Tana French - The Likeness

“Do you know what I thought?” Justin said, very quietly. “I was standing there, listening to you three argue and looking out the window waiting for the police or someone to come, and I realized: it could be days. It could be weeks; this could go on for weeks, the waiting. Lexie could be there for… I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I could get through that day at college, never mind weeks. And I thought what we should really do was stop fighting and get a duvet and curl up under it, all four of us together, and turn the gas on. That was what I wanted to do.”

“We don’t even have gas,” Rafe snapped. “Don’t be such a bloody drama queen.”

“I think that was on all our minds-what we would do if you weren’t found right away-but nobody wanted to mention it,” Abby said. “It was actually a huge relief when the police showed up. Justin saw them first, out the window; he said, ‘Someone’s here,’ and we all froze, right in the middle of yelling at each other. Rafe and I started to go for the window, but Daniel said, ‘Everyone sit down. Now.’ So we all sat at the kitchen table, like we had just finished breakfast, and waited for the bell to ring.”

“Daniel answered it,” Rafe said, “of course. He was cool as ice. I could hear him out in the hall: Yes, Alexandra Madison lives here, and no we haven’t seen her since last night, and no there’s been no argument, and no we’re not worried about her, just unsure whether she’s coming to college today, and is there a problem, Officers, and this note of concern gradually seeping into his voice… He was perfect. It was absolutely terrifying.”

Abby’s eyebrows went up. “Would you have preferred him to be a babbling mess?” she inquired. “What do you think would have happened if you had answered that door?”

Rafe shrugged. He had started fiddling with the cards again.

“In the end,” Abby said, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, “I realized we could go out there-actually, it would look weird if we didn’t. It was Mackey and O’Neill-Mackey was leaning up against the wall and O’Neill was taking notes-and they scared the living shit out of me. The plain clothes, these expressions that told you absolutely nothing, the way they talked-like there was no hurry, they could take all the time they wanted… I’d been expecting those two eejits from Rathowen, and it was obvious straight away that these guys were not the same thing at all. They were so much smarter and so, so much more dangerous. I’d been thinking the worst was over, nothing could ever be as bad as that night. When I saw those two, that was when it hit me that this was only just beginning.”

“They were cruel,” Justin said suddenly. “Horribly, horribly cruel. They stretched it out forever, before they told us. We kept asking what had happened, and they just stared at us with these smug blank faces and wouldn’t give a straight answer-”

“ ‘What makes you think something might have happened to her?’ ” Rafe put in, doing a viciously accurate send-up of Frank’s lazy Dublin. “ ‘Did someone have a reason to hurt her? Was she afraid of someone?’ ”

“-and even when they did, the bastards didn’t tell us you were alive. Mackey just said something like, ‘She was found a few hours ago, not far from here. Sometime last night, she was stabbed.’ He deliberately made it sound like you were dead.”

“Daniel was the only one who kept his head,” Abby said. “I was about a second from bursting into tears; I’d been holding it back all morning in case it made my eyes look funny, and it was such a relief to finally be allowed to know what had happened… But Daniel said straight off, like a shot, ‘Is she alive?’ ”

“And they just left it,” Justin said. “They didn’t say a word, for what felt like forever; just stood there watching us, and waiting. I told you they were cruel.”

“Finally,” Rafe said, “Mackey shrugged and said, ‘Barely.’ It was like all of our heads had exploded. I mean, we had been primed for… well, the worst; we just wanted to get it over with, so we could go have our nervous breakdowns in peace. We were not ready for this. God knows what we might have come out with-we could have blown the whole thing right there-except that Abby, with impeccable timing, threw a fainting fit. I’ve been meaning to ask you, actually, was that real? Or was it all part of the plan?”

“Very little of this was part of anyone’s plan,” Abby said tartly, “and I did not faint. I got dizzy for a second. If you remember, I hadn’t had a lot of sleep.” Rafe laughed, nastily.

“Everyone jumped to catch her and sit her down and get water,” said Justin, “and by the time she was all right, we had pulled ourselves together-”

“Oh, we had, had we?” Rafe inquired, eyebrows going up. “You were still standing there opening and shutting your mouth like a goldfish. I was so terrified you would say something idiotic, I was babbling, the cops must have thought I was a total moron: where did you find her, where is she, when can we see her… Not that they answered, but at least I tried.”

“I did my best,” said Justin. His voice was rising; he was starting to get upset again. “It was easy for you, getting your head around it: oh, she’s alive, isn’t that lovely. You weren’t there. You weren’t remembering that awful cottage-”

“Where, as far as I can see, you were about as much use as tits on a bull. Again.”

“You’re drunk,” Abby said coldly.

“Do you know,” Rafe said, like a kid pleased at shocking the grown-ups, “I think I am. And I think I might just keep getting drunker. Unless anyone has a problem with that?”

No one answered. He stretched for the bottle, eyes sliding sideways to me: “You missed some night, Lexie. If you were wondering why Abby thinks everything Daniel says is the Word of God-”

Abby didn’t move. “I’ve warned you once, Rafe. This is twice. You don’t get a third chance.”

After a moment Rafe shrugged and buried his face in his glass. In the silence I realized Justin had flushed deep red, right up to his hairline.

“The next few days,” Abby said, “were pure hell. They told us you were in intensive care in a coma, the doctors weren’t sure whether you were going to make it, but they wouldn’t let us go see you-even getting them to tell us how you were doing was like pulling teeth. The most we could get out of them was that you weren’t dead yet, which wasn’t exactly comforting.”

“The place was swarming with cops,” said Rafe. “Cops searching your room, searching the lanes, pulling out bits of the carpet… They interviewed us so many times that I started repeating myself, I couldn’t remember what I’d already said to who. Even when they weren’t there, we were on guard all the time-Daniel said they couldn’t bug the house, not legally, but Mackey doesn’t strike me as the type to worry too much about technicalities; and anyway, having cops is like having rats, or fleas, or something. Even when you can’t see them, you can feel them somewhere, crawling.”

“It was awful,” Abby said. “And Rafe can bitch all he wants about that poker game, but it’s a damn good thing Daniel made us do it. If I’d even thought about it before, I would’ve figured giving an alibi took about five minutes: I was here, everyone else says the same thing, the end. But the cops grilled us for hours, over and over, about every single tiny detail-what time did you start the game? Who sat where? How much money did you each start with? Who dealt first? Were you drinking? Who drank what? Which ashtray were you using?”

“And they kept trying to trap us,” Justin said. He reached for the bottle; his hand shook, just a little. “I’d give a perfectly simple answer-we started playing around quarter past eleven, that kind of thing-and Mackey or O’Neill or whoever it was that day would get this worried look and say, ‘Are you sure about that? Because I think one of your friends said it was at quarter past ten,’ and start rummaging through notes, and I would just freeze. I mean, I didn’t know whether one of the others had made a mistake-it would have been easy to do, we were all such a mess we could barely think straight-and whether I should back them up, say, ‘Oh, that’s right, I must have got mixed up,’ or something. In the end I always stuck to the story, which turned out to be the right thing to do-nobody had made any mistakes, the cops were just bluffing-but that was sheer luck: I was too paralyzed with terror to do anything else. If it had gone on any longer, I think we would all have lost our minds.”