Plenty of murder cases turn into knock-down-drag-out battles of wits, but this was different. This was the first time I had felt like my real opponent wasn’t the murderer but the victim: defiant, clenching her secrets white-knuckle tight, and evenly, perfectly matched against me in every way, too close to call.
By Saturday lunchtime I had made myself nuts enough that I climbed up on the kitchen counter, took down my Official Stuff shoebox from the top of a cupboard, dumped the documents on the floor and went through them for my birth cert. Maddox, Cassandra Jeanne, female, six pounds ten ounces. Type of birth: single.
“Idiot,” I said, out loud, and climbed back up on the counter.
* * *
That afternoon, Frank called round. At this stage I was so stir-crazy—my flat is small, I’d run out of stuff to clean—that I was actually glad to hear his voice over the intercom.
“What year is it?” I asked, when he reached the top of the stairs. “Who’s the president?”
“Quit bitching,” he said, giving me a one-armed hug around the neck. “You’ve got this whole lovely flat to play in. You could be a sniper stuck in a hide, not moving a muscle for days on end and pissing into a bottle. And I brought you supplies.”
He handed me a plastic bag. All the main food groups: chocolate biscuits, smokes, ground coffee and two bottles of wine. “You’re a gem, Frank,” I said. “You know me too well.” He did, too; four years on, and he had remembered I like Lucky Strike Lights. The feeling wasn’t a reassuring one, but then he hadn’t intended it to be.
Frank raised a noncommittal eyebrow. “Got a corkscrew?”
My antennae went up, but I can hold my booze fairly well, and Frank had to know I wasn’t stupid enough to get drunk with him. I threw him a corkscrew and rummaged for glasses.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, going to work on the first bottle. “I was scared I’d find you in some foul yuppie apartment with chrome surfaces.”
“On a cop’s salary?” Dublin housing prices are a lot like New York ones, except that in New York, you get New York for your money. My flat is one mid-sized room, on the top floor of a tall converted Georgian house. It has the original wrought-iron fireplace, enough room for a futon and a sofa and all my books, a tipsy slant to the floor in one corner, a family of owls living in the roof space, and a view of Sandymount beach. I like it.
“On two cops’ salaries. Aren’t you going out with our boy Sammy?”
I sat on the futon and held out the glasses for him to pour. “Only for a couple of months. We’re not at the living-in-sin stage yet.”
“I thought it was longer. He seemed pretty protective on Thursday. Is it true love?”
“None of your business,” I said, clinking my glass against his. “Cheers. Now: what are you doing here?”
Frank looked injured. “I thought you could use the company. I got to feeling guilty about leaving you stuck here, all on your own . . .” I gave him a dirty look; he realized it wasn’t working and grinned. “You’re too smart for your own good, do you know that? I didn’t want you getting hungry, or bored, or desperate for a smoke, and heading out to the shop. The odds are a thousand to one against you being spotted by anyone who knows our girl, but why take chances?”
This was plausible enough, but Frank has always had a habit of tossing lures in a few directions at once to distract you from the hook in the middle. “I’ve still got no intention of doing this, Frankie,” I said.
“Fair enough,” Frank said, unperturbed. He took a big swig of his wine and settled himself more comfortably on the sofa. “I had a chat with the brass, by the way, and this is now officially a joint investigation: Murder and Undercover. But your boyfriend probably already told you that.”
He hadn’t. Sam had stayed at his own place the last couple of nights (“I’ll be up at six, sure, no reason you should be as well. Unless you need me to come over? Will you be OK on your own?”); I hadn’t seen him since the murder scene. “I’m sure everyone’s delighted,” I said. Joint investigations are a pain in the hole. They always end up getting spectacularly bogged down in endless, pointless testosterone competitions.
Frank shrugged. “They’ll survive. Want to hear what we’ve got on this girl so far?”
Of course I did. I wanted it the way an alcoholic must want booze: badly enough to shove aside the hard knowledge that this was a truly lousy idea. “You might as well tell me,” I said. “Since you’re here.”
“Beautiful,” Frank said, rummaging through the plastic bag for the cigarettes. “OK: she first shows up in February 2002, when she pulls Alexandra Madison’s birth cert and uses it to open a bank account. She uses the birth cert, an account statement and her face to pull your old records from UCD, and she uses those to get into Trinity, to do a PhD in English.”
“Organized,” I said.
“Oh yeah. Organized, creative and persuasive. She was a natural at this; I couldn’t have done it better myself. She never tried to sign on the dole, which was smart; just got herself a job in a café in town, worked there full-time for the summer, then started at Trinity come October. Her thesis title is—you’ll like this—‘Other Voices: Identity, Concealment and Truth.’ It’s about women who wrote under other identities.”
