I wanted Rob, dammit. I had never let myself think that before, not one time in all the months since we stopped talking, no matter how tired I got or how late at night it was. At first I wanted to kick his ass so badly it was doing my head in, I was throwing things at my wall on a regular basis. So I stopped thinking about him altogether. But the squad room all round me, and the four of them peering intently as if I were some exotic forensic exhibit, and those photos so close to my cheek I could feel them; the acid-trip feeling I’d had all week was swelling into a wild, dizzying wave and I hurt, somewhere under my breastbone. I would have sold a limb to have Rob there for just one instant, raising a sardonic eyebrow at me behind O’Kelly’s back, pointing out blandly that the swap would never work because the dead girl had been pretty. For a vicious second I could have sworn I smelled his aftershave.

“Eyebrows,” Frank said, tapping the ID shot—I had to stop myself from jumping—“eyebrows are good. Eyes are good. Lexie’s fringe is shorter, you’ll need a trim; apart from that, the hair’s good. Ears—turn to the side for a second?—ears are good. Yours pierced?”

“Three times,” I said.

“She only had two. Let’s have a look . . .” Frank leaned in. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t even see ’em unless I’m looking for them. Nose is good. Mouth is good. Chin’s good. Jawline’s good.” Sam blinked, a rapid flick like a wince, on every one.

“Your cheekbones and clavicles appear to be more pronounced than the victim’s,” Cooper said, studying me with vaguely creepy professional interest. “May I ask how much you weigh?”

I never weigh myself. “A hundred and something. Sixteen? seventeen?”

“You’re a little thinner than she was,” Frank said. “No problem; a week or two of hospital food’ll do that. Her clothes are size six, jeans waist twenty-nine inches, bra size 34B, shoe size seven. All of that sound like it’ll fit?”

“Near enough,” I said. I wondered how the fuck my life had ended up here. I thought about finding some magic button that would rewind me, at lightning speed, till I was lounging happily in the back corner kicking Rob in the leg every time O’Kelly came out with a cliché, instead of standing here like a Muppet showing people my ears and trying to stop my voice shaking while we discussed whether I would fit into a dead girl’s bra.

“A brand-new wardrobe,” Frank told me, grinning. “Who says this job doesn’t have perks?”

“She could do with it,” O’Kelly said bitchily.

Frank moved on to the full-length shot, drew a finger down it from shoulders to feet, glancing back and forth at me. “Build is all good, give or take the few pounds.” His finger on the photo made a long dragging squeak; Sam shifted, sharply, in his chair. “Shoulder width looks good, waist-to-hip ratio looks good—we can measure, just to be sure, but the weight difference gives us a little leeway there. Leg length looks good.”

He tapped the close-up. “These are important; people notice hands. Give us a look, Cassie?”

I held out my hands like he was going to cuff me. I couldn’t make myself look at the photo; I could barely breathe. This was one question to which Frank couldn’t already know the answer. This could be it: the difference that would slice me away from this girl, sever the link with one hard final snap and let me go home.

“Those right there,” Frank said appreciatively, after a long look, “may be the loveliest hands I’ve ever seen.”

“Extraordinary,” Cooper said with relish, leaning forwards to peer at me and AnonyGirl over his glasses. “The odds must be one in millions.”

“Anyone seeing any discrepancies?” Frank asked the room.

No one said anything. Sam’s jaw was tight.

“Gentlemen,” Frank said, with a flourish of his arm, “we have a match.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean we need to do anything with it,” said Sam.

O’Kelly was doing a sarcastic slow clap. “Congratulations, Mackey. Makes a great party trick. Now that we all know what Maddox looks like, can we get back to the case?”

“And can I stop standing here?” I asked. My legs were trembling like I’d been running and I was furiously pissed off with everyone in sight, including myself. “Unless you need me for inspiration.”

“You can, of course,” Frank said, finding a marker for the whiteboard. “So here’s what we’ve got. Alexandra Janet Madison, aka Lexie, registered as born in Dublin on the first of March 1979—and I should know, I registered her myself. In October 2000”—he started sketching a timeline, fast straight strokes—“she entered UCD as a psychology postgrad. In May of 2001, she dropped out of college due to stress-related illness and went to her parents in Canada to recover, and that should’ve been the end of her—”

“Hang on. You gave me a nervous breakdown?” I demanded.

“Your thesis was getting on top of you,” Frank told me, grinning. “It’s a tough old world, academia; you couldn’t take the heat, so you got out of the kitchen. I had to get rid of you somehow.”

I rearranged myself against my wall and made a face at him; he winked at me. He had played straight into this girl’s hands, years before she ever came on the scene. Any slip she made when she ran into that old acquaintance and started trawling for info, any off-kilter pause, any reluctance to meet up again: Well, you know she did have that nervous breakdown . . .

“In February 2002, though,” Frank said, switching from blue marker to red, “Alexandra Madison shows up again. She pulls her UCD records and uses them to wangle her way into Trinity to do a PhD in English. We don’t have a clue who this girl actually is, what she was doing before then, or how she hit on the Lexie Madison ID. We ran her prints: she’s not in the system.”

“You might want to widen the net,” I said. “There’s a decent chance she’s not Irish.”

Frank glanced at me sharply. “Why’s that?”

“When Irish people want to hide, they don’t hang around here. They go abroad. If she was Irish, she’d have run into someone from her mammy’s bingo club inside a week.”

“Not necessarily. She was living a pretty isolated life.”

“As well as that,” I said, keeping my voice level, “I take after the French side. Nobody thinks I’m Irish, till I open my mouth. If I didn’t get my looks here, odds are neither did she.”

“Great,” O’Kelly said, heavily. “Undercover, DV, Immigration, the Brits, Interpol, the FBI. Anyone else who might want to join the party? The Irish Countrywomen’s Association? The Vincent de Paul?”

“Any chance of getting an ID off her teeth?” Sam asked. “Or a country, even? Can’t you tell where dental work was done?”

“The young woman in question had excellent teeth,” Cooper said. “I am not, of course, a specialist in the field, but she had no fillings, crowns, extractions or other readily identifiable work.”

Frank arched an inquiring eyebrow at me. I gave him my best puzzled look.

“The two bottom front teeth overlap slightly,” Cooper said, “and one top molar is significantly misaligned, implying that she had no orthodontic work done as a child. I would hazard that the possibility of dental identification is practically nonexistent.” Sam shook his head, frustrated, and went back to his notebook.

Frank was still eyeballing me, and it was getting on my nerves. I shoved myself off the wall, opened my mouth wide at him and pointed at my teeth. Cooper and O’Kelly gave me identical horrified looks.

“No, I don’t have fillings,” I told Frank. “See? Not that it matters anyway.”

“Good girl,” Frank said approvingly. “Keep flossing.”

"That’s lovely, Maddox,” O’Kelly said. “Thanks for sharing. So in autumn of 2002 Alexandra Madison goes into Trinity, and in April 2005 she turns up murdered outside Glenskehy. Do we know what she was doing in between?”

Sam stirred and looked up, put down his pen. “Her PhD, mostly,” he said. “Something to do with women writers and pseudonyms; I didn’t understand the whole of it. She was doing grand, her supervisor says—a bit behind schedule, but what she came up with was good. Up until September she was living in a bedsit off the South Circular Road. She paid her way with student loans, grants, and by working in the English department and in Caffeine, in town. She had no known criminal activity, no debts except the loan for her college fees, no dodgy activity on her bank account, no addictions, no boyfriend or ex-boyfriend”—Cooper raised an eyebrow—“no enemies and no recent arguments.”

“So no motive,” Frank said musingly, to the whiteboard, “and no suspects.”

“Her main associates,” Sam said evenly, “were a bunch of other postgrads: Daniel March, Abigail Stone, Justin Mannering and Raphael Hyland.”

“Bloody silly name,” said O’Kelly. “He a poof, or a Brit?” Cooper closed his eyes briefly in distaste, like a cat.

“He’s half English,” Sam said; O’Kelly gave a smug little grunt. “Daniel has two speeding tickets, Justin has one, apart from that they’re all clean as a whistle. They don’t know Lexie was using an alias—or if they do, they’ve said nothing. According to them, she was estranged from her family and didn’t like talking about her past. They don’t even know where she was from; Abby thinks maybe Galway, Justin thinks Dublin, Daniel gave me a snotty look and told me that ‘wasn’t really of interest’ to him. They’re the same about her family. Justin thinks her parents were dead, Rafe says divorced, Abby says she was illegitimate . . .”"

“Or maybe none of the above,” Frank said. “We already know our girl wasn’t above telling a few little white ones.”

Sam nodded. “In September, Daniel inherited Whitethorn House near Glenskehy from his great-uncle, Simon March, and they all moved in. Last Wednesday night, the five of them were home, playing poker. Lexie got knocked out first and went for a walk around half past eleven—late-night walks were a regular part of her routine, the area’s safe, the rain hadn’t started in yet, the others didn’t think twice. They finished up a little after midnight and went to bed. They all describe the card game the same way, who won how much on what hand—little differences here and there, but that’s only natural. We’ve interviewed all of them several times, and they haven’t budged an inch. Either they’re innocent or they’re dead organized.”

“And the next morning,” Frank said, finishing off the timeline with a flourish, “she shows up dead.”

Sam pulled a handful of papers out of the pile on his desk, went to the whiteboard and stuck something in one corner: a surveyor’s map of a patch of countryside, detailed down to the last house and boundary fence, marked with neat Xs and squiggles in colored highlighter. “Here’s Glenskehy village. Whitethorn House is just under a mile to the south. Here, about halfway in between and a little to the east, that’s the derelict cottage where we found our girl. I’ve marked all the obvious routes she might have taken to get there. The Bureau and the uniforms are still searching them: nothing yet. According to her mates, she always went out the back gate for her walk, wandered around the little lanes for an hour or so—it’s a maze of them, all around there—and came home either by the front or by the back, depending on what route took her fancy.”

“In the middle of the night?” O’Kelly wanted to know. “Was she mental, or what?”

“She always took the torch we found on her,” Sam said, “unless the night was bright enough to see without. She was mad for the old walks, went out almost every night; even if it was lashing rain, she mostly just bundled up warm and went anyway. I wouldn’t say it’s exercise she was after, more privacy—living that close with the other four, it’s the only time she got to herself. They don’t know whether she ever went to the cottage, but they did say she liked it. Just after they first moved in, the five of them spent a day wandering all round Glenskehy, getting the lie of the land. When they spotted the cottage, Lexie wouldn’t move on till she’d gone in and had a look around, even though the others told her the farmer would probably be out with his shotgun any minute. She liked that it had been left there, even though no one was using it—Daniel said she ‘likes inefficiency,’ whatever that means. So we can’t rule out the possibility that it was a regular stop on her walks.”

Definitely not Irish, then, or at least not brought up here. Famine cottages are all over the countryside, we barely even see them any more. It’s only tourists—and mostly tourists from newer countries, America, Australia—who look at them long enough to feel their weight.

Sam found another piece of paper to add to the whiteboard: a floor plan of the cottage, with a neat, tiny scale at the bottom. “However she ended up there,” he said, pressing the last corner into place, “that’s where she died—against this wall, in what we’re calling the outer room. Sometime after death and before rigor set in, she was moved to the inner room. That’s where she was found, early Thursday morning.”

He gestured to Cooper.

Cooper had been gazing into space, in a lofty trance. He took his time: cleared his throat primly, glanced around to make sure he had everyone’s full attention. “The victim,” he said, “was a healthy white female, five feet five inches in height, a hundred and twenty pounds. No scars, tattoos or other identifying marks. She had a blood alcohol content of .03, consistent with drinking two to three glasses of wine a few hours previously. The toxicology screen was otherwise clear—at the time of death she had consumed no drugs, toxins or medications. All organs were within normal limits; I found no defects or signs of disease. The epiphyses of the long bones are completely fused and the inner sutures of the skull bones show early signs of fusion, placing her age around the late twenties. It is clear from the pelvis that she has never delivered a child.” He reached for his water glass and took a judicious sip, but I knew he wasn’t finished; the pause was for effect. Cooper had something up his sleeve.

He put down the glass, aligning it neatly in the corner of the desk. “She was, however,” he said, “in the early stages of pregnancy.” He sat back and watched the impact.

“Ah, Jesus,” Sam said softly. Frank leaned back against the wall and whistled, one long low note. O’Kelly rolled his eyes.

That was all this case needed. I wished I had had the sense to sit down. “Any of her mates mention this?” I asked.

“Not a one,” Frank said, and Sam shook his head. “Our girl kept her friends close and her secrets closer.”

“She might not even have known,” I said. “If her cycle wasn’t regular—”

"Ah, Jaysus, Maddox,” said O’Kelly, horrified. “We don’t want to hear about that carry-on. Put it in a report or something.”

"Any chance of IDing the father through DNA?” Sam asked.

“I see no reason why not,” Cooper said, “given a sample from the putative father. The embryo was approximately four weeks old and just under half a centimeter long, and was—”

"Christ,” said O’Kelly; Cooper smirked. “Skip the bloody details and get on with it. How’d she die?”

Cooper left a loud pause, to show everyone that he wasn’t taking orders from O’Kelly. “At some point on Wednesday night,” he said, when he figured his point was made, “she suffered a single stab wound to the right chest. The probability is that the attack came from the front: the angle and point of entry would be difficult to achieve from behind the victim. I found slight abrasions to both palms and one knee, consistent with a fall on hard ground, but no defensive wounds. The weapon was a blade at least three inches long, with a single edge, a sharp point and no distinctive features—it could have been any large pocketknife, even a sharp kitchen knife. This blade entered on the midclavicular line at the level of the eighth rib, at an upward angle, and nicked the lung, leading to a tension pneumothorax. To put it as simply as possible”—he threw O’Kelly a snide sidelong glance—“the blade created a flap valve in the lung. Each time she inhaled, air escaped from the lung into the pleural space; when she exhaled, the flap closed, leaving the air trapped. Prompt medical attention could almost certainly have saved her. In the absence of such attention, however, the air gradually accumulated, compressing the other thoracic organs within the chest cavity. Eventually the heart was no longer able to fill with blood, and she died.”

There was a tiny silence, only the soft hum of the fluorescents. I thought of her in that cold ruined house, with night birds keening above her and rain gentle all around, dying of breathing.

“How long would that have taken?” Frank asked.

“The progression would depend on a variety of factors,” Cooper said. “If, for example, the victim ran for any distance after being stabbed, her breathing would have accelerated and deepened, hastening the development of the tension pneumothorax. The blade also left a minute nick in one of the major veins of the chest; with activity, this nick grew into a tear, and she would gradually have begun to bleed quite heavily. To give a tentative estimate, I would guess that she became unconscious approximately twenty to thirty minutes after receiving the injury, and died perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later.”

“In that half hour,” Sam asked, “how far could she have got?”

