* * *
I photocopied the pictures and the interviews and sent the file back to Frank with a Post-it that said “Thank you.” The next afternoon I left work early and went to see Abby.
Her new address was on file: she was living in Ranelagh, Student Central, in a tattered little house with weeds in the front lawn and too many bells beside the door. I stayed out on the pavement, leaning on the railing. It was five o’clock, she would be coming home soon—routine dies hard—and I wanted to let her see me from far off, be braced and ready before she reached me.
It was about half an hour before she came around the corner, wearing her long gray coat and carrying two supermarket bags. She was too far away for me to see her face, but I knew that brisk, neat walk by heart. I saw the second when she spotted me, the wild rock backwards, the grab as her bags almost slipped out of her hands; the long pause, after she realized, when she stood in the middle of the empty pavement deciding whether to turn around and go somewhere else, anywhere else; the lift of her shoulders as she took a deep breath and started walking again, towards me. I remembered that first morning, around the kitchen table: how I had thought that, if things had been different, the two of us could have been friends.
She stopped at the gate and stood still, scanning every detail of my face, deliberate and unflinching. “I should kick the living shite out of you,” she said, eventually.
She didn’t look like she could do it. She had lost a lot of weight and her hair was pulled up in a knot that made her face look even thinner, but it was more than that. Something had gone out of her skin: a luminosity, a resilience. For the first time I got a flash of what she would be like as an old woman, erect and sharp-tongued and wiry, with tired eyes.
“You’d have every right,” I said.
“What do you want?”
“Five minutes,” I said. “We’ve found out some stuff about Lexie. I thought you might want to know. It might . . . I don’t know. It might help.”
A lanky kid in Docs and an iPod brushed past us, let himself into the house and slammed the door behind him. “Can I come in?” I asked. “Or if you’d rather I didn’t, we can stay out here. Just five minutes.”
“What’s your name again? They told us, but I forget.”
“Cassie Maddox.”
“Detective Cassie Maddox,” Abby said. After a moment she shifted one bag up onto her wrist and found her keys. “OK. You might as well come in. When I tell you to leave, you leave.” I nodded.
Her flat was one room, at the back of the first floor, smaller than mine and barer: a single bed, an armchair, a boarded-up fireplace, a minifridge, a tiny table and chair pulled up to the window; no door to a kitchen or a bathroom, nothing on the walls, no knickknacks on the mantelpiece. Outside it was a warm evening, but the air in the flat was cool as water. There were faint damp-stains on the ceiling, but every inch of the place was scrubbed clean and a big sash window looked out to the west, giving the room a long melancholy glow. I thought of her room in Whitethorn House, that rich, ornate nest.
Abby dumped the bags on the floor, shook off her coat and hung it on the back of the door. The bags had left red grooves on her wrists, like handcuff marks. “It’s not as crap as you think,” she said; defiantly, but there was a weary undertone there. “It does have its own bathroom. Out on the landing, but what can you do.”
“I don’t think it’s crap,” I said, which was actually sort of true; I’ve lived in worse. “I just expected . . . I thought there would be insurance money, or something. From the house.”
Abby’s lips tightened for a second. “We weren’t insured,” she said. “We always figured, the house had lasted this long; we’d rather put our money into doing it up. More fools us.” She pulled open what looked like a wardrobe; inside were a tiny sink, a two-ring cooker and a couple of cupboards. “So we sold up. To Ned. We didn’t have much choice. He won—or maybe Lexie won, or your lot, or the guy who burned us out, I don’t know. Someone else won, anyway.”
“Then why live here,” I asked, “if you don’t like it?”
Abby shrugged. She had her back to me, putting stuff away in the cupboards—baked beans, tinned tomatoes, a bag of off-brand cornflakes; her shoulder blades, sharp through the thin gray sweater, looked fine as a child’s. “First place I saw. I needed somewhere to live. After your lot let us go, the people from Victim Support found us this horrible B and B in Summerhill; we didn’t have any money, we put most of our cash into the kitty—as you know, obviously—and it all went up in the fire. The landlady made us get out by ten in the morning, come back in by ten at night, I spent all day in the library staring at nothing and all night sitting in my room by myself—the three of us weren’t really talking . . . I got out as fast as I could. Now that we’ve sold up, the logical thing would be to use my share for a deposit on an apartment, but for that I’d need a job that can pay the mortgage, and until I finish my PhD ... The whole damn thing just feels too complicated. I have a hard time making decisions, these days. If I leave it long enough, my rent will eat up all the money and the decision’ll take care of itself.”
“You’re still in Trinity?” I wanted to scream. This tight, strange, eggshells conversation, when I’d danced to her singing, when we’d sat on my bed eating chocolate biscuits and swapping worst-kiss stories; this was more than I had any right to, and I couldn’t break through it and find her.
