Abby’s eyebrows went up. “Would you have preferred him to be a babbling mess?” she inquired. “What do you think would have happened if you had answered that door?”
Rafe shrugged. He had started fiddling with the cards again.
“In the end,” Abby said, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, “I realized we could go out there—actually, it would look weird if we didn’t. It was Mackey and O’Neill—Mackey was leaning up against the wall and O’Neill was taking notes—and they scared the living shit out of me. The plain clothes, these expressions that told you absolutely nothing, the way they talked—like there was no hurry, they could take all the time they wanted . . . I’d been expecting those two eejits from Rathowen, and it was obvious straight away that these guys were not the same thing at all. They were so much smarter and so, so much more dangerous. I’d been thinking the worst was over, nothing could ever be as bad as that night. When I saw those two, that was when it hit me that this was only just beginning.”
“They were cruel,” Justin said suddenly. “Horribly, horribly cruel. They stretched it out forever, before they told us. We kept asking what had happened, and they just stared at us with these smug blank faces and wouldn’t give a straight answer—”
“ ‘What makes you think something might have happened to her?’ ” Rafe put in, doing a viciously accurate send-up of Frank’s lazy Dublin. “ ‘Did someone have a reason to hurt her? Was she afraid of someone?’ ”
“—and even when they did, the bastards didn’t tell us you were alive. Mackey just said something like, ‘She was found a few hours ago, not far from here. Sometime last night, she was stabbed.’ He deliberately made it sound like you were dead.”
“Daniel was the only one who kept his head,” Abby said. “I was about a second from bursting into tears; I’d been holding it back all morning in case it made my eyes look funny, and it was such a relief to finally be allowed to know what had happened . . . But Daniel said straight off, like a shot, ‘Is she alive?’ ”
“And they just left it,” Justin said. “They didn’t say a word, for what felt like forever; just stood there watching us, and waiting. I told you they were cruel.”
“Finally,” Rafe said, “Mackey shrugged and said, ‘Barely.’ It was like all of our heads had exploded. I mean, we had been primed for . . . well, the worst; we just wanted to get it over with, so we could go have our nervous breakdowns in peace. We were not ready for this. God knows what we might have come out with—we could have blown the whole thing right there—except that Abby, with impeccable timing, threw a fainting fit. I’ve been meaning to ask you, actually, was that real? Or was it all part of the plan?”
“Very little of this was part of anyone’s plan,” Abby said tartly, “and I did not faint. I got dizzy for a second. If you remember, I hadn’t had a lot of sleep.” Rafe laughed, nastily.
“Everyone jumped to catch her and sit her down and get water,” said Justin, “and by the time she was all right, we had pulled ourselves together—”
“Oh, we had, had we?” Rafe inquired, eyebrows going up. “You were still standing there opening and shutting your mouth like a goldfish. I was so terrified you would say something idiotic, I was babbling, the cops must have thought I was a total moron: where did you find her, where is she, when can we see her . . . Not that they answered, but at least I tried.”
“I did my best,” said Justin. His voice was rising; he was starting to get upset again. “It was easy for you, getting your head around it: oh, she’s alive, isn’t that lovely. You weren’t there. You weren’t remembering that awful cottage—”
“Where, as far as I can see, you were about as much use as tits on a bull. Again.”
“You’re drunk,” Abby said coldly.
“Do you know,” Rafe said, like a kid pleased at shocking the grown-ups, “I think I am. And I think I might just keep getting drunker. Unless anyone has a problem with that?”
No one answered. He stretched for the bottle, eyes sliding sideways to me: “You missed some night, Lexie. If you were wondering why Abby thinks everything Daniel says is the Word of God—”
Abby didn’t move. “I’ve warned you once, Rafe. This is twice. You don’t get a third chance.”
After a moment Rafe shrugged and buried his face in his glass. In the silence I realized Justin had flushed deep red, right up to his hairline.
“The next few days,” Abby said, “were pure hell. They told us you were in intensive care in a coma, the doctors weren’t sure whether you were going to make it, but they wouldn’t let us go see you—even getting them to tell us how you were doing was like pulling teeth. The most we could get out of them was that you weren’t dead yet, which wasn’t exactly comforting.”