“I am not a medium, Detective,” Cooper said sweetly. “Adrenaline can have fascinating effects on the human body, and there is evidence that the victim was in fact in a state of considerable emotion. The presence of cadaveric spasm—in this case, the hands contracting into fists at the moment of death and remaining clenched through rigor mortis—is generally associated with extreme emotional stress. If she was sufficiently motivated, which under the circumstances I would imagine she was, a mile or so would not be out of the question. Alternatively, of course, she could have collapsed within yards.”

“OK,” Sam said. He found a highlighter pen on someone’s desk and drew a wide circle around the cottage on the map, taking in the village and Whitethorn House and acres of empty hillside. “So our primary crime scene could be anywhere in here.”

“Wouldn’t she have been in too much pain to get far?” I asked. I felt Frank’s eyes flick to me. We don’t ask whether victims suffered. Unless they were actually tortured, we don’t need to know: getting emotionally involved does nothing except wreck your objectivity and give you nightmares, and we’re going to tell the family it was painless anyway.

“Restrain your imagination, Detective Maddox,” Cooper told me. “A tension pneumothorax is often relatively painless. She would have been aware of mounting shortness of breath and an increased heart rate; as shock set in, her skin would have become cold and clammy and she would have felt light-headed, but there is no reason to suppose that she was in excruciating agony.”

“How much force went into the stabbing?” Sam asked. “Could anyone have done it, or would it take a big strong fella?”

Cooper sighed. We always ask: could a scrawny guy have done it? What about a woman? A kid? How big a kid? “The shape of the wound on cross section, ” he said, “combined with the lack of splitting in the skin at the entry point, implies a blade with a fairly sharp tip. It did not encounter bone or cartilage at any point. Assuming a fairly swift lunge, I would say that this injury could have been inflicted by a large man, a small man, a large woman, a small woman, or a strong pubescent child. Does that answer your question?”

Sam shut up. “Time of death?” O’Kelly demanded.

“Between eleven and one o’clock,” said Cooper, examining a cuticle. “As I believe my preliminary report stated.”

“We can narrow it down a bit,” Sam said. He found a marker and started a new timeline under Frank’s. “Rainfall in that area started about ten past midnight, and the Bureau’s guessing she was out in it for fifteen or twenty minutes max, from the degree of dampness, so she was moved into shelter by around half past twelve. And she was dead by then. Going by what Dr. Cooper says, that puts the actual stabbing no later than midnight, probably earlier—I’d say she was well on the way to unconscious before the rain started in, or she’d have gone into shelter. If the housemates are telling the truth about her leaving the house unharmed at half past eleven, then that gives us a half-hour window for the stabbing. If they’re lying or mistaken, it could’ve been anywhere between ten and twelve.”

“And that,” Frank said, swinging a leg over his chair, “is all we’ve got. No footprints and no blood trail—the rain got rid of all that. No fingerprints: someone went through her pockets and then wiped down all her stuff. Nothing good under her fingernails, according to the Bureau; looks like she didn’t get a go at the killer. They’re going through the trace, but on preliminary there’s nothing that stands out. All the hairs and fibers look like matching either her, her housemates or various stuff from the house, which means they don’t cut either way. We’re still searching the area, but so far we’ve got no sign of the murder weapon and no sign of an ambush site or a struggle. Basically, what we have is one dead girl and that’s it.”

“Wonderful,” O’Kelly said heavily. “One of those. What do you do, Maddox, carry a crap-case magnet in your bra?”

“This one isn’t mine, sir,” I reminded him.

“And yet here you are. Lines of investigation?”

Sam put the marker back and held up his thumb. “One: a random attack.” In Murder you get into the habit of numbering things; it makes O’Kelly happy. “She was out walking and someone jumped her—for money, as part of a sexual assault, or just looking for trouble.”

“If there had been any sign of sexual assault,” Cooper said wearily, to his fingernails, “I would, I think, have mentioned it by this point. In fact, I found nothing to indicate recent sexual contact of any kind.”

Sam nodded. “No sign of robbery, either—she still had her wallet, with cash in it, she didn’t own a credit card and she’d left her mobile at home. But that doesn’t prove it wasn’t the motive. Maybe she fights, he stabs her, she runs, he goes after her and then panics when he realizes what he’s done . . .” He shot me a quick, inquiring look.

O’Kelly has definite opinions on psychology, and he likes to pretend he doesn’t know about the profiling thing. I needed to do this delicately. “You think?” I said. “I don’t know, I sort of figured . . . I mean, she was moved after she died, right? If it took her half an hour to die, then either this guy spent all that time looking for her—and why would a mugger or a rapist do that?—or someone else found her later, moved her, and didn’t bother ringing us. They’re both possible, I guess, but I don’t think either one’s likely.”

"Fortunately, Maddox,” O’Kelly said nastily, “your opinion is no longer our problem. As you pointed out, you’re not on this case.”

“Yet,” Frank said, to the air.

“There’s other problems with the stranger scenario, too,” said Sam. “That area’s pretty well deserted during the daytime, never mind at night. If someone was looking for trouble, why would he hang around a laneway in the middle of nowhere, just on the off chance that a victim might wander past? Why not head into Wicklow town, or Rathowen, or at least Glenskehy village?”

"Any similars in the area?” O’Kelly asked.

“No knifepoint muggings or stranger sexual assaults,” Sam said. “Glenskehy’s a small village, sure; the two main crimes are drinking after hours and then driving home. The only stabbing in the last year was a group of lads getting drunk and stupid. Unless something similar turns up, I’d say we put the stranger on the back burner for now.”

“Suits me,” Frank said, grinning at me. A random attack would mean no info within the victim’s life, no evidence or motive waiting to be discovered, no reason to send me under. “Suits me down to the ground.”

"Might as well,” said O’Kelly. “If it’s random, we’re bolloxed anyway: it’s luck or nothing.”

“Grand, so. Two”—Sam ticked off a finger—“a recent enemy; I mean, someone who knew her as Lexie Madison. She moved in a pretty limited circle, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out whether anyone had any problems with her. We’re starting with the housemates and working our way outwards—staff at Trinity, students—”

“With no luck so far,” Frank said, to no one in particular.

“It’s early days,” Sam said firmly. “We’re only at the preliminary interviews. And now we know she was pregnant, we’ve a whole other line of inquiry. We need to find the father.”

O’Kelly snorted. “Good luck with that. Girls these days, he’s probably some young fella she met at a disco and shagged down a laneway.”

I felt a sudden, confused spurt of fury: Lexie wasn’t like that. I reminded myself that my info was out of date, for all I knew this edition had been a five-star slapper. “Discos went out with the slide rule, sir,” I said sweetly.

“Even if he’s some fella from a nightclub,” Sam said, “he’ll have to be found and eliminated. It might take time, but we’ll get it done.” He was looking at Frank, who nodded gravely. “I’ll ask the lads from the house to give us DNA samples, to start with.”

“We might want to leave that for a while,” Frank said smoothly, “all depending, of course. If by any chance her acquaintances should end up under the impression that she’s alive and well, we don’t want to rattle their cages. We want them relaxed, off their guard, thinking the investigation’s wound down. The DNA’ll still be there in a few weeks’ time.”

Sam shrugged. He was starting to tense up again. “We’ll work that out as we go. Three: an enemy from her previous life, someone who had a grudge and tracked her down.”

“Now that’s the one I fancy,” Frank said, straightening up. “We’ve got no indication of any problems in her Lexie Madison life, right? But wherever she was before, something obviously went wrong. She wasn’t going around under a fake name just for the laugh. Either she was on the run from the cops, or she was on the run from someone else. My money’s on someone else.”

"I’m not sure I buy it,” I said. Screw O’Kelly’s feelings; I could see exactly where Frank was going with this, and I don’t like being railroaded. “The killing’s completely disorganized: one stab wound that didn’t even need to be fatal, and then—instead of finishing her off, or at least holding her so she can’t go for help and give him up—he lets her get away, to the point where it takes him half an hour to find her again. To me, that says no premeditation, maybe even no intent to kill.”

O’Kelly gave me a disgusted grimace. "Someone stuck a knife in this girl’s chest, Maddox. I’d say he knew there was a fair chance she could die.”

I have years of practice in letting O’Kelly wash over me. “A chance, sure. But if someone had spent years thinking about killing her, he’d have it planned down to the last detail. He’d have every base covered, he’d have a script, and he’d stick to it.”

“So maybe he did have a script,” Frank said, “but it didn’t involve anything like violence. Say it’s not a grudge that has him chasing her, it’s unrequited love. He’s got it in his head that they’re soul mates, he’s planning a lovey-dovey reunion and happy ever after, and instead she tells him to fuck off. She’s the one who breaks away from the script, and he can’t handle it.”

“Stalkers snap,” I said, “yeah. But they do it a whole lot more thoroughly than this. You’d expect a frenzy of violence: multiple blows, facial disfigurement, serious overkill. Instead, we’ve got one stab, barely even deep enough to kill her. It doesn’t fit.”

“Maybe he didn’t get the chance for overkill,” Sam said. “He stabs her, she runs, by the time he catches up with her she’s already dead.”

“Still,” I said. “You’re talking about someone obsessed enough to wait years and follow her God knows how far. That level of emotion, when it finally gets an outlet it’s not going to vanish just because the target’s dead. If anything, the fact that she’d escaped him again would have made him even angrier. I’d expect at least a few more stab wounds, a couple of kicks in the face, something like that.”

It felt good, getting stuck into the case like this, like I was just a Murder detective again and she was just another victim; it spread through me strong and sweet and soothing as hot whiskey after a long day in wind and rain. Frank was sprawled casually in his chair, but I could feel him watching me, and I knew I was starting to sound too interested. I shrugged, leaned my head back against the wall and gazed up at the ceiling.

“The real point is,” Frank said, inevitably, “if she’s foreign and he followed her over here, for whatever reason, then the minute he knows he’s got the job done, he’ll be out of the country like a hot snot off a slate. The only way he’ll stick around long enough for us to catch up with him is if he thinks she’s still alive.”

A brief, heavy silence.

“We can run checks on everyone leaving the country,” Sam said.

“Checks for what?” Frank inquired. “We haven’t a clue who we’re looking for, where he or she might be heading, nothing. Before we can get anywhere, we need an ID.”

“We’re working on that. Like I said. If this woman could pass herself off as Irish, then odds are English was her first language. We’ll start with England, the U.S., Canada—”

Frank shook his head. “That’s going to take time. We need to keep our boy—or girl—here until we find out who the hell we’re looking for. And I can think of exactly one way to do that.”

“Four,” Sam said, firmly. He ticked off another finger, and his eyes went to me for a split second, then slid away. “Mistaken identity.”

There was another small silence. Cooper came out of his trance and started looking distinctly intrigued. My face had started to feel like it was scorching me, like overdone eye shadow or a top cut too low, something I should have known better than to wear.

"Piss anyone off lately?” O’Kelly asked me. “More than usual.”

“About a hundred abusive men and a couple of dozen abusive women,” I said. “No one’s jumping out at me, but I’ll send over the case files, flag the ones who got most obnoxious.”

“What about when you were undercover?” Sam asked. “Could anyone have held a grudge against Lexie Madison?”

“Apart from the idiot who stabbed me?” I said. “Not that I recall.”

“He’s been inside for a year now,” Frank said. “Possession with intent. I meant to tell you. Anyway, his brain’s so fried he probably couldn’t pick you out of a lineup. And I’ve gone through all our intelligence from that period: not a single red flag anywhere. Detective Maddox didn’t piss anyone off, there’s no sign that anyone ever suspected her of being a cop, and when she was wounded we pulled her out and sent someone else in to start over. No one was arrested as a direct result of her work, and she never had to testify. Basically, no one had any reason to want her dead.”

“Does the idiot not have friends?” Sam wanted to know.

Frank shrugged. “Presumably, but again, I don’t see why he’d sic them on Detective Maddox. It’s not like he was charged with the assault. We pulled him in, he gave us some bullshit story about self-defense, we acted like we believed him and cut him loose. He was a lot more useful outside than in.”

Sam’s head snapped up and he started to say something, but then he bit his lip and focused on rubbing a smudge off the whiteboard. No matter what he thought of someone who would let an attempted cop killer off the hook, he and Frank were stuck with each other. It was going to be a long investigation.

“What about in Murder?” Frank asked me. “Make any enemies?” O’Kelly gave a sour little laugh.

“All my solves are still inside,” I said, “but I guess they could have friends, family, accomplices. And there are suspects we never managed to convict.” The sun had slid off my old desk; our corner had gone dark. The squad room felt suddenly colder and emptier, blown through by long sad winds.

“I’ll do that,” Sam said. “I’ll check those out.”

“If someone’s after Cassie,” Frank said helpfully, “she’ll be a lot safer in Whitethorn House than she would be all by herself in that flat.”

“I can stay with her,” Sam said, without looking at him. We weren’t about to point out that he spent half his time at my place anyway, and Frank knew it.

Frank raised an amused eyebrow. “Twenty-four seven? If she goes under, she’ll be miked up, she can have someone listening to the mike feed day and night—”

“Not on my budget she can’t,” O’Kelly told him.

“No problem: it’ll go on our budget. We’ll work out of Rathowen station; anyone comes after her, we’ll have guys on the scene in minutes. Will she get that at home?”

“If we think someone’s out to kill a police officer,” Sam said, “then she bloody well should get that at home.” His voice was starting to tauten.

“Fair enough. How’s your budget for round-the-clock protection?” Frank asked O’Kelly.

“Fuck that for a game of soldiers,” O’Kelly said. “She’s DV’s detective, she’s DV’s problem.” Frank spread his hands and grinned at Sam.

Cooper was enjoying this way too much. “I don’t need round-the-clock protection,” I said. “If this guy was obsessed with me, he wouldn’t have stopped at one blow, any more than he would’ve if he was obsessed with Lexie. Everybody relax.”

“Right,” Sam said, after a moment. He didn’t sound happy. “I think that’s the lot.” He sat down, hard, and pulled his chair up to his desk.

“She wasn’t killed for her money, anyway,” Frank said. “The five of them pool most of their funds—a hundred quid a week each into a kitty, to pay for food, petrol, bills, doing up the house, all the rest of it. On her income, that didn’t leave much. She had eighty-eight quid in her bank account.”

“What do you think?” Sam asked me.

He meant from a profiling angle. Profiling is nowhere near foolproof and I don’t actually have much of a clue what I’m doing anyway, but as far as I could see, everything said she had been killed by someone she knew, someone with a hair-trigger temper rather than a well-nursed grudge. The obvious answer was either the kid’s father or one of the housemates, or both.

But if I said that, then this meeting was over, at least as far as I was concerned; Sam would blow every gasket at the thought of me sharing a house with the odds-on favorites. And I didn’t want that. I tried to tell myself it was because I wanted to make the decision, not have Sam make it for me, but I knew: this was working on me, this room and this company and this conversation, pressing subtly just like Frank had known they would. Nothing in this world takes over your blood like a murder case, nothing demands you, mind and body, with such a huge and blazing and irresistible voice. It had been months since I had worked like this, concentrated like this on fitting together evidence and patterns and theories, and all of a sudden it felt like years.

