Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb. “Really,” he said, a little wearily, “when I think about it, I made an astounding number of mistakes along the way. The hypothermia story, for instance: I should never have fallen for that. Initially, in fact, I didn’t. I know very little about medicine, but when your colleague-Detective Mackey-told me that story, I didn’t believe a word of it. I assumed he was hoping we’d be more likely to talk if we thought that it was a matter of assault, rather than murder, and that Lexie might at any minute tell him everything. All that week, I took it for granted that he was bluffing. But then…” He lifted his head and looked at me, blinking, as if he had almost forgotten I was there. “But then, you see,” he said, “you arrived.”
His eyes moved over my face. “The resemblance really is extraordinary. Are you-were you-related to Lexie?”
“No,” I said. “Not as far as I know.”
“No.” Daniel went through his pockets methodically, took out his cigarette case and lighter. “She told us she had no family. This may be why the possibility of you didn’t occur to me. The inherent unlikeliness of the situation was in your favor all along: any suspicion that you weren’t Lexie would have had to be predicated on the improbable hypothesis of your existence. I should have remembered Conan Doyle: ‘whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
He flicked the lighter and tilted his head to the flame. “I knew, you see,” he said, “that it was impossible Lexie should be alive. I checked her pulse myself.”
The garden dumbstruck, in the fading gold light. The birds hushed, the branches caught in midsway; the house, a great silence poised over us, listening. I had stopped breathing. Lexie blew down the grass like a silver shower of wind, she rocked in the hawthorn trees and balanced light as a leaf on the wall beside me, she slipped along my shoulder and blazed down my back like fox fire.
“What happened?” I asked, very quietly.
“Well, really,” Daniel said, “you know I can’t tell you that. As you probably suspected, Lexie was stabbed in Whitethorn House; in the kitchen, to be exact. You won’t find any blood-there was none at the time, although I know she bled later-and you won’t find the knife. There was no premeditation and no intent to kill. We went after her, but by the time we found her it was already too late. I think that’s all I can say.”
“OK,” I said, “OK.” I pressed my feet down hard on the flagstones and tried to pull my head together. I wanted to dip a hand in the pond and splash cold water down the back of my neck, but I couldn’t let Daniel see that, and anyway I doubted it would help. “Can I tell you what I think happened?”
Daniel inclined his head and made a small, courteous gesture with one hand: Please do.
“I think Lexie was planning to sell her share of the house.”
He didn’t rise to that, didn’t even blink. He was watching me blandly, like a professor at an oral exam, flicking the ash off his cigarette, aiming it carefully into the water where it would wash away.
“And I’m pretty sure I know why.”
I was sure he would bite on that one, positive-for a month now, he had to have been wondering-but he shook his head. “I don’t need to know,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter, at this stage-if it ever did. I think, you know, that all five of us have a ruthless streak, in our different ways. Possibly it goes with the territory; with having crossed that river, into being sure of what you want. Certainly Lexie was capable of great ruthlessness. But not of cruelty. When you think of her, please, remember that. She was never cruel.”
“She was going to sell up to your cousin Ned,” I said. “Mr. Executive Apartments himself. That sounds a lot like cruelty to me.”
Daniel startled me by laughing, a hard, humorless little snort. “Ned,” he said, with a wry twist to the corner of his mouth. “My God. I was far more worried about him than about Lexie. Lexie-like you-was strong-willed: if she decided to tell the police what had happened, then she would, but if she didn’t want to talk, no amount of questioning would get anything out of her. Ned, on the other hand…”
