The Likeness: A Novel (68 page)

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.
“Hey,” I said, kicking the sofa to get Rafe’s attention. “
I
don’t remember. What happened?”
“It was that prat Mackey,” Rafe said. He took the vodka bottle from Justin and topped up his glass, not bothering with tonic. “Bright and early on the Monday morning, he’s at the door, telling us he’s got news and asking if he can come in. Personally I would have told him to fuck himself, I’d seen enough cops that weekend to last me a lifetime, but Daniel answered the door and he had this crackpot theory that we shouldn’t do anything that might antagonize the police—I mean, Mackey was
already
antagonized, he hated us all on sight, what was the point of cozying up to him?—so he let him in. I came out of my room to see what the story was, and Justin and Abby were coming out of the kitchen, and Mackey stood there in the hall looking round at us all and said, ‘Your friend’s going to make it. She’s awake and asking for breakfast.’ ”
“And we were all overjoyed,” Abby said. She had found the needle and was stabbing at the doll’s dress with short, angry stitches.
“Well,” Rafe said. “Some of us were. Justin was clutching onto the door handle grinning like an idiot and sagging as if his knees had gone out from under him, and Abby started laughing and jumped on him and gave him this huge hug, and I think I made some kind of weird whooping noise. But Daniel . . . he just stood there. He looked—”
“He looked young,” Justin said suddenly. “He looked really young and really scared.”
“You,” Abby told him sharply, “were in no state to notice anything.”
“I
was.
I was looking at him
specifically.
He was so white he looked sick.”
“Then he turned round and walked in here,” Rafe said, “and leaned on the window frame, looking out at the garden. Not a word. Mackey gave the rest of us the eyebrow and asked, ‘What’s up with your mate? Isn’t he pleased?’ ”
Frank had never mentioned any of this. I should have been annoyed—he was one to talk about playing dirty—but he seemed like some half-forgotten person from another world, a million miles away.
“Abby disentangled herself from Justin and said something about Daniel being all emotional—”
“Which he was,” Abby said, and bit off a thread with a snap.
“—but Mackey just smiled this cynical little smirk and then left. As soon as I was sure he was actually gone—he’s the type who would hang around eavesdropping in shrubberies—I went in to Daniel and asked him what the fuck his problem was. He was still at the window, he hadn’t moved. He pushed his hair off his face—he was sweating—and he said, ‘There isn’t a problem. He’s lying, of course; I should have realized that immediately, but he caught me off guard.’ I just stared at him. I thought he had finally lost it.”
“Or you have,” Abby said crisply. “I don’t remember any of this.”
“You and Justin were busy dancing around hugging each other and making squeaky noises, like a pair of Teletubbies. Daniel gave me this irritated look and said, ‘Don’t be naďve, Rafe. If Mackey were telling the truth, do you honestly believe that would be unadulterated good news? Hasn’t it even occurred to you just how serious the consequences could have been?’ ”
He took a long swallow of his drink. “You tell me, Abby. Does that sound
overjoyed
to you?”
“Jesus
Christ,
Rafe,” Abby said. She was sitting up straight, eyes snapping: she was getting angry. “What are you babbling about? Are you losing your mind? Nobody wanted Lexie to die.”
“You didn’t, I didn’t, Justin didn’t. Maybe Daniel didn’t. All I’m saying is that I’ve got no way of knowing what he felt when he checked Lexie’s pulse; I wasn’t there. And I can’t swear I know what he’d have done if he realized she was alive. Can you, Abby? After these last few weeks, can you swear, hand on heart, that you’re absolutely positive what Daniel would have done?”
Something cold slipped across the back of my neck, riffled the curtains, spiraled off to nose delicately in corners. All Cooper and the Bureau had been able to tell us was that she had been moved after she died; not how long after. For at least twenty minutes they had been alone together in the cottage, Lexie and Daniel. I thought of her fists, clenched tight—
extreme emotional stress,
Cooper had said—and then of Daniel sitting quietly beside her, carefully tapping ash into his smoke packet, droplets of soft rain catching in his dark hair. If there had been anything more than that—a hand twitching, a gasp; wide brown eyes staring up at him, a whisper almost too faint to hear—no one would ever know.
Long night wind sweeping across the hillside, owl calls fading. The other thing Cooper had said: doctors could have saved her.
Daniel could have made Justin stay in the cottage, if he had really wanted to. It would have been the logical thing to do. The one who stayed had nothing to do, if Lexie was dead, except keep still and not touch anything; the one who went back to the house had to break the news to the others, find the wallet and the keys and the Maglite, stay calm and work fast. Daniel had sent Justin, who could barely stand up.
“Right up until the night before you came home,” Rafe told me, “he
insisted
you were dead. According to him, the cops were just bluffing, claiming you were alive so we’d think you were talking to them. He said all we had to do was keep our heads and they’d back down sooner or later, they’d come up with some story about how you’d relapsed and died in hospital. It wasn’t until Mackey phoned to ask if he could drop you off the next day, if we’d be home—that was when it hit Daniel that, duh, there might not actually be some huge conspiracy going on; this might actually be as simple as it looked. Lightbulb moment.”
He took another big swig of his drink. “Overjoyed, my shiny white arse. I’ll tell you what he was: he was
petrified.
All he could think about was whether Lexie had really lost her memory or whether she’d just said that to the cops, and what she might do about it once she got home.”
“So?” Abby demanded. “Big deal. We were all worried about that, if we’re honest. Why not? If she did remember, she’d have had every right to be raging with the lot of us. That evening you came home, Lex, we’d been like a bunch of cats on hot bricks all day. Once we realized you weren’t angry or anything, we were OK—but when you got out of that cop car . . . Jesus. I thought my head was going to explode.” For one last second, I saw them again the way I had that evening: a golden apparition on the front steps, shining and poised like young warriors stepped out of some lost myth, heads lifted, too bright to be real.
“Worried,” Rafe said, “yes. But Daniel was a lot more than worried. He was so hysterically nervous that it was making me nervous too. Finally I cornered him—I had to sneak up to his room late at night, like we were having an affair or something; he was bloody careful not to let me get him alone—and I asked him what the hell was up. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘We have to accept the fact that this may not be over so easily. I think I have a plan that should cover all eventualities, but a few of the details are still unclear. Try not to worry about it for the moment; it may never come to that.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“Not being a mind reader,” Abby said crisply, “I haven’t a clue. I assume he was trying to reassure you.”
A dark lane and a tiny click, and that note in Daniel’s voice: focused, absorbed, so calm. I could feel my hair lifting. It had never occurred to me, not once, that the gun might not have been pointing at Naylor.
Rafe snorted. “Oh, please. Daniel didn’t give a damn about how any of us felt—including Lexie. All he cared about was finding out whether she remembered anything and what she was going to do next. He wasn’t even subtle about it; he was
blatantly
pumping her for information, every chance he got. Do you remember what route you took that night, are you taking the jacket or would you rather not, oh Lexie do you want to
talk
about it . . . It made me
sick.
”
“He was trying to
protect
you, Rafe. Us.”
“I don’t need protecting, thanks very much. I’m not a bloody child. And I definitely, definitely don’t need protecting by
Daniel.
”
“Well, good for you,” said Abby. “Congratulations, big man. Whether you feel you needed it or not, he was doing his best. If that’s not good enough for you—”
Rafe gave a jerky, one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe he was. Like I said, I’ve got no way to know for sure. But if he was, then his best is pretty crap, for such a smart guy. These last few weeks have been hell, Abby, living hell, and they didn’t