I rolled my eyes. Outside the French windows behind her head, a rabbit was nibbling the lawn, leaving little dark scatters of paw prints in the white dew.
* * *
Half an hour later, Rafe and Justin left—Justin pulled up his car in front of the house and sat there, beeping the horn and shouting inaudible threats out the window, until Rafe finally bounded into the kitchen with his coat half on and his knapsack swinging wildly from one hand, grabbed another slice of toast, shoved it between his teeth and dashed out again, slamming the front door hard enough to shake the house. Abby washed up, singing to herself in a rich contralto undertone: “The water is wide, I cannot get o’er . . .” Daniel smoked an unfiltered cigarette, thin plumes curling up through the pale rays of sun from the window. They’d relaxed around me; I was in.
I should have felt a lot better about this than I did. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might like these people. Daniel and Rafe, I wasn’t sure about yet, but Justin had a warmth to him that was even more endearing because it was so fussy and unpracticed, and Frank had been right about Abby: if things had been different, I would have wanted her for a friend.
They had just lost one of their own and they didn’t even know it, and there was still a chance it had been due to me; and I was sitting in their kitchen, eating their fry-up and messing with their heads. Last night’s suspicions—hemlock steak, Jesus—seemed so ridiculous and Gothic that I wanted to cringe.
“Daniel, we should start moving,” Abby said eventually, checking the clock and wiping her hands on the dish towel. “Want anything from the outside world, Lex?”
“Smokes,” I said. “I’m almost out.”
She fished a pack of Marlboro Lights out of her dressing-gown pocket and tossed it to me. “Have these. I’ll pick up more on the way in. What are you going to do all day?”
“Be a sloth on the sofa and read and eat. Are there biscuits?”
“Those vanilla cream ones you like, in the biscuit tin, and chocolate chip in the freezer.” She flipped the dish towel into a neat fold and slung it over the bar of the cooker. “You’re sure you don’t want someone to stay home with you?”
Justin had already asked me about six times. I raised my eyes to the ceiling. “Positive.”
I caught Abby’s quick glance across my head to Daniel, but he was turning a page and paying no attention to us. “Fair enough,” she said. “Don’t faint down the stairs or anything. Five minutes, Daniel?”
Daniel nodded, without looking up. Abby ran upstairs, light in her sock feet; I heard her opening and closing drawers and, after a minute, starting to sing to herself again. “I leaned my back up against an oak, I thought it was a trusty tree . . .”
Lexie smoked more than I did, a pack a day, and she started after breakfast. I took Daniel’s matches and lit up.
Daniel checked the page of his book, closed it and put it aside. “Should you really be smoking?” he asked. “Under the circumstances.”
“No,” I said pertly, and blew a stream of smoke across the table at him. “Should you?”
That made him smile. “You’re looking better this morning,” he said. “Last night you seemed very tired; a little lost, somehow. Which I suppose is only to be expected, but it’s nice to see your energy starting to come back.”
I made a mental note to up the boing level, gradually, over the next few days. “In the hospital they kept saying it would take a while and not to rush myself,” I said, “but they can stick it in their ear. I’m bored of being sick.”
The smile deepened. “Well, so I imagine. I’m sure you were a dream patient.” He leaned over to the cooker, tilted the coffeepot to see if there was anything left. “How much of the incident itself do you actually remember?”
He was pouring himself the last of the coffee and watching me; his face was serene, interested, untroubled. “Bugger-all,” I said. “That whole day’s gone, and bits from before. I thought the cops told you.”
“They did,” Daniel said, “but that didn’t mean it was necessarily the case. You could have had your own reasons for telling them that.”
I looked blank. “Like what?”
“I have no idea,” Daniel said, replacing the coffeepot carefully on the stove. “I hope, though, that if you do remember anything and you’re unsure whether to take it to the police, you won’t feel you have to deal with it alone; you’ll come and talk to me, or to Abby. Would you do that?”
He sipped his coffee, one ankle crossed neatly over the opposite knee, watching me calmly. I was starting to see what Frank meant about these four giving away very little. This guy’s expression would have worked equally well whether he had just come from choir practice or from ax-murdering a dozen orphans. “Well, yeah, sure,” I said. “But all I remember is coming home from college on the Tuesday evening and then getting really, really sick in a bedpan, and I already told the police all that.”
“Hmm,” said Daniel. He pushed the ashtray over to my side of the table. “Memory is an odd thing. Let me ask you this: if you were to—” But just then Abby came clattering back down the stairs, still singing, and he shook his head and stood up and started patting at his pockets.
* * *
I waved from the top of the steps while Daniel pulled out of the driveway in a fast expert arc, and the car disappeared among the cherry trees. When I was sure they were gone, I shut the door and stood still in the hallway, listening to the empty house. I could feel it settling, a long whisper like shifting sand, to see what I would do now.
