“Oh, for God’s sake. Bloody Lady Macbeth—”
“Jesus,” I said suddenly. “The knife. Is it still—I mean, have we been eating with . . .” I flipped a hand vaguely towards the kitchen, then shoved a knuckle in my mouth and bit down. I wasn’t faking; the thought of every meal I’d eaten here streaked with invisible traces of Lexie’s blood did slow somersaults across my mind.
“No,” Abby said quickly. “God, no. Daniel got rid of it. After we’d all gone to bed, or anyway to our bedrooms—”
“Good night, Mary Ellen,” said Rafe. “Good night, Jim Bob. Sleep tight. Jesus.”
“—he went straight down again—I heard him on the stairs. I don’t know exactly what he did down there, but next morning the clocks were back to normal, the sink was spotless, the kitchen floor was clean—it looked like it had been scrubbed, the whole thing, not just that one patch. The shoes, Daniel’s and Justin’s that they’d left on the patio, they were in the coat closet and they were clean too—not squeaky clean, just the way we always do them—and dry, like he’d put them by the fire. The clothes were all ironed and folded, and the knife was gone.”
“What one was it?” I asked, a little shakily, around my knuckle.
“It was just one of those manky old steak knives with the wooden handles,” Abby said gently. “It’s OK, Lex. It’s gone.”
“I don’t want it to be in the house,” I said.
“I know. Me neither. I’m pretty sure Daniel got rid of it, though. I’m not positive how many we had to start with, but I heard the front door, so I figure he must have been taking it outside.”
“Where to? I don’t want it in the garden either. I don’t want it anywhere around.” My voice was shaking harder. Frank, somewhere, listening and whispering, Go girl go.
Abby shook her head. “I’m not sure. He was gone a few minutes, and I don’t think he’d have left it in the grounds, but do you want me to ask? I can tell him to move it if it’s anywhere nearby.”
I twitched one shoulder. “Whatever. Yeah, I guess. Tell him.” Daniel would never in a million years do it, but I had to go through the motions, and he would have a lot of fun leading surveillance on wild-goose chases; if things ever got that far.
“I didn’t even hear him go downstairs,” Justin said. “I was . . . Christ. I don’t even want to think about it. I was sitting on the edge of my bed with the lights out, rocking. All through the card game I wanted to get away so badly I could have screamed, I just wanted to be by myself, but as soon as I was, it was even worse. The house kept creaking—all that wind and rain—but I swear to God it sounded exactly like you were moving around upstairs, getting ready for bed. Once”—he swallowed, jaw muscles clenching—“once I heard you humming. ‘Black Velvet Band,’ of all things. It was that clear. I wanted to—If I look out my window I can see whether your light is on, it shines onto the lawn, and I wanted to check, just to reassure myself—oh God, I don’t mean reassure, you know what I mean—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself stand up. I was absolutely positive that if I pulled that curtain I would see your light on the grass. And then what? Then what could I do?”
He was shaking. “Justin,” Abby said gently. “It’s OK.”
Justin pressed his fingers across his mouth, hard, and took a deep breath. “Well,” he said. “Anyway. Daniel could have been thundering up and down those stairs and I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“I heard him,” Rafe said. “I think I heard every single thing for a mile around, that night; even the tiniest noise somewhere down at the bottom of the garden practically made me jump out of my skin. The joy of criminal activity is that it gives you ears like a bat’s.” He shook his smoke packet, tossed it into the fireplace—Justin opened his mouth automatically and then closed it again—and took Abby’s off the coffee table. “Some of it made for very interesting listening.”
Abby’s eyebrows went up. She stuck her needle carefully into a hem, put the doll down and gave Rafe a long cool look. “Do you really want to go there?” she inquired. “Because I can’t stop you, but if I were you I’d think very, very hard before I opened that particular Pandora’s box.”
There was a long, fizzing silence. Abby folded her hands in her lap and watched Rafe calmly.
“I was drunk,” Rafe said, suddenly and sharply, into the silence. “Banjoed.”
After a second Justin said, to the coffee table, “You weren’t that drunk.”
“I was. I was legless. I don’t think I’ve ever been that drunk in my life.”
“No you weren’t. If you had been that drunk—”
“We had all been drinking pretty solidly for most of the night,” Abby said evenly, cutting him off. “Not surprisingly. It didn’t help; I don’t think any of us got much sleep. The next morning was pure nightmare. We were so upset and wrecked and hungover that we were practically dizzy, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t even see straight. We couldn’t decide whether to call the cops and report you missing, or what. Rafe and Justin wanted to do it—”
“Rather than leave you lying in a rat-infested hovel till some local yokel happened to stumble on you,” Rafe said through a cigarette, shaking Abby’s lighter. “Call us crazy.”
