After about twenty minutes the front door opened and closed again, very quietly this time. A pause; then delicate, careful steps going up the stairs, into Justin’s room, and the explosive creak of bedsprings below me.
I gave it five minutes. When nothing interesting happened, I slid out of bed and ran downstairs—there was no point in trying to be quiet. “Oh,” Justin said, when I stuck my head round his door. “It’s you.”
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, half dressed: trousers, shoes but no socks, his shirt untucked and half buttoned. He looked awful.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
Justin ran his hands over his face, and I saw that they were trembling. “No,” he said. “I’m really not.”
“What happened?”
His hands came down and he stared at me, red-eyed. “Go to bed,” he said. “Just go to bed, Lexie.”
“Are you pissed off with me?”
“Not everything in this world is about you, you know,” Justin said coldly. “Believe it or not.”
“Justin,” I said, after a second. “I just wanted to—”
“If you really want to help,” Justin said, “then you can leave me alone.”
He got up and started fussing with the bedsheets, pulling them tight in fast, clumsy little jerks, his back turned to me. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything more, I closed his door gently behind me and went back upstairs. There was no light from Daniel’s room, but I could feel him there, only a few feet away in the darkness, listening and thinking.
The next day, when I came out of my five o’clock tutorial, Abby and Justin were waiting for me in the corridor. “Have you seen Rafe?” Abby asked.
“Not since lunch,” I said. They were dressed for outdoors—Abby in her long gray coat, Justin’s tweed jacket buttoned—and rain sparkled on their shoulders and in their hair. “Didn’t he have a thesis meeting?”
“That’s what he told us,” said Abby, shifting back against the wall to let a bunch of yelling undergrads tumble by, “but thesis meetings don’t last four hours, and anyway we checked Armstrong’s office. It’s locked. He’s not in there.”
“Maybe he went to the Buttery for a pint,” I suggested. Justin winced. We all knew that Rafe had been drinking a little more than was good for him, but nobody mentioned it, ever.
“We checked there too,” Abby said. “And he wouldn’t go to the Pav, he says it’s full of rugger-bugger wankers and it gives him boarding-school flashbacks. I don’t know where else to look.”
“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked, coming out of his tutorial across the corridor.
“We can’t find Rafe.”
“Hmm,” Daniel said, adjusting his armful of books and papers. “Have you tried ringing him?”
“Three times,” said Abby. “The first time he hit Reject Call, and after that he turned his phone off.”
“Are his things still in his carrel?”
“No,” Justin said, slumping against the wall and picking at a cuticle. “Everything’s gone.”
“But that’s a good sign, surely,” Daniel said, giving him a look of mild surprise. “It means nothing unexpected’s happened to him; he hasn’t been hit by a car, or had some kind of health emergency and been taken to hospital. He’s simply gone off on his own somewhere.”
“Yes, but where?” Justin’s voice was rising. “And what are we supposed to do now? He can’t get home without us. Do we just leave him here?”
Daniel gazed down the corridor, over the milling heads. The air smelled of wet carpet; somewhere round the corner a girl shrieked, high and piercing, and Justin and Abby and I all jumped before we realized she was only playing at terrified, the scream had already dissolved into loud flirtatious scolding. Daniel, biting down thoughtfully on his lip, didn’t seem to notice.
After a moment he sighed. “Rafe,” he said, and gave a quick, exasperated shake of his head. “Honestly. Yes, of course we leave him here; there’s really nothing else we can do. If he wants to come home, he can ring one of us, or take a taxi.”
"To Glenskehy ? And I’m not driving all the way back into town for him, just because he feels like being an idiot—”
“Well,” Daniel said, “I’m sure he’ll find a way.” He tucked a stray sheet of paper into the pile he was carrying. “Let’s go home.”
By the end of dinner—a half-arsed dinner, chicken fillets from the freezer, rice, a bowl of fruit shoved into the middle of the table—Rafe hadn’t rung. He had switched his phone back on, but he was still letting our calls go to voice mail. “It’s not like him,” Justin said. He was scraping compulsively, with one thumbnail, at the pattern on the edge of his plate.
“Sure it is,” said Abby firmly. “He’s gone on a bender and picked up some girl, just like he did that other time, remember? He was gone for two days.”
“That was different. And what are you nodding about?” Justin added, sourly, to me. “You don’t remember that. You weren’t even here for that.”
My adrenaline leaped, but no one looked suspicious; they were all too focused on Rafe to notice a slip that small. “I’m nodding because I’ve heard about it. There’s this thing called communication, you should try it sometime—” Everyone was in a prickly mood, including me. I wasn’t frantic with worry about Rafe, exactly, but the fact that he wasn’t there was making me edgy, and so was the fact that I couldn’t tell whether this was for solid investigative reasons—Frank’s beloved intuition—or just because without him the balance of the room felt all wrong, off-kilter and precarious.
“How was that different?” Abby wanted to know.
Justin shrugged. “We didn’t live together then.”
“So? All the more reason. What’s he supposed to do, if he wants to hook up with someone? Bring her here?”
“He’s supposed to ring us. Or at least leave us a note.”
“Saying what?” I demanded. I was chopping a peach into tiny bits. “ ‘Dear guys, I’m off to get laid. Will talk to you tomorrow, or later tonight if I can’t score, or at three in the morning if she turns out to be a crap shag—’ ”
“Don’t be vulgar,” Justin snapped. “And for God’s sake eat that bloody thing or stop messing about with it.”
“I’m not being vulgar, I’m just saying. And I’ll eat it when I’m ready. Do I tell you how to eat?”
“We should call the police,” Justin said.
“No,” Daniel said, tapping a cigarette on the back of his wrist. “It wouldn’t do any good at this point, anyway. The police wait a certain amount of time after someone goes missing—twenty-four hours, I think, although it may be more—before they set any kind of search in motion. Rafe’s an adult—”
“In theory,” said Abby.
“—and he has every right to stay out for the night.”
“But what if he’s done something stupid?” Justin’s voice was rising towards a wail.
“One of the reasons I dislike euphemisms,” Daniel said, shaking out his match and dropping it neatly into the ashtray, “is that they preclude any real communication. I think it’s a safe bet that Rafe has in fact done something stupid, but that covers such a wide variety of possibilities. I assume you’re worried that he’s busy committing suicide, which frankly I think is extremely unlikely.”
After a moment Justin said, without looking up, “Did he ever tell you about that time when he was sixteen? When his parents made him move school for the tenth time or whatever it was?”
“No pasts,” Daniel said.
“He wasn’t trying to kill himself,” Abby said. “He was trying to get some attention from his dickhead dad, and it didn’t work.”
“I said no pasts.”
“I’m not. I’m just saying this isn’t the same, Justin. Hasn’t Rafe been completely different, these last few months? Hasn’t he been way happier?”
“These last few months,” Justin said. “Not these last few weeks.”