: he was planning to stretch this out for as long as he could, eight hours, twelve. I wondered if it would be in character for Lexie to kick him in the goolies.

“I knew we shouldn’t have rung them about that rock,” Justin said wretchedly. “I knew it. They were leaving us alone.”

“So let’s not go,” I said. Probably Frank would class this as doing something stupid, breaking one of his conditions, but I was too annoyed to care. “They can’t make us.”

A startled pause. “Is that true?” Abby asked Daniel.

“I think so, actually,” Daniel said. He was examining me speculatively; I could almost hear the wheels spinning. “We’re not under arrest. This was a request, not a command, although that’s not how Mackey made it sound. All the same, I think we need to go.”

“Oh, do you?” Rafe inquired, not nicely. “Do you really? And what if I think we should let Mackey go fuck himself?”

Daniel turned to look at him. “I plan to continue cooperating fully with the investigation,” he said calmly. “Partly because I think it’s wise, but mainly because I’d like to know who did this terrible thing. If any of you would prefer to stand in the way and raise Mackey’s suspicions by refusing to cooperate, I can’t stop you; but remember, the person who stabbed Lexie is still out there, and I for one think we should do our best to help catch him.” The smart-arsed bastard: he was using my mike to feed Frank exactly what he wanted him to hear, which apparently was a heap of pious clichés. The two of them were perfect for each other.

Daniel glanced inquiringly around the kitchen. No one answered. Rafe started to say something, checked himself and shook his head in disgust.

“Good,” said Daniel. “In that case, let’s finish up here and get to bed. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.” And he picked up the dishcloth.

I was in the sitting room with Abby, pretending to read and thinking up creative new words for Frank and listening to the tense silence coming from the kitchen, when I realized something. Given the choice, Daniel had decided he’d prefer to spend one of my last few days with Frank, rather than with me. I figured, in its own dangerous way, that was probably a compliment.

* * *

What I remember most about Sunday morning is that we did the whole breakfast routine, every step of it. Abby’s quick tap on my door; the two of us making breakfast side by side, her face flushed from the heat of the stove. We moved easily around each other, passing things back and forth without having to ask. I remembered that first evening, the pang as I’d seen how closely woven together they were: somehow, along the way, I had become part of that. Justin frowning at his toast as he sliced it into triangles, Rafe’s autopilot maneuver with the coffee, Daniel with the edge of a book caught under the corner of his plate. I didn’t let myself think, even for a splinter of a second, about the fact that in thirty-six hours I would be gone; the fact that, even if I were to see them again, someday, it would never be like this.

We took our time. Even Rafe resurfaced once he’d finished his coffee, nudging me sideways with his hip so he could share my chair and nick bites of my toast. Dew ran down the windowpanes, and the rabbits—they were getting cheekier and closer every day—were nibbling the grass outside.

Something had changed, during the night. The jagged cutting edges between the four of them had melted away; they were gentle with one another, careful, almost tender. Sometimes I wonder if they took such care with that breakfast because, at some level deeper and surer than logic, they knew.

“We should go,” Daniel said, finally. He closed his book, reached to put it on the counter. I felt a breath, something between a catch and a sigh, ripple around the table. Rafe’s chest rose, quickly, against my shoulder.

“Right,” Abby said softly, almost to herself. “Let’s do this.”

“There’s something I’d like to discuss with you, Lexie,” Daniel said. “Why don’t you and I ride into town together?”

“Discuss what?” Rafe asked sharply. His fingers dug into my arm.

“If it were any of your business,” Daniel said, taking his plate to the sink, “I would have invited you to join us.” The jagged edges crystallized again, out of nowhere, fine and slicing the air.

* * *

“So,” Daniel said, when he had pulled up his car in front of the house and I got in beside him, “here we are.”

Something smoky curled through me: a warning. It was the way he was looking not at me but out the car window, at the house in cool morning mist, at Justin rubbing his windscreen fussily with a folded rag and Rafe slumping down the stairs with his chin tucked deep into his scarf; it was the expression on his face, intent and thoughtful and just a touch sad.

I had no way of knowing what this guy’s limits were, or if he had any. My gun was behind Lexie’s bedside table—Murder has a metal detector. The only time you’ll be out of coverage, Frank had said, is on the drive to and from town.

Daniel smiled, a small private smile up at the hazy blue sky. “It’s going to be a beautiful day,” he said.

I was about to slam out of the car, stamp over to Justin and tell him Daniel was being horrible and demand to ride with him and the others—it seemed to be the week for complicated vicious spats, nobody would be suspicious of one more—when the door behind me flew open and Abby slid into the back seat, flushed and tangle-haired, in a tumble of gloves and hat and coat. “Hey,” she said, slamming the door. “Can I come with you guys?”

“Sure,” I said. I’d seldom been that glad to see anyone.

Daniel turned to look at her over his shoulder. “I thought we said you were going with Justin and Rafe.”

“You must be joking. The mood they’re in? It’d be like riding with Stalin and Pol Pot, only less cheerful.”

Unexpectedly, Daniel smiled at her, a real smile, warm and amused. “They are being ridiculous. Yes, let’s leave them to it; an hour or two stuck in a car together might be exactly what they need.”

“Maybe,” Abby said, sounding unconvinced. “That or they’ll just kill each other.” She pulled a folding hairbrush out of her bag and attacked her hair. In front of us, Justin got his car off to a jerky, irritable start and peeled off down the drive, way too fast.

Daniel put his hand back over his shoulder, palm up, towards Abby. He wasn’t looking at her, or at me; he was gazing out the windscreen, unseeing, at the cherry trees. Abby lowered her brush and laid her hand in his, squeezed his fingers. She didn’t let go until Daniel sighed and detached his hand from hers, gently, and started the car.

22

Frank, the utter fuckbucket, dumped me in an interview room (“We’ll have someone with you in a minute, Miss Madison”) and left me there for two hours. It wasn’t even one of the good interview rooms, with a watercooler and comfy chairs; it was the crap little one that’s two steps up from a holding cell, the one we use to make people nervous. It worked: I got edgier every minute. Frank could be doing anything out there, blowing my cover, telling the others about the baby, that we knew about Ned, anything. I knew I was reacting exactly the way he wanted me to, exactly like a suspect, but instead of snapping me out of it this just made me madder. I couldn’t even tell the camera what I thought about this situation, since for all I knew he had one of the others watching and was banking on me doing exactly that.

I swapped the chairs around—Frank had of course given me the one with the cap taken off the end of one leg, the one meant to make suspects uncomfortable. I felt like yelling at the camera, I used to work here, dickhead, this is my turf, don’t try that shit on me. Instead I found a pen in my jacket pocket and kept myself amused by writing LEXIE WAS HERE on the wall, in fancy letters. This didn’t get anyone’s attention, but then I hadn’t expected it to: the walls were already scattered with years’ worth of tags and drawings and anatomically difficult suggestions. I recognized a couple of the names.

I hated this. I had been in this room so many times, me and Rob working suspects with the flawless, telepathic coordination of two hunters circling their moment; being there without him made me feel like someone had scooped out all my organs and I was about to cave in on myself, too hollow to stand. Eventually I dug my pen into the wall so hard that the point snapped off. I threw the rest of it across the room at the camera and got it with a crack, but even that didn’t make me feel any better.

By the time Frank decided to make his big entrance, I was seething in about seven different ways. “Well well well,” he said, reaching up and switching off the camera. “Fancy meeting you here. Have a seat.”

I stayed standing. “What the fuck are you playing at?”

His eyebrows went up. “I’m interviewing suspects. What, I need your permission now?”

“You need to bloody well talk to me before you throw a curveball straight at my head. I’m not just having a laugh out there, Frank, I’m working, and this could wreck everything I’m trying to do.”

“Working? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

“That’s what you called it. I’m doing exactly what you sent me in there to do, I’m finally getting somewhere, why the hell are you shoving a spoke in my wheels?”

Frank leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “If you want to play dirty, Cass, I can play too. Not as much fun when you’re on the receiving end, is it?”

The thing was that I knew he wasn’t playing dirty, not really. Making me sit in the naughty corner and think about what I’d done was one thing: he was furious enough—and with good reason—that he probably wanted to punch me in the eye, and I knew well that unless I pulled off a spectacular last-minute save I was going to be in big trouble when I came in the next day. But he would never, no matter how angry he was, do anything that might jeopardize the case. And I knew, cool as snow under all the spitting mad, that I could use that.

