It was only the third time I had been inside that cottage. I was a little wary about angry farmers-the field had to belong to someone, after all, although apparently he wasn’t too attached to it-but it was a still, bright night, nothing moving for miles around, just pale empty fields and the mountains black silhouettes against the stars. I got my back into a corner, where I could see the field and the road but where the shadows would mask me from anyone watching, and waited.
Just on the off chance that Ned did show up, I had to get this right; I only had one shot. I needed to let him lead, not just on everything I said, but on how I said it. Whatever Lexie had been for him, I needed to be the same. Going on past form, that could have been anything-breathy vamp, brave put-upon Cinderella, enigmatic Mata Hari-and, regardless of what Frank said about Ned’s brainpower, if I hit the wrong note even he would probably notice. All I could do was play it quiet and hope he gave me some cue.
The road was white and mysterious, curling away downhill into deep black hedges. A few minutes before eleven there was a vibration somewhere, too deep or too far away to pinpoint, just a throb tugging at the edge of my hearing. Silence; then the faint crunch of footsteps, away down the lane. I pressed back into the corner and got one hand around my torch and the other up my sweater, on the butt of my gun.
That flash of fair hair, moving among the dark hedges. Ned had made it after all.
I let go of my gun and watched him haul himself awkwardly over the wall, inspect his trousers for contamination, brush off his hands and pick his way across the field with deep distaste. I waited till he was in the cottage, only a few feet away, before I switched on my torch.
“God,” Ned said peevishly, throwing an arm up to shield his eyes. “Like, go ahead and totally blind me?”
That right there was, like, totally enough time for me to learn everything I needed to know about Ned in one easy lesson. Here I had been all freaked out about having one double; he must have run into a clone of himself on every street corner in south Dublin. He was so exactly like everyone else that there was no way to see him, through all those thousands of reflected images. Standard-issue trendy haircut, standard-issue good looks, standard-issue rugby build, standard-issue overpriced labels; I could have told you his whole life story on that one glance. I hoped to God I never had to pick him out of a lineup.
Lexie would have given him whatever he wanted to see, and there was no doubt in my mind that Ned liked his girls clichéd: sexy by numbers rather than by nature, humorless, not too bright and ever so slightly bitchy. It was a shame I didn’t have a fake tan. "OhmyGod,” I said, matching his peeved tone and doing the same geebag accent I’d used to get Naylor out of his hedge. “Don’t have a thrombo. It’s just a torch.” This conversation wasn’t starting out on a great note, but I was OK with that. There are some social circles where manners are a sign of weakness.
“Where have you been?” Ned demanded. “I’ve been leaving you notes, like, every other day. I’ve got better stuff to do than haul my arse down to bogland all the time, yah?”
If Lexie had been shagging this space waste, I was going to head over to the morgue and stab her myself. I rolled my eyes. “Um, hello? I got stabbed? I was in a coma?”
“Oh,” Ned said. “Yah. Right.” He gave me a pale-blue, vaguely put-out stare, like I’d done something tasteless. “Still, though. You could have got in touch. This is business.”
That, at least, was good news. “Yah, well,” I said. “We’re in touch now, aren’t we?”
“This total fucking low-life detective came and talked to me,” Ned said, suddenly remembering. He looked as outraged as you can get without changing expression. “Like I was a suspect, or something. I told him this was so not my problem. I’m not from Ballymun. I don’t stab people.”
I decided I was with Frank on this one: Ned was not the brightest little bunny hopping through this forest. He was the type who was basically one big cluster of secondhand reflexes, no actual thought involved. I would have been willing to bet good money that he talked to working-class clients as though they were handicapped and said “Me love you long time” whenever he saw an Asian girl. “Did you tell him about this?” I asked, pulling myself up onto a broken bit of wall.
He gave me a horrified look. “No way. He’d have been all over me like a rash, and I couldn’t be arsed trying to explain myself to him. I just want this sorted, yah?”
And civic-minded, too-not that I was complaining. “Good,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like this has anything to do with what happened to me, right?”
Ned didn’t seem to have an opinion on that. He went to lean against the wall, examined it suspiciously and changed his mind. “So can we, like, move forwards?” he wanted to know.
