“I was thinking,” Daniel said, “of a little more time than three weeks. If you consider that unreasonable, then do by all means tell me.”
“How can you be so calm?” Justin wasn’t far off tears. “This is Rafe we’re talking about.”
“Whatever he’s doing,” Daniel said, turning his head politely to the side to blow smoke away from the rest of us, “I fail to see how it would make any difference if I became hysterical.”
“I am not hysterical. This is how normal people react when one of their friends vanishes.”
“Justin,” Abby said, gently, “it’s going to be fine,” but Justin didn’t hear her.
“Just because you’re a bloody robot . . . My God, Daniel, just once, just once I’d like to see you act as if you care about the rest of us, about anything—”
“I think you have every reason to be aware,” Daniel said coldly, “that I care very deeply about all four of you.”
“I do not. What reason? I’ve got every reason to think that you don’t give a damn—”
Abby made a small gesture, palm upturned to the ceiling, the room around us, the garden outside. There was something about it, about the way her hand fell back into her lap; something tired, almost resigned.
“That’s right,” Justin said, slumping down in his chair. The light caught him at a cruel angle, hollowing out his cheeks and raking a long vertical groove between his eyebrows, and for a second I saw like a time-slip overlaid on his face what he would look like in fifty years’ time. “Of course. The house. And look where that’s got us.”
There was a tiny, sharp silence. “I have never claimed,” Daniel said, and his voice had a dangerous depth of some emotion that I’d never heard there before, “to be infallible. All I’ve ever claimed is that I try, very hard, to do what’s best for the five of us. If you believe I’m doing such a bad job of it, feel free to make decisions of your own. If you think we shouldn’t be living together, then move out. If you think we need to report Rafe missing, then pick up the phone.”
After a moment Justin shrugged miserably and went back to picking at his plate. Daniel smoked, gazing into the middle distance. Abby ate her apple; I turned my peach into purée. Nobody said anything for a long time.
* * *
“I see you’ve lost the lady boy,” Frank said, when I rang him from my tree. We had apparently inspired him to have a health-food moment: he was eating something with seeds—I could hear him spitting them, attractively, into his hand or wherever. “If he turns up dead, then maybe everyone will start believing me about the mysterious stranger. I should’ve had money on it.”
“Stop being a git, Frankie,” I said.
Frank laughed. “You’re not worried about him, are you? Seriously?”
I shrugged. “I’d rather know where he is, that’s all.”
“You can relax, babe. A lovely young lady of my acquaintance was trying to find out where her friend Martin was this evening, and just happened to dial little Rafe’s number by mistake. Unfortunately, he didn’t mention where he was before the misunderstanding got cleared up, but the background noise gave us a general idea. Abby was bang on: your boy’s in a pub somewhere, getting gee-eyed and chasing the ladies. You’ll get him back safe and sound, except for a five-star hangover.”
So Frank had been worried, too; worried enough to dig out some woman floater with a sexy voice and get her making phone calls. Maybe Naylor hadn’t been just a way for Frank to get at Sam; maybe he had been serious about him as a suspect, all along. I pulled my feet farther up into the branches. “Great,” I said. “That’s good to know.”
“So how come you sound like your cat just died?”
“They’re in bad shape,” I said, and I was glad Frank couldn’t see my face. I thought I was about to fall out of the tree from sheer exhaustion. I grabbed a branch and held on. “For whatever reason—because they can’t handle me getting stabbed, or because they can’t deal with whatever it is they’re not telling us—they’re coming apart at the seams.”
After a moment Frank said, very gently, “I know you’re getting on well with them, babe. That’s fine; they’re not my cup of Earl Grey, but I’ve no objection to you feeling differently if it makes your job easier. But they’re not your mates. Their problems aren’t your problems; they’re your opportunities.”
“I know,” I said. “I know that. It’s just hard to watch.”
“No harm in a bit of compassion,” Frank said cheerfully, taking another big bite of whatever he was eating. “As long as it doesn’t get out of hand. I’ve got something to take your mind off their troubles, though. Your Rafe’s not the only one gone missing.”
“What are you talking about?”
He spat out seeds. “I was planning on keeping tabs on Naylor, from a safe distance—get a handle on his routine, his associates, all the rest; give you a little more to work with. But it’s not turning out that way. He didn’t show for work today. His parents haven’t seen him since last night, and they say this is out of character; the father’s in a wheelchair, it’s not like John to leave his mammy to do the heavy lifting on her own. Your Sammy and a couple of floaters are taking turns sitting on his house, and we’ve told Byrne and Doherty to keep an eye out. For whatever that’s worth.”
