“Over my dead body,” said Abby. Her voice was tightening up. “You didn’t have to deal with him. We did.”
“And mine,” said Justin. “The man’s a Philistine. He drank Heineken all night, of course, and then he kept belching and naturally he thought that was hilarious, every single time. And all that droning about fitted kitchens and tax breaks and Section Whatever-it-is. Once was enough, thank you very much.”
“You people have no heart,” Rafe told them. “Ned loves this house. He told the judge so. I think we owe him a chance to see that the old family seat is in good hands. Give me a smoke.”
“The only thing Ned loves,” Daniel said, very sharply, “is the thought of six fully fitted executive apartments on extensive grounds with potential for further development. And over my dead body will he ever get a chance to see that.”
Justin made a sudden jerky movement, covered it by reaching for an ashtray and shoving it across to Abby. There was a complicated, sharp-edged silence. Abby lit her smoke, shook out the match and threw the packet to Rafe, who caught it one-handed. Nobody was looking at anybody. An early bumblebee blundered in at the window, hovered over the piano in a slant of sun and eventually bumped back out again.
I wanted to say something—that was my job, defusing moments like this one—but I knew we had veered into some kind of treacherous and complicated swamp where one misstep could get me into big trouble. Ned was sounding like more and more of a wankstain—even if I didn’t have the first clue what an executive apartment was, I got the general idea—but whatever was going on ran a lot deeper and darker than that.
Abby was watching me over her cigarette with cool, curious gray eyes. I shot her an agonized look, which didn’t take much effort. After a moment she stretched for the ashtray and said, “If there’s nothing decent to put up on the walls, maybe we should try something different. Rafe, if we found photos of old murals, do you think you could do something like that?”
Rafe shrugged. An edge of the belligerent don’t-blame-me look was creeping back onto his face. That dark electric cloud had come down over the room again.
Silence was fine with me. My mind was doing cartwheels—not just because Lexie had for some reason been hanging out with the archenemy, but because Ned was clearly a taboo subject. For three weeks his name had never been mentioned, the first reference to him had fried everyone’s heads, and I couldn’t figure out why. He had lost, after all; the house was Daniel’s, both Uncle Simon and a judge had said so, Ned should have triggered nothing more serious than a laugh and a few snide comments. I would have sold a major organ to find out what the hell was going on here, but I knew a lot better than to ask.
* * *
As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Frank’s mind—and I wasn’t at all sure I liked this—had run parallel to mine, parallel and fast.
I went for my walk as early as I could. That cloud hadn’t dissipated; if anything it had got thicker, pressing in from the walls and ceilings. Dinner had been painful. Justin and Abby and I had done our best to be chatty, but Rafe had gone into a sour sulk that you could practically see, and Daniel had withdrawn into himself, answering questions in monosyllables. I needed to get out of that house and think.
Lexie had met up with Ned at least three times, and she had gone to a lot of trouble to do it. The four big Ls of motive: lust, lucre, loathing and love. The chance of lust made my gag reflex kick in; the more I heard about Ned, the more I wanted to believe that Lexie wouldn’t have touched him with someone else’s. Lucre, though . . . She had needed money, fast, and a rich boy like Ned would have made a way better buyer than John Naylor and his crap farm job. If she had been meeting Ned to discuss what knickknacks he might want from Whitethorn House, how much he would be willing to pay, and then something had gone wrong . . .
It was a very strange night: huge and dark and gusty, snaps of wind roaring across the hillsides, a million high stars and no moon. I stuffed my gun back into my girdle, climbed up my tree and spent a long time there, watching the shadowy black surge of the bushes below me, listening hard for any faint sound that didn’t belong; thinking about phoning Sam.
In the end I phoned Frank. “Naylor hasn’t shown up yet,” he said, no hello. “You keeping an eye out?”
“Yeah,” I said. “No sign of him, as far as I can tell.”
“Right.” There was an absent note to his voice that told me his mind wasn’t on Naylor either. “Good. Meanwhile, I’ve got something that might interest you. You know the way your new pals were bitching about Cousin Eddie and his executive apartments, this afternoon?”
For a second all my muscles jolted awake, till I remembered Frank didn’t know about N. “Yep,” I said. “Cousin Eddie sounds like a right little gem.”
“Oh, yeah. One hundred percent pure brain-dead yuppie fuck, never had a thought in his life that didn’t involve his dick or his wallet.”
“You think Rafe was right about him hiring Naylor?”
“Not a chance. Eddie doesn’t hobnob with the lower classes. You should’ve seen his face when he heard my accent; I think he was afraid I was going to mug him. But this afternoon reminded me. Remember how you said the Fantastic Four were weird about the house? Too attached?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” I had almost forgotten that, actually. “I think I overreacted. When you put a lot of work into a place, you do get attached to it. And it’s a nice house.”
