The Likeness

by Tana French

  “But this girl isn’t Lexie Madison. She’s an identity thief; I could go down to Fraud in the morning and find you hundreds more just like her. There is no Lexie Madison. You and Mackey made her up.”

  His hands had tightened on mine. “I know,” I said. “That’s sort of the point.”

  The corner of Sam’s mouth twisted. “Like I said. The man’s mad.”

  I didn’t exactly disagree with him. I’ve always thought one of the reasons for Frank’s legendary fearlessness is that, way deep down, he’s never quite managed to connect with reality. To him every operation is one of those war games the Pentagon plays, only even cooler, because the stakes are higher and the results are tangible and long-lasting. The fracture is small enough and he’s smart enough that it never shows in obvious ways; but, while he’s keeping every angle covered and every situation beautifully, icily under control, some part of him truly believes he’s being played by Sean Connery.

  I spotted this because I recognize it. My own border fence between real and not-real has never been all that great. My friend Emma, who likes things to add up neatly, claims that this is because my parents died when I was too young to take it in: they were there one day and gone the next, crashing through that fence so hard and fast they left it splintered for good. When I was Lexie Madison for eight months she turned into a real person to me, a sister I lost or left behind on the way; a shadow somewhere inside me, like the shadows of vanishing twins that show up on people’s X-rays once in a blue moon. Even before she came back to find me I knew I owed her something, for being the one who lived.

  This was presumably not what Sam wanted to hear; he had enough on his plate without adding several new flavors of weird into the mix. Instead—it was the closest I could get—I tried to tell him about undercover. I told him how your senses are never quite the same again, how colors turn fierce enough to brand you and the air tastes bright and jagged as that clear liqueur filled with tiny flakes of gold; how the way you walk changes, your balance turns fine and taut as a surfer’s, when you spend every second on the shifting edge of a fast risky wave. I told him how afterwards I never shared a spliff with my mates or took E in a club again, because no high could ever compare. I told him how damn good at it I was, a natural, better than I’ll be at DV in a million years.

  When I finished, Sam was looking at me with a worried little furrow between his eyebrows. “What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying you want to transfer back into Undercover?”

  He had taken his hands off mine. I looked at him, sitting across the sofa with his hair rucked up on one side, frowning at me. “No,” I said, “that’s not it,” and watched his face clear in relief. “That’s not it at all.”

  * * *

  This is the part I didn’t tell Sam: bad stuff happens to undercovers. A few of them get killed. Most lose friends, marriages, relationships. A couple turn feral, cross over to the other side so gradually that they never see it happening till it’s too late, and end up with discreet, complicated early-retirement plans. Some, and never the ones you’d think, lose their nerve—no warning, they just wake up one morning and all at once it hits them what they’re doing, and they freeze like tightrope walkers who’ve looked down. This guy McCall: he’d infiltrated an IRA splinter group and nobody thought he even knew what fear was, till one evening he phoned in from an alleyway outside a pub. He couldn’t go back in there, he said, and he couldn’t walk away because his legs wouldn’t stop shaking. He was crying. Come get me, he said; I want to go home. When I met him, he was working in Records. And some go the other way, the most lethal way of all: when the pressure gets to be too much, it’s not their nerve that breaks, it’s their fear. They lose the capacity to be afraid, even when they should be. These can’t ever go home again. They’re like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were. Some people are undercovers all the way to the bone; the job has taken them whole.

  I was never afraid of getting killed and I was never afraid of losing my nerve. My kind of courage holds up best under fire; it’s different dangers, more refined and insidious ones, that shake me. But the other things: I worried about those. Frank told me once—and I don’t know whether he’s right or not, and I didn’t tell Sam this either—that all the best undercovers have a dark thread woven into them, somewhere.

  3

  So, on Sunday evening, Sam and I went to Dublin Castle for Frank’s council of war. Dublin Castle is where the Murder squad works. I had cleared out my desk there on another long cool evening, in autumn: stacked my paperwork in neat piles and labeled each pile with a Post-it, thrown away the cartoons stuck to my computer and the chewed pens and old Christmas cards and stale M&Ms in my desk drawers, turned off the light and closed the door behind me.

  Sam picked me up. He was very quiet. He had been up and out early that morning, so early that the flat was still dark when he leaned over to kiss me good-bye. I didn’t ask him about the case. If he had found anything good, even the slimmest lead, he would have told me.

  “Don’t let your man pressure you,” he said, in the car. “Into doing anything you don’t want to.”

  “Come on,” I said. “When have I ever let anyone pressure me into anything?”

  Sam adjusted his rearview mirror, carefully. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  When he unlocked the door, the smell of the building came at me like a shout: an old, elusive smell, damp and smoke and lemon, nothing like the antiseptic tang of DV in the new building up in Phoenix Park. I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories, but every step hit me straight in the gut with something: me running down those stairs with a bunch of files in each hand and an apple caught between my teeth, my partner and me high-fiving each other outside that door after getting our first confession in that interview room; the two of us double-teaming the superintendent down that hallway, one in each ear, trying to hassle him into giving us more overtime. It seemed like the corridors had an Escher look, the walls all tilting in subtle, seasick ways, but I couldn’t focus my eyes enough to figure out exactly how.