“He won’t go far,” I said. “This guy wouldn’t leave Glenskehy unless he was dragged away kicking and screaming. He’ll turn up.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figure. As far as the stabbing goes, I don’t think this cuts one way or the other; it’s a myth that only the guilty ones run. But here’s one thing I do know: whatever has Naylor running, it’s not fear. Did he look scared to you?”
“No,” I said. “Not for a second. He looked furious.”
“To me, too. He wasn’t one bit happy about that interview. I watched him leave, afterwards; two steps from the door, he turned around and he spat at it. That’s one very pissed-off bogger, Cassie, and we already know he’s got a temper problem—and, like you said, he’s probably still in the area. I don’t know whether he’s gone missing because he doesn’t want us surveilling him, or because he’s got something up his sleeve, or what; but watch yourself.”
I did. All the way home I kept to the middle of the lanes, with my gun cocked and ready in my hands. I didn’t put it back into my girdle until the back gate had clanged behind me and I was safe in the garden, at the edge of the bright tracks of light from the windows.
I hadn’t rung Sam. This time it wasn’t because I’d forgotten. It was because I had no idea whether he would answer, or what either of us would have to say if he did.
17
Rafe showed up in the library the next morning, around eleven, with his coat buttoned wrong and his knapsack swinging carelessly from one hand. He stank of cigar smoke and stale Guinness, and he was still pretty unsteady on his feet. "Well,” he said, swaying a little and surveying the four of us. “Hello, hello, hello.”
“Where have you been?” Daniel hissed. His voice had a tense edge of anger, barely suppressed. He had been a lot more worried about Rafe than he’d let on.
“Here and there,” Rafe told him. “Out and about. How are you?”
“We thought something had happened to you.” Justin’s whisper cracked, into something too loud and too sharp. “Why didn’t you ring us? Even text us?”
Rafe turned to look at him. “I was otherwise occupied,” he said, after considering this. “And I didn’t feel like it.” One of the Goon Squad, the mature students who always appoint themselves the Library Noise Vigilantes, looked up over his stack of philosophy books and went, “Shhh!”
“Your timing sucks,” Abby said coldly. “This was not a good moment to take off on a skirt hunt, and even you should have been able to figure that out.”
Rafe rocked backwards on his heels and gave her a deeply miffed look. “Fuck you,” he said, loudly and haughtily. “I’ll decide when I do what I want.”
“Don’t talk to her like that any more,” Daniel
said. He didn’t even pretend to care about keeping his voice down. The entire Goon Squad went, “Shhh!” at once.
I tugged at Rafe’s sleeve. “Sit down here and talk to me.”
“Lexie,” Rafe said, managing to focus on me. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair needed washing. “I shouldn’t have left you on your own, should I?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a happy camper. Want to sit down and tell me how your night went?”
He stretched out a hand; his fingers trailed down my cheek, my throat, slipped along the neckline of my top. I saw Abby’s eyes widen behind him, heard a quick rustle from Justin’s carrel. “God, you’re so sweet,” Rafe said. “You’re not as delicate as you look, are you? Sometimes I think the rest of us are the other way around.”
One of the Goon Squad had dug up Attila, who is the narkiest security guard in the known universe. He obviously went into the job in the hope of getting to crack the heads of dangerous criminals, but since these are thin on the ground in your average college library, he gets his kicks by making lost freshers cry. “Is this fella giving you any bother?” he asked me. He was trying to loom over Rafe, but the height difference was giving him trouble.
The wall went up straight away: Daniel and Abby and Justin snapped into attitudes of cool, poised ease, even Rafe straightened up and whipped his hand away from me and managed to look instantly, effortlessly sober. “Everything’s fine,” Abby said.
“I didn’t ask you,” Attila told her. “Do you know this fella?”
He was talking to me. I gave him an angelic smile and said, “Actually, Officer, he’s my husband. I did have a barring order against him, but now I’ve changed my mind and we’re off to shag deliriously in the Ladies.” Rafe started to snicker.
“There’s no fellas allowed in the Ladies,” said Attila ominously. “And yous are causing a disturbance.”
“It’s all right,” Daniel said. He stood up and took Rafe by the upper arm—the grip looked casual, but I could see his fingers digging in hard. “We were just leaving. All of us.”
“Get off me,” Rafe snapped, trying to shrug off Daniel’s hand. Daniel steered him briskly past Attila and down the long aisle of books, without looking back to see if the rest of us were following.
* * *
We gathered up our stuff, left in a hurry through Attila’s awful warnings, and found Daniel and Rafe in the foyer. Daniel was swinging his car keys from one finger; Rafe was leaning lopsidedly against a pillar and sulking.