“—but Daniel said it would look weird; you were old enough to go for an early-morning walk or even skive off college for the day if you wanted to. He phoned your mobile—it was right there in the kitchen, obviously, but still, he figured there should be a call on it.”
“He made us have breakfast,” Justin said.
“Justin managed to get as far as the bathroom, that time,” said Rafe.
“We couldn’t stop fighting,” Abby said. She had picked up the doll again and was methodically, unconsciously plaiting its hair, over and over. “Whether we had to eat breakfast, whether to call the cops, whether we should leave for college like normal or wait for you to come back—I mean, the natural thing would have been for Daniel or Justin to wait for you while the rest of us headed in, but we couldn’t do it. The thought of splitting up—I don’t know if I can explain it, how badly that idea freaked us out. We were ready to kill each other—Rafe and I were screaming at each other, actually screaming—but the second someone suggested doing separate stuff, I literally went weak at the knees.”
“Do you know what I thought?” Justin said, very quietly. “I was standing there, listening to you three argue and looking out the window waiting for the police or someone to come, and I realized: it could be days. It could be weeks; this could go on for weeks, the waiting. Lexie could be there for . . . I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I could get through that day at college, never mind weeks. And I thought what we should really do was stop fighting and get a duvet and curl up under it, all four of us together, and turn the gas on. That was what I wanted to do.”
“We don’t even have gas,” Rafe snapped. “Don’t be such a bloody drama queen.”
“I think that was on all our minds—what we would do if you weren’t found right away—but nobody wanted to mention it,” Abby said. “It was actually a huge relief when the police showed up. Justin saw them first, out the window; he said, ‘Someone’s here,’ and we all froze, right in the middle of yelling at each other. Rafe and I started to go for the window, but Daniel said, ‘Everyone sit down. Now.’ So we all sat at the kitchen table, like we had just finished breakfast, and waited for the bell to ring.”
“Daniel answered it,” Rafe said, “of course. He was cool as ice. I could hear him out in the hall: Yes, Alexandra Madison lives here, and no we haven’t seen her since last night, and no there’s been no argument, and no we’re not worried about her, just unsure whether she’s coming to college today, and is there a problem, Officers, and this note of concern gradually seeping into his voice . . . He was perfect. It was absolutely terrifying.”
Abby’s eyebrows went up. “Would you have preferred him to be a babbling mess?” she inquired. “What do you think would have happened if you had answered that door?”
; Rafe shrugged. He had started fiddling with the cards again.
“In the end,” Abby said, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, “I realized we could go out there—actually, it would look weird if we didn’t. It was Mackey and O’Neill—Mackey was leaning up against the wall and O’Neill was taking notes—and they scared the living shit out of me. The plain clothes, these expressions that told you absolutely nothing, the way they talked—like there was no hurry, they could take all the time they wanted . . . I’d been expecting those two eejits from Rathowen, and it was obvious straight away that these guys were not the same thing at all. They were so much smarter and so, so much more dangerous. I’d been thinking the worst was over, nothing could ever be as bad as that night. When I saw those two, that was when it hit me that this was only just beginning.”
“They were cruel,” Justin said suddenly. “Horribly, horribly cruel. They stretched it out forever, before they told us. We kept asking what had happened, and they just stared at us with these smug blank faces and wouldn’t give a straight answer—”
“ ‘What makes you think something might have happened to her?’ ” Rafe put in, doing a viciously accurate send-up of Frank’s lazy Dublin. “ ‘Did someone have a reason to hurt her? Was she afraid of someone?’ ”
“—and even when they did, the bastards didn’t tell us you were alive. Mackey just said something like, ‘She was found a few hours ago, not far from here. Sometime last night, she was stabbed.’ He deliberately made it sound like you were dead.”
“Daniel was the only one who kept his head,” Abby said. “I was about a second from bursting into tears; I’d been holding it back all morning in case it made my eyes look funny, and it was such a relief to finally be allowed to know what had happened . . . But Daniel said straight off, like a shot, ‘Is she alive?’ ”
“And they just left it,” Justin said. “They didn’t say a word, for what felt like forever; just stood there watching us, and waiting. I told you they were cruel.”
“Finally,” Rafe said, “Mackey shrugged and said, ‘Barely.’ It was like all of our heads had exploded. I mean, we had been primed for . . . well, the worst; we just wanted to get it over with, so we could go have our nervous breakdowns in peace. We were not ready for this. God knows what we might have come out with—we could have blown the whole thing right there—except that Abby, with impeccable timing, threw a fainting fit. I’ve been meaning to ask you, actually, was that real? Or was it all part of the plan?”
“Very little of this was part of anyone’s plan,” Abby said tartly, “and I did not faint. I got dizzy for a second. If you remember, I hadn’t had a lot of sleep.” Rafe laughed, nastily.
