The Likeness

by Tana French

  “Any sign of sexual assault?” I asked. Sam flinched. I was way past that.

  “Cooper won’t say for sure till the post-mortem, but nothing on the preliminary points that way. We might get lucky and find some foreign blood on her”—a lot of stabbers cut themselves—“but, basically, I’m not holding my breath for DNA.”

  My first impression—the invisible killer, leaving no trace—hadn’t been far off. After a few months in Murder, you can tell One of Those Cases a mile away. With the last clear corner of my mind I reminded myself that, no matter what it looked like, this one was not my problem. “Great,” I said. “What do you have? Anything on her, other than she’s in Trinity and she’s running around wearing a fake name?”

  “Sergeant Byrne says she’s local,” Sam said. “Lives at Whitethorn House, maybe half a mile away, with a bunch of other students. That’s all he knows about her. I haven’t talked to the housemates yet, because . . .” He gestured at Frank.

  “Because I begged him to hold off,” Frank said smoothly. “I have this little idea I wanted to run by you two, before the investigation gets into full gear.” He arched an eyebrow towards the door and the uniforms. “Maybe we should go for a wander.”

  “Why not,” I said. The girl’s body was doing something funny to the air in there, fizzing it, like the needle-thin whine the TV makes on mute; it was hard to think straight. “If we stay in the same room for too long, the universe might turn into antimatter.” I gave Frank his evidence bag back and wiped my hand on the side of my trousers.

  In the moment before I passed through the doorway I turned my head and looked at her, over my shoulder. Frank had switched off his torch, but pulling back the brambles let in a flood of spring sun and for the split second before my shadow blocked it again she rose up blazing out of the darkness, tilted chin and a clenched fist and the wild arch of her throat, bright and bloodied and relentless as my own wrecked ghost.

  That was the last time I saw her. It didn’t occur to me at the time—I had other stuff on my mind—and it seems impossible now, but those ten minutes, sharp as a crease pressed straight across my life: that was the only time we were ever together.

  * * *

  The uniforms were slumped where we had left them, like beanbags. Byrne was staring off into the middle distance in some kind of catatonic state; Doherty was examining one finger in a way that made me think he had been picking his nose.

  “Right,” Byrne said, once he surfaced from his trance and registered that we were back. “We’ll be off, so. She’s all yours.”

  Sometimes the local uniforms are pure diamond—reeling off details about everyone for miles around, listing half a dozen possible motives, handing you a prime suspect on a plate. Other times, all they want is to pass the hassle to you and get back to their game of Go Fish. This was obviously going to be other times.

  “We’ll need you to hang on for a while,” Sam said, which I took as a good sign—the extent to which Frank had been running this show was making me edgy. “The Technical Bureau might want you to help with the search, and I’ll be asking you to give me all the local info you can.”

  “She’s not local, sure,” Doherty said, wiping his finger on the side of his trousers. He was staring at me again. “Them up at Whitethorn House, they’re blow-ins. They’ve nothing to do with Glenskehy.”

  “Lucky bastards,” Byrne mumbled, to his chest.

  “She lived local, though,” Sam said patiently, “and she died local. That means we’ll be needing to canvass the area. You should probably give us a hand, seeing as ye know your way around.”

  Byrne’s head sank farther into his shoulders. “They’re all mentallers, round here,” he said morosely. “Stone mentallers. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Some of my best friends are mentallers,” Frank said cheerfully. “Think of it as a challenge.” He gave them a wave and headed off up the field, feet swishing wetly through the grass.

  Sam and I followed him. Even without looking I could feel the worried little line between Sam’s eyebrