“Were you in pain?”
“Yeah,” I said, low. “It hurt. A lot. I thought . . . I was scared I was going to die.”
We were good together, me and Frank; we were on the same page. We were working together as smoothly as Abby and me making breakfast, as smoothly as a pair of professional torturers. You can’t be both, Daniel had told me. And: She was never cruel.
“You’re doing great,” Frank told me. “Now that it’s started coming back to you, you’ll have the whole lot remembered in no time, you’ll see. That’s what the doctors told us, isn’t it? Once the floodgates open . . .” He flipped through the file and pulled out a map, one of the ones we’d used during our training week. “Do you think you could show me where you were?”
I took my time, picked a spot about three-quarters of the way from the house to the cottage and put my finger on it. “Maybe there, I think. I’m not sure.”
“Great,” Frank said, doing a careful little scribble in his notebook. “Now I want you to do something else for me. You’re leaning against that hedge, and you’re bleeding, and you’re scared. Can you try and think backwards? Just before that, what had you been doing?”
I kept my eyes on the map. “I was all out of breath, like . . . Running. I was running. So fast I fell over. I hurt my knee.”
“From where? Think hard. What were you running away from?”
“I don’t—” I shook my head, hard. “No. I can’t tell what bits happened, and what bits I just . . . dreamed, or something. I could’ve dreamed all of it, even the blood.”
“It’s possible,” Frank said, nodding easily. “We’ll keep that in mind. But, just in case, I think you need to tell me everything—even the parts you probably dreamed. We’ll sort them out as we go. OK?”
I left a long pause. “That’s all,” I said at last, too weakly. “Running, and falling over. And the blood. That’s it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I’m positive. There’s nothing else.”
Frank sighed. “Here’s the problem, Miss Madison,” he said. A fine, steely sediment was slowly building up in his voice. “Just a few minutes ago, you were worried about getting the wrong person into trouble. But nothing you’ve said so far points towards anyone at all. That tells me you’re skipping something, along the way.”
I gave him my defiant Lexie glare, chin out. “No I’m not.”
“Sure you are. And the really interesting question, as far as I’m concerned, is why.” Frank shoved his chair back and started a leisurely stroll around the interview room, hands in his pockets, making me shift again and again to watch him. “See, call me crazy, but I figured we were on the same side here, you and me. I thought both of us were trying to find out who stabbed you and put that person away. Am I crazy? Does that sound crazy to you?”
I shrugged, twisting to keep an eye on him. He kept circling. “Back when you were in hospital, you answered every question I asked—not a bother, no hesitation, no messing about. You were a lovely witness, Miss Madison, lovely and helpful. But now, all of a sudden, you’re not interested any more. So either you’ve decided to turn the other cheek on someone who almost killed you—and forgive me if I’m wrong, but you don’t look like a saint to me—or there’s something else, something more important, getting in the way.”
He leaned against the wall behind me. I gave up on watching him and started picking nail polish off my thumbnail. “So I have to ask myself,” Frank said softly, “what could possibly be more important to you than putting this person away? You tell me, Miss Madison. What’s important to you?”
“Good chocolate,” I said, to my thumbnail.
Frank’s tone didn’t change. “I think I’ve got to know you pretty well. When you were in hospital, what did you talk about, every day, the second I got in your door? What was the one thing you kept asking for, even when you knew you couldn’t have it? What was the one thing you were dying to see, the day you got out? What had you so excited you nearly burst your stitches jumping around at the thought?”
I kept my head down, bit at the nail polish. “Your friends,” Frank said, very quietly. “Your housemates. They matter to you, Miss Madison. More than anything else I can think of. Maybe more than getting the person who stabbed you. Don’t they?”
I shrugged. “Course they matter to me. So?”
“If you had to make that choice, Miss Madison. If, let’s just say, just for the hell of it, you remembered that one of them had stabbed you. What would you do?”
“I wouldn’t have to make that choice, because none of them would hurt me. Ever. They’re my friends.”
“That’s exactly my point. You’re protecting someone, and I don’t see that being John Naylor. Who is there that you’d protect, except your friends?”
“I’m not protecting—”
Before I even heard him move he had come off the wall and slammed both hands down on the table beside me, his face inches from mine. I flinched harder than I meant to. “You’re lying to me, Miss Madison. Do you honestly not realize how bloody obvious that is? You know something important, something that could blow this case wide open, and you’re hiding it. That’s obstruction. It’s a crime. It can land you in jail.”