“I’ve started. I might as well finish.”
“What about Rafe and Justin?”
Abby slammed the cupboard doors and ran her hands through her hair, that gesture I’d seen a thousand times. “I don’t know what to do about you,” she said abruptly. “You ask me something like that, and part of me wants to fill you in on every detail, and part of me wants to give you hell for putting us through this when we were supposed to be your best friends, and part of me wants to tell you to mind your own fucking business, cop, don’t you dare even mention their names. I can’t . . . I don’t know how to talk to you. I don’t know how to look at you. What do you want ?”
She was about two seconds from throwing me out. “I brought this,” I said, fast, and found the sheaf of photocopies in my satchel. “You know Lexie was going under a fake name, don’t you?”
Abby folded her arms at her waist and watched me, wary and expressionless. “One of your friends told us. Whatsisname, who was all over us from the start. Stocky blond guy, Galway accent?”
“Sam O’Neill,” I said. I was wearing the ring on my finger, these days—the slagging, which had ranged from affectionate to deeply bitchy, had more or less died down; the Murder squad even gave us some mystifying silver dish thing, for an engagement present—but there was no reason why she should make the connection.
“Him. I think he expected it to shock us into spilling our guts, or something. So?”
“We traced her,” I said, and held out the photocopies.
Abby took them and ran a thumbnail through the pages, one fast flip; I thought of that expert, effortless shuffle. “What’s all this?”
“Places she lived. Other IDs she used. Photos. Interviews.” She was still giving me that look, flat and final as a slap in the face. “I figured you should have the choice. The chance to have them, if you want them.”
Abby tossed the papers onto the table and went back to her shopping bags, slotting things into the tiny fridge: a pint of milk, a little plastic serving of some chocolate-mousse thing. “I don’t. I already know everything I need to know about Lexie.”
“I thought it might help explain some stuff. Why she did what she did. Maybe you’d rather not know, but—”
She whipped upright, fridge door swinging wildly. “What the hell do you know about it? You never even met Lexie. I don’t give a flying fuck if she was going under a fake name, if she was a dozen different people in a dozen different places. None of that matters. I knew her. I lived with her. That wasn’t fake. You’re like Rafe’s father, all that bullshit about the real world—That was the rea
l world. It was a whole lot more real than this.” A fierce jerk of her chin, at the room around us.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I just don’t think she ever wanted to hurt you, any of you. It wasn’t like that.”
After a moment the air went out of her; her spine sagged. “That’s what you said, that day. That you—she—just panicked. Because of the baby.”
“I believed that,” I said. “I still do.”
“Yeah,” said Abby. “Me too. That’s the only reason I let you in.” She shoved something more firmly onto one of the fridge shelves, shut the door.
“Rafe and Justin,” I said. “Would they want to see this stuff?”
Abby balled up the plastic bags and stuffed them into another bag, hanging off the chair. “Rafe’s in London,” she said. “He left as soon as your lot would let us travel. His father found him a job—I don’t know what, exactly; something to do with finance. He’s totally unqualified for it and he’s probably crap at it, but he won’t get fired, not as long as Daddy’s around.”
“Oh, God,” I said, before I could stop myself. “He must be miserable.”
She shrugged and shot me a quick, unfathomable look. “We don’t talk a lot. I’ve phoned him a few times, stuff about the sale—not that he gives a damn, he just tells me to do whatever I want and send him the papers to sign, but I have to check. I rang him in the evenings, and it mostly sounded like he was in some fancy pub, or a nightclub—loud music, people yelling. They call him ‘Raffy.’ He was always about three-quarters drunk, which I doubt comes as any surprise to you, but no, he didn’t sound miserable. If that helps you feel better.”
Rafe in moonlight, smiling, eyes slanted sideways at me; his fingers warm on my cheek. Rafe with Lexie, somewhere—I still wondered about that alcove. “What about Justin?”
“He went back up North. He tried to stick it out at Trinity, but he couldn’t take it—not just the staring and whispering, although that was pretty bad, but . . . nothing being the same. A couple of times I heard him crying, in his carrel. One day he tried to go into the library and he couldn’t do it; he had a panic attack, right there in the Arts block, in front of everyone. They had to take him away in an ambulance. He didn’t come back.”
She took a coin from a neat stack on the fridge and fed it into the electricity meter, turned the knob. “I’ve talked to him a couple of times. He’s teaching English in a boys’ school, filling in for some woman on maternity leave. He says the kids are spoiled little monsters and they write ‘Mr. Mannering is a faggot’ on the board most mornings, but at least it’s peaceful—it’s out in the countryside—and the other teachers leave him alone. I doubt either he or Rafe would want that stuff.” She flicked her head at the table. “And I’m not going to ask them. You want to talk to them, do your own dirty work. I should warn you, I don’t think they’ll be overjoyed to hear from you.”
