Tana French - The Likeness

Frank grinned, not the least bit shamefaced. “You can’t blame a guy for trying. Seriously, you should come. The floaters don’t start till Monday morning, so it’ll basically be just me and Sam, having a chat about what we’ve got. Aren’t you curious?”

Of course I was. All Frank’s info hadn’t told me the one thing I wanted to know: what this girl had been like. I leaned my head back on the futon and lit another smoke. “Do you seriously think we could pull this off?” I asked.

Frank considered this. He poured himself another glass of wine and waved the bottle at me; I shook my head. “Under normal circumstances,” he said at last, settling back into the sofa, “I’d say probably not. But these aren’t normal circumstances, and we’ve got a couple of things in our favor, besides the obvious. For one thing, to all intents and purposes, this girl only existed for three years. It’s not like you’d have to deal with a lifetime’s worth of history here. You don’t have to get by parents or siblings, you’re not going to run into some childhood friend, nobody’s going to ask you if you remember your first school dance. For another thing, during those three years, her life seems to have been pretty tightly circumscribed: she ran with one small crowd, studied in one small department, held down one job. You don’t need to get the hang of wide circles of family and friends and colleagues.”

“She was doing a PhD in English literature,” I pointed out. “I know zip about English literature, Frank. I got an A in my Leaving Cert, but that’s it. I don’t speak the jargon.”

Frank shrugged. “Neither did Lexie, as far as we know, and she managed to pull it off. If she can do it, so can you. Again, we’re in luck there: she could’ve been doing pharmacy, or engineering. And if you get sweet fuck-all done on her thesis, well, hey, what do they expect? Ironically enough, that stab wound’s going to come in useful: we can give you post-traumatic stress, amnesia, whatever we fancy.”

“Any boyfriend?” There is a limit to what I’m prepared to do for the job.

“No, so your virtue is safe. And the other thing working for us: you know those photos? Our girl had a video phone, and it looks like the five of them used it as the group camcorder. The image quality’s not brilliant, but she had a whacking great memory card and it’s packed with clips-her and her mates on nights out, on picnics, moving into their new gaff, doing it up, everything. So you’ve got a ready-made guide to her voice, her body language, mannerisms, the tone of the relationships-everything a girl could ask for. And you’re good, Cassie. You’re a damn fine undercover. Put it all together, and I’d say we’re in with a pretty good chance of pulling this off.”

He tipped up the glass to get the last drops and reached for his jacket. “Been fun catching up, babe. You have my mobile number. Let me know what you decide about tomorrow night.”

And he let himself out. It was only as the door shut behind him that I realized what I had slipped into asking: What about college, any boyfriend? as if I were checking the plan for holes; as if I were thinking about doing it.

Frank’s always had a knack for knowing exactly when to leave it. After he’d gone, I sat on the windowsill for a long time, staring out over the rooftops without seeing them. It was only when I got up for another glass of wine that I realized he had left something on my coffee table.

It was the photo of Lexie and her mates in front of Whitethorn House. I stood there, with the wine bottle in one hand and my glass in the other, and thought about turning it face down and leaving it there till Frank gave up and came back for it; thought, for a minute, about sticking it in an ashtray and burning it. Then I picked it up and brought it back to the windowsill with me.

She could have been any age. She had been passing for twenty-six, but I would have believed nineteen, or thirty. There wasn’t a mark on her face, not a line or a scar or a chicken-pox blemish. Whatever life had thrown at her before Lexie Madison fell into her lap, it had rolled over her and burned off like mist, left her untouched and pristine, sealed without a crack. I looked older than her: Operation Vestal gave me my first lines around my eyes, and shadows that don’t go away with a good night’s sleep. I could practically hear Frank: You lost a shitload of blood and you’ve been in a coma for days, the eye bags are perfect, don’t go using night cream.

At her shoulders the housemates watched me, poised and smiling, long dark coats billowing and Rafe’s scarf a flash of crimson. The angle of the shot was a little off-kilter; they had propped the camera on something, used a timer. There was no photographer on the other side telling them to say cheese. Those smiles were private things, just for one another, for their someday selves looking back, for me.

And behind them, almost filling the shot, Whitethorn House. It was a simple house: a wide gray Georgian, three stories, with the sash windows getting smaller as they went up, to give the illusion of even more height. The door was deep blue, paint peeling away in big patches; a flight of stone steps led up to it on either side. Three neat rows of chimney pots, thick drifts of ivy sweeping up the walls almost to the roof. The door had fluted columns and a peacock’s-tail fanlight, but apart from that there was no decoration; just the house.

This country’s passion for property is built into the blood, a current as huge and primal as desire. Centuries of being turned out on the roadside at a landlord’s whim, helpless, teach your bones that everything in life hangs on owning your home. This is why house prices are what they are: property developers know they can charge half a million for a one-bedroom dive, if they band together and make sure there’s no other choice the Irish will sell a kidney, work hundred-hour weeks and pay it. Somehow-maybe it’s the French blood-that gene missed me. The thought of a mortgage round my neck makes me edgy. I like the fact that my flat is rented, four weeks’ notice and a couple of bin liners and I could be gone any time I choose.

If I had ever wanted a house, though, it would have been a lot like this one. This had nothing in common with the characterless pseudohouses all my friends were buying, shrunken middle-of-nowhere shoeboxes that come with great spurts of sticky euphemisms (“architect-designed bijou residence in brand-new luxury community”) and sell for twenty times your income and are built to last just till the developer can get them off his hands. This was the real thing, one serious do-not-fuck-with-me house with the strength and pride and grace to outlast everyone who saw it. Tiny swirling flecks of snow blurred the ivy and hung in the dark windows, and the silence of it was so huge that I felt like I could put my hand straight through the glossy surface of the photo and down into its cool depths.

I could find out who this girl was and what had happened to her without ever going in there. Sam would tell me when they got an ID or a suspect; probably he would even let me watch the interrogation. But right at the bottom of me I knew that was all he would ever get, her name and her killer, and I would be left to wonder about everything else for the rest of my life. That house shimmered in my mind like some fairy fort that appeared for one day in a lifetime, tantalizing and charged, with those four cool figures for guardians and inside secrets too hazy to be named. My face was the one pass that would unbar the door. Whitethorn House was ready and waiting to whisk itself away to nothing, the instant I said no.

I realized the photo was about three inches from my nose; I had been sitting there long enough that it was getting dark, the owls doing their warm-up exercises above the ceiling. I finished off the wine and watched the sea turn thunder-colored, the blink of the lighthouse far off on the horizon. When I figured I was drunk enough not to care if he gloated, I texted Frank: What time is that meeting?