“I’d go with door number two,” I said, finally. “Someone who knew her as Lexie Madison.”

“If that’s where we’re focusing,” Sam said, “her housemates were the last ones to see her alive, and they’re the ones were closest to her. That puts them front and center.”

Frank shook his head. “I’m not so sure. She was wearing her coat, and it wasn’t put on her after she died—there’s a slit in the front right side, perfect match to the wound. To me, that says she was out of the house, away from the housemates, when she got stabbed.”

“I’m not eliminating them yet,” Sam said. “I don’t know why any of them would want to stab her, I don’t know why they’d do it outside the house, all I know is that on this job the obvious answer is mostly the one you’re after—and any way you look at it, they’re the obvious answers. Unless we find a witness who saw her alive and well after she left that house, I’m keeping them in.”

Frank shrugged. “Fair enough. Say it’s one of the housemates: they’re sticking together like glue, they’ve been interviewed for hours without batting an eyelid, the chances of us breaking their story are virtually nil. Or say it’s an outsider: we don’t have the foggiest clue who he is, how he knew Lexie or where to start looking for him. There are some cases that just plain can’t be broken from the outside. That’s why Undercover exists. Which brings me back nicely to my alternative tack.”

“Throwing a detective into the middle of a bunch of murder suspects,” Sam said.

“Just as a rule,” Frank told him, with an amused little lift of one eyebrow, “we don’t send undercovers to investigate holy innocents. Being surrounded by criminals is what we tend to do.”

“And we’re talking IRA, gangsters, dealers,” O’Kelly said. “This is a bunch of fucking students. Even Maddox can probably handle them.”

“Exactly,” Sam said. “Exactly. Undercover investigates organized crime: drugs, gangs. They don’t go in on your run-of-the-mill murder. Why do we need them on this one?”

“From a murder detective,” Frank said, concerned, “that amazes me. Are you saying that this girl’s life is worth less than a K of heroin?”

“No,” Sam said, evenly. “I’m saying there are other ways to investigate a murder.”

“Like what?” Frank demanded, going in for the kill. “In the case of this particular murder, what other ways have you got? You don’t have an ID on the victim”—he was leaning in towards Sam, ticking off fingers fast—“a suspect, a motive, a weapon, a primary scene, a print, a witness, trace evidence or a single good lead. Am I right?”

“It’s three days into the investigation,” Sam said. “Who knows what we’ll—”

“Now let’s look at what you have got.” Frank held up one finger. “A first-rate, trained, experienced undercover who’s the spitting image of the victim. That’s it. Any reason why you don’t want to use that?”

Sam laughed, an angry little sound, swinging his chair onto its back legs. “Why I don’t want to throw her in there for shark bait?”

“She’s a detective,” Frank said, very gently.

“Yeah,” Sam said, after a long moment. He let the front legs of his chair down again, carefully. “She is.” His eyes skated away from Frank, across the squad room: empty desks in dimming corners, the explosion of scribbles and maps and Lexie on the whiteboard, me.

“Don’t look at me,” O’Kelly said. “Your case, your call.” If this thing went splat, and he obviously thought it would, he wanted to be well out of range.

All three of them were starting to get right up my nose. “Remember me?” I inquired. “You might want to start trying to convince me, too, Frank, because I’d say this was at least partly my call.”

“You’ll go where you’re sent,” said O’Kelly.

“It is, of course,” Frank told me reproachfully. “I’m getting to you. I felt it would be polite to start by discussing matters with Detective O’Neill, what with this being a joint investigation and all. Am I wrong?”

This is why joint investigations are from hell: nobody is ever quite sure who the big boss is, and nobody wants to find out. Officially, Sam and Frank were supposed to agree on any major decisions, but if it came to the crunch, anything to do with undercover was Frank’s call. Sam could probably override him, since this had started out as his investigation, but not without an awful lot of string-pulling and a damn good reason. Frank was making sure—I felt it would be polite—that Sam remembered that. “You’re dead right,” I said. “Just remember, you need to discuss matters with me, too. So far, I haven’t heard anything very convincing.”

“How long are we talking about?” Sam asked. He was asking Frank, but his eyes were on me, and the look in them startled me: they were intent and very grave, almost sad. That was the second when I realized Sam was going to say yes.

Frank saw it too; his voice didn’t change, but his back had straightened and there was a new spark in his face, something alert and predatory. “Not long. A month, max. It’s not like we’re investigating organized crime and we could need someone on the inside for years. If this doesn’t pay off inside a few weeks, then it’s not going to.”

“She’d have backup.”

“Twenty-four-hour.”

“If there’s any indication of danger—”

“We’ll pull Detective Maddox out straightaway, or go in and get her if we need to. Same if you develop information that means she’s no longer necessary to the investigation: we’ll have her out that same day.”

“So I’d better get cracking,” Sam said quietly, on a long breath. “OK: if Detective Maddox wants to do it, then we’ll do it. On condition that I’m kept fully informed of all developments. No exceptions.”

“Beautiful,” Frank said, sliding off his chair fast, before Sam could change his mind. “You won’t regret it. Hang on, Cassie—before you say anything, I want to show you this. I promised you videos, and I’m a man of my word.”

O’Kelly let out a snort and said something predictable about amateur porn, but I barely heard him. Frank fished around in his big black knapsack, waved a DVD labeled in marker scrawl at me and shoved it into the squad room’s cheapo DVD player.

“Date stamp says the twelfth of September last,” he said, turning on the monitor. “Daniel got the keys to the house on the tenth. He and Justin drove down that afternoon to make sure the roof hadn’t fallen in or anything, the five of them spent the eleventh packing up their stuff, and on the twelfth they all handed in the keys to their flats and moved out to Whitethorn House, lock, stock and barrel. They don’t hang about, this lot.” He hoisted himself onto Costello’s desk, beside me, and hit Play on the remote.

Darkness; a click and rattle, like an old key turning; feet thumping on wood. “Sweet Jesus,” someone said. A finely modulated voice with a Belfast tinge: Justin. “The smell.”

“What are you being shocked about?” demanded a deeper voice, cool and almost accentless. (“That’s Daniel,” Frank said, next to me.) “You knew what to expect.”

“I blanked it out of my mind.”

“Is this thing working?” a girl asked. “Rafe, can you tell?”

“That’s our girl,” Frank said softly, but I already knew. Her voice was lighter than mine, alto and very clear, and the first syllable had hit me straight in the back of the neck, at the top of my spine.

“My God,” said a guy with an English accent, amused: Rafe. “You’re recording this?”

“Course I am. Our new home. Only I can’t tell if it’s doing anything, because I’m only recording black anyway. Does the electricity work?”

Another clatter of feet; a door creaked. “This should be the kitchen,” Daniel said. “As far as I remember.”

“Where’s the switch?”

“I’ve got a lighter,” said another girl’s voice. Abigail; Abby.

“Brace yourselves,” said Justin.

A tiny flame, wavering in the center of the screen. All I could see was one side of Abby’s face, eyebrow raised, mouth a little open.

“Jesus H. Christ, Daniel,” said Rafe.

“I did warn you,” said Justin.

“In fairness, he did,” said Abby. “If I remember, he said it was a cross between an archaeological site and the nastier bits of Stephen King.”

“I know, but I thought he was exaggerating as usual. I didn’t expect him to be understating.”

Someone—Daniel—took the lighter off Abby and cupped his hand around a cigarette; there was a draft coming from somewhere. His face on the wobbly screen was calm, unperturbed. He glanced up over the flame and gave Lexie a solemn wink. Maybe because I had spent so long staring at that photo, there was something astonishing about seeing them all in action. It was like being one of those kids in books who find a magic spyglass that lets them into the secret life of some old painting, enthralling and risky.

“Don’t,” said Justin, taking the lighter and poking gingerly at something on a rickety shelf. “If you want to smoke, go outside.”

“Why?” asked Daniel. “So I don’t smudge the wallpaper, or so I don’t stink up the curtains?”

“He’s got a point,” said Abby.

“What a bunch of wusses,” said Lexie. “I think this place is terrifantastic. I feel like one of the Famous Five.”

“Five Find a Prehistoric Ruin,” Daniel said.

“Five Find the Mold Planet,” said Rafe. “Simply spiffing.”

“We should have ginger cake and potted meat,” Lexie said.

“Together?” asked Rafe.

“And sardines,” said Lexie. “What is potted meat?”

“Spam,” Abby told her.

“Ew.”

Justin went over to the sink, held the lighter close and turned on the taps. One of them sputtered, popped and eventually let out a thin stream of water.

“Mmm,” said Abby. “Typhoid tea, anyone?”

“I want to be George,” said Lexie. “She was cool.”

“I don’t care as long as I’m not Anne,” Abby said. “She always got stuck doing the washing up, just because she was a girl.”

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Rafe.

“You can be Timmy the dog,” Lexie told him.

The rhythms of their conversation were faster than I had expected, smart and sharp as a jitterbug, and I could see why the rest of the English department thought this lot were up themselves. They had to be impossible to talk to; those tight, polished syncopations didn’t leave room for anyone else. Somehow, though, Lexie had managed to slot herself in there, tailored herself or rearranged them inch by inch till she made a place for herself and became part of them, seamless. Whatever this girl’s game was, she had been good at it.

A small clear voice at the back of my head said: Just like I’m good at mine.

Miraculously, the screen lit up, more or less, as a forty-watt bulb came on overhead: Abby had found the light switch, in an unlikely corner by a grease-draped cooker. “Well done, Abby,” said Lexie, panning.

“I’m not sure,” said Abby. “It looks even worse now that I can see it.”

She was right. The walls had obviously been papered at some stage, but a greenish mold had staged a coup, creeping in from every corner and almost meeting in the middle. Spectacular Halloween-decoration cobwebs trailed from the ceiling, swaying gently in the draft. The linoleum was grayish and curling, with sinister dark streaks; on the table was a glass vase holding a bunch of very dead flowers, stalks broken and sagging at odd angles. Everything was about three inches thick with dust. Abby looked deeply skeptical; Rafe looked amused, in a horrified kind of way; Daniel looked mildly intrigued; Justin looked like he might throw up.

“You want me to live there?” I said to Frank.

“It doesn’t look like that now,” he told me, reproachfully. “They’ve really done a lot with it.”

“Have they bulldozed it and started over?”

“It’s lovely. You’ll love it. Shh.”

“Here,” Lexie said; the camera jerked and swung wildly, caught cobwebby curtains in a horrible seventies orange swirl. “You mind that. I want to explore.”

“I hope you’ve had your shots,” Rafe said. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Lexie told him, and bounced into shot, heading over towards the cupboards.

She moved lighter than me, small steps tipped up on the balls of her feet, and girlier: her curves were no more impressive than mine, obviously, but she had a dancing little swing that made you notice them. Her hair had been longer then, just long enough to pull into two curly bunches over her ears, and she was wearing jeans and a tight cream-colored sweater a lot like one I used to have. I still had no idea whether we would have liked each other, if we had had the chance to meet—probably not—but that was beside the point, so irrelevant that I didn’t even know how to think about it.

“Wow,” Lexie said, peering into one of the cupboards. “What is it? Is it alive?”

“It may well have been,” Daniel said, leaning over her shoulder. “A very long time ago.”

“I think it’s the other way around,” said Abby. “It didn’t use to be alive, but it is now. Has it evolved opposable thumbs yet?”

“I miss my flat,” said Justin lugubriously, from a safe distance.

“You do not,” Lexie told him. “Your flat was three foot square and made from reconstituted cardboard and you hated it.”

“My flat didn’t have unidentified life-forms.”

“Whatsisname upstairs with the sound system who thought he was Ali G.”

“I think it’s some kind of fungus,” Daniel said, inspecting the cupboard with interest.

“That does it,” said Rafe. “I am not recording this. When we’re old and gray and wallowing in nostalgia, our first memories of our home should not be defined by fungus. How do I turn this thing off?”

A second of linoleum; then the screen went black.

“We’ve got forty-two clips like that,” Frank told me, hitting buttons, “all between about one minute and five minutes long. Add in, say, another week’s worth of intensive interviews with her associates, and I’m pretty sure we’ll have enough information to put together our very own DIY Lexie Madison. Assuming, that is, that you want to.”

He froze the frame on Lexie, head turned over her shoulder to say something, eyes bright and mouth half open in a smile. I looked at her, soft-edged and flickering like she might fly off the screen at any second, and I thought: I used to be like that. Sure-footed and invulnerable, up for anything that came along. Just a few months ago, I used to be like that.

“Cassie,” Frank said softly. “Your call.”

For what seemed like a long time, I thought about saying no. Back to DV: the standard Monday crop of the weekend’s aftermath, too many bruises and high-necked sweaters and sunglasses indoors, the regulars filing charges on their boyfriends and withdrawing them by Tuesday night, Maher sitting beside me like a big pink ham in a sweater and sniggering predictably every time we pulled a case with foreign names.

If I went back in there the next morning I would never leave. I knew it solid as a fist in my stomach. This girl was like a dare, flung hard and deadly accurate straight at me: a once-off chance, and catch it if you can.

O’Kelly stretched out his legs and sighed ostentatiously; Cooper examined the cracks in the ceiling. I could tell from the stillness of Sam’s shoulders that he wasn’t breathing. Only Frank was looking at me, his eyes steady and unblinking. The air of the squad room hurt everywhere it touched me. Lexie in dim gold light on the screen was a dark lake I could high-dive into, she was a thin-ice river I could skate away on, she was a long-distance flight leaving now.

“Tell me this woman smoked,” I said.

My ribs opened up like windows, I’d forgotten you could breathe that deeply. "Jesus, you took your time,” said O’Kelly, heaving himself out of his chair and pulling his trousers up over his belly. “I think you’re bloody certifiable, but nothing new there. When you get yourself killed, don’t come crying to me.”

“Fascinating,” Cooper said, eyeing me speculatively; a part of him was obviously working out the odds that I would end up on his table. “Do keep me posted.”

Sam ran a hand over his mouth, hard, and I saw his neck sag. “Marlboro Lights,” Frank said, and hit Eject, a big grin slowly breaking across his face. "That’s my girl.”"

* * *

I used to believe, bless my naive little heart, that I had something to offer the robbed dead. Not revenge—there’s no revenge in the world that could return the tiniest fraction of what they’ve lost—and not justice, whatever that means, but the one thing left to give them: the truth. I was good at it. I had one, at least, of the things that make a great detective: the instinct for truth, the inner magnet whose pull tells you beyond any doubt what’s dross, what’s alloy and what’s the pure, uncut metal. I dug out the nuggets without caring when they cut my fingers and brought them in my cupped hands to lay on graves, until I found out—Operation Vestal again—how slippery they were, how easily they crumbled, how deep they sliced and, in the end, how very little they were worth.

