“Jesus H. Christ, Daniel,” said Rafe.
“I did warn you,” said Justin.
“In fairness, he did,” said Abby. “If I remember, he said it was a cross between an archaeological site and the nastier bits of Stephen King.”
“I know, but I thought he was exaggerating as usual. I didn’t expect him to be understating.”
Someone—Daniel—took the lighter off Abby and cupped his hand around a cigarette; there was a draft coming from somewhere. His face on the wobbly screen was calm, unperturbed. He glanced up over the flame and gave Lexie a solemn wink. Maybe because I had spent so long staring at that photo, there was something astonishing about seeing them all in action. It was like being one of those kids in books who find a magic spyglass that lets them into the secret life of some old painting, enthralling and risky.
“Don’t,” said Justin, taking the lighter and poking gingerly at something on a rickety shelf. “If you want to smoke, go outside.”
“Why?” asked Daniel. “So I don’t smudge the wallpaper, or so I don’t stink up the curtains?”
“He’s got a point,” said Abby.
“What a bunch of wusses,” said Lexie. “I think this place is terrifantastic. I feel like one of the Famous Five.”
“Five Find a Prehistoric Ruin,” Daniel said.
“Five Find the Mold Planet,” said Rafe. “Simply spiffing.”
“We should have ginger cake and potted meat,” Lexie said.
“Together?” asked Rafe.
“And sardines,” said Lexie. “What is potted meat?”
“Spam,” Abby told her.
“Ew.”
Justin went over to the sink, held the lighter close and turned on the taps. One of them sputtered, popped and eventually let out a thin stream of water.
“Mmm,” said Abby. “Typhoid tea, anyone?”
“I want to be George,” said Lexie. “She was cool.”
“I don’t care as long as I’m not Anne,” Abby said. “She always got stuck doing the washing up, just because she was a girl.”
“What’s wrong with that?” asked Rafe.
“You can be Timmy the dog,” Lexie told him.
The rhythms of their conversation were faster than I had expected, smart and sharp as a jitterbug, and I could see why the rest of the English department thought this lot were up themselves. They had to be impossible to talk to; those tight, polished syncopations didn’t leave room for anyone else. Somehow, though, Lexie had managed to slot herself in there, tailored herself or rearranged them inch by inch till she made a place for herself and became part of them, seamless. Whatever this girl’s game was, she had been good at it.
A small clear voice at the back of my head said: Just like I’m good at mine.
Miraculously, the screen lit up, more or less, as a forty-watt bulb came on overhead: Abby had found the light switch, in an unlikely corner by a grease-draped cooker. “Well done, Abby,” said Lexie, panning.
“I’m not sure,” said Abby. “It looks even worse now that I can see it.”
She was right. The walls had obviously been papered at some stage, but a greenish mold had staged a coup, creeping in from every corner and almost meeting in the middle. Spectacular Halloween-decoration cobwebs trailed from the ceiling, swaying gently in the draft. The linoleum was grayish and curling, with sinister dark streaks; on the table was a glass vase holding a bunch of very dead flowers, stalks broken and sagging at odd angles. Everything was about three inches thick with dust. Abby looked deeply skeptical; Rafe looked amused, in a horrified kind of way; Daniel looked mildly intrigued; Justin looked like he might throw up.
“You want me to live there?” I said to Frank.
“It doesn’t look like that now,” he told me, reproachfully. “They’ve really done a lot with it.”
“Have they bulldozed it and started over?”
“It’s lovely. You’ll love it. Shh.”
“Here,” Lexie said; the camera jerked and swung wildly, caught cobwebby curtains in a horrible seventies orange swirl. “You mind that. I want to explore.”
“I hope you’ve had your shots,” Rafe said. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“Don’t tempt me,” Lexie told him, and bounced into shot, heading over towards the cupboards.
She moved lighter than me, small steps tipped up on the balls of her feet, and girlier: her curves were no more impressive than mine, obviously, but she had a dancing little swing that made you notice them. Her hair had been longer then, just long enough to pull into two curly bunches over her ears, and she was wearing jeans and a tight cream-colored sweater a lot like one I used to have. I still had no idea whether we would have liked each other, if we had had the chance to meet—probably not—but that was beside the point, so irrelevant that I didn’t even know how to think about it.
“Wow,” Lexie said, peering into one of the cupboards. “What is it? Is it alive?”
“It may well have been,” Daniel said, leaning over her shoulder. “A very long time ago.”
“I think it’s the other way around,” said Abby. “It didn’t use to be alive, but it is now. Has it evolved opposable thumbs yet?”
“I miss my flat,” said Justin lugubriously, from a safe distance.
“You do not,” Lexie told him. “Your flat was three foot square and made from reconstituted cardboard and you hated it.”
“My flat didn’t have unidentified life-forms.”
“Whatsisname upstairs with the sound system who thought he was Ali G.”
“I think it’s some kind of fungus,” Daniel said, inspecting the cupboard with interest.