“OK,” I said, taking a breath and running my hands over my hair, “OK. Fair enough. I deserved that.”

He laughed, a short, tight bark. “You don’t want to get me started on what you deserve, babe. Trust me on that one.”

“I know, Frank,” I said. “And when we’ve got the time, I’ll let you give me hell for as long as you want, but not now. How’re you doing with the others?”

He shrugged. “As well as could be expected.”

“In other words, you’ve got nowhere.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I do. I know those four. You can keep going at them till you have to retire, and you’ll still get nowhere.”

“It’s possible,” Frank said blandly. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? I’ve got a few years left in me.”

“Come on, Frank. You’re the one who’s said that, right from the beginning: those four stick together like glue, there’s no point in going at them from the outside. Wasn’t that why you wanted me on the inside to start with?”

A noncommittal little tilt of his chin, like a shrug.

“You know well you’re not going to get anything good out of them. You just want to rattle them, right? So let’s rattle them together. I know you’re pissed off with me, but that’ll keep till tomorrow. For now, we’re still on the same side.”

One of Frank’s eyebrows flickered. “We are?”

“Yeah, Frank, we are. And the two of us together can do a lot more damage than you can on your own.”

“Sounds fun,” Frank said. He was lounging against the wall with his hands in his pockets, eyes hooded lazily to hide the sharp, assessing glint. “What kind of damage did you have in mind?”

I moved round the table and sat on the edge, leaning in towards him, as close as I could get. “Interview me and let the others eavesdrop. Not Daniel—he doesn’t rattle, all that’ll happen if we push him is he’ll walk out—but the other three. Switch on their intercoms to pick up this room, put them near monitors, whatever—if you can make it look accidental, great, but if you can’t it doesn’t matter. If you want to keep an eye on their reactions, then let Sam do the interview.”

“While you say what, exactly?”

“I’ll let it slip that my memory’s starting to come back. I’ll keep it vague, stick to stuff I can’t get wrong—running for the cottage, blood, that kind of thing. If that doesn’t rattle them, nothing will.”

“Ah,” Frank said, with a wry tip of a grin. “So that’s what you were setting up, with the sulks and the temper tantrums and the whole prima-donna bit. I should have guessed. Silly me.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, sure, I was going to do it anyway. But this way’s even better. Like I said, we can do a lot more damage together. I can get edgy, make it obvious that there’s more I’m not telling you . . . If you want to script it for me, then fine, do it, I’ll say whatever you want. Come on, Frankie, what do you say? You and me?”

Frank thought this over. “And what do you want in exchange?” he inquired. “Just so I know.”

I gave him my best wicked grin. “Relax, Frank. Nothing that’ll jeopardize your professional soul. I just need to know how much you’ve told them, so I don’t shove my foot in my mouth. And you were planning to share that with me anyway, right? Since we’re on the same side and all.”

“Yeah,” Frank said dryly, on a sigh. “Naturally. I’ve told them sweet fuck-all, Cass. Your arsenal is still intact. That being the case, it would make me a very happy camper if you were to actually use some of it, sooner or later.”

“I’m going to, believe me. Which reminds me,” I added, as an afterthought. “The other thing I need: can you keep Daniel out of my hair for a while? Whenever you’ve finished with us, send the rest of us home—don’t tell him we’re gone, though, or he’ll be out of here faster than a speeding bullet. Then give me an hour, two if you can, before you cut him loose. Don’t spook him, just keep it routine and keep him talking. OK?”

“Interesting,” Frank said. “Why?”

“I want to have a chat with the others without him around.”

“That much I got. Why?”

“Because I think it’ll work, is why. He’s the one in charge there, you know that; he decides what they say and don’t say. If the others are shaken up and they don’t have him around to keep a lid on them, who knows what they’ll come out with?”

Frank picked at something between his front teeth, examined his thumbnail. “What exactly are you aiming for?” he asked.

“I won’t know till I hear it. But we’ve always said they were hiding something, right? I don’t want to walk off this case without doing my best to get it out of them. I’m going to hit them with everything I’ve got—guilt trips, tears, tantrums, threats, the kid, Slow Eddie, you name it. Maybe I’ll get a confession—”

“Which I’ve said from the beginning,” Frank pointed out, “is not what we need from you. What with that annoying little admissibility rule, and all.”

“You’re telling me you’d turn down a confession if I brought you one on a silver platter? Even if it’s not admissible, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. You pull them in, play them the tape, go at them hard—Justin’s cracking already, one good tap and he’ll fall apart.” It took me a second to realize where the déj©• vu was coming from. The fact that I was having the exact same argument with Frank that I had had with Daniel gave me a strange cold twist in my stomach. “A confession may not be exactly what you asked Santy to bring you, but at this stage, Frankie, we can’t afford to pick and choose.”

“I’ll admit it would be better than what we’ve got now. Which is a big heaping plate of fuck-all.”

“There you go. And I could end up with something a lot better than that. Maybe they’ll give us the weapon, the crime scene, who knows?”

“The old ketchup technique,” Frank said, still inspecting his thumbnail with interest. “Turn ’em upside down, give ’em a good shake and hope something comes out.”

“Frank,” I said, and waited till he glanced up at me. “This is my last shot. Tomorrow I come in. Let me have it.”

Frank sighed, leaned his head back against the wall and had a leisurely look around the room; I saw him take in the new graffiti, the bits of exploded pen in the corner. “What I’m curious about,” he said eventually, “is how you’re so sure that one of them did it.”

My blood stopped moving for a second. All Frank had ever wanted from me was one solid lead. If he found out I had that already, I was toast: off the case and into big trouble, faster than you can say Up Shit Creek. I would never even make it back to Glenskehy. “Well, I’m not sure,” I said easily. “But, like you said, they’ve got motive.”

“Yeah, they’ve got motive. Of a kind. But then, so do Naylor and Eddie and a whole bunch of other people, some of whom we presumably haven’t even identified yet. This girl put herself in harm’s way on a regular basis, Cass. She may not have ripped people off financially—although that’s debatable: you could argue that she got her share of Whitethorn House under false pretenses—but she ripped them off emotionally. That’s a dangerous thing to do. She lived at risk. And yet you’re very, very sure which risk caught up with her.”

I shrugged, hands going out. “This is the only one I can go after. I’ve got one day left; I don’t want to ditch this case without giving it everything I’ve got. What are you bitching about, anyway? You’ve always liked them for it.”

“Oh, you picked up on that? I underestimated you, babe. Yeah, I’ve always liked them. But you haven’t. A few days ago you were claiming these four were a bunch of fluffy little bunnies who wouldn’t hurt a fly between them, and now you’ve got that steel-trap look in your eye and you’re working out the best way for us to fuck with their heads. So I’m wondering what it is that you’re not telling me.”

His eyes were on me, level and unblinking. I gave it a second, ran my hands through my hair like I was trying to figure out how to put this. “It’s not like that,” I said, in the end. “I’ve just got a feeling, Frank. Just a feeling.”

Frank watched me for a long minute; I swung my legs and tried to look open and sincere. Then: “OK,” he said, suddenly all business, shoving himself off the wall and heading over to switch the camera back on. “You’ve got a deal. Did you lot bring two cars, or am I going to have to drive Danny Boy all the way back to Glenarsefuck when I’m done with him?”

“We brought both cars,” I said. Relief and adrenaline were making me giddy; my mind was racing through how to work this interview and I wanted to shoot straight up in the air like a firework. “Thanks, Frank. You won’t regret it.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, “well.” He swapped the chairs back around. “Sit. Stay. I’ll get back to you.”

* * *

He left me there for another couple of hours, presumably while he gave the others everything he’d got, in the hope that one of them would crack and he wouldn’t need to use me after all. I spent the time smoking illegal cigarettes—no one seemed to care—and working out the details of how to do this. I knew Frank would be coming back. From the outside, the others were impregnable, seamless; even Justin would be holding up cool as ice in the face of Frank’s worst. Outsiders were too far away to shake them. They were like one of those medieval fortresses built with such fierce, intricate, defensive care that they could only ever be taken from the inside, by treachery.

Finally the door flew open and Frank stuck his head in. “I’m about to link you up to the other interview rooms, so get in character. Five minutes to curtain.”

