Justin, take your clothes off.’ He was already unbuttoning his shirt-”
“By the time I got back with the bag, he and Justin were both standing on the patio in their boxers,” Rafe said, brushing ash off his shirt. “Not a pretty sight.”
“I was freezing,” Justin said. He sounded a lot better, now that the worst part was over: shaky, drained, released. “It was lashing rain, it was about seven million degrees below zero, the wind was like ice and we were standing on the patio in our underwear. I had no idea why we were doing this; my mind had gone numb, I was just doing whatever I was told. Daniel threw all our clothes into the bag and said something about lucky we weren’t wearing coats-I started to put my shoes in, I was trying to help, but he said, ‘No, leave those here; I’ll deal with them later.’ Sometime around then Abby got back with the towels and the clothes, and we dried off and got dressed-”
“I tried again to ask what was going on,” said Rafe, “from a safe distance this time. Justin gave me this deer- in-headlights stare and Daniel didn’t even look at me; he just tucked his shirt into his trousers and said, ‘Rafe, Abby, bring your washing, please. If you don’t have any dirty clothes, clean ones will do.’ Then he scooped up the bag in his arms and marched off into the kitchen, barefoot, with Justin tagging after him like a puppy. For some reason I actually went and got my washing.”
“He was right,” Abby said. “If the police had got there before we had the washing done, it needed to look like a normal load, not getting rid of evidence.”
Rafe gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Whatever. Daniel got the washing machine started and stood there frowning at it, like it was some fascinating mystery object. We were all in the kitchen, standing around like a bunch of spare pricks, waiting for I don’t know what; for Daniel to say something, I suppose, although-”
“All I could see was the knife,” Justin said, low. “Rafe and Abby had just left it there, on the kitchen floor-”
Rafe raised his eyes to the ceiling, jerked his head at Abby. “Yeah,” she said, “that was me. I figured we’d better not touch anything, not until the others came back and we knew what the plan was.”
“Because of course,” Rafe told me, in a drawling pseudo-undertone, “there was bound to be a plan. With Daniel, isn’t there always a plan? Isn’t it nice to know there’s a plan?”
“Abby yelled at us,” said Justin. “She shouted, ‘Where the hell is Lexie?’ In my ear. I almost fainted.”
“Daniel turned around and stared,” Rafe said, “like he had no idea who we were. Justin tried to say something and made this awful choking noise, and Daniel jumped about a mile and blinked at him. Then he said, ‘Lexie is in that ruined cottage she likes. She’s dead. I assumed Justin had told you.’ And he started putting his socks on.”
“Justin had told us,” Abby said quietly, “but I guess we had been hoping he’d got it wrong, somehow…”
A long silence. Upstairs the clock on the landing was ticking, slow and heavy. Somewhere Daniel had his foot on the accelerator and I thought I could feel him out there, coming closer every second, the dizzying speed of the road under his tyres.
'And then?” I asked. “Did you just go to bed?”
They looked at each other. Justin started to laugh, a high, helpless sound, and after a moment the others joined in.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know what we’re laughing about,” Abby said, wiping her eyes and trying to compose herself and look stern, which sent them all into fresh spurts of giggles. “Oh, God… It wasn’t funny; really, it wasn’t. It’s just…”
“You’re not going to believe this,” Rafe said. “We played poker.”
“We did. We sat at that table-”
“-practically having heart attacks every time the rain hit the window-”
“Justin’s teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, it was like sitting next to a maraca player-”
“And when the wind did that thing with the door? And Daniel knocked his chair over?”
