Page 63 of The Likeness

  But when she was nine her mother had hemorrhaged, giving birth to Grace’s baby brother, and bled out before a doctor could get there. “Gracie was too young to hear that,” he said. I knew from the simple, heavy fall of his voice that he had thought this a million times, it had worn a long groove in his mind. “I knew as soon as I told her. The look in her eyes: she was too young to hear it. It cracked her straight across. If she’d been even a couple of years older, she might’ve been all right. But she changed, after that. Nothing you could put your finger on. She was still a great kid, still did her schoolwork and all that, didn’t talk back. Took over running the house—little slip of a thing making beef stew for dinner like she’d seen her mum do, on a stove bigger than her. But I never knew what was going on in her head again.”

  In the gaps the static roared in my ear, a long muted sound like a seashell. I wished I knew more about Australia. I thought of red earth and sun that hit you like a shout, twisted plants stubborn enough to pull life out of nothing, spaces that could dizzy you, swallow you whole.

  She had been ten the first time she ran away. They found her inside a few hours, out of water and crying with fury by the side of the road, but she did it again the next year, and the next. She got a little farther each time. In between she never mentioned it, gave him a blank stare when he tried to talk about it. He never knew what morning he would wake up and find her gone. He put blankets on his bed in summer and none in winter, trying to make himself sleep lightly enough to wake at the click of a door.

  “She got it right when she was sixteen,” he said, and I heard him swallow. “Nicked three hundred quid from under my mattress and a Land Rover from the farm, let the air out of the tires on all the other cars to slow us down. By the time we got after her she’d made it to town, ditched the Land Rover at the service station and got a lift from some truckie headed east. The coppers said they’d do their best, but if she didn’t want to be found . . . It’s a big country.”

  He’d heard nothing for four months, while he dreamed of her thrown away on some roadside, picked clean by dingoes under a huge red moon. Then, the day before his birthday, he’d got a card.

  “Hang on,” he said. Rustling, a bump; a dog barking, somewhere far off. “Here we go. Says, ‘Dear Dad, happy birthday. I’m fine. I’ve got a job and I’ve got good mates. I’m not coming back but I wanted to say hi. Love, Grace. P.S. Don’t worry, I’m not a pro.’ ” He laughed, that gruff little breath again. “Isn’t that something? She was right, you know, I’d been worrying about that—pretty girl with no qualifications . . . But she wouldn’t have bothered saying that if it wasn’t true. Not Gracie.”

  The postmark said Sydney. He had dropped everything, driven to the nearest airfield and caught the mail plane east to put crappy photocopied fliers on lampposts, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Nobody had called. Next year’s card had come from New Zealand: “Dear Dad, happy birthday. Please quit looking for me. I had to move because I saw a poster of me. I AM FINE so knock it off. Love, Grace. P.S. I don’t actually live in Wellington, I just came here to post this, so don’t bother.”

  He didn’t have a passport, didn’t even know how to set about getting one. Grace was only a few weeks off eighteen, and the Wellington cops pointed out, reasonably enough, that there wasn’t much they could do if a healthy adult decided to move out of home. There had been two more cards from there—she’d got a dog, and a guitar—and then, in 1996, one from San Francisco. “So she made it to America in the end,” he said. “God only knows how she got herself over there. I guess Gracie never did let anything stand in her way.” She had liked it there—she took the tram car to work, and her flatmate was a sculptor who was teaching her how to throw pottery—but the next year she was in North Carolina, no explanation. Four cards from there, one from Liverpool with a picture of the Beatles on it, then the three from Dublin.

  “She had your birthday marked in her date book,” I said. “I know she would have sent you one this year too.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Probably she would.” Somewhere in the background, something—a bird—gave a loud witless yelp. I thought of him sitting on a battered wooden veranda, thousands of miles of wild stretching all around him, with their own pure and merciless rules.

  There was a long silence. I realized I had slid my free hand, elegantly, into the neck of my top, to touch Sam’s engagement ring. Until Operation Mirror was officially closed out and we could tell people without giving IA a collective aneurysm, I was wearing it on a fine gold chain that used to be my mother’s. It hung between my breasts, just about where the mike had been. Even on cold days, it felt warmer than my skin.

  “How’d she turn out?” he asked, at last. “What was she like?”

  His voice had gone lower, rough at the edges. He needed to know. I thought about May-Ruth bringing her fiancé’s parents a house plant, Lexie throwing strawberries at Daniel and giggling, Lexie shoving that cigarette case deep into the long grass, and I had absolutely no clue what the answer was.

  “She was still smart,” I said. “She was doing a postgrad in English. She still didn’t let anything get in her way. Her friends loved her, and she loved them. They were happy together.” In spite of everything the five of them had done to one another in the end, I believed that. I still do.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, absently. “That’s my girl . . .”

  He was thinking about things I had no way of knowing. After a while he took a fast breath, coming out of his reverie. “One of them killed her, though, didn’t he?”

  It had taken him a long time to ask. “Yes,” I said, “he did. If it’s any comfort, he didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t planned, nothing like that. They just had an argument. He happened to have a knife in his hand, because he was doing the washing up, and he lost his temper.”

