“Presumably that’s exactly what they were looking for.”
“They were fascinating, actually,” Daniel said. “The police. Most of them seemed utterly uninterested: all routine. I would have loved to watch them do the search, but I don’t think it would have been a good idea to ask.”
“They didn’t get what they were after, anyway,” I said with satisfaction. “Where is it, Daniel?”
“I have no idea,” Daniel said, mildly surprised. “Wherever you keep it, I assume,” and he went back to his steak.
* * *
The guys cleared the plates away; Abby and I sat at the table, smoking, in a silence that was starting to feel companionable. I heard someone doing something in the sitting room, hidden behind wide sliding double doors, and the smell of wood smoke seeped out to us. “Peaceful one tonight?” Abby asked, watching me over her cigarette. “Just read?”
After dinner was their free time: cards, music, reading, talking, slowly knocking the house into shape. Reading sounded like the easiest option by about a mile. “Perfect,” I said. “I’ve got loads of thesis catching-up to do.”
“Relax,” Abby said—that small one-sided smile again. “You’re only just home. You’ve got all the time in the world.” She stubbed out her smoke and threw open the sliding doors.
The sitting room was huge and, unexpectedly, wonderful. The photos had caught only the shabbiness, missed the atmosphere altogether. High ceiling, with moldings along the edges; wide floorboards, unvarnished and lumpy; horrible flowered wallpaper, peeling in patches to show the old layers underneath—rose and gold stripes, a dull cream-colored sheen like silk. The furniture was mismatched and ancient: a scuffed card table in inlaid rosewood, faded brocade armchairs, a long uncomfortable-looking sofa, bookshelves jammed with tattered leather covers and bright paperbacks. There was no overhead light, just standing lamps and a wood fire crackling in a massive wrought-iron fireplace, throwing wild shadows scudding among the cobwebs in the high corners. The room was a mess, and I fell in love with it before I was through the doorway.
The armchairs looked cozy and I was right on the edge of heading for one of them when my mind slammed on the brakes, hard. I could hear my heart. I had no idea where I was supposed to sit; my head had gone blank. The food, the easy slagging, the comfortable silence with Abby: I had relaxed.
“Back in a sec,” I said, and hid in the bathroom to let the others narrow things down by taking their places, and to let my knees stop shaking. By the time I could breathe right, my brain had come out of neutral and I knew where my seat was: a low Victorian nursing chair to one side of the fireplace. Frank had shown me photos by the handful. I had known that.
It would have been that easy: sitting down in the wrong chair. Barely four hours.
Justin glanced up, with a faint worried furrow between his eyebrows, when I went back into the sitting room, but nobody said anything. My books were spread out on a low table by my chair: thick historical references, a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre open face-down across a lined notepad, a yellowing pulp novel called She Dressed to Kill by Rip Corelli—presumably non-thesis-related, although who knew—with a cover picture of a pneumatic lady wearing a slit skirt and a gun in her garter (“She drew men like honey draws flies . . . and then she swatted them!”). My pen—a blue Biro, the end covered with toothmarks—was still where I had put it down midsentence, that Wednesday night.
I watched the others over my book for any signs of edginess, but they had all settled to reading with an instant, trained concentration that was almost intimidating. Abby, in an armchair with her feet up on a little embroidered footstool—her restoration project, probably—flipped pages briskly and twisted a lock of hair round her finger. Rafe sat across the fire from me in the other armchair; every now and then he put his book down and leaned forwards to poke the fire or add another chunk of wood. Justin lay on the sofa with his notepad propped on his chest, scribbling, occasionally murmuring something or huffing to himself or clicking his tongue disapprovingly. There was a frayed tapestry of a hunting scene on the wall behind him; he should have looked incongruous beneath it, with his corduroys and his little rimless glasses, but somehow he didn’t, not at all. Daniel sat at the card table, his dark head bent under the glow of a tall lamp, only moving to deliberately, unhurriedly turn a page. The heavy green velvet curtains were open and I imagined how we would look, to a watcher in the dark garden beyond; how securely wrapped in our firelight and concentration; how bright and tranquil, like something from a dream. For a sharp, dizzying second I envied Lexie Madison.
Daniel felt me watching; he lifted his head and smiled at me, across the table. It was the first time I’d seen him smile, and it had an immense, grave sweetness to it. Then he bent his head over his book again.
