Given their relationship with the locals and their general enthusiasm level, Doherty and Byrne had been assigned to go through a bazillion hours of closed-circuit TV footage, looking for regular unexplained visitors to Glenskehy, but the cameras hadn’t been positioned with this in mind and the best they could come up with was that they were fairly sure no one had driven into or out of Glenskehy by a direct route between ten and two on the night of the murder. This made Sam start talking about the housemates again, which made Frank point out the multiple ways someone could have got to Glenskehy without being picked up on CCTV, which made Byrne get snippy about suits who swanned down from Dublin and wasted everyone’s time with pointless busywork. I got the sense that the incident room was blanketed by a dense, electric cloud of dead ends and turf wars and that nasty sinking feeling.
Frank had told the housemates that Lexie was coming home. They had sent her things: a get-well card and half a dozen Caramilk bars, pale-blue pajamas, clothes to wear home, moisturizer—that had to be Abby—two Barbara Kingsolver books, a Walkman and a pile of mix tapes. Even aside from the fact that I hadn’t seen a mix tape since I was about twenty, these were kind of hard to put your finger on—there was Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, music for late-night jukeboxes on long strange highways, in with Edith Piaf and the Guillemots and some woman called Amalia singing in throaty Portuguese. At least they were all good stuff; if there had been any Eminem on there, I would have had to pull the plug. The card said “Love” and the four names, nothing else; the briefness made it feel secretive, fizzing with messages I couldn’t read. Frank ate the Caramilks.
The official story was that the coma had knocked out Lexie’s short-term memory: she remembered nothing about the attack, very little about the days before. “Which has side benefits,” Frank pointed out. “If you fuck up some detail, you can just look upset and murmur something helpless about the coma, and everyone’ll be too embarrassed to push you.” Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had told my aunt and uncle and my friends that I was going off to do a training course—I kept it vague—and wouldn’t be around for a few weeks. Sam had smoothed over my exit from work by having a chat with Quigley, the Murder squad’s resident mistake, and telling him in confidence that I was taking a career break to finish my degree, which meant I would be covered if anyone spotted me hanging around town looking studenty. Quigley basically consists of a large arse and a large mouth, and he never liked me much. Within twenty-four hours it would be all over the grapevine that I was taking time out, probably with a few flourishes (pregnancy, psychosis, crack addiction) thrown in for good measure.
By Thursday Frank was firing questions at me: where do you sit for breakfast? where do you keep the salt? who gives you a lift into college on Wednesday mornings? what room is your supervisor’s office? If I missed one, he zeroed in on that area, worked around it from every angle he had—photos, anecdotes, phone video, audio footage of interviews—till it felt like my own set of memories and the answer rolled off my tongue automatically. Then he went back to the question barrage: where did you spend the Christmas before last? what day of the week is your turn to buy food? It was like having a human tennis-ball machine on my sofa.
I didn’t tell Sam this—it made me feel guilty, somehow—but I enjoyed that week. I like a challenge. It did occasionally occur to me that I was in a deeply weird situation and that it was only likely to get weirder. This case had a level of Möbius strip that made it hard to keep things straight: Lexies everywhere, sliding into each other at the edges till you started to lose track of which one you were talking about. Every now and then I had to catch myself back from asking Frank how she was doing.
* * *
Frank’s sister Jackie was a hairdresser, so on Friday evening he brought her over to the flat, to cut my hair. Jackie was skinny, bleached blonde and totally unimpressed by her big brother. I liked her.
“Ah, yeah, you could do with a trim all right,” she told me, giving my fringe a professional riffle with long purple nails. “How do you want it?”
“Here,” Frank said, fishing out a crime-scene shot and passing it to her. “Can you do it to match this?”
Jackie held the photo between thumb and fingertip and gave it a suspicious look. “Here,” she said. “Is your woman dead ?”
“That’s confidential,” Frank said.
“Confidential, me arse. Is that your sister, love?”
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “This is Frank’s gig. I’m only getting dragged along for the ride.”
“You wouldn’t want to mind him. Here—” She took another look at the photo and held it out to Frank at arm’s length. “That’s bleeding disgusting, so it is. Would you not think of doing something decent, Francis? Sorting out the traffic, something useful like that. Took me two hours to get into town from—”
“Would you ever just cut, Jackie?” Frank demanded, raking his hair exasperatedly so that it stood up in tufts. “And stop wrecking my head?” Jackie’s eyes slid sideways to mine and we shared a tiny, mischievous, female grin.
“And remember,” Frank said belligerently, noticing, “keep your mouth shut about this. Clear? It’s crucial.”
“Ah, yeah,” Jackie said, pulling a comb and scissors out of her bag. “Crucial. Go and make us a cup of tea, will you? That’s if you don’t mind, love,” she added, to me.
