Tana French - The Likeness

“And all for what?” Rafe demanded. He sat up suddenly, almost spilling the cards off his lap, and plucked his cigarette out of the ashtray. “Here’s the part that still amazes me: we took Daniel’s word for it. He has all the medical knowledge of a cheese soufflé, but he told us Lexie was dead and we just assumed he was right. Why do we always believe him?”

“Habit,” said Abby. “He usually is right.”

“You think so?” Rafe asked. He was lounging back against the arm of the sofa again, but there was an edge to his voice, something dangerous and spiraling. “He certainly wasn’t right this time. We could have simply phoned for an ambulance like normal people and everything would have been fine. Lexie would never press charges or whatever they call it, and if any of us had thought about it for a single second, we’d have known that. But no, we let Daniel call all the shots; we had to sit here having the Mad Hatter’s tea party-”

“He didn’t know everything would be fine,” Abby said sharply. “What do you think he should have done? He thought Lexie was dead, Rafe.”

Rafe shrugged, one-shouldered. “So he says.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying. Remember when that wanker showed up to tell us she was out of the coma? The three of us,” he told me, “we were so relieved we almost collapsed; I thought Justin was actually going to faint.”

“Thank you for that, Rafe,” Justin said, reaching for the bottle.

“But did Daniel look relieved to you? Like hell he did. He looked like someone had hit him in the gut with a bat. Even the cop noticed, for God’s sake. Remember?” Abby shrugged coldly and bent her head over the doll, fumbled for her needle.

“Hey,” I said, kicking the sofa to get Rafe’s attention. “I don’t remember. What happened?”

“It was that prat Mackey,” Rafe said. He took the vodka bottle from Justin and topped up his glass, not bothering with tonic. “Bright and early on the Monday morning, he’s at the door, telling us he’s got news and asking if he can come in. Personally I would have told him to fuck himself, I’d seen enough cops that weekend to last me a lifetime, but Daniel answered the door and he had this crackpot theory that we shouldn’t do anything that might antagonize the police-I mean, Mackey was already antagonized, he hated us all on sight, what was the point of cozying up to him?-so he let him in. I came out of my room to see what the story was, and Justin and Abby were coming out of the kitchen, and Mackey stood there in the hall looking round at us all and said, ‘Your friend’s going to make it. She’s awake and asking for breakfast.’ ”

“And we were all overjoyed,” Abby said. She had found the needle and was stabbing at the doll’s dress with short, angry stitches.

“Well,” Rafe said. “Some of us were. Justin was clutching onto the door handle grinning like an idiot and sagging as if his knees had gone out from under him, and Abby started laughing and jumped on him and gave him this huge hug, and I think I made some kind of weird whooping noise. But Daniel… he just stood there. He looked-”

“He looked young,” Justin said suddenly. “He looked really young and really scared.”

“You,” Abby told him sharply, “were in no state to notice anything.”

“I was. I was looking at him specifically. He was so white he looked sick.”

“Then he turned round and walked in here,” Rafe said, “and leaned on the window frame, looking out at the garden. Not a word. Mackey gave the rest of us the eyebrow and asked, ‘What’s up with your mate? Isn’t he pleased?’ ”

Frank had never mentioned any of this. I should have been annoyed-he was one to talk about playing dirty-but he seemed like some half-forgotten person from another world, a million miles away.

“Abby disentangled herself from Justin and said something about Daniel being all emotional-”

“Which he was,” Abby said, and bit off a thread with a snap.

“-but Mackey just smiled this cynical little smirk and then left. As soon as I was sure he was actually gone-he’s the type who would hang around eavesdropping in shrubberies-I went in to Daniel and asked him what the fuck his problem was. He was still at the window, he hadn’t moved. He pushed his hair off his face-he was sweating-and he said, ‘There isn’t a problem. He’s lying, of course; I should have realized that immediately, but he caught me off guard.’ I just stared at him. I thought he had finally lost it.”

“Or you have,” Abby said crisply. “I don’t remember any of this.”

“You and Justin were busy dancing around hugging each other and making squeaky noises, like a pair of Teletubbies. Daniel gave me this irritated look and said, ‘Don’t be naďve, Rafe. If Mackey were telling the truth, do you honestly believe that would be unadulterated good news? Hasn’t it even occurred to you just how serious the consequences could have been?’ ”

He took a long swallow of his drink. “You tell me, Abby. Does that sound overjoyed to you?”

“Jesus Christ, Rafe,” Abby said. She was sitting up straight, eyes snapping: she was getting angry. “What are you babbling about? Are you losing your mind? Nobody wanted Lexie to die.”

“You didn’t, I didn’t, Justin didn’t. Maybe Daniel didn’t. All I’m saying is that I’ve got no way of knowing what he felt when he checked Lexie’s pulse; I wasn’t there. And I can’t swear I know what he’d have done if he realized she was alive. Can you, Abby? After these last few weeks, can you swear, hand on heart, that you’re absolutely positive what Daniel would have done?”

Something cold slipped across the back of my neck, riffled the curtains, spiraled off to nose delicately in corners. All Cooper and the Bureau had been able to tell us was that she had been moved after she died; not how long after. For at least twenty minutes they had been alone together in the cottage, Lexie and Daniel. I thought of her fists, clenched tight-extreme emotional stress, Cooper had said-and then of Daniel sitting quietly beside her, carefully tapping ash into his smoke packet, droplets of soft rain catching in his dark hair. If there had been anything more than that-a hand twitching, a gasp; wide brown eyes staring up at him, a whisper almost too faint to hear-no one would ever know.

Long night wind sweeping across the hillside, owl calls fading. The other thing Cooper had said: doctors could have saved her.

Daniel could have made Justin stay in the cottage, if he had really wanted to. It would have been the logical thing to do. The one who stayed had nothing to do, if Lexie was dead, except keep still and not touch anything; the one who went back to the house had to break the news to the others, find the wallet and the keys and the Maglite, stay calm and work fast. Daniel had sent Justin, who could barely stand up.

“Right up until the night before you came home,” Rafe told me, “he insisted you were dead. According to him, the cops were just bluffing, claiming you were alive so we’d think you were talking to them. He said all we had to do was keep our heads and they’d back down sooner or later, they’d come up with some story about how you’d relapsed and died in hospital. It wasn’t until Mackey phoned to ask if he could drop you off the next day, if we’d be home-that was when it hit Daniel that, duh, there might not actually be some huge conspiracy going on; this might actually be as simple as it looked. Lightbulb moment.”

He took another big swig of his drink. “Overjoyed, my shiny white arse. I’ll tell you what he was: he was petrified. All he could think about was whether Lexie had really lost her memory or whether she’d just said that to the cops, and what she might do about it once she got home.”