The Likeness: A Novel (57 page)

“As if nothing had ever happened,” I said.
“I thought so. She never meant to hurt us; none of us ever meant to hurt her, let alone kill her. I still believe that should count for something.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “That it just happened. She had been negotiating with Ned for a while, but before they could finalize anything, the four of you somehow found out.” Actually, I had the beginnings of an idea how that part had gone down, too, but there was no reason to share that with Daniel. I was saving that one for when it would make the loudest bang. “I think there was a blazing row, and in the middle of it, someone stabbed Lexie. Probably no one, not even the two of them, was sure exactly what had happened; Lexie could well have thought she had just been punched. She slammed out and ran for the cottage—maybe she was supposed to meet Ned that night, maybe it was just blind instinct, I don’t know. Either way, Ned never showed up. The ones who found her were you guys.”
Daniel sighed. “Roughly,” he said, “yes. In every essential, that’s what happened. Can’t you leave it at that? You know the gist of it; the other details would do no one the slightest bit of good and would do several people considerable harm. She was lovely, she was complicated and she is dead. What else is there that matters, now?”
“Well,” I said. “There’s the question of who killed her.”
“Has it occurred to you,” Daniel asked, and there was an undercurrent of some intense emotion building in his voice, “to wonder whether Lexie herself would want you to pursue this? No matter what she was considering doing, she loved us. Do you think she would want you setting out specifically to destroy us?”
Something still bending the air, rippling the stones under my feet; something high as a needle against the sky and shivering just behind each leaf. “She found me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for her. She came for me.”
“Possibly she did,” said Daniel. He was leaning towards me across the water, close, his elbows on his knees; behind the glasses his eyes were magnified, gray and bottomless. “But are you really so sure that what she wanted was revenge? She could so easily have run for the village, after all: knocked on a door, got someone to call an ambulance and the police. The villagers may not like us very much, but I doubt they would have denied help to an obviously wounded woman. Instead, she went straight to the cottage and simply stayed there, waiting. Haven’t you ever wondered if she may have been a willing participant in her own death and in the concealment of her killer—if she went consenting, one of us to the end? Haven’t you ever wondered if perhaps, for her sake, you should respect that?”
The air tasted strange, sweet, honey and salt. “Yeah,” I said. It was hard to talk, the thoughts seemed to take forever moving between my mind and my tongue. “I have. I’ve wondered all the time. But I’m not doing this for Lexie. I’m doing this because it’s my job.”
It’s such a cliché, and I said it so automatically; but the words seemed to whipcrack through the air startling and potent as electricity, rocketing down the ivy trails, burning white on the water. For a split second I was back in that first reeking stairwell with my hands in my pockets, looking up at that young junkie’s dead bewildered face. I was stone cold sober again, that dreamlike dazzle had dissolved out of the air and the bench was solid and clammy under my arse. Daniel was watching me with a new alertness in his eyes, watching me like he had never seen me before. It was only in that second that it hit me: it was true, what I had said to him, and maybe it had been true all along.
“Well,” he said, quietly. “In that case . . .”
He leaned back, slowly, away from me, against the wall. There was a long, humming silence.
“Where,” Daniel said. He stopped for an instant, but his voice stayed perfectly even: “Where is Lexie now?”
“In the morgue,” I said. “We haven’t been able to reach her next of kin.”
“We’ll do whatever needs to be done. I think she would prefer that.”
“The body is evidence in an open homicide case,” I said. “I doubt anyone’s going to release it to you. Until the investigation’s closed, she’ll have to stay where she is.”
There was no need for me to get graphic. I knew what he was seeing; my mind had a full-color slide show of the same images ready and waiting to play. Something rippled over Daniel’s face, a tiny spasm tightening his nose and lips.
“As soon as we know who did this to her,” I said, “I can argue that the body should be released to the rest of you. That you count as her next of kin.”
For a second his eyelids flickered; then his face turned blank. Looking back, I think—not that this is any excuse—that it was the easiest thing to miss about Daniel: how ruthlessly, lethally pragmatic he was, under the vague ivory-tower haze. An officer on the battlefield will leave his own dead brother behind without a second look, while the enemy’s still circling, to get his live men safe away.
“Obviously,” Daniel said, “I’d like you to leave this house. The others won’t be back for an hour or so; that should give you ample time to pack your things and make any necessary arrangements.”
This should hardly have come as a surprise, but it still felt like he’d slapped me straight across the face. He felt for his cigarette case. “I’d prefer that the others not find out who you are. I think you can imagine how badly it would upset them. I admit I’m not sure how to accomplish this, but surely you and Detective Mackey have a get-out clause in place, no? Some story you worked out to extricate you without raising any suspicions?”
It was the obvious thing to do, the only thing. You get burned, you get out, fast. And I had everything a girl could ask for. I had narrowed our suspects down to four; Sam and Frank would be well able to take it from there. I could get around the fact that this wasn’t on tape: disconnect the mike wire and claim it was accidental—Frank might not believe me, exactly, but he wouldn’t care—report back the bits of this conversation that suited me, bounce back home immaculate and triumphant and take a bow.
I never even considered doing it. “We do, yeah,” I said. “I can get out of here on a couple of hours’ notice without blowing my cover. I’m not going to, though. Not till I find out who killed Lexie, and why.”
Daniel turned his head and looked at me, and in that second I smelled danger, clear and cold as snow. Why not? I had invaded his home, his family, and I was trying to wreck them both for good. Either he or one of his own had already killed a woman for doing the same thing on a lesser scale. He was strong enough to do it and very possibly smart enough to get away with it, and I had left my gun in my bedroom. The trickle of water sang on at our feet and electricity fizzed through my back, down into the palms of my hands. I held his eyes and didn’t move, didn’t blink.
After a long moment his shoulders shifted, almost imperceptibly, and I saw his gaze turn inwards, abstracted. He had rejected that idea: he was moving towards some other plan, his mind clicking through options, sorting, classifying, connecting, faster than I could guess. “You won’t do it, you know,” he said. “You assume that my reluctance to hurt the others gives you an advantage—that, as they’ll continue to believe you’re Lexie, you have a chance at getting them to talk to you. But believe me, they’re all very well aware of what’s at stake. I’m not talking about the possibility of one or all of us going to jail; you have no evidence pointing towards any one of us in particular, no case against us either individually or collectively, or you’d have made your arrests long ago and this charade would never have been necessary. In fact, I’m willing to bet that, until a few minutes ago, you weren’t actually certain that your target was within Whitethorn House.”
“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?”