The Likeness

by Tana French

  “He always is,” Rafe said, to the window.

  “He figured this would happen,” Abby said. “He wasn’t sure which one of us they’d hang onto—he thought probably Justin or Lexie, maybe both of you—but he figured they’d split us up.”

  “Me? Why me?” Justin’s voice was getting a hysterical edge.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Justin, act like you have a pair,” Rafe snapped.

  “Slow down,” Abby said, “or we’ll get pulled over. They’re just trying to shake us up, in case we know anything we’re not telling them.”

  “But why do they think—”

  “Don’t get into that. That’s what they want us doing: wondering what they’re thinking, why they’re doing stuff, getting all freaked out. Don’t play into their hands.”

  “If we let those apes outwit us,” Rafe said, “then we deserve to go to jail. Surely to God we’re smarter than—”

  “Stop it!” I yelled, banging my fist against the back of Abby’s seat. Justin gasped and nearly sent the car off the road, but I didn’t care. “You stop it! This isn’t a competition! This is my life and it’s not a fucking game and I hate all of you!”

  Then I startled the living hell out of myself by bursting into tears. I hadn’t cried in months, not for Rob, not for my lost life in Murder, not for any of the terrible fallout of Operation Vestal, but I cried then. I pressed the sleeve of my sweater over my mouth and bawled my eyes out, for Lexie in every one of her changing faces, for the baby whose face no one would ever see, for Abby spinning on moonlit grass and Daniel smiling as he watched her, for Rafe’s expert hands on the piano and Justin kissing my forehead, for what I had done to them and what I was about to do, for a million lost things; for the wild speed of that car, how mercilessly fast it was taking us where we were going.

  After a while Abby reached into the glove compartment and passed me a packet of tissues. She had her window open and the long roar of the air sounded like high wind in trees, and it was so peaceful, in there, that I just kept crying.

  23

  As soon as Justin pulled up in the stables, I jumped out of the car and ran for the house, pebbles flying up under my feet. Nobody called after me. I jammed my key into the lock, left the door swinging open and thumped upstairs to my room.

  It felt like ages before I heard the others coming in (door closing, fast overlapping undertones moving into the sitting room), but actually it was less than sixty seconds—I had an eye on my watch. I figured I needed to give them about ten minutes. Any less, and they wouldn’t have time to compare notes—their first chance all day—and work themselves into a full-on panic; any more, and Abby would pull herself together and start bringing the guys back into line.

  During those ten minutes I listened to the voices downstairs, taut and muffled and fringed with hysteria, and I got ready. Late-afternoon sun was flooding through my bedroom window and the air blazed so bright that I felt weightless, suspended in amber, every movement I made as clear and rhythmic and measured as part of some ritual that I had been preparing for all my life. My hands felt like they were moving on their own, smoothing out my girdle—it was starting to get grubby by this time, it wasn’t exactly something I could stick in the washing machine—pulling it on, tucking the hem into my jeans, easing my gun into place, as calmly and precisely as if I had forever and a day. I thought about that afternoon a million miles away, in my flat, when I had put on Lexie’s clothes for the first time: how they had felt like armor, like ceremonial robes; how they had made me want to laugh out loud from something like happiness.

  When the ten minutes were up I pulled the door closed behind me, on that little room full of light and lily-of-the-valley smell, and listened as the voices downstairs trailed off into silence. I washed my face in the bathroom, dried it carefully and straightened my towel between Abby’s and Daniel’s. My face in the mirror looked very strange, pale and huge-eyed, staring out at me with some crucial, unreadable warning. I tugged my sweater down and checked to make sure the bulge of the gun didn’t show. Then I went downstairs.