In Domestic Violence, if you can get one bruised girl to press charges or go to a shelter, then there’s at least one night when her boyfriend is not going to hit her. Safety is a small debased currency, copper-plated pennies to the gold I had been chasing in Murder, but what value it has it holds. I had learned, by that time, not to take that lightly. A few safe hours and a sheet of phone numbers to call: I had never been able to offer a single murder victim that much.

I had no clue what currency I had to offer Lexie Madison—not safety, obviously, and truth didn’t appear to have been one of her main priorities—but she had come looking for me, alive and dead she had padded closer on soft feet till she arrived with a spectacular bang on my doorstep: she wanted something. What I wanted from her in exchange—I really believed this, at the time—was simple: I wanted her the fuck out of my life. I knew she would drive a hard bargain, but I was good with that; I had done it before.

I don’t tell people this, it’s nobody’s business, but the job is the nearest thing I’ve got to a religion. The detective’s god is the truth, and you don’t get much higher or much more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover—and those were always the ones I wanted, why go chasing diluted versions when you could have the breathtaking full-on thing?—is anything or everything you’ve got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the coldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose.

Undercover picked my honesty. I should have seen this coming, but somehow I had been so caught by the dazzling absoluteness of the job that I had managed to miss the most obvious thing about it: you spend your day lying. I don’t like lying, don’t like doing it, don’t like people who do it, and to me it seemed deeply fucked-up to go after the truth by turning yourself into a liar. I spent months picking my way along a fine double-talk line, cozying up to this small-fish dealer and spinning jokes or sarcasm to mislead him with literal truths. Then one day he fried both his brain cells on speed, pulled a knife on me and asked me if I was just using him to get to know his supplier. I skated the fine line for what felt like hours—Chill out, what’s your problem, what have I ever done to make you think I’m trying to screw you over?—stalling and hoping to God that Frank was listening to the mike feed. Dealer Boy put the knife in between my ribs and shrieked in my face, Are you? Are you? No bullshit. Yes or no. Are you? When I hesitated—because of course I was, even if it wasn’t for the reason he had in mind, and this seemed like too crucial a moment for lies—he stabbed me. Then he burst into tears, and sometime in there Frank arrived and carted me discreetly off to the hospital. But I knew. The sacrifice had been demanded and I had withheld it. I had thirty stitches for warning: Don’t do that again.

I was a good Murder detective. Rob once told me that all through his first case he had elaborate visions of fucking up, sneezing on DNA evidence, waving a cheerful good-bye to someone who had just let slip the giveaway piece of withheld info, bumbling vacantly past every clue and red flag. I never had that. My first Murder case was about as banal and depressing as they get—a young junkie knifed in the stairwell of a nightmare block of flats, great blood smears down grimy flights of stairs and eyes watching behind chained doors and the smell of piss everywhere. I stood on the landing with my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t touch anything by mistake, looking up at the victim sprawled on the steps with his tracksuit bottoms half pulled down by the fall or the fight, and I thought: So this is it. This is where I was coming to, all along.

I still remember that junkie’s face: too thin, a faint fuzz of pale stubble, his mouth a little open as if all this had startled him silly. He had a crooked front tooth. Against all the odds and O’Kelly’s nonstop depressing predictions, we got a solve.

On Operation Vestal the Murder god chose my best friend and my honesty, and gave me nothing in exchange. I transferred out knowing there would be a price to pay for the desertion. At the back of my mind I expected my solve rate to plummet, expected every vicious guy to beat the living daylights out of me, every raging woman to scratch my eyes out. I wasn’t scared; I was looking forward to it being over. But when nothing happened I realized, like a slow cold tide, that this was the punishment: to be turned loose, allowed to go on my way. To be left empty by my guardian god.

And then Sam phoned and Frank was waiting at the top of the hill, and strong implacable hands were reeling me back in. You can put all of this down to a superstitious streak if that’s easiest, or to the kind of intense secret life that a lot of orphans and onlies have; I don’t mind. But maybe it goes some way towards explaining why I said yes to Operation Mirror, and why, when I signed on, I figured there was a decent chance I was going to get killed.

4

Frank and I spent the next week developing Lexie Madison Version 3.0. During the day he pumped people for information about her, her routine, her moods, her relationships; then he came over to my flat and spent the night hammering the day’s crop into my head. I’d forgotten how good at this he was, how systematic and thorough, and how fast he expected me to keep up. Sunday evening, before we left the squad room, he handed me Lexie’s weekly schedule and a sheaf of photocopies of her thesis material. On Monday he had a thick file of her KAs—known associates—complete with photos and voice recordings and background info and smart-arsed commentary, for me to memorize. On Tuesday he brought an aerial map of the Glenskehy area, made me go over every detail till I could draw it from memory, gradually worked his way inwards till we got to floor plans and photos of Whitethorn House. This stuff had taken time to get together. Frank, the fucker, had known long before Sunday night that I was going to say yes.

We watched the phone videos again and again, Frank hitting Pause every few seconds to snap his fingers at some detail: “See that? How her head tilts to the right when she laughs? Show me that angle . . . See the way she looks at Rafe, and there, at Justin? She’s flirting with them. Daniel and Abby, she looks at straight on; the two lads, it’s sideways and up. Remember that . . . See her with the cigarette? She doesn’t tuck it into the right-hand side of her mouth, the way you do. Her hand crosses over, and the smoke goes in on the left. Let’s see you do it . . . See that? Justin starts getting all worked up about the mildew, and straightaway there’s that little glance between Abby and Lexie, and they start talking about the pretty tiles to take his mind off it. There’s an understanding there . . .” I watched those clips so many times that when I finally went to sleep—five in the morning, mostly, Frank sprawled on the sofa in all his clothes—they slid through my dreams, a constant undercurrent, tugging: the brusque cut of Daniel’s voice against Justin’s light obbligato, the patterns of the wallpaper, the rich tumble of Abby’s laugh.

They lived with a kind of ceremony that startled me. My student life was spur-of-the-moment house parties, frantic bursts of all-night study and non-meals involving crisp sandwiches at weird hours. But this lot: the girls made breakfast at half past seven every morning, they were in college around ten—Daniel and Justin had cars, so they drove the others—whether they had tutorials to give or not, home around half past six and the guys made dinner. On weekends they worked on the house; occasionally, if the weather was good, they took a picnic somewhere. Even their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool. They didn’t own a TV, never mind a computer—Daniel and Justin shared a manual typewriter, the other three were in enough contact with the twenty-first century to use the computers in college. They were like spies from another planet who had got their research wrong and wound up reading Edith Wharton and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie. Frank had to look up piquet on the internet and teach me to play.

All this stuff, of course, got right up Frank’s nose and inspired him to more and more creative flights of bitchery (“I’m thinking this is some weird cult that believes technology is the work of Satan and chants to house plants at the full moon. Don’t worry, if they start gearing up for an orgy, I’ll get you out; by the looks of them, it’s not like you’d enjoy it. Who the hell doesn’t have a television ?”). I didn’t tell him this, but the more I thought about it, the less bizarre their lives seemed and the more they enchanted me. Dublin goes fast, these days, fast and jam-packed and jostling, everyone terrified of being left behind and forcing themselves louder and louder to make sure they don’t disappear. I had spent my time since Operation Vestal going fast too, headlong and gritted, anything not to stop, and at first the unabashed, graceful leisure of these four—embroidery, for Christ’s sake—was as shocking as a slap. I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms. That house and that life hung in my mind cool as well water, cool as the shadow under an oak tree on a hot afternoon.

During the day I practiced: Lexie’s handwriting, her walk, her accent—which luckily for me was a light old-fashioned County Dublin, probably picked up from some TV or radio talk-show host, and not all that different from my own—her inflections, her laugh. The first time I got that right—a delighted, helpless bubble of a laugh, running up the scale like a tickled kid’s—it scared the shit out of me.

Her version of Lexie Madison had been, comfortingly, a little different from mine. Way back in UCD, I played Lexie as cheerful, easygoing, sociable, happiest at the center of the action; nothing unpredictable about her, no dark edges, nothing that could make dealers or buyers see her as a risk. At the beginning, at least, Frank and I thought of her as a custom-made precision tool, built to suit our needs and do our bidding, with a very specific goal in mind. The mystery girl’s Lexie had been more mercurial, more volatile, more willful and capricious. She had come up with a Siamese kitten of a girl, all bounce and chatter and little explosions of mischief with her friends, aloof and ice cool with outsiders, and it bothered me that I couldn’t trace that thread backwards and work out what her goal had been, what job she had precision-made this new self to do.

I did consider the possibility that I was making things more complicated than they needed to be, and she had never had a goal at all; that when it came to personality, at least, she was just plain being herself. It isn’t easy, after all, wearing someone else against your skin for months on end; I should know. But the thought of taking her at face value, no pun intended, made me edgy. Something told me that underestimating this girl would be a big, big mistake.

* * *

On Tuesday evening Frank and I were sitting on my floor, eating Chinese takeaway off the banged-up wooden chest I use for a coffee table, across a sprawl of maps and photos. It was a wild night, wind slamming at the window in great irregular bursts like some mindless attacker, and we were both in a jittery mood. I had spent the day memorizing KA info and building up enough excess energy that by the time Frank arrived I was doing handstands to keep myself from shooting straight through the ceiling; Frank had come in moving fast, sweeping stuff off the table and talking nonstop while he dealt out maps and food cartons, and I was wondering—there was no point in asking—what was going on, somewhere in the hidden levels of that X-box game he calls a brain, that he wasn’t telling me.

The combination of geography and food calmed us down a little—this was probably why Frank had gone for Chinese; it’s hard to be edgy when you’re full of lemon chicken. “And here,” Frank said, maneuvering the last of his rice onto his fork with one hand and pointing with the other, “that’s the petrol station on the Rathowen road. Open from seven in the morning till three at night, mainly to sell smokes and petrol to locals who’re in no condition to be buying either one. You sometimes do cigarette runs there. Want more food?”

“God, no,” I said. I had startled myself by being starving—normally I eat like a horse, Rob used to be constantly fascinated by how much food I could put away, but Operation Vestal had sort of sidelined my appetite. “Coffee?” I had a pot already going on the cooker; Frank’s eye bags were reaching the point where they would scare small children.

“And lots of it. We’ve got work to do. Gonna be another long night, babe.”

“Surprise, surprise,” I said. “What’s Olivia think of you sleeping over at my place?”

I was fishing, and I knew from the fraction of a pause as Frank pushed his plate away that I had guessed right: undercover strikes again. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah, you did. Olivia got smart and dumped me last year. I get Holly one weekend a month and two weeks in summer. What’s your Sammy think of me sleeping over at your place?”

His eyes were cool and unblinking and he didn’t sound annoyed, just firm, but the message was clear: Back off. “He’s fine with it,” I said, getting up to check the coffee. “Anything for the job.”

“You think? The job didn’t seem to be his main priority on Sunday.”

I changed my mind: he was pissed off with me about the Olivia thing. Apologizing would only make it worse. Before I could think of anything useful to say, my buzzer rang. I managed to keep the jump down to a minimum, had a graceful Inspector Clouseau moment where I whacked myself neatly across the shin with the sofa corner on my way to the door, and caught Frank’s sharp, curious up-glance.

It was Sam. “And there’s your answer,” Frank said, grinning and hoisting himself up off the floor. “You, he’d trust anywhere, but me he’s keeping an eye on. I’ll take care of the coffee; you go canoodle.”

Sam was exhausted; I could feel it in the weight of his body when he kissed me, the way he let out his breath in something like a sigh of relief. “God, it’s good to see you,” he said; then, as he spotted Frank waving from the kitchen, “Oh.”

“Welcome to the Lexie Lab,” Frank said cheerfully. “Coffee? Sweet and sour pork? Prawn cracker?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, blinking. “I mean, no; just coffee, thanks. I won’t stay, if you’re working; I just wanted to . . . Are you busy?”

“You’re fine,” I told him. “We were having dinner. What’ve you eaten today?”

“I’m grand,” Sam said vaguely, dumping his holdall on the floor and struggling out of his coat. “Could I borrow you for a few minutes? If you’re not in the middle of something.”

He was asking me, but Frank said expansively, “Why not? Have a seat, have a seat,” and waved him to the futon. “Milk? Sugar?”

“No milk, two sugars,” Sam said, collapsing onto the futon. “Thanks.” I was pretty sure that he was starving, that he wasn’t going to touch anything Frank had bought, that the holdall contained all the ingredients for something a lot more evolved than lemon chicken, and that if I could just get my hands on his shoulders I could rub that tension away in five minutes flat. Going undercover was starting to seem like the easy part here.

I sat next to Sam, as close as I could get without touching. “How’s it going?” I asked.

He gave my hand a quick squeeze and reached round to his coat, draped over the back of the futon, to find his notebook. “Ah, sure, all right, I suppose. Just eliminating, mostly. Richard Doyle, your man who found the body, his alibi’s solid. We’ve ruled out all the DV files you flagged; we’re working on the rest and on your murder cases, but nothing yet.” The thought of the Murder squad combing through my files, with the rumors sizzling in their heads and my face for victim, sent a nasty little twitch down between my shoulder blades. “It doesn’t look like she used the internet at all—no internet activity under her log-in on the college computers, no MySpace page or anything like that, the e-mail address Trinity assigned her hasn’t even been used—so no leads there. And not even a sniff of any arguments in college—and the English department is mad for the old rumors. If she’d had problems with anyone, we’d have heard.”

“I hate to say I told you so,” Frank said sweetly, gathering up mugs, “but sometimes, in life, we have to do things we hate.”

“Yeah,” Sam said absently. Frank bent to hand him his coffee with a servile little flourish, and winked at me behind Sam’s back. I ignored him. One of Sam’s rules is that he doesn’t fight with anyone working the same case, but there are always people like Frank who figure he’s just too thick to notice when he’s being messed with. “So I wondered, Cassie . . . The thing is, eliminating could take forever, but as long as I’ve no motive and no leads, I’ve no other choice; there’s nothing to tell me where to start. I thought, if I just had some idea what I was looking for . . . Could you profile this for me?”

For a second I felt like the air in the room had gone dark with pure sadness, bitter and ineradicable as smoke. Every murder case I ever pulled, I had done my best to profile right here in my flat: late nights, whiskey, Rob stretched out on the sofa cat’s-cradling an elastic band and testing everything I came up with for holes. On Operation Vestal we’d brought Sam along, Sam smiling shyly at me while music and moths swirled at the windowpane, and all I could think was how happy the three of us had been, in spite of everything, and how fatally, devastatingly innocent. This prickly, crowded place—greasy smell of cold Chinese, my shin hurting like hell, Frank watching with those sidelong amused eyes—this wasn’t the same thing, it was like a mocking reflection in some creepy distorting mirror, and all I could think was, ludicrously, I want to go home.

