The Likeness: A Novel (49 page)

* * *

We gathered up our stuff, left in a hurry through Attila’s awful warnings, and found Daniel and Rafe in the foyer. Daniel was swinging his car keys from one finger; Rafe was leaning lopsidedly against a pillar and sulking.
“Well done,” Abby said to Rafe. “Really. That was classy.”
“Don’t start.”
“But what are we doing?” Justin asked Daniel. He was carrying Daniel’s stuff, as well as his own; he looked worried and overloaded. “We can’t just
leave.
”
“Why not?”
There was a brief, taken-aback silence. Our routine was so ingrained, I think it had stopped occurring to any of us that it wasn’t actually a law of nature, that we could break it if we wanted to. “What’ll we do instead?” I asked.
Daniel threw the car keys into the air and caught them. “We’re going to go home and paint the sitting room,” he said. “We’ve been spending far too much time in that library. A bit of work on the house will do us all good.”
To any outsider this would have sounded deeply weird—I could hear Frank in my head,
God, they’re rock ’n’ roll, how do you stand the pace?
But everyone nodded, even, after a moment, Rafe. I had already noticed that the house was their safe zone: whenever things got tense, one of them would steer the conversation onto something that needed fixing or rearranging, and everyone would settle down again. We were going to be in big trouble once the house was all sorted out and we didn’t have grouting or floor stains to use as our Happy Place.
It worked, too. Old sheets thrown over the furniture and cold bright air flooding through the open windows, crap clothes and hard work and the smell of paint, ragtime playing in the background, the naughty buzz of ditching college and the house swelling like an approving cat under the attention: it was exactly what we needed. By the time we finished the room, Rafe was starting to look sheepish instead of belligerent, Abby and Justin had relaxed enough to have a long comfortable argument about whether Scott Joplin sucked, and we were all in a much better mood.
“First dibs on the shower,” I said.
“Let Rafe have it,” said Abby. “To each according to his need.” Rafe made a face at her. We were sprawled on the dust sheets, admiring our work and trying to get up the energy to move.
“Once this dries,” Daniel said, “we’ll need to decide what, if anything, we’re putting on the walls.”
“I saw these really old tin signs,” said Abby, “up in the top spare room—”
“I am not living in a 1980s pub,” said Rafe. He had sobered up along the way, or else the paint fumes had got the rest of us high enough that we didn’t notice. “Aren’t there paintings, or something
normal
?”
“The ones that are left are all horrible,” Daniel said. He was leaning back against the edge of the sofa, with spatters of white paint in his hair and on his old plaid shirt, looking happier and more at ease than he had in days. “Landscape with Stag and Hounds, that kind of thing, and not particularly well done, either. Some great-great-aunt with artistic pretensions, I think.”
“You’ve got no soul,” Abby told him. “Things with sentimental value aren’t
supposed
to have artistic merit as well. They’re supposed to be crap. Otherwise, it’s just showing off.”
“Let’s use those old newspapers,” I said. I was flat on my back in the middle of the floor, waving my legs in the air to examine the new paint splashes on Lexie’s work dungarees. “The ancient ones, with the article about the Dionne quintuplets and the ad for the thing that makes you gain weight. We can stick them all over the walls and varnish over them, like the photos on Justin’s door.”
“That’s in my
bedroom,
” Justin said. “A sitting room should have elegance. Grandeur. Not
ads.
”
“You know,” Rafe said, out of the blue, propping himself up on one elbow, “I do realize that I owe all of you an apology. I shouldn’t have vanished, especially not without letting you know where I was. My only excuse, and it’s not much of one, is that I was deeply pissed off about that guy getting off scot-free. I’m sorry.”
He was at his most charming, and Rafe could be very charming when he felt like it. Daniel gave him a grave little nod. “You’re an idiot,” I said, “but we love you anyway.”
“You’re OK,” Abby said, stretching up to get her cigarettes off the card table. “I’m not crazy about the idea of that guy running around loose, either.”
“You know what I wonder?” Rafe said. “I wonder if Ned hired him to frighten us off.”
There was an instant of absolute silence, Abby’s hand stopped with a smoke halfway out of the pack, Justin frozen in the middle of sitting up.
Daniel snorted. “I seriously doubt that Ned has the intellect for anything that complex,” he said acidly.