I jerked my head back, shoved my chair away from him. “You’re going to arrest me? For what? Jesus, I’m the one who got hurt here! If I just want to forget all about it—”
“If you want to get yourself stabbed every day of the week and twice on Sunday, I don’t give a flying fuck. But when you waste my time and my officers’ time, that’s my business. Do you know how many people have been working this case for the past month, Miss Madison? Do you have the faintest clue how much time and energy and money we’ve put into this? There’s not a chance I’m going to let all that go down the toilet because some spoiled little girl is too wrapped up in her friends to give a fuck about anything or anyone else. Not a chance in hell.”
He wasn’t faking. His face thrust hard up to mine, the hot blue sizzle in his eyes: he was raging and he meant every word, to me, to Lexie, probably even he didn’t know which. This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got. “I’m going to break this case,” Frank said. “I don’t care how long it takes: the person who did this is going down. And if you don’t pull your head out of your arse and realize how important this is, if you keep playing stupid little games with me, you’re going down right alongside him. Is that clear?”
“Get out of my face,” I said. My forearm was up between us, blocking him. In that second I realized that my fist was clenched and that I was as angry as he was.
“Who stabbed you, Miss Madison? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you don’t know? Let’s see you do it. Tell me you don’t know. Come on.”
“Fuck that. I don’t have to prove anything to you. I remember running, and blood on my hands, and you can do whatever you want with that. Now leave me alone.” I slumped down in my chair, shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at the wall in front of me.
I felt Frank’s eyes on the side of my face, his fast breathing, for a long time. “Right,” he said, at last. He eased back slowly, away from the table. “We’ll leave it at that, then. For now.” And he left.
* * *
It was a long time before he came back—another hour, maybe, I’d stopped watching the clock. I picked up the Biro bits, one by one, and arranged them in pretty patterns on the edge of the table.
“Well,” Frank said, when he finally decided to join me. “You were right: that was fun.”
“Poetry in motion,” I said. “Did it do the job?”
He shrugged. “It rattled them, all right; they’re antsy as hell. But they’re not cracking, not yet. Another couple of hours might do it, I don’t know, but Daniel’s starting to get restless—oh, very politely, of course, but he’s been asking how much longer we think
this might take. I figure if you want any time with the other three before he walks out, you’d better take them now.”
“Thanks, Frank,” I said, and meant it. “Thank you.”
“I’ll keep him as long as I can, but I’m not guaranteeing anything.” He took my coat off the back of the door and held it for me. As I slid into it he said, “I’m playing fair with you, Cassie. Now let’s see you play fair with me.”
The others were downstairs in the lobby. They all looked gray and eye-baggy. Rafe was at the window, jiggling one knee; Justin was huddled in a chair like a big miserable stork. Only Abby, sitting up straight with her hands cupped in her lap, looked anything like composed.
“Thanks for coming in,” Frank said cheerfully. “You’ve all been very, very helpful. Your mate Daniel is just finishing up a few things for us; he said you should go ahead, he’ll catch you on the way.”
Justin started upright, like he’d just been woken up. “But why—” he began, but Abby cut him off, her fingers coming down across his wrist.
“Thanks, Detective. Call us if there’s anything else you need.”
“Will do,” Frank said, giving her a wink. He had the door open for us, and was holding out his other hand to shake good-bye, before anyone caught up enough to argue. “See you soon,” he said to each of us, as we passed.
* * *
“Why did you do that?” Justin demanded, as soon as the door closed behind us. “I don’t want to leave without Daniel.”
“Shut up,” Abby said, giving his arm a squeeze that looked casual, “and keep walking. Don’t turn around. Mackey’s probably watching us.”
In the car, nobody said anything for a very long time.
“So,” Rafe said, after a silence that felt like it was filing my teeth. “What did you talk about this time?” He braced himself, a tiny jerk of his head, before he turned to look at me.
“Leave it,” Abby said, from the front.
“Why Daniel?” Justin wanted to know. He was driving like someone’s lunatic granny, switching back and forth between bursts of suicidal speed—I was praying we wouldn’t run into a traffic cop—and patches of obsessive carefulness, and his voice sounded like he might be about to cry. “What do they want? Have they arrested him?”
“No,” Abby said firmly. There was obviously no way she could have known that, but Justin’s shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
“He always is,” Rafe said, to the window.
“He figured this would happen,” Abby said. “He wasn’t sure which one of us they’d hang onto—he thought probably Justin or Lexie, maybe both of you—but he figured they’d split us up.”
