The top floor: my room, Daniel’s, two more spares. The one beside Daniel was full of old furniture, tumbled in splayed heaps as if an earthquake had hit: those grayish undersized chairs that never actually get used, a display cabinet that looked like the Rococo movement had thrown up on it, and just about everything in between. Bits and pieces had obviously been taken out—drag marks, bare patches—presumably to furnish the rooms when the five of them moved in. What was left was inches deep in trailing, sticky dust. The room next to mine had more wild debris (a cracked stone hot-water bottle, mud-crusted green wellies, a mouse-shredded tapestry cushion involving deer and flowers) and teetering stacks of cardboard boxes and old leather suitcases. Someone had made a start on going through this stuff, not too long ago: layers of bright finger marks on some of the suitcase lids, one even wiped semiclean, mysterious outlines in corners and on boxes where things had been taken away. There were tangles of faint shoe prints on the dusty floorboards.
If you were going to hide something—a murder weapon, or some kind of evidence, or some small priceless antique—this wouldn’t be a bad place. I went through all the cases that had been opened, staying well clear of the finger marks, just in case, but they were stuffed to the lids with pages and pages of crabby fountain-pen scribble. As far as I could tell, someone, presumably Great-uncle Simon, had been writing a history of the March family through the ages. The Marches had been around for a while—the dates went back to 1734, when the house had been built—but had apparently never done anything more interesting than getting married, buying the odd horse and gradually losing most of their estate.
Daniel’s room was locked. The life skills I learned from Frank do include lock picking, and this one looked pretty simple, but I was already antsy from the diary, and that door wound me a notch tighter. I had no way of knowing whether Daniel always locked his room or whether this was specially for me. I was suddenly positive that he had left some trap—a hair across the frame, a glass of water just inside the door—that would give me away if I went in there.
I finished off with Lexie’s room—it had been searched already, but I wanted to do it myself. Unlike Uncle Simon, Lexie had kept sweet fuck-all. The room wasn’t tidy, exactly—the books were tossed onto the shelves rather than lined up, the clothes were mostly in piles on the wardrobe floor; under the bed were three empty smoke packets, half a Caramilk and a crumpled page of notes on Villette—but it was too sparse to be messy. No knickknacks, no old ticket stubs or birthday cards or dried flowers, no photographs; the only mementos she had wanted were the phone videos. I thumbed through every book and turned every pocket inside out, but the room gave me nothing.
It had that same taste of permanence, though. She had been trying out paint colors on the wall beside her bed, in broad fast sweeps: ochre, old rose, china blue. That flick of envy went through me again. Screw you, I told Lexie inside my head; you may have lived here for longer, but I’m getting paid for it.
I sat down on the floor, dug my mobile out of my bag and rang Frank. “Hey, babe,” he said, on the second ring. “Burned already, yeah?”
He was in a good mood. “Yep,” I said. “Sorry about that. Come get me.”
Frank laughed. “How’s it going?”
I stuck him on speakerphone, put the phone on the floor beside me and stuffed my gloves and notebook back into the bag. “OK, I guess. I don’t think any of them suspect anything’s up.”
“Why would they? Nobody in their right mind would think of something this unlikely. Got anything good for me?”
“They’re all at college, so I had a quick look around the house. No bloody knife, no bloody clothes, no Renoirs, no signed confessions. Not even a stash of spliff or a porn mag. They’re awfully pure, for students.” My bandages were in carefully numbered packets, so that the stains would get lighter as the wound supposedly healed, just in case someone with a very weird mind was checking the bin—in this job, you leave room for a fair amount of weirdness. I found the bandage marked “2” and peeled off the wrapper. Whoever had done the staining lived life with enthusiasm.
“Any sign of that diary?” Frank asked. “The famous diary that Daniel saw fit to mention to you, but not to us.”
I leaned back against the bookshelf, hiked up my top and pulled off the old bandage. “If it’s in the house,” I said, “someone’s done a good job of hiding it.”
A noncommittal noise from Frank. “Or else you were right and the killer took it off her body. Either way, though, it’s interesting that Daniel and company felt the need to lie about it. Anyone acting dodgy?”
“No. They were a little awkward around me to start with, but they would be. Basically, the main thing I’m getting is they’re glad to have Lexie back.”
“That’s what I got from the mike feed. Which,” Frank said, “reminds me. What happened last night, after you went up to your room? I heard you talking, but somehow I had trouble catching the exact words.”
There was a different note in his voice, and not a good one. I stopped smoothing down the edges of the new bandage. “Nothing. Everyone said good night.”
“How sweet,” Frank said. “Very Waltons. I’m sorry I missed it. Where was your mike?”
“In my bag. The battery pack sticks into me when I sleep.”
“So sleep on your back. Your door doesn’t lock.”
“I put a chair in front of it.”
“Oh, well, then. That’s all the backup you need. Jesus, Cassie!” I could practically see him raking his free hand furiously through his hair, pacing.
“What’s the big deal, Frank? Last time I never even used the mike unless I was actually doing something interesting. Whether I talk in my sleep isn’t going to make or break this case.”
“Last time you weren’t living with suspects. These four may not be top of our list, but we haven’t eliminated them yet. Unless you’re in the shower, that mike stays on your body. You want to talk about last time? If your mike had been in your bag where we couldn’t hear you, you’d be dead. You’d have bled out before we could get to you.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Point taken.”
“Got it? On your body at all times. No fucking about.”
“Got it.”