Sam moved a sheaf of maps to one side—gingerly, glancing up at us to make sure he wasn’t messing anything up—and put down his mug. Frank scooted his arse to the very edge of the sofa, leaned his chin on his interlaced fingers and did enthralled. I kept my eyes down so they wouldn’t see the look on my face. There was a photo of Lexie on the table, half hidden under a carton of rice; Lexie up a ladder in the kitchen of Whitethorn House, wearing dungarees and a man’s shirt and an awful lot of white paint. For the first time ever, the sight of her felt good: that handcuff bite on my wrist jerking me down to earth, that cold-water slap in the face slamming everything else out of my mind. I almost reached out and pressed my hand onto the picture.

“Yeah, sure, I’ll profile,” I said. “You know I can’t give you a lot, though, right? Not on one crime.” Most of profiling is built on patterns. With a stand-alone crime, you have no way of knowing what’s pure chance and what’s a clue, stenciled in by the boundaries of your guy’s life or by the secret jagged outlines of his mind. One murder on a Wednesday evening tells you nothing very much; three more matching ones say that your guy has a window that night, and you might want to look twice when you find a suspect whose wife plays Bingo on Wednesdays. A phrase used in one rape could mean nothing; used in four, it becomes a signature that some girlfriend or wife or ex, somewhere, is going to recognize.

“Anything,” Sam said. He flipped his notebook open, pulled out his pen and leaned forwards, eyes fixed on me, ready. “Anything at all.”

“OK,” I said. I didn’t even need the file. I had spent more than enough time thinking about this, while Frank snored like a water buffalo on the sofa and my window went from black to gray to gold. “The first thing is that it’s probably a man. We can’t rule out a woman for definite—if you get a good female suspect, don’t ignore her—but statistically, stabbing’s usually a male crime. For now, we’ll go with a guy.”

Sam nodded. “That’s what I figured, too. Any ideas on what age he is?”

“This isn’t a teenager; he’s too organized and too controlled. We’re not talking about an old man, either, though. This didn’t take an athlete, but it did take a basic level of fitness—running around lanes, climbing over walls, dragging a body. I’d go with twenty-five to forty, give or take.”

“And I’m thinking,” Sam said, scribbling, “there’s local knowledge there.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Either he’s local or he’s spent an awful lot of time around Glenskehy, one way or another. He’s very comfortable in the area. He hung around for ages after the stabbing; killers who’re off their turf tend to get uneasy and split as fast as they can. And going by the maps, the place is a maze, but he managed to find her—in the dead of night, with no street lamps—after she got away from him.”

For some reason this was harder than usual. I had analyzed the living bejasus out of every fact we had, gone back over every textbook, but I couldn’t make the killer materialize. Every time I reached out for him, he streamed between my fingers like smoke and slid away over the horizon, left me staring at no silhouette except Lexie’s. I tried to tell myself profiling is like any other skill, doing a backflip, riding a bike: get out of practice and your instinct goes rusty; that doesn’t have to mean it’s gone for good.

I found my cigarettes—I think better if I have something to do with my hands. “He knows Glenskehy, all right, and he almost definitely knew our girl. For one thing, we’ve got the positioning of the body: her face was turned away, towards the wall. Any kind of focus on the victim’s face—covering it, disfiguring it, turning it away—usually means it’s personal; the killer and the victim knew each other.”

“Or,” Frank said, swinging his legs up onto the sofa and balancing his mug on his stomach, “it’s pure coincidence: that’s just the way she landed when he put her down.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But we’ve also got the fact that he found her. That cottage is well off the lane; in the dark, you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were looking for it specifically. The time lag says he wasn’t exactly hot on her trail, so I doubt he actually saw her go in there, and once she was sitting down the wall would hide her from the road. Unless she had her torch on and our guy spotted the light—and why would you switch on a torch if you were trying to hide from a homicidal maniac?—then he had to have a reason for checking there. I think he knew she liked the cottage.”

“None of that says she knew him,” Frank said. “Just that he knew her. If he’d been stalking her for a while, say, he could feel like there was a personal connection, and he’d have a good handle on her habits.”

I shook my head. “I’m not completely ruling out a stalker, but if that’s what we’re dealing with, he was at least an acquaintance of hers. She was stabbed from the front, remember. She wasn’t running away, and she wasn’t jumped from behind; they were face to face, she knew he was there, they could well have been talking for a while. And she didn’t have any defensive wounds. To me, that says she wasn’t on guard. This guy was up close and she was at ease with him, right up until the second he stabbed her. Me, I wouldn’t be all that relaxed with a complete stranger who showed up at that hour in the middle of nowhere.”

“All of which will be a lot more use,” Frank said, “just as soon as we have a clue who this girl knew, exactly.”

“Anything else I can look for?” Sam asked, ignoring him—I could see the effort. “Would you say he’s got a record?”

“He probably has some kind of criminal experience,” I said. “He did a damn good job of cleaning up after himself. There’s a good chance he’s never got caught, if he’s this careful, but maybe he learned the hard way. If you’re going through files, you could try looking for stuff like car theft, burglary, arson—something that would take cleanup skills but wouldn’t involve any direct contact with victims. No assault, including sexual assault. Judging by how crap he is at killing people, he’d had no practice being violent, or practically none.”

“He’s not that crap,” Sam said quietly. “He got the job done.”

“Barely,” I said. “Through dumb luck, more than anything. And I don’t think that’s the job he went there to do. There are elements of this crime that just don’t match up. Like I said on Sunday, the stabbing reads as unplanned, spontaneous; but everything around that moment is a whole lot more organized. Your guy knew where to find her—I don’t buy the idea that he just happened to wander into her, at midnight on some back lane in the middle of nowhere. Either he knew her routine, or they’d arranged to meet. And after the stabbing, he kept his head and he took his time: tracked her down, searched her, erased his footprints and wiped her stuff clean—and that says he wasn’t wearing gloves. Again, he wasn’t planning on a murder.”

“He was carrying a knife,” Frank pointed out. “What was he planning on, whittling?”

I shrugged. “Threatening her, maybe; scaring her, impressing her, I don’t know. But someone this thorough, if he’d gone out there intending to kill her, he wouldn’t have made such a bollocks of it. The attack came out of the blue, there had to be a moment when she was stunned by what had just happened; if he was aiming to finish her off, he could have done it. Instead, she’s the one who reacts first—she takes off running, and gets a good head start, before he can do anything about it. That makes me think he was almost as stunned as she was. I think the meeting was planned for a completely different purpose, and then something went badly wrong.”

“Why follow her?” Sam asked. “After the stabbing. Why not leg it out of there?”

“When he caught up with her,” I said, “he found out she was dead, moved her and went through her pockets. So I’m betting one of those things was his reason for going after her. He didn’t hide or display the body, and you wouldn’t spend half an hour looking for someone just to drag her a few yards for the hell of it, so moving her seems more like a side effect: he got her into shelter in order to conceal the light from a torch, or to be out of the rain, while he achieved his real goal—either to find out for sure whether she was dead, or else to search her.”

“If you’re right about him knowing her,” Sam said, “and about him not meaning to kill her, then couldn’t he have moved her because he cared about her? He felt guilty enough already, didn’t want to leave her out in the rain ...”

“I thought about that. But this guy’s smart, he thinks ahead, and he was very serious about not getting caught. Moving her meant getting blood on himself, leaving more footprints, taking more time, maybe leaving hairs or fibers on her . . . I can’t see him taking that kind of extra risk just out of sentimentality. He had to have a solid reason. Checking whether she was dead wouldn’t take long—less time than moving her, anyway—so my best guess is that he followed her, and moved her, because he needed to search her.”

“What for?” Sam asked. “We know he wasn’t after cash.”

“I can only think of three reasons,” I said. “One is that he was checking for anything on her that might identify him—making sure she hadn’t written down the appointment in a diary, trying to delete his number off her mobile, that kind of thing.”

“She didn’t keep a diary,” Frank said, to the ceiling. “I asked the Fantastic Four.”

“And she’d left her mobile at home, on the kitchen table,” Sam said. “The housemates say that was normal; she always meant to bring it on her walks, but she mostly forgot it. We’re going through it: nothing dodgy so far.”

“He didn’t necessarily know that, though,” I said. “Or he could have been looking for something more specific. Maybe she was supposed to give him something, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind . . . Either he took it off the body, or she didn’t have it on her in the first place.”

“The map to the hidden treasure?” Frank inquired, helpfully. “The Crown Jewels?”

“That house is full of old bits and bobs,” Sam said. “If there was something valuable in there . . . Was there an inventory done, when your man inherited?”

“Ha,” Frank said. “You’ve seen it. How would anyone inventory that? Simon March’s will lists the good stuff—mostly antique furniture, a couple of paintings—but that’s all gone. The death duties were massive, anything worth more than a few quid had to go to pay them off. From what I’ve seen, all that’s left is your basic attic tat.”

“The other possibility,” I said, “is that he was looking for ID. God knows there’s enough confusion around this girl’s identity. Say he thought he was talking to me and then had doubts, or say she dropped a hint that Lexie Madison wasn’t her real name: your guy might have gone looking for ID, trying to figure out who he’d just stabbed.”

“Here’s what your scenarios have in common,” Frank said. He was lying back with his arms folded behind his head, watching us, and that glint in his eye had got cockier. “Our guy planned to meet her once, which means he might very well want to meet her again, given the chance. He didn’t plan to kill her, which means it’s highly unlikely that there’s any further danger. And he came from outside Whitethorn House.”

“Not necessarily,” Sam said. “If one of the housemates did it, he—or she—might have taken Lexie’s mobile off her body, to make sure she hadn’t called 999 or recorded anything. We know she used the video camera all the time; they could well have been worried that she’d put the attacker’s name on there.”

“Prints from the phone back yet?” I asked.

“This afternoon,” Frank said. “Lexie and Abby. Both Abby and Daniel say that Abby passed Lexie her mobile that morning, on their way out to college, and the prints back that up. Lexie’s are overlaid on Abby’s in at least two places: she touched the phone after Abby did. Nobody took that phone off Lexie’s body. It was at home on the kitchen table when she died, and any of the housemates could have found that out without needing to chase after her.”

“Or they could’ve taken her diary,” said Sam. “We’ve only their word for it that she didn’t keep one.”

Frank rolled his eyes. “If you want to play that game, we’ve only got their word for it that she even lived there. For all we know, she could have had a row with them a month ago and moved into the penthouse of the Shelbourne as the mistress of a Saudi prince, except there’s not one speck of evidence that points that way. All four of their stories match up perfectly, we haven’t caught any of them in a lie, she got stabbed outside the house—”

“What do you think?” Sam asked me, cutting Frank off. “Do they fit the profile?”

“Yeah, Cassie,” Frank said sweetly. “What do you think?”

Sam so badly wanted it to be one of them. For a moment I actually wished I could say it was, and never mind what that would do to the investigation, just to see the drained look evaporate off his face, a spark come into his eyes. “Statistically,” I said, “sure, close enough. They’re the right age, they’re local, they’re smart, they knew her—not just that: they’re the ones who knew her best, and that’s where you mostly find your killer. None of them has a record, but like I said, one of them could have done stuff we don’t know about, somewhere along the way. At first, yeah, I liked them for it. The more I hear, though . . .” I ran my hands through my hair and tried to figure out how to say this. “Here’s the one thing I don’t like taking their word for. Do we have any kind of independent confirmation that she normally went for these walks on her own? That none of the housemates went with her?”

“Actually,” Frank said, feeling on the floor for his smokes, “we do. There’s an English postgrad called Brenda Grealey, had the same supervisor as Lexie.” Brenda Grealey was on the KA list: large, with sticking-out gooseberry eyes, plump cheeks already beginning to droop and a lot of ginger curls. “She’s the nosy type. After the five of them moved in together, she asked Lexie if she ever got any privacy, living with all those guys. I get the feeling Brenda meant it as a double entendre, she was hoping for some kind of wild sex gossip, but apparently Lexie just gave her a blank look and said she went for solo walks every evening and that was all the privacy she needed, thanks, she didn’t hang out with people unless she liked their company. Then she walked off. I’m not sure our Brenda realized she’d been bitchslapped.”

“OK,” I said. “In that case, I really can’t see a way to make any of the housemates work. Look at how it would’ve had to play out. One of them needs to talk to Lexie in private, about something big. So, instead of going about it the inconspicuous way, bringing her for coffee in college or whatever, he goes on her walk with her, or follows her out. Either way, he’s breaking the routine—and those five are all about the routine—and telling everyone including Lexie, loud and clear, that something’s up. And then he brings along a knife. These are nice middle-class intellectuals we’ve got here—”

“She means they’re a bunch of nancy boys,” Frank informed Sam, over the click of his lighter.

“Ah, here,” Sam said, putting his pen down. “Hang on. You can’t rule them out just because they’re middle-class. How many cases have we worked where some lovely, respectable—”

“I’m not, Sam,” I said. “The killing’s not the problem. If she’d been choked to death, or had her head smashed off a wall, I’d be fine with one of them as the doer. I don’t even have a problem with the idea of one of them stabbing her, if he happened to be there with the knife in his hand. What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t have the knife on him to begin with—not unless he was actually planning to kill her, and like I said before, that doesn’t fit. I’m willing to bet serious money that those four don’t make a habit of carrying knives around; and if they just wanted to threaten someone, or convince someone, it wouldn’t even occur to them to use a knife to do it. That’s not the world they live in. When they gear up for a big fight, they prepare by thinking out debate points, not picking out knives.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, after a moment. He took a deep breath and picked up his pen again, left it hanging above the page as if he’d forgotten what he meant to write. “I suppose they do, sure.”

“Even if we go with the idea that one of them followed her,” I said, “and brought along a knife to scare her with for some reason, what did he think was going to happen next? Did he seriously expect to get away with it? They’re part of the same social circle. It’s tiny, and it’s intimate. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t agree to anything he wanted, then head straight home and tell the other three exactly what had happened. Cue shock, horror, and quite possibly—unless it’s Daniel—our knife-wielder getting thrown out of Whitethorn House. These are smart people, Sam. They couldn’t overlook something that obvious.”

“In fairness,” Frank said helpfully, switching sides—apparently he was getting bored—“smart people do stupid things all the time.”

“Not like that,” Sam said. He left his pen lying across his notebook and pressed two fingers into the corners of his eyes. “Stupid things, yeah, sure. Not things that make no sense at all.”

I had put that look on his face, and I felt like crap. “Do they do drugs?” I asked. “People on coke, say, don’t always think straight.”

Frank snorted smoke. “I doubt it,” said Sam, without looking up. “They’re straight arrows, this lot. They take a drink, all right, but from the looks of them I wouldn’t say they’d even be into the odd bit of hash, never mind the hard stuff. Our girl’s tox screen came back clean as a whistle, remember?”

The wind hurled itself up against the window with a bang and a rattle, fell away again. “Then, unless we’re missing something huge,” I said, “they just don’t add up.”

After a moment Sam said, “Yeah.” He closed his notebook carefully, clipped the pen onto it. “I’d better start looking for something huge, then.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Frank inquired. “Why do you have such a hard-on for these four?”

