I didn’t have much time. Frank had no idea that Lexie had ever met Ned and no idea that she had been getting ready to blow town—I knew there would turn out to be a good reason why I didn’t want to tell him about that diary; just like he always says, your instincts work faster than your mind. But he wasn’t about to let go of this. He would worry away at it like a pit bull, and sooner or later he was going to hit on this same possibility. I didn’t know all that much about Ned, but enough to be pretty sure that, if he ended up in an interview room with Frank going at him full throttle, he would spill his guts inside five minutes. It never once occurred to me, not for a second, to sit back and let that happen. Whatever had been going on here, I needed to put my finger on it before Frank did.
If I wanted to make an appointment to meet Ned, without any chance of the others finding out, how would I do it?
No phones. Mobiles keep a call register and they get itemized bills, she wouldn’t have left anything like that lying around, and Whitethorn House didn’t have a landline. There was no pay phone within walking distance, and the ones in college were risky: the Arts block phones were the only ones close enough to use on a fake bathroom break, and if one of the others had happened to walk by at the wrong moment, she would have been fucked—and this was too important for gambles. No calling in to see him, either. Frank had said Ned lived in Bray and worked in Killiney, there was no way she could have got there and back without the others missing her. And no letters or e-mails; she would never, not in a million years, have left a trail.
“How the hell, girl?” I said softly, into the air. I felt her like a shimmer over my shadow on the lane, the tilt of her chin and the mocking sideways flash of her eyes: Not telling.
Somewhere along the way I had stopped noticing just how seamlessly conjoined their five lives were. Into college together, all day in the library together, smoke break at noon with Abby and at four with Rafe, lunch together at one, home together for dinner: the routine of it was choreographed as precisely and tightly as a gavotte, never a minute left unaccounted for and never a minute to myself, except—
Except now. For one hour a night, like some spellbound girl in a fairy tale, I unwound my life from the others’ and it was all my own again. If I were Lexie and I wanted to contact someone I should never have been contacting, I would use my late-night walk.
Not would: had. For weeks now I had been using it to phone Frank, phone Sam, keep my secrets safe. A fox skittered across the lane in front of me and vanished into the hedge, all bones and luminous eyes, and a shiver went down my back. Here I had thought this was my very own bright idea, I was making my own way step by step and alert through the dark. It was only now, when I turned around and looked back down the road, that I realized I had been blithely, blindly putting my feet smack in Lexie’s footprints, all the way.
“So?” I said aloud, like a challenge. “So what?” This was what Frank had sent me in for, to get close to the victim, get into her life, and—duh—I was doing it. A certain amount of creepy was not only beside the point but also pretty much par for the course on a murder investigation; they’re not supposed to be one long round of laughs. I was getting spoiled, all these cozy candlelight dinners and handicrafts, turning jumpy when reality kicked back in.
One hour to get hold of Ned. How?
Notes in the hollow tree . . . I almost laughed out loud. Professional deformation: you’ve got the most esoteric possibilities all worked out, it’s the simple ones that take forever to hit you. The higher the stakes, Frank once told me, the lower the technology. If you want to meet your mate for coffee, you can afford to arrange it by text message or e-mail; if you think the cops or the Mob or the Illuminati are closing in, you signal your contact with a blue towel on the washing line. For Lexie, days ticking away and morning sickness starting to kick in, the stakes must have felt like life and death.
Ned lived in Bray; only a fifteen-minute drive away, outside rush hour. Probably she had taken the risk of phoning him from college, the first time. After that, all she had needed was a safe drop spot, somewhere in these lanes, that both of them could check every couple of days. I must have walked straight past it a dozen times.
That shimmer again, in the corner of my eye: tip of a grin, there and tricky and then gone.
In the cottage? The Bureau gang had been all over it like flies on shite, dusted every inch for prints and found nothing. And he hadn’t been parked anywhere near the cottage, that night I’d followed him. Allowing a little leeway for the fact that God forbid you should drive your Monster Truck on the kind of roads for which it was constructed, he would have parked as close to the drop spot as he could get. He had been on the main Rathowen road, nowhere near any turnoff. Wide verges, long grass and brambles, the dark road dropping away over the brow of the hill; and the milestone, worn and leaning like a tiny grave-marker.
I hardly realized I had turned around and was running hard. The others would be expecting me back any minute and the last thing I wanted was for them to get worried and come looking for me, but this couldn’t wait till tomorrow night. I wasn’t racing some hypothetical, infinitely flexible deadline any more; I was racing against Frank’s mind, and Lexie’s.
After the narrow lanes, the verge felt wide and bare and very exposed, but the road was deserted, not a glimmer of headlights in either direction. When I pulled out my torch, the letters on the stone marker jumped out at me, blurred with time and weather, throwing their own slanted shadows: Glenskehy 1828. The grass swirled and bent around it, in the high wind, with a sound like a long hiss of breath.