“Don’t link Daniel in,” I said, sitting up fast.

“Don’t fuck up,” Frank said, and vanished again.

When he came back I was perched on the table, bending the ink tube of the Biro into a catapult and flipping the broken bits at the camera. “Hey,” I said, brightening up at the sight of him. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

“Now how could I ever do that?” Frank asked, giving me his very best grin. “I even brought you coffee—milk and two sugars, am I right? No, no, don’t worry about that”—as I hopped off the table and went for the Biro bits—“someone’ll get them later. Sit down and we’ll have a chat. How’ve you been?” He pulled out a chair and shoved one of the Styrofoam cups across to me.

He started out sweet as honey—I’d forgotten what a charmer Frank can be, when he feels like it. You’re looking wonderful, Miss Madison, and how’s the old war wound getting on, and—when I played up to him, gave a stretch to show him how well the stitches had healed—isn’t that a lovely sight, and just the right amount of flirtation in his grin. I threw in eyelash-and-giggle touches, just little ones, to piss Rafe off.

Frank took me through the whole John Naylor saga, or anyway a version of it—not exactly the version that had originally happened, but definitely a version that made Naylor sound like a good suspect: soothing the others down, before we started detonating things. “I’m all impressed now,” I told him, tilting my chair back and giving him a mischievous sideways look. “I thought you’d given up ages ago.”

Frank shook his head. “We don’t give up,” he said soberly. “Not on something as serious as this. No matter how long it takes. We don’t always want to be obvious about it, but we’re always working away, putting the pieces together.” It was impressive; he should have come with his own soundtrack. “We’re getting there. And right now, Miss Madison, we need a little help from you.”

“Sure,” I said, bringing my chair down and doing focused. “Do you want me to look at that guy Naylor again?”

“Nothing like that. It’s your mind we need this time, not your eyes. You remember how the doctors said your memory might start coming back, as you recovered?”

“Yeah,” I said, uncertainly, after a pause.

“Anything you remember, anything at all, could help us a lot. I want you to have a think and tell me: has anything come back to you?”

I left it a beat too long before I said, almost convincingly, “No. Nothing. Just what I told you before.”

Frank clasped his hands on the table and leaned towards me. Those attentive blue eyes, that gentle, coaxing voice: if I’d been a genuine civilian, I’d have been melting all over my chair. “See, I’m not so sure. I’m getting the impression you’ve remembered something new, Miss Madison, but you’re worried about telling me. Maybe you think I might misinterpret it, and the wrong person could get in trouble? Is that it?”

I threw him a quick looking-for-reassurance glance. “Sort of. I guess.”

He smiled at me, all crinkling crow’s-feet. “Trust me, Miss Madison. We don’t go around charging people with serious crimes unless we have serious evidence. You’re not about to get anyone arrested all by yourself.”

I shrugged, made a face at my coffee cup. “It’s nothing big. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

“You let me worry about that, OK?” Frank said soothingly. He was about one step from patting my hand and calling me “love.” “You’d be surprised what can come in useful. And if it doesn’t, then there’s no harm done, am I right?”

“OK,” I said, on a breath. “It’s just . . . OK. I remember blood, on my hands. All over my hands.”

“There you go,” Frank said, keeping that reassuring smile switched on. “Well done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I shook my head. “Can you remember what you were doing? Were you standing up? Sitting down?”

“Standing up,” I said. I didn’t have to put the shake in my voice. A few feet away, in the interview rooms I knew inside out, Daniel was waiting patiently for someone to come back and the other three were slowly, silently, beginning to wind tighter. “Leaning against a hedge—it was prickly. I was . . .” I mimed twisting up my top, pressing it against my ribs. “Like that. Because of the blood, to make it stop. But it didn’t help.”

“Were you in pain?”

“Yeah,” I said, low. “It hurt. A lot. I thought . . . I was scared I was going to die.”

We were good together, me and Frank; we were on the same page. We were working together as smoothly as Abby and me making breakfast, as smoothly as a pair of professional torturers. You can’t be both, Daniel had told me. And: She was never cruel.

“You’re doing great,” Frank told me. “Now that it’s started coming back to you, you’ll have the whole lot remembered in no time, you’ll see. That’s what the doctors told us, isn’t it? Once the floodgates open . . .” He flipped through the file and pulled out a map, one of the ones we’d used during our training week. “Do you think you could show me where you were?”

I took my time, picked a spot about three-quarters of the way from the house to the cottage and put my finger on it. “Maybe there, I think. I’m not sure.”

“Great,” Frank said, doing a careful little scribble in his notebook. “Now I want you to do something else for me. You’re leaning against that hedge, and you’re bleeding, and you’re scared. Can you try and think backwards? Just before that, what had you been doing?”

I kept my eyes on the map. “I was all out of breath, like . . . Running. I was running. So fast I fell over. I hurt my knee.”

“From where? Think hard. What were you running away from?”

“I don’t—” I shook my head, hard. “No. I can’t tell what bits happened, and what bits I just . . . dreamed, or something. I could’ve dreamed all of it, even the blood.”

“It’s possible,” Frank said, nodding easily. “We’ll keep that in mind. But, just in case, I think you need to tell me everything—even the parts you probably dreamed. We’ll sort them out as we go. OK?”

I left a long pause. “That’s all,” I said at last, too weakly. “Running, and falling over. And the blood. That’s it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m positive. There’s nothing else.”

Frank sighed. “Here’s the problem, Miss Madison,” he said. A fine, steely sediment was slowly building up in his voice. “Just a few minutes ago, you were worried about getting the wrong person into trouble. But nothing you’ve said so far points towards anyone at all. That tells me you’re skipping something, along the way.”

I gave him my defiant Lexie glare, chin out. “No I’m not.”

“Sure you are. And the really interesting question, as far as I’m concerned, is why.” Frank shoved his chair back and started a leisurely stroll around the interview room, hands in his pockets, making me shift again and again to watch him. “See, call me crazy, but I figured we were on the same side here, you and me. I thought both of us were trying to find out who stabbed you and put that person away. Am I crazy? Does that sound crazy to you?”

I shrugged, twisting to keep an eye on him. He kept circling. “Back when you were in hospital, you answered every question I asked—not a bother, no hesitation, no messing about. You were a lovely witness, Miss Madison, lovely and helpful. But now, all of a sudden, you’re not interested any more. So either you’ve decided to turn the other cheek on someone who almost killed you—and forgive me if I’m wrong, but you don’t look like a saint to me—or there’s something else, something more important, getting in the way.”

He leaned against the wall behind me. I gave up on watching him and started picking nail polish off my thumbnail. “So I have to ask myself,” Frank said softly, “what could possibly be more important to you than putting this person away? You tell me, Miss Madison. What’s important to you?”

“Good chocolate,” I said, to my thumbnail.

Frank’s tone didn’t change. “I think I’ve got to know you pretty well. When you were in hospital, what did you talk about, every day, the second I got in your door? What was the one thing you kept asking for, even when you knew you couldn’t have it? What was the one thing you were dying to see, the day you got out? What had you so excited you nearly burst your stitches jumping around at the thought?”

I kept my head down, bit at the nail polish. “Your friends,” Frank said, very quietly. “Your housemates. They matter to you, Miss Madison. More than anything else I can think of. Maybe more than getting the person who stabbed you. Don’t they?”

I shrugged. “Course they matter to me. So?”

“If you had to make that choice, Miss Madison. If, let’s just say, just for the hell of it, you remembered that one of them had stabbed you. What would you do?”

“I wouldn’t have to make that choice, because none of them would hurt me. Ever. They’re my friends.”

“That’s exactly my point. You’re protecting someone, and I don’t see that being John Naylor. Who is there that you’d protect, except your friends?”

“I’m not protecting—”

Before I even heard him move he had come off the wall and slammed both hands down on the table beside me, his face inches from mine. I flinched harder than I meant to. “You’re lying to me, Miss Madison. Do you honestly not realize how bloody obvious that is? You know something important, something that could blow this case wide open, and you’re hiding it. That’s obstruction. It’s a crime. It can land you in jail.”

