He was about to hang up. “Anything new on our girl?” I asked. May-Ruth. Somehow I couldn’t say it out loud; even bringing her up felt strange now, electric. But if he had found out anything more about her, I wanted it.
Frank snorted. “Ever tried rushing the FBI? They’ve got a whole plateful of mother-stabbers and father-rapers of their own; someone else’s little murder case isn’t at the top of their list. Forget about them. They’ll get back to us when they get back to us. You just concentrate on getting me a few answers.”
Frank was right, at first I think I had seen the four of them as a single unit: The Housemates, shoulder to shoulder, graceful and inseparable as a group in a painting and all with the same fine bloom of light on them, like the luster on old beeswaxed wood. It was only over that first week that they had turned real to me, come into focus as separate individuals with their own little quirks and weaknesses. I knew the cracks had to be there. That kind of friendship doesn’t just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.
Small cracks, at first: slippery as mist, nothing you could put your finger on. We were in the kitchen Monday morning, eating breakfast. Rafe had done his Mongo-want-coffee routine and disappeared to finish waking up. Justin was slicing his fried eggs into neat strips, Daniel was eating sausages one-handed and making notes in the margins of what looked like an Old Norse photocopy, Abby was flipping through a week-old newspaper she had found in the Arts block and I was chattering to no one in particular about nothing very much. I had been ratcheting up the energy level, little by little. This was more complicated than it sounds. The more I talked, the more likely I was to shove my foot in my mouth; but the only way I was going to get anything useful out of these four was if they relaxed around me, and that would only happen once everything went back to normal, which, for Lexie, had not involved a lot of silence. I was telling the kitchen about these four awful girls in my Thursday tutorial, which I figured was safe enough.
“As far as I can tell they’re actually all the same person. They’re all called Orla or Fiona or Aoife or something, and they all have that accent like they’ve had their sinuses surgically removed, and they’ve all got that fake-straight fake-blond hair, and none of them ever, ever do the reading. I don’t know why they’re bothering with college.”
“To meet rich boys,” Abby said, without looking up.
“At least one of them’s found one. Some rugby-looking guy. He was waiting for her after the tutorial last week and I swear, when the four of them came out the door he got this terrified look and then he held out his hand to the wrong girl for a second, before the right one dived on him. He can’t tell them apart either.”
“Look who’s feeling better,” Daniel said, smiling across at me.
“Chatterbox,” said Justin, putting another slice of toast on my plate. “Just out of curiosity, have you ever stayed quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch?”
“I have so. I had laryngitis once, when I was nine, and I couldn’t say a single word for five days. It was awful. Everyone kept bringing me chicken soup and comic books and boring stuff, and I kept trying to explain that I felt totally fine and I wanted to get up, but they just told me to be quiet and rest my throat. When you were little, did you ever—”
“Dammit,” Abby said suddenly, looking up from her paper. “Those cherries. The best-by date was yesterday. Is anyone still hungry? We could put them in pancakes or something.”
“I’ve never heard of cherry pancakes,” Justin said. “It sounds disgusting.”
“I don’t see why. If you can have blueberry pancakes—”
“And cherry scones,” I pointed out, through toast.
“That’s a different principle entirely,” Daniel said. “Candied cherries. The acidity and moisture levels—”
“We could try it. They cost about a million quid; I’m not just leaving them to rot.”
“I’ll try anything,” I said helpfully. “I’d have some cherry pancakes.”
“Oh God, let’s not,” said Justin, with a little shudder of distaste. “Let’s just take the cherries into college and have them with lunch.”
“Rafe’s not getting any,” Abby said, folding the paper away and heading for the fridge. “You know that weird smell off his bag? Half a banana he stuck in the inside pocket and forgot about. From now on we don’t feed him anything we can’t actually watch him eat. Lex, give me a hand wrapping them up?”
It was so smooth, I didn’t even notice anything had happened. Abby and I split the cherries into four bundles and put them in with that day’s sandwiches, Rafe ended up eating most of them, and I forgot the whole thing, until the next evening.
We had washed a few of the less fugly curtains and were putting them up in the spare rooms, to keep the heat in rather than as an aesthetic choice—we had one electric storage heater and the fireplace to heat that whole house, in winter it must have been Arctic. Justin and Daniel were doing the first-floor room, while the rest of us did the top ones. Abby and I were threading curtain hooks for Rafe to hang when we heard a tumble of heavy things falling below us, a thud, a yelp from Justin; then Daniel calling, “It’s all right, I’m fine.”
“What now?” said Rafe. He was balanced precariously on the windowsill, hanging onto the curtain rail with one hand.
“Someone fell off something,” Abby said, through a mouthful of curtain hooks, “or over something. I think they’ll live.”
There was a sudden low exclamation, through the floorboards, and Justin called, “Lexie, Abby, Rafe, come here! Come look!”
We ran downstairs. Daniel and Justin were kneeling on the spare-room floor, surrounded by an explosion of weird old objects, and for a second I thought one of them was hurt after all. Then I saw what they were looking at. There was a stiff, stained leather pouch on the floor between them, and Daniel was holding a revolver.
“Daniel came off the stepladder,” Justin said, “and knocked over all this stuff, and this just fell out, right at his feet. I can’t even work out where it was, in all this mess. God knows what else is in there.”
It was a Webley, a beauty, glowing with patina between the crusted patches of dirt. “My God,” Rafe said, dropping down beside Daniel and reaching out to touch the barrel. “That’s a Webley Mark Six; an old one, too. They were standard issue during the First World War. Your crazy great-uncle or whoever he was, Daniel, the one you look like: this could have been his.”
Daniel nodded. He inspected the gun for a moment, then broke it open: unloaded. “William,” he said. “It could have been his, yes.” He closed the cylinder, fitted his hand carefully, gently, around the grip.
“It’s a mess,” Rafe said, “but it could be cleaned up. All it needs is a couple of days’ soak in a good solvent, and then some work with a brush. I suppose ammo would be too much to ask for.”