The Likeness: A Novel (47 page)

devastated.
Four and a half years, it’s been, and he hasn’t gone out with another girl. He’ll probably never trust a woman again. How could he? He woke up one morning with his whole life in bits around him. Everything he dreamed about, gone up in smoke.”
“Unless you want that super of yours in here,” Frank said silkily, “I’d keep it down.”
Sam didn’t even hear him. “And don’t forget, she didn’t fall into North Carolina out of the sky. She was somewhere else before that, and for all we know somewhere else before that. Somewhere out there, there’s more people—God only knows how many—who’ll never be able to stop wondering where she is, whether she’s in a shallow grave in a dozen pieces, whether she went off the rails and ended up on the streets, whether she just never gave a damn about them to start with, what the hell
happened
to blow up their lives. All of them were on this girl’s side, and look what it did to them. Everyone who’s been on her side has ended up fucked, Cassie, everyone, and you’re going the same way.”
“I’m fine, Sam,” I said. His voice rolled over me like the fine edge of dawn haze, barely there, barely real.
“Let me ask you this. Your last serious boyfriend was just before you first went undercover, am I right? Aidan something?”
"Yeah,” I said. “Aidan O’Donovan.” He was good news, Aidan: smart, high octane, going places, an offbeat sense of humor that could make me laugh no matter how crap my day had been. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time.
“What happened to him?”
“We broke up,” I said. “While I was under.” For a second I saw Aidan’s eyes, the evening he dumped me. I was in a hurry, had to get back to my flat in time for a late-night meeting with the speed-bunny who ended up stabbing me a few months later. Aidan waited with me at my bus stop and when I looked down at him from the top deck of the bus, I think he might have been crying.
“
Because
you were under. Because that’s what
happens.
” Sam spun round to Frank: “What about you, Mackey? Have you got a wife? A girlfriend? Anything?”
“Are you asking me out?” Frank inquired. His voice sounded amused, but his eyes had narrowed. “Because I should warn you, I’m not a cheap date.”
“That’s a no. And that’s what I figured.” Sam whipped round to me again: “Just three weeks, Cassie, and look what’s happening to us. Is this what you want? What do you think happens to us if you head off for a year to do this fucked-up
joke
of an idea?”
“Let’s try this,” Frank said softly, very still against the wall. “You decide if there’s a problem on your side of the investigation, and I’ll decide if there’s a problem on mine. Is that OK with you?”
The look in his eyes had sent superintendents and drug lords scuttling for cover, but Sam didn’t even seem to notice it. “
No,
it’s not bloody OK. Your side of this investigation is a fucking disaster area, and if you can’t see that, then thank Jesus I can. I’ve got a
suspect
in that room, whether he’s our fella or not, and I found him through
police
work. What have you got? Three weeks of this insane bloody carry-on, all for nothing. And instead of cutting our losses, you’re trying to force us to up the ante and do something even more insane—”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything. I’m asking Cassie—who’s on this investigation as my undercover, remember, not your Murder detective—whether she’d be willing to take her assignment a step further.”
Long summer afternoons on the grass, the hum of bees and the lazy creak of the swing seat. Kneeling in the herb garden picking our harvest, soft rain and leaf-smoke in the air, scent of bruised rosemary and lavender on my hands. Wrapping Christmas presents on Lexie’s bedroom floor, snow falling past my window, while Rafe played carols on the piano and Abby harmonized from her room and the smell of gingerbread curled under my door.
Sam’s eyes and Frank’s on me, unblinking. Both of them had shut up; the silence in the room was sudden and deep and peaceful. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Naylor had moved on to “Avondale” and down the corridor Quigley was being aggrieved about something. I thought of me and Rob watching suspects from this observation room, laughing shoulder to shoulder along the corridor, disintegrating like a meteor in Operation Vestal’s poison air, crashing and burning, and I felt nothing at all, nothing except the walls opening up and falling away around me, light as petals. Sam’s eyes were huge and dark as if I had hit him, and Frank was watching me in a way that made me think if I had any sense I’d be scared, but all I could feel was every muscle loosening like I was eight years old and cartwheeling myself dizzy on some green hillside, like I could dive a thousand miles through cool blue water without once needing to breathe. I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