I jerked my head back, shoved my chair away from him. “You’re going to arrest me? For what? Jesus, I’m the one who got hurt here! If I just want to forget all about it—”

“If you want to get yourself stabbed every day of the week and twice on Sunday, I don’t give a flying fuck. But when you waste my time and my officers’ time, that’s my business. Do you know how many people have been working this case for the past month, Miss Madison? Do you have the faintest clue how much time and energy and money we’ve put into this? There’s not a chance I’m going to let all that go down the toilet because some spoiled little girl is too wrapped up in her friends to give a fuck about anything or anyone else. Not a chance in hell.”

He wasn’t faking. His face thrust hard up to mine, the hot blue sizzle in his eyes: he was raging and he meant every word, to me, to Lexie, probably even he didn’t know which. This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got. “I’m going to break this case,” Frank said. “I don’t care how long it takes: the person who did this is going down. And if you don’t pull your head out of your arse and realize how important this is, if you keep playing stupid little games with me, you’re going down right alongside him. Is that clear?”

“Get out of my face,” I said. My forearm was up between us, blocking him. In that second I realized that my fist was clenched and that I was as angry as he was.

“Who stabbed you, Miss Madison? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you don’t know? Let’s see you do it. Tell me you don’t know. Come on.”

“Fuck that. I don’t have to prove anything to you. I remember running, and blood on my hands, and you can do whatever you want with that. Now leave me alone.” I slumped down in my chair, shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at the wall in front of me.

I felt Frank’s eyes on the side of my face, his fast breathing, for a long time. “Right,” he said, at last. He eased back slowly, away from the table. “We’ll leave it at that, then. For now.” And he left.

* * *

It was a long time before he came back—another hour, maybe, I’d stopped watching the clock. I picked up the Biro bits, one by one, and arranged them in pretty patterns on the edge of the table.

“Well,” Frank said, when he finally decided to join me. “You were right: that was fun.”

“Poetry in motion,” I said. “Did it do the job?”

He shrugged. “It rattled them, all right; they’re antsy as hell. But they’re not cracking, not yet. Another couple of hours might do it, I don’t know, but Daniel’s starting to get restless—oh, very politely, of course, but he’s been asking how much longer we think this might take. I figure if you want any time with the other three before he walks out, you’d better take them now.”

“Thanks, Frank,” I said, and meant it. “Thank you.”

“I’ll keep him as long as I can, but I’m not guaranteeing anything.” He took my coat off the back of the door and held it for me. As I slid into it he said, “I’m playing fair with you, Cassie. Now let’s see you play fair with me.”

The others were downstairs in the lobby. They all looked gray and eye-baggy. Rafe was at the window, jiggling one knee; Justin was huddled in a chair like a big miserable stork. Only Abby, sitting up straight with her hands cupped in her lap, looked anything like composed.

“Thanks for coming in,” Frank said cheerfully. “You’ve all been very, very helpful. Your mate Daniel is just finishing up a few things for us; he said you should go ahead, he’ll catch you on the way.”

Justin started upright, like he’d just been woken up. “But why—” he began, but Abby cut him off, her fingers coming down across his wrist.

“Thanks, Detective. Call us if there’s anything else you need.”

“Will do,” Frank said, giving her a wink. He had the door open for us, and was holding out his other hand to shake good-bye, before anyone caught up enough to argue. “See you soon,” he said to each of us, as we passed.

* * *

“Why did you do that?” Justin demanded, as soon as the door closed behind us. “I don’t want to leave without Daniel.”

“Shut up,” Abby said, giving his arm a squeeze that looked casual, “and keep walking. Don’t turn around. Mackey’s probably watching us.”

In the car, nobody said anything for a very long time.

“So,” Rafe said, after a silence that felt like it was filing my teeth. “What did you talk about this time?” He braced himself, a tiny jerk of his head, before he turned to look at me.

“Leave it,” Abby said, from the front.

“Why Daniel?” Justin wanted to know. He was driving like someone’s lunatic granny, switching back and forth between bursts of suicidal speed—I was praying we wouldn’t run into a traffic cop—and patches of obsessive carefulness, and his voice sounded like he might be about to cry. “What do they want? Have they arrested him?”

“No,” Abby said firmly. There was obviously no way she could have known that, but Justin’s shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

“He always is,” Rafe said, to the window.

“He figured this would happen,” Abby said. “He wasn’t sure which one of us they’d hang onto—he thought probably Justin or Lexie, maybe both of you—but he figured they’d split us up.”

“Me? Why me?” Justin’s voice was getting a hysterical edge.

“Oh for God’s sake, Justin, act like you have a pair,” Rafe snapped.

“Slow down,” Abby said, “or we’ll get pulled over. They’re just trying to shake us up, in case we know anything we’re not telling them.”

“But why do they think—”

“Don’t get into that. That’s what they want us doing: wondering what they’re thinking, why they’re doing stuff, getting all freaked out. Don’t play into their hands.”

“If we let those apes outwit us,” Rafe said, “then we deserve to go to jail. Surely to God we’re smarter than—”

“Stop it!” I yelled, banging my fist against the back of Abby’s seat. Justin gasped and nearly sent the car off the road, but I didn’t care. “You stop it! This isn’t a competition! This is my life and it’s not a fucking game and I hate all of you!”

Then I startled the living hell out of myself by bursting into tears. I hadn’t cried in months, not for Rob, not for my lost life in Murder, not for any of the terrible fallout of Operation Vestal, but I cried then. I pressed the sleeve of my sweater over my mouth and bawled my eyes out, for Lexie in every one of her changing faces, for the baby whose face no one would ever see, for Abby spinning on moonlit grass and Daniel smiling as he watched her, for Rafe’s expert hands on the piano and Justin kissing my forehead, for what I had done to them and what I was about to do, for a million lost things; for the wild speed of that car, how mercilessly fast it was taking us where we were going.

After a while Abby reached into the glove compartment and passed me a packet of tissues. She had her window open and the long roar of the air sounded like high wind in trees, and it was so peaceful, in there, that I just kept crying.

23

As soon as Justin pulled up in the stables, I jumped out of the car and ran for the house, pebbles flying up under my feet. Nobody called after me. I jammed my key into the lock, left the door swinging open and thumped upstairs to my room.

It felt like ages before I heard the others coming in (door closing, fast overlapping undertones moving into the sitting room), but actually it was less than sixty seconds—I had an eye on my watch. I figured I needed to give them about ten minutes. Any less, and they wouldn’t have time to compare notes—their first chance all day—and work themselves into a full-on panic; any more, and Abby would pull herself together and start bringing the guys back into line.

During those ten minutes I listened to the voices downstairs, taut and muffled and fringed with hysteria, and I got ready. Late-afternoon sun was flooding through my bedroom window and the air blazed so bright that I felt weightless, suspended in amber, every movement I made as clear and rhythmic and measured as part of some ritual that I had been preparing for all my life. My hands felt like they were moving on their own, smoothing out my girdle—it was starting to get grubby by this time, it wasn’t exactly something I could stick in the washing machine—pulling it on, tucking the hem into my jeans, easing my gun into place, as calmly and precisely as if I had forever and a day. I thought about that afternoon a million miles away, in my flat, when I had put on Lexie’s clothes for the first time: how they had felt like armor, like ceremonial robes; how they had made me want to laugh out loud from something like happiness.

When the ten minutes were up I pulled the door closed behind me, on that little room full of light and lily-of-the-valley smell, and listened as the voices downstairs trailed off into silence. I washed my face in the bathroom, dried it carefully and straightened my towel between Abby’s and Daniel’s. My face in the mirror looked very strange, pale and huge-eyed, staring out at me with some crucial, unreadable warning. I tugged my sweater down and checked to make sure the bulge of the gun didn’t show. Then I went downstairs.

They were in the sitting room, all three of them. For a second, before they saw me, I stood in the doorway watching them. Rafe was sprawled on the sofa, snapping a pack of cards from hand to hand in a fast restless arc. Abby, curled in her chair, had her head bent over the doll and her bottom lip caught hard between her teeth; she was trying to sew, but every stitch took her about three stabs. Justin was in one of the wingbacked chairs with a book, and for some reason he was the one who almost broke my heart: those narrow hunched shoulders, the darn in the sleeve of his sweater, those long hands on wrists as thin and vulnerable as a little boy’s. The coffee table was scattered with glasses and bottles—vodka, tonic, orange juice; something had splashed onto the table as they poured, but no one had bothered to clean it up. On the floor, shadows of ivy curled like cut-outs through the sunlight.

Then their heads came up, one by one, and their faces turned towards me, expressionless and watchful as they had been that first day on the steps. “How’re you doing?” Abby asked.

