A fraction of a pause. Then: “Fair enough,” Sam said. “I’ll get to work on finding that link. And, Cassie . . .”
His voice had gone sober, tense. “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I am being careful.”
“Half past eleven to one o’clock. That fits the time of the stabbing.”
“I know. I haven’t seen anyone dodgy hanging around.”
“Do you have your gun?”
“Whenever I go out. Frank already lectured me about that.”
“Frank,” Sam said, and I heard that remoteness come into his voice. “Right.”
After we hung up I waited in the shadow of the tree for a long time. I heard the crash of long grass and the thin scream as whatever predator was out there finally pounced. When the rustles had faded into the dark and only small things moved, I slipped out into the lane and went home.
I stopped at the back gate and swung on it for a while, listening to the slow creak of the hinge and looking up the long garden at the house. It looked different, that night. The gray stone of the back was flat and defensive as a castle wall, and the golden glow from the windows didn’t feel cozy any more; it had turned defiant, warning, like a small campfire in a savage forest. The moonlight whitened the lawn into a wide fitful sea, with the house tall and still in the middle, exposed on every side; besieged.
10
When you find a crack, you push on it and you see if something breaks. It had taken me about an hour and a half to work out that, if there was something the housemates weren’t telling me, Justin was my best bet. Any detective with a couple of years under his belt can tell you who’s going to break first; back in Murder I once saw Costello, who was installed in the eighties along with the decor, pick the weak link just from watching the gang of suspects get booked in. It’s our version of Name That Tune.
Daniel and Abby were both useless: too controlled and too focused, almost impossible to distract or wrong-foot—I had tried a couple of times to nudge Abby into telling me who she thought the daddy was, got nothing but cool blank looks. Rafe was more suggestible and I knew I could probably get somewhere with him if I had to, but it would be tricky; he was too volatile and contrary, just as likely to storm out in a strop as to tell you what you wanted to know. Justin—gentle, imaginative, easily worried, wanting everyone to be happy—was pretty near to being an interviewer’s dream.
The only thing was that I was never alone with him. In the first week I hadn’t really noticed it, but now that I was looking for a chance, it stood out. Daniel and I drove into college together a couple of times a week, and I saw a lot of Abby—breakfasts, after dinner when the guys were washing up, sometimes she knocked on my door at night with a packet of biscuits and we sat on the bed and talked till we got sleepy—but if I was ever on my own with Rafe or Justin for more than five minutes, one of the others would drift over or call out to us, and we would be effortlessly, invisibly enveloped by the group again. It could have been natural; all five of them did spend an awful lot of time together, and every group has subtle subdivisions, people who never pair off because they only work as part of the whole. But I had to wonder if someone, probably Daniel, had considered all four of them with an interrogator’s assessing eye and come to the same conclusion I had.
It was Monday morning before I got my chance. We were in college; Daniel was giving a tutorial and Abby had a meeting with her supervisor, so it was just Rafe and Justin and me in our corner of the library. When Rafe got up and headed off somewhere, presumably to the bathroom, I counted to twenty and then stuck my head over the barrier into Justin’s carrel.
“Hello, you,” he said, looking up from a page of tiny, fastidious handwriting. Every inch of his desk was heaped with books and looseleaf and photocopies striped with highlighter pen; Justin couldn’t work unless he was snugly nested in the middle of everything he might possibly need.
“I’m bored and it’s sunny,” I said. “Come for lunch.”
He checked his watch. “It’s only twenty to one.”
“Live dangerously,” I said.
Justin looked uncertain. “What about Rafe?”
“He’s big and ugly enough to look after himself. He can wait for Abby and Daniel.” Justin was still looking way too unsure for a decision of this magnitude, and I figured I had about a minute to get him out of there before Rafe came back. “Ah, Justin, come on. I’ll do this till you do.” I drummed “shave and a haircut, two bits” on the barrier with my fingernails.
“Argh,” Justin said, putting his pen down. “Chinese noise torture. You win.”
The obvious place to go was the edge of New Square, but you can see it through the library windows, so I dragged Justin over to the cricket pitch, where it would take Rafe longer to find us. It was a bright, cold day, high blue sky and the air like ice water. Down by the Pavilion a bunch of cricketers were doing earnest stylized things at each other, and up at our end four guys were playing Frisbee and trying to act like they weren’t doing it for the benefit of three industrially groomed girls on a bench, who were trying to look like they weren’t watching. Mating rituals: it was spring.
“So,” Justin said, when we were settled on the grass. “How’s the chapter going?”
“Crap,” I said, rummaging through my book bag for my sandwich. “I’ve written bugger-all since I got back. I can’t concentrate.”