16

I
t was lunchtime when I got back to Trinity, but the others were still in their carrels. As soon as I turned into the long aisle of books that led to our corner they looked up, fast and almost simultaneously, pens going down.
"Well,”
Justin said, on a big relieved sigh, as I reached them. “
There
you are. About time.”
“Jesus,” said Rafe. “What took so long? Justin thought you’d been arrested, but I told him you’d probably just eloped with O’Neill.”
Rafe’s hair was standing up in cowlicks and Abby had pen smudged on one cheekbone and they had no idea how beautiful they looked to me, how close we’d come to losing each other. I wanted to touch all four of them, hug them, grab their hands and hold on hard. “They kept me hanging around for ages,” I said. “Are we going for lunch? I’m starving.”
“What happened?” Daniel asked. “Were you able to identify this man?”
“Nah,” I said, leaning across Abby to get my satchel. “He’s definitely the guy from the other night, though. You should see his face. He looks like he went ten rounds with Muhammad Ali.” Rafe laughed and held up his hand to me for a high-five.
“What are you laughing about?” Abby wanted to know. “The guy could have you charged with assault, if he wanted to. That’s what Justin thought had happened, Lex.”
“He won’t press charges. He told the cops he fell off his bike. Everything’s fine.”
“Nothing jogged your memory?” Daniel inquired.
“Nope.” I tugged Justin’s coat off his chair and waved it at him. “Come
on.
Can we go to the Buttery? I want proper food. Cops make me hungry.”
“Did you get any sense of what happens now? Do they think he’s the man who attacked you? Did they arrest him?”
“Nah,” I said. “They don’t have enough evidence, or something. And they don’t think he stabbed me.”
I’d been so swept up by the thought that this was good news, I had forgotten that it might look very different from most other perspectives. There was a sudden flat silence, nobody looking at anyone else. Rafe’s eyes closed for a second, like a flinch.
“Why not?” Daniel asked. “As far as I can see, he seems like a logical suspect.”
I shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in their heads? That’s all they told me.”
“For fuck’s
sake,
” said Abby. She looked suddenly pale and heavy-eyed, in the glare of the fluorescent lights.
“So,” Rafe said, “this whole thing was pointless, after all. We’re back where we started.”
“We don’t know that yet,” said Daniel.
“I think it’s fairly clear. Call me a pessimist.”
“Oh, God,” Justin said softly. “I so hoped this was going to be over.” No one answered him.

* * *

Daniel and Abby, talking late again, out on the patio. This time I didn’t need to feel my way along the walls to the kitchen; I could have moved through that house blindfolded without putting a foot wrong, without creaking a floorboard.
“I don’t know why,” Daniel said. They were sitting on the swing seat, smoking, not touching. “I can’t put my finger on it. Possibly I’m letting all the other tensions cloud my judgment . . . I’m just worried.”
“She’s been through a tough time,” Abby said carefully. “I think all she wants is to settle down and forget it ever happened.”
Daniel watched her, moonlight reflecting off his glasses, screening his eyes. “What is it,” he asked, “that you’re not telling me?”
The baby. I bit down on my lip and prayed that Abby believed in loyalty among the sisterhood.
She shook her head. “You’ll have to trust me on this one.”
Daniel looked away, out over the grass, and I saw a flash of something—exhaustion, or grief—cross his face. “We used to tell one another everything,” he said, “not so long ago. Didn’t we? Or is that simply the way I remember it? The five of us against the world, and no secrets, ever.”
Abby’s eyebrows flicked up. “Did we? I’m not sure anyone tells anyone else everything. You don’t, for example.”
“I’d like to think,” Daniel said, after a moment, “that I do my best. That, unless there’s some pressing reason not to, I tell you and the others everything that really matters.”
“But there’s always some pressing reason, isn’t there? With you.” Abby’s face was pale and shuttered.
“Possibly there is,” Daniel said quietly, on a long sigh. “There didn’t use to be.”
“You and Lexie,” Abby said. “Have you ever . . . ?”
A silence; the two of them watching each other, intent as enemies.
“Because that would matter.”
“Would it? Why?”
Another silence. The moon went in; their faces faded into the night.
“No,” Daniel said, finally. “We haven’t. I would probably say the same thing either way, since I don’t see how it would be important, so I don’t expect you to believe me. But, for what it’s worth, we haven’t.”
Silence, again. The tiny red glow of a cigarette butt, arcing into the dark like a meteor. I stood in the cold kitchen, watching them through the glass, and wished I could tell them:
It’ll all be OK now. Everyone will settle; everything will go back to normal, given time, and now we’ve got time. I’m staying.