I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. The stair carpet had been taken off, but they hadn’t got around to doing anything instead; there was a wide unvarnished band across each step, dusty and worn down in the middle by generations of feet. I leaned against the newel post, wriggled till I got my back comfortable, and thought about that diary.
If it had been in Lexie’s room, the Bureau gang would have found it. That left the rest of the house, the whole garden, and the question of what was in there that she had wanted to hide even from her best friends. For a second I heard Frank’s voice, in the squad room: her friends close and her secrets closer.
The other possibility was that Lexie had kept it on her, that she had had it in a pocket when she died and the killer had nicked it. That would explain why he had taken the time and the risk to go after her (pulling her into cover, black darkness and his hands moving fast over her limp body, patting down pockets, glazed with rain and blood): if he needed that diary.
That fit with what I knew about Lexie—keep secrets close—but, on a more practical level, it would have had to be pretty small to go into a pocket, and she would have had to swap it over every time she changed clothes. Finding a hiding place would have been simpler and safer. Somewhere it would be safe from rain and from accidental discovery; somewhere she could be sure of privacy, even living with four people; somewhere she could go whenever she wanted, without catching anyone’s attention; not her room.
There was a toilet on the ground floor and a full bathroom on the first. I checked the jacks first, but the room was the size of a coat closet, and once I’d looked in the cistern I had basically exhausted the possibilities. The main bathroom was big: 1930s tiles with a black-and-white checked border, chipped bath, unfrosted windows with tattered net curtains. The door bolted.
Nothing in the cistern, or behind it. I sat down on the floor and pulled out the wooden panel from the side of the bath. It came easily; a scraping sound, but nothing that running water or a flush wouldn’t cover. Underneath there were cobwebs, mouse droppings, sweeps of finger marks in the dust; and, tucked in a corner, a tiny red notebook.
My breath felt like I’d been running. I didn’t like this; didn’t like how, with acres to choose from, I had come homing straight to Lexie’s hiding place as if I had no choice. Around me the house seemed to have tightened and drawn closer, leaning in over my shoulder; watching; focused.
I went up to my room—Lexie’s room—and found my gloves and a nail file. Then I sat back
down on the bathroom floor and carefully, holding it by the edges, pulled out the notebook. I used the file to turn the pages. Sooner or later, the Bureau would need to fingerprint this.
I had been hoping for a pour-your-heart-out diary, but I should have known better. This was just a date book, red fake-leather cover, a page for each day. The first few months were covered with appointments and reminders in that quick, rounded writing: Lettuce, Brie, garlic salt; 11 tut Rm 3017; elec bill; ask D Ovid book?? Homey, innocuous stuff, and reading it made me edgier than anything yet. When you’re a detective you get used to invading people’s privacy in every way you can think of, I had slept in Lexie’s bed and I was wearing her clothes, but this; this was the small day-to-day debris of her life, it had been only for herself, and I had no right to it.
In the last few days of March, though, something changed. The shopping lists and tutorial timetables vanished and the pages went bare. There were only three notes, in a hard, dashed-off scribble. The last of March: 10.30 N. The fifth of April: 11.30 N. And the eleventh, two days before she died: 11 N.
No N in January or February; no mention till that appointment on the last of March. The list of Lexie’s KAs wasn’t a long one, and as far as I could remember, no one on it began with N. A nickname? A place? A café? Someone from her old life, just like Frank had said, resurfacing from nowhere and wiping the rest of her world blank?
Across the last two days of April was a list of letters and numbers, in that same furious scrawl. AMS 79, LHR 34, EDI 49, CDG 59, ALC 104. Scores from some game, sums of money she’d lent or borrowed? Abby’s initials were AMS—Abigail Marie Stone—but the others didn’t match anyone on the KA list. I stared at them for a long time, but the only thing they reminded me of was the plate numbers on classic cars, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of a reason why Lexie would be car spotting or why, if she was, it would be a state secret.
Nobody had said one word about her acting tense or odd, her last few weeks. She seemed fine, every single interviewee had told Frank and Sam; she seemed happy; she seemed just like always. The last video clip was from three days before she died and it showed her clambering down a ladder from the attic, a red bandanna tied round her hair and every inch of her powdered gray with dust, sneezing and laughing and holding out something in her free hand: “No, look, Rafe, look! It’s”—explosive sneeze—“it’s opera glasses, I think they’re mother-of-pearl, aren’t they brilliant?” Whatever had been going on, she had hidden it well; too well.
The rest of the book was empty, except for the twenty-second of August: Dad’s bday.
Not a changeling or a collective hallucination, after all. She had a father, somewhere out there, and she hadn’t wanted to forget his birthday. She had kept at least one slender tie to the life where she had started out.
I went through the pages again, slower this time, looking for anything I’d missed. Towards the beginning, a few dates here and there were circled: 2 January, 29 January, 25 February. The first page had a tiny calendar for December 2004, and sure enough, there was a circle around the sixth.