“The place was swarming with cops,” said Rafe. “Cops searching your room, searching the lanes, pulling out bits of the carpet . . . They interviewed us so many times that I started repeating myself, I couldn’t remember what I’d already said to who. Even when they weren’t there, we were on guard all the time—Daniel said they couldn’t bug the house, not legally, but Mackey doesn’t strike me as the type to worry too much about technicalities; and anyway, having cops is like having rats, or fleas, or something. Even when you can’t see them, you can feel them somewhere, crawling.”
“It was awful,” Abby said. “And Rafe can bitch all he wants about that poker game, but it’s a damn good thing Daniel made us do it. If I’d even thought about it before, I would’ve figured giving an alibi took about five minutes: I was here, everyone else says the same thing, the end. But the cops grilled us for hours, over and over, about every single tiny detail—what time did you start the game? Who sat where? How much money did you each start with? Who dealt first? Were you drinking? Who drank what? Which ashtray were you using?”
“And they kept trying to trap us,” Justin said. He reached for the bottle; his hand shook, just a little. “I’d give a perfectly simple answer—we started playing around quarter past eleven, that kind of thing—and Mackey or O’Neill or whoever it was that day would get this worried look and say, ‘Are you sure about that? Because I think one of your friends said it was at quarter past ten,’ and start rummaging through notes, and I would just freeze. I mean, I didn’t know whether one of the others had made a mistake—it would have been easy to do, we were all such a mess we could barely think straight—and whether I should back them up, say, ‘Oh, that’s right, I must have got mixed up,’ or something. In the end I always stuck to the story, which turned out to be the right thing to do—nobody had made any mistakes, the cops were just bluffing—but that was sheer luck: I was too paralyzed with terror to do anything else. If it had gone on any longer, I think we would all have lost our minds.”
“And all for what?” Rafe demanded. He sat up suddenly, almost spilling the cards off his lap, and plucked his cigarette out of the ashtray. “Here’s the part that still amazes me: we took Daniel’s word for it. He has all the medical knowledge of a cheese soufflé, but he told us Lexie was dead and we just assumed he was right. Why do we always believe him?”
“Habit,” said Abby. “He usually is right.”
“You think so?” Rafe asked. He was lounging back against the arm of the sofa again, but there was an edge to his voice, something dangerous and spiraling. “He certainly wasn’t right this time. We could have simply phoned for an ambulance like normal people and everything would have been fine. Lexie would never press charges or whatever they call it, and if any of us had thought about it for a single second, we’d have known that. But no, we let Daniel call all the shots; we had to sit here having the Mad Hatter’s tea party—”
“He didn’t know everything would be fine,” Abby said sharply. “What do you think he should have done? He thought Lexie was dead, Rafe.”
Rafe shrugged, one-shouldered. “So he says.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying. Remember when that wanker showed up to tell us she was out of the coma? The three of us,” he told me, “we were so relieved we almost collapsed; I thought Justin was actually going to faint.”
“Thank you for that, Rafe,” Justin said, reaching for the bottle.
“But did Daniel look relieved to you? Like hell he did. He looked like someone had hit him in the gut with a bat. Even the cop noticed, for God’s sake. Remember?” Abby shrugged coldly and bent her head over the doll, fumbled for her needle.
“Hey,” I said, kicking the sofa to get Rafe’s attention. “I don’t remember. What happened?”
“It was that prat Mackey,” Rafe said. He took the vodka bottle from Justin and topped up his glass, not bothering with tonic. “Bright and early on the Monday morning, he’s at the door, telling us he’s got news and asking if he can come in. Personally I would have told him to fuck himself, I’d seen enough cops that weekend to last me a lifetime, but Daniel answered the door and he had this crackpot theory that we shouldn’t do anything that might antagonize the police—I mean, Mackey was already antagonized, he hated us all on sight, what was the point of cozying up to him?—so he let him in. I came out of my room to see what the story was, and Justin and Abby were coming out of the kitchen, and Mackey stood there in the hall looking round at us all and said, ‘Your friend’s going to make it. She’s awake and asking for breakfast.’ ”
“And we were all overjoyed,” Abby said. She had found the needle and was stabbing at the doll’s dress with short, angry stitches.