“Well,” Justin said, after a moment. “That’s only to be expected, isn’t it? For a little while.”
I shrugged, not looking at him.
“It’ll wear off. Really, it will. Now that you’re home and everything’s back to normal.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I found my sandwich, made a face at it and dumped it on the grass: few things worried Justin as much as people not eating. “It just sucks, not knowing what happened. It sucks enormously. I keep wondering . . . The cops kept hinting that they had all these leads and stuff, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. For fuck’s sake, I’m the one who got stabbed here. If anyone has a right to know why, it’s me.”
“But I thought you were feeling better. You said you were fine.”
“I guess. Never mind.”
“We thought . . . I mean, I didn’t expect you to be this bothered. To keep thinking about it. It’s not like you.”
I glanced over at him, but he didn’t look suspicious, just worried. “Yeah, well,” I said. “I never got stabbed before.”
“No,” said Justin. “I suppose not.” He arranged his lunch on the grass: bottle of orange juice on one side, banana on the other, sandwich in the middle. He was biting the edge of his lip.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said abruptly. “My parents.” Saying the words gave me a sharp, giddy little thrill.
Justin’s head snapped up and he stared at me. “What about them?”
“That maybe I should get in touch with them. Tell them what happened.”
“No pasts,” Justin said, instantly, like a quick sign against bad luck. “We agreed.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. Easy for you to say.”
“It isn’t, actually.” Then, when I didn’t answer: “Lexie? Are you serious?”
I did another edgy little shrug. “Not sure yet.”
“But I thought you hated them. You said you never wanted to speak to them again.”
“That’s not the point.” I twisted the strap of my book bag around my finger, pulled it away in a long spiral. “I just keep thinking . . . I could have died there. Actually died. And my parents would never even have known.”
“If something happens to me,” Justin said, “I don’t want my parents called. I don’t want them there. I don’t want them to know.”
“Why not?” He was picking the seal off his bottle of juice, head down. “Justin?”
“Never mind. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No. Tell me, Justin. Why not?”
After a moment Justin said, “I went back to Belfast for Christmas, our first year of postgrad. Not long after you
came. Do you remember?”
“Yeah,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me; he was blinking at the cricketers, white and formal as ghosts against the green, the thwack of the bat reaching us late and faraway.
“I told my father and my stepmother that I’m gay. On Christmas Eve.” A small, humorless snort of a laugh. “God love me, I suppose I thought the holiday spirit—peace and good will to all men . . . And the four of you had taken it so completely in your stride. Do you know what Daniel said, when I told him? He thought it over for a few minutes and then informed me that straight and gay are modern constructs, the concept of sexuality was much more fluid right up through the Renaissance. And Abby rolled her eyes and asked me if I wanted her to act surprised. Rafe was the one I was most worried about—I’m not sure why—but he just grinned and said, ‘Less competition for me.’ Which was sweet of him, actually; it’s not like I was ever much competition to him anyway . . . It was very comforting, you know. I suppose it made me think that telling my family might not be such a huge big deal, after all.”
“I didn’t realize,” I said. “That you’d told them. You never said.”
“Yes, well,” Justin said. He picked the cling-film away from his sandwich delicately, being careful not to get relish on his fingers. “My stepmother’s a dreadful woman, you know. Really dreadful. Her father’s a carpenter, but she tells people he’s an artisan, whatever she thinks that means, and she never invites him to parties. Everything about her is pure faultless middle-class—the accent, the clothes, the hair, the china patterns, it’s as if she ordered herself from a catalogue—but you can see the incredible effort that goes into every second of it. Marrying her boss must have been like attaining the Holy Grail. I’m not saying my father would have been OK with me if it hadn’t been for her—he looked like he was going to be sick—but she made it so, so much worse. She was hysterical. She told my father she wanted me out of the house, right away. For good.”
“Jesus, Justin.”
“She watches a lot of soap operas,” Justin said. “Erring sons get banished all the time. She kept shrieking, actually shrieking, ‘Think of the boys!’—she meant my half brothers. I don’t know if she thought I was going to convert them or molest them or what, but I said—which was nasty of me, but you can see why I was feeling vicious—I said she had nothing to worry about, no self-respecting gay man would touch either of those hideous little Cabbage Patch Kids with a barge pole. It went downhill from there. She threw things, I said things, the Cabbage Patch Kids actually put down their PlayStations to come see what was happening, she tried to drag them out of the room—presumably so I wouldn’t jump them on the spot—they started shrieking . . . Finally my father told me it would be better if I wasn’t in the house—‘for the moment,’ as he put it, but we both knew what he meant. He drove me to the station and gave me a hundred pounds. For Christmas.” He pulled the cling-film straight and laid it on the grass, the sandwich neatly in the middle.