“Everyone jumped to catch her and sit her down and get water,” said Justin, “and by the time she was all right, we had pulled ourselves together—”
“Oh, we had, had we?” Rafe inquired, eyebrows going up. “You were still standing there opening and shutting your mouth like a goldfish. I was so terrified you would say something idiotic, I was babbling, the cops must have thought I was a total moron: where did you find her, where is she, when can we see her . . . Not that they answered, but at least I tried.”
“I did my best,” said Justin. His voice was rising; he was starting to get upset again. “It was easy for you, getting your head around it: oh, she’s alive, isn’t that lovely. You weren’t there. You weren’t remembering that awful cottage—”
“Where, as far as I can see, you were about as much use as tits on a bull. Again.”
“You’re drunk,” Abby said coldly.
“Do you know,” Rafe said, like a kid pleased at shocking the grown-ups, “I think I am. And I think I might just keep getting drunker. Unless anyone has a problem with that?”
No one answered. He stretched for the bottle, eyes sliding sideways to me: “You missed some night, Lexie. If you were wondering why Abby thinks everything Daniel says is the Word of God—”
Abby didn’t move. “I’ve warned you once, Rafe. This is twice. You don’t get a third chance.”
After a moment Rafe shrugged and buried his face in his glass. In the silence I realized Justin had flushed deep red, right up to his hairline.
“The next few days,” Abby said, “were pure hell. They told us you were in intensive care in a coma, the doctors weren’t sure whether you were going to make it, but they wouldn’t let us go see you—even getting them to tell us how you were doing was like pulling teeth. The most we could get out of them was that you weren’t dead yet, which wasn’t exactly comforting.”
“The place was swarming with cops,” said Rafe. “Cops searching your room, searching the lanes, pulling out bits of the carpet . . . They interviewed us so many times that I started repeating myself, I couldn’t remember what I’d already said to who. Even when they weren’t there, we were on guard all the time—Daniel said they couldn’t bug the house, not legally, but Mackey doesn’t strike me as the type to worry too much about technicalities; and anyway, having cops is like having rats, or fleas, or something. Even when you can’t see them, you can feel them somewhere, crawling.”
“It was awful,” Abby said. “And Rafe can bitch all he wants about that poker game, but it’s a damn good thing Daniel made us do it. If I’d even thought about it before, I would’ve figured giving an alibi took about five minutes: I was here, everyone else says the same thing, the end. But the cops grilled us for hours, over and over, about every single tiny detail—what time did you start the game? Who sat where? How much money did you each start with? Who dealt first? Were you drinking? Who drank what? Which ashtray were you using?”
“And they kept trying to trap us,” Justin said. He reached for the bottle; his hand shook, just a little. “I’d give a perfectly simple answer—we started playing around quarter past eleven, that kind of thing—and Mackey or O’Neill or whoever it was that day would get this worried look and say, ‘Are you sure about that? Because I think one of your friends said it was at quarter past ten,’ and start rummaging through notes, and I would just freeze. I mean, I didn’t know whether one of the others had made a mistake—it would have been easy to do, we were all such a mess we could barely think straight—and whether I should back them up, say, ‘Oh, that’s right, I must have got mixed up,’ or something. In the end I always stuck to the story, which turned out to be the right thing to do—nobody had made any mistakes, the cops were just bluffing—but that was sheer luck: I was too paralyzed with terror to do anything else. If it had gone on any longer, I think we would all have lost our minds.”
“And all for what?” Rafe demanded. He sat up suddenly, almost spilling the cards off his lap, and plucked his cigarette out of the ashtray. “Here’s the part that still amazes me: we took Daniel’s word for it. He has all the medical knowledge of a cheese soufflé, but he told us Lexie was dead and we just assumed he was right. Why do we always believe him?”
“Habit,” said Abby. “He usually is right.”
“You think so?” Rafe asked. He was lounging back against the arm of the sofa again, but there was an edge to his voice, something dangerous and spiraling. “He certainly wasn’t right this time. We could have simply phoned for an ambulance like normal people and everything would have been fine. Lexie would never press charges or whatever they call it, and if any of us had thought about it for a single second, we’d have known that. But no, we let Daniel call all the shots; we had to sit here having the Mad Hatter’s tea party—”
“He didn’t know everything would be fine,” Abby said sharply. “What do you think he should have done? He thought Lexie was dead, Rafe.”
Rafe shrugged, one-shouldered. “So he says.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying. Remember when that wanker showed up to tell us she was out of the coma? The three of us,” he told me, “we were so relieved we almost collapsed; I thought Justin was actually going to faint.”
“Thank you for that, Rafe,” Justin said,
reaching for the bottle.
“But did Daniel look relieved to you? Like hell he did. He looked like someone had hit him in the gut with a bat. Even the cop noticed, for God’s sake. Remember?” Abby shrugged coldly and bent her head over the doll, fumbled for her needle.