“I don’t blame them,” I said. I went to the table, tapped the bundle of paper into shape. Below the window, the back garden was overgrown, strewn with bright crisp packets and empty bottles.
Abby said, behind me, with no inflection in her voice at all, “We’re always going to hate you, you know.”
I didn’t turn around. Whether I liked it or not, in this one small room my face was still a weapon, a bare blade laid between her and me; it was easier for her to talk when she couldn’t see it. “I know,” I said.
“If you’re looking for some kind of absolution, you’re in the wrong place.”
“I’m not,” I said. “This stuff is the only thing I’ve got to offer you, so I figured I had to try. I owe you that.”
After a second, I heard her sigh. “It’s not that we think this was all your fault. We’re not stupid. Even before you came . . .” A movement: her shifting, pushing back hair, something. “Daniel believed, right up to the end, that we could still fix things; that there was still a way for it to be OK again. I didn’t. Even if Lexie had made it . . . I think, by the time your mates showed up at our door, it was already too late. Too much had changed.”
“You and Daniel,” I said. “Rafe and Justin.”
Another beat. “I guess it was that obvious. That night, the night Lexie died . . . we couldn’t have made it through, otherwise. And it shouldn’t have been a big deal. Various stuff had happened before, here and there along the way; everyone was always fine about it. But that night . . .”
I heard her swallow. “Before that, we had a balance, you know? Everyone knew Justin was in love with Rafe, but it was just there, in the background. I didn’t even realize that I . . . Call me stupid, but I really didn’t; I just thought Daniel was the best friend I could ever want. I think we could all have gone on like that, maybe forever—or maybe not. But that night was different. The second Daniel said, ‘She’s dead,’ things changed. Everything got clearer, too clear to bear, like some huge light had been switched on and you could never close your eyes again, not even for a second. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
“After that, even if Lexie had come home after all, I don’t know if we . . .”
Her voice trailed off. I turned round and found her watching me, closer than I’d expected. “You don’t sound like her,” she said. “You don’t even move like her. Are you anything like her at all?”
“We had some things in common,” I said. “Not everything.”
Abby nodded. After a moment she said, “I’d like you to leave now.”
I had my hand on the doorknob when she said, suddenly and almost unwillingly, “You want to hear something strange?”
It was getting dark; her face looked like it was fading away, into the dim room. “One of the times I rang Rafe, he wasn’t in that club or whatever; he was home, on the balcony of his apartment. It was late. We talked for a while. I said something about Lexie—that I still miss her, even though . . . in spite of everything. Rafe made some flip comment about having too much fun to miss anyone; but before he said it, before he answered, there was this little pause. Baffled. Like it took him a second to figure out who I was talking about. I know Rafe, and I swear to God he almost said, ‘Who?’ ”
Upstairs, half muffled by the ceiling, a phone burst into “Baby Got Back” and someone thumped across the floor to answer it. “He was pretty drunk,” Abby said. “Like I told you. Still, though . . . I can’t stop wondering. If we’re forgetting each other. If in another year or two we’ll all have been wiped right out of each other’s minds; gone, like we never met. If we could pass on the street, within inches, and not even blink.”
“No pasts,” I said.
“No pasts. Sometimes”—a quick breath—“I can’t see their faces. Rafe and Justin, I can handle it; but Lexie. And Daniel.”
I saw her head turn, her profile against the window: that snub nose, a stray strand of hair. “I loved him, you know,” she said. “I would have loved him as hard as he’d let me, for the rest of my life.”
“I know,” I said. I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack. Instead I got the photocopies back out of my bag and flipped through them—I practically had to hold them against my nose, to see—until I found the streaky color copy of that snapshot: the five of them, smiling, wrapped in falling snow and silence, outside Whitethorn House. “Here,” I said, and held it out to Abby.
Her hand, pale in the near-darkness, reaching out. She went to the window, tilted the page to the last of the light.
“Thanks,” she said, after a moment. “I’ll keep this.” She was still there, looking at it, when I closed the door.
* * *
After that I hoped I’d dream about Lexie, just every now and then. She’s fading from the others’ minds, day by day; soon she’ll be gone for good, she’ll be only bluebells and a hawthorn tree, in a ruined cottage where no one goes. I figured I owed her my dreams. But she never came. Whatever it wa
s that she wanted from me, I must have brought it to her, somewhere along the way. The only thing I dream of is the house, empty, open to sun and dust and ivy; scuffles and whispers, always just one corner away; and one of us, her or me, in the mirror, laughing.