I shrugged.

“Have a drink,” Rafe said, nodding at the table. “If you want anything that’s not vodka, you’ll have to get it yourself.”

“I’m getting bits back,” I said. There was a long slant of sun lying across the floorboards at my feet, making the new varnish shine like water. I kept my eyes on that. “Bits of that night. They said that might happen, the doctors did.”

Trill and snap of the cards, again. “We know,” Rafe said.

“They let us watch,” Abby said softly. “While you talked to Mackey.”

I jerked my head up and stared at them, open-mouthed. “Well, Jesus,” I said, after a moment. “Were you going to tell me that? Ever?”

“We’re telling you now,” said Rafe.

“Fuck you,” I said, and the shake in my voice sounded like I was an inch from more tears. “Fuck the lot of you. How stupid do you think I am? Mackey was a total dickhead to me and I still kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t want to get you into trouble. But you were just going to let me keep being the idiot, for the rest of our lives, while all of you knew—” I pressed the back of my wrist over my mouth.

Abby said, very quietly and very carefully, “You kept your mouth shut.”

“I shouldn’t have,” I said, into my wrist. “I should’ve just told him everything I remember and let you bloody well deal with it.”

“What else,” Abby asked, “what else do you remember?”

My heart felt like it was about to slam straight out of my chest. If I had this wrong, then I was going down in flames, and every second of this month had been for nothing at all—crashing through these four lives, hurting Sam, staking my job: all for nothing. I was throwing every chip I had onto the table, without the slimmest clue how good my hand was. In that instant I thought of Lexie: how she had lived her whole life like this, all in on the blind; what it had cost her, in the end.

“The jacket,” I said. “The note, in the jacket pocket.”

For a second I thought I had lost. Their faces, upturned to me, were so utterly blank, as if what I had said meant nothing at all. I was already whipping through ways to backpedal (coma dream? morphine hallucination?) when Justin whispered, a tiny devastated breath, “Oh God.”

You didn’t usually bring your cigarettes on your walk, Daniel had said. I had been so focused on covering the slipup, it had taken me days to realize: I had burned Ned’s note. If Lexie didn’t have a lighter on her, then—short of eating the notes, which was a little extreme even for her—she had no quick way of getting rid of them. Maybe she had ripped them to tiny pieces on her way home, thrown the bits into hedges as she passed, like a dark Hansel-and-Gretel trail; or maybe she hadn’t wanted to leave even that much trace, maybe she had shoved them into her pocket to flush or burn later, at home.

She had been so fiercely careful, standing guard over her secrets. There was only one mistake I could imagine her making. Just once, hurrying home in the dark and the lashing rain—because it had to have been raining—with the baby already turning the edges of her mind to cotton wool and escape hammering through every vein, she had pushed the note into her pocket without remembering that the jacket she was wearing wasn’t all hers. She had been betrayed by the same thing she was betraying: the closeness of them, how much they had shared.

“Well,” Rafe said, reaching for his glass, one eyebrow arching up. He was trying for his best world-weary look, but his nostrils flared, just slightly, with each breath. “Nicely done, Justin my friend. This should be interesting.”

“What? What are you talking about, nicely done? She already knew—”

“Shut up,” said Abby. She had gone white, freckles standing out like face paint.

Rafe ignored her. “Well, if she didn’t, she does now.”

“It’s not my fault. Why do you always, always blame me for everything?”

Justin was very close to losing it. Rafe raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Do you hear me complaining? As far as I’m concerned, it’s about bloody time we got this over with.”

“We are not discussing this,” Abby said, “until Daniel gets home.”

Rafe started to laugh. “Oh, Abby,” he said. “I do love you, but sometimes I wonder about you. You have to know that, once Daniel gets home, we won’t be discussing this at all.”

“This is about all five of us. We don’t talk about it till we’re all here.”

“That’s crap,” I said. My voice was rising and I let it. “It’s such crap I can’t even listen to it. If this is about all five of us, then why didn’t you tell me weeks ago? If you can talk about it behind my back, then surely to God we can talk about it without Daniel.”

“Oh God,” Justin whispered again. His mouth was open, one hand trembling inches from it.

Abby’s mobile started to ring, in her bag. I had been listening for that sound all the way home, all the time in my room. Frank had let Daniel go.

“Leave it!” I yelled, loud enough to stop her hand midreach. “It’s Daniel, and I know exactly what he’s going to say anyway. He’ll just order you not to tell me anything, and I am so fucking sick of him treating me like I’m six! If anyone has a right to know exactly what happened here, it’s me. If you try to answer that bloody phone I swear I’m going to stamp on it!” I meant it, too. Sunday afternoon, all the traffic was headed into Dublin, not out; if Daniel floored it—and he would—and managed not to get pulled over, he could be home in maybe half an hour. I needed every second of that.

Rafe laughed, a small rough sound. “Attagirl,” he said, raising his glass to me.

Abby stared at me, her hand still halfway to her bag.

“If you guys don’t tell me what’s going on,” I said, “I’m phoning the cops right now and I’m telling them everything I remember. I am.”

“Jesus,” Justin whispered. “Abby . . .”

The phone stopped ringing.

“Abby,” I said, taking a deep breath. I could feel my nails digging into my hands. “I can’t do this if you guys keep leaving me out. This is important. I can’t . . . we can’t work this way. Either we’re all in this together or we’re not.”

Justin’s phone rang.

“You don’t even have to tell me who actually did it, if you don’t want to.” I was pretty sure that if I listened hard enough I’d hear Frank banging his head off a wall, somewhere, but I didn’t care: one step at a time. “I just want to know what happened. I’m so sick of everyone knowing but me. I’m so sick of it. Please.”

“She’s got every right to know,” Rafe said. “And personally, I’m also pretty sick of living my life on the basis of ‘Because Daniel said so.’ How well has that been working out for us, so far?”

The ringing stopped. “We should call him back,” Justin said, half out of his chair. “Shouldn’t we? What if he’s been arrested and he needs bail money, or something?”

“He hasn’t been arrested,” Abby said automatically. She dropped back into the chair and ran her hands over her face, blew out a long breath. “I keep telling you, they need evidence to arrest someone. He’s fine. Lexie, sit down.”

I stayed where I was. “Oh, God, sit down,” Rafe said, on a long-suffering sigh. “I’m going to tell you this whole pathetic saga anyway, whether anyone else likes it or not, and you’re getting on my nerves, fidgeting there. And Abby, chill out. We should have done this weeks ago.”

After a moment I went to my chair, by the fireplace. “Much better,” Rafe said, grinning at me. There was a reckless, risky gaiety in his face; he looked happier than he had in weeks. “Have a drink.”

“I don’t want one.”

He swung his legs off the sofa, poured a big sloppy vodka and orange and passed it to me. “Actually, I think we should all have another drink. We’re going to need it.” He topped up glasses with a flourish—Abby and Justin didn’t seem to notice—and raised his to the room. “Here’s to full disclosure.”

“OK,” Abby said, on a deep breath. “OK. If you really want to do this, and it’s coming back to you anyway, then I guess . . . what the hell.”

Justin opened his mouth, then shut it again and bit his lips.

Abby ran her hands through her hair, smoothing it hard. “Where do you want us to . . . ? I mean, I don’t know how much you remember, or . . .”

“Bits,” I said. “They don’t fit together or anything. Just go from the beginning. ” All the adrenaline had dissolved out of my blood and I felt so calm, all of a sudden. This was the last thing I would ever do in Whitethorn House. I could feel it all around me, every inch of it singing with sun and dust motes and memory, waiting to hear what came next. I felt like we had all the time in the world.

“You were heading out for your walk,” Rafe said helpfully, flopping back onto the sofa, “around, what, just after eleven? And Abby and I discovered we were both out of smokes. Funny, isn’t it, what little things make all the difference? If we’d been nonsmokers, this might never have happened. When they talk about the evils of tobacco, they never mention this.”

“You said you’d pick some up on your way,” Abby said. She was watching me carefully, hands clasped tight in her lap. “But you’re always gone for at least an hour, so I figured I might as well run out and get them at the petrol station. It looked like it was going to rain, so I threw on the jacket—I mean, it didn’t seem like you wanted it, you were already putting your coat on. I stuck my wallet in the pocket, and . . .”

