Tana French - The Likeness

Sam and I followed him. Even without looking I could feel the worried little line between Sam’s eyebrows, but I didn’t have the energy to reassure him. Now I was out of that cottage, all I could feel was outrage, pure and simple. My face and my old name: it was like coming home one day and finding another girl coolly making dinner in your kitchen, wearing your comfiest jeans and singing along to your favorite CD. I was so furious I could barely breathe. I thought of that photo and I wanted to punch my smile straight off her face.

“Well,” I said, when we caught up with Frank at the top of the field, “that was fun. Can I go to work now?”

“DV must be a lot more entertaining than I thought,” Frank said, doing impressed, “if you’re in this much of a hurry. Sunglasses.”

I left the glasses where they were. “Unless this girl was a victim of domestic violence, and I’m not seeing anything that points that way, she’s got sweet fuck-all to do with me. So you dragged me out here why, exactly?”

“Hey, I’ve missed you, babe. Any excuse.” Frank grinned at me; I gave him a hairy look. “And you seriously figure she’s fuck-all to do with you? Let’s see you say that when we’re trying to ID her, and everyone you’ve ever known is freaking out and ringing up to give us your name.”

All the anger deflated out of me, leaving a nasty hollow at the bottom of my stomach. Frank, the little bollocks, was right. As soon as this girl’s face went into the papers alongside an appeal for her real name, there would be a tidal wave of people who had known me as Lexie, her as Lexie, me as me, all of them wanting to know who was dead and who both of us had been if we weren’t in fact Lexie Madison, and general hall-of-mirrors overload. Believe it or not, that was the first time it hit me: there was no way in the world for this to be as easy as Don’t know her, don’t want to know her, thanks for wasting my morning, see you around.

“Sam,” I said. “Is there any way you could hold off on putting her picture out for a day or two? Just till I can warn people.” I had no idea how I was going to word this one. See, Aunt Louisa, we found this dead girl and…

“Interestingly,” Frank said, “now that you mention it, that fits right in with my little idea.” There was a jumble of moss-covered boulders piled in the corner of the field; he pulled himself backwards onto them and sat there, one leg swinging.

I’d seen that gleam in his eyes before. It always meant he was about to come out, spectacularly casually, with something totally outrageous. “What, Frank,” I said.

“Well,” Frank began, getting comfortable against the rocks and folding his arms behind his head, “we’ve got a unique opportunity here, haven’t we? Shame to waste it.”

“We do?” Sam said.

“We do?” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Jesus, yeah.” That risky grin was starting at the corners of Frank’s mouth. “We’ve got the chance,” he said, taking his time, “we’ve got the chance to investigate a murder case from the inside. We’ve got the chance to place an experienced undercover officer smack in the middle of a murder victim’s life.”

We both stared at him.

“When have you ever seen anything like that before? It’s beautiful, Cass. It’s a work of art.”

“Work of arse, more like,” I said. “What the hell are you on about, Frankie?”

Frank spread his arms like it was obvious. “Look. You’ve been Lexie Madison before, right? You can be her again. You can-no, hang on, hear me out-if she’s not dead, just wounded, right? You can walk straight back into her life and pick up where she left off.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “This is why no Bureau and no morgue guys? This is why you made me dress like a dork? So nobody notices you have a spare?” I pulled my hat off and stuffed it back in my bag. Even for Frank, this had taken some fast thinking. Within seconds of arriving at the scene, he must have had this in his head.

“You can get hold of info no cop would ever learn, you can get close to everyone she was close to, you can identify suspects-”

“You want to use her as bait,” Sam said, too levelly.

“I want to use her as a detective, mate,” Frank said. “Which is what she is, last time I checked.”

“You want to put her in there so this fella will come back to finish the job. That’s bait.”

“So? Undercovers are bait all the time. I’m not asking her to do anything I wouldn’t do myself in a heartbeat, if-”

“No,” Sam said. “No way.”

Frank raised an eyebrow. “What are you, her ma?”

“I’m the lead investigator on this case, and I’m saying no way.”

“You might want to think about it for more than ten seconds, pal, before you-”

I might as well not have been there. “Hello?” I said.

They turned and stared at me. “Sorry,” Sam said, somewhere between sheepish and defiant.

“Hi,” Frank said, grinning at me.

“Frank,” I said, “this is officially the looniest idea I’ve ever heard in my life. You are off your bloody trolley. You are up the wall and tickling the bricks. You are-”

“What’s loony about it?” Frank demanded, injured.

“Jesus,” I said. I ran my hands through my hair and turned full circle, trying to figure out where to start. Hills, fields, spaced-out uniforms, cottage with dead girl: this wasn’t some messed-up dream. “OK, just for starters, it’s impossible. I’ve never even heard of anything like this before.”

“But that’s the beauty of it,” Frank explained.

“If you go under as someone who actually exists, it’s for like half an hour, Frank, and it’s to do something specific. It’s to do a drop-off or a pickup or something, from a stranger. You’re talking about me jumping right into the middle of this girl’s life, just because I look a bit like her-”

"A bit?”

“Do you even know what color her eyes are? What if they’re blue, or-”

“Give me some credit, babe. They’re brown.”

“Or what if she programs computers, or plays tennis? What if she’s left-handed? It can’t be done. I’d be burned inside an hour.”

Frank pulled a squashed pack of smokes out of his jacket pocket and fished out a cigarette. He had that glint in his eye again; he loves a challenge. “I have every faith in you. Want a smoke?”

“No,” I said, even though I did. I couldn’t stop moving, up and down and around the patch of long grass between us. I don’t even like her, I wanted to say, which made no sense at all.

Frank shrugged and lit up. “Let me worry about whether it’s possible. It might not be, I’ll grant you that, but I’ll figure that out as we go along. What’s next?”

Sam was looking away, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, leaving me to it. “Next,” I said, “it’s somewhere out on the other side of unethical. This girl must have family, friends. You’re going to tell them she’s alive and well and just needs a few stitches, while she’s lying on a table in the morgue with Cooper slicing her open? Jesus, Frank.”

“She’s living under a fake name, Cass,” Frank said, reasonably. “You really think she’s in touch with her family? By the time we track them down, this will all be over. They’ll never know the difference.”

“So what about her mates? The uniforms said she lives with a bunch of others. What if she’s got a boyfriend?”

“The people who care about her,” Frank said, “will want us to catch the guy who did this to her. Whatever it takes. That’s what I’d want.” He blew smoke up at the sky.

Sam’s shoulders shifted. He thought Frank was just being smart-arsed. But Sam’s never done undercover, he had no way of knowing: undercovers are different. There is nothing they won’t do, to themselves or anyone else, to take their guy down. There was no point in arguing with Frank on this one, because he meant what he had said: if his kid were killed, and someone kept that from him in order to get the guy, he would take it without a murmur. It’s one of the most powerful lures of undercover, the ruthlessness, no borderlines; strong stuff, strong enough to take your breath away. It’s one of the reasons I left.