“Oh, it is,” Frank said. There was something in his tone that set my alarm bells jingling faintly, a fierce, sardonic grin. “It is that. I was bored today—Naylor’s still in the wind and I’m getting nowhere on Lexie-May-Ruth-Princess-Anastasia-whoever, I’ve drawn a blank in about fourteen countries so far, I’m considering the possibility that she was built in a pod by mad scientists in 1997. So, just to show my homegirl Cassie that I trust her instincts, I put in a call to my mate in the Land Registry office and ask him for a rundown on Whitethorn House. Who loves you, baby?”
“You do,” I said. Frank has always had a spectacular array of mates in unlikely places: my mate down at the docks, my mate on the County Council, my mate who runs the S&M shop. Back when we first began this whole Lexie Madison thing, My Mate At Births Deaths and Marriages made sure she was officially registered, in case anyone got suspicious and started sniffing around, while My Mate With The Van helped me move into her bedsit. I figure I’m happier not knowing about whatever complex barter system is going on there. “You bloody well should, after all this. And?”
“And remember saying they all act like they own the place?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Your instincts hit the jackpot, babe. They do. So do you, actually.”
“Quit being cute, Frankie,” I said. My heart was pounding hard and slow and there was a strange dark shiver through the hedges: something was happening. “What are you on about?”
“Old Simon’s will cleared probate and Daniel took possession of Whitethorn House on the tenth of September. On the fifteenth of December, ownership of the house was transferred into five names: Raphael Hyland, Alexandra Madison, Justin Mannering, Daniel March and Abigail Stone. Happy Christmas.”
It was the sheer blazing courage of it that hit me first: the passion of trust it would take, to put your future where your mouth was, no half measures, scoop up all your tomorrows and put them so deliberately, so simply, in the hands of the people you loved best. I thought of Daniel at the table, broad-backed and solid in his crisp white shirt, the precise flick of his wrist as he turned a page; of Abby flipping bacon in her bathrobe, Justin singing out of tune while he got ready for bed, Rafe sprawled on the grass squinting up into the sun. And all the time, underpinning everything, this. I had had moments of envying them before, but this was something too deep for envy; something like awe.
And then I realized. N, plane fares, Over my dead body will Ned get a chance. Here I had been fucking about with music boxes and tin soldiers and trying to figure out how much your average family photo
album was worth; here I had thought she had nothing to sell, this time.
If she had been negotiating with Ned, and the others had somehow found out: holy shit. No wonder his name had turned the room to ice, that afternoon. I couldn’t breathe.
Frank was still going. I could hear him moving, pacing up and down the room, fast steps. “The paperwork on that would take months; Danny Boy must’ve started it almost the same day he got the keys. I know you like these people, Cassie, but you can’t tell me that’s not bizarre as all hell. That house is worth a cool couple of million, easy. What the fuck is he thinking? They’re all going to live there forever in one big happy hippie commune? Actually, never mind what he’s thinking, what the fuck is he smoking?”
He was taking it personally because he had missed it: all that investigation, and the middle-class student wimps had somehow slipped this right past him. “Yeah,” I said, very carefully, “it’s weird. They are weird, Frank. And yeah, it’s going to get complicated down the road, when someone wants to get married or whatever. But, like you said yourself, they’re young. They’re not thinking that way yet.”
“Yeah, well, little Justin won’t be getting married any time soon, not without a major change in the legislation—”
“Stop being a cliché, Frank. What’s the big deal?” This didn’t mean it had to be one of the four of them, not necessarily; the evidence still added up to Lexie being stabbed by someone she had met outside the house. It didn’t even mean she had actually been going to sell. If she had made a deal with Ned and then changed her mind, told him she was backing out; if she had just been playing with him all along—loathing—yanking his chain to pay him back for trying to take the house . . . He had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to spit on his grandfather’s memory; what would he have done if a share of it had been so close he could taste it, and then Lexie had snatched it away? I tried to shove the diary out of my mind: those dates, the first N just a few days after that missing circle; the hard scribble, pen almost digging through the paper, that said she hadn’t been playing.
“Well,” Frank said, with the lazy note to his voice that means he’s at his most dangerous. “If you ask me, this could give us the motive we’ve been looking for. Me, I’d call that a big deal.”
“No,” I said promptly, maybe too promptly, but Frank didn’t comment. “Not a chance. Where’s the motive in that? If they all wanted to sell and she was blocking it, then maybe, but those four would rather pull out their own teeth with rusty pliers than sell that house. What have they got to gain by killing her?”
“One of them dies, his share—or hers—reverts back to the other four. Maybe someone figured a quarter of that lovely big house would be even nicer than a fifth. It more or less lets Danny Boy out—if he wanted the whole thing, he could’ve just kept it to start with. But that still leaves us with three little Indians.”