“That does it,” said Rafe. “I am not recording this. When we’re old and gray and wallowing in nostalgia, our first memories of our home should not be defined by fungus. How do I turn this thing off?”
A second of linoleum; then the screen went black.
“We’ve got forty-two clips like that,” Frank told me, hitting buttons, “all between about one minute and five minutes long. Add in, say, another week’s worth of intensive interviews with her associates, and I’m pretty sure we’ll have enough information to put together our very own DIY Lexie Madison. Assuming, that is, that you want to.”
He froze the frame on Lexie, head turned over her shoulder to say something, eyes bright and mouth half open in a smile. I looked at her, soft-edged and flickering like she might fly off the screen at any second, and I thought: I used to be like that. Sure-footed and invulnerable, up for anything that came along. Just a few months ago, I used to be like that.
“Cassie,” Frank said softly. “Your call.”
For what seemed like a long time, I thought about saying no. Back to DV: the standard Monday crop of the weekend’s aftermath, too many bruises and high-necked sweaters and sunglasses indoors, the regulars filing charges on their boyfriends and withdrawing them by Tuesday night, Maher sitting beside me like a big pink ham in a sweater and sniggering predictably every time we pulled a case with foreign names.
If I went back in there the next morning I would never leave. I knew it solid as a fist in my stomach. This girl was like a dare, flung hard and deadly accurate straight at me: a once-off chance, and catch it if you can.
O’Kelly stretched out his legs and sighed ostentatiously; Cooper examined the cracks in the ceiling. I could tell from the stillness of Sam’s shoulders that he wasn’t breathing. Only Frank was looking at me, his eyes steady and unblinking. The air of the squad room hurt everywhere it touched me. Lexie in dim gold light on the screen was a dark lake I could high-dive into, she was a thin-ice river I could skate away on, she was a long-distance flight leaving now.
“Tell me this woman smoked,” I said.
My ribs opened up like windows, I’d forgotten you could breathe that deeply. "Jesus, you took your time,” said O’Kelly, heaving himself out of his chair and pulling his trousers up over his belly. “I think you’re bloody certifiable, but nothing new there. When you get yourself killed, don’
t come crying to me.”
“Fascinating,” Cooper said, eyeing me speculatively; a part of him was obviously working out the odds that I would end up on his table. “Do keep me posted.”
Sam ran a hand over his mouth, hard, and I saw his neck sag. “Marlboro Lights,” Frank said, and hit Eject, a big grin slowly breaking across his face. "That’s my girl.”"
* * *
I used to believe, bless my naive little heart, that I had something to offer the robbed dead. Not revenge—there’s no revenge in the world that could return the tiniest fraction of what they’ve lost—and not justice, whatever that means, but the one thing left to give them: the truth. I was good at it. I had one, at least, of the things that make a great detective: the instinct for truth, the inner magnet whose pull tells you beyond any doubt what’s dross, what’s alloy and what’s the pure, uncut metal. I dug out the nuggets without caring when they cut my fingers and brought them in my cupped hands to lay on graves, until I found out—Operation Vestal again—how slippery they were, how easily they crumbled, how deep they sliced and, in the end, how very little they were worth.
In Domestic Violence, if you can get one bruised girl to press charges or go to a shelter, then there’s at least one night when her boyfriend is not going to hit her. Safety is a small debased currency, copper-plated pennies to the gold I had been chasing in Murder, but what value it has it holds. I had learned, by that time, not to take that lightly. A few safe hours and a sheet of phone numbers to call: I had never been able to offer a single murder victim that much.
I had no clue what currency I had to offer Lexie Madison—not safety, obviously, and truth didn’t appear to have been one of her main priorities—but she had come looking for me, alive and dead she had padded closer on soft feet till she arrived with a spectacular bang on my doorstep: she wanted something. What I wanted from her in exchange—I really believed this, at the time—was simple: I wanted her the fuck out of my life. I knew she would drive a hard bargain, but I was good with that; I had done it before.
I don’t tell people this, it’s nobody’s business, but the job is the nearest thing I’ve got to a religion. The detective’s god is the truth, and you don’t get much higher or much more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover—and those were always the ones I wanted, why go chasing diluted versions when you could have the breathtaking full-on thing?—is anything or everything you’ve got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the coldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose.
Undercover picked my honesty. I should have seen this coming, but somehow I had been so caught by the dazzling absoluteness of the job that I had managed to miss the most obvious thing about it: you spend your day lying. I don’t like lying, don’t like doing it, don’t like people who do it, and to me it seemed deeply fucked-up to go after the truth by turning yourself into a liar. I spent months picking my way along a fine double-talk line, cozying up to this small-fish dealer and spinning jokes or sarcasm to mislead him with literal truths. Then one day he fried both his brain cells on speed, pulled a knife on me and asked me if I was just using him to get to know his supplier. I skated the fine line for what felt like hours—Chill out, what’s your problem, what have I ever done to make you think I’m trying to screw you over?—stalling and hoping to God that Frank was listening to the mike feed. Dealer Boy put the knife in between my ribs and shrieked in my face, Are you? Are you? No bullshit. Yes or no. Are you? When I hesitated—because of course I was, even if it wasn’t for the reason he had in mind, and this seemed like too crucial a moment for lies—he stabbed me. Then he burst into tears, and sometime in there Frank arrived and carted me discreetly off to the hospital. But I knew. The sacrifice had been demanded and I had withheld it. I had thirty stitches for warning: Don’t do that again.