  They were in the sitting room, all three of them. For a second, before they saw me, I stood in the doorway watching them. Rafe was sprawled on the sofa, snapping a pack of cards from hand to hand in a fast restless arc. Abby, curled in her chair, had her head bent over the doll and her bottom lip caught hard between her teeth; she was trying to sew, but every stitch took her about three stabs. Justin was in one of the wingbacked chairs with a book, and for some reason he was the one who almost broke my heart: those narrow hunched shoulders, the darn in the sleeve of his sweater, those long hands on wrists as thin and vulnerable as a little boy’s. The coffee table was scattered with glasses and bottles—vodka, tonic, orange juice; something had splashed onto the table as they poured, but no one had bothered to clean it up. On the floor, shadows of ivy curled like cut-outs through the sunlight.

  Then their heads came up, one by one, and their faces turned towards me, expressionless and watchful as they had been that first day on the steps. “How’re you doing?” Abby asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Have a drink,” Rafe said, nodding at the table. “If you want anything that’s not vodka, you’ll have to get it yourself.”

  “I’m getting bits back,” I said. There was a long slant of sun lying across the floorboards at my feet, making the new varnish shine like water. I kept my eyes on that. “Bits of that night. They said that might happen, the doctors did.”

  Trill and snap of the cards, again. “We know,” Rafe said.

  “They let us watch,” Abby said softly. “While you talked to Mackey.”

  I jerked my head up and stared at them, open-mouthed. “Well, Jesus,” I said, after a moment. “Were you going to tell me that? Ever?”

  “We’re telling you now,” said Rafe.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and the shake in my voice sounded like I was an inch from more tears. “Fuck the lot of you. How stupid do you think I am? Mackey was a total dickhead to me and I still kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t want to get you into trouble. But you were just going to let me keep being the idiot, for the rest of our lives, while all of you knew—” I pressed the back of my wrist over my mouth.

  Abby said, very quietly and very carefully, “You kept your mouth shut.”

  “I shouldn’t have,” I said, into my wrist. “I should’ve just told him everything I remember and let you bloody well deal with it.”

  “What else,” Abby asked, “what else do you remember?”

  My heart felt like it was about to slam straight out of my chest. If I had this wrong, then I was going down in flames, and every second of this month had been for nothing at all—crashing through these four lives, hurting Sam, staking my job: all for nothing. I was throwing every chip I had onto the table, without the slimmest clue how good my hand was. In that instant I thought of Lexie: how she had lived her whole life like this, all in on the blind; what it had cost her, in the end.

  “The jacket,” I said. “The note, in the jacket pocket.”

  For a second I thought I had lost. Their faces, upturned to me, were so utterly blank, as if what I had said meant nothing at all. I was already whipping through ways to backpedal (coma dream? morphine hallucination?) when Justin whispered, a tiny devastated breath, “Oh God.”

  You didn’t usually bring your cigarettes on your walk, Daniel had said. I had been so focused on covering the slipup, it had taken me days to realize: I had burned Ned’s note. If Lexie didn’t have a lighter on her, then—short of eating the notes, which was a little extreme even for her—she had no quick way of getting rid of them. Maybe she had ripped them to tiny pieces on her way home, thrown the bits into hedges as she passed, like a dark Hansel-and-Gretel trail; or maybe she hadn’t wanted to leave even that much trace, maybe she had shoved them into her pocket to flush or burn later, at home.

  She had been so fiercely careful, standing guard over her secrets. There was only one mistake I could imagine her making. Just once, hurrying home in the dark and the lashing rain—because it had to have been raining—with the baby already tur
ning the edges of her mind to cotton wool and escape hammering through every vein, she had pushed the note into her pocket without remembering that the jacket she was wearing wasn’t all hers. She had been betrayed by the same thing she was betraying: the closeness of them, how much they had shared.

  “Well,” Rafe said, reaching for his glass, one eyebrow arching up. He was trying for his best world-weary look, but his nostrils flared, just slightly, with each breath. “Nicely done, Justin my friend. This should be interesting.”

  “What? What are you talking about, nicely done? She already knew—”

  “Shut up,” said Abby. She had gone white, freckles standing out like face paint.

  Rafe ignored her. “Well, if she didn’t, she does now.”

