bust, staring loftily out over Lexie’s red bandanna. I was starting to like Rafe.
The first floor had Abby’s room and the bathroom at the front, Justin’s and a spare room to the back-either it had been too complicated to clear out, or Rafe liked being on his own downstairs. I started with the spare. The thought of going into either of the others put a small, ridiculous nasty taste in my mouth.
Great-uncle Simon had obviously never, ever thrown anything away. The room had a schizophrenic, dreamlike look, some lost store-cupboard of the mind: three copper kettles with holes in them, a moldy top hat, a broken stick-horse giving me a Godfather leer, what appeared to be half of an accordion. I know nothing about antiques, but none of it looked valuable, definitely not valuable enough to kill for. It looked more like stuff you would leave outside the gate in the hope that drunk students on a kitsch kick would take it home.
Abby and Justin were both neat, in very different ways. Abby went in for knickknacks-a tiny alabaster vase holding a handful of violets, a lead-crystal candlestick, an old sweet tin with a picture of a red-lipped girl in improbable Egyptian getup on the lid, all shiny clean and lined up carefully on just about every flat surface-and color; the curtains were made of strips of old fabric sewn together, red damask, bluebell-sprigged cotton, frail lace, and she had glued patches of fabric over the bald spots in the faded wallpaper. The room felt cozy and quirky and a little unreal, like the den of some kids’-book wood-land creature that would wear a frilly bonnet and make jam tarts.
Justin, sort of unexpectedly, turned out to have minimalist tastes. There was a small nest of books and photocopies and scribbled pages beside his bedside table, and he had covered the back of his door with photos of the gang-arranged symmetrically, in what looked like chronological order, and covered with some kind of clear sealant-but everything else was spare and clean and functional: white bedclothes, white curtains blowing, dark wood furniture polished to a shine, neat rows of balled-up socks in the drawers and glossy shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room smelled, very faintly, of something cypressy and masculine.
There was nothing dodgy in any of the bedrooms, as far as I could see, but something about all three of them kept catching at me. It took me a while to put my finger on it. I was kneeling on Justin’s floor, checking under his bed like a burglar (nothing, not even dust bunnies), when it hit me: they felt permanent. I had never lived in a place where I could mess with the wallpaper or glue things down-my aunt and uncle wouldn’t have objected, exactly, but their house had a tiptoe atmosphere that prevented anything along those lines from even occurring to me, and all my landlords apparently had this idea that they were renting me Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest; it had taken me months to convince my current guy that property values would not plummet if I painted the walls white instead of banana-barf yellow and stuck the LSD-based carpet in the garden shed. None of this had bothered me at the time, but all of a sudden, surrounded by this houseful of happy, cavalier possessiveness-I would have loved a mural; Sam can draw-it seemed like a very strange way to live, on some stranger’s sufferance, asking permission like a little kid before I left any mark.
The top floor: my room, Daniel’s, two more spares. The one beside Daniel was full of old furniture, tumbled in splayed heaps as if an earthquake had hit: those grayish undersized chairs that never actually get used, a display cabinet that looked like the Rococo movement had thrown up on it, and just about everything in between. Bits and pieces had obviously been taken out-drag marks, bare patches-presumably to furnish the rooms when the five of them moved in. What was left was inches deep in trailing, sticky dust. The room next to mine had more wild debris (a cracked stone hot-water bottle, mud-crusted green wellies, a mouse-shredded tapestry cushion involving deer and flowers) and teetering stacks of cardboard boxes and old leather suitcases. Someone had made a start on going through this stuff, not too long ago: layers of bright finger marks on some of the suitcase lids, one even wiped semiclean, mysterious outlines in corners and on boxes where things had been taken away. There were tangles of faint shoe prints on the dusty floorboards.