Her voice trailed off and she made a small, tense gesture that could have meant anything. I kept my mouth shut. No more leading, if I could help it. The rest of this story had to come from them.

“And she pulled out this piece of paper,” Rafe said, through a cigarette, “and went, ‘What’s this?’ Nobody paid much attention, at first. We were all in the kitchen; we were doing the washing up, me and Justin and Daniel, and arguing about something or other—”

“Stevenson,” Justin said, softly and very sadly. “Remember? Jekyll and Hyde. Daniel was going on about them; something to do with reason and instinct. You were in a silly mood, Lexie, you said you’d had enough shop talk for the night and anyway Jekyll and Hyde would both have been crap in bed, and Rafe said, ‘A one-track mind, and it’s a dirt track . . .’ We were all laughing.”

“And then Abby said, ‘Lexie, what the hell?’ ” said Rafe. “A whole lot louder. We all stopped messing about and turned around, and she was holding out this ratty bit of paper and looking like someone had slapped her across the face—I’ve never seen her look like that, ever.”

“That’s the part I remember,” I said. My hands felt like they’d been melted onto the arms of the chair by some blast of heat. “Then it goes fuzzy again.”

“Luckily for you,” Rafe said, “we can help you with that. I think the rest of us will remember every second for the rest of our lives. You said, ‘Give me that,’ and grabbed for the piece of paper, but Abby jumped back, fast, and passed it to Daniel.”

“I think,” Justin said, in a low voice, “that was when we started to realize there was something serious happening. I’d been about to say something silly about a love letter—just teasing you, Lexie—but you were so . . . You lunged at Daniel, trying to get it away from him. He shot out his other hand to hold you off, sort of reflexively, but you were fighting him, really fighting—punching at his arm, trying to kick him, grabbing for that thing. You didn’t make a single sound. That’s what frightened me most, I think: the silence. It seemed like people should be shouting or screaming or something, like then I might be able to do something, but it was so quiet—just you and Daniel breathing hard, and the tap still running . . .”

“Abby caught hold of your arm,” Rafe said, “but you whipped round, with your fists up; I honestly thought you were about to go for her. Justin and I were standing there gawping like a pair of morons, trying to figure out what the fuck—I mean, two seconds ago we’d been on Jekyll sex, for God’s sake. As soon as you let go of Daniel, he shoved the paper at me, caught your wrists from behind and told me, ‘Read that.’ ”

“I didn’t like it,” Justin said softly. “You were flinging yourself back and forth, trying to pull away from Daniel, but he wouldn’t let go. It was . . . You tried to bite him, his arm. I thought he shouldn’t be doing that, if it was your paper then he should let you have it, but I just couldn’t catch up enough to say anything.”

I wasn’t surprised. These were not men of action here; their currencies were thoughts and words, and they had been catapulted into something that blew both of those right out of the water. What did surprise me, what set warning lights flashing at the back of my mind, was the speed and ease with which Daniel had snapped into action.

“So,” Rafe said, “I read the thing out loud. It said, ‘Dear Lexie, have thought it over and OK we can talk about 200K. Please get in touch ’cause I know we both want to get this deal wrapped up. Best regards, Ned.’ ”

“Surely to God,” Justin said softly and bitterly, into the airless silence, “you remember that.”

“The spelling was shit,” said Rafe, through his cigarette. “He actually had a number two for ‘to,’ like a fucking fourteen-year-old. What an utter moron. Apart from anything else, I would’ve expected you to have better taste than to mess about making shoddy little deals with someone like that.”

“Would you have?” Abby asked. Her eyes were very steady on mine, searching, and her hands had gone still in her lap. “If none of this had happened, would you really have sold out to Ned?”

When I think about how breathtakingly cruel I was to those four, this is one of the few things that make me feel any better: I could have said yes, then. I could have told them exactly what Lexie was planning to do to them, to everything they had put their hearts and minds and bodies into building. Maybe that would have hurt them less, in the end, than thinking it had all been over nothing; I don’t know. All I know is that the last time I had a choice, and much too late to make any difference, I lied for the right reasons.

“No,” I said. “I just . . . God. I just needed to know I could. I freaked out, Abby. I started feeling trapped and I panicked. It was never about actually leaving. I just had to know I could leave, if I wanted to.”

“Trapped,” Justin said, and his head moved in a quick, hurt jerk. “With us,” but I saw Abby’s fast blink as she realized: the baby.

“You were going to stay.”

“Oh God, I wanted to stay,” I said, and I still don’t know and never will whether this one was a lie at all. “So much, Abby. I really did.”

After a long moment she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“I told you,” Rafe said, tipping his head back and blowing smoke at the ceiling. “Fucking Daniel. Up until last week he was still practically hysterical with paranoia about that. I told him I’d talked to you and you had no intention of going anywhere, but God forbid he should listen to anyone.”

Abby didn’t react to that, didn’t move; it looked like she wasn’t even breathing. “And now?” she asked me. “Now what?”

For a light-headed second I lost the thread, thought she had made me and was asking if I wanted to stay anyway. “What do you mean?”

“She means,” Rafe said, his voice cool and clipped and very level, “when this conversation is over, are you going to phone Mackey or O’Neill or the village idiots and turn us in. Shop us. Rat us out. Whatever the appropriate expression is, in these circumstances.”

You’d think this would have sent guilt shooting through me like pins and needles, spreading from that mike red-hot against my skin, but the only thing I felt was sad: a huge, final, dragging sadness, like an ebb tide down in my bones. “I’m not going to say anything to anyone,” I said, and felt Frank, off in his little humming circle of electronics, approve. “I don’t want you guys going to jail. No matter what happened.”

“Well,” Abby said softly, almost to herself. She sat back in her chair and smoothed her skirt, absently, with both hands. “Well, then . . .”

“Well, then,” Rafe said, and drew hard on his smoke, “we made this whole thing an awful lot more complicated than it needed to be. Somehow, I’m not surprised.”

“Then what?” I said. “After the note. Then what happened?”

A small, tense shift through the room. None of them were looking at each other. I searched for some tiny difference between their faces, anything that would hint that this conversation was hitting one of them harder than the others, that someone was protecting, being protected, guilty, defensive: nothing.

“Then,” Abby said, on a big breath. “Lex, I don’t know if you’d thought about what it would mean, if you sold your share to Ned. You don’t always . . . I don’t know. Think things through.”

A vicious snort from Rafe. “That’s putting it mildly. My God, Lexie, what the hell did you think would happen? You’d sell up, buy yourself a nice little apartment somewhere, and everything would be just ducky? What did you expect to get when you walked into college every morning? Hugs and kisses and your sandwich all ready for you? We would never have spoken to you again. We would have hated your guts.”

“Ned would have been at the rest of us,” Abby said, “all the time, every day, to sell out to some developer and turn this house into apartments or a golf club or whatever the hell it was that he wanted. He could have moved in here, lived with us, and there would’ve been nothing we could do about it. Sooner or later, we would have given up. We would have lost the house. This house.”

Something stirred, subtle and waking: a tiny ripple in the walls, a creak of floorboards upstairs, a draft spinning down the stairwell.

“We all started shouting,” Justin said, low. “Screaming, everyone at once—I don’t even know what I was saying. You got away from Daniel, and Rafe grabbed you, and you hit him—hard, Lexie, you punched him in the stomach—”

“It was a fight,” Rafe said. “We can call it whatever we want, but the fact is we were fighting like a bunch of scumbags on a street corner. Another thirty seconds and we would all have been rolling around on the kitchen floor beating the living shit out of each other. Except that before we got that far—”

“Except,” Abby said, her voice slicing his off clean as a slammed door, “we never got that far.”

She met Rafe’s eyes calmly, unblinking. After a second he shrugged and slumped back on the sofa, one foot jiggling restlessly.

“It could have been any of us,” Abby said, to me or to Rafe, I couldn’t tell. There was a depth of passion in her voice that startled me. “We were all raging—I’ve never been that angry in my life. The rest was just chance; just the way things happened. Every one of us was ready to kill you, Lexie, and you can’t blame us.”

That stirring again, somewhere off the far edge of my hearing: a whisk across the landing, a humming in the chimneys. “I don’t,” I said. I wondered—I should have known a whole lot better, I must have read too many cheesy ghost stories as a kid—if this was all Lexie had wanted from me: to let them know it was OK. “You had every right to be mad. Even afterwards, you would’ve had every right to throw me out.”

