He drew in a breath and stirred, coming out of his reverie. “Those onions,” he said, with a faint smile. “Lexie was fanatical about them: onions and cabbage. Fortunately none of the rest of us like cabbage either, but we had to reach a compromise on the onions: once a week. She still complained and picked them out and so on-mainly to tease Rafe and Justin, I think. So, when you ate them without a murmur and asked for more, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what, exactly-you covered it very well-but I couldn’t simply dismiss it. The only alternative explanation I could come up with was that, incredible though it seemed, you weren’t Lexie.”
“So you set a trap for me,” I said. “The Brogan’s thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a trap,” Daniel said, with a touch of asperity. “More of a test. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Lexie had no particular feelings about Brogan’s either way-I’m not sure she’d ever been there-which didn’t seem like something an impostor would know; you might have found out her likes and dislikes, but hardly her indifferences. The fact that you got it right, and the Elvis comment, reassured me. But then there was last night. That kiss.”
I went cold all over, till I remembered I didn’t have the mike on me. “Lexie wouldn’t have done that?” I asked coolly, leaning over to put out my smoke on the flagstones.
Daniel smiled at me, that slow sweet smile that made him suddenly handsome. “Oh, she would have,” he said. “The kiss was very much in character-and very nice, if I may say so.” I didn’t blink. “No, it was your reaction to it. For a split second, you looked stunned; utterly shocked at what you had done. Then you recovered and made some airy comment, and found an excuse to move away-but, you see, Lexie would never have been shaken by that kiss, not even for a second. And she would certainly never have drawn back at that point. She would have been…” He blew thoughtful smoke rings up into the ivy. “She would have been,” he said, “triumphant.”
“Why?” I asked. “Had she been trying to make something like that happen? ” My mind was fast-forwarding through the video clips; there had been flirting with Rafe and Justin but never with Daniel, not a hint, but that could have been a bluff, to mislead the others-
“That,” Daniel said, “is what gave you away.”
I stared at him.
He ground out the cigarette under his foot. “Lexie was both incapable of thinking about the past,” he said, “and incapable of thinking more than one step into the future. This may be one of the few things you overlooked. Not your fault; that level of simplicity is hard to imagine, and also hard to describe. It was as startling as a deformity. I seriously doubt that she would have been able to plan a seduction; but, once something had happened, she would have seen no reason to be shocked by it and certainly no reason to stop there. You, on the other hand, were clearly trying to gauge the consequences this might have. I’d guess that you have a boyfriend, or a partner, in your own life.”
I didn’t say anything. “So,” Daniel said, “I rang the police headquarters this afternoon, once the others had gone out, and asked where I could find Detective Sam O’Neill. The woman I spoke to couldn’t find an extension for him at first, but then she checked some directory and gave me a number to ring. She said, ‘That’s the Murder squad room.’ ”
He sighed, a small, tired, final sound. “Murder,” he said quietly. “So then, you see, I knew.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, again. All day, while we drank coffee and got on each other’s nerves and bitched about our hangovers, while he sent the others off to the pictures and sat in Lexie’s small dimming bedroom waiting for me, he had been carrying this alone.
Daniel nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see that.”
There was a long silence. Finally I said, “You know I need to ask you what happened.”
Daniel took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. Without them his eyes looked blank, blind. “There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. ‘Take what you want and pay for it, says God.’ ”
The words fell into the silence under the ivy like cool pebbles into water, sank without a ripple. “I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could possibly be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”
