“I’m not sure,” I said, carefully. “It doesn’t seem like his style—I mean, he could have broken down old Simon’s bedroom door and whacked him with a poker any time he wanted to, but he didn’t. But the fact that he only seems to do this stuff when he’s drunk makes me think he’s got an unhealthy relationship with alcohol—one of those guys who grow a whole new personality after four or five pints, and not a nice one. Once you throw booze into the equation, everything gets less predictable. And, like I said, this is an obsession with him. If he got the impression that the enemy was escalating the conflict—by going after him when he threw that rock through the window, for example— he could well have upped his game to match.”
“You know what this sounds exactly like,” Sam said, after a pause, “don’t you. Same age, local, smart, controlled, criminal experience but no violence . . .”
The profile I had given him, back in my flat; the profile of the killer. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“What you’re telling me is that he could be our boy. The murderer.”
That streak of shadow again, quick and silent through the grass and the moonlight: a fox, maybe, after a field mouse. “He could be,” I said. “We can’t rule him out.”
“If this is a family feud,” Sam said, “then Lexie wasn’t the specific target, her life’s nothing to do with anything and there’s no need for you to be there. You can come home.”
The hope in his voice made me flinch. “Yeah,” I said, “maybe. But I don’t think we’re at that stage. We’ve got no concrete link between the vandalism and the stabbing; they could be completely unrelated. And once we pull the plug, we can’t go back.”
A fraction of a pause. Then: “Fair enough,” Sam said. “I’ll get to work on finding that link. And, Cassie . . .”
His voice had gone sober, tense. “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I am being careful.”
“Half past eleven to one o’clock. That fits the time of the stabbing.”
“I know. I haven’t seen anyone dodgy hanging around.”
“Do you have your gun?”
“Whenever I go out. Frank already lectured me about that.”
“Frank,” Sam said, and I heard that remoteness come into his voice. “Right.”
After we hung up I waited in the shadow of the tree for a long time. I heard the crash of long grass and the thin scream as whatever predator was out there finally pounced. When the rustles had faded into the dark and only small things moved, I slipped out into the lane and went home.
I stopped at the back gate and swung on it for a while, listening to the slow creak of the hinge and looking up the long garden at the house. It looked different, that night. The gray stone of the back was flat and defensive as a castle wall, and the golden glow from the windows didn’t feel cozy any more; it had turned defiant, warning, like a small campfire in a savage forest. The moonlight whitened the lawn into a wide fitful sea, with the house tall and still in the middle, exposed on every side; besieged.
10
When you find a crack, you push on it and you see if something breaks. It had taken me about an hour and a half to work out that, if there was something the housemates weren’t telling me, Justin was my best bet. Any detective with a couple of years under his belt can tell you who’s going to break first; back in Murder I once saw Costello, who was installed in the eighties along with the decor, pick the weak link just from watching the gang of suspects get booked in. It’s our version of Name That Tune.
Daniel and Abby were both useless: too controlled and too focused, almost impossible to distract or wrong-foot—I had tried a couple of times to nudge Abby into telling me who she thought the daddy was, got nothing but cool blank looks. Rafe was more suggestible and I knew I could probably get somewhere with him if I had to, but it would be tricky; he was too volatile and contrary, just as likely to storm out in a strop as to tell you what you wanted to know. Justin—gentle, imaginative, easily worried, wanting everyone to be happy—was pretty near to being an interviewer’s dream.
The only thing was that I was never alone with him. In the first week I hadn’t really noticed it, but now that I was looking for a chance, it stood out. Daniel and I drove into college together a couple of times a week, and I saw a lot of Abby—breakfasts, after dinner when the guys were washing up, sometimes she knocked on my door at night with a packet of biscuits and we sat on the bed and talked till we got sleepy—but if I was ever on my own with Rafe or Justin for more than five minutes, one of the others would drift over or call out to us, and we would be effortlessly, invisibly enveloped by the group again. It could have been natural; all five of them did spend an awful lot of time together, and every group has subtle subdivisions, people who never pair off because they only work as part of the whole. But I had to wonder if someone, probably Daniel, had considered all four of them with an interrogator’s assessing eye and come to the same conclusion I had.
It was Monday morning before I got my chance. We were in college; Daniel was giving a tutorial and Abby had a meeting with her supervisor, so it was just Rafe and Justin and me in our corner of the library. When Rafe got up and headed off somewhere, presumably to the bathroom, I counted to twenty and then stuck my head over the barrier into Justin’s carrel.
“Hello, you,” he said, looking up from a page of tiny, fastidious handwriting. Every inch of his desk was heaped with books and looseleaf and photocopies striped with highlighter pen; Justin couldn’t work unless he was snugly nested in the middle of everything he might possibly need.
“I’m bored and it’s sunny,” I said. “Come for lunch.”
He checked his watch. “It’s only twenty to one.”
“Live dangerously,” I said.
Justin looked uncertain. “What about Rafe?”
“He’s big and ugly enough to look after himself. He can wait for Abby and Daniel.” Justin was still looking way too unsure for a decision of this magnitude, and I figured I had about a minute to get him out of there before Rafe came back. “Ah, Justin, come on. I’ll do this till you do.” I drummed “shave and a haircut, two bits” on the barrier with my fingernails.
“Argh,” Justin said, putting his pen down. “Chinese noise torture. You win.”
The obvious place to go was the edge of New Square, but you can see it through the library windows, so I dragged Justin over to the cricket pitch, where it would take Rafe longer to find us. It was a bright, cold day, high blue sky and the air like ice water. Down by the Pavilion a bunch of cricketers were doing earnest stylized things at each other, and up at our end four guys were playing Frisbee and trying to act like they weren’t doing it for the benefit of three industrially groomed girls on a bench, who were trying to look like they weren’t watching. Mating rituals: it was spring.