“Why? Why should we let him get away with—”
“Because,” I said, in a small voice. “I want to go for my walk tonight.”
That stopped Rafe in his tracks, just like I had known it would; he stared at me, one hand still on the window handle. Justin stalled the car with a horrible grinding sound, managed to jam it into gear and hit the accelerator hard. “Charming,” he said. There was a brittle edge to his voice: any kind of nastiness always upset him. “That was really charming. I mean, I realize they don’t like us, but that was completely unnecessary. I didn’t do anything to that man. I braked to let him cross. What did he do that for?”
I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that one. Sam had been busy in Glenskehy, the last few days. A detective swanning down from Dublin in his city-boy suit, walking into their sitting rooms asking questions, patiently digging for their buried stories; and all because a girl from the Big House had got herself stabbed. Sam would have done his job gently and deftly, he always does; it wasn’t him they would hate.
“Nothing,” said Rafe. He and I were twisted around in our seats to watch the old man, who was standing on the pavement outside the newsagent’s, leaning on his stick and staring after us. “He did it because he’s a knuckle-dragging bog monster and he loathes anyone who isn’t actually his wife or his sister or both. It’s like living in the middle of bloody Deliverance.”
“You know something?” Abby said coldly, without turning around. “I’m getting really, really sick of your colonial attitude. Just because he didn’t go to some fancy English prep school, that doesn’t necessarily make him your inferior. And if Glenskehy isn’t good enough for you, you’re free to find somewhere that is.”
Rafe opened his mouth, then shrugged disgustedly and closed it again. He gave his shoelace a vicious jerk; it broke, and he swore under his breath.
If the man had been thirty or forty years younger, I would have been memorizing his description to pass on to Sam. The fact that he wasn’t a viable suspect—this guy had not outrun five students out for blood—sent a nasty little ripple across my shoulders. Abby turned up the volume; Rafe tossed his shoe on the floor and shoved up two fingers at the back windscreen. This, I thought, is going to be trouble.
“OK,” Frank said, that night. “I got my FBI friend to have his boys do some more digging. I told him we have reason to believe that our girl took off because she had a nervous breakdown, so we’re looking for signs and possible causes. Is that what we think, just out of interest?”
“I have no idea what you think, Frankie boy. Don’t ask me to climb into that black hole.” I was up my tree. I wriggled my back up against one half of the trunk and braced my feet against the other, so I could lean my notebook on my thigh. There was just enough moonlight, between the branches, that I could see the page. “Hang on a sec.” I clamped the phone under my jaw and hunted for my pen.
“You sound cheerful,” Frank said, suspiciously.
“I just had a gorgeous dinner and a laugh. What’s not to be cheerful about?” I managed to extract the pen from my jacket pocket without falling out of the tree. “OK, shoot.”
Frank made an exasperated noise. “Lovely for some. Just don’t get too chummy. There’s always a chance you may have to arrest one of these people.”
“I thought you were gunning for the mysterious stranger in the black cape.”
“I’m keeping an open mind. And the cape’s optional. OK, here’s everything we’ve got—you did say you wanted ordinary stuff, so don’t blame me. On the sixteenth of August 2000, Lexie-May-Ruth switched mobile-phone providers to get cheaper local minutes. On the twenty-second, she got a raise at the diner, seventy-five cents extra an hour. On the twenty-eighth, Chad proposed to her, and she said yes. The first weekend of September, the two of them drove to Virginia so she could meet Chad’s parents, who said she was a very sweet girl and brought them a potted plant.”
“The engagement ring,” I said, keeping my voice easy. This was setting ideas exploding in my head like popcorn, but I didn’t want Frank to know that. “Did she take it with her when she split?”
“No. The cops asked Chad at the time. She left it on her bedside table, but that was normal. She always left it there when she went to work, in case it got lost or fell in the hash browns or whatever. It wasn’t a big fancy rock or anything. Chad’s the bassist in a grunge band called Man From Nantucket, and they have yet to get their big break, so he makes a living as a carpenter. He’s skint.”
My notes were scrawly and went at a funny angle, on account of the light and the tree, but I could just about read them. “Then what?”
"On the twelfth of September she and Chad bought a PlayStation on their joint credit, which I suppose is as good a statement of commitment as any, these days. On the eighteenth, she sold her car, an ’86 Ford, for six hundred bucks—she told Chad she wanted to get something a little less beat-up, now that she had the extra money from the raise. On the twenty-seventh, she went to her doctor with an ear infection, probably contracted from swimming; he gave her antibiotics and it cleared up. And on the tenth of October, she’s gone. Is that what you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly the kind of stuff I had in mind. Thanks, Frank. You’re a gem.”
