Page 53 of The Likeness

  I shrugged, hands going out. “This is the only one I can go after. I’ve got one day left; I don’t want to ditch this case without giving it everything I’ve got. What are you bitching about, anyway? You’ve always liked them for it.”

  “Oh, you picked up on that? I underestimated you, babe. Yeah, I’ve always liked them. But you haven’t. A few days ago you were claiming these four were a bunch of fluffy little bunnies who wouldn’t hurt a fly between them, and now you’ve got that steel-trap look in your eye and you’re working out the best way for us to fuck with their heads. So I’m wondering what it is that you’re not telling me.”

  His eyes were on me, level and unblinking. I gave it a second, ran my hands through my hair like I was trying to figure out how to put this. “It’s not like that,” I said, in the end. “I’ve just got a feeling, Frank. Just a feeling.”

  Frank watched me for a long minute; I swung my legs and tried to look open and sincere. Then: “OK,” he said, suddenly all business, shoving himself off the wall and heading over to switch the camera back on. “You’ve got a deal. Did you lot bring two cars, or am I going to have to drive Danny Boy all the way back to Glenarsefuck when I’m done with him?”

  “We brought both cars,” I said. Relief and adrenaline were making me giddy; my mind was racing through how to work this interview and I wanted to shoot straight up in the air like a firework. “Thanks, Frank. You won’t regret it.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said, “well.” He swapped the chairs back around. “Sit. Stay. I’ll get back to you.”

  * * *

  He left me there for another couple of hours, presumably while he gave the others everything he’d got, in the hope that one of them would crack and he wouldn’t need to use me after all. I spent the time smoking illegal cigarettes—no one seemed to care—and working out the details of how to do this. I knew Frank would be coming back. From the outside, the others were impregnable, seamless; even Justin would be holding up cool as ice in the face of Frank’s worst. Outsiders were too far away to shake them. They were like one of those medieval fortresses built with such fierce, intricate, defensive care that they could only ever be taken from the inside, by treachery.

  Finally the door flew open and Frank stuck his head in. “I’m about to link you up to the other interview rooms, so get in character. Five minutes to curtain.”

  “Don’t link Daniel in,” I said, sitting up fast.

  “Don’t fuck up,” Frank said, and vanished again.

  When he came back I was perched on the table, bending the ink tube of the Biro into a catapult and flipping the broken bits at the camera. “Hey,” I said, brightening up at the sight of him. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

  “Now how could I ever do that?” Frank asked, giving me his very best grin. “I even brought you coffee—milk and two sugars, am I right? No, no, don’t worry about that”—as I hopped off the table and went for the Biro bits—“someone’ll get them later. Sit down and we’ll have a chat. How’ve you been?” He pulled out a chair and shoved one of the Styrofoam cups across to me.

  He started out sweet as honey—I’d forgotten what a charmer Frank can be, when he feels like it. You’re looking wonderful, Miss Madison, and how’s the old war wound getting on, and—when I played up to him, gave a stretch to show him how well the stitches had healed—isn’t that a lovely sight, and just the right amount of flirtation in his grin. I threw in eyelash-and-giggle touches, just little ones, to piss Rafe off.

  Frank took me through the whole John Naylor saga, or anyway a version of it—not exactly the version that had originally happened, but definitely a version that made Naylor sound like a good suspect: soothing the others down, before we started detonating things. “I’m all impressed now,” I told him, tilting my chair back and giving him a mischievous sideways look. “I thought you’d given up ages ago.”

  Frank shook his head. “We don’t give up,” he said soberly. “Not on something as serious as this. No matter how long it takes. We don’t always want to be obvious about it, but we’re always working away, putting the pieces together.” It was impressive; he should have come with his own soundtrack. “We’re getting there. And right now, Miss Madison, we need a little help from you.”

  “Sure,” I said, bringing my chair down and doing focused. “Do you want me to look at that guy Naylor again?”

  “Nothing like that. It’s your mind we need this time, not your eyes. You remember how the doctors said your memory might start coming back, as you recovered?”

  “Yeah,” I said, uncertainly, after a pause.

  “Anything you remember, anything at all, could help us a lot. I want you to have a think and tell me: has anything come back to you?”

  I left it a beat too long before I said, almost convincingly, “No. Nothing. Just what I told you before.”

  Frank clasped his hands on the table and leaned towards me. Those attentive blue eyes, that gentle, coaxing voice: if I’d been a genuine civilian, I’d have been melting all over my chair. “See, I’m not so sure. I’m getting the impression you’ve remembered something new, Miss Madison, but you’re worried about telling me. Maybe you think I might misinterpret it, and the wrong person could get in trouble? Is that it?”

  I threw him a quick looking-for-reassurance glance. “Sort of. I guess.”

  He smiled at me, all crinkling crow’s-feet. “Trust me, Miss Madison. We don’t go around charging people with serious crimes unless we have serious evidence. You’re not about to get anyone arrested all by yourself.”

  I shrugged, made a face at my coffee cup. “It’s nothing big. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

  “You let me worry about that, OK?” Frank said soothingly. He was about one step from patting my hand and calling me “love.” “You’d be surprised what can come in useful. And if it doesn’t, then there’s no harm done, am I right?”

  “OK,” I said, on a breath. “It’s just . . . OK. I remember blood, on my hands. All over my hands.”

  “There you go,” Frank said, keeping that reassuring smile switched on. “Well done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I shook my head. “Can you remember what you were doing? Were you standing up? Sitting down?”

  “Standing up,” I said. I didn’t have to put the shake in my voice. A few feet away, in the interview rooms I knew inside out, Daniel was waiting patiently for someone to come back and the other three were slowly, silently, beginning to wind tighter. “Leaning against a hedge—it was prickly. I was . . .” I mimed twisting up my top, pressing it against my ribs. “Like that. Because of the blood, to make it stop. But it didn’t help.”

  “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 t
ime.

  “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.”