* * *

A door banging, in the middle of the night; fast, careless footsteps thumping on wood; another slam, heavier this time, the front door.
I listened, sitting up in bed, my heart hammering. There was a shift somewhere in the house, so subtle that I felt it more than heard it, running through walls and floorboards into my bones: someone moving. It could have come from anywhere. It was a still night, no wind in the trees, only the cool deceptive call of an owl hunting far off in the lanes. I pulled my pillow up against the headboard, got comfortable and waited. I thought about having a cigarette, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one sitting upright, senses on full alert for the tiniest thing: the click of a lighter, the smell of smoke twisting in the dark air.
After about twenty minutes the front door opened and closed again, very quietly this time. A pause; then delicate, careful steps going up the stairs, into Justin’s room, and the explosive creak of bedsprings below me.
I gave it five minutes. When nothing interesting happened, I slid out of bed and ran downstairs—there was no point in trying to be quiet. “Oh,” Justin said, when I stuck my head round his door. “It’s you.”
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, half dressed: trousers, shoes but no socks, his shirt untucked and half buttoned. He looked awful.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
Justin ran his hands over his face, and I saw that they were trembling. “No,” he said. “I’m really not.”
“What happened?”
His hands came down and he stared at me, red-eyed. “Go to bed,” he said. “Just go to bed, Lexie.”
“Are you pissed off with me?”
“Not everything in this world is about you, you know,” Justin said coldly. “Believe it or not.”
“Justin,
” I said, after a second. “I just wanted to—”
“If you really want to help,” Justin said, “then you can leave me alone.”
He got up and started fussing with the bedsheets, pulling them tight in fast, clumsy little jerks, his back turned to me. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything more, I closed his door gently behind me and went back upstairs. There was no light from Daniel’s room, but I could feel him there, only a few feet away in the darkness, listening and thinking.

* * *

The next day, when I came out of my five o’clock tutorial, Abby and Justin were waiting for me in the corridor. “Have you seen Rafe?” Abby asked.
“Not since lunch,” I said. They were dressed for outdoors—Abby in her long gray coat, Justin’s tweed jacket buttoned—and rain sparkled on their shoulders and in their hair. “Didn’t he have a thesis meeting?”
“That’s what he told us,” said Abby, shifting back against the wall to let a bunch of yelling undergrads tumble by, “but thesis meetings don’t last four hours, and anyway we checked Armstrong’s office. It’s locked. He’s not in there.”
“Maybe he went to the Buttery for a pint,” I suggested. Justin winced. We all knew that Rafe had been drinking a little more than was good for him, but nobody mentioned it, ever.
“We checked there too,” Abby said. “And he wouldn’t go to the Pav, he says it’s full of rugger-bugger wankers and it gives him boarding-school flashbacks. I don’t know where else to look.”
“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked, coming out of his tutorial across the corridor.
“We can’t find Rafe.”
“Hmm,” Daniel said, adjusting his armful of books and papers. “Have you tried ringing him?”
“Three times,” said Abby. “The first time he hit Reject Call, and after that he turned his phone off.”
“Are his things still in his carrel?”
“No,” Justin said, slumping against the wall and picking at a cuticle. “Everything’s gone.”
“But that’s a good sign, surely,” Daniel said, giving him a look of mild surprise. “It means nothing unexpected’s happened to him; he hasn’t been hit by a car, or had some kind of health emergency and been taken to hospital. He’s simply gone off on his own somewhere.”
“Yes, but
where
?” Justin’s voice was rising. “And what are we supposed to do now? He can’t get home without us. Do we just
leave
him here?”
Daniel gazed down the corridor, over the milling heads. The air smelled of wet carpet; somewhere round the corner a girl shrieked, high and piercing, and Justin and Abby and I all jumped before we realized she was only playing at terrified, the scream had already dissolved into loud flirtatious scolding. Daniel, biting down thoughtfully on his lip, didn’t seem to notice.
After a moment he sighed. “Rafe,” he said, and gave a quick, exasperated shake of his head. “Honestly. Yes, of course we leave him here; there’s really nothing else we can do. If he wants to come home, he can ring one of us, or take a taxi.”