  “It’s not my fault. Why do you always, always blame me for everything?”

  Justin was very close to losing it. Rafe raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Do you hear me complaining? As far as I’m concerned, it’s about bloody time we got this over with.”

  “We are not discussing this,” Abby said, “until Daniel gets home.”

  Rafe started to laugh. “Oh, Abby,” he said. “I do love you, but sometimes I wonder about you. You have to know that, once Daniel gets home, we won’t be discussing this at all.”

  “This is about all five of us. We don’t talk about it till we’re all here.”

  “That’s crap,” I said. My voice was rising and I let it. “It’s such crap I can’t even listen to it. If this is about all five of us, then why didn’t you tell me weeks ago? If you can talk about it behind my back, then surely to God we can talk about it without Daniel.”

  “Oh God,” Justin whispered again. His mouth was open, one hand trembling inches from it.

  Abby’s mobile started to ring, in her bag. I had been listening for that sound all the way home, all the time in my room. Frank had let Daniel go.

  “Leave it!” I yelled, loud enough to stop her hand midreach. “It’s Daniel, and I know exactly what he’s going to say anyway. He’ll just order you not to tell me anything, and I am so fucking sick of him treating me like I’m six! If anyone has a right to know exactly what happened here, it’s me. If you try to answer that bloody phone I swear I’m going to stamp on it!” I meant it, too. Sunday afternoon, all the traffic was headed into Dublin, not out; if Daniel floored it—and he would—and managed not to get pulled over, he could be home in maybe half an hour. I needed every second of that.

  Rafe laughed, a small rough sound. “Attagirl,” he said, raising his glass to me.

  Abby stared at me, her hand still halfway to her bag.

  “If you guys don’t tell me what’s going on,” I said, “I’m phoning the cops right now and I’m telling them everything I remember. I am.”

  “Jesus,” Justin whispered. “Abby . . .”

  The phone stopped ringing.

  “Abby,” I said, taking a deep breath. I could feel my nails digging into my hands. “I can’t do this if you guys keep leaving me out. This is important. I can’t . . . we can’t work this way. Either we’re all in this together or we’re not.”

  Justin’s phone rang.

  “You don’t even have to tell me who actually did it, if you don’t want to.” I was pretty sure that if I listened hard enough I’d hear Frank banging his head off a wall, somewhere, but I didn’t care: one step at a time. “I just want to know what happened. I’m so sick of everyone knowing but me. I’m so sick of it. Please.”

  “She’s got every right to know,” Rafe said. “And personally, I’m also pretty sick of living my life on the basis of ‘Because Daniel said so.’ How well has that been working out for us, so far?”

  The ringing stopped. “We should call him back,” Justin said, half out of his chair. “Shouldn’t we? What if he’s been arrested and he needs bail money, or something?”

  “He hasn’t been arrested,” Abby said automatically. She dropped back into the chair and ran her hands over her face, blew out a long breath. “I keep telling you, they need evidence to arrest someone. He’s fine. Lexie, sit down.”

  I stayed where I was. “Oh, God, sit down,” Rafe said, on a long-suffering sigh. “I’m going to tell you this whole pathetic saga anyway, whether anyone else likes it or not, and you’re getting on my nerves, fidgeting there. And Abby, chill out. We should have done this weeks ago.”

  After a moment I went to my chair, by the fireplace. “Much better,” Rafe said, grinning at me. There was a reckless, risky gaiety in his face; he looked happier than he had in weeks. “Have a drink.”

  “I don’t want one.”

  He swung his legs off the sofa, poured a big sloppy vodka and orange and passed it to me. “Actually, I think we should all have another drink. We’re going to need it.” He topped up glasses with a flourish—Abby and Justin didn’t seem to notice—and raised his to the room. “Here’s to full disclosure.”

  “OK,” Abby said, on a deep breath. “OK. If you really want to do this, and it’s coming back to you anyway, then I guess . . . what the hell.”