I had opened my mouth to ask,
Who’s Ned?
but I had shut it again, fast; not just because I was obviously supposed to know this, but because I did. I could have kicked myself for not seeing it earlier. Frank has always thrown diminutives at people he doesn’t like—Danny Boy, our Sammy—and like an idiot I had never considered the possibility that he might have picked the wrong one. They were talking about Slow Eddie. Slow Eddie, who had been wandering around the late-night laneways looking for someone, who had claimed he’d never met Lexie, was N. I was sure Frank could hear my heart punching the mike.
“Probably not,” Rafe said, lying back on his elbows and contemplating the walls. “When we’re done here, we should really invite him over for dinner.”
“Over my dead body,” said Abby. Her voice was tightening up. “You didn’t have to deal with him. We did.”
“And mine,” said Justin. “The man’s a Philistine. He drank Heineken all night, of course, and then he kept belching and naturally he thought that was hilarious, every single time. And all that droning about fitted kitchens and tax breaks and Section Whatever-it-is. Once was enough, thank you very much.”
“You people have no heart,” Rafe told them. “Ned
loves
this house. He told the judge so. I think we owe him a chance to see that the old family seat is in good hands. Give me a smoke.”
“The only thing Ned loves,” Daniel said, very sharply, “is the thought of six fully fitted
executive apartments
on extensive grounds with potential for further development. And over
my
dead body will he ever get a chance to see that.”
Justin made a sudden jerky movement, covered it by reaching for an ashtray and shoving it across to Abby. There was a complicated, sharp-edged silence. Abby lit her smoke, shook out the match and threw the packet to Rafe, who caught it one-handed. Nobody was looking at anybody. An early bumblebee blundered in at the window, hovered over the piano in a slant of sun and eventually bumped back out again.
I wanted to say something—that was my job, defusing moments like this one—but I knew we had veered into some kind of treacherous and complicated swamp where one misstep could get me into big trouble. Ned was sounding like more and more of a wankstain—even if I didn’t have the first clue what an executive apartment was, I got the general idea—but whatever was going on ran a lot deeper and darker than that.
Abby was watching me over her cigarette with cool, curious gray eyes. I shot her an agonized look, which didn’t take much effort. After a moment she stretched for the ashtray and said, “If there’s nothing decent to put up on the walls, maybe we should try something different. Rafe, if we found photos of old murals, do you think you could do something like that?”
Rafe shrugged. An edge of the belligerent don’t-blame-me look was creeping back onto his face. That dark electric cloud had come down over the room again.
Silence was fine with me. My mind was doing cartwheels—not just because Lexie had for some reason been hanging out with the archenemy, but because Ned was clearly a taboo subject. For three weeks his name had never been mentioned, the first reference to him had fried everyone’s heads, and I couldn’t figure out why. He had lost, after all; the house was Daniel’s, both Uncle Simon and a judge had said so, Ned should have triggered nothing more serious than a laugh and a few snide comments. I would have sold a major organ to find out what the hell was going on here, but I knew a lot better than to ask.

* * *

As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Frank’s mind—and I wasn’t at all sure I liked this—had run parallel to mine, parallel and fast.
I went for my walk as early as I could. That cloud hadn’t dissipated; if anything it had got thicker, pressing in from the walls and ceilings. Dinner had been painful. Justin and Abby and I had done our best to be chatty, but Rafe had gone into a sour sulk that you could practically see, and Daniel had withdrawn into himself, answering questions in monosyllables. I needed to get out of that house and think.
Lexie had met up with Ned at least three times, and she had gone to a lot of trouble to do it. The four big Ls of motive: lust, lucre, loathing and love. The chance of lust made my gag reflex kick in; the more I heard about Ned, the more I wanted to believe that Lexie wouldn’t have touched him with someone else’s. Lucre, though . . . She had needed money, fast, and a rich boy like Ned would have made a way better buyer than John Naylor and his crap farm job. If she had been meeting Ned to discuss what knickknacks he might want from Whitethorn House, how much he would be willing to pay, and then something had gone wrong . . .
It was a very strange night: huge and dark and gusty, snaps of wind roaring across the hillsides, a million high stars and no moon. I stuffed my gun back into my girdle, climbed up my tree and spent a long time there, watching the shadowy black surge of the bushes below me, listening hard for any faint sound that didn’t belong; thinking about phoning Sam.
