Tana French - The Likeness

I shrugged, hands going out. “This is the only one I can go after. I’ve got one day left; I don’t want to ditch this case without giving it everything I’ve got. What are you bitching about, anyway? You’ve always liked them for it.”

“Oh, you picked up on that? I underestimated you, babe. Yeah, I’ve always liked them. But you haven’t. A few days ago you were claiming these four were a bunch of fluffy little bunnies who wouldn’t hurt a fly between them, and now you’ve got that steel-trap look in your eye and you’re working out the best way for us to fuck with their heads. So I’m wondering what it is that you’re not telling me.”

His eyes were on me, level and unblinking. I gave it a second, ran my hands through my hair like I was trying to figure out how to put this. “It’s not like that,” I said, in the end. “I’ve just got a feeling, Frank. Just a feeling.”

Frank watched me for a long minute; I swung my legs and tried to look open and sincere. Then: “OK,” he said, suddenly all business, shoving himself off the wall and heading over to switch the camera back on. “You’ve got a deal. Did you lot bring two cars, or am I going to have to drive Danny Boy all the way back to Glenarsefuck when I’m done with him?”

“We brought both cars,” I said. Relief and adrenaline were making me giddy; my mind was racing through how to work this interview and I wanted to shoot straight up in the air like a firework. “Thanks, Frank. You won’t regret it.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, “well.” He swapped the chairs back around. “Sit. Stay. I’ll get back to you.”

He left me there for another couple of hours, presumably while he gave the others everything he’d got, in the hope that one of them would crack and he wouldn’t need to use me after all. I spent the time smoking illegal cigarettes-no one seemed to care-and working out the details of how to do this. I knew Frank would be coming back. From the outside, the others were impregnable, seamless; even Justin would be holding up cool as ice in the face of Frank’s worst. Outsiders were too far away to shake them. They were like one of those medieval fortresses built with such fierce, intricate, defensive care that they could only ever be taken from the inside, by treachery.

Finally the door flew open and Frank stuck his head in. “I’m about to link you up to the other interview rooms, so get in character. Five minutes to curtain.”

“Don’t link Daniel in,” I said, sitting up fast.

“Don’t fuck up,” Frank said, and vanished again.

When he came back I was perched on the table, bending the ink tube of the Biro into a catapult and flipping the broken bits at the camera. “Hey,” I said, brightening up at the sight of him. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

“Now how could I ever do that?” Frank asked, giving me his very best grin. “I even brought you coffee-milk and two sugars, am I right? No, no, don’t worry about that”-as I hopped off the table and went for the Biro bits-“someone’ll get them later. Sit down and we’ll have a chat. How’ve you been?” He pulled out a chair and shoved one of the Styrofoam cups across to me.

He started out sweet as honey-I’d forgotten what a charmer Frank can be, when he feels like it. You’re looking wonderful, Miss Madison, and how’s the old war wound getting on, and-when I played up to him, gave a stretch to show him how well the stitches had healed-isn’t that a lovely sight, and just the right amount of flirtation in his grin. I threw in eyelash-and-giggle touches, just little ones, to piss Rafe off.

Frank took me through the whole John Naylor saga, or anyway a version of it-not exactly the version that had originally happened, but definitely a version that made Naylor sound like a good suspect: soothing the others down, before we started detonating things. “I’m all impressed now,” I told him, tilting my chair back and giving him a mischievous sideways look. “I thought you’d given up ages ago.”

Frank shook his head. “We don’t give up,” he said soberly. “Not on something as serious as this. No matter how long it takes. We don’t always want to be obvious about it, but we’re always working away, putting the pieces together.” It was impressive; he should have come with his own soundtrack. “We’re getting there. And right now, Miss Madison, we need a little help from you.”

“Sure,” I said, bringing my chair down and doing focused. “Do you want me to look at that guy Naylor again?”

“Nothing like that. It’s your mind we need this time, not your eyes. You remember how the doctors said your memory might start coming back, as you recovered?”

“Yeah,” I said, uncertainly, after a pause.

“Anything you remember, anything at all, could help us a lot. I want you to have a think and tell me: has anything come back to you?”

I left it a beat too long before I said, almost convincingly, “No. Nothing. Just what I told you before.”

Frank clasped his hands on the table and leaned towards me. Those attentive blue eyes, that gentle, coaxing voice: if I’d been a genuine civilian, I’d have been melting all over my chair. “See, I’m not so sure. I’m getting the impression you’ve remembered something new, Miss Madison, but you’re worried about telling me. Maybe you think I might misinterpret it, and the wrong person could get in trouble? Is that it?”

I threw him a quick looking-for-reassurance glance. “Sort of. I guess.”

He smiled at me, all crinkling crow’s-feet. “Trust me, Miss Madison. We don’t go around charging people with serious crimes unless we have serious evidence. You’re not about to get anyone arrested all by yourself.”

I shrugged, made a face at my coffee cup. “It’s nothing big. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

“You let me worry about that, OK?” Frank said soothingly. He was about one step from patting my hand and calling me “love.” “You’d be surprised what can come in useful. And if it doesn’t, then there’s no harm done, am I right?”

“OK,” I said, on a breath. “It’s just… OK. I remember blood, on my hands. All over my hands.”

“There you go,” Frank said, keeping that reassuring smile switched on. “Well done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I shook my head. “Can you remember what you were doing? Were you standing up? Sitting down?”

“Standing up,” I said. I didn’t have to put the shake in my voice. A few feet away, in the interview rooms I knew inside out, Daniel was waiting patiently for someone to come back and the other three were slowly, silently, beginning to wind tighter. “Leaning against a hedge-it was prickly. I was…” I mimed twisting up my top, pressing it against my ribs. “Like that. Because of the blood, to make it stop. But it didn’t help.”

“Were you in pain?”

“Yeah,” I said, low. “It hurt. A lot. I thought… I was scared I was going to die.”

We were good together, me and Frank; we were on the same page. We were working together as smoothly as Abby and me making breakfast, as smoothly as a pair of professional torturers. You can’t be both, Daniel had told me. And: She was never cruel.

“You’re doing great,” Frank told me. “Now that it’s started coming back to you, you’ll have the whole lot remembered in no time, you’ll see. That’s what the doctors told us, isn’t it? Once the floodgates open…” He flipped through the file and pulled out a map, one of the ones we’d used during our training week. “Do you think you could show me where you were?”

I took my time, picked a spot about three-quarters of the way from the house to the cottage and put my finger on it. “Maybe there, I think. I’m not sure.”