The Likeness: A Novel (36 page)

I had no idea what I thought about this, and no room to figure it out. “That sounds gorgeous,” I said, “and you’re wonderful to think of it. Can we decide when I get home? The thing is, I’m not sure how long this is going to take.”
There was a tiny silence that made me grimace. I hate hurting Sam; it’s like kicking a dog too gentle to ever bite back. “It’s been more than two weeks already. I thought Mackey said a month max.”
Frank says whatever comes in useful at the time. Undercover investigations can last for years, and although I couldn’t see that happening here—the long operations are aimed at ongoing criminal activity, not once-off crimes—I was pretty sure that a month was something he had made up at random to get Sam off his back. For a second I almost hoped so. The thought of leaving all this, back to DV and Dublin crowds and corporate clothes, was vastly depressing.
“In theory, yeah,” I said, “but you can’t put an exact time on something like this. It could be less than a month—I could be home any time, if one of us gets something solid. But if I pick up a good lead and it needs following through, I might be here a week or two extra.”
Sam made a furious, frustrated sound. “If I ever talk about doing a joint investigation again, lock me in a closet till I get sense. I need a
deadline
here. I’ve been holding off on all kinds of stuff—getting DNA off the lads to test against the baby . . . Till you’re done in there, sure, I can’t even tell anyone we’re dealing with a murder. A few weeks is one thing—”
I had stopped listening to him. Somewhere, down the lane or deep in the trees, there was a sound. Not one of the usual noises, night birds and leaves and small hunting animals, I knew those by now; something else.
“Hang on,” I said, softly, through Sam’s sentence.
I took the phone away from my ear and listened, holding my breath. It was coming from down the lane, towards the main road, faint but getting closer: a slow, rhythmic crunching noise. Footsteps on pebbles.
“Gotta go,” I said into the phone, just above a whisper. “Ring you back later if I can.” I switched the phone off, shoved it into my pocket, tucked up my legs among the branches and sat still.
The footsteps were steady and coming nearer; someone big, from the weight of them. There was nothing up this lane except Whitethorn House. I pulled my sweater up, slowly, to cover the bottom half of my face. In the dark, it’s the flash of white that gives you away.
Night changes your sense of distance, makes things sound closer than they are, and it seemed like forever before someone came into view: just a flick of movement at first, a dappled shadow passing slowly under the leaves. Flash of fair hair, silver as a ghost’s in the pale light. I had to fight the instinct to turn my head away. This was a bad place to wait for something to step out of the dark. There were too many unknown things around me, moving intently along their secret routes on their own private business, and some of them had to be the kind that isn’t safe for us to see.
Then he stepped into a patch of moonlight and I saw that it was just a guy, tall, with a rugby build and a designer-looking leather jacket. He moved like he was unsure, hesitating, glancing off into the trees on either side. When he was only a few yards away he turned his head and looked straight at my tree, and in the instant before I shut my eyes—that’s the other thing that can give you away, that glint, we’re all programmed to spot watching eyes—I saw his face. He was my age, maybe a little younger, good-looking in a forgettable clean-cut way, with a hazy, perplexed frown, and he wasn’t on the KA list. I had never seen him before.
He passed under me, so close I could have dropped a leaf on his head, and vanished up the lane. I stayed put. If he was someone’s friend come to visit, I was going to be up there a long time, but I didn’t think he was. The hesitancy, the confused glances around; he wasn’t looking for the house. He was looking for something, or someone, else.
Three times, in her last weeks, Lexie had met N—or at least planned to meet N—somewhere. And on the night she died, if the other four were telling the truth, she had gone out for that walk and met her killer.
My adrenaline was pumping hard and I was itching to go after the guy, or at least intercept him on his way back, but I knew that was a bad idea. I wasn’t scared—I had a gun, after all, and in spite of his size he didn’t look very formidable—but I only had one shot at this, metaphorically, and I couldn’t afford to fire it while I was completely in the dark. There was probably no way to find out whether or how he was linked to Lexie, I would have to play that one by ear, but it would be nice to at least know his name before we got into conversation.
I slid down from the tree in slow motion—the scrape of the bark pulled up my top and nearly dragged the mike off me, Frank would think I was being run over by a tank—and got behind it to wait. It felt like hours before the guy came wandering back down the lane, rubbing the back of his head and still looking bewildered. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t found it. When he had passed me, I counted thirty footsteps and then followed him, keeping on the grass verge and putting my feet down carefully, staying behind tree trunks.
He had a wankermobile parked on the main road, a hunormous black SUV with depressingly inevitable tinted windows. It was about fifty yards from the turnoff, and the road was bordered by wide open stretches—long grass, ragged nettles, an old milestone sticking up off-kilter—so there was no cover; I couldn’t risk getting close enough to read the plate. My guy whacked the hood affectionately, got in, slammed the door too loudly—sudden cold silence, in the trees all round me—and sat there for a while, contemplating whatever guys like that contemplate, probably his haircut. Then he revved the engine and bulldozed off down the road, towards Dublin.