“I’m thinking,” he said, “something happened between the twelfth and the eighteenth of September. Up through the twelfth, everything says she’s planning on staying put: she’s getting engaged, she’s meeting the parents, she and Chad are buying stuff as a couple. But on the eighteenth she sells her car, which tells me she’s getting together the money to split. That the way you’re thinking?”
“Makes sense,” I said, but I knew Frank was wrong. That shifting pattern had slid into focus with a soft, final click, and I knew why Lexie had taken off running from North Carolina; knew it as clear as if she were sitting weightless on a branch beside me, swinging her legs in the moonlight and whispering in my ear. And I knew why she had been about to take off running from Whitethorn House. Someone had tried to hold her.
“I’ll try and find out more about that week, maybe get someone to re-interview poor old Chad. If we can figure out what changed her plans, we should be able to put our finger on the mystery man.”
“Sounds good. Thanks, Frank. Let me know how you get on.”
“Don’t do anyone I wouldn’t do,” he said, and hung up.
I angled the screen of my mobile towards the page, so I could read over my notes. The PlayStation meant nothing; it’s easy to buy on credit with no plans to pay it off, no plans to be anywhere within reach. The last solid thing that said she intended to stay put was the phone-provider switch, back in August. You don’t care about cheaper minutes unless you’re going to be around to use them. On August 16, she had been tucked snugly into her May-Ruth life and going nowhere.
And then, less than two weeks later, poor grunge Chad had proposed. After that, not one thing said Lexie was staying. She had said yes, smiled and bided her time till she got the money together, and then run as far and as fast as she could and never once looked behind. It hadn’t been Frank’s mystery stalker after all, it hadn’t been some masked menace slinking out of the shadows with a glinting blade. It had been as simple as a cheap ring.
And this time, there had been the baby: a lifelong tie to some man, somewhere. She could have got rid of it, just like she could have turned Chad down, but that had been beside the point. Just the thought of that tie had sent her slamming off the walls, frantic as a trapped bird.
The missed period and the flight prices; and, somewhere in there, N. N was either the trap trying to hold her here or, in some way I needed to find, her way out.
The others were sprawled on the sitting-room floor in front of the fire, like kids, rummaging through a wrecked traveling case that Justin had found somewhere. Rafe had his legs flung companionably across Abby’s—they had apparently made up their fight from that morning. The rug was strewn with mugs and a plate of ginger biscuits and a medley of small battered things: pockmarked marbles, tin soldiers, half of a clay pipe. “Cool,” I said, dropping my jacket on the sofa and flopping down between Daniel and Justin. “What’ve we got?”
“Odd oddments,” Rafe said. “Here. For you.” He wound up a moth-eaten clockwork mouse and sent it ticking along the floor towards me. It ground to a halt halfway, with a depressed scraping sound.
“Have one of these instead,” Justin said, stretching to pull the biscuits across to us. “Tastier.”
I got a biscuit in one hand, dipped the other into the traveling case and found something hard and heavy. I came up holding what looked like a beaten-up wooden box; the lid had said “EM” once upon a time, in mother-of-pearl inlay, but there were only a few bits left. “Ah, excellent,” I said, opening the lid. “This is like the world’s best lucky dip.”
It was a music box, tarnished cylinder and splitting blue silk lining, and after a whirring second it plucked out a tune: “Greensleeves,” rusty and sweet. Rafe put a hand over the clockwork mouse, which was still fizzing halfheartedly. There was a long silence, just the crackle of the fire, while we listened.
“Beautiful,” Daniel said softly, closing the box, when the tune ended. “That’s beautiful. Next Christmas . . .”
“Can I have this in my room, to send me to sleep?” I asked. “Till Christmas?”
“Now you need lullabies?” Abby asked, but she was grinning at me. “Course you can.”
“I’m glad we didn’t find it before,” Justin said. “This must be valuable; they’d only have made us sell it, towards the taxes.”
“Not that valuable,” Rafe said, taking the box from me and examining it. “Basic ones like this go for about a hundred quid—a lot less in this condition. My grandmother used to collect them. Dozens of them, on every surface, just waiting to fall off and smash and send her into a fit if you walked too hard.”