* * *
I went to bed early, around ten, partly as a character choice and partly because Frank had been right, I was wrecked. My brain felt like it had just done a triathlon. I shut Lexie’s bedroom door (smell of lily of the valley, a subtle little eddy swirling up my shoulder and round the neck of my T-shirt, curious and watchful) and leaned back against it. For a second I thought I wasn’t going to make it as far as the bed, I’d just slide down the door and be asleep before I hit the carpet. This was harder than I remembered, and I didn’t think it was because I was getting old or losing my touch or any of the other appealing possibilities O’Kelly would have suggested. Last time I had been the one calling the shots, deciding who I needed to hang out with, for how long, how close I needed to get. This time Lexie had called them all for me and I didn’t have a choice: I had to follow her rules to the letter, listen hard and nonstop like she was on a faint crackly earpiece and let her run me.
I had had this feeling before, on some of my least favorite investigations: Someone else is running this show. Most of them hadn’t ended well. But then it had always been the killer, a smug three steps ahead of us all the way. I had never had a case where that someone else was the victim.
One thing, though, felt easier. Last time, in UCD, every word out of my mouth had left a nasty taste behind, something tainted and wrong, like bread gone moldy. Like I said, I don’t like lying. This time, though, everything I’d said left nothing except the clean-cotton taste of true. The only possible reasons I could come up with were that I was fooling the living bejasus out of myself—rationalization is a major part of the undercover’s skill set—or that, in some tangled way that ran deeper and surer than cold hard fact, I wasn’t lying. As long as I did this right, almost everything I said was the truth, just Lexie’s rather than mine. I decided it would probably be a wise move to peel myself off the door and go to bed before I started thinking too hard about either of those possibilities.
Her room was on the top floor, at the back of the house, across from Daniel and above Justin. It was midsized, low-ceilinged, with plain white curtains and a rickety wrought-iron single bed that screeched like an ancient mangle when I sat down on it—if Lexie had managed to get pregnant in that thing, respect to her. The duvet cover was blue and freshly ironed; someone had changed my sheets. She didn’t have a lot of furniture: a bookshelf, a narrow wooden wardrobe with helpful strips of tin on the shelves to tell you what went where (HATS, STOCKINGS), a crap plastic lamp on a crap bedside table, and a wooden dressing table with dusty scrollwork and a three-way mirror, which reflected my face at confusing angles and gave me the creeps in all the predictable ways. I considered covering it up with a sheet or something, but that would have taken some explaining, and anyway I couldn’t shake the feeling that the reflection would keep doing its own thing behind there, just the same.
I unlocked my bag, keeping a sharp ear out for any noise on the stairs, and dug out my new gun and the roll of surgical tape for my bandages. Even at home, I don’t sleep without my gun handy—old habit, and not one I felt like breaking right at that moment. I taped the gun to the back of the bedside table, out of sight but in easy reach. No cobwebs, not even a film of dust on the back of
the table: the Bureau had been there before me.
Before I put on Lexie’s blue pajamas, I peeled off the fake bandage, unclipped the mike and stashed the whole shebang at the bottom of my bag. Somewhere Frank was going into a full-blown conniption about this, but I didn’t care; I had reasons.
Going to sleep on your first night undercover is something you never forget. All day you’ve been pure concentrated control, watching yourself as sharply and ruthlessly as you watch everyone and everything around you; but come night, alone on a strange mattress in a room where the air smells different, you’ve got no choice but to open your hands and let go, fall into sleep and into someone else’s life like a pebble falling through cool green water. Even your first time, you know that in that second something irreversible will start happening, that in the morning you’ll wake up changed. I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters’ children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.
I found a beautiful, illustrated, fragile old edition of the Brothers Grimm in the bookshelf and took it to bed with me. The others had given it to Lexie on her birthday, last year: the flyleaf said, in slanted, flowing fountain pen—Justin’s writing, I was almost sure—“3/1/04. Happy Birthday YOUNG girl (when are you going to grow up??). Love,” and their four names.
I sat in bed with the book on my knees, but I couldn’t read. Every now and then the quick muffled rhythms of conversation seeped up from the sitting room, and outside my window the garden was alive: wind in leaves, a fox barking and an owl on the hunt, rustles and calls and scuffles everywhere. I sat there and looked around Lexie Madison’s strange little room, and listened.
A little before midnight, the stairs creaked and there was a discreet tap on my door. I leaped halfway to the ceiling, grabbed at my bag to make sure it was zipped up all the way and called, “Come in.”
“It’s me,” said Daniel or Rafe or Justin, close behind the door, too soft for me to tell which one it was. “Just saying good night. We’re going to bed.”
My heart was pounding. “Night,” I called. “Sleep tight.”
Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets’ chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams.
* * *
I sleep lightly and I have good ears. Sometime in the night I woke up, instantly and completely. Across the hall, in Daniel’s room, someone was whispering.
I held my breath, but the doors were thick and all I could make out was the flicker of sibilants in the dark; no words, no voices. I reached out my arm from under the covers, carefully, and found Lexie’s phone on the bedside table. 3:17 a.m.
