The light through the curtains glinted blue on his glasses as he turned his head to me. “Who are you?” he asked.
I thought as fast as even Frank could ever want from me, I already had one finger on my mouth to shut him up while my other hand smacked the light switch, and then I called, “Hey, it’s me, I’m out here,” and thanked God Daniel was weird enough that we might just possibly get away with that Who are you? His eyes were intent on my face, and he was between me and my case. “Where is everyone?” I asked him, and ripped open the buttons of my top so he could see the tiny mike clipped to my bra, the wire running down into the white pad of bandage.
Daniel’s eyebrows lifted, just a touch. “They went to see a film in town,” he said calmly. “I had a few things I needed to do here. We decided not to wake you.”
I nodded, gave him the thumbs-up and knelt down slowly to pull my case out from under the bed, not taking my eyes off him. The music box on the bedside table, solid and sharp-cornered and within reach: that should slow him down long enough to get me out of there if I needed it. But Daniel didn’t move. I dialed the combination, opened the case, found my ID and threw it to him.
He inspected it closely. “Did you sleep well?” he asked formally.
He had his head bent over the ID, apparently absorbed in it, and my hand was on the bedside table, inches from my gun. But if I went to slip it into my waistband and he looked up; no. I zipped the case shut and locked it. “Not great,” I said. “My head is still killing me. I’m going to go read for a while and hope it gets better. See you in a bit?” I waved a hand to get Daniel’s attention; then I moved towards the door and beckoned.
He gave my ID one last look, then laid it carefully on the bedside table. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll see you later.” He got up from the bed and followed me downstairs.
He moved very silently, for such a big guy. I could feel him at my back all the way and I knew I should be scared—one push—but I wasn’t: adrenaline was flying through me like wildfire and I’ve never been less afraid in my life. Rapture of the deep, Frank called it once, and warned me not to trust it: undercovers can drown like deep-sea divers on the ecstasy of weightlessness, but I didn’t care.
Daniel stood in the sitting-room doorway, watching me with interest, while I hummed “Oh, Johnny, How You Can Love” under my breath and flipped through the records. I picked out Fauré’s Requiem, stacked it up over the string sonatas—Frank might as well have something good to listen to, broaden his cultural horizons, and I doubted he’d notice the midstream switch—and turned it up to a nice solid volume. I flopped into my chair with a thump, sighed contentedly and flipped a few pages of my notebook. Then, very carefully, I peeled off the bandage strip by strip, unclipped the mike from my bra, and left the whole package on the chair to listen to music for a while.
Daniel followed me through the kitchen and out the French doors. I didn’t like the idea of crossing the open lawn—You won’t have visual surveillance, Frank had told me, but he would have said that either way—but we didn’t have a choice. I skirted around the edge and got us in among the trees. Once we were out of view, I relaxed enough to remember my buttons and do them up again. If Frank did have someone watching, that would have given him something to think about.
The alcove was brighter than I had expected; the light slanted long and gold across the grass, slipped between the creepers and glowed in patches on the paving stones. The seat was cold even through my jeans. The ivy swayed back into place to hide us.
“OK,” I said. “We can talk, but keep it down, just in case.”
Daniel nodded. He brushed flecks of dirt off the other seat and sat down. “Lexie is dead, then,” he said.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “I’m sorry.” It sounded ludicrously, insanely inadequate on about a million levels.
“When?”
“The night she was stabbed. She wouldn’t have suffered much, if that’s any comfort.”
He didn’t respond. He clasped his hands in his lap and gazed out through the ivy. At our feet the trickle of water murmured.
“Cassandra Maddox,” Daniel said eventually, trying out the sound of it. “I wondered quite a lot about that, you know: what your real name was. It suits you.”
“I go by Cassie,” I said.
He ignored that. “Why did you take off your microphone?”
With someone else I might have skated around this, parried it—Why do you think?—but not with Daniel. “I want to know what happened to Lexie. I don’t care whether anyone else hears it or not. And I thought you would be more likely to tell me if I gave you a reason to trust me.”
Either out of politeness or out of indifference, he didn’t point out the irony. “And you think I know how she died?” he inquired.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
Daniel considered this. “Shouldn’t you be afraid of me, in that case?”