Sam rubbed his hands down his face and blinked hard, like he was trying to focus. “Because they’re there,” he said, after a moment. “And no one else is, at least not so’s you’d notice. Because if it’s not them, what’ve we got?”

“You’ve got that lovely profile,” Frank reminded him.

“I know,” Sam said, heavily. “And I appreciate it, Cassie; I do, honest. But right now I’ve got no one that matches it. I’ve plenty of local fellas—women as well—in the right age group, some of them have records and I’d say there’s a good few are smart and organized, but there’s no sign that any of them ever met our girl. I’ve plenty of acquaintances from college, and a few of them tick just about all the boxes, except as far as I can find out they’ve never so much as been to Glenskehy, never mind knowing their way around the place. There’s no one who matches right across the board.”

Frank arched an eyebrow. “Not to labor the point,” he said, “but that’s what Detective Maddox and I are going after.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, without looking at him. “And if I find him fast enough, you won’t need to.”

“Better get a move on,” Frank said. He was still lying back on the sofa, watching Sam through lazy, narrowed eyes across the curls of smoke. “I’m aiming to go in Sunday.”

There was a second of absolute silence; even the wind outside seemed to have skidded to a stop. Frank had never mentioned a definite date before. In the corner of my eye the maps and photos on the table twitched and crystallized, unfurling into sun-glossed leaves, rippled glass, smooth-worn stone; turning real.

“This Sunday?” I said.

“Don’t give me that gobsmacked look,” Frank told me. “You’ll be fine, babe. And think of it this way: you won’t have to look at my ugly mug any more.” Right at that moment, this actually did feel like a pretty big plus.

“Right,” Sam said. He drained his coffee in long gulps and winced. “I’d better head.” He stood up and patted vaguely at his pockets.

Sam lives on one of those creepy housing estates out in the middle of nowhere, he was dropping with fatigue and the wind was picking up again, ripping at the roof tiles. “Don’t drive all that way, Sam,” I said. “Not in this weather. Stay here. We’ll be working pretty late, but—”

“Yeah, stick around,” Frank said, spreading his arms and grinning up at him. “We can make it a pajama party. Toast marshmallows. Play Truth or Dare.”

Sam took his coat off the back of the futon and stared at it as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it. “Ah, no; I’m not going home, sure. I’ll head into the squad for a bit, pull a few records. I’ll be grand.”

“Fair enough,” Frank said cheerfully, waving good-bye. “Have fun. Be sure and ring us if you find a prime suspect.”

I walked Sam downstairs and kissed him good night at the front door and he headed doggedly off towards his car, hands in his pockets and head bent hard against the wind. Maybe it was just the blast that funneled back up the stairwell with me, but without him my flat felt colder, barer somehow, a thin sharp edge in the air. “He was leaving anyway, Frank,” I said. “You didn’t have to be such a wankstain about it.”

“Possibly not,” Frank said, swinging himself vertical and starting to stack up the Chinese cartons. “But, as far as I can tell from the phone videos, Lexie didn’t use the term ‘wankstain.’ In the relevant circumstances, she used ‘git’—occasionally ‘big smelly git’—or ‘prat’ or ‘dickhead.’ Just something to bear in mind. I’ll do the washing up if you can tell me, without peeking, how to get from the house to the cottage.”

* * *

Sam didn’t try to make me dinner again, after that. He came in and out at weird hours, slept at his own place and said nothing when he found Frank on my sofa. Mostly he stayed just long enough to give me a kiss, a bag of supplies and a fast update. There wasn’t a lot to tell. The Bureau and the floaters had combed every inch of the lanes where Lexie took her late-night walks: no blood trail, no identifiable footprints, no sign of a struggle or a hiding place—they were blaming the rain—and no weapon. Sam and Frank had called in a couple of favors to keep the media from jumping all over this one; they gave the press a carefully generic statement about an assault in Glenskehy, dropped vague hints that the victim had been taken to Wicklow Hospital, and set up discreet surveillance, but no one came looking for her, not even the housemates. The phone company came back with nothing good on Lexie’s mobile. The door-to-door turned up blank shrugs, unprovable alibis (“. . . and then when Winning Streak was over the wife and I went to bed”), a few snotty comments about the rich kids up at Whitethorn House, an awful lot of snotty comments about Byrne and Doherty and their sudden burst of interest in Glenskehy, and no useful info at all.

Given their relationship with the locals and their general enthusiasm level, Doherty and Byrne had been assigned to go through a bazillion hours of closed-circuit TV footage, looking for regular unexplained visitors to Glenskehy, but the cameras hadn’t been positioned with this in mind and the best they could come up with was that they were fairly sure no one had driven into or out of Glenskehy by a direct route between ten and two on the night of the murder. This made Sam start talking about the housemates again, which made Frank point out the multiple ways someone could have got to Glenskehy without being picked up on CCTV, which made Byrne get snippy about suits who swanned down from Dublin and wasted everyone’s time with pointless busywork. I got the sense that the incident room was blanketed by a dense, electric cloud of dead ends and turf wars and that nasty sinking feeling.

Frank had told the housemates that Lexie was coming home. They had sent her things: a get-well card and half a dozen Caramilk bars, pale-blue pajamas, clothes to wear home, moisturizer—that had to be Abby—two Barbara Kingsolver books, a Walkman and a pile of mix tapes. Even aside from the fact that I hadn’t seen a mix tape since I was about twenty, these were kind of hard to put your finger on—there was Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, music for late-night jukeboxes on long strange highways, in with Edith Piaf and the Guillemots and some woman called Amalia singing in throaty Portuguese. At least they were all good stuff; if there had been any Eminem on there, I would have had to pull the plug. The card said “Love” and the four names, nothing else; the briefness made it feel secretive, fizzing with messages I couldn’t read. Frank ate the Caramilks.

The official story was that the coma had knocked out Lexie’s short-term memory: she remembered nothing about the attack, very little about the days before. “Which has side benefits,” Frank pointed out. “If you fuck up some detail, you can just look upset and murmur something helpless about the coma, and everyone’ll be too embarrassed to push you.” Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had told my aunt and uncle and my friends that I was going off to do a training course—I kept it vague—and wouldn’t be around for a few weeks. Sam had smoothed over my exit from work by having a chat with Quigley, the Murder squad’s resident mistake, and telling him in confidence that I was taking a career break to finish my degree, which meant I would be covered if anyone spotted me hanging around town looking studenty. Quigley basically consists of a large arse and a large mouth, and he never liked me much. Within twenty-four hours it would be all over the grapevine that I was taking time out, probably with a few flourishes (pregnancy, psychosis, crack addiction) thrown in for good measure.

By Thursday Frank was firing questions at me: where do you sit for breakfast? where do you keep the salt? who gives you a lift into college on Wednesday mornings? what room is your supervisor’s office? If I missed one, he zeroed in on that area, worked around it from every angle he had—photos, anecdotes, phone video, audio footage of interviews—till it felt like my own set of memories and the answer rolled off my tongue automatically. Then he went back to the question barrage: where did you spend the Christmas before last? what day of the week is your turn to buy food? It was like having a human tennis-ball machine on my sofa.

I didn’t tell Sam this—it made me feel guilty, somehow—but I enjoyed that week. I like a challenge. It did occasionally occur to me that I was in a deeply weird situation and that it was only likely to get weirder. This case had a level of Möbius strip that made it hard to keep things straight: Lexies everywhere, sliding into each other at the edges till you started to lose track of which one you were talking about. Every now and then I had to catch myself back from asking Frank how she was doing.

* * *

Frank’s sister Jackie was a hairdresser, so on Friday evening he brought her over to the flat, to cut my hair. Jackie was skinny, bleached blonde and totally unimpressed by her big brother. I liked her.

“Ah, yeah, you could do with a trim all right,” she told me, giving my fringe a professional riffle with long purple nails. “How do you want it?”

“Here,” Frank said, fishing out a crime-scene shot and passing it to her. “Can you do it to match this?”

Jackie held the photo between thumb and fingertip and gave it a suspicious look. “Here,” she said. “Is your woman dead ?”

“That’s confidential,” Frank said.

“Confidential, me arse. Is that your sister, love?”

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “This is Frank’s gig. I’m only getting dragged along for the ride.”

“You wouldn’t want to mind him. Here—” She took another look at the photo and held it out to Frank at arm’s length. “That’s bleeding disgusting, so it is. Would you not think of doing something decent, Francis? Sorting out the traffic, something useful like that. Took me two hours to get into town from—”

“Would you ever just cut, Jackie?” Frank demanded, raking his hair exasperatedly so that it stood up in tufts. “And stop wrecking my head?” Jackie’s eyes slid sideways to mine and we shared a tiny, mischievous, female grin.

“And remember,” Frank said belligerently, noticing, “keep your mouth shut about this. Clear? It’s crucial.”

“Ah, yeah,” Jackie said, pulling a comb and scissors out of her bag. “Crucial. Go and make us a cup of tea, will you? That’s if you don’t mind, love,” she added, to me.

Frank shook his head and stamped off to the sink. Jackie combed my hair down over my eyes and winked at me.

When she was finished I looked different. I had never had my fringe cropped that short before; it was a subtle thing, but it made my face younger and barer, gave it the big-eyed, deceptive innocence of a model’s. The longer I stared in the bathroom mirror, that night while I got ready for bed, the less it looked like me. When I hit the point where I couldn’t remember what I had looked like to begin with, I gave up, gave the mirror the finger and went to bed.

* * *

On Saturday afternoon Frank said, “I think we’re just about good to go.”

I was lying back on the sofa with my knees hooked over the arm, going through the photos of Lexie’s tutorial groups one last time and trying to look blasé about this whole thing. Frank was pacing: the closer you get to the start of an operation, the less he sits down.

“Tomorrow,” I said. The word burned in my mouth, a wild clean burn like snow, taking my breath away.

“Tomorrow afternoon—we’ll start you off with a half day, ease you into it. I’ll let the housemates know this evening, make sure they’re all there to give you a nice warm welcome. Think you’re ready?”

I couldn’t imagine what, on an operation like this, could possibly constitute “ready.” “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

“Let’s hear it once more: what’s your goal for Week One?”

“Not to get caught, mainly,” I said. “And not to get killed.”

“Not mainly; only.” Frank snapped his fingers in front of my eyes on his way past. “Hey. Concentrate. This is important.”

I put the photos down on my stomach. “I’m concentrating. What?”

“If someone’s going to suss you, it’ll be in the first few days, while you’re still finding your feet and everyone’s looking at you. So for Week One, all you do is ease your way in. This is hard work, it’ll be tiring at first, and if you overdo it you’ll start slipping—and all it takes is one slip. So go easy. Take time out if you can: go to bed early, read a book while the others play cards. If you make it to next weekend, you’ll be into the swing of things, everyone else will have got used to having you back, they’ll barely be looking at you any more, and you’ll have a lot more leeway. Until then, though, you keep your head down: no risks, no sleuthing, nothing that could raise a single eyebrow. Don’t even think about the case. I don’t care if this time next week you don’t have one single piece of useful info for me, as long as you’re still in that house. If you are, we’ll reassess and take it from there.”

“But you don’t really think I will be,” I said. “Do you?”

Frank stopped pacing and gave me a long steady look. “Would I send you in there,” he asked, “if I didn’t think it could be done?”

“Sure you would,” I said. “As long as you thought the results would be interesting either way, you wouldn’t think twice.”

He leaned back against the window frame, apparently considering that; the light was behind him and I couldn’t see his expression. “Possible,” he said, “but irrelevant. Yeah, sure, it’s dicey as all hell. You’ve known that since Day One. But it can be done, as long as you’re careful, you don’t get spooked and you don’t get impatient. Remember what I said last time, about asking questions?”

“Yep,” I said. “Play innocent and ask as many of them as you can get away with.”

“This time is different. You need to do the opposite: don’t ask anything unless you’re absolutely sure you’re not meant to know the answer already. Which means, basically, don’t ask anyone anything at all.”

“So what am I supposed to do, if I can’t ask questions?” I had been wondering about this.

Frank crossed the room fast, shoved paper off the coffee table and sat down, leaning in to me, blue eyes intent. “You keep your eyes and ears wide open. The main problem with this investigation is that we don’t have a suspect. Your job is to identify one. Remember, nothing you get will be admissible anyway, since you can’t exactly caution the suspects, so we’re not gunning for a confession or anything like that. Leave that part to me and our Sammy. We’ll make the case, if you just point us in the right direction. Find out if there’s someone out there who’s managed to stay off our radar—either someone left over from this girl’s past, or someone she took up with more recently and kept a secret. If anyone who isn’t on the KA list approaches you—by phone, in person, whatever—you play them along, find out what they’re after and what the relationship was, and get a phone number and full name if you can.”

“Right,” I said. “Your mystery man.” It sounded plausible enough, but then Frank always does. I was still pretty sure that Sam was right and his main reason for doing this wasn’t because he thought it had a snowball’s chance in hell but because it was such a dazzling, reckless, ridiculous once-off. I decided I didn’t care.

“Exactly. To go with our mystery girl. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the housemates and keep them talking. I don’t rate them as suspects—I know your Sammy has a bee in his bonnet about them, but I’m with you, they don’t add up—but I’m pretty sure there’s something they’re not telling us. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them. It might be something completely irrelevant, maybe they just cheat on their exams or make moonshine in the back garden or know who’s the daddy, but I’d like to decide for myself what’s relevant here and what’s not. They’re never going to talk to cops, but if you go at it right, there’s a good chance they’ll talk to you. Don’t worry too much about her other KAs—we’ve got nothing that points to any of them, and Sammy and I will be on them anyway—but if anyone’s acting even slightly dodgy, obviously, report back to me. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said.

“One last thing,” said Frank. He unfolded himself from the table, found our coffee mugs and took them over to the kitchen. We had got to the point where there was always, every hour of the day or night, a large pot of strong coffee keeping warm on the cooker; another week and we would probably have been eating the grounds straight from the bag with a spoon. “I’ve been meaning to have a little chat with you for a while now.”

I had felt this one coming for days. I flipped through the photos like flash cards and tried to concentrate on running the names in my head: Cillian Wall, Chloe Nelligan, Martina Lawlor . . . “Hit me,” I said.

Frank put the mugs down and started playing with my saltcellar, turning it carefully between his fingers. “I hate to bring this up,” he said, “but what can you do, sometimes life sucks. You’re aware that you’ve been—how shall I put this—a little jumpy lately, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said, keeping my eyes on the photos. Isabella Smythe, Brian Ryan—someone’s parents either hadn’t been thinking too clearly, or had a weird sense of humor—Mark O’Leary ... “I’m aware.”

“I don’t know if it’s because of this case or if it was going on already or what, and I don’t need to know. If it’s just stage fright, it might well vanish as soon as you’re inside that door. But here’s what I wanted to say to you: if it doesn’t, don’t panic. Don’t start second-guessing yourself, or you’ll talk yourself into losing your nerve, and don’t try to hide it. Use it. There’s no reason why Lexie shouldn’t be a little shaky right now, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make that work for you. Use what you’ve got, even if it’s not necessarily what you’d have chosen. Everything’s a weapon, Cass. Everything.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. The thought of Operation Vestal actually coming in useful did something complicated inside my chest, made it hard to breathe. I knew if I blinked Frank would notice.

