“The rest of us could barely talk in sentences,” said Rafe, “and he’s waxing philosophical about the art of the alibi. I couldn’t have said ‘reliable alibi.’ ”
“—so he made us turn all the clocks back to eleven, just before it all went horrible, and go back into the kitchen and finish the washing up, and then he made us come in here and play cards. As if nothing had happened.”
“He played your hand as well as his,” Abby told me. “The first time you had a decent hand and he had a better one, he went all in for you and then knocked you out. It was surreal.”
“And he kept narrating,” Rafe said. He stretched for the vodka bottle and topped up his glass. In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling in his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night’s dancing. “ ‘Lexie’s raising, Lexie folds, Lexie would need another drink at this point, could someone please pass her the wine . . .’ He was like some nutcase who sits next to you in the park and feeds bites of sandwich to his imaginary friend. Once he’d got you out of the game he made us act out this little scene, you heading off on your walk and all of us waving bye-bye to thin air . . . I thought we were losing our minds. I remember sitting there, in that chair, politely saying good-bye to the door and thinking very clearly and calmly, So this is what insanity feels like.”
“It must have been three in the morning by then,” Justin said, “but Daniel wouldn’t let us go to bed. We had to sit there and keep playing Texas bloody Hold-’em, to the bitter end—Daniel won, of course, he was the only one who could concentrate, but it took him forever to wipe the rest of us out. Honestly, the cops must think we’re the worst poker players in history, I was folding on flush draws and raising on a ten high . . . I was so exhausted I was seeing double, and it all felt like a hideous nightmare, I kept thinking I had to wake up. We hung the clothes in front of the fire to dry and the room was like something out of The Fog, clothes steaming and the fire spitting and everyone chain-smoking Daniel’s horrible unfiltered things—”
“He wouldn’t let me go get normal ones,” said Abby. “He said we all needed to stay together, and anyway the cameras at the petrol station would show what time I’d come in and it would mess everything up . . . He was like a general.” Rafe snorted. “He was. The rest of us were shaking so much we could barely hold our cards—”
“Justin got sick at one stage,” Rafe said through a cigarette, waving out the match. “In the kitchen sink, charmingly enough.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Justin said. “All I could think of was you, lying there in the dark, all by yourself—” He reached out and squeezed my arm. I put up a hand to cover his for a second; his was cool and bony and trembling hard.
“That was all any of us could think about,” Abby said, “but Daniel . . . I could see how much it was taking out of him—his face had fallen in under the cheekbones, like he’d lost a stone since dinner, and his eyes looked wrong, all huge and black—but he was so calm, as if nothing had happened. Justin started cleaning up the sink—”
“He was still gagging,” Rafe said. “I could hear him. Out of the five of us, Lexie, I think you may have had the nicest evening.”
“—but Daniel told him to leave it; he said it would skew the timeline in our minds.”
“Apparently,” Rafe informed me, “the essence of the alibi is simplicity; the fewer steps one has to omit or invent, the less likely one is to make a mistake. He kept saying, ‘As it stands, all we need to do is remember that we went from the washing up to the card game, and eliminate the intervening events from our minds. They never happened.’ In other words, get back here and play your hand, Justin. The poor bastard was green.”
Daniel had been right, about the alibi. He was good at this; too good. In that second I thought of my flat, Sam scribbling and the air outside the windows dimming to purple and me profiling the killer: someone with previous criminal experience.
Sam had run background checks on every one of them, found nothing worse than a couple of speeding tickets. I had no way of knowing what checks Frank might have run, in his private, complex, off-the-record world; how much he had found and kept to himself, and how much had slipped past even him; who, out of all the contenders, was the best secret keeper of us all.
“He wouldn’t even let us move the knife,” Justin said. “It was there the whole time we were playing cards. I had my back to the kitchen and I swear I could feel it behind me, like something out of Poe, or the Jacobeans. Rafe was across from me, and he kept doing this little jump and blink, like a tic—”
Rafe threw him an incredulous grimace. “I did not.”
“You did. You were twitching, every minute, like clockwork. It looked exactly like you had seen something terrifying over my shoulder, and every time you did it I was too afraid to turn around in case the knife was hanging there in midair, glowing or throbbing or I don’t know what—”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Bloody Lady Macbeth—”
“Jesus,” I said suddenly. “The knife. Is it still— I mean, have we been eating with . . .” I flipped a hand vaguely towards the kitchen, then shoved a knuckle in my mouth and bit down. I wasn’t faking; the thought of every meal I’d eaten here streaked with invisible traces of Lexie’s blood did slow somersaults across my mind.
“No,” Abby said quickly. “God, no. Daniel got rid of it. After we’d all gone to bed, or anyway to our bedrooms—”
“Good night, Mary Ellen,” said Rafe. “Good night, Jim Bob. Sleep tight. Jesus.”
“—he went straight down again—I heard him on the stairs. I don’t know exactly what he did down there, but next morning the clocks were back to normal, the sink was spotless, the kitchen floor was clean—it looked like it had been scrubbed, the whole thing, not just that one patch. The shoes, Daniel’s and Justin’s that they’d left on the patio, they were in the coat closet and they were clean too—not squeaky clean, just the way we always do them—and dry, like he’d put them by the fire. The clothes were all ironed and folded, and the knife was gone.”
“What one was it?” I asked, a little shakily, around my knuckle.
“It was just one of those manky old steak knives with the wooden handles,” Abby said gently. “It’s OK, Lex. It’s gone.”
“I don’t want it to be in the house,” I said.