I caught the torch under my arm and parted the grass with both hands; it was wet and sharp-edged, tiny serrations pulling at my fingers. At the foot of the stone, something flashed crimson.
For a moment my mind couldn’t take in what I was seeing. Sunk deep in the grass, colors glowed bright as jewels and minute figures scudded away from the torchlight: gloss of a horse’s flank, flick of a red coat, toss of powdered curls and a dog’s head turning as he leaped for cover. Then my hand touched wet, gritty metal and the figures shivered and clicked into place, and I laughed out loud, a small gasp that sounded strange even to me. A cigarette tin, old and rusty and probably nicked from Uncle Simon’s stash; the rich, battered hunting scene was painted with a brush fine as an eyelash. The Bureau and the floaters had done a fingertip search for a mile around the cottage, but this was outside their perimeter. Lexie had beaten them, saved this for me.
The note was on lined paper torn out of some kind of Filofax thing. The handwriting looked like a ten-year-old’s, and apparently Ned hadn’t been able to decide whether he was writing a business letter or a text message: Dear Lexie, been trying 2 get hold of u in refrence 2 that matter we were talking about, Im still v v interested. Please let me know whenever u get a chance. Thanks, Ned. I was willing to bet that Ned had gone to an insanely expensive private school. Daddy hadn’t exactly got his money’s worth.
Dear Lexie; Thanks, Ned . . . Lexie must have wanted to kick him for leaving that kind of thing lying around, no matter how well hidden. I took out my lighter, moved over to the road and set the note on fire; when it caught, I dropped it, waited for the quick flare to die down and crushed out the embers with my foot. Then I found my Biro and ripped a page out of my notebook.
By this stage Lexie’s handwriting came easier than my own. 11 Thursday—talk then. No need for fancy bait: Lexie had done all that for me, this guy was already well hooked. The tin shut with a neat, tiny click and I tucked it back into the long grass, feeling my fingerprints overlaying themselves perfectly on Lexie’s, my feet planted carefully in the precise spots where her footprints had long since washed away.
18
The next day lasted about a week. The Arts block was too hot, dry and airless. My tutorial group were bored and fidgety; it was their last session, they hadn’t read the material and couldn’t be bothered to fake it, and I couldn’t be bothered pretending I cared. All I could think about was Ned: w
hether he would show, what I would say if he did, what I would do if he didn’t; how long I had before Frank caught up with us.
I knew that night was a long shot. Even assuming I was right about the cottage being their meeting place, Ned might easily have given up on Lexie altogether, after a month with no communication—he hadn’t dated his note, it could have been weeks old. And even if he was the persistent type, the odds were against him checking the drop spot in time to make the meeting. A big part of me hoped he wouldn’t. I needed to hear what he had to say, but anything I heard, Frank was going to hear too.
I got to the cottage early, around half past ten. At home, Rafe was playing stormy Beethoven with an awful lot of pedal, Justin was trying to read with his fingers in his ears, everyone was getting snippier by the minute and the whole thing showed every sign of spiralling into a vicious argument.
It was only the third time I had been inside that cottage. I was a little wary about angry farmers—the field had to belong to someone, after all, although apparently he wasn’t too attached to it—but it was a still, bright night, nothing moving for miles around, just pale empty fields and the mountains black silhouettes against the stars. I got my back into a corner, where I could see the field and the road but where the shadows would mask me from anyone watching, and waited.
Just on the off chance that Ned did show up, I had to get this right; I only had one shot. I needed to let him lead, not just on everything I said, but on how I said it. Whatever Lexie had been for him, I needed to be the same. Going on past form, that could have been anything—breathy vamp, brave put-upon Cinderella, enigmatic Mata Hari—and, regardless of what Frank said about Ned’s brainpower, if I hit the wrong note even he would probably notice. All I could do was play it quiet and hope he gave me some cue.
The road was white and mysterious, curling away downhill into deep black hedges. A few minutes before eleven there was a vibration somewhere, too deep or too far away to pinpoint, just a throb tugging at the edge of my hearing. Silence; then the faint crunch of footsteps, away down the lane. I pressed back into the corner and got one hand around my torch and the other up my sweater, on the butt of my gun.
That flash of fair hair, moving among the dark hedges. Ned had made it after all.
I let go of my gun and watched him haul himself awkwardly over the wall, inspect his trousers for contamination, brush off his hands and pick his way across the field with deep distaste. I waited till he was in the cottage, only a few feet away, before I switched on my torch.
“God,” Ned said peevishly, throwing an arm up to shield his eyes. “Like, go ahead and totally blind me?”
That right there was, like, totally enough time for me to learn everything I needed to know about Ned in one easy lesson. Here I had been all freaked out about having one double; he must have run into a clone of himself on every street corner in south Dublin. He was so exactly like everyone else that there was no way to see him, through all those thousands of reflected images. Standard-issue trendy haircut, standard-issue good looks, standard-issue rugby build, standard-issue overpriced labels; I could have told you his whole life story on that one glance. I hoped to God I never had to pick him out of a lineup.
