Tana French - The Likeness

“You might want to widen the net,” I said. “There’s a decent chance she’s not Irish.”

Frank glanced at me sharply. “Why’s that?”

“When Irish people want to hide, they don’t hang around here. They go abroad. If she was Irish, she’d have run into someone from her mammy’s bingo club inside a week.”

“Not necessarily. She was living a pretty isolated life.”

“As well as that,” I said, keeping my voice level, “I take after the French side. Nobody thinks I’m Irish, till I open my mouth. If I didn’t get my looks here, odds are neither did she.”

“Great,” O’Kelly said, heavily. “Undercover, DV, Immigration, the Brits, Interpol, the FBI. Anyone else who might want to join the party? The Irish Countrywomen’s Association? The Vincent de Paul?”

“Any chance of getting an ID off her teeth?” Sam asked. “Or a country, even? Can’t you tell where dental work was done?”

“The young woman in question had excellent teeth,” Cooper said. “I am not, of course, a specialist in the field, but she had no fillings, crowns, extractions or other readily identifiable work.”

Frank arched an inquiring eyebrow at me. I gave him my best puzzled look.

“The two bottom front teeth overlap slightly,” Cooper said, “and one top molar is significantly misaligned, implying that she had no orthodontic work done as a child. I would hazard that the possibility of dental identification is practically nonexistent.” Sam shook his head, frustrated, and went back to his notebook.

Frank was still eyeballing me, and it was getting on my nerves. I shoved myself off the wall, opened my mouth wide at him and pointed at my teeth. Cooper and O’Kelly gave me identical horrified looks.

“No, I don’t have fillings,” I told Frank. “See? Not that it matters anyway.”

“Good girl,” Frank said approvingly. “Keep flossing.”

"That’s lovely, Maddox,” O’Kelly said. “Thanks for sharing. So in autumn of 2002 Alexandra Madison goes into Trinity, and in April 2005 she turns up murdered outside Glenskehy. Do we know what she was doing in between?”

Sam stirred and looked up, put down his pen. “Her PhD, mostly,” he said. “Something to do with women writers and pseudonyms; I didn’t understand the whole of it. She was doing grand, her supervisor says-a bit behind schedule, but what she came up with was good. Up until September she was living in a bedsit off the South Circular Road. She paid her way with student loans, grants, and by working in the English department and in Caffeine, in town. She had no known criminal activity, no debts except the loan for her college fees, no dodgy activity on her bank account, no addictions, no boyfriend or ex-boyfriend”-Cooper raised an eyebrow-“no enemies and no recent arguments.”

“So no motive,” Frank said musingly, to the whiteboard, “and no suspects.”

“Her main associates,” Sam said evenly, “were a bunch of other postgrads: Daniel March, Abigail Stone, Justin Mannering and Raphael Hyland.”

“Bloody silly name,” said O’Kelly. “He a poof, or a Brit?” Cooper closed his eyes briefly in distaste, like a cat.

“He’s half English,” Sam said; O’Kelly gave a smug little grunt. “Daniel has two speeding tickets, Justin has one, apart from that they’re all clean as a whistle. They don’t know Lexie was using an alias-or if they do, they’ve said nothing. According to them, she was estranged from her family and didn’t like talking about her past. They don’t even know where she was from; Abby thinks maybe Galway, Justin thinks Dublin, Daniel gave me a snotty look and told me that ‘wasn’t really of interest’ to him. They’re the same about her family. Justin thinks her parents were dead, Rafe says divorced, Abby says she was illegitimate…”"

“Or maybe none of the above,” Frank said. “We already know our girl wasn’t above telling a few little white ones.”

Sam nodded. “In September, Daniel inherited Whitethorn House near Glenskehy from his great-uncle, Simon March, and they all moved in. Last Wednesday night, the five of them were home, playing poker. Lexie got knocked out first and went for a walk around half past eleven-late-night walks were a regular part of her routine, the area’s safe, the rain hadn’t started in yet, the others didn’t think twice. They finished up a little after midnight and went to bed. They all describe the card game the same way, who won how much on what hand-little differences here and there, but that’s only natural. We’ve interviewed all of them several times, and they haven’t budged an inch. Either they’re innocent or they’re dead organized.”

“And the next morning,” Frank said, finishing off the timeline with a flourish, “she shows up dead.”

Sam pulled a handful of papers out of the pile on his desk, went to the whiteboard and stuck something in one corner: a surveyor’s map of a patch of countryside, detailed down to the last house and boundary fence, marked with neat Xs and squiggles in colored highlighter. “Here’s Glenskehy village. Whitethorn House is just under a mile to the south. Here, about halfway in between and a little to the east, that’s the derelict cottage where we found our girl. I’ve marked all the obvious routes she might have taken to get there. The Bureau and the uniforms are still searching them: nothing yet. According to her mates, she always went out the back gate for her walk, wandered around the little lanes for an hour or so-it’s a maze of them, all around there-and came home either by the front or by the back, depending on what route took her fancy.”

“In the middle of the night?” O’Kelly wanted to know. “Was she mental, or what?”

“She always took the torch we found on her,” Sam said, “unless the night was bright enough to see without. She was mad for the old walks, went out almost every night; even if it was lashing rain, she mostly just bundled up warm and went anyway. I wouldn’t say it’s exercise she was after, more privacy-living that close with the other four, it’s the only time she got to herself. They don’t know whether she ever went to the cottage, but they did say she liked it. Just after they first moved in, the five of them spent a day wandering all round Glenskehy, getting the lie of the land. When they spotted the cottage, Lexie wouldn’t move on till she’d gone in and had a look around, even though the others told her the farmer would probably be out with his shotgun any minute. She liked that it had been left there, even though no one was using it-Daniel said she ‘likes inefficiency,’ whatever that means. So we can’t rule out the possibility that it was a regular stop on her walks.”

Definitely not Irish, then, or at least not brought up here. Famine cottages are all over the countryside, we barely even see them any more. It’s only tourists-and mostly tourists from newer countries, America, Australia -who look at them long enough to feel their weight.

Sam found another piece of paper to add to the whiteboard: a floor plan of the cottage, with a neat, tiny scale at the bottom. “However she ended up there,” he said, pressing the last corner into place, “that’s where she died-against this wall, in what we’re calling the outer room. Sometime after death and before rigor set in, she was moved to the inner room. That’s where she was found, early Thursday morning.”

He gestured to Cooper.

Cooper had been gazing into space, in a lofty trance. He took his time: cleared his throat primly, glanced around to make sure he had everyone’s full attention. “The victim,” he said, “was a healthy white female, five feet five inches in height, a hundred and twenty pounds. No scars, tattoos or other identifying marks. She had a blood alcohol content of.03, consistent with drinking two to three glasses of wine a few hours previously. The toxicology screen was otherwise clear-at the time of death she had consumed no drugs, toxins or medications. All organs were within normal limits; I found no defects or signs of disease. The epiphyses of the long bones are completely fused and the inner sutures of the skull bones show early signs of fusion, placing her age around the late twenties. It is clear from the pelvis that she has never delivered a child.” He reached for his water glass and took a judicious sip, but I knew he wasn’t finished; the pause was for effect. Cooper had something up his sleeve.