“Think you can do that?”

Lexie, I thought, Lexie wouldn’t tell him to mind his own business and let her mind hers, which was my main instinct here, and she sure as hell wouldn’t answer. Lexie would yawn in his face, or tell him to quit nagging and lecturing like someone’s granny, or demand ice cream. “We’re out of biscuits,” I said, stretching—the photos slid off my stomach, all over the floor. “Go get some. Lemon creams,” and then I laughed out loud at the look on Frank’s face.

* * *

Frank graciously gave me Saturday night off—heart of gold, our Frankie—so Sam and I could say our good-byes. Sam made chicken tikka for dinner; for dessert I tried an incongruous tiramisu, which turned out looking ridiculous but tasting OK. We talked about small stuff, unimportant stuff, touching hands across the table and swapping the little things that new couples pass back and forth and save like beach finds: stories from when we were kids, the dumbest things we’d done as teenagers. Lexie’s clothes, hanging on the wardrobe door, shimmered in the corner like hard sun on sand, but we didn’t mention them, not once.

After dinner we curled up on the sofa. I had lit a fire, Sam had put music on the CD player; it could have been any evening, it could have been all ours, except for those clothes and for the fast ready beat of my pulse, waiting.

“How’re you doing?” Sam asked.

I had been starting to hope we could make it through the night without talking about tomorrow, but realistically this was probably too much to ask. “OK,” I said.

“Are you nervous?”

I thought this over. This situation was totally bananas on about a dozen different levels. I probably should have been petrified. “No,” I said. “Excited.”

I felt Sam nod, against the top of my head. He was running one hand over my hair in a slow, soothing rhythm, but his chest felt rigid as a board against mine, like he was holding his breath.

“You hate this idea, don’t you?” I said.

“Yeah,” Sam said quietly. “I do.”

“Why didn’t you stop it? It’s your investigation. You could have put your foot down, any time you felt like it.”

Sam’s hand stopped still. “Do you want me to?”

“No,” I said. That, at least, I knew for sure. “No way.”

“It wouldn’t be easy, at this stage. Now that the undercover operation’s up and running, it’s Mackey’s baby; I’ve no authority there. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’ll find a way to—”

“I haven’t, Sam. Seriously. I just wondered why you gave the OK to start with.”

He shrugged. “Mackey has a point, sure: we’ve nothing else on the case. This could be the only way to solve it.”

Sam has unsolveds with his name on them, every detective has, and I was pretty sure he could survive another one, as long as he was sure the guy hadn’t been after me. “You didn’t have anything last Saturday, either,” I said, “and you were dead against it then.”

His hand started moving again, absently. “That first day,” he said, after a while. “When you came down to the scene. You were messing with Mackey, do you remember? He was slagging you about your clothes and you were slagging back, almost like the way you used to with . . . when you were on Murder.”

He meant with Rob. Rob was probably the closest friend I’ve ever had, but then we had this huge complicated vicious fight and that was the end of that. I twisted round and propped myself on Sam’s chest so I could see him, but he was looking up at the ceiling. “I hadn’t seen you like that in a while,” he said. “That much bounce to you.”

“I’ve probably been pretty crap company, these last few months,” I said.

He smiled, just a little. “I’m not complaining.”

I tried to remember ever hearing Sam complain about anything. “No,” I said. “I know.”

“Then Saturday,” he said. “I know we were fighting and all”—he gave me a quick squeeze, dropped a kiss on my forehead—“but still. I realized afterwards: that was because we were both really into it, this case. Because you cared. It felt . . .” He shook his head, looking for the words. “DV’s not the same,” he said, “is it?”

I had mostly kept my mouth shut about DV. It hadn’t occurred to me, till then, that all that silence could have been plenty revealing, in its own way. “It needs doing,” I said. “Nothing’s the same as Murder, but DV’s fine.”

Sam nodded, and for a second his arms tightened around me. “And that meeting,” he said. “Right up until then, I’d been wondering should I pull rank and tell Mackey to bugger off for himself. This started off as a murder case, I’m down as lead detective, if I said no . . . But the way you were talking, all interested, thinking it out . . . I just thought, why would I wreck that?”

I had not seen this coming. Sam has one of those faces that fool you even when you know better: a countryman’s face, all ruddy cheeks and clear gray eyes and crow’s-feet starting, so simple and open that there couldn’t possibly be anything hidden behind it. “Thanks, Sam,” I said. “Thank you.”

I felt his chest lift and fall as he sighed. “It might turn out to be a good thing, this case. You never know.”

“But you still wish this girl had picked just about anywhere else to get herself killed,” I said.

Sam thought about that for a minute, twisting a finger delicately through one of my curls. “Yeah,” he said, “I do, of course. But there’s no point in wishing. Once you’re stuck with something, all you can do is make the best of it.”

He looked down at me. He was still smiling, but there was something else, something almost sad, around his eyes. “You’ve looked happy, this week,” he said simply. “It’s nice to see you looking happy again.”

I wondered how the hell this man put up with me. “Plus you knew I would kick your arse if you started making decisions for me,” I said.

Sam grinned and flicked the end of my nose with his finger. “That too,” he said, “my little vixen,” but there was still that shadow behind his eyes.

* * *

Sunday moved fast, after those long ten days, fast as a tidal wave built to bursting point and finally crashing down. Frank was coming over at three, to wire me up and get me to Whitethorn House by half past four. All the time Sam and I were going through our Sunday-morning routine—the newspapers and leisurely cups of tea in bed, the shower, the toast and eggs and bacon—that was hanging over our heads, a huge alarm clock ticking, waiting for its moment to explode into life. Somewhere out there, the housemates were getting ready to welcome Lexie home.

After brunch, I put on the clothes. I got dressed in the bathroom; Sam was still there, and I wanted to do this in private. The clothes felt like something more: fine chain-mail armor handmade to fit me, or robes laid out ready for some fiercely secret ceremony. They made my palms tingle when I touched them.

Plain white cotton underwear with the Penney’s tags still on; faded jeans, worn soft and fraying at the hems; brown socks, brown ankle boots; a long-sleeved white T-shirt; a pale-blue suede jacket, scuffed but clean. The collar of it smelled of lilies of the valley and something else, a warm note almost too faint to catch: Lexie’s skin. In one of the pockets there was a Dunne’s Stores receipt from a few weeks back, for chicken fillets, shampoo, butter and a bottle of ginger ale.

When I was dressed I checked myself out, in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. For a second I didn’t know what I was seeing. Then, ridiculously, all I wanted was to laugh. It was the irony of it: I had spent months dressing up as Executive Barbie, and now that I was being someone else, I finally got to go to work dressed a lot like me. “You look nice,” Sam said, with a faint smile, when I came out. “Comfortable.”

My stuff was packed and waiting by the door, as if I were off on some voyage; I felt like I should be checking my passport and tickets. Frank had bought me a nice new traveling case, the hard kind, with discreet reinforcement and a solid combination lock; it would take a safecracker to get in there. Inside were Lexie’s things—wallet, keys, phone, all dead ringers for the real things; the stuff from the housemates; a plastic tub of vitamin C tablets with a pharmacist’s label that said AMOXICILLIN TABS TAKE ONE THREE TIMES DAILY, to go somewhere prominent. My gear was in a separate compartment: latex gloves, my mobile, spare battery packs for the mike, a supply of artistically stained bandages to go in the bathroom bin every morning and evening, my notebook, my ID and my new gun—Frank had got me a .38 snub-nose that felt good in my hand and was a lot easier to hide than my regulation Smith & Wesson. There was also—seriously—a girdle, the industrial-strength elastic kind that’s supposed to give you a smooth silhouette in your Little Black Dress. It’s a lot of undercovers’ version of a holster. It’s not comfortable—after an hour or two you feel like there’s a gun-shaped dent in your liver—but it does a good job of hiding the outline. Just the thought of Frank going into the Marks & Sparks lingerie department and picking it out made this whole thing worthwhile.

“You look like shite,” he said, examining me approvingly, when he arrived at the door of my flat. He was carrying a double armful of Bond-looking black electronics, cables and speakers and God knows what: the setup for the wire. “The eye bags are to die for.”

“She’s had three hours’ sleep a night,” Sam said tightly, behind me. “Same as yourself and myself. And we’re not exactly looking the best either.”

“Hey, I’m not giving her hassle,” Frank told him, heading past us and dumping the armful on the coffee table. “I’m delighted with her. She looks like she’s been in intensive care for ten days. Hi, babe.”

The mike was tiny, the size of a shirt button. It clipped onto the front of my bra, between my breasts: “Lucky our girl didn’t go in for low-cut tops,” Frank said, glancing at his watch. “Go lean over in front of the mirror, check the view.” The battery pack went where the knife wound should have been, surgical-taped to my side under a thick pad of white gauze, just an inch or two below the scar Dealer Boy had left on Lexie Madison the First. The sound quality, once Frank had done small complicated things to the equipment, was crystal clear: “Only the best for you, babe. Transmission radius is seven miles, depending on conditions. We’ve got receivers set up at Rathowen station and at the Murder squad, so you’ll be covered at home and in Trinity. The only time you’ll go out of coverage is on the drive to and from town, and I don’t anticipate anyone shoving you out of a moving car. You won’t have visual surveillance, so any visuals that we should know about, tell us. If the shit hits the fan and you need a subtle way to yell for help, say ‘My throat hurts’ and you’ll have big-time backup on the scene inside a few minutes—don’t go getting a sore throat for real, or if you do, don’t complain about it. You need to check in with me as often as possible, ideally every day.”

“And with me,” Sam said, not turning around from the sink. Frank, squatting on the floor and squinting at some dial on his receiver, didn’t even bother to throw me a mocking look.

Sam finished the washing up and started drying things too thoroughly. I sorted the Lexie material into some kind of order—that high-wire final-exam feeling, taking your hands off your notes at last, If I don’t know it now—stacked it in bundles and packed it into plastic bags, to leave in Frank’s car. “And that,” Frank said, unplugging the speakers with a flourish, “should do it. Are we good to go?”

“Ready when you are,” I said, picking up the plastic bags. Frank swept up his equipment one-armed, grabbed my case and headed for the door.

“I’ll take that,” Sam said brusquely. “You’ve enough to carry,” and he took the case from Frank’s hand and headed down the stairs, the wheels hitting each step with a hard dull thump.

On the landing Frank turned and looked back over his shoulder, waiting for me. My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone falling fast. I’d felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt’s house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it’s crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror, I don’t want to do this any more.

All you can do with that moment is bite down and wait for it to be over. The thought of what Frank would have to say, if I actually pulled out now, helped a lot. I took one more look around my flat—lights off, water heater off, bins emptied, window locked; the room was already closing in on itself, silence seeping into the spaces where we had been, drifting up like dust in the corners. Then I shut the door.

5

The drive down to Glenskehy took almost an hour, even with no traffic and Frank driving, and it should have been excruciating. Sam slumped miserably in the back seat, next to the gadgetry; Frank helped the atmosphere by turning up 98FM nice and loud and bopping along, whistling and nodding his head and beating time on the steering wheel. I barely even noticed either of them. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and crisp, I was out of my flat for the first time in a full week, and I had the window rolled all the way down and wind streaking through my hair. That hard black stone of fear had dissolved the second Frank started the car, turned into something sweet and lemon-colored and wildly intoxicating.

“Right,” Frank said, when we hit Glenskehy, “let’s see how well you’ve learned your geography. Give me directions.”

“Straight on through the village, fourth lane to your right, way too narrow, no wonder Daniel and Justin’s cars look like they’ve been drag racing, give me good old dirty Dublin any day,” I told him, doing his accent. “Home, James.” I was on a giddy one. The jacket had been freaking me out all afternoon—it was that lily-of-the-valley smell, right up close, I kept whipping round to see who had come up beside me—and the fact that I was being given the heebiejeebies by a jacket, like something out of Dr. Seuss, was making me want to giggle. Even passing the turnoff to the cottage, where I had met Frank and Sam that first day, didn’t sober me up.

The lane was unpaved and potholey. Trees gone shapeless with years of ivy, hedge branches rattling along the sides of the car and flicking in at my window; and then huge wrought-iron gates, flaking with rust and hanging drunkenly off their hinges. The stone pillars were half drowned in hawthorn grown wild. “Here,” I said.

Frank nodded and turned, and we were looking down an endless, graceful sweep of avenue, between cherry trees crowded with exploded balls of flowers. “Fuck me,” I said. “Why did I have doubts about this, again? Can I sneak Sam in with me in my suitcase, and we can just live here forever?”

“Get it out of your system,” Frank said. “By the time we reach that door, you need to be blasé about all this. Anyway, the house is still shitty, so you can calm down.”

“You told me they’d redone it. I expect cashmere curtains and white roses in my dressing room, or I’m calling my agent.”

“I said they were doing it up. I didn’t say they were magic.”

Then the drive gave a little twist and opened up into a great semicircular carriage sweep, white pebbles speckled through with weeds and daisies, and I saw Whitethorn House for the first time. The photos hadn’t done it justice. You see Georgian houses all over Dublin, mostly turned into offices and undermined by the depressing fluorescents you can see through the windows, but this one was special. Every proportion was balanced so perfectly that the house looked like it had grown there, nested in with its back to the mountains and all Wicklow dropping away rich and gentle in front of it, poised between the pale arc of the carriage sweep and the blurred dark-and-green curves of the hills like a treasure held out in a cupped palm.

I heard Sam take a fast hard breath. “Home sweet home,” said Frank, turning the radio off.

They were waiting for me outside the door, ranged at the top of the steps. In my mind I still see them like that, lacquered gold by the evening sun and glowing vivid as a vision, every fold of their clothes and curve of their faces pristine and achingly clear. Rafe leaning against the railing with his hands in his jeans pockets; Abby in the middle, swayed forwards on her toes, one arm crooked to shade her eyes; Justin, his feet precisely together and his hands clasped behind his back. And behind them, Daniel, framed between the columns of the door, his head up and the light splintering off his glasses.

None of them moved as Frank pulled up and braked, pebbles scattering. They were like figures on a medieval frieze, self-contained, mysterious, spelling out a message in some lost and arcane code. Only Abby’s skirt fluttered, fitfully, in the breeze.

Frank glanced at me over his shoulder. “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Good girl,” he said. “Good luck. And we’re go.” He got out of the car and went round to the boot to get my case.

“Mind yourself,” Sam said. He didn’t look at me. “I love you.”

“I’ll be home soon,” I said. There was no way even to touch his arm, under all those unblinking eyes. “I’ll try to ring you tomorrow.”

He nodded. Frank slammed the boot—the sound was wild, enormous, bouncing off the house front and setting crows scattering from the trees—and opened the car door for me.