  “How’re you doing?” Sam asked quietly.

  “Starving,” I said. “Whose idea was it to do this at dinnertime?”

  Sam smiled, relieved, and gave my hand a quick squeeze. “We don’t have an incident room yet,” he said. “Till we decide . . . well, how we’re doing this; where we’re working out of.” Then he opened the door of the Murder squad room.

  Frank was straddling a backwards chair at the head of the room, in front of the big whiteboard, and all his reassurances about a casual chat between him and me and Sam had been bollocks. Cooper, the state pathologist, and O’Kelly, the superintendent of the Murder squad, were sitting at desks on opposite sides of the room with their arms folded, wearing identical narky looks. This should have been funny—Cooper looks like a heron and O’Kelly looks like a bulldog with a comb-over—but actually it gave me a very bad feeling. Cooper and O’Kelly hate each other; getting them in the same room for any length of time takes a lot of skilled persuasion and a couple of bottles of pretty serious wine. For some cryptic reason of his own, Frank had pulled out all the stops to get them both there. Sam shot me a wary, warning glance. He hadn’t been expecting this either.

  “Maddox,” O’Kelly said, managing to make it sound injured. O’Kelly never had any use for me when I was on Murder, but the second I applied for a transfer, I somehow morphed into the serpent’s-tooth protégée who snubbed years of devoted mentoring and buggered off to DV. “How’s life in the minor leagues?”

  “All sunshine and flowers, sir,” I said. When I’m tense, I get flippant. “Evening, Dr. Cooper.”

  “Always a pleasure, Detective Maddox,” said Cooper. He ignored Sam. Cooper hates Sam, too, and more or less everyone else. I’d stayed in his good books so far, but if he discovered I was going out with Sam, I would shoot down his Christmas-card list at the speed of light.

  “At least in Murder,” O’Kelly said, giving my ripped jeans a fishy
look—for some reason I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear my nice new appropriate-image clothes, not for this—“most of us can afford decent gear. How’s Ryan getting on?”

  I wasn’t sure whether the question was bitchy or not. Rob Ryan used to be my partner, back in Murder. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I hadn’t seen O’Kelly, either, or Cooper; not since I’d transferred out. This was all happening too fast and out of control. “Sends love and kisses,” I said.

  “Can’t say I didn’t suspect,” O’Kelly said, and sniggered at Sam, who looked away.

  The squad room holds twenty, but it was Sunday-evening empty: computers off, desks scattered with paperwork and fast-food wrappers—the cleaners don’t come in till Monday morning. In the back corner by the window, the desks where Rob and I used to sit were still at right angles, the way we liked them, so we could be shoulder to shoulder. Some other team, maybe the newbies brought in to replace us, had taken them over. Whoever was at my desk had a kid—silver-framed photo of a grinning little boy with his front teeth missing—and a pile of statement sheets, sun falling across them. It always used to get in my eyes, this time of day.

  I was having a hard time breathing; the air felt too thick, almost solid. One of the fluorescents was on the fritz and it gave the room a shimmery, epileptic look, something out of a fever dream. A couple of the big binders lined up on the filing cabinets still had my handwriting down the spines. Sam pulled up his chair to his desk and glanced at me with a faint furrow between his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for that. I concentrated on Frank’s face. There were bags under his eyes and he had cut himself shaving, but he looked wide awake, alert and energized. He was looking forward to this.

  He caught me watching him. “Glad to be back?”

  “Ecstatic,” I said. I wondered, suddenly, if he had got me into this room deliberately, knowing it might throw me. I dropped my satchel on a desk—Costello’s; I knew the handwriting on the paperwork—leaned back against the wall and stuck my hands in my jacket pockets.

  “Companionable though this may be,” Cooper said, edging a little farther from O’Kelly, “I, for one, would be delighted to come to the point of this little gathering.”

  “Fair enough,” Frank said. “The Madison case—well, the Jane Doe alias Madison case. What’s the official name?”

  “Operation Mirror,” Sam said. Obviously the word about the victim’s looks had spread as far as headquarters. Beautiful. I wondered whether it was too late to change my mind, go home and order pizza.

  Frank nodded. “Operation Mirror it is. It’s been three days, and we’ve got no suspects, no leads and no ID. As you all know, I think it might be time to try a different tack—”

  “Hold your horses there,” O’Kelly said. “We’ll get to your ‘different tack’ in a moment, don’t you worry about that. But first, I’ve a question.”

  “Off you go,” Frank said magnanimously, with an expansive gesture to match.

  O’Kelly gave him a dirty look. There was an awful lot of testosterone circulating in this room. “Unless I’m missing something,” he said, “this girl was murdered. Correct me if I’m wrong here, Mackey, but I’m not seeing any indication of domestic violence, and I’m not seeing anything that says she was undercover. Why did you people”—he jerked his chin at me and Frank—“want in on this one to begin with?”

  “I didn’t,” I told him. “I don’t.”