In the end I phoned Frank. “Naylor hasn’t shown up yet,” he said, no hello. “You keeping an eye out?”
“Yeah,” I said. “No sign of him, as far as I can tell.”
“Right.” There was an absent note to his voice that told me his mind wasn’t on Naylor either. “Good. Meanwhile, I’ve got something that might interest you. You know the way your new pals were bitching about Cousin Eddie and his executive apartments, this afternoon?”
For a second all my muscles jolted awake, till I remembered Frank didn’t know about N. “Yep,” I said. “Cousin Eddie sounds like a right little gem.”
“Oh, yeah. One hundred percent pure brain-dead yuppie fuck, never had a thought in his life that didn’t involve his dick or his wallet.”
“You think Rafe was right about him hiring Naylor?”
“Not a chance. Eddie doesn’t hobnob with the lower classes. You should’ve seen his face when he heard my accent; I think he was afraid I was going to mug him. But this afternoon reminded me. Remember how you said the Fantastic Four were weird about the house? Too attached?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” I had almost forgotten that, actually. “I think I overreacted. When you put a lot of work into a place, you do get attached to it. And it’s a nice house.”
“Oh, it is,” Frank said. There was something in his tone that set my alarm bells jingling faintly, a fierce, sardonic grin. “It is that. I was bored today—Naylor’s still in the wind and I’m getting nowhere on Lexie-May-Ruth-Princess-Anastasia-whoever, I’ve drawn a blank in about fourteen countries so far, I’m considering the possibility that she was built in a pod by mad scientists in 1997. So, just to show my homegirl Cassie that I trust her instincts, I put in a call to my mate in the Land Registry office and ask him for a rundown on Whitethorn House. Who loves you, baby?”
“You do,” I said. Frank has always had a spectacular array of mates in unlikely places: my mate down at the docks, my mate on the County Council, my mate who runs the S&M shop. Back when we first began this whole Lexie Madison thing, My Mate At Births Deaths and Marriages made sure she was officially registered, in case anyone got suspicious and started sniffing around, while My Mate With The Van helped me move into her bedsit. I figure I’m happier not knowing about whatever complex barter system is going on there. “You bloody well should, after all this. And?”
“And remember saying they all act like they own the place?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Your instincts hit the jackpot, babe. They do. So do you, actually.”
“Quit being cute, Frankie,” I said. My heart was pounding hard and slow and there was a strange dark shiver through the hedges: something was happening. “What are you on about?”
“Old Simon’s will cleared probate and Daniel took possession of Whitethorn House on the tenth of September. On the fifteenth of December, ownership of the house was transferred into five names: Raphael Hyland, Alexandra Madison, Justin Mannering, Daniel March and Abigail Stone. Happy Christmas.”
It was the sheer blazing courage of it that hit me first: the passion of trust it would take, to put your future where your mouth was, no half measures, scoop up all your tomorrows and put them so deliberately, so simply, in the hands of the people you loved best. I thought of Daniel at the table, broad-backed and solid in his crisp white shirt, the precise flick of his wrist as he turned a page; of Abby flipping bacon in her bathrobe, Justin singing out of tune while he got ready for bed, Rafe sprawled on the grass squinting up into the sun. And all the time, underpinning everything, this. I had had moments of envying them before, but this was something too deep for envy; something like awe.
And then I realized. N, plane fares,
Over my dead body will Ned get a chance.
Here I had been fucking about with music boxes and tin soldiers and trying to figure out how much your average family photo album was worth; here I had thought she had nothing to sell, this time.
If she had been negotiating with Ned, and the others had somehow found out: holy shit. No wonder his name had turned the room to ice, that afternoon. I couldn’t breathe.
Frank was still going. I could hear him moving, pacing up and down the room, fast steps. “The paperwork on that would take months; Danny Boy must’ve started it almost the same day he got the keys. I know you like these people, Cassie, but you can’t tell me that’s not bizarre as all hell. That house is worth a cool couple of million, easy. What the fuck is he thinking? They’re all going to live there forever in one big happy hippie commune? Actually, never mind what he’s thinking, what the fuck is he
smoking
?”
He was taking it personally because he had missed it: all that investigation, and the middle-class student wimps had somehow slipped this right past him. “Yeah,” I said, very carefully, “it’s weird. They