“We talked about it,” Abby said. Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Me and Daniel. Whether we could all still live together, after . . . But it would have been complicated, and anyway, it was you. No matter what, it was still you.”

“The next thing I remember,” Justin said, very quietly, “is the back door slamming and this knife lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. With blood on it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening.”

“And you just let me go?” I said, to my hands. “You didn’t even bother to find out if—”

“No,” said Abby, leaning forwards, trying to catch my eye. “No, Lex. Of course we bothered. It took us all a minute to catch up with what had happened, but the second we did . . . It was Daniel, mostly; the rest of us were basically paralyzed. By the time I could move again, he was already getting the torch out. He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages ready—”

“Which would have come in useful,” Rafe said, lighting another cigarette, “if we’d been delivering a baby in Gone With the Wind. What on earth was he picturing? Home surgery on the kitchen table with Abby’s embroidery needle?”

“—and he and Justin went looking for you. Straight away.”

It had been a good call. Daniel had known he could trust Abby to keep it together; if anyone flaked out, it would be Rafe or Justin. He had got them separated, put them both under supervision and come up with a plan that kept them both busy, all within seconds. The guy was wasted on academia.

“I’m not sure we were really as quick off the mark as we think,” Justin said. “We could have been standing there in a daze for a good five or ten minutes, for all I know. I can barely remember that part; my mind’s wiped it out. The first thing I’m clear on is that, by the time Daniel and I got to the back gate, you were gone. We didn’t know if you’d headed for the village to get help, or collapsed somewhere, or—”

“I just ran,” I said quietly. “I just remember running. I didn’t even notice I was bleeding for ages.” Justin flinched.

“I don’t think you were, at first,” Abby said gently. “There wasn’t any blood on the kitchen floor, or on the patio.”

They had checked. I wondered when, and whether that had been Daniel’s idea or Abby’s. “That was the other thing,” Justin said. “We didn’t know . . . well, how bad it was. You were gone so fast, we hadn’t had a chance to . . . We thought—I mean, I thought, anyway—since you had got out of sight so quickly, it couldn’t be all that serious, could it? It might have been just a nick, for all we knew.”

“Ha,” said Rafe, reaching for an ashtray.

“We didn’t know. It might have been. I said so to Daniel, but he just gave me a look that could have meant anything. So we . . . God. We started looking for you. Daniel said the most urgent thing was to find out if you’d gone to the village, but it was all locked up and dark, just the odd light on in bedrooms; there was obviously nothing going on. So we started working our way back towards the house, going back and forth in these big arcs, hoping we’d cross paths with you somewhere along the way.”

He stared down at the glass in his hands. “At least, that’s what I assume we were doing. I was just following Daniel on and on and on through this pitch-black labyrinth of lanes; I had no idea where we were, my sense of direction was completely gone. We were afraid to switch on the torch and afraid to call you—I’m not even sure why, it just seemed too dangerous: in case someone in a farmhouse noticed or in case you hid from us, I suppose, I don’t know which. So Daniel just flicked on the torch for a second every few minutes, cupped his hand around it and did a quick sweep, then switched it off again. The rest of the time we felt our way by the hedges. It was freezing, like winter—we hadn’t even thought of coats. It didn’t seem to bother Daniel, you know what he’s like, but I couldn’t feel my toes; I was sure I was getting frost-bite. We wandered around for hours—”

“You didn’t,” Rafe said. “Trust me. We were stuck here with a bottle of disinfectant and a bloody knife and nothing to do but stare at the clock and go out of our minds. You were only gone about forty-five minutes.”

Justin shrugged, a tense twitch. “Well, it felt like hours. Finally Daniel stopped dead—I bumped straight into the back of him, like something out of Laurel and Hardy—and he said, ‘This is absurd. We’ll never find her like this.’ I asked him what else he suggested we should do, but he ignored me. He just stood there, staring up at the sky like he was waiting for divine inspiration; it was starting to cloud over, but the moon had come up, I could see his profile against it. After a moment he said—perfectly normally, as if we were in the middle of some dinner-table discussion—‘Well, let’s assume she’s headed for a specific place, rather than simply wandering around in the dark. She must have been meeting Ned somewhere. Somewhere sheltered, surely; the weather’s so unpredictable. Is there anywhere nearby that she—’ And then he took off. He was running, flat out, and fast, I didn’t know he could run like that—I don’t think I’d ever seen Daniel run before, have you?”

“He ran the other night,” Rafe said, grinding out his cigarette. “After the torch-bearing villager. He’s fast, all right, when he needs to be.”

“I didn’t have a clue where he was going; all I could think about was trying to keep up. For some reason the idea of being out there by myself sent me into a complete panic—I mean, I know we were only a few hundred yards from home, but that’s not what it felt like. It felt . . .” Justin shivered. “It felt dangerous, ” he said. “Like something was happening, all round us, and we couldn’t see it, but if I was on my own . . .”

“That was shock, hon,” Abby said gently. “It’s normal.”

Justin shook his head, still staring down at his glass. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t like that.” He took a quick, hard swig of his drink and grimaced. “Then Daniel switched the torch on and swung it around—it was like a lighthouse beam, I was sure everyone for miles around would come running—and he stopped on that cottage. I only saw it for a second, just a corner of broken-down wall. Then the torch went out again, and Daniel threw himself over the wall into the field. There was all this long wet grass tangling round my ankles, it was like trying to run through porridge . . .” He blinked at his glass and pushed it away from him on the bookshelf; a little of his drink splashed out, staining someone’s notes with sickly orange splotches. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“You don’t smoke,” Rafe said. “You’re the good one.”

“If I have to tell this story,” said Justin, “I want a fucking cigarette.”

There was a high, precarious wobble in his voice. “Knock it off, Rafe,” Abby said. She stretched over to pass Justin her smoke packet; as he took it, she caught his hand and squeezed.

Justin lit the cigarette clumsily, holding it high up between stiff fingers, inhaled too hard and choked. No one said anything while he coughed, caught his breath, wiped his eyes with a knuckle under his glasses.

“Lexie,” Abby said. “Can’t we just . . . You’ve got the important part. Can’t we leave it?”

“I want to hear,” I said. I could hardly breathe.

“So do I,” said Rafe. “I’ve never heard this part either, and I’ve got a feeling it might be interesting. Aren’t you curious, Abby? Or do you already know this story?”

Abby shrugged. “All right,” said Justin. His eyes were pressed shut and his jaw was so tense he could barely get the cigarette between his lips. “I’m . . . Just give me a second. God.”

He took another drag, retched a little, managed to hold it. “OK,” he said. He had his voice under control again. “So we got to the cottage. There was just enough moonlight that I could see outlines—the walls, the doorway. Daniel switched on the torch, with his other hand partway over it, and . . .”

His eyes opened, skated away from us to the window. “You were sitting in a corner, against the wall. I shouted something—called you, maybe, I don’t know—and I started to run over to you, but Daniel grabbed my arm, hard, he hurt me, and pulled me back. He put his mouth right up against my ear and hissed, ‘Shut up,’ and then, ‘Don’t move. You stay right here. You stay still.’ He shook my arm—I had bruises—and then he let go of me and went over to you. He put his fingers on your throat, like this, checking your pulse—he had the torch on you, and you looked . . .”

Justin’s eyes were still on the window. “You looked like a wee girl asleep,” he said, and the grief in his voice was soft and relentless as rain. “And then Daniel said, ‘She’s dead.’ That’s what we thought, Lexie. We thought you had died.”

“You must have already been in the coma,” Abby said gently. “The cops told us it would have slowed down your heartbeat, your breathing, stuff like that. If it hadn’t been so cold—”

“Daniel straightened up,” Justin said, “and wiped his hand on the front of his shirt—I’m not sure why, it wasn’t bloody or anything, but that was all I could see: him rubbing his hand down his chest, over and over, as if he didn’t even know he was doing it. I couldn’t—I couldn’t look at you. I went to hold myself up against the wall—I mean, I was hyperventilating, I thought I was going to faint—but he said, very sharply, ‘Don’t touch anything. Put your hands in your pockets. And hold your breath for a count of ten.’ I didn’t understand what he was talking about, none of it made any sense, but I did it anyway.”

“We always do,” Rafe said, in an undertone. Abby gave him a quick glance.