I followed the faint double trail of whispers, weaving between the bat shrills and the rolls of wind, for a long time. It was two minutes to four when I heard the slow grate of a doorknob turning, and then the soft click as Daniel’s door closed. A breath of sound across the landing, almost imperceptible, like a shadow moving against blackness; then nothing.
6
Footsteps woke me, thumping downstairs. I had been dreaming, something dark and messy, and it took me a wild second to disentangle my mind and figure out where I was. My gun wasn’t beside my bed and I was grabbing for it, starting to panic, when I remembered.
I sat up in bed. Apparently nothing had been poisoned, after all; I felt fine. The smell of a fry-up was creeping under the door, and I could hear the brisk morning rhythm of voices, somewhere far below. Shit: I had missed cooking breakfast. It had been so long since I’d managed to sleep past six, I hadn’t bothered to set Lexie’s alarm. I stuck the mike-bandage back on, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and a mammoth sweater that looked like it had belonged to one of the lads—the air was freezing—and went downstairs.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it had improved a lot since Lexie’s scary movie. They’d got rid of the mold and the cobwebs and the scummy linoleum; instead there was a flagstoned floor, a scrubbed wooden table, a pot of ragged geraniums on the windowsill behind the sink. Abby, in a red-flannel dressing gown with the hood pulled up, was flipping bacon and sausages. Daniel was at the table, fully dressed, reading a book pinned under the edge of his plate and eating fried eggs with methodical enjoyment. Justin was slicing his toast into triangles and complaining.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. Last week only two of them had done the reading; the rest just sat there staring and chewing gum, like a pack of cows. Are you sure you don’t want to swap, just for today? Maybe you could get more out of them—”
“No,” Daniel said, without looking up.
“But yours are doing the sonnets. I know the sonnets. I’m good at the sonnets.”
“No.”
“Morning,” I said, in the doorway.
Daniel nodded at me gravely and went back to his book. Abby waved the spatula. “Morning, you.”
“Sweetie,” Justin said. “Come here. Let me look at you. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said. “Sorry, Abby; I slept it out. Here, give me that—”
I reached for the spatula, but she whipped it away. “No, you’re grand; you still count as walking wounded. Tomorrow I’ll come up and haul you out of bed. Sit.”
That split second again—wounded: Daniel and Justin seemed to pause, suspended midbite. Then I sat down at the table and Justin reached for another slice of toast, and Daniel turned a page and shoved a red enamel teapot across to me.
Abby flipped three rashers and two eggs onto a plate, without asking, and came over to put it in front of me. “Oh, brrr,” she said, hurrying back to the cooker. “Jesus. Daniel, I know about you and double-glazing, but seriously, we should at least think about windows that would—”
“Double-glazing is the spawn of Satan. It’s hideous.”
“Yes, but it’s warm. If we’re not getting carpets—”
Justin was nibbling toast, chin on hand, gazing at me closely enough to make me nervous. I concentrated on my food. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked anxiously. “You look pale. You’re not going in today, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a full day of this, not yet. And, also, I wanted a chance to check out the house in private; I wanted that diary, or date book, or whatever it was. “I’m supposed to take it easy for another few days. That reminds me, though: what’s been happening with my tutorials?” Tutorials officially end at the Easter holidays, but there are always a few that, for whatever reason, drag on into the summer term. I had two groups left, one on Tuesdays and one on Thursdays. I wasn’t looking forward to them.
“We covered them,” Abby said, loading a plate for herself and joining us at the table, “in a manner of speaking. Daniel did Beowulf with your Thursday bunch. In the original.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “How’d they take it?”
“Not too badly, really,” Daniel said. “At first they were aghast, but eventually one or two of them came up with some intelligent comments. It was quite interesting.”
Rafe stumbled in with his hair sticking up in clumps, wearing a T-shirt and striped pajama bottoms and apparently navigating by radar. He waved at the room in general, fumbled for a mug, poured himself a lot of black coffee, snagged a triangle of Justin’s toast and wandered out again.
“Twenty minutes!” Justin yelled after him. “I’m not waiting for you!” Rafe flipped a hand backwards, over his shoulder, and kept going.
“I don’t know why you bother,” Abby said, slicing sausage. “In five minutes he won’t even remember seeing you. After the coffee. With Rafe, always after the coffee.”
“Yes, but then he moans that I haven’t given him enough time to get ready. I mean it, this time I’m leaving him behind, and if he’s late then that’s his problem. H
e can get a car of his own or he can walk to town, I don’t care—”
“Every morning,” Abby said to me, across Justin, who was making outraged gestures with his butter knife.