If you were going to hide something-a murder weapon, or some kind of evidence, or some small priceless antique-this wouldn’t be a bad place. I went through all the cases that had been opened, staying well clear of the finger marks, just in case, but they were stuffed to the lids with pages and pages of crabby fountain-pen scribble. As far as I could tell, someone, presumably Great-uncle Simon, had been writing a history of the March family through the ages. The Marches had been around for a while-the dates went back to 1734, when the house had been built-but had apparently never done anything more interesting than getting married, buying the odd horse and gradually losing most of their estate.
Daniel’s room was locked. The life skills I learned from Frank do include lock picking, and this one looked pretty simple, but I was already antsy from the diary, and that door wound me a notch tighter. I had no way of knowing whether Daniel always locked his room or whether this was specially for me. I was suddenly positive that he had left some trap-a hair across the frame, a glass of water just inside the door-that would give me away if I went in there.
I finished off with Lexie’s room-it had been searched already, but I wanted to do it myself. Unlike Uncle Simon, Lexie had kept sweet fuck-all. The room wasn’t tidy, exactly-the books were tossed onto the shelves rather than lined up, the clothes were mostly in piles on the wardrobe floor; under the bed were three empty smoke packets, half a Caramilk and a crumpled page of notes on Villette-but it was too sparse to be messy. No knickknacks, no old ticket stubs or birthday cards or dried flowers, no photographs; the only mementos she had wanted were the phone videos. I thumbed through every book and turned every pocket inside out, but the room gave me nothing.
It had that same taste of permanence, though. She had been trying out paint colors on the wall beside her bed, in broad fast sweeps: ochre, old rose, china blue. That flick of envy went through me again. Screw you, I told Lexie inside my head; you may have lived here for longer, but I’m getting paid for it.
I sat down on the floor, dug my mobile out of my bag and rang Frank. “Hey, babe,” he said, on the second ring. “Burned already, yeah?”
He was in a good mood. “Yep,” I said. “Sorry about that. Come get me.”
Frank laughed. “How’s it going?”
I stuck him on speakerphone, put the phone on the floor beside me and stuffed my gloves and notebook back into the bag. “OK, I guess. I don’t think any of them suspect anything’s up.”
“Why would they? Nobody in their right mind would think of something this unlikely. Got anything good for me?”
“They’re all at college, so I had a quick look around the house. No bloody knife, no bloody clothes, no Renoirs, no signed confessions. Not even a stash of spliff or a porn mag. They’re awfully pure, for students.” My bandages were in carefully numbered packets, so that the stains would get lighter as the wound supposedly healed, just in case someone with a very weird mind was checking the bin-in this job, you leave room for a fair amount of weirdness. I found the bandage marked “ 2” and peeled off the wrapper. Whoever had done the staining lived life with enthusiasm.
“Any sign of that diary?” Frank asked. “The famous diary that Daniel saw fit to mention to you, but not to us.”
I leaned back against the bookshelf, hiked up my top and pulled off the old bandage. “If it’s in the house,” I said, “someone’s done a good job of hiding it.”
A noncommittal noise from Frank. “Or else you were right and the killer took it off her body. Either way, though, it’s interesting that Daniel and company felt the need to lie about it. Anyone acting dodgy?”
“No. They were a little awkward around me to start with, but they would be. Basically, the main thing I’m getting is they’re glad to have Lexie back.”
“That’s what I got from the mike feed. Which,” Frank said, “reminds me. What happened last night, after you went up to your room? I heard you talking, but somehow I had trouble catching the exact words.”
There was a different note in his voice, and not a good one. I stopped smoothing down the edges of the new bandage. “Nothing. Everyone said good night.”
“How sweet,” Frank said. “Very Waltons. I’m sorry I missed it. Where was your mike?”
“In my bag. The battery pack sticks into me when I sleep.”
“So sleep on your back. Your door doesn’t lock.”
“I put a chair in front of it.”
“Oh, well, then. That’s all the backup you need. Jesus, Cassie!” I could practically see him raking his free hand furiously through his hair, pacing.
“What’s the big deal, Frank? Last time I never even used the mike unless I was actually doing something interesting. Whether I talk in my sleep isn’t going to make or break this case.”
