dark lane, and I understood then that I could have just kept driving. I could have been like Lexie. I could have hit full speed and taken us soaring up off the road, into the vast silence at the heart of those lights and out on the other side where nothing could touch us, ever.
21
It only took Daniel a couple of hours to come up with his next move. I was sitting up in bed, staring at the Brothers Grimm and reading the same sentence over and over without taking in a word of it, when there was a quick, discreet rap on my door.
'Come in,” I called.
Daniel put his head in the door. He was still dressed, spotless in his white shirt and shining shoes. “Do you have a minute?” he inquired politely.
“Of course,” I said, just as politely, putting down the book. There was no way this was a surrender or even a truce, but I couldn’t think of anything either of us could try, not without the others there for weapons.
“I just wanted,” Daniel said, turning to close the door behind him, “a quick word with you. In private.”
My body thought faster than my mind. In that second when his back was to me, before I knew why I was doing it, I grabbed the mike wire through my pajama top, gave it a hard upwards yank and felt the pop as the jack came free. By the time he looked around again, my hands were lying innocently on the book. “About what?” I asked.
“There are a few things,” Daniel said, smoothing the bottom of the duvet and sitting down, “that have been bothering me.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Almost since you… well, let’s say arrived. Small inconsistencies, growing more troubling as time went on. By the time you asked for more onions, the other evening, I had serious questions.”
He left a polite pause, in case I wanted to contribute anything to the conversation. I stared at him. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this one coming.
“And then, of course,” he said, when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to answer, “we come to last night. As you may or may not know, on a few occasions you and I-or, at any rate, Lexie and I-have… Well, suffice it to say that a kiss can be as individual and unmistakable as a laugh. When we kissed, last night, it left me more or less positive that you’re not Lexie.”
He gazed at me blandly, across the bed. He was burning me all over again, every way he knew how: with my boss, with the boyfriend he’d guessed at, with the brass who would not approve of an undercover smooching a suspect. They were his brand-new remote-controlled weapons. If that mike had been plugged in, I would have been a few hours away from a grim trip home and a one-way ticket to a desk in Offaly.
“Absurd though this may sound,” Daniel said tranquilly, “I’d like to see this supposed stab wound. Simply to reassure myself that you’re actually who you’re claiming to be.”
“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “why not?” and saw the startled flicker in his eyes. I pulled up my pajama top and tugged the bandage free to show him the jack and the battery pack, separate.
“Nice shot,” I told him, “but no dice. And if you do get me pulled out, do you think I’ll go quietly? I’ll have nothing to lose. Even if all I’ve got is five minutes, I’ll use them to tell the others who I am and that you’ve known for weeks. How well do you think that’ll go down with, say, Rafe?”
Daniel leaned forwards to inspect the mike. “Ah,” he said. “Well, it was worth a try.”
“My time’s almost up on this case anyway,” I said. I was talking fast: Frank would have started getting suspicious the instant the mike feed died, I had maybe a minute before his head went up in smoke. “I’ve only got a few days left. But I want those few days. If you try to take them away from me, I’ll go down all guns blazing. If you don’t, you still have a good chance that I won’t get anything worthwhile, and we can work it so the others never have to know who I was.”
He watched me, expressionless, those big square hands tidily clasped in his lap. “My friends are my responsibility. I’m not going to stand back and let you sweep them off into corners for interrogation.”
I shrugged. “Fair enough. Try and stop me any way you can; you didn’t have any trouble tonight. Just don’t mess with my last few days. Deal?”
“How many days,” Daniel asked, “exactly?”
I shook my head. “Not in the deal. In about ten seconds I’m going to plug this in again, so it sounds like an accidental disconnect, and we’re going to have a harmless little chat about why I was in a mood at dinner. OK?”
He nodded absently, still examining the mike. “Great,” I said. “Here goes. I don’t feel like”-I plugged the wire back in halfway through the sentence, for an extra touch of realism-“talking about it. My head’s a mess, everything feels sucky, I just want everyone to leave me alone. OK?”
“You’re probably just hungover,” Daniel said, obligingly. “You’ve always had a hard time with red wine, haven’t you?”
Everything sounded like a trap. “Whatever,” I said, giving him an irritable teenager shrug and sticking my bandage back down. “Maybe it was the punch. Rafe probably put meths in it. He’s drinking a lot more these days, have you noticed?”
“Rafe is fine,” Daniel said coolly. “And so will you be, I hope, after a good night’s sleep.”
Quick footsteps downstairs, and a door opening. “Lexie?” Justin called anxiously, up the stairs. “Is everything OK?”
“Daniel’s annoying me,” I shouted back.
“Daniel? How are you annoying her?”
“I’m not.”
“He wants to know why I feel crap,” I called. “I feel crap because I just do, and I want him to leave me alone.”
“You feel crap because what?” Justin had come out of his room, to the bottom of the stairs; I could picture him, in his striped pyjamas, clutching the banister and peering short-sightedly upwards. Daniel was giving me an intent, thoughtful gaze that made me edgy as hell.
“Shut up!” yelled Abby, furious enough that we could hear her right through her door. “Some of us are trying to sleep here.”
“Lexie? You feel crap because what?”
A thud: Abby had thrown something. “Justin, I said shut up! Jesus! ”
Faintly, from the ground floor, Rafe shouted something irritable that sounded like “What the hell is going on?”
“I’ll come down and explain, Justin,” Daniel called. “Everyone go back to bed.” To me: “Good night.” He stood up and smoothed the duvet again. “Sleep well. I hope you’ll feel better in the morning.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. Don’t count on it.”
The steady rhythm of his footsteps going downstairs, then hushed voices below me: at first a lot of Justin and an occasional brief interjection from Daniel, shifting gradually till it was the other way round. I got out of bed, carefully, and put my ear to the floor, but they were talking barely above whispers and I couldn’t make out the words.
It was twenty minutes before Daniel came back upstairs, softly, pausing for a long few seconds on the landing. I didn’t start shaking until his bedroom door closed behind him.
I stayed awake for hours that night, flipping pages and pretending to read, rustling the covers and doing deep breaths and pretending to be asleep, unplugging the mike for a few seconds or a few minutes every now and then. I think I created a pretty good impression of a jack come loose, disconnecting and reconnecting itself as I moved, but it didn’t reassure me. Frank is very far from stupid, and he was in no humor to give me the benefit of any doubts.
Frank to the left of me, Daniel to the right, and here I was, stuck in the middle with Lexie. I passed the time, while I played my mike-jack game, by trying to work out how it was logistically possible for me to have ended up on the opposite side from absolutely everyone else involved in this case, including people who were on opposite