“Look who’s talking. About ninety percent of the time I could see every card in your hand. You’re lucky I was in no mood for cheating, I could’ve cleaned you out-”
They were talking over each other, chattering like a bunch of teenagers bursting out of some huge exam, giddy with relief. “Oh, my God,” Justin said, closing his eyes and pressing his glass against his temple. “That fucking, fucking card game. My jaw still drops when I think about it. Daniel kept saying, ‘The only reliable alibi is an actual sequence of events-’ ”
“The rest of us could barely talk in sentences,” said Rafe, “and he’s waxing philosophical about the art of the alibi. I couldn’t have said ‘reliable alibi.’ ”
“-so he made us turn all the clocks back to eleven, just before it all went horrible, and go back into the kitchen and finish the washing up, and then he made us come in here and play cards. As if nothing had happened.”
“He played your hand as well as his,” Abby told me. “The first time you had a decent hand and he had a better one, he went all in for you and then knocked you out. It was surreal.”
“And he kept narrating,” Rafe said. He stretched for the vodka bottle and topped up his glass. In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling in his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night’s dancing. “ ‘Lexie’s raising, Lexie folds, Lexie would need another drink at this point, could someone please pass her the wine…’ He was like some nutcase who sits next to you in the park and feeds bites of sandwich to his imaginary friend. Once he’d got you out of the game he made us act out this little scene, you heading off on your walk and all of us waving bye-bye to thin air… I thought we were losing our minds. I remember sitting there, in that chair, politely saying good-bye to the door and thinking very clearly and calmly, So this is what insanity feels like.”
“It must have been three in the morning by then,” Justin said, “but Daniel wouldn’t let us go to bed. We had to sit there and keep playing Texas bloody Hold-’em, to the bitter end-Daniel won, of course, he was the only one who could concentrate, but it took him forever to wipe the rest of us out. Honestly, the cops must think we’re the worst poker players in history, I was folding on flush draws and raising on a ten high… I was so exhausted I was seeing double, and it all felt like a hideous nightmare, I kept thinking I had to wake up. We hung the clothes in front of the fire to dry and the room was like something out of The Fog, clothes steaming and the fire spitting and everyone chain-smoking Daniel’s horrible unfiltered things-”
“He wouldn’t let me go get normal ones,” said Abby. “He said we all needed to stay together, and anyway the cameras at the petrol station would show what time I’d come in and it would mess everything up… He was like a general.” Rafe snorted. “He was. The rest of us were shaking so much we could barely hold our cards-”
“Justin got sick at one stage,” Rafe said through a cigarette, waving out the match. “In the kitchen sink, charmingly enough.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Justin said. “All I could think of was you, lying there in the dark, all by yourself-” He reached out and squeezed my arm. I put up a hand to cover his for a second; his was cool and bony and trembling hard.
“That was all any of us could think about,” Abby said, “but Daniel… I could see how much it was taking out of him-his face had fallen in under the cheekbones, like he’d lost a stone since dinner, and his eyes looked wrong, all huge and black-but he was so calm, as if nothing had happened. Justin started cleaning up the sink-”
“He was still gagging,” Rafe said. “I could hear him. Out of the five of us, Lexie, I think you may have had the nicest evening.”
“-but Daniel told him to leave it; he said it would skew the timeline in our minds.”
“Apparently,” Rafe informed me, “the essence of the alibi is simplicity; the fewer steps one has to omit or invent, the less likely one is to make a mistake. He kept saying, ‘As it stands, all we need to do is remember that we went from the washing up to the card game, and eliminate the intervening events from our minds. They never happened.’ In other words, get back here and play your hand, Justin. The poor bastard was green.”
Daniel had been right, about the alibi. He was good at this; too good. In that second I thought of my flat, Sam scribbling and the air outside the windows dimming to purple and me profiling the killer: someone with previous criminal experience.
Sam had run background checks on every one of them, found nothing worse than a couple of speeding tickets. I had no way of knowing what checks Frank might have run, in his private, complex, off-the-record world; how much he had found and kept to himself, and how much had slipped past even him; who, out of all the contenders, was the best secret keeper of us all.
“He wouldn’t even let us move the knife,” Justin said. “It was there the whole time we were playing cards. I