* * *

When I was sure he was gone, I climbed back up my tree and thought this over. There was always a chance that this guy had been stalking me for a while now, that the electric feeling at the back of my neck had been coming from him, but I doubted it. Whatever he was after, he hadn’t been particularly covert about it that night, and I didn’t get the sense that slinking through the wilderness was a major part of his skill set. Whatever had been lurking in the corner of my eye, it wasn’t coming into view this easily.
I was clear on one thing: neither Sam nor Frank needed to know about the SUV Prince, not until I had something a whole lot more concrete to tell them. Sam would go ballistic if he found out I was dodging strange men on the same late-night walk where Lexie had failed to dodge her killer. That wouldn’t bother Frank one bit—he always figured I was well able to take care of myself—but if I told him then he would take over, he would find this guy and pull him in and interrogate the bejasus out of him, and I didn’t want that. Something in me said that wasn’t the way to go at this case. And something else, deeper, said that this wasn’t Frank’s business, not really. He had stumbled into it by accident. This was between me and Lexie.
I phoned him anyway. We had already talked that night and it was late, but he answered fast. “Yeah? You OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out. I just wanted to ask you something, before I forget again. Has the investigation turned up a guy about six foot tall, solid build, late twenties, good-looking, fair hair with that trendy quiff thing going on, fancy brown leather jacket?”
Frank yawned, which made me feel guilty but also slightly relieved: it was nice to know he actually slept sometimes. “Why?”
“I passed a guy in Trinity a couple of days ago, and he smiled at me and nodded, like he knew me. He’s not on the KA list. It’s not a big deal—he didn’t act like we were supposed to be bosom buddies or anything—but I thought I’d check. I don’t want to get blindsided if we run into each other again.” This was true, by the way, although the guy in question had been small and skinny and redheaded. It had taken me about ten minutes of racking my brains to figure out how he knew me. His carrel was in our corner of the library.
Frank thought about this; I heard the rustle of sheets as he turned over in bed. “Doesn’t ring any bells,” he said. “The only person I can think of is Slow Eddie—Daniel’s cousin. He’s twenty-nine and blond and wears a brown leather jacket, and I guess he could be good-looking, if you go for big and dumb.”
“Not your type?” Still no N. Why the hell would Slow Eddie be wandering around Glenskehy at midnight?
“I like them with more cleavage. Eddie says he never met Lexie, though. There’s no reason why he would have. He and Daniel don’t get on; it’s not like Eddie’s popping over to the house for tea or joining the gang on nights out. And he lives in Bray, works in Killiney; I can’t see any reason why he’d be in Trinity.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s probably just someone who knows her from around college. Go back to sleep. Sorry for waking you.”
“It’s grand,” Frank said, through another yawn. “Better safe than sorry. Put a report on tape, with a full description—and if you see him again, let me know.” He was already about half asleep.
“Will do. Night.”
I stayed still in my tree for a few minutes, listening for out-of-place noises. Nothing; just the undergrowth below me tossing like ocean in the wind, and that prickle, faint and unignorable, scratching at the top of my spine. I told myself that if anything was going to send my imagination into overdrive, it would be the story Sam had told: the girl stripped of her lover, her family, her future, knotting a rope to one of these dark branches for everything she had left, herself and her baby. I phoned Sam back before I could think too hard about that.
He was still wide awake. “What was that all about? Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m really sorry about that. I thought I heard someone coming. I was picturing Frank’s mystery stalker with a hockey mask and a chain saw, but no such luck.” This was also true, obviously, but twisting facts for Sam wasn’t like twisting them for Frank, and doing it made my stomach curl up.
A second of silence. “I worry about you,” Sam said quietly.
“I know, Sam,” I said. “I know you do. I’m grand. I’ll be home soon.”
I thought I heard him sigh, a small resigned breath, too soft for me to be sure. “Yeah,” he said. “We can talk about that holiday then.”
I walked back home thinking about Sam’s vandal, about that prickling feeling, and about Slow Eddie. All I knew about him was that he worked for an estate agent, he and Daniel didn’t get on, Frank didn’t think much of his brainpower, and he had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to call his grandfather a lunatic. I bounced a few scenarios around in my head—Homicidal Maniac Eddie picking off the occupants of Whitethorn House one by one, Casanova Eddie having a dangerous liaison with Lexie and then flipping out when he found out about the baby—but all of them seemed pretty far-fetched, and anyway I liked to think that Lexie had had better taste than to boink some dumb yuppie in the back of an SUV.
If he’d wandered around the house once and not found what he was looking for, the chances were that he would come back—unless he’d just been taking a last look at the place he had loved and lost, and he didn’t strike me as the sentimental type. I filed him under Things to Worry About Some Other Time. Right then, he wasn’t at the top of my list.
The part I wasn’t telling Sam, the new dark thing unfurling and fluttering in a corner of my mind: someone was holding a high-octane grudge against Whitethorn House; someone had been meeting Lexie in these lanes, someone faceless who began with an N; and someone had helped her make that baby. If all three of those had been the same person . . . Sam’s vandal wasn’t too tightly wrapped, but he could well be smart enough—sober, anyway—to hide that; he could be gorgeous, charming, all kinds of good stuff, and we already knew that Lexie’s decision-making process had worked a little differently from most people’s. Maybe she had gone for the angst boys. I thought of a chance meeting somewhere in the lanes, long walks together under a high winter moon and branches filigreed with frost; of that smile slanting up under her lashes; of the ruined cottage, and shelter behind the curtain of brambles.
If the guy I was picturing had found himself with a chance at getting a Whitethorn House girl pregnant, it would have seemed to him like a God-given thing, a perfect, blinding symmetry: a golden ball dropped into his hands by angels, not to be refused. And he would have killed her.