I was a good Murder detective. Rob once told me that all through his first case he had elaborate visions of fucking up, sneezing on DNA evidence, waving a cheerful good-bye to someone who had just let slip the giveaway piece of withheld info, bumbling vacantly past every clue and red flag. I never had that. My first Murder case was about as banal and depressing as they get—a young junkie knifed in the stairwell of a nightmare block of flats, great blood smears down grimy flights of stairs and eyes watching behind chained doors and the smell of piss everywhere. I stood on the landing with my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t touch anything by mistake, looking up at the victim sprawled on the steps with his tracksuit bottoms half pulled down by the fall or the fight, and I thought: So this is it. This is where I was coming to, all along.
I still remember that junkie’s face: too thin, a faint fuzz of pale stubble, his mouth a little open as if all this had startled him silly. He had a crooked front tooth. Against all the odds and O’Kelly’s nonstop depressing predictions, we got a solve.
On Operation Vestal the Murder god chose my best friend and my honesty, and gave me nothing in exchange. I transferred out knowing there would be a price to pay for the desertion. At the back of my mind I expected my solve rate to plummet, expected every vicious guy to beat the living daylights out of me, every raging woman to scratch my eyes out. I wasn’t scared; I was looking forward to it being over. But when nothing happened I realized, like a slow cold tide, that this was the punishment: to be turned loose, allowed to go on my way. To be left empty by my guardian god.
And then Sam phoned and Frank was waiting at the top of the hill, and strong implacable hands were reeling me back in. You can put all of this down to a superstitious streak if that’s easiest, or to the kind of intense secret life that a lot of orphans and onlies have; I don’t mind. But maybe it goes some way towards explaining why I said yes to Operation Mirror, and why, when I signed on, I figured there was a decent chance I was going to get killed.
4
Frank and I spent the next week developing Lexie Madison Version 3.0. During the day he pumped people for information about her, her routine, her moods, her relationships; then he came over to my flat and spent the night hammering the day’s crop into my head. I’d forgotten how good at this he was, how systematic and thorough, and how fast he expected me to keep up. Sunday evening, before we left the squad room, he handed me Lexie’s weekly schedule and a sheaf of photocopies of her thesis material. On Monday he had a thick file of her KAs—known associates—complete with photos and voice recordings and background info and smart-arsed commentary, for me to memorize. On Tuesday he brought an aerial map of the Glenskehy area, made me go over every detail till I could draw it from memory, gradually worked his way inwards till we got to floor plans and photos of Whitethorn House. This stuff had taken time to get together. Frank, the fucker, had known long before Sunday night that I was going to say yes.
We watched the phone videos again and again, Frank hitting Pause every few seconds to snap his fingers at some detail: “See that? How her head tilts to the right when she laughs? Show me that angle . . . See the way she looks at Rafe, and there, at Justin? She’s flirting with them. Daniel and Abby, she looks at straight on; the two lads, it’s sideways and up. Remember that . . . See her with the cigarette? She doesn’t tuck it into the right-hand side of her mouth, the way you do. Her hand crosses over, and the smoke goes in on the left. Let’s see you do it . . . See that? Justin starts getting all worked up about the mildew, and straightaway there’s that little glance between Abby and Lexie, and they start talking about the pretty tiles to take his mind off it. There’s an understanding there . . .” I watched those clips so many times that when I finally went to sleep—five in the morning, mostly, Frank sprawled on the sofa in all his clothes—they slid through my dreams, a constant undercurrent, tugging: the brusque cut of Daniel’s voice against Justin’s light obbligato, the patterns of the wallpaper, the rich tumble of Abby’s laugh.
They lived with a kind of ceremony that startled me. My student life was s
pur-of-the-moment house parties, frantic bursts of all-night study and non-meals involving crisp sandwiches at weird hours. But this lot: the girls made breakfast at half past seven every morning, they were in college around ten—Daniel and Justin had cars, so they drove the others—whether they had tutorials to give or not, home around half past six and the guys made dinner. On weekends they worked on the house; occasionally, if the weather was good, they took a picnic somewhere. Even their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool. They didn’t own a TV, never mind a computer—Daniel and Justin shared a manual typewriter, the other three were in enough contact with the twenty-first century to use the computers in college. They were like spies from another planet who had got their research wrong and wound up reading Edith Wharton and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie. Frank had to look up piquet on the internet and teach me to play.