Frank shook his head and stamped off to the sink. Jackie combed my hair down over my eyes and winked at me.
When she was finished I looked different. I had never had my fringe cropped that short before; it was a subtle thing, but it made my face younger and barer, gave it the big-eyed, deceptive innocence of a model’s. The longer I stared in the bathroom mirror, that night while I got ready for bed, the less it looked like me. When I hit the point where I couldn’t remember what I had looked like to begin with, I gave up, gave the mirror the finger and went to bed.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon Frank said, “I think we’re just about good to go.”
I was lying back on the sofa with my knees hooked over the arm, going through the photos of Lexie’s tutorial groups one last time and trying to look blasé about this whole thing. Frank was pacing: the closer you get to the start of an operation, the less he sits down.
“Tomorrow,” I said. The word burned in my mouth, a wild clean burn like snow, taking my breath away.
“Tomorrow afternoon—we’ll start you off with a half day, ease you into it. I’ll let the housemates know this evening, make sure they’re all there to give you a nice warm welcome. Think you’re ready?”
I couldn’t imagine what, on an operation like this, could possibly constitute “ready.” “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.
“Let’s hear it once more: what’s your goal for Week One?”
“Not to get caught, mainly,” I said. “And not to get killed.”
“Not mainly; only.” Frank snapped his fingers in front of my eyes on his way past. “Hey. Concentrate. This is important.”
I put the photos down on my stomach. “I’m concentrating. What?”
“If someone’s going to suss you, it’ll be in the first few days, while you’re still finding your feet and everyone’s looking at you. So for Week One, all you do is ease your way in. This is hard work, it’ll be tiring at first, and if you overdo it you’ll start slipping—and all it takes is one slip. So go easy. Take time out if you can: go to bed early, read a book while the others play cards. If you make it to next weekend, you’ll be into the swing of things, everyone else will have got used to having you back, they’ll barely be looking at you any more, and you’ll have a lot more leeway. Until then, though, you keep your head down: no risks, no sleuthing, nothing that could raise a single eyebrow. Don’t even think about the case. I don’t care if this time next week you don’t have one single piece of useful info for me, as long as you’re still in that house. If you are, we’ll reassess and take it from there.”
“But you don’t really think I w
ill be,” I said. “Do you?”
Frank stopped pacing and gave me a long steady look. “Would I send you in there,” he asked, “if I didn’t think it could be done?”
“Sure you would,” I said. “As long as you thought the results would be interesting either way, you wouldn’t think twice.”
He leaned back against the window frame, apparently considering that; the light was behind him and I couldn’t see his expression. “Possible,” he said, “but irrelevant. Yeah, sure, it’s dicey as all hell. You’ve known that since Day One. But it can be done, as long as you’re careful, you don’t get spooked and you don’t get impatient. Remember what I said last time, about asking questions?”
“Yep,” I said. “Play innocent and ask as many of them as you can get away with.”
“This time is different. You need to do the opposite: don’t ask anything unless you’re absolutely sure you’re not meant to know the answer already. Which means, basically, don’t ask anyone anything at all.”
“So what am I supposed to do, if I can’t ask questions?” I had been wondering about this.
Frank crossed the room fast, shoved paper off the coffee table and sat down, leaning in to me, blue eyes intent. “You keep your eyes and ears wide open. The main problem with this investigation is that we don’t have a suspect. Your job is to identify one. Remember, nothing you get will be admissible anyway, since you can’t exactly caution the suspects, so we’re not gunning for a confession or anything like that. Leave that part to me and our Sammy. We’ll make the case, if you just point us in the right direction. Find out if there’s someone out there who’s managed to stay off our radar—either someone left over from this girl’s past, or someone she took up with more recently and kept a secret. If anyone who isn’t on the KA list approaches you—by phone, in person, whatever—you play them along, find out what they’re after and what the relationship was, and get a phone number and full name if you can.”
“Right,” I said. “Your mystery man.” It sounded plausible enough, but then Frank always does. I was still pretty sure that Sam was right and his main reason for doing this wasn’t because he thought it had a snowball’s chance in hell but because it was such a dazzling, reckless, ridiculous once-off. I decided I didn’t care.