“I know. Me neither. I’m pretty sure Daniel got rid of it, though. I’m not positive how many we had to start with, but I heard the front door, so I figure he must have been taking it outside.”
“Where to? I don’t want it in the garden either. I don’t want it anywhere around.” My voice was shaking harder. Frank, somewhere, listening and whispering, Go girl go.
Abby shook her head. “I’m not sure. He was gone a few minutes, and I don’t think he’d have left it in the grounds, but do you want me to ask? I can tell him to move it if it’s anywhere nearby.”
I twitched one shoulder. “Whatever. Yeah, I guess. Tell him.” Daniel would never in a million years do it, but I had to go through the motions, and he would have a lot of fun leading surveillance on wild-goose chases; if things ever got that far.
“I didn’t even hear him go downstairs,” Justin said. “I was . . . Christ. I don’t even want to think about it. I was sitting on the edge of my bed with the lights out, rocking. All through the card game I wanted to get away so badly I could have screamed, I just wanted to be by myself, but as soon as I was, it was even worse. The house kept creaking—all that wind and rain—but I swear to God it sounded exactly like you were moving around upstairs, getting ready for bed. Once”—he swallowed, jaw muscles clenching—“once I heard you humming. ‘Black Velvet Band,’ of all things. It was that clear. I wanted to— If I look out my window I can see whether your light is on, it shines onto the lawn, and I wanted to check, just to reassure myself—oh God, I don’t mean reassure, you know what I mean—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself stand up. I was absolutely positive that if I pulled that curtain I would see your light on the grass. And then what? Then what could I do?”
He was shaking. “Justin,” Abby said gently. “It’s OK.”
Justin pressed his fingers across his mouth, hard, and took a deep breath. “Well,” he said. “Anyway. Daniel could have been thundering up and down those stairs and I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“I heard him,” Rafe said. “I think I heard every single thing for a mile around, that night; even the tiniest noise somewhere down at the bottom of the garden practically made me jump out of my skin. The joy of criminal activity is that it gives you ears like a bat’s.” He shook his smoke packet, tossed it into the fireplace—Justin opened his mouth automatically and then closed it again—and took Abby’s off the coffee table. “Some of it made for very interesting listening.”
Abby’s eyebrows went up. She stuck her needle carefully into a hem, put the doll down and gave Rafe a long cool look. “Do you really want to go there?” she inquired. “Because I can’t stop you, but if I were you I’d think very, very hard before I opened that particular Pandora’s box.”
There was a long, fizzing silence. Abby folded her hands in her lap and watched Rafe calmly.
“I was drunk,” Rafe said, suddenly and sharply, into the silence. “Banjoed.”
After a second Justin said, to the coffee table, “You weren’t that drunk.”
“I was. I was legless. I don’t think I’ve ever been that drunk in my life.”
“No you weren’t. If you had been that drunk—”
“We had all been drinking pretty solidly for most of the night,” Abby said evenly, cutting him off. “Not surprisingly. It didn’t help; I don’t think any of us got much sleep. The next morning was pure nightmare. We were so upset and wrecked and hungover that we were practically dizzy, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t even see straight. We couldn’t decide whether to call the cops and report you missing, or what. Rafe and Justin wanted to do it—”
“Rather than leave you lying in a rat-infested hovel till some local yokel happened to stumble on you,” Rafe said through a cigarette, shaking Abby’s lighter. “Call us crazy.”
“—but Daniel said it would look weird; you were old enough to go for an early-morning walk or even skive off college for the day if you wanted to. He phoned your mobile—it was right there in the kitchen, obviously, but still, he figured there should be a call on it.”
“He made us have breakfast,” Justin said.
“Justin managed to get as far as the bathroom, that time,” said Rafe.
“We couldn’t stop fighting,” Abby said. She had picked up the doll again and was methodically, unconsciously plaiting its hair, over and over. “Whether we had to eat breakfast, whether to call the cops, whether we should leave for college like normal or wait for you to come back—I mean, the natural thing would have been for Daniel or Justin to wait for you while the rest of us headed in, but we couldn’t do it. The thought of splitting up—I don’t know if I can explain it, how badly that idea freaked us out. We were ready to kill each other—Rafe and I were screaming at each other, actually screaming—but the second someone suggested doing separate stuff, I literally went weak at the knees.”
“Do you know what I thought?” Justin said, very quietly. “I was standing there, listening to you three argue and looking out the window waiting for the police or someone to come, and I realized: it could be days. It could be weeks; this could go on for weeks, the waiting. Lexie could be there for . . . I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I could get through that day at college, never mind weeks. And I thought what we should really do was stop fighting and get a duvet and curl up under it, all four of us together, and turn the gas on. That was what I wanted to do.”
“We don’t even have gas,” Rafe snapped. “Don’t be such a bloody drama queen.”
“I think that was on all our minds—what we would do if you weren’t found right away—but nobody wanted to mention it,” Abby said. “It was actually a huge relief when the police showed up. Justin saw them first, out the window; he said, ‘Someone’s here,’ and we all froze, right in the middle of yelling at each other. Rafe and I started to go for the window, but Daniel said, ‘Everyone sit down. Now.’ So we all sat at the kitchen table, like we had just finished breakfast, and waited for the bell to ring.”
“Daniel answered it,” Rafe said, “of course. He was cool as ice. I could hear him out in the hall: Yes, Alexandra Madison lives here, and no we haven’t seen her since last night, and no there’s been no argument, and no we’re not worried about her, just unsure whether she’s coming to college today, and is there a problem, Officers, and this note of concern gradually seeping into his voice . . . He was perfect. It was absolutely terrifying.”