The Likeness: A Novel (30 page)

Frank sighed. “You didn’t. Anything’s worth checking.” If I heard that sentence one more time, I was going to kill someone myself. “If you think they’re dodgy, then they probably are. Just not that particular way.”
“I never said I thought they were dodgy.”
“A few days ago you thought they’d put a pillow over Uncle Simon’s head.”
I pulled my hood farther over my face—the rain was picking up, fine little stinging needles of it, and I wanted to go home. It was a toss-up which one was more pointless, this stakeout or this conversation. “I didn’t
think
it. I just asked you to check it out, on the off chance. I can’t see them as a bunch of killers.”
“Hmm,” Frank said. “And you’re positive that’s not just because they’re such lovely people.”
I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was winding me up or testing me—Frank being Frank, probably a little of both. “Come on, Frankie, you know me better than that. You asked me about my instinct; that’s what it says. I’ve spent basically every waking second with these four for a week now, and there’s been no sign of a motive, no indications of guilty consciences—and like we said before, if one of them did it, the other three have to know. By now
someone
would have cracked, even for a second. I think you’re dead right that they’re hiding something, but I can’t see it being that.”
“Fair enough,” Frank said, noncommittally. “So you’ve got two jobs for Week Two. The first one is to pinpoint whatever it is that’s tingling your spidey sense. The second one is to start pushing the housemates a little, find out what it is they’re not sharing. They’ve been getting an easy ride so far—which is fine, that’s what we planned, but now it’s time to start tightening the screws. And while you’re doing that, here’s something to bear in mind. Remember your girlie chat with Abby, the other night?”
“Yeah,” I said. A flicker of something very strange went through me, at the thought of Frank hearing that conversation; something almost like outrage. I wanted to snap at him,
That was private.
“Pajama parties rule. I told you she was a smart kid. What do you think: does she know who the daddy is?”
I hadn’t been able to make up my mind on that. “She could probably make a good guess, but I don’t think she’s sure. And she’s not about to tell me what her guess is.”
“Watch her,” Frank said, taking another swig of his drink. “She’s a little too observant for my taste. You think she’ll tell the guys?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t have to think about this one. “I get the sense that Abby’s very good at minding her own business and letting other people sort out their dramas all by themselves. She brought up the baby so I wouldn’t have to deal with it alone if I didn’t want to, but once she’d made that clear, she was straight out of there—no hints, no probing. She won’t say anything. And, Frank—are you going to be interviewing the guys again?”
“Not sure yet,” Frank said. There was a wary note in his voice; he doesn’t like being pinned down. “Why?”
“If you do, don’t mention the baby. OK? I want to spring that one on them myself. Around you, they’re on their guard; you’ll only get half their reaction. I can get the whole thing.”
“All right,” Frank said, after a moment. He was trying to sound like he was doing me a favor, but I heard the undercurrent of satisfaction: he liked the way I was thinking. It was nice to know someone did. “But make sure you time it right. Get ’em when they’re drunk or something.”
“They don’t get drunk, exactly, just tipsy. I’ll know my moment when I see it.”
“Fair enough. Here’s my point, though: that’s one thing Abby was keeping under wraps, and not just where we’re concerned—she was hiding it from Lexie, too, and she’s still hiding it from the boys. We’ve been talking about them like they’re one big entity with one big secret, but it’s not that simple. There are cracks there. They could all be keeping the same secret, or they could each have secrets of their own, or both. Look for the cracks. And keep me posted.”
He was about to hang up. “Anything new on our girl?” I asked. May-Ruth. Somehow I couldn’t say it out loud; even bringing her up felt strange now, electric. But if he had found out anything more about her, I wanted it.
Frank snorted. “Ever tried rushing the FBI? They’ve got a whole plateful of mother-stabbers and father-rapers of their own; someone else’s little murder case isn’t at the top of their list. Forget about them. They’ll get back to us when they get back to us. You just concentrate on getting me a few answers.”

* * *

Frank was right, at first I think I had seen the four of them as a single unit: The Housemates, shoulder to shoulder, graceful and inseparable as a group in a painting and all with the same fine bloom of light on them, like the luster on old beeswaxed wood. It was only over that first week that they had turned real to me, come into focus as separate individuals with their own little quirks and weaknesses. I knew the cracks had to be there. That kind of friendship doesn’t just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.