“Maybe. But I’m not.”
He scrutinized me for a long moment. “You’re very like Lexie, you know,” he said. “Not only physically, but temperamentally as well. At first I wondered if I simply wanted to believe that, to excuse the fact that I had been fooled for so long, but it’s true. Lexie was fearless. She was like an ice skater balanced effortlessly on the edge of her own speed, throwing in joyous, elaborate twirls and leaps just for the hell of it. I always envied her that.” His eyes were in shadow, and I couldn’t read his expression. “Was this just for the hell of it? If I may ask.”
“No,” I said. “At first I didn’t even want to do it. It was Detective Mackey’s idea. He thought it was necessary to the investigation.”
Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “He suspected us from the beginning,” he said, and I realized that he was right; of course he was right. All Frank’s talk about the mysterious foreigner who followed Lexie halfway across the world, that was just a smoke screen: Sam would have thrown a blue fit if he thought I was going to share a roof with the killer. Frank’s famous intuition had kicked in long before we ever got into that squad room. He had known, all along, that the answer was in this house.
“He’s an interesting man, Detective Mackey,” Daniel said. “He’s like one of those charming murderers in Jacobean plays, the ones who get all the best monologues: Bosola, or De Flores. It’s a pity you can’t tell me anything; I would be fascinated to know how much he’s guessed.”
“So would I,” I said. “Believe me.”
Daniel took out his cigarette case, opened it and politely offered it to me. His face, bent over the lighter as I cupped my hand around the flame, was absorbed and untroubled.
“Now,” he said, when he had lit his own smoke and put the case away, “I’m sure you have some questions you’d like to ask me.”
“If I’m so much like Lexie,” I said, “what gave me away?” I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t professional pride or anything; I just needed, badly, to know what that unmissable difference had been.
Daniel turned his head and looked at me. There was an expression on his face that I hadn’t expected: something almost like affection, or sympathy. “You did extraordinarily well, you know,” he said, kindly. “Even now, I don’t think the others suspect anything. We’ll have to decide what to do about that, you and I.”
“I can’t have done all that well,” I said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”
He shook his head. “I think that underrates both of us, don’t you? You were virtually flawless. I did know, almost immediately, that something was wrong—all of us did, just as you would sense something amiss if your partner were replaced by his identical twin. But there were so many possible reasons for that. At first I wondered if you might be faking the amnesia, for reasons of your own, but gradually it became clear that your memory was, in fact, damaged—there seemed to be no reason why you should pretend to forget about finding that photo album, for example, and it was obvious that you were genuinely disturbed by the fact that you didn’t remember it. Once I was satisfied that that wasn??
?t the problem, I thought perhaps you were planning to leave—which would have been understandable, in the circumstances, but Abby seemed very sure that you weren’t, and I trust Abby’s judgment. And you really did seem . . .”
His face turned towards me. “You really did seem happy, you know. More than happy: content; settled. Nested back in among us as if you had never been away. Perhaps this was deliberate, and you’re even better at your job than I realize, but I find it hard to believe that both my instincts and Abby’s could have been quite so wrong.”
There was nothing I could say to that. For a split second I wanted to curl up in a ball and howl at the top of my lungs, like a kid devastated by the sheer ruthlessness of this world. I gave Daniel a noncommittal tilt of my chin, drew on my smoke and tapped ash onto the flagstones.
Daniel waited with a grave patience that sent a little warning chill through me. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to answer, he nodded, a tiny, private, thoughtful nod. “At any rate,” he said, “I decided you, or rather Lexie, must simply be traumatized. A profound trauma—and clearly this would qualify—can transform a person’s entire character, you know: turn a strong person into a trembling wreck, a happy nature melancholic, a gentle one vicious. It can shatter you into a million pieces, and rearrange the remains in an utterly unrecognizable form.”
His voice was even, calm; he was looking away from me again, out at the hawthorn flowers white and shivering in the breeze, and I couldn’t see his eyes. “The changes in Lexie were so small, by comparison, so trivial; so easily accounted for. I assume Detective Mackey gave you the information you needed.”
“Detective Mackey and Lexie. The video phone.”