“Well done,” Abby said to Rafe. “Really. That was classy.”
“Don’t start.”
“But what are we doing?” Justin asked Daniel. He was carrying Daniel’s stuff, as well as his own; he looked worried and overloaded. “We can’t just leave.”
“Why not?”
There was a brief, taken-aback silence. Our routine was so ingrained, I think it had stopped occurring to any of us that it wasn’t actually a law of nature, that we could break it if we wanted to. “What’ll we do instead?” I asked.
Daniel threw the car keys into the air and caught them. “We’re going to go home and paint the sitting room,” he said. “We’ve been spending far too much time in that library. A bit of work on the house will do us all good.”
To any outsider this would have sounded deeply weird—I could hear Frank in my head, God, they’re rock ’n’ roll, how do you stand the pace? But everyone nodded, even, after a moment, Rafe. I had already noticed that the house was their safe zone: whenever things got tense, one of them would steer the conversation onto something that needed fixing or rearranging, and everyone would settle down again. We were going to be in big trouble once the house was all sorted out and we didn’t have grouting or floor stains to use as our Happy Place.
It worked, too. Old sheets thrown over the furniture and cold bright air flooding through the open windows, crap clothes and hard work and the smell of paint, ragtime playing in the background, the naughty buzz of ditching college and the house swelling like an approving cat under the attention: it was exactly what we needed. By the time we finished the room, Rafe was starting to look sheepish instead of belligerent, Abby and Justin had relaxed enough to have a long comfortable argument about whether Scott Joplin sucked, and we were all in a much better mood.
“First dibs on the shower,” I said.
“Let Rafe have it,” said Abby. “To each according to his need.” Rafe made a face at her. We were sprawled on the dust sheets, admiring our work and trying to get up the energy to move.
“Once this dries,” Daniel said, “we’ll need to decide what, if anything, we’re putting on the walls.”
“I saw these really old tin signs,” said Abby, “up in the top spare room—”
“I am not living in a 1980s pub,” said Rafe. He had sobered up along the way, or else the paint fumes had got the rest of us high enough that we didn’t notice. “Aren’t there paintings, or something normal ?”
“The ones that are left are all horrible,” Daniel said. He was leaning back against the edge of the sofa, with spatters of white paint in his hair and on his old plaid shirt, looking happier and more at ease than he had in days. “Landscape with Stag and Hounds, that kind of thing, and not particularly well done, either. Some great-great-aunt with artistic pretensions, I think.”
“You’ve got no soul,” Abby told him. “Things with sentimental value aren’t supposed to have artistic merit as well. They’re supposed to be crap. Otherwise, it’s just showing off.”
“Let’s use those old newspapers,” I said. I was flat on my back in the middle of the floor, waving my legs in the air to examine the new paint splashes on Lexie’s work dungarees. “The ancient ones, with the article about the Dionne quintuplets and the ad for the thing that makes you gain weight. We can stick them all over the walls and varnish over them, like the photos on Justin’s door.”
“That’s in my bedroom,” Justin said. “A sitting room should have elegance. Grandeur. Not ads.”
“You know,” Rafe said, out of the blue, propping himself up on one elbow, “I do realize that I owe all of you an apology. I shouldn’t have vanished, especially not without letting you know where I was. My only excuse, and it’s not much of one, is that I was deeply pissed off about that guy getting off scot-free. I’m sorry.”
He was at his most charming, and Rafe could be very charming when he felt like it. Daniel gave him a grave little nod. “You’re an idiot,” I said, “but we love you anyway.”
“You’re OK,” Abby said, stretching up to get her cigarettes off the card table. “I’m not crazy about the idea of that guy running around loose, either.”
“You know what I wonder?” Rafe said. “I wonder if Ned hired him to frighten us off.”
There was an instant of absolute silence, Abby’s hand stopped with a smoke halfway out of the pack, Justin frozen in the middle of sitting up.
Daniel snorted. “I seriously doubt that Ned has the intellect for anything that complex,” he said acidly.
I had opened my mouth to ask, Who’s Ned? but I had shut it again, fast; not just because I was obviously supposed to know this, but because I did. I could have kicked myself for not seeing it earlier. Frank has always thrown diminutives at people he doesn’t like—Danny Boy, our Sammy—and like an idiot I had never considered the possibility that he might have picked the wrong one. They were talking about Slow Eddie. Slow Eddie, who had been wandering around the late-night laneways looking for someone, who had claimed he’d never met Lexie, was N. I was sure Frank could hear my heart punching the mike.
“Probably not,” Rafe said, lying back on his elbows and contemplating the walls. “When we’re done here, we should really invite him over for dinner.”