Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “He suspected us from the beginning,” he said, and I realized that he was right; of course he was right. All Frank’s talk about the mysterious foreigner who followed Lexie halfway across the world, that was just a smoke screen: Sam would have thrown a blue fit if he thought I was going to share a roof with the killer. Frank’s famous intuition had kicked in long before we ever got into that squad room. He had known, all along, that the answer was in this house.
“He’s an interesting man, Detective Mackey,” Daniel said. “He’s like one of those charming murderers in Jacobean plays, the ones who get all the best monologues: Bosola, or De Flores. It’s a pity you can’t tell me anything; I would be fascinated to know how much he’s guessed.”
“So would I,” I said. “Believe me.”
Daniel took out his cigarette case, opened it and politely offered it to me. His face, bent over the lighter as I cupped my hand around the flame, was absorbed and untroubled.
“Now,” he said, when he had lit his own smoke and put the case away, “I’m sure you have some questions you’d like to ask me.”
“If I’m so much like Lexie,” I said, “what gave me away?” I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t professional pride or anything; I just needed, badly, to know what that unmissable difference had been.
Daniel turned his head and looked at me. There was an expression on his face that I hadn’t expected: something almost like affection, or sympathy. “You did extraordinarily well, you know,” he said, kindly. “Even now, I don’t think the others suspect anything. We’ll have to decide what to do about that, you and I.”
“I can’t have done all that well,” I said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”
He shook his head. “I think that underrates both of us, don’t you? You were virtually flawless. I did know, almost immediately, that something was wrong-all of us did, just as you would sense something amiss if your partner were replaced by his identical twin. But there were so many possible reasons for that. At first I wondered if you might be faking the amnesia, for reasons of your own, but gradually it became clear that your memory was, in fact, damaged-there seemed to be no reason why you should pretend to forget about finding that photo album, for example, and it was obvious that you were genuinely disturbed by the fact that you didn’t remember it. Once I was satisfied that that wasn’t the problem, I thought perhaps you were planning to leave-which would have been understandable, in the circumstances, but Abby seemed very sure that you weren’t, and I trust Abby’s judgment. And you really did seem…”
His face turned towards me. “You really did seem happy, you know. More than happy: content; settled. Nested back in among us as if you had never been away. Perhaps this was deliberate, and you’re even better at your job than I realize, but I find it hard to believe that both my instincts and Abby’s could have been quite so wrong.”
There was nothing I could say to that. For a split second I wanted to curl up in a ball and howl at the top of my lungs, like a kid devastated by the sheer ruthlessness of this world. I gave Daniel a noncommittal tilt of my chin, drew on my smoke and tapped ash onto the flagstones.
Daniel waited with a grave patience that sent a little warning chill through me. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to answer, he nodded, a tiny, private, thoughtful nod. “At any rate,” he said, “I decided you, or rather Lexie, must simply be traumatized. A profound trauma-and clearly this would qualify-can transform a person’s entire character, you know: turn a strong person into a trembling wreck, a happy nature melancholic, a gentle one vicious. It can shatter you into a million pieces, and rearrange the remains in an utterly unrecognizable form.”
His voice was even, calm; he was looking away from me again, out at the hawthorn flowers white and shivering in the breeze, and I couldn’t see his eyes. “The changes in Lexie were so small, by comparison, so trivial; so easily accounted for. I assume Detective Mackey gave you the information you needed.”
“Detective Mackey and Lexie. The video phone.”
Daniel thought about that for so long that I thought he’d forgotten my question. There was an in-built immobility to his face-that square-cut jaw, maybe-that made it almost impossible to read. “ ‘Everything’s overrated except Elvis and chocolate,’ ” he said, in the end. “That was a nice touch.”
“Was it the onions that did it?” I asked.
