Daniel inclined his head and made a small, courteous gesture with one hand: Please do.
“I think Lexie was planning to sell her share of the house.”
He didn’t rise to that, didn’t even blink. He was watching me blandly, like a professor at an oral exam, flicking the ash off his cigarette, aiming it carefully into the water where it would wash away.
“And I’m pretty sure I know why.”
I was sure he would bite on that one, positive—for a month now, he had to have been wondering—but he shook his head. “I don’t need to know,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter, at this stage—if it ever did. I think, you know, that all five of us have a ruthless streak, in our different ways. Possibly it goes with the territory; with having crossed that river, into being sure of what you want. Certainly Lexie was capable of great ruthlessness. But not of cruelty. When you think of her, please, remember that. She was never cruel.”
“She was going to sell up to your cousin Ned,” I said. “Mr. Executive Apartments himself. That sounds a lot like cruelty to me.”
Daniel startled me by laughing, a hard, humorless little snort. “Ned,” he said, with a wry twist to the corner of his mouth. “My God. I was far more worried about him than about Lexie. Lexie—like you—was strong-willed: if she decided to tell the police what had happened, then she would, but if she didn’t want to talk, no amount of questioning would get anything out of her. Ned, on the other hand . . .”
He sighed, an exasperated puff that blew smoke out of his nose, and shook his head. “It’s not just that Ned has a weak character,” he said, “but that he has no character at all; he’s essentially a cipher, composed entirely of the jumbled reflections of what he thinks other people want to see. We were talking earlier about knowing what you want . . . Ned was all fired up about this plan to turn the house into luxury apartments or a golf club, he had sheaves of complex financial projections showing how many hundreds of thousands we could each make over how many years, but he had no idea why he wanted to do it. Not a clue. When I asked him what on earth he wanted to do with all that money—it’s not as though he’s exactly on the breadline as it is—he stared at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. The question was completely unintelligible to him, light-years outside his frame of reference. It wasn’t that he had some deep longing to travel the world, say, or to quit his job and focus on painting the Great Irish Masterwork. He wanted the money purely because everything around him has told him that it’s what he should want. And he was utterly incapable of understanding that the five of us might have different priorities, priorities that we had established all by ourselves.”
He stubbed out his cigarette. “So,” he said, “you can see why I was worried about him. He had every reason in the world to keep his mouth shut about his dealings with Lexie—talking would blow any possibility of a sale right out of the water, and besides, he lives alone, as far as I know he doesn’t have an alibi; even he must realize that there’s nothing to prevent him from becoming the prime suspect. But I knew that if Mackey and O’Neill were to give him anything more than a cursory interrogation, all that would fly straight out the window. He would become exactly what they wanted him to be: the helpful witness, the concerned citizen doing his duty. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world, of course—he doesn’t have anything to offer that would constitute solid evidence—but he could cause us an awful lot of trouble and tension, and that was the last thing we needed. And it wasn’t as though I could gauge him, get some sense of what he was thinking, try to steer him away from disaster. Lexie—you—I could at least keep an eye on, to some extent, but Ned . . . I knew that getting in contact with him would be the worst thing I could possibly do, but, my God, it took everything I had not to do it anyway.”
Ned was dangerous territory. I didn’t want Daniel thinking too much about him, about my walks, about the possibilities. “You must have been raging, ” I said. “All of you, at both of them. I’m not surprised someone stabbed her.” I meant it. In a lot of ways, the amazing thing was that Lexie had made it this far.
Daniel considered this; his face looked like it did in the evenings, in the sitting room, when he was deep in a book, lost to the world. “We were angry,” he said, “at first. Furious; devastated; sabotaged, from within our own gates. But in a way, you know, the same thing that betrayed you in the end worked for you in the beginning: that crucial difference between Lexie and you. Only someone like Lexie—someone with no conception of action and consequence—would have been able to come home and settle back in as if nothing had ever happened. If she had been a slightly different kind of person, then none of us could ever have forgiven her, and you would never have made it in the door. But Lexie . . . We all knew that she had never for a moment intended to hurt us, and so it had never really occurred to her that we could be hurt; the devastation she was about to cause had truly never seemed like a reality to her. And so . . .” He drew in a long, tired breath. “And so,” he said, “she could come home.”
“As if nothing had ever happened,” I said.
“I thought so. She never meant to hurt us; none of us ever meant to hurt her, let alone kill her. I still believe that should count for something.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “That it just happened. She had been negotiating with Ned for a while, but before they could finalize anything, the four of you somehow found out.” Actually, I had the beginnings of an idea how that part had gone down, too, but there was no reason to share that with Daniel. I was saving that one for when it would make the loudest bang. “I think there was a blazing row, and in the middle of it, someone stabbed Lexie. Probably no one, not even the two of them, was sure exactly what had happened; Lexie could well have thought she had just been punched. She slammed out and ran for the cottage—maybe she was supposed to meet Ned that night, maybe it was just blind instinct, I don’t know. Either way, Ned never showed up. The ones who found her were you guys.”
Daniel sighed. “Roughly,” he said, “yes. In every essential, that’s what happened. Can’t you leave it at that? You know the gist of it; the other details would do no one the slightest bit of good and would do several people considerable harm. She was lovely, she was complicated and she is dead. What else is there that matters, now?”
“Well,” I said. “There’s the question of who killed her.”