Small cracks, at first: slippery as mist, nothing you could put your finger on. We were in the kitchen Monday morning, eating breakfast. Rafe had done his Mongo-want-coffee routine and disappeared to finish waking up. Justin was slicing his fried eggs into neat strips, Daniel was eating sausages one-handed and making notes in the margins of what looked like an Old Norse photocopy, Abby was flipping through a week-old newspaper she had found in the Arts block and I was chattering to no one in particular about nothing very much. I had been ratcheting up the energy level, little by little. This was more complicated than it sounds. The more I talked, the more likely I was to shove my foot in my mouth; but the only way I was going to get anything useful out of these four was if they relaxed around me, and that would only happen once everything went back to normal, which, for Lexie, had not involved a lot of silence. I was telling the kitchen about these four awful girls in my Thursday tutorial, which I figured was safe enough.
“As far as I can tell they’re actually all the same person. They’re all called Orla or Fiona or Aoife or something, and they all have that accent like they’ve had their sinuses surgically removed, and they’ve all got that fake-straight fake-blond hair, and none of them ever, ever do the reading. I don’t know why they’re bothering with college.”
“To meet rich boys,” Abby said, without looking up.
“At least one of them’s found one. Some rugby-looking guy. He was waiting for her after the tutorial last week and I swear, when the four of them came out the door he got this terrified look and then he held out his hand to
the wrong girl
for a second, before the right one dived on him. He can’t tell them apart either.”
“Look who’s feeling better,” Daniel said, smiling across at me.
“Chatterbox,” said Justin, putting another slice of toast on my plate. “Just out of curiosity, have you ever stayed quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch?”
“I have so. I had laryngitis once, when I was nine, and I couldn’t say a single word for five days. It was awful. Everyone kept bringing me chicken soup and comic books and boring stuff, and I kept trying to explain that I felt totally fine and I wanted to get up, but they just told me to be quiet and rest my throat. When you were little, did you ever—”
“Dammit,” Abby said suddenly, looking up from her paper. “Those cherries. The best-by date was yesterday. Is anyone still hungry? We could put them in pancakes or something.”
“I’ve never heard of cherry pancakes,” Justin said. “It sounds disgusting.”
“I don’t see why. If you can have blueberry pancakes—”
“And cherry scones,” I pointed out, through toast.
“That’s a different principle entirely,” Daniel said. “Candied cherries. The acidity and moisture levels—”
“We could try it. They cost about a million quid; I’m not just leaving them to rot.”
“I’ll try anything,” I said helpfully. “I’d have some cherry pancakes.”
“Oh God, let’s not,” said Justin, with a little shudder of distaste. “Let’s just take the cherries into college and have them with lunch.”
“Rafe’s not getting any,” Abby said, folding the paper away and heading for the fridge. “You know that weird smell off his bag? Half a banana he stuck in the inside pocket and forgot about. From now on we don’t feed him anything we can’t actually watch him eat. Lex, give me a hand wrapping them up?”
It was so smooth, I didn’t even notice anything had happened. Abby and I split the cherries into four bundles and put them in with that day’s sandwiches, Rafe ended up eating most of them, and I forgot the whole thing, until the next evening.
We had washed a few of the less fugly curtains and were putting them up in the spare rooms, to keep the heat in rather than as an aesthetic choice—we had one electric storage heater and the fireplace to heat that whole house, in winter it must have been Arctic. Justin and Daniel were doing the first-floor room, while the rest of us did the top ones. Abby and I were threading curtain hooks for Rafe to hang when we heard a tumble of heavy things falling below us, a thud, a yelp from Justin; then Daniel calling, “It’s all right, I’m fine.”
“What now?” said Rafe. He was balanced precariously on the windowsill, hanging onto the curtain rail with one hand.
“Someone fell off something,” Abby said, through a mouthful of curtain hooks, “or over something. I think they’ll live.”
There was a sudden low exclamation, through the floorboards, and Justin called, “Lexie, Abby, Rafe, come here! Come look!”