“Cute,” I said. “So she had a sense of humor.”
Frank gave me a quizzical look. “We don’t have to like her, babe,” he said, after a moment. “We just have to find out who killed her.”
“You do. I don’t. Got anything else?”
He flipped a smoke between his lips and found his lighter. “OK, so she’s in Trinity. She makes friends with four other English postgrads, hangs out almost exclusively with them. Last September, one of them inherits a house from his great-uncle, and they all move into it. Whitethorn House, it’s called. It’s outside Glenskehy, just over half a mile from where she was found. On Wednesday night, she goes for a walk and never comes home. The other four alibi each other.”
“Which you could have told me over the phone,” I said.
“Ah,” Frank said, rummaging in his jacket pocket, “but I couldn’t have shown you these. Here we go: the Fantastic Four. Her housemates.” He pulled out a handful of photos and spread them on the table.
One of them was a snapshot, taken on a winter day, thin gray sky and a sprinkle of snow on the ground: five people in front of a big Georgian house, heads tilted together and hair blown sideways in a swirl of wind. Lexie was in the middle, bundled in that same peacoat and laughing, and my mind did that wild lurch and swerve again: When was I ... ? Frank was watching me like a hunting dog. I put the photo down.
The other shots were stills pulled off some kind of home video—they had that look, blurry edges where people were moving—and printed out in the Murder squad room: the printer always leaves a streak across the top right corner. Four full-length shots, four blown-up head shots, all taken in the same room against the same ratty wallpaper striped with tiny flowers. There was a huge fir tree, no decorations, caught in the corner of two of the shots: just before Christmas.
“Daniel March,” Frank said, pointing. “Not Dan, not God forbid Danny: Daniel. He’s the one who inherited the house. Only child, orphaned, from an old Anglo-Irish family. Grandfather lost most of their money in dodgy deals in the fifties, but there’s enough left to give Danny Boy a small income. He’s on a scholarship, so he doesn’t have fees to pay. Doing a PhD on, I kid you not, the inanimate object as narrator in early medieval epic poetry.”
“No idiot, then,” I said. Daniel was a big guy, well over six foot and built to match, with glossy dark hair and a square jaw. He was sitting in a wingbacked chair, delicately lifting a glass bauble out of its box and glancing up at the camera. His clothes—white shirt, black trousers, soft gray sweater—looked expensive. In the close-up his eyes, behind steel-rimmed glasses, were gray and cool as stone.
“Definitely no idiot. None of them are, but especially not him. You’ll need to watch your step around that one.?
??
I ignored that. “Justin Mannering,” Frank said, moving on. Justin had got himself wound up in a snarl of white Christmas lights and was giving them a helpless look. He was tall, too, but in a narrow, prematurely professorial way: short mousy hair already starting to recede, little rimless glasses, long gentle face. “From Belfast. Doing his PhD on sacred and profane love in Renaissance literature, whatever profane love may be; sounds to me like it would cost a couple of quid a minute. Mother died when he was seven, father remarried, two half brothers, Justin doesn’t go home much. But Daddy—Daddy’s a lawyer—still pays his fees and sends money every month. Nice for some, eh?”
“They can’t help it if their parents have money,” I said absently.
“They could get a bloody job, couldn’t they? Lexie gave tutorials, marked papers, invigilated exams—she worked in a café, till they moved out to Glenskehy and the commute got too complicated. Didn’t you work in college?”
“I waited tables in a pub, and it sucked. No way would I have done it if I’d had any choice. Getting your arse pinched by drunk accountants doesn’t necessarily make you a better person.”
Frank shrugged. “I don’t like people who get everything for free. Speaking of whom: Raphael Hyland, goes by Rafe. Sarky little fucker. Daddy’s a merchant banker, originally from Dublin, moved to London in the seventies; Mummy’s a socialite. They divorced when he was six, dumped him straight into boarding school, moved him every couple of years when Daddy got another raise and could afford to trade up. Rafe lives off his trust fund. Doing his PhD on the malcontent in Jacobean drama.”
Rafe was stretched out on a sofa with a glass of wine and a Santa hat, being purely ornamental and doing it well. He was ridiculously beautiful, in that way that makes a lot of guys feel a panicky urge to come out with snide comments in their deepest voices. He was the same general height and build as Justin, but his face was all bones and dangerous curves, and he was gold all over: heavy dark-blond hair, that skin that always looks faintly tanned, long iced-tea eyes hooded like a hawk’s. He was like a mask from some Egyptian prince’s tomb.
“Wow,” I said. “All of a sudden this gig looks more tempting.”
“If you’re good, I won’t tell your fella you said that. The guy’s probably a bender anyway,” Frank said, with crashing predictability. “Last but not least: Abigail Stone. Goes by Abby.”
