His voice had gone sober, tense. “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I am being careful.”
“Half past eleven to one o’clock. That fits the time of the stabbing.”
“I know. I haven’t seen anyone dodgy hanging around.”
“Do you have your gun?”
“Whenever I go out. Frank already lectured me about that.”
“Frank,” Sam said, and I heard that remoteness come into his voice. “Right.”
After we hung up I waited in the shadow of the tree for a long time. I heard the crash of long grass and the thin scream as whatever predator was out there finally pounced. When the rustles had faded into the dark and only small things moved, I slipped out into the lane and went home.
I stopped at the back gate and swung on it for a while, listening to the slow creak of the hinge and looking up the long garden at the house. It looked different, that night. The gray stone of the back was flat and defensive as a castle wall, and the golden glow from the windows didn’t feel cozy any more; it had turned defiant, warning, like a small campfire in a savage forest. The moonlight whitened the lawn into a wide fitful sea, with the house tall and still in the middle, exposed on every side; besieged.
10
When you find a crack, you push on it and you see if something breaks. It had taken me about an hour and a half to work out that, if there was something the housemates weren’t telling me, Justin was my best bet. Any detective with a couple of years under his belt can tell you who’s going to break first; back in Murder I once saw Costello, who was installed in the eighties along with the decor, pick the weak link just from watching the gang of suspects get booked in. It’s our version of Name That Tune.
Daniel and Abby were both useless: too controlled and too focused, almost impossible to distract or wrong- foot-I had tried a couple of times to nudge Abby into telling me who she thought the daddy was, got nothing but cool blank looks. Rafe was more suggestible and I knew I could probably get somewhere with him if I had to, but it would be tricky; he was too volatile and contrary, just as likely to storm out in a strop as to tell you what you wanted to know. Justin-gentle, imaginative, easily worried, wanting everyone to be happy-was pretty near to being an interviewer’s dream.
The only thing was that I was never alone with him. In the first week I hadn’t really noticed it, but now that I was looking for a chance, it stood out. Daniel and I drove into college together a couple of times a week, and I saw a lot of Abby-breakfasts, after dinner when the guys were washing up, sometimes she knocked on my door at night with a packet of biscuits and we sat on the bed and talked till we got sleepy-but if I was ever on my own with Rafe or Justin for more than five minutes, one of the others would drift over or call out to us, and we would be effortlessly, invisibly enveloped by the group again. It could have been natural; all five of them did spend an awful lot of time together, and every group has subtle subdivisions, people who never pair off because they only work as part of the whole. But I had to wonder if someone, probably Daniel, had considered all four of them with an interrogator’s assessing eye and come to the same conclusion I had.
It was Monday morning before I got my chance. We were in college; Daniel was giving a tutorial and Abby had a meeting with her supervisor, so it was just Rafe and Justin and me in our corner of the library. When Rafe got up and headed off somewhere, presumably to the bathroom, I counted to twenty and then stuck my head over the barrier into Justin’s carrel.
“Hello, you,” he said, looking up from a page of tiny, fastidious handwriting. Every inch of his desk was heaped with books and looseleaf and photocopies striped with highlighter pen; Justin couldn’t work unless he was snugly nested in the middle of everything he might possibly need.
“I’m bored and it’s sunny,” I said. “Come for lunch.”
He checked his watch. “It’s only twenty to one.”
“Live dangerously,” I said.
Justin looked uncertain. “What about Rafe?”
“He’s big and ugly enough to look after himself. He can wait for Abby and Daniel.” Justin was still looking way too unsure for a decision of this magnitude, and I figured I had about a minute to get him out of there before Rafe came back. “Ah, Justin, come on. I’ll do this till you do.” I drummed “shave and a haircut, two bits” on the barrier with my fingernails.
“Argh,” Justin said, putting his pen down. “Chinese noise torture. You win.”
The obvious place to go was the edge of New Square, but you can see it through the library windows, so I dragged Justin over to the cricket pitch, where it would take Rafe longer to find us. It was a bright, cold day, high blue sky and the air like ice water. Down by the Pavilion a bunch of cricketers were doing earnest stylized things at each other, and up at our end four guys were playing Frisbee and trying to act like they weren’t doing it for the benefit of three industrially groomed girls on a bench, who were trying to look like they weren’t watching. Mating rituals: it was spring.
“So,” Justin said, when we were settled on the grass. “How’s the chapter going?”
“Crap,” I said, rummaging through my book bag for my sandwich. “I’ve written bugger-all since I got back. I can’t concentrate.”
“Well,” Justin said, after a moment. “That’s only to be expected, isn’t it? For a little while.”
I shrugged, not looking at him.
“It’ll wear off. Really, it will. Now that you’re home and everything’s back to normal.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I found my sandwich, made a face at it and dumped it on the grass: few things worried Justin as much as people not eating. “It just sucks, not knowing what happened. It sucks enormously. I keep wondering… The cops kept hinting that they had all these leads and stuff, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. For fuck’s sake, I’m the one who got stabbed here. If anyone has a right to know why, it’s me.”
“But I thought you were feeling better. You said you were fine.”
“I guess. Never mind.”
“We thought… I mean, I didn’t expect you to be this bothered. To keep thinking about it. It’s not like you.”
I glanced over at him, but he didn’t look suspicious, just worried. “Yeah, well,” I said. “I never got stabbed before.”
“No,” said Justin. “I suppose not.” He arranged his lunch on the grass: bottle of orange juice on one side, banana on the other, sandwich in the middle. He was biting the edge of his lip.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said abruptly. “My parents.” Saying the words gave me a sharp, giddy little thrill.
Justin’s head snapped up and he stared at me. “What about them?”
“That maybe I should get in touch with them. Tell them what happened.”
“No pasts,” Justin said, instantly, like a quick sign against bad luck. “We agreed.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. Easy for you to say.”
“It isn’t, actually.” Then, when I didn’t answer: “Lexie? Are you serious?”
I did another edgy little shrug. “Not sure yet.”
“But I thought you hated them. You said you never wanted to speak to them again.”
“That’s not the point.” I twisted the strap of my book bag around my finger, pulled it away in a long spiral. “I just keep thinking… I could have died there. Actually died. And my parents would never even have known.”
“If something happens to me,” Justin said, “I don’t want my parents called. I don’t want them there. I don’t want them to know.”
“Why not?” He was picking the seal off his bottle of juice, head down. “Justin?”
“Never mind. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No. Tell me, Justin. Why not?”
After a moment Justin said, “I went back to Belfast for Christmas, our first year of postgrad. Not long after you came. Do you remember?”
“Yeah,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me; he was blinking at the cricketers, white and formal as ghosts against the green, the thwack of the bat reaching us late and faraway.
“I told my father and my stepmother that I’m gay. On Christmas Eve.” A small, humorless snort of a laugh.