  Justin opened his mouth, then shut it again and bit his lips.

  Abby ran her hands through her hair, smoothing it hard. “Where do you want us to . . . ? I mean, I don’t know how much you remember, or . . .”

  “Bits,” I said. “They don’t fit together or anything. Just go from the beginning. ” All the adrenaline had dissolved out of my blood and I felt so calm, all of a sudden. This was the last thing I would ever do in Whitethorn House. I could feel it all around me, every inch of it singing with sun and dust motes and memory, waiting to hear what came next. I felt like we had all the time in the world.

  “You were heading out for your walk,” Rafe said helpfully, flopping back onto the sofa, “around, what, just after eleven? And Abby and I discovered we were both out of smokes. Funny, isn’t it, what little things make all the difference? If we’d been nonsmokers, this might never have happened. When they talk about the evils of tobacco, they never mention this.”

  “You said you’d pick some up on your way,” Abby said. She was watching me carefully, hands clasped tight in her lap. “But you’re always gone for at least an hour, so I figured I might as well run out and get them at the petrol station. It looked like it was going to rain, so I threw on the jacket—I mean, it didn’t seem like you wanted it, you were already putting your coat on. I stuck my wallet in the pocket, and . . .”

  Her voice trailed off and she made a small, tense gesture that could have meant anything. I kept my mouth shut. No more leading, if I could help it. The rest of this story had to come from them.

  “And she pulled out this piece of paper,” Rafe said, through a cigarette, “and went, ‘What’s this?’ Nobody paid much attention, at first. We were all in the kitchen; we were doing the washing up, me and Justin and Daniel, and arguing about something or other—”

  “Stevenson,” Justin said, softly and very sadly. “Remember? Jekyll and Hyde. Daniel was going on about them; something to do with reason and instinct. You were in a silly mood, Lexie, you said you’d had enough shop talk for the night and anyway Jekyll and Hyde would both have been crap in bed, and Rafe said, ‘A one-track mind, and it’s a dirt track . . .’ We were all laughing.”

  “And then Abby said, ‘Lexie, what the hell?’ ” said Rafe. “A whole lot louder. We all stopped messing about and turned around, and she was holding out this ratty bit of paper and looking like someone had slapped her across the face—I’ve never seen her look like that, ever.”

  “That’s the part I remember,” I said. My hands felt like they’d been melted onto the arms of the chair by some blast of heat. “Then it goes fuzzy again.”

  “Luckily for you,” Rafe said, “we can help you with that. I think the rest of us will remember every second for the rest of our lives. You said, ‘Give me that,’ and grabbed for the piece of paper, but Abby jumped back, fast, and passed it to Daniel.”

  “I think,” Justin said, in a low voice, “that was when we started to realize there was something serious happening. I’d been about to say something silly about a love letter—just teasing you, Lexie—but you were so . . . You lunged at Daniel, trying to get i
t away from him. He shot out his other hand to hold you off, sort of reflexively, but you were fighting him, really fighting—punching at his arm, trying to kick him, grabbing for that thing. You didn’t make a single sound. That’s what frightened me most, I think: the silence. It seemed like people should be shouting or screaming or something, like then I might be able to do something, but it was so quiet—just you and Daniel breathing hard, and the tap still running . . .”

  “Abby caught hold of your arm,” Rafe said, “but you whipped round, with your fists up; I honestly thought you were about to go for her. Justin and I were standing there gawping like a pair of morons, trying to figure out what the fuck—I mean, two seconds ago we’d been on Jekyll sex, for God’s sake. As soon as you let go of Daniel, he shoved the paper at me, caught your wrists from behind and told me, ‘Read that.’ ”

  “I didn’t like it,” Justin said softly. “You were flinging yourself back and forth, trying to pull away from Daniel, but he wouldn’t let go. It was . . . You tried to bite him, his arm. I thought he shouldn’t be doing that, if it was your paper then he should let you have it, but I just couldn’t catch up enough to say anything.”