“Me? Why me?” Justin’s voice was getting a hysterical edge.
“Oh for God’s sake, Justin, act like you have a pair,” Rafe snapped.
“Slow down,” Abby said, “or we’ll get pulled over. They’re just trying to shake us up, in case we know anything we’re not telling them.”
“But why do they think—”
“Don’t get into that. That’s what they want us doing: wondering what they’re thinking, why they’re doing stuff, getting all freaked out. Don’t play into their hands.”
“If we let those apes outwit us,” Rafe said, “then we deserve to go to jail. Surely to God we’re smarter than—”
“Stop it!” I yelled, banging my fist against the back of Abby’s seat. Justin gasped and nearly sent the car off the road, but I didn’t care. “You stop it! This isn’t a competition! This is my life and it’s not a fucking game and I hate all of you!”
Then I startled the living hell out of myself by bursting into tears. I hadn’t cried in months, not for Rob, not for my lost life in Murder, not for any of the terrible fallout of Operation Vestal, but I cried then. I pressed the sleeve of my sweater over my mouth and bawled my eyes out, for Lexie in every one of her changing faces, for the baby whose face no one would ever see, for Abby spinning on moonlit grass and Daniel smiling as he watched her, for Rafe’s expert hands on the piano and Justin kissing my forehead, for what I had done to them and what I was about to do, for a million lost things; for the wild speed of that car, how mercilessly fast it was taking us where we were going.
After a while Abby reached into the glove compartment and passed me a packet of tissues. She had her window open and the long roar of the air sounded like high wind in trees, and it was so peaceful, in there, that I just kept crying.
23
As soon as Justin pulled up in the stables, I jumped out of the car and ran for the house, pebbles flying up under my feet. Nobody called after me. I jammed my key into the lock, left the door swinging open and thumped upstairs to my room.
It felt like ages before I heard the others coming in (door closing, fast overlapping undertones moving into the sitting room), but actually it was less than sixty seconds—I had an eye on my watch. I figured I needed to give them about ten minutes. Any less, and they wouldn’t have time to compare notes—their first chance all day—and work themselves into a full-on panic; any more, and Abby would pull herself together and start bringing the guys back into line.
During those ten minutes I listened to the voices downstairs, taut and muffled and fringed with hysteria, and I got ready. Late-afternoon sun was flooding through my bedroom window and the air blazed so bright that I felt weightless, suspended in amber, every movement I made as clear and rhythmic and measured as part of some ritual that I had been preparing for all my life. My hands felt like they were moving on their own, smoothing out my girdle—it was starting to get grubby by this time, it wasn’t exactly something I could stick in the washing machine—pulling it on, tucking the hem into my jeans, easing my gun into place, as calmly and precisely as if I had forever and a day. I thought about that afternoon a million miles away, in my flat, when I had put on Lexie’s clothes for the first time: how they had felt like armor, like ceremonial robes; how they had made me want to laugh out loud from something like happiness.
When the ten minutes were up I pulled the door closed behind me, on that little room full of light and lily-of-the-valley smell, and listened as the voices downstairs trailed off into silence. I washed my face in the bathroom, dried it carefully and straightened my towel between Abby’s and Daniel’s. My face in the mirror looked very strange, pale and huge-eyed, staring out at me with some crucial, unreadable warning. I tugged my sweater down and checked to make sure the bulge of the gun didn’t show. Then I went downstairs.
They were in the sitting room, all three of them. For a second, before they saw me, I stood in the doorway watching them. Rafe was sprawled on the sofa, snapping a pack of cards from hand to hand in a fast restless arc. Abby, curled in her chair, had her head bent over the doll and her bottom lip caught hard between her teeth; she was trying to sew, but every stitch took her about three stabs. Justin was in one of the wingbacked chairs with a book, and for some reason he was the one who almost broke my heart: those narrow hunched shoulders, the darn in the sleeve of his sweater, those long hands on wrists as thin and vulnerable as a little boy’s. The coffee table was scattered with glasses and bottles—vodka, tonic, orange juice; something had splashed onto the table as they poured, but no one had bothered to clean it up. On the floor, shadows of ivy curled like cut-outs through the sunlight.
Then their heads came up, one by one, and their faces turned towards me, expressionless and watchful as they had been that first day on the steps. “How’re you doing?” Abby asked.
I shrugged.
“Have a drink,” Rafe said, nodding at the table. “If you want anything that’s not vodka, you’ll have to get it yourself.”