Here’s one of the more disturbing things about working Murder: how little you think about the person who’s been killed. There are some who move into your mind—children, battered pensioners, girls who went clubbing in their sparkly hopeful best and ended the night in bog drains—but mostly the victim is only your starting point; the gold at the end of the rainbow is the killer. It’s scarily easy to slip to the point where the victim becomes incidental, half forgotten for days on end, just a prop wheeled out for the prologue so that the real show can start. Rob and I used to stick a photo smack in the middle of the whiteboard, on every case—not a crime-scene shot or a posed portrait; a snapshot, the candidest candid we could find, a bright snippet from the time when this person was something more than a murder victim—to keep us reminded.
This isn’t just callousness, or self-preservation. The cold fact is that every murder I’ve worked was about the killer. The victim—and imagine explaining this to families who have nothing left but the hope of a reason—the victim was just the person who happened to wander into the sights when the gun was loaded and cocked. The control freak was always going to kill his wife the first time she refused to follow orders; your daughter happened to be the one who married him. The mugger was hanging around the alleyway with a knife, and your husband happened to be the next person who walked by. We go through victims’ lives with a fine-tooth comb, but we’re doing it to learn more not about them but about the murderer: if we can figure out the exact point where someone walked into those crosshairs, we can go to work with our dark, stained geometries and draw a line straight back to the barrel of the gun. The victim can tell us how, but almost never why. The only reason, the beginning and the end, the closed circle, is the killer.
This case had been different from the first moment. I had never been in any danger of forgetting about Lexie; and not just because I carried the reminder photo around with me, there every time I brushed my teeth or washed my hands. From the second I walked into that cottage, before I ever saw her face, this had been about her. For the first time ever, the murderer was the one I kept forgetting.
The possibility hit me like a wrecking ball: suicide. I felt like I had fallen off the windowsill, straight through the glass and down into cold air. If this killer had never been anything but invisible, if Lexie had been the core of the case all along, maybe it was because there had never been a killer at all: she was all there was. In that split second I saw it as clearly as if it were unfolding on the dark lawn below me, in all its slow sickening horror. The others putting away the cards and stretching, Where’s Lexie got to? And then the worry winding tighter and tighter, till finally they put on coats and went out into the night to look for her, torches, rain gusting hard, Lexie! Lex! The four of them crammed in the wrecked cottage, gasping for breath. Shaking hands feeling for a pulse, pressing harder; moving her into shelter and laying her out so gently, reaching for the knife, fumbling in her pockets for some note, some explanation, some word. Maybe—Jesus—maybe they had even found one.
A moment later, of course, my head cleared, my breath came back and I knew that was rubbish. It would explain a lot—Rafe’s snit fit, Daniel’s suspicions, Justin’s nerves, the moved body, the searched pockets—and we’ve all heard about cases where people staged everything from improbable accidents through murders, rather than let their loved ones be branded as suicides. But I couldn’t think of a single reason why they would have left her there all night for someone else to find, and anyway women generally don’t commit suicide by knifing themselves in the chest. And, above all that, there was the immovable fact that Lexie—even if whatever went down in March had somehow wrecked all this for her, this house, these friends, this life—was about the last person in the world who would have killed herself. Suicides are people who can’t see any other way out. From what we had learned, Lexie had had no trouble finding escape routes when she wanted them.
Downstairs Abby was humming to herself; Justin sneezed, a chain of small fastidious yelps; someone slammed a drawer. I was in bed and halfway asleep when I realized: I had forgotten all about ringing Sam.
8
God, that first week. Even thinking about it I want to bite into it like the world’s brightest red apple. In the middle of an all-out murder investigation, while Sam worked his way painstakingly through various shades of scumbag and Frank tried to explain our situation to the FBI without coming across like a lunatic, there was nothing I was supposed to be doing except living Lexie’s life. It gave me a gleeful, lazy, daring feeling right down to my toes, like mitching off school when it’s the best day of spring and you know your class has to dissect frogs.
On Tuesday I went back to college. In spite of the vast number of new opportunities to fuck up, I was looking forward to it. I loved Trinity, the first time round. It still has its centuries of graceful gray stone, red brick, cobblestones; you can feel the layers on layers of lost students streaming through Front Square beside you, feel the print of you being added to the air, archived, saved. If someone hadn’t decided to drive me out of college, I might have turned into an eternal student like these four. Instead—and probably because of that same person—I turned into a cop. I liked the thought that this had brought me full circle, back to reclaim the place I’d lost. It felt like a strange, delayed victory, something salvaged against ridiculous odds.
“You should probably know,” Abby said, in the car, “the rumor mill’s been going mental. Apparently it was a major coke deal gone wrong, also an illegal immigrant—you married him for money and then started blackmailing him—also an abusive ex-boyfriend who just got out of jail for beating you up. Brace yourself.”
“Also, I assume,” Daniel said, maneuvering past an Explorer that was blocking two lanes, “all of us, singly or in various combinations and for various motives. No one’s said so to our faces, of course, but the inference is inevitable. ” He swung into the entrance of the Trinity car park and held up his ID for the security guard. “If people ask questions, what are you going to tell them?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said. “I was thinking about saying I’m the lost heir to some throne and a rival faction came after me, but I couldn’t decide which throne. Do I look like a Romanov?”
“Definitely,” said Rafe. “They were a bunch of chinless weirdos. Go for that.”
“Be nice to me or I’ll tell everyone you came after me with a cleaver in a drug-fueled rage.”
