“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.