Abby wasn’t pretty, exactly—small, with shoulder-length brown hair and a snub nose—but there was something about her face: the quirk of her eyebrows and the twist of her mouth gave her a quizzical air that made you want to look twice. She was sitting in front of a turf fire, threading popcorn for garlands, but she was giving the cameraperson—Lexie, presumably—a wry look, and the blur of her free hand made me think she had just whipped a piece of popcorn at the camera.
“She’s a very different story,” Frank said. “From Dublin, father was never on the scene, mother dumped her in foster care when she was ten. Abby aced her Leaving Cert, got into Trinity, worked her arse off and came out with a first. PhD on social class in Victorian literature. Used to pay her way by cleaning offices and tutoring schoolkids in English; now that she doesn’t have rent to pay—Daniel doesn’t charge them—she picks up a few bob giving tutorials in college and helping her professor with research. You’ll get on.”
Even caught off guard like that, the four of them made you want to keep looking. Partly it was the sheer luminous perfection of it all—I could practically smell gingerbread baking and hear carolers in the background, they were about one robin redbreast away from a greeting card. Partly it was the way they dressed, austere, almost Puritan: the guys’ shirts dazzling white, knife creases in their trousers, Abby’s long woolen skirt tucked demurely round her knees, not a logo or a slogan in sight. Back when I was a student, all our clothes always looked as if they had been washed once too often in a dodgy laundrette with off-brand detergent, which they had. These guys were so pristine it was almost eerie. Separately they might have looked subdued, even boring, in the middle of Dublin’s orgy of designer-label self-expression, but together: they had a cool, challenging quadruple gaze that made them not just eccentric but alien, something from another century, remote and formidable. Like most detectives—and Frank knew this, of course he did—I’ve never been able to look away from anything that I can’t figure out.
“They’re quite a bunch,” I said.
“They’re a weird bunch, is what they are, according to the rest of the English department. The four of them met when they started college, almost seven years ago now. Been inseparable ever since; no time for anyone else. They’re not particularly popular in the department—the other students think they’re up themselves, amazingly enough. But somehow our girl got in with them, almost as soon as she started at Trinity. Other people tried to make friends with her, but she wasn’t interested. She’d set her sights on this lot.”
I could see why, and I warmed towards her, just a little. Whatever else about this girl, she hadn’t had cheap taste. “What have you told them?”
Frank grinned. “Once she got to the cottage and passed out, the shock and the cold sent her into a hypothermic coma. That slowed down her heartbeat—so anyone who found her could easily have thought she was dead, right?—stopped the blood loss and prevented organ damage. Cooper says it’s ‘clinically ludicrous, but quite possibly plausible to those with no medical knowledge,’ which is fine by me. So far no one seems to have a problem with it.”
He lit up and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “She’s still unconscious and it’s touch and go, but she might well pull through. You never know.”
I wasn’t about to rise to that. “They’ll want to see her,” I said.
“They already asked. Unfortunately, due to security concerns, we are unable to disclose her location at this time.”
He was enjoying this. “How’d they take it?” I asked.
Frank thought about that for a while, head leaned back on the sofa, smoking slowly. “Shaken up,” he said at last, “naturally enough. But there’s no way of knowing whether they’re all four shaky because she got stabbed, or whether one of them’s shaky because she might come round and tell us what happened. They’re very helpful, answer all our questions, no reluctance, nothing like that; it’s only afterwards that you realize they haven’t actually told you very much at all. They’re an odd bunch, Cass; hard to read. I’d love to see what you make of them.”
I swept the photos into a pile and passed them back to Frank. “OK,” I said. “Why did you need to come over and show me these, again?”
He shrugged, all wide innocent blue eyes. “To see if you recognized any of them. That could give a whole different angle—”
“I don’t. Come clean, Frankie. What do you want?”
Frank sighed. He tapped the photos methodically on the table, aligning the edges, and tucked them back into his jacket pocket.
“I want to know,” he said quietly, “if I’m wasting my time here. I need to know if you’re one hundred percent sure that what you want is to go back into work on Monday morning, to DV, and forget this ever happened.”
All the laughter and façade had gone out of his voice, and I knew Frank well enough to know that this was when he was most dangerous. “I’m not sure I have the option of forgetting about it,” I said, carefully. “This thing’s thrown me for a loop. I don’t like it, and I don’t want to get involved.”
“You’re sure about that? Because I’ve been working my arse off these last two days, pumping everyone in sight for every detail of Lexie Madison’s life—”
“Which would’ve needed doing anyway. Quit guilt-tripping me.”
“—and if you’re absolutely positive, then there’s no point in you wasting any more of your time and mine by humoring me.”