Lexie would have given him whatever he wanted to see, and there was no doubt in my mind that Ned liked his girls clichéd: sexy by numbers rather than by nature, humorless, not too bright and ever so slightly bitchy. It was a shame I didn’t have a fake tan. "OhmyGod,” I said, matching his peeved tone and doing the same geebag accent I’d used to get Naylor out of his hedge. “Don’t have a thrombo. It’s just a torch.” This conversation wasn’t starting out on a great note, but I was OK with that. There are some social circles where manners are a sign of weakness.
“Where have you been?” Ned demanded. “I’ve been leaving you notes, like, every other day. I’ve got better stuff to do than haul my arse down to bogland all the time, yah?”
If Lexie had been shagging this space waste, I was going to head over to the morgue and stab her myself. I rolled my eyes. “Um, hello? I got stabbed? I was in a coma?”
“Oh,” Ned said. “Yah. Right.” He gave me a pale-blue, vaguely put-out stare, like I’d done something tasteless. “Still, though. You could have got in touch. This is business.”
That, at least, was good news. “Yah, well,” I said. “We’re in touch now, aren’t we?”
“This total fucking low-life detective came and talked to me,” Ned said, suddenly remembering. He looked as outraged as you can get without changing expression. “Like I was a suspect, or something. I told him this was so not my problem. I’m not from Ballymun. I don’t stab people.”
I decided I was with Frank on this one: Ned was not the brightest little bunny hopping through this forest. He was the type who was basically one big cluster of secondhand reflexes, no actual thought involved. I would have been willing to bet good money that he talked to working-class clients as though they were handicapped and said “Me love you long time” whenever he saw an Asian girl. “Did you tell him about this?” I asked, pulling myself up onto a broken bit of wall.
He gave me a horrified look. “No way. He’d have been all over me like a rash, and I couldn’t be arsed trying to explain myself to him. I just want this sorted, yah?”
And civic-minded, too—not that I was complaining. “Good,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like this has anything to do with what happened to me, right?”
Ned didn’t seem to have an opinion on that. He went to lean against the wall, examined it suspiciously and changed his mind. “So can we, like, move forwards?” he wanted to know.
I ducked my head and threw him a sideways poor-little-me glance, up under the lashes. “The coma totally messed up my memory. So you’ll have to tell me where we were, and stuff?”
Ned stared at me. That impassive face, utterly expressionless, giving away nothing: for the first time I saw a resemblance to Daniel, even if it was Daniel after a frontal lobotomy. “We were on a hundred,” he said, after a moment. “Cash.”
A hundred quid for some family heirloom, a hundred grand for a share of the house? I didn’t have to be sure what we were talking about to know he was lying. “Um, I don’t think so,” I told him, giving him a flirty smirk to soften the blow of being outsmarted by a girl. “The coma messed up my memory, not my brain.”
Ned laughed, completely unembarrassed, stuffing his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. “Well, hey, a guy’s gotta try, right?”
I kept the smirk, since he seemed to like it. “Keep trying.”
“OK,” Ned said, sobering up and putting on his business face. “Seriously. So I said one eighty, right? And you told me I’d have to do better than that, which you’re totally breaking my bollocks here but fair enough, and to get back to you. So I left you a note saying we can talk about two hundred K, right, but then you . . .” An uncomfortable shrug. “You know.”
Two hundred K. For a second all I felt was the pure white high of triumph, the one every detective knows, when the cards turn over and you see that every bet you placed was pinpoint perfect, that flying blind you found your way straight home. Then I realized.
I had assumed Ned was the one holding things up, sorting out paperwork or trying to raise cash. Lexie had never needed serious money to run before. She had reached North Carolina with the deposit for a fleabag apartment and left it with what she got for her beaten-up car; all she had ever asked for was an open road and a few hours’ head start. This time, she had been negotiating six-figure deals with Ned. Not just because she could; with the baby growing and Abby’s sharp eyes in the background and an offer that size on the table, why hang around for weeks over a few grand either way? She would have signed on the dotted line, demanded small bills and been gone, unless she needed every penny she could get.
The more I had learned about Lexie, the more I had taken it for granted that she was planning on having an abortion, as soon as she got to wherever she was going. Abby—and Abby had kno
wn her, as well as anyone could—thought the same, after all. But an abortion only costs a few hundred quid. Lexie could have saved that much from her job by this time, nicked it out of the kitty one night, got a bank loan she would never repay; no need to mess around with Ned at all.
Raising a child costs a whole lot more. The princess of No Man’s Land, the queen of a thousand castles between worlds, had crossed over. She had been about to open her hands and take hold of the biggest commitment of all. The wall felt like it was turning to water underneath me.