  “The victim was using an identity I created for one of my officers,” Frank said, “and I take that pretty personally. So you’re stuck with me. You may or may not be stuck with Detective Maddox; that’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “I can tell you that right now,” I said.

  “Humor me,” Frank said. “Don’t tell me till I’ve finished. Once you’ve heard me out, you can tell me to fuck off all you like, and I won’t say a word. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  I gave up. This is another of Frank’s skills: the ability to sound like he’s making a vast concession, so that you come across as an unreasonable cow if you won’t meet him halfway. “Sounds like a dream date,” I said.

  “Fair enough?” Frank asked everyone. “At the end of this evening, you tell me to climb back in my box, and I’ll never mention my little idea again. Just hear me out first. That OK with everyone?”

  O’Kelly grunted noncommittally; Cooper gave a not-my-problem shrug; Sam, after a moment, nodded. I was getting that specific feeling of Frank-related impending doom.

  “And before we all get too carried away,” Frank said, “let’s make sure the resemblance stands up to a closer look. If it doesn’t, then there’s no point fighting about it, is there?”

  Nobody answered. He swung himself off the chair, pulled a handful of photos out of his file and started Blu-tacking them to the whiteboard. The shot from the Trinity ID, blown up to eight by ten; the dead girl’s face in profile, eye closed and bruised-looking; a full-length shot of her on the autopsy table—still dressed, thank Jesus—with her fists clenched on top of that dark star of blood; a close-up of her hands, unfurled and stippled with brownish-black, streaks of silver nail polish showing through the blood. “Cassie, could you do me a favor? Stand over here for a minute?”

  You fucker, I thought. I peeled myself off the wall, went to the whiteboard and stood against it like I was having a mug shot taken. I would have bet good money that Frank had already pulled my photo from Records and compared it to these with a magnifying glass. He prefers to ask questions to which he already knows the answers.

  “We should really be using the actual body for this,” Frank told us cheerfully, biting a piece of Blu-tack in half, “but I figured that might be a little weird.”

  “God forbid,” said O’Kelly.

  I wanted Rob, dammit. I had never let myself think that before, not one time in all the months since we stopped talking, no matter how tired I got or how late at night it was. At first I wanted to kick his ass so badly it was doing my head in, I was throwing things at my wall on a regular basis. So I stopped thinking about him altogether. But the squad room all round me, and the four of them peering intently as if I were some exotic forensic exhibit, and those photos so close to my cheek I could feel them; the acid-trip feeling I’d had all week was swelling into a wild, dizzying wave and I hurt, somewhere under my breastbone. I would have sold a limb to have Rob there for just one instant, raising a sardonic eyebrow at me behind O’Kelly’s back, pointing out blandly that the swap would never work because the dead girl had been pretty. For a vicious second I could have sworn I smelled his aftershave.

  “Eyebrows,” Frank said, tapping the ID shot—I had to stop myself from jumping—“eyebrows are good. Eyes are good. Lexie’s fringe is shorter, you’ll need a trim; apart from that, the hair’s good. Ears—turn to the side for a second?—ears are good. Yours pierced?”

  “Three times,” I said.

  “She only had two. Let’s have a look . . .” Frank leaned in. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t even see ’em unless I’m looking for them. Nose is good. Mouth is good. Chin’s good. Jawline’s good.” Sam blinked, a rapid flick like a wince, on every one.

  “Your cheekbones and clavicles appear to be more pronounced than the victim’s,” Cooper said, studying me with vaguely creepy professional interest. “May I ask how much you weigh?”

  I never weigh myself. “A hundred and something. Sixteen? seventeen?”

  “You’re a little thinner than she was,” Frank said. “No problem; a week or two of hospital food’ll do that. Her clothes are size six, jeans waist twenty-nine inches, bra size 34B, shoe size seven. All of that sound like it’ll fit?”

  “Near enough,” I said. I wondered how the fuck my life had ended up here. I thought about finding some magic button that would rewind me, at lightning speed, till I was lounging happily in the back corner kicking Rob in the leg every time O’Kelly came out with a cliché, instead of standing here like a Muppet showing people my ears and trying to stop my voice shaking while we discussed whether I would fit into a dead girl’s bra.

  “A brand-new wardrobe,” Frank told me, grinning. “Who says
this job doesn’t have perks?”

  “She could do with it,” O’Kelly said bitchily.

  Frank moved on to the full-length shot, drew a finger down it from shoulders to feet, glancing back and forth at me. “Build is all good, give or take the few pounds.” His finger on the photo made a long dragging squeak; Sam shifted, sharply, in his chair. “Shoulder width looks good, waist-to-hip ratio looks good—we can measure, just to be sure, but the weight difference gives us a little leeway there. Leg length looks good.”

  He tapped the close-up. “These are important; people notice hands. Give us a look, Cassie?”

  I held out my hands like he was going to cuff me. I couldn’t make myself look at the photo; I could barely breathe. This was one question to which Frank couldn’t already know the answer. This could be it: the difference that would slice me away from this girl, sever the link with one hard final snap and let me go home.