We ran downstairs. Daniel and Justin were kneeling on the spare-room floor, surrounded by an explosion of weird old objects, and for a second I thought one of them was hurt after all. Then I saw what they were looking at. There was a stiff, stained leather pouch on the floor between them, and Daniel was holding a revolver.
“Daniel came off the stepladder,” Justin said, “and knocked over all this stuff, and this just fell out, right at his feet. I can’t even work out where it was, in all this mess. God knows what else is in there.”
It was a Webley, a beauty, glowing with patina between the crusted patches of dirt. “My God,” Rafe said, dropping down beside Daniel and reaching out to touch the barrel. “That’s a Webley Mark Six; an old one, too. They were standard issue during the First World War. Your crazy great-uncle or whoever he was, Daniel, the one you look like: this could have been his.”
Daniel nodded. He inspected the gun for a moment, then broke it open: unloaded. “William,” he said. “It could have been his, yes.” He closed the cylinder, fitted his hand carefully, gently, around the grip.
“It’s a mess,” Rafe said, “but it could be cleaned up. All it needs is a couple of days’ soak in a good solvent, and then some work with a brush. I suppose ammo would be too much to ask for.”
Daniel smiled at him, a quick, unexpected flash of a grin. He tipped the leather pouch upside down and a faded cardboard packet of cartridges fell out, onto the floor.
“Oh, beautiful,” Rafe said, picking up the box and giving it a shake. I could tell from the rattle that it was almost full; there had to be nine or ten cartridges in there. “We’ll have this up and running in no time. I’ll buy the solvent.”
“Don’t mess around with that thing unless you know what you’re doing,” said Abby. She was the only one who hadn’t sat down on the floor to have a look, and she didn’t sound all that pleased with this whole idea. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, either. The Webley was a sweetheart and I would have loved a chance to try it out, but an undercover job grows a whole new level when there’s a gun bouncing around. Sam wasn’t going to like this one little bit.
Rafe rolled his eyes. “What makes you think I don’t? My father took me shooting every single year, starting when I was
seven.
I can hit a pheasant in midair, three shots out of five. One year we went up to Scotland—”
“Is that thing even legal?” Abby wanted to know. “Don’t we need a license, or something?”
“But it’s a family heirloom,” said Justin. “We didn’t buy it, we inherited it.”
Again with that
we.
“Licenses aren’t for buying a gun, silly,” I said. “They’re for owning it.” I had already decided to let Frank explain to Sam why, even though the gun had probably never been licensed in its existence, we weren’t about to confiscate it.
Rafe raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to hear this? I’m telling you a tender tale of father-son bonding, and all you can talk about is red tape. Once my father found out I could shoot, he used to pull me out of school for a whole week, every time the season came around. Those are the only times in my life when he’s treated me like something other than a living ad for contraception. For my sixteenth birthday he got me—”
“I’m fairly sure we do need a license, officially,” Daniel said, “but I think we should leave it, at least for now. I’ve had enough of the police for a while. When do you think you could get the solvent, Rafe?”
His eyes were on Rafe, ice gray and steady and unblinking. For a second Rafe stared back, but then he shrugged and took the gun out of Daniel’s hands. “Sometime this week, probably. Whenever I find a place that carries it.” He broke the gun open, a lot more expertly than Daniel had, and started peering into the barrel.
That was when I remembered the cherries, me chattering, Abby cutting in. It was the note in Daniel’s voice that reminded me: that same calm, inflexible firmness, like a door closing. It took me a second to remember what I had been talking about, before the others had deftly, expertly diverted the conversation. Something about having laryngitis, being stuck in bed, when I was a kid.
I tested my new theory later that evening, when Daniel had put the revolver away and we had hung the curtains and were curled up in the sitting room. Abby had finished her doll’s petticoat and was starting on a dress; her lap was covered with the scraps of material I’d been sorting on Sunday.
“I used to have dolls, when I was little,” I said. If my theory was right, then this wasn’t risky; the others wouldn’t have heard all that much about Lexie’s childhood. “I had a collection—”
“You?” Justin said, giving me a quirk of a smile. “The only thing you collect is chocolate.”
“Actually,” Abby asked me, “have you got any? Something with nuts?”