“Has it occurred to you,” Daniel asked, and there was an undercurrent of some intense emotion building in his voice, “to wonder whether Lexie herself would want you to pursue this? No matter what she was considering doing, she loved us. Do you think she would want you setting out specifically to destroy us?”
Something still bending the air, rippling the stones under my feet; something high as a needle against the sky and shivering just behind each leaf. “She found me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for her. She came for me.”
“Possibly she did,” said Daniel. He was leaning towards me across the water, close, his elbows on his knees; behind the glasses his eyes were magnified, gray and bottomless. “But are you really so sure that what she wanted was revenge? She could so easily have run for the village, after all: knocked on a door, got someone to call an ambulance and the police. The villagers may not like us very much, but I doubt they would have denied help to an obviously wounded woman. Instead, she went straight to the cottage and simply stayed there, waiting. Haven’t you ever wondered if she may have been a willing participant in her own death and in the concealment of her killer—if she went consenting, one of us to the end? Haven’t you ever wondered if perhaps, for her sake, you should respect that?”
The air tasted strange, sweet, honey and salt. “Yeah,” I said. It was hard to talk, the thoughts seemed to take forever moving between my mind and my tongue. “I have. I’ve wondered all the time. But I’m not doing this for Lexie. I’m doing this because it’s my job.”
It’s such a cliché, and I said it so automatically; but the words seemed to whipcrack through the air startling and potent as electricity, rocketing down the ivy trails, burning white on the water. For a split second I was back in that first reeking stairwell with my hands in my pockets, looking up at that young junkie’s dead bewildered face. I was stone cold sober again, that dreamlike dazzle had dissolved out of the air and the bench was solid and clammy under my arse. Daniel was watching me with a new alertness in his eyes, watching me like he had never seen me before. It was only in that second that it hit me: it was true, what I had said to him, and maybe it had been true all along.
“Well,” he said, quietly. “In that case . . .”
He leaned back, slowly, away from me, against the wall. There was a long, humming silence.
“Where,” Daniel said. He stopped for an instant, but his voice stayed perfectly even: “Where is Lexie now?”
“In the morgue,” I said. “We haven’t been able to reach her next of kin.”
“We’ll do whatever needs to be done. I think she would prefer that.”
“The body is evidence in an open homicide case,” I said. “I doubt anyone’s going to release it to you. Until the investigation’s closed, she’ll have to stay where she is.”
There was no need for me to get graphic. I knew what he was seeing; my mind had a full-color slide show of the same images ready and waiting to play. Something rippled over Daniel’s face, a tiny spasm tightening his nose and lips.
“As soon as we know who did this to her,” I said, “I can argue that the body should be released to the rest of you. That you count as her next of kin.”
For a second his eyelids flickered; then his face turned blank. Looking back, I think—not that this is any excuse—that it was the easiest thing to miss about Daniel: how ruthlessly, lethally pragmatic he was, under the vague ivory-tower haze. An officer on the battlefield will leave his own dead brother behind without a second look, while the enemy’s still circling, to get his live men safe away.
“Obviously,” Daniel said, “I’d like you to leave this house. The others won’t be back for an hour or so; that should give you ample time to pack your things and make any necessary arrangements.”
This should hardly have come as a surprise, but it still felt like he’d slapped me straight across the face. He felt for his cigarette case. “I’d prefer that the others not find out who you are. I think you can imagine how badly it would upset them. I admit I’m not sure how to accomplish this, but surely you and Detective Mackey have a get-out clause in place, no? Some story you worked out to extricate you without raising any suspicions?”
It was the obvious thing to do, the only thing. You get burned, you get out, fast. And I had everything a girl could ask for. I had narrowed our suspects down to four; Sam and Frank would be well able to take it from there. I could get around the fact that this wasn’t on tape: disconnect the mike wire and claim it was accidental—Frank might not believe me, exactly, but he wouldn’t care—report back the bits of this conversation that suited me, bounce back home immaculate and triumphant and take a bow.
I never even considered doing it. “We do, yeah,” I said. “I can get out of here on a couple of hours’ notice without blowing my cover. I’m not going to, though. Not till I find out who killed Lexie, and why.”
Daniel turned his head and looked at me, and in that second I smelled danger, clear and cold as snow. Why not? I had invaded his home, his family, and I was trying to wreck them both for good. Either he or one of his own had already killed a woman for doing the same thing on a lesser scale. He was strong enough to do it and very possibly smart enough to get away with it, and I had left my gun in my bedroom. The trickle of water sang on at our feet and electricity fizzed through my back, down into the palms of my hands. I held his eyes and didn’t move, didn’t blink.
After a long moment his shoulders shifted, almost imperceptibly, and I saw his gaze turn inwards, abstracted. He had rejected that idea: he was moving towards some other plan, his mind clicking through options, sorting, classifying, connecting, faster than I could guess. “You won’t do it, you know,” he said. “You assume that my reluctance to hurt the others gives you an advantage—that, as they’ll continue to believe you’re Lexie, you have a chance at getting them to talk to you. But believe me, they’re all very well aware of what’s at stake. I’m not talking about the possibility of one or all of us going to jail; you have no evidence pointing towards any one of us in particular, no case against us either individually or collectively, or you’d have made your arrests long ago and this charade would never have been necessary. In fact, I’m willing to bet that, until a few minutes ago, you weren’t actually certain that your target was within Whitethorn House.”