Tana French - The Likeness

I gave up. This is another of Frank’s skills: the ability to sound like he’s making a vast concession, so that you come across as an unreasonable cow if you won’t meet him halfway. “Sounds like a dream date,” I said.

“Fair enough?” Frank asked everyone. “At the end of this evening, you tell me to climb back in my box, and I’ll never mention my little idea again. Just hear me out first. That OK with everyone?”

O’Kelly grunted noncommittally; Cooper gave a not-my-problem shrug; Sam, after a moment, nodded. I was getting that specific feeling of Frank-related impending doom.

“And before we all get too carried away,” Frank said, “let’s make sure the resemblance stands up to a closer look. If it doesn’t, then there’s no point fighting about it, is there?”

Nobody answered. He swung himself off the chair, pulled a handful of photos out of his file and started Blu-tacking them to the whiteboard. The shot from the Trinity ID, blown up to eight by ten; the dead girl’s face in profile, eye closed and bruised-looking; a full-length shot of her on the autopsy table-still dressed, thank Jesus-with her fists clenched on top of that dark star of blood; a close-up of her hands, unfurled and stippled with brownish-black, streaks of silver nail polish showing through the blood. “Cassie, could you do me a favor? Stand over here for a minute?”

You fucker, I thought. I peeled myself off the wall, went to the whiteboard and stood against it like I was having a mug shot taken. I would have bet good money that Frank had already pulled my photo from Records and compared it to these with a magnifying glass. He prefers to ask questions to which he already knows the answers.

“We should really be using the actual body for this,” Frank told us cheerfully, biting a piece of Blu-tack in half, “but I figured that might be a little weird.”

“God forbid,” said O’Kelly.

I wanted Rob, dammit. I had never let myself think that before, not one time in all the months since we stopped talking, no matter how tired I got or how late at night it was. At first I wanted to kick his ass so badly it was doing my head in, I was throwing things at my wall on a regular basis. So I stopped thinking about him altogether. But the squad room all round me, and the four of them peering intently as if I were some exotic forensic exhibit, and those photos so close to my cheek I could feel them; the acid-trip feeling I’d had all week was swelling into a wild, dizzying wave and I hurt, somewhere under my breastbone. I would have sold a limb to have Rob there for just one instant, raising a sardonic eyebrow at me behind O’Kelly’s back, pointing out blandly that the swap would never work because the dead girl had been pretty. For a vicious second I could have sworn I smelled his aftershave.

“Eyebrows,” Frank said, tapping the ID shot-I had to stop myself from jumping-“eyebrows are good. Eyes are good. Lexie’s fringe is shorter, you’ll need a trim; apart from that, the hair’s good. Ears-turn to the side for a second?-ears are good. Yours pierced?”

“Three times,” I said.

“She only had two. Let’s have a look…” Frank leaned in. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t even see ’ em unless I ’m looking for them. Nose is good. Mouth is good. Chin’s good. Jawline’s good.” Sam blinked, a rapid flick like a wince, on every one.

“Your cheekbones and clavicles appear to be more pronounced than the victim’s,” Cooper said, studying me with vaguely creepy professional interest. “May I ask how much you weigh?”

I never weigh myself. “A hundred and something. Sixteen? seventeen?”

“You’re a little thinner than she was,” Frank said. “No problem; a week or two of hospital food’ll do that. Her clothes are size six, jeans waist twenty-nine inches, bra size 34B, shoe size seven. All of that sound like it’ll fit?”

“Near enough,” I said. I wondered how the fuck my life had ended up here. I thought about finding some magic button that would rewind me, at lightning speed, till I was lounging happily in the back corner kicking Rob in the leg every time O’Kelly came out with a cliché, instead of standing here like a Muppet showing people my ears and trying to stop my voice shaking while we discussed whether I would fit into a dead girl’s bra.

“A brand-new wardrobe,” Frank told me, grinning. “Who says this job doesn’t have perks?”

“She could do with it,” O’Kelly said bitchily.

Frank moved on to the full-length shot, drew a finger down it from shoulders to feet, glancing back and forth at me. “Build is all good, give or take the few pounds.” His finger on the photo made a long dragging squeak; Sam shifted, sharply, in his chair. “Shoulder width looks good, waist-to-hip ratio looks good-we can measure, just to be sure, but the weight difference gives us a little leeway there. Leg length looks good.”

He tapped the close-up. “These are important; people notice hands. Give us a look, Cassie?”

I held out my hands like he was going to cuff me. I couldn’t make myself look at the photo; I could barely breathe. This was one question to which Frank couldn’t already know the answer. This could be it: the difference that would slice me away from this girl, sever the link with one hard final snap and let me go home.

“Those right there,” Frank said appreciatively, after a long look, “may be the loveliest hands I’ve ever seen.”

“Extraordinary,” Cooper said with relish, leaning forwards to peer at me and AnonyGirl over his glasses. “The odds must be one in millions.”

“Anyone seeing any discrepancies?” Frank asked the room.

No one said anything. Sam’s jaw was tight.

“Gentlemen,” Frank said, with a flourish of his arm, “we have a match.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean we need to do anything with it,” said Sam.

O’Kelly was doing a sarcastic slow clap. “Congratulations, Mackey. Makes a great party trick. Now that we all know what Maddox looks like, can we get back to the case?”

“And can I stop standing here?” I asked. My legs were trembling like I’d been running and I was furiously pissed off with everyone in sight, including myself. “Unless you need me for inspiration.”

“You can, of course,” Frank said, finding a marker for the whiteboard. “So here’s what we’ve got. Alexandra Janet Madison, aka Lexie, registered as born in Dublin on the first of March 1979-and I should know, I registered her myself. In October 2000”-he started sketching a timeline, fast straight strokes-“she entered UCD as a psychology postgrad. In May of 2001, she dropped out of college due to stress-related illness and went to her parents in Canada to recover, and that should’ve been the end of her-”

“Hang on. You gave me a nervous breakdown?” I demanded.

“Your thesis was getting on top of you,” Frank told me, grinning. “It’s a tough old world, academia; you couldn’t take the heat, so you got out of the kitchen. I had to get rid of you somehow.”

I rearranged myself against my wall and made a face at him; he winked at me. He had played straight into this girl’s hands, years before she ever came on the scene. Any slip she made when she ran into that old acquaintance and started trawling for info, any off-kilter pause, any reluctance to meet up again: Well, you know she did have that nervous breakdown…

“In February 2002, though,” Frank said, switching from blue marker to red, “Alexandra Madison shows up again. She pulls her UCD records and uses them to wangle her way into Trinity to do a PhD in English. We don’t have a clue who this girl actually is, what she was doing before then, or how she hit on the Lexie Madison ID. We ran her prints: she’s not in the system.”