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.”