“After a minute Daniel said, ‘If she had gone for her walk as usual, she would have her keys and wallet on her, and that torch she uses. One of us needs to go home and get them. The other one should stay here. It’s unlikely that anyone will pass by, at this hour, but we don’t know the full extent of her arrangements with Ned, and if someone does happen to pass, we need to know about it. Which would you prefer to do?’ ”

Justin made a tentative move to stretch out a hand to me, took it back and clasped it tightly around his other elbow. “I told him I couldn’t stay there. I’m sorry, Lexie. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have been . . . I mean, it was you; it was still you, even if you had been . . . But I couldn’t. I was—I was shaking all over, I think I must have been gibbering at him . . . Finally he said—and he didn’t even seem upset, not any more, just impatient—he said, ‘For heaven’s sake, shut up. I’ll stay. Get home as fast as you can. Put your gloves on and get Lexie’s keys, her wallet and her torch. Tell the others what’s happened. They’ll want to come back with you; don’t let them, whatever you do. The last thing we need is more people trampling all over the place, and anyway there’s no point in giving them more to forget. Come straight back here. Take the torch with you, but don’t use it unless you really need to, and try to be quiet. Can you remember all that?’ ”

He drew hard on the cigarette. “I said yes—I’d have said yes if he’d asked me whether I could fly home, as long as it meant getting out of there. He made me repeat it all back to him. Then he sat down on the ground, beside you—not too close, I suppose in case he got . . . you know. Blood on his trousers. And he looked up at me and said, ‘Well? Go on. Hurry.’

“So I went home. It was horrible. It took—well, if Rafe’s right, it can’t have actually taken that long. I don’t know. I got lost. There were places where I knew I should have been able to see the lights from the house, but I couldn’t; just black, for miles around. I knew for sure, like a fact, that the house wasn’t even there any more; there was nothing left but hedges and lanes, on and on, this huge maze and I would never get out of it, it would never be daylight again. That there were things watching me, up in the trees and hidden in the hedges—I don’t know what kind of things, but . . . watching me, and laughing. I was terrified. When I finally saw the house—just this faint gold glow, over the bushes—it was such a relief I almost screamed. The next thing I remember is pushing the back door open—”

“He looked like The Scream,” Rafe said, “only muddier. And he was making absolutely no sense; half what came out of his mouth was pure gibberish, like he was speaking in tongues. All we could make out was that he had to go back, and that Daniel said we should stay where we were. Personally, I thought fuck that, I wanted to go find out what the hell was going on, but when I started getting my coat, Justin and Abby both went into such hysterics that I gave up.”

“And a good thing too,” Abby said coolly. She had gone back to the doll; her hair fell across her face, hiding it, and even from across the room I could tell that her stitches were huge and sloppy and useless. “What possible use do you think you could have been?”

Rafe shrugged. “We’ll never know, will we? I know that cottage; if Justin had just told me where he was going, I could have gone instead, and he could have stayed here and pulled himself together. But apparently that’s not what Daniel had in mind.”

“Presumably he had reasons.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Rafe said. “I’m sure he did. So Justin flapped around for a bit, grabbing things and babbling at us, and then he dashed out again.”

“I don’t remember getting back to the cottage,” Justin said. “Afterwards I was absolutely covered in mud, up to my knees—maybe I fell over, I don’t know—and I had all these little scratches on my hands; I think I must have been holding onto the hedges to stay standing. Daniel was still sitting beside you; I’m not sure he’d moved since I left. He looked up at me—there was rain on his glasses—and do you know what he said? He said, ‘This rain should come in useful. If it keeps up, any blood or footprints will be gone by the time the police arrive.’ ”

Rafe moved, a sudden restless shift that made the sofa springs grate.

“I just stood there staring at him. All I heard was ‘police’ and I honestly couldn’t think what the police had to do with anything, but it terrified me just the same. He looked me up and down and then he said, ‘You’re not wearing gloves.’ ”

“With Lexie right there beside him,” Rafe said, to nobody in particular. “Lovely.”

“I’d forgotten all about the gloves. I mean, I was . . . well, you get the idea. Daniel sighed and got up—he didn’t even seem to be in a hurry—and wiped his glasses on his handkerchief. Then he held out the handkerchief to me and I tried to take it, I thought he meant for me to clean my glasses as well, but he whipped it away and said, sort of irritably, ‘Keys?’ So I brought them out, and he took them and wiped them off—that was when I finally figured out what the handkerchief was all about. Then he . . .” Justin moved in the chair, as if he was looking for something but wasn’t sure what. “Do you really not remember any of this?”

“I don’t know,” I said, giving a convulsive little shrug. I still wasn’t looking at him, except out of the corner of my eye, and it was making him nervous. “If I remembered, I wouldn’t have to ask you, would I?”

“OK. OK.” Justin pushed his glasses up his nose. “Well. Then Daniel . . . Your hands were sort of in your lap, and they were all . . . He picked one of your arms up by the sleeve, so he could get the keys into your coat pocket. Then he let go, and your arm—it just fell, Lexie, like a rag doll’s, with this awful thud . . . I couldn’t watch any more after that, I really couldn’t. I kept the torch on—on you, so he could see, but I turned around and looked out at the field—I hoped maybe Daniel would think I was watching in case anyone came. He said, ‘Wallet’ and then ‘torch’ and I passed them back to him, but I don’t know what he did with them—I heard scuffly noises, but I was trying not to picture . . .”

He took a deep, shaky breath. “It took him forever. The wind was getting up and there were noises everywhere, rustles and creaks and little skittering sounds . . . I don’t know how you do it, wandering around there at night. The rain was coming down harder but only in patches, there were these huge clouds blowing fast, and every time the moon came out the whole field looked alive. Maybe it was just shock, like Abby says, but I think . . . I don’t know. Maybe there are some places that just aren’t right. They’re not good for you. For your mind.”

He was staring somewhere in the middle of the room, eyes unfocused, remembering. I thought of that small unmistakable shot of current up the back of my neck and I wondered, for the first time, how often John Naylor had really been following me.

“Finally Daniel straightened up and said, ‘That should do it. Let’s go.’ So I turned around, and . . .” Justin swallowed. “I still had the torch on you. Your head had sort of fallen on one shoulder, and it was raining on you, there was rain on your face; it looked like you were crying in your sleep, like you’d had a bad dream . . . I couldn’t—God. I couldn’t stand the thought of just leaving you there like that. I wanted to stay with you till it got light, or at least till it stopped raining, but when I said that to Daniel he looked at me like I had lost my mind. So I told him at least, at the very least, we had to get you out of the rain. At first he said no to that, too; but when he realized that I wasn’t going to leave otherwise, that he’d have to physically drag me all the way home, he gave in. He was absolutely furious—all this stuff about how it would be my fault if we all ended up in jail—but I didn’t care. So we . . .”

Wetness shone on Justin’s cheek, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You were so heavy,” he said. “You’re such a little slip of a thing, I’ve picked you up a million times; I thought . . . But it was like dragging a huge sack of wet sand. And you were so cold, and so . . . your face felt like something else; like that doll. I couldn’t believe it was really you.

“We got you into that room with the roof, and I tried to make you—make it less . . . It was so cold. I wanted to put my cardigan over you, but I knew Daniel would do something if I tried; hit me, I don’t know. He was rubbing things off with his handkerchief—even your face, where I’d touched you, and your neck where he’d felt for . . . He broke off a branch from those bushes at the door, and he swept out the whole place. Footprints, I suppose. He looked . . . God. Grotesque. Walking backwards in that awful eerie room, hunched over with this branch, sweeping. The torch shining through his fingers, and these huge shadows swinging on the walls . . .”

He wiped his face, stared down at his fingertips. “I said a prayer over you, before we left. I know that’s not much, but . . .” His face was wet again. “May perpetual light shine upon her,” he said.

“Justin,” Abby said, gently. “She’s right here.”

Justin shook his head. “Then,” he said, “we went home.”

After a moment Rafe clicked his lighter, hard—all three of us jumped. “They showed up on the patio,” he said. “Looking like something out of Night of the Living Dead.”

“We were both practically screaming at them, trying to find out what had happened,” Abby said, “but Daniel just stared past us; he had this terrible glassy look, I don’t think he really saw us. He put out one arm to stop Justin going inside, and he said, ‘Does anyone have any washing to do?’ ”