“It’s not funny,” said Justin. He hadn’t brought his car—I got the sense they all wanted to stick close together, just now—so he was in the back with me and Rafe, rubbing flecks of dirt off the windowpane and wiping his fingers on his handkerchief.
“Well,” said Abby, “it wasn’t funny last week, no. But now that you’re back . . .” She turned to grin at me, over her shoulder. “Four-Boobs Brenda asked me—you know that horrible confidential whisper?—if it was ‘one of those games gone wrong.’ I just froze her out, but now I’m thinking I could have made her day.”
“What amazes me about her,” Daniel said, opening his door, “is that she’s so determined to believe we’re wildly interesting. If only she knew.”
When we got out of the car I got my first real look at what Frank had meant about these four, how they came across to outsiders. As we walked down the long avenue between the sports fields something happened, a change as subtle and definite as water turning to ice: they moved closer, shoulder to shoulder and in step, backs straightening, heads lifting, expressions falling away from their faces. By the time we reached the Arts block the fa?ade was in place, a barricade so impenetrable you could almost see it, cool and glinting like diamond. All that week in college, every time someone started angling for a good stare at me—edging down the library shelves towards the corner where we had our carrels, rubbernecking round a newspaper in the tea queue—that barricade swung around like a Roman shield formation, confronting the intruder with four pairs of impassive, unblinking eyes, till he or she backed off. Collecting gossip was going to be a major problem; even Four-Boobs Brenda stopped midbreath, hovering over my desk, and then asked if she could borrow a pen.
Lexie’s thesis turned out to be a lot more fun than I’d thought. The bits Frank had given me were mainly stuff about the Bront?s, Currer Bell as the madwoman in the attic bursting free from demure Charlotte, truth in alias; not exactly comfortable reading, in the circumstances, but more or less what you’d expect. What she’d been working on just before she died was a lot snazzier: Rip Corelli, of She Dressed to Kill fame, turned out to be Bernice Matlock, a librarian from Ohio who had led a blameless life and written lurid pulp masterpieces in her spare time. I was starting to like the way Lexie’s mind had worked.
I’d been worried that her supervisor would want me to come up with something that made academic sense—Lexie had been no idiot, her stuff was smart and original and well thought out, and I was years out of practice. I’d been worried about her supervisor all round, actually. Her tutorial students weren’t going to spot the difference—when you’re eighteen, most people over twenty-five are just generic adult white noise—but someone who’d spent one-on-one time with her was a whole different story. One meeting with him reassured me. He was a bony, gentle, disconnected guy who was so paralyzed by the whole “unfortunate incident” that he could barely look me in the eye, and he told me to take all the recovery time I needed and not to worry about dead-lines. I figured I could handle a few weeks curled up in the library reading about hard-boiled PIs and dames who were nothing but trouble.
And in the evenings there was the house. We put some work into it almost every day, maybe for an hour or two, maybe just for twenty minutes: sand down the stairs, sort through a box from Uncle Simon’s stash, take turns climbing the stepladder to change the ancient brittle fittings on the lightbulbs. The crappiest jobs—scrubbing stains off the toilets—got the same time and care as the interesting ones; the four of them treated the house like some marvelous musical instrument, a Stradivarius or a B?sendorfer, that they had found in a long-lost treasure trove and were restoring with patient, enchanted, absolute love. I think the most relaxed I ever saw Daniel was flat on his stomach on the kitchen floor, wearing battered old trousers and a plaid shirt, painting baseboards and laughing at some story Rafe was telling, while Abby leaned over him to dip her brush, her ponytail whisking paint across his cheek.
They were very tactile, all of them. We never touched in college, but at home, someone was always touching someone: Daniel’s hand on Abby’s head as he passed behind her chair, Rafe’s arm on Justin’s shoulder as they examined some spare-room discovery together, Abby lying back in the swing seat across my lap and Justin’s, Rafe’s ankles crossed over mine as we read by the fire. Frank made predictable snide noises about homosexuality and orgies, but I was on full alert for any kind of sexual vibe—the baby—and that wasn’t what I was picking up. It was stranger and more powerful than that: they didn’t have boundaries, not among themselves, not the way most people do. Your average house share involves a pretty high level of territorial dispute— tense negotiations over the remote control, house meetings about whether bread counts as personal or shared, Rob’s flatmate used to have a three-day snit fit if he used her butter. But these people: as far as I could tell, everything, except thank God underwear, belonged to all of them. The guys pulled clothes out of the airing cupboard at random, anything that would fit; I never did figure out which tops were officially Lexie’s and which ones were Abby’s. They ripped sheets of paper out of each other’s notepads, ate toast off the nearest plate, took sips out of whatever glass was handy.
I didn’t mention this to Frank—he would only have switched from orgy comments to dark warnings about communism, and I liked the blurred boundaries. They reminded me of something warm and solid that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. There was a big green wax jacket, hanging in the coat closet left over from Uncle Simon, that belonged to anyone who was going out in the rain; the first time I put it on for my walk it gave me a strange, intoxicating little thrill, like holding hands with a boy for the very first time.
It was Thursday when I managed to put my finger on the feeling. The days were starting to lengthen towards summer and it was a clear, warm, graceful evening; after dinner we took a bottle of wine and a plate of sponge cake out onto the lawn. I had made a daisy chain and was trying to fasten it around my wrist. By this time I had given up on the not-drinking thing—it felt out of character, it made the others think about the stabbing and tense up, and besides, whatever antibiotics and booze do together could get me out of there when I needed it—so I was mildly, happily tipsy.