I wriggled round the other way on my branch. I was very glad that Frank was off target, but, illogically, the extent to which he didn’t get it was pissing me off. "What for ? Like I said, they don’t want to sell it. They want to live in it. They can do that just as well no matter what percentage they own. You think one of them killed her because he liked her bedroom better than his own?”
“Or her own. Abby’s a good kid, but I’m not ruling her out. Or maybe it wasn’t financial, for once; maybe Lexie was just plain driving someone nuts. People share a house, they get on each other’s tits. And remember, there’s a very good chance she was shagging one of the lads, and we all know how nasty that can turn. If you’re renting, no big deal: some yelling, a few tears, a house meeting, one of you moves out. But what do you do if it’s a co-owner? They can’t throw her out, I doubt any of them can afford to buy her out—”
“Sure,” I said, “except I haven’t got one single whiff of any kind of major tension aimed at me. Rafe was pissed off with me at first for not realizing how shaken up they all were, but that’s it. If Lexie had been getting up someone’s nose to the point of murder, there’s no way I could have missed it. These people like each other, Frank. They may be weird, but they like being weird together.”
“So why didn’t they tell us they all own the place? Why are they being so fucking secretive, unless they’re hiding something?”
“They didn’t tell you because you never asked them. If you were in their place, even if you were innocent as a baby, would you give the cops anything you didn’t have to? Would you even spend hours answering questions, the way they have?”
“You know what you’re talking like?” Frank said, after a pause. He had stopped pacing. “You’re talking like a defense attorney.”
I twisted round the other way again, swung my feet up against a branch. I was having a hard time staying still. “Oh, come on, Frank. I’m talking like a detective. And you’re talking like a fucking obsessive. If you don’t like these four, that’s fine. If they twang your antennae, that’s fine too. But it doesn’t mean that every single thing you find is automatically evidence that they’re stone-cold killers.”
“I don’t think you’re in any position to question my objectivity, babe,” Frank said. That lazy drawl had come back into his voice, and it made my back tense up against the tree trunk.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m on the outside, keeping my perspective, while you’re neck-deep in all the action, and I’d like you to keep that in mind. It also means I think there’s a limit to how far ‘Oh, they’re just charmingly eccentric’ will go as an excuse for acting downright bloody squirrely.”
“What brought this on, Frank? You’ve counted them out since the beginning, two days ago you were all over Naylor like a rash—”
“And I still am, or I will be as soon as we find the little bastard again. But I like spreading my bets. I’m not dropping anyone, anyone at all, until they’re definitively ruled out. And these four haven’t been. Don’t forget that.”
It was way past time for me to back off. “Fair enough,” I said. “Until Naylor turns up again, I’ll focus on them.”
“You do that. So will I. And keep watching yourself, Cassie. Not just outside that house; inside, too. Talk tomorrow.” And he was gone.
The fourth big L: love. I thought, suddenly, of the phone videos: a picnic on Bray Head, the summer before, all of them lying on the grass drinking wine out of plastic cups and eating strawberries and arguing lazily over whether Elvis was overrated. Daniel had gone into a long absorbed monologue about sociocultural context, until Rafe and Lexie decided everything was overrated except Elvis and chocolate and started throwing strawberries at him. They had been passing the camera phone around; the clips were disjointed and shaky. Lexie with her head in Justin’s lap and him tucking a daisy behind her ear; Lexie and Abby sitting back to back and looking out at the sea, hair blowing, shoulders lifting in long matching breaths; Lexie laughing up into Daniel’s face as she picked a ladybug out of his hair and held it out, him bending his head over her hand and smiling. I had seen the video so many times that it felt like my own memory, flickering and sweet. They had been happy, that day, all five of them.
There had been love there. It had looked solid and simple as bread; real. And it felt real to live in, a warm element through which we moved easily and which we breathed in with every breath. But Lexie had been ready and willing to blow all that sky-high. More than willing; hell-bent on it—that furious scrawl in the date book, while the phone video showed her climbing down from the attic laughing and covered in dust. If she had lived a couple of weeks longer, the others would have woken up one morning and found her gone, not a note, not a good-bye, not a second thought. It slid through a back corner of my mind that Lexie Madison had been dangerous, under that bright surface, and that maybe she still was.
* * *
I slid off my branch, hanging by my hands, dropped and landed in the lane with a thump. I dug my hands into my pockets and started walking—moving helps me think. The wind pulled at my cap
and shoved into the small of my back, almost taking me off my feet.
I needed to talk to Ned, fast. Lexie had neglected to leave me instructions on how the hell they got in touch with each other. Not by mobile: Sam had pulled her phone records first thing, no unidentified numbers in or out. Carrier pigeon? Notes in the hollow tree? Smoke signals?