“What did you do?” I asked quietly.
“Over Christmas? Stayed in my flat, mostly. Bought a hundred-quid bottle of whiskey. Felt sorry for myself.” He gave me a wry half smile. “I know: I should have told you I was back in town. But . . . well, pride, I suppose. It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I know none of you would have asked, but you couldn’t have helped wondering, and you’re all too sharp for your own good. Someone would have guessed.”
The way he was sitting—knees pulled up, feet neatly together—rucked up his trousers; he was wearing gray socks worn thin by too much washing, and his ankles were delicate and bony as a boy’s. I reached over and covered one of them with my hand. It was warm and solid and my fingers almost circled it.
“No, it’s all right,” Justin said, and when I looked up I saw that he was smiling at me, properly this time. “Really and truly, it is. At first it did upset me a lot; I felt like I was orphaned, homeless—honestly, if you could have seen the level of melodrama going on in my head . . . But I don’t think about it any more, not since the house. I don’t even know why I brought it up.”
“My fault,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He gave my hand a little fingertip pat. “If you really want to get in touch with your parents, then . . . well, it’s none of my business, is it? All I’m saying is, don’t forget: we’ve all got reasons why we decided no pasts. It’s not just me. Rafe . . . Well, you’ve heard his father.”
I nodded. “He’s a git.”
“Rafe’s been getting that exact same phone call for as long as I’ve known him: you’re pathetic, you’re useless, I’m ashamed to mention you to my friends. I’m pretty sure his whole childhood was like that. His father disliked him almost from the moment he was born—it happens sometimes, you know. He wanted a big oaf of a son who would play rugby and grope his secretary and throw up outside chi-chi nightclubs, and instead he got Rafe. He made his life a misery. You didn’t see Rafe when we first started college: this skinny prickly creature, so defensive that if you teased him the tiniest bit he would absolutely take your head off. I wasn’t even sure I liked him, at first. I just hung around with him because I liked Abby and Daniel, and they obviously thought he was all right.”
“He’s still skinny,” I said. “And he’s still prickly, too. He’s a little bollocks when he feels like it.”
Justin shook his head. “He’s a million times better than he was. And it’s because he doesn’t have to think about those awful parents of his any more, at least not often. And Daniel . . . Have you ever, once, heard him mention his childhood?”
I shook my head.
“Neither have I. I know his parents are dead, but I don’t know when or how, or what happened to him afterwards—where he lived, with who, nothing. Abby and I got awfully drunk together one night and started being silly about that, making up childhoods for Daniel: he was one of those feral children raised by hamsters, he grew up in a brothel in Istanbul, his parents were CIA sleepers who got taken out by the KGB and he escaped by hiding in the washing machine . . . It was funny at the time, but the fact is, his childhood can’t have been too pleasant, can it, for him to be so secretive about it? You’re bad enough . . .” Justin shot me a quick glance. “But at least I know you had chicken pox, and you learned to ride horses. I don’t know anything like that about Daniel. Not a thing.”
I hoped to God we wouldn’t run into a situation where I needed to show off my equestrian skills. “And then there’s Abby,” Justin said. “Has Abby ever talked to you about her mother?”
“Bits,” I said. “I got the idea.”
“It’s worse than she makes it sound. I actually met the woman—you weren’t here yet, it was back in about third year. We were all over at Abby’s flat one evening, and her mother showed up, banging on the door. She was . . . God. The way she was dressed—I don’t know if she’s actually a prostitute, or just . . . well. She was obviously out of it; she kept shouting at Abby, but I barely understood a word she said. Abby shoved something into her hand—money, I’m sure, and you know how broke Abby’s always been—and practically hauled her out of the door. She was white as a ghost, Abby was; I thought she was going to faint.” Justin looked up at me anxiously, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Don’t tell her I told you that.”
“I won’t.”
“She’s never mentioned it since; I doubt she wants to talk about it now. Which is sort of my point. I’m sure you’ve got reasons, too, why you thought the no-pasts thing was a good idea. Maybe what happened changed all that, I don’t know, but . . . just remember you’re still fragile, right now. Just give it a little while before you do anything irrevocable. And if you do decide to get in touch with your parents, maybe the best thing would be not to tell the others. It would . . . Well. It would hurt them.”
I gave him a puzzled look. “You think?”
“Well, of course. We’re . . .” He was still messing with the cling-film; there was a faint pink flush creeping up his cheeks. “We love you
, you know. As far as we’re concerned, we’re your family now. All of one another’s family—I mean, that’s not right, but you know what I mean . . .”