“Exactly. To go with our mystery girl. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the housemates and keep them talking. I don’t rate them as suspects—I know your Sammy has a bee in his bonnet about them, but I’m with you, they don’t add up—but I’m pretty sure there’s something they’re not telling us. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them. It might be something completely irrelevant, maybe they just cheat on their exams or make moonshine in the back garden or know who’s the daddy, but I’d like to decide for myself what’s relevant here and what’s not. They’re never going to talk to cops, but if you go at it right, there’s a good chance they’ll talk to you. Don’t worry too much about her other KAs—we’ve got nothing that points to any of them, and Sammy and I will be on them anyway—but if anyone’s acting even slightly dodgy, obviously, report back to me. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
“One last thing,” said Frank. He unfolded himself from the table, found our coffee mugs and took them over to the kitchen. We had got to the point where there was always, every hour of the day or night, a large pot of strong coffee keeping warm on the cooker; another week and we would probably have been eating the grounds straight from the bag with a spoon. “I’ve been meaning to have a little chat with you for a while now.”
I had felt this one coming for days. I flipped through the photos like flash cards and tried to concentrate on running the names in my head: Cillian Wall, Chloe Nelligan, Martina Lawlor . . . “Hit me,” I said.
Frank put the mugs down and started playing with my saltcellar, turning it carefully between his fingers. “I hate to bring this up,” he said, “but what can you do, sometimes life sucks. You’re aware that you’ve been—how shall I put this—a little jumpy lately, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, keeping my eyes on the photos. Isabella Smythe, Brian Ryan—someone’s parents either hadn’t been thinking too clearly, or had a weird sense of humor—Mark O’Leary ... “I’m aware.”
“I don’t know if it’s because of this case or if it was going on already or what, and I don’t need to know. If it’s just stage fright, it might well vanish as soon as you’re inside that door. But here’s what I wanted to say to you: if it doesn’t, don’t panic. Don’t start second-guessing yourself, or you’ll talk yourself into losing your nerve, and don’t try to hide it. Use it. There’s no reason why Lexie shouldn’t be a little shaky right now, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make that work for you. Use what you’ve got, even if it’s not necessarily what you’d have chosen. Everything’s a weapon, Cass. Everything.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. The thought of Operation Vestal actually coming in useful did something complicated inside my chest, made it hard to breathe. I knew if I blinked Frank would notice.
“Think you can do that?”
Lexie, I thought, Lexie wouldn’t tell him to mind his own business and let her mind hers, which was my main instinct here, and she sure as hell wouldn’t answer. Lexie would yawn in his face, or tell him to quit nagging and lecturing like someone’s granny, or demand ice cream. “We’re out of biscuits,” I said, stretching—the photos slid off my stomach, all over the floor. “Go get some. Lemon creams,” and then I laughed out loud at the look on Frank’s face.
* * *
Frank graciously gave me Saturday night off—heart of gold, our Frankie—so Sam and I could say our good-byes. Sam made chicken tikka for dinner; for dessert I tried an incongruous tiramisu, which turned out looking ridiculous but tasting OK. We talked about small stuff, unimportant stuff, touching hands across the table and swapping the little things that new couples pass back and forth and save like beach finds: stories from when we were kids, the dumbest things we’d done as teenagers. Lexie’s clothes, hanging on the wardrobe door, shimmered in the corner like hard sun on sand, but we didn’t mention them, not once.
After dinner we curled up on the sofa. I had lit a fire, Sam had put music on the CD player; it could have been any evening, it could have been all ours, except for those clothes and for the fast ready beat of my pulse, waiting.
“How’re you doing?” Sam asked.
I had been starting to hope we could make it through the night without talking about tomorrow, but realistically this was probably too much to ask. “OK,” I said.
“Are you nervous?”
I thought this over. This situation was totally bananas on about a dozen different levels. I probably should have been petrified. “No,” I said. “Excited.”
I felt Sam nod, against the top of my head. He was running one hand over my hair in a slow, soothing rhythm, but his chest felt rigid as a board against mine, like he was holding his breath.
“You hate this idea, don’t you?” I said.
“Yeah,” Sam said quietly. “I do.”
“Why didn’t you stop it? It’s your investigation. You could have put your foot down, any time you felt like it.”
Sam’s hand stopped still. “Do you want me to?”
“No,” I said. That, at least, I knew for sure. “No way.”
“It wouldn’t be easy, at this stage. Now that the undercover operation’s up and running, it’s Mackey’s baby; I’ve no authority there. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’ll find a way to—”
“I haven’t, Sam. Seriously. I just wondered why you gave the OK to start with.”
He shrugged. “Mackey has a point, sure: we’ve nothing else on the case. This could be the only way to solve it.”
Sam has unsolveds with his name on them, every detective has, and I was pretty sure he could survive another one, as long as he was sure the guy hadn’t been after me. “You didn’t have anything last Saturday, either,” I said, “and you were dead against it then.”
&
nbsp; His hand started moving again, absently. “That first day,” he said, after a while. “When you came down to the scene. You were messing with Mackey, do you remember? He was slagging you about your clothes and you were slagging back, almost like the way you used to with . . . when you were on Murder.”