Twenty-seven days apart. Lexie had been clockwork and she had kept track. By the end of March, with no circle around the twenty-fourth, she had to have suspected she was pregnant. Somewhere—not at home; at Trinity or in some café, where nobody would see the packet in the bin and wonder—she had taken a pregnancy test, and something had changed. Her date book had turned to a fierce secret, N had moved in and everything else had been stripped away.
N. An obstetrician? A clinic? The baby’s father?
“What the hell were you at, girl?” I said softly, into the empty room. There was a whisper behind me and I jumped about a mile, but it was only the breeze riffling the net curtains.
* * *
I thought about taking the date book back to my room, but in the end I figured Lexie had probably had reasons of her own for not leaving it there, and her hiding place had apparently worked fine so far. I copied the good bits into my own notebook, put hers back under the bath and slid the panel into place. Then I went over the house, getting to know the details and doing a quick, not-too-thorough search as I went. Frank would expect to hear that I’d done something useful with my day, and I already knew I wasn’t going to tell him about the date book, at least not yet.
I started at the bottom and worked my way up. If I found anything good, we were going to have a major admissibility battle on our hands. I was a resident of the house, which meant I could look in the common spaces all I wanted but the others’ rooms were basically out of bounds, and I was there under false pretenses to begin with; this is the kind of tangle that buys lawyers new Porsches. Once you know what you’re chasing, though, you can almost always find a legit way to get to it.
The house had the effortlessly off-kilter feel of something out of a storybook—I kept expecting to fall down a secret staircase, or come out of a room into a completely new corridor that only existed on alternate Mondays. I worked fast: I couldn’t make myself slow down, couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere in the attic a huge clock was counting down, great handfuls of seconds tumbling away.
On the ground floor were the double sitting room, the kitchen, the toilet and Rafe’s room. Rafe’s room was a mess—clothes piled in cardboard boxes, sticky glasses and snowdrifts of paper everywhere—but in an assured way; you could tell he usually knew where everything was, even if no one else could work it out. He had been goofing off on one wall with charcoal, dashing off quick, fairly impressive sketches for some kind of mural involving a beech tree, a red setter and a guy in a top hat. On the mantelpiece was—eureka—the Head: a porcelain phrenology bust, staring loftily out over Lexie’s red bandanna. I was starting to like Rafe.
The first floor had Abby’s room and the bathroom at the front, Justin’s and a spare room to the back—either it had been too complicated to clear out, or Rafe liked being on his own downstairs. I started with the spare. The thought of going into either of the others put a small, ridiculous nasty taste in my mouth.
Great-uncle Simon had obviously never, ever thrown anything away. The room had a schizophrenic, dreamlike look, some lost store-cupboard of the mind: three copper kettles with holes in them, a moldy top hat, a broken stick-horse giving me a Godfather leer, what appeared to be half of an accordion. I know nothing about antiques, but none of it looked valuable, definitely not valuable enough to kill for. It looked more like stuff you would leave outside the gate in the hope that drunk students on a kitsch kick would take it home.
Abby and Justin were both neat, in very different ways. Abby went in for knickknacks—a tiny alabaster vase holding a handful of violets, a lead-crystal candlestick, an old sweet tin with a picture of a red-lipped girl in improbable Egyptian getup on the lid, all shiny clean and lined up carefully on just about every flat surface—and color; the curtains were made of strips of old fabric sewn together, red damask, bluebell-sprigged cotton, frail lace, and she had glued patches of fabric over the bald spots in the faded wallpaper. The room felt cozy and quirky and a little unreal, like the den of some kids’-book wood-land creature that would wear a frilly bonnet and make jam tarts.
Justin, sort of unexpectedly, turned out to have minimalist tastes. There was a small nest of books and photocopies and scribbled pages beside his bedside table, and he had covered the back of his door with photos of the gang—arranged symmetrically, in what looked like chronological order, and covered with some kind of clear sealant—but everything else was spare and clean and functional: white bedclothes, white curtains blowing, dark wood furniture polished to a shine, neat rows of balled-up socks in the drawers and glossy shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room smelled, very faintly, of something cypressy and masculine.
There was nothing dodgy in any of the bedrooms, as far as I could see, but something about all three of them kept catching at me. It took me a while to put my finger on it. I was kneeling on Justin’s floor, checking under his bed like a burglar (nothing, not even dust
bunnies), when it hit me: they felt permanent. I had never lived in a place where I could mess with the wallpaper or glue things down—my aunt and uncle wouldn’t have objected, exactly, but their house had a tiptoe atmosphere that prevented anything along those lines from even occurring to me, and all my landlords apparently had this idea that they were renting me Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest; it had taken me months to convince my current guy that property values would not plummet if I painted the walls white instead of banana-barf yellow and stuck the LSD-based carpet in the garden shed. None of this had bothered me at the time, but all of a sudden, surrounded by this houseful of happy, cavalier possessiveness—I would have loved a mural; Sam can draw—it seemed like a very strange way to live, on some stranger’s sufferance, asking permission like a little kid before I left any mark.