Daniel thought about that for so long that I thought he’d forgotten my question. There was an in-built immobility to his face—that square-cut jaw, maybe—that made it almost impossible to read. “ ‘Everything’s overrated except Elvis and chocolate,’ ” he said, in the end. “That was a nice touch.”
“Was it the onions that did it?” I asked.
He drew in a breath and stirred, coming out of his reverie. “Those onions,” he said, with a faint smile. “Lexie was fanatical about them: onions and cabbage. Fortunately none of the rest of us like cabbage either, but we had to reach a compromise on the onions: once a week. She still complained and picked them out and so on—mainly to tease Rafe and Justin, I think. So, when you ate them without a murmur and asked for more, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what, exactly—you covered it very well—but I couldn’t simply dismiss it. The only alternative explanation I could come up with was that, incredible though it seemed, you weren’t Lexie.”
“So you set a trap for me,” I said. “The Brogan’s thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a trap,” Daniel said, with a touch of asperity. “More of a test. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Lexie had no particular feelings about Brogan’s either way—I’m not sure she’d ever been there—which didn’t seem like something an impostor would know; you might have found out her likes and dislikes, but hardly her indifferences. The fact that you got it right, and the Elvis comment, reassured me. But then there was last night. That kiss.”
I went cold all over, till I remembered I didn’t have the mike on me. “Lexie wouldn’t have done that?” I asked coolly, leaning over to put out my smoke on the flagstones.
Daniel smiled at me, that slow sweet smile that made him suddenly handsome. “Oh, she would have,” he said. “The kiss was very much in character—and very nice, if I may say so.” I didn’t blink. “No, it was your reaction to it. For a split second, you looked stunned; utterly shocked at what you had done. Then you recovered and made some airy comment, and found an excuse to move away—but, you see, Lexie would never have been shaken by that kiss, not even for a second. And she would certainly never have drawn back at that point. She would have been . . .” He blew thoughtful smoke rings up into the ivy. “She would have been,” he said, “triumphant.”
“Why?” I asked. “Had she been trying to make something like that happen? ” My mind was fast-forwarding through the video clips; there had been flirting with Rafe and Justin but never with Daniel, not a hint, but that could have been a bluff, to mislead the others—
“That,” Daniel said, “is what gave you away.”
I stared at him.
He ground out the cigarette under his foot. “Lexie was both incapable of thinking about the past,” he said, “and incapable of thinking more than one step into the future. This may be one of the few things you overlooked. Not your fault; that level of simplicity is hard to imagine, and also hard to describe. It was as startling as a deformity. I seriously doubt that she would have been able to plan a seduction; but, once something had happened, she would have seen no reason to be shocked by it and certainly no reason to stop there. You, on the other hand, were clearly trying to gauge the consequences this might have. I’d guess that you have a boyfriend, or a partner, in your own life.”
I didn’t say anything. “So,” Daniel said, “I rang the police headquarters this afternoon, once the others had gone out, and asked where I could find Detective Sam O’Neill. The woman I spoke to couldn’t find an extension for him at first, but then she checked some directory and gave me a number to ring. She said, ‘That’s the Murder squad room.’ ”
He sighed, a small, tired, final sound. “Murder,” he said quietly. “So then, you see, I knew.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, again. All day, while we drank coffee and got on each other’s nerves and bitched about our hangovers, while he sent the others off to the pictures and sat in Lexie’s small dimming bedroom waiting for me, he had been carrying this alone.
Daniel nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see that.”
There was a long silence. Finally I said, “You know I need to ask you what happened.”
Daniel took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. Without them his eyes looked blank, blind. “There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. ‘Take what you want and pay for it, says God.’ ”
The words fell into the silence under the ivy like cool pebbles into water, sank without a ripple. “I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could possibly be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”
He put the glasses on and looked at me calmly, tucking the handkerchief back into his shirt pocket. “It seems to me,” he said, “that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only ‘Take what you want, says God’; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone’s outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that’s come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can’t afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture—theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth.”
He didn’t sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. “I don’t consider this anything to become incensed about,” he said, reading my look. “In fact, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising to anyone. We’ve taken what we wanted and we’re paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man—what’s his name? the prime minister—comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning
it. I finally had to get rid of the television,” he added, a little peevishly. “We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.”