  “She suffer?”

  “No,” I said. “No, Mr. Corrigan. The pathologist says all she would have felt before she lost consciousness is shortness of breath and a fast heartbeat, as if she’d been running too hard.” It was peaceful, I almost said; but those hands.

  He said nothing for so long that I wondered if the line had gone or if he had walked away, just put the phone down and left the room; if he was leaning on a railing somewhere, taking deep breaths of wild cool evening air. People were starting to come back from lunch: footsteps thumping up the stairs, someone in the corridor bitching about paperwork, Maher’s big belligerent laugh. Hurry, I wanted to say; we don’t have much time.

  Finally he sighed, one long slow breath. “Do you know what I remember?” he said. “The night before she ran away, that last time. We were sitting out on the veranda after dinner, Gracie was having sips of my beer. She looked so beautiful. More like her mum than ever: calm, for once. Smiling at me. I thought it meant . . . well, I thought she’d settled, finally. Maybe taken a fancy to one of the jackaroos—she looked like that, like a girl does when she’s in love. I thought, That’s our baby, Rachel. Isn’t she gorgeous? She turned out all right, in the end.”

  It sent strange things fluttering in my head, frail as moths circling. Frank hadn’t told him: not about the undercover angle, not about me. “She did, Mr. Corrigan,” I said. “In her own way, she did.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Sounds like. I just wish . . .” Somewhere that bird screamed again, a long desolate alarm call fading off into the distance. “What I’m saying is, I reckon you’re right: that fella didn’t mean to kill her. I reckon it was always going to happen, one way or another. She wasn’t made right for this world. She’d been running away from it since she was nine.”

  Maher slammed into the squad room, bellowed something at me, whapped a big piece of sticky-looking cake onto his desk and started disemboweling it. I listened to the static echoing in my ear and thought of those herds of horses you get in the vast wild spaces of America and Australia, the ones running free, fighting off bobcats or dingoes and living lean on what they find, gold and tangled in the fierce sun. My friend Alan from when I was a kid, he worked on a ranch in Wyoming one summer, on a J1 visa. He watched guys breaking those horses. He told me that e
very now and then there was one that couldn’t be broken, one wild to the bone. Those horses fought the bridle and the fence till they were ripped up and streaming blood, till they smashed their legs or their necks to splinters, till they died of fighting to run.

  * * *

  Frank turned out to be right: we all came out of Operation Mirror just fine, or at least no one ended up fired or in jail, which I think probably meets Frank’s standard for “fine.” He got docked three days’ holiday and got a reprimand on his file, officially for letting his investigation get out of control—with a mess this size, IA needed someone’s head to go on the block, and I got the feeling they were delighted to let it be Frank’s. The media had a shot at whipping up some kind of frenzy about police brutality, but nobody would talk to them—the most they got was a shot of Rafe giving a photographer the finger, which showed up in a tabloid, complete with morally upright pixilation to protect the children. I did my compulsory time with the shrink, who was over the moon to see me again; I gave him a bunch of mild trauma symptoms, let them vanish miraculously over a few weeks under his expert guidance, got my clearance and dealt with Operation Mirror my own way, in private.

  Once we knew where those cards had been posted, she was easy enough to track down. There was no need to bother—anything she had done before she hit our patch and got herself killed wasn’t our problem—but Frank did it anyway. He sent me over the file, stamped CLOSED, with no note.

  They never found her in Sydney—the nearest they got was a surf stud who thought he had seen her selling ice cream at Manley Beach and had a feeling her name was Hazel, but he was too unsure and too thick to count as a reliable witness—but in New Zealand she had been Naomi Ballantine, the most efficient office receptionist on her temp agency’s books, until a satisfied customer started pushing her to go full-time. In San Francisco she was a hippie chick called Alanna Goldman, who worked in a beach-supplies shop and spent a lot of time smoking pot around campfires; friends’ photos showed waist-length curls whipping in ocean breeze, bare feet and seashell necklaces and brown legs in cutoff jeans. In Liverpool she was Mags Mackenzie, an aspiring hat designer who served drinks in a quirky cocktail bar all week and sold her hats from a market stall at weekends; the photo had her wearing a wide-brimmed red-velvet swirl with a puff of old silk and lace over one ear, and laughing. Her housemates—a bunch of high-octane late-night girls who did the same general kind of thing, fashion, backing vocals, something called “urban art”—said that two weeks before she split, she had been offered a contract to design for a trendy boutique label. They hadn’t been all that worried when they woke up and found her gone. Mags would be all right, they said; she always was.

  The letter from Chad was paper-clipped to a blurry snapshot of the two of them in front of a lake, on a shimmering-hot day. She had a long plait and an oversized T-shirt and a shy smile, head ducking away from the camera; Chad was tall and tan and gangly, with a floppy gold forelock. He had his arm around her and he was looking down at her like he couldn’t believe his luck. I just wish you would of given me a chance to come with you, the letter said, just a chance, May. I would of gone anywhere. Whatever you wanted I really hope you found it now. I just wish I could know what it was and why it wasn’t me.

  * * *

  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 dep
osit 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 ?”