* * *

The next morning someone spat on our car. We were on our way to college, Justin and Abby up front, me and Rafe in the back—Daniel had left early, no explanation, while the rest of us were halfway through breakfast. It was a cool gray morning, dawn hush left in the air and soft drizzle misting the windows; Abby was flipping through notes and humming along to Mahler on the CD player, switching octaves dramatically in midphrase, and Rafe was in his sock feet, trying to disentangle a massive knot in his shoelace. As we went through Glenskehy Justin braked, outside the newsagent’s, to let someone cross the road: an old guy, hunched and wiry, in a farmer’s tired tweed suit and flat cap. He raised his walking stick in a kind of salute as he shuffled past, and Justin waved back.
Then the man caught Justin’s eye. He stopped in the middle of the road and stared through the windscreen at us. For a split second his face contorted into a tight mask of pure fury and disgust; then he brought down his stick on the hood, with a flat clang that split the morning wide open. We all shot upright, but before any of us could do anything sensible the old man hawked, spat on the windscreen—straight at Justin’s face—and hobbled on across the road, at the same deliberate pace.
“What the—” Justin said, breathless. “What the
hell
? What was that?”
“They don’t like us,” Abby said evenly, reaching over to switch on the windscreen wipers. The street was long and deserted, little pastel houses closed down tight against the rain, dark blur of hills rising behind them. Nothing moved anywhere, only the old man’s slow mechanical shuffle and the flick of a lace curtain down the street. “Drive, hon.”
“That little
fuck,
” Rafe said. He was clutching his shoe like a weapon, knuckles white. “You should have floored it, Justin. You should have splattered whatever he’s got instead of a brain across this wretched street.” He started to roll down his window.
“Rafe,” Abby said sharply. “Roll that up. Now.”