Daniel sighed. “Roughly,” he said, “yes. In every essential, that’s what happened. Can’t you leave it at that? You know the gist of it; the other details would do no one the slightest bit of good and would do several people considerable harm. She was lovely, she was complicated and she is dead. What else is there that matters, now?”
“Well,” I said. “There’s the question of who killed her.”
“Has it occurred to you,” Daniel asked, and there was an undercurrent of some intense emotion building in his voice, “to wonder whether Lexie herself would want you to pursue this? No matter what she was considering doing, she loved us. Do you think she would want you setting out specifically to destroy us?”
Something still bending the air, rippling the stones under my feet; something high as a needle against the sky and shivering just behind each leaf. “She found me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for her. She came for me.”
“Possibly she did,” said Daniel. He was leaning towards me across the water, close, his elbows on his knees; behind the glasses his eyes were magnified, gray and bottomless. “But are you really so sure that what she wanted was revenge? She could so easily have run for the village, after all: knocked on a door, got someone to call an ambulance and the police. The villagers may not like us very much, but I doubt they would have denied help to an obviously wounded woman. Instead, she went straight to the cottage and simply stayed there, waiting. Haven’t you ever wondered if she may have been a willing participant in her own death and in the concealment of her killer-if she went consenting, one of us to the end? Haven’t you ever wondered if perhaps, for her sake, you should respect that?”
The air tasted strange, sweet, honey and salt. “Yeah,” I said. It was hard to talk, the thoughts seemed to take forever moving between my mind and my tongue. “I have. I’ve wondered all the time. But I’m not doing this for Lexie. I’m doing this because it’s my job.”
It’s such a cliché, and I said it so automatically; but the words seemed to whipcrack through the air startling and potent as electricity, rocketing down the ivy trails, burning white on the water. For a split second I was back in that first reeking stairwell with my hands in my pockets, looking up at that young junkie’s dead bewildered face. I was stone cold sober again, that dreamlike dazzle had dissolved out of the air and the bench was solid and clammy under my arse. Daniel was watching me with a new alertness in his eyes, watching me like he had never seen me before. It was only in that second that it hit me: it was true, what I had said to him, and maybe it had been true all along.
“Well,” he said, quietly. “In that case…”
He leaned back, slowly, away from me, against the wall. There was a long, humming silence.
“Where,” Daniel said. He stopped for an instant, but his voice stayed perfectly even: “Where is Lexie now?”
“In the morgue,” I said. “We haven’t been able to reach her next of kin.”
“We’ll do whatever needs to be done. I think she would prefer that.”
“The body is evidence in an open homicide case,” I said. “I doubt anyone’s going to release it to you. Until the investigation’s closed, she’ll have to stay where she is.”
There was no need for me to get graphic. I knew what he was seeing; my mind had a full-color slide show of the same images ready and waiting to play. Something rippled over Daniel’s face, a tiny spasm tightening his nose and lips.
“As soon as we know who did this to her,” I said, “I can argue that the body should be released to the rest of you. That you count as her next of kin.”
For a second his eyelids flickered; then his face turned blank. Looking back, I think-not that this is any excuse-that it was the easiest thing to miss about Daniel: how ruthlessly, lethally pragmatic he was, under the vague ivory-tower haze. An officer on the battlefield will leave his own dead brother behind without a second look, while the enemy’s still circling, to get his live men safe away.
“Obviously,” Daniel said, “I’d like you to leave this house. The others won’t be back for an hour or so; that should give you ample time to pack your things and make any necessary arrangements.”
This should hardly have come as a surprise, but it still felt like he’d slapped me straight across the face. He felt for his cigarette case. “I’d prefer that the others not find out who you are. I think you can imagine how badly it would upset them. I admit I’m not sure how to accomplish this, but surely you and Detective Mackey have a get-out clause in place, no? Some story you worked out to extricate you without raising any suspicions?”