I got out, putting my hand to my side for a second as I straightened up. “Thanks, Detective,” I said to Frank. “Thanks for everything.”

We shook hands. “My pleasure,” Frank said. “And don’t worry, Miss Madison: we’ll get this guy.”

He pulled out the handle of the case with a neat snap and passed it to me, and I dragged it across the carriage sweep towards the steps and the others.

Still none of them moved. As I got closer I realized, with a shift of focus like a shock. Those straight backs, the lifted heads: there was some tension stretched between the four of them, so tight it hummed high in the silence. The wheels of my case, grating across the pebbles, sounded loud as machine-gun fire.

“Hi,” I said at the bottom of the steps, looking up at them.

For a second I thought they weren’t going to answer, they had made me already, and I wondered wildly what the hell I was supposed to do now. Then Daniel took a step forwards, and the picture wavered and broke. A smile started across Justin’s face, Rafe straightened up and raised one arm in a wave, and Abby came running down the steps and hugged me hard.

“Hey, you,” she said, laughing, “welcome home.” Her hair smelled like camomile. I dropped the case and hugged her back; it was a strange feeling, as if I were touching someone out of an old painting, amazed to find her shoulder blades warm and solid as my own. Daniel nodded gravely at me over her head and ruffled my hair, Rafe grabbed my case and started bumping it up the steps to the door, Justin patted my back over and over and I was laughing too, and I didn’t even hear Frank start the car and drive away.

* * *

This is the first thing I thought when I stepped into Whitethorn House: I’ve been here before. It zinged straight through me, straightened my spine like a crash of cymbals. The place bloody well should have looked familiar, all the hours I’d spent staring at photos and video, but it was more than that. It was the smell, old wood and tea leaves and a faint whiff of dried lavender; it was the way the light lay along the scarred floorboards; it was the little taps our footsteps sent flying up the stairwell, echoing softly along the upstairs corridors. It felt—and you’d think I would like this but I didn’t, it flashed danger-sign red right across my mind—it felt like coming home.

From there on, most of that evening is a merry-go-round blur, colors and images and voices whirled together into a burst almost too bright to look at. A ceiling rose and a cracked china vase, a piano stool and a bowl of oranges, running feet on stairs and a rising laugh. Abby’s fingers small and strong on my wrist, leading me out to the flagstoned patio behind the house, curlicued metal chairs, ancient wicker swing seat swaying in the light sweet breeze; great sweep of grass falling away to high stone walls half hidden in trees and ivy, blink of a bird’s shadow across the paving stones. Daniel lighting my cigarette, his hand cupped round the match and his bent head inches from mine. The full ring of their voices hit me like a shock, after the flattened-out video sound, and their eyes were so clear they burned on my skin. Sometimes, still, I wake up with one of their voices strong and close by my ear, fallen straight out of that day: Come here, Justin calls, come outside, the evening’s so lovely; or Abby says, We have to decide what to do with the herb garden, but we were waiting for you, what do you—and I’m awake, and they’re gone.

I must have talked too, somewhere in there, but I can’t remember most of what I said. All I remember is trying to keep my weight forwards on my toes like Lexie did, my voice up in her register, my eyes and my shoulders and my smoke at the right angles, trying not to look around too much and not to move too fast without wincing and not to say anything idiotic and not to whack into the furniture. And God the taste of undercover on my tongue again, the brush of it down the little hairs on my arms. I’d thought I remembered what it was like, every detail, but I’d been wrong: memories are nothing, soft as gauze against the ruthless razor-fineness of that edge, beautiful and lethal, one tiny slip and it’ll slice to the bone.

It took my breath away, that evening. If you’ve ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you’ve got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you’ve been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it. Abby and I rocked the swing seat lazily; the guys moved in and out through the small-paned French windows between the patio and the kitchen, making dinner—smell of roasting potatoes, sizzle of meat, suddenly I was starving—and calling to us. Rafe came outside to lean on the back of the seat between us and take a drag of Abby’s cigarette. Rose-gold sky deepening and great puffs of cloud streaming like the smoke of some faraway wildfire, cool air rich with grass and earth and growing things. “Dinner!” Justin yelled, against a clatter of plates.

That long, laden table, immaculate in its heavy red damask cloth, its snow-white napkins; the candlesticks twined with strands of ivy, flames glittering miniature in the curves of the glasses, catching in the silver, beckoning in the dimming windows like will-o’-the-wisps. And the four of them, pulling up high-backed chairs, smooth-skinned and shadow-eyed in the confusing golden light: Daniel at the head of the table and Abby at the foot, Rafe beside me and Justin opposite. In the flesh, that ceremonial feel I had caught off the videos and Frank’s notes was powerful as incense. It was like sitting down to a banquet, a war council, a game of Russian roulette high in some lonely tower.

They were so beautiful. Rafe was the only one who could have been called good-looking; but still, when I remember them, that beauty is all I can think of.

Justin loaded up plates with Steak Diane and passed them around—“Specially for you,” he told me, with a faint smile; Rafe scooped roast potatoes onto them as they passed him. Daniel poured red wine into mismatched wineglasses.

This evening was taking every brain cell I had; the last thing I needed was to get drunk. “I’m not supposed to have booze,” I said. “The antibiotics.”

It was the first time any of us had brought up the stabbing, even indirectly. For a fraction of a second—or maybe it was just my imagination—the room seemed to stop motionless, the bottle suspended in midtilt, hands arrested halfway through gestures. Then Daniel went back to pouring, with a deft twist of the wrist that left less than an inch in the glass. “There,” he said, unruffled. “A sip won’t do you any harm. Just for a toast.”

He passed me my glass and filled his own. “To homecomings,” he said.

In the moment when that glass passed from his hand to mine, something sent up a high wild warning cry in the back of my mind. Persephone’s irrevocable pomegranate seeds, Never take food from strangers; old stories where one sip or bite seals the spellbound walls forever, dissolves the road home into mist and blows it away on the wind. And then, sharper: If it was them, after all, and it’s poisoned; Jesus, what a way to go. And I realized, with a thrill like an electric shock, that they would be well able for it. That poised quartet waiting for me at the door, with their straight backs and their cool, watchful eyes: they were more than capable of playing the game all evening, waiting with immaculate control and without a single slip for their chosen moment.

But they were all smiling at me, glasses raised, and I didn’t have a choice. “Homecomings,” I said, and leaned over the table to clink their glasses among the ivy and the candle flames: Justin, Rafe, Abby, Daniel. I took a sip of the wine—it was warm and rich and smooth, honey and summer berries, and I felt it right down to the tips of my fingers—and then I picked up my knife and fork and sliced into my steak.

Maybe it was just that I needed food—the steak was delicious and my appetite had resurfaced like it was trying to make up for lost time, but unfortunately no one had mentioned anything about Lexie eating like a horse, so I wasn’t going to be asking for seconds—but that was when they came into focus for me, that dinner; that’s when the memories start to fall into sequence, like glass beads caught on a string, and the evening changes from a bright blur into something real and manageable. “Abby got a poppet,” Rafe said, dumping potatoes on his plate. “We were going to burn her as a witch, but we decided to wait till you got back, so we could put it to a democratic vote.”

“Burn Abby, or the poppet?” I asked.

“Both.”

“It is not a poppet,” Abby said, flicking Rafe in the arm. “It’s a late-Victorian doll, and Lexie will appreciate it, because she’s not a Philistine.”

“I’d appreciate it from a distance, if I were you,” Justin told me. “I think it’s possessed. Its eyes keep following me.”

“So lie her down. Her eyes close.”

“I’m not touching it. What if it bites me? I’ll have to wander the outer darkness for all eternity, searching for my soul—”

“God, I’ve missed you,” Abby told me. “I’ve been stuck with no one to talk to except this bunch of wusses. It’s just an itsy-bitsy dolly, Justin.”

“Poppet,” Rafe said, through potatoes. “Seriously. It’s made from a sacrificed goat.”

“Mouth full, you,” Abby told him. To me: “It’s kidskin. With a bisque head. I found her in a hatbox in the room opposite me. Her clothes are in bits, and I finished the footstool, so I figured I might as well make her a new wardrobe. There are all these old scraps of material—”

“And then there’s its hair,” Justin said, pushing the vegetables across to me. “Don’t forget the hair. It’s horrible.”

“It’s wearing a dead person’s hair,” Rafe informed me. “If you stick a pin in the doll, you can hear screaming coming from the graveyard. Try it.”

“See what I mean?” Abby said, to me. “Wusses. It’s got real hair. Why he thinks it’s from a dead person—”

“Because your poppet was made in about 1890 and I can do subtraction.”

“And what graveyard? There’s no graveyard.”

“There is somewhere. Somewhere out there, every time you touch that doll, someone twitches in her grave.”

“Until you get rid of the Head,” Abby said with dignity, “you don’t get to slag my doll for being creepy.”

“That’s not the same thing at all. The Head is a valuable scientific tool.”

“I like the Head,” said Daniel, glancing up, surprised. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It looks like something Aleister Crowley would carry around, is what’s wrong with it. Back me up here, Lex.”

Frank and Sam hadn’t told me, maybe they’d never seen, the most important thing about these four: just how close they were. The phone videos hadn’t been able to catch the power of it, any more than they’d caught the house. It was like a shimmer in the air between them, like glittering web-fine threads tossed back and forth and in and out until every movement or word reverberated through the whole group: Rafe passing Abby her smokes almost before she glanced around for them, Daniel turning with his hands out ready to take the steak dish in the same second that Justin brought it through the door, sentences flicked onto each other like playing cards with never a fraction of a pause. Rob and I used to be like that: seamless.

My main feeling was that I was fucked. These four had harmonies close as the most polished a cappella group on the planet, and I had to pick up my line and join in the jam session without missing a single beat. I had a little leeway for weakness and medication and general trauma—right now they were just happy I was home and talking, what I actually said was beside the point—but that would only carry me so far, and nobody had told me anything about a Head. No matter how upbeat Frank had been, I was pretty positive that the incident room had a sweepstakes going—behind Sam’s back; not necessarily behind Frank’s—on how long it would be before I went down in a spectacular fireball, and that most of the spread was clustered under three days. I didn’t blame them. I should have got in on the action: a tenner on twenty-four hours.

“I want to hear the news,” I said. “What’s been happening? Was anyone asking after me? Do I have get-well cards?”

“You got hideous flowers,” Rafe said, “from the English department. Those huge mutant daisy things, dyed lurid colors. They wilted, thank God.”

“Four-Boobs Brenda tried to comfort Rafe,” Abby said, with a one-sided grin. “In his time of need.”

“Oh God,” Rafe said in horror, dropping his knife and fork and putting his hands over his face. Justin started to snicker. “She did. She and her bosom-age cornered me in the photocopy room and asked me how I was feeling.”

That had to be Brenda Grealey. I couldn’t see her being Rafe’s type. I laughed too—they were working hard to keep the mood up, and Brenda was starting to sound like a geebag anyway. “I think he quite enjoyed it, deep down,” Justin said demurely. “He came out reeking of cheap perfume.”

“I almost asphyxiated. She pinned me up against the photocopier—”

“Was there wucka-wucka music playing in the background?” I asked. It was feeble but I was doing my best, and I caught Abby’s quick sideways smile, the flick of relief across Justin’s face. “What on earth have you been watching in that hospital?” Daniel wanted to know.

“—and she breathed all over me,” Rafe said. “Moistly. It was like being molested by a walrus soaked in air freshener.”

“The inside of your head is a horrible place,” Justin told him.

“She wanted to buy me a drink so we could talk. She said I needed to open up. What does that even mean?”

“Sounds like she’s the one who wanted to open up,” Abby said. “So to speak.” Rafe made a fake gagging noise.

“You’re disgusting too,” Justin said.

“Thank God for me,” I said. Talking still felt like poking black ice with a stick. “I’m the civilized one.”

“Well,” Justin said, giving me a small, tucked-in smile. “Hardly. But we love you anyway. Have more steak; you’re eating like a wee bird. Don’t you like it?”

Hallelujah: apparently Lexie and I shared the same metabolism, as well as everything else. “It’s gorgeous, silly,” I said. “I’m still getting my appetite back.”

“Yes, well.” Justin leaned across the table to spoon steak onto my plate. “You need to build up your strength.”

“Justin,” I said, “you’ve always been my favorite.”

He flushed right up to his hairline, and before he could hide behind his glass I saw something painful—what, I couldn’t tell—flick across his face. “Don’t be absurd,” he said. “We missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” I said, and gave him a wicked grin. “Mostly because of hospital food.”

“Typical,” said Rafe.

For a moment I was sure Justin was going to say something else, but then Daniel reached over to refill his glass and Justin blinked, the flush subsiding, and picked up his knife and fork again. There was one of those content, absorbed silences that go with good food. Something rippled round the table: a loosening, a settling, a long sigh too low to hear. Un ange passe, my French grandfather would have said: an angel is passing. Somewhere upstairs I heard the faint, dreamy note of a clock striking.

Daniel cut his eyes sideways at Abby, so subtly I barely caught it. He was the one who had done the least talking, all evening. He was quiet on the phone videos, too, but this seemed to have a different flavor to it, a concentrated intensity, and I wasn’t sure whether this just didn’t translate well onto camera or whether it was new. “So,” Abby said. “How’re you feeling, Lex?”

They had all stopped eating. “Fine,” I said. “I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy for a few weeks.”

“Are you in any pain?” Daniel inquired.

I shrugged. “They gave me supercool painkillers, but most of the time I don’t need them. I’m not even gonna have much of a scar. They had to sew up all my insides, but I only got six stitches on the outside.”

“Let’s see them,” Rafe said.

“God,” said Justin, putting his fork down. He looked like he was seconds from leaving the table. “You’re a ghoul. I have no desire to see them, thanks very much.”

“I definitely don’t want to see them at the dinner table,” Abby said. “No offense.”

“Nobody’s seeing them anywhere,” I said, narrowing my eyes at Rafe—I was ready for this one. “I’ve been getting poked and prodded all week, and the next person who goes anywhere near my stitches gets his finger bitten off.”

Daniel was still inspecting me thoughtfully. “You tell ’em,” said Abby.

“Are you sure it doesn’t hurt?” There was a pinched, white look around Justin’s mouth and nose, as if even the thought had him in pain. “It must have hurt, at first. Was it bad?”

“She’s fine,” said Abby. “She just said so.”

“I’m only asking. The police kept saying—”

“Don’t poke at it.”

“What?” I asked. “What did the police keep saying?”

“I think,” Daniel said, calmly but finally, turning in his chair to look at Justin, “that we should leave it at that.”

Another silence, less comfortable this time. Rafe’s knife screeched on his plate; Justin winced; Abby reached for the pepper shaker, gave it a hard tap on the table and shook it briskly.

“The police asked,” Daniel said suddenly, glancing up at me over his glass, “whether you kept a diary or a date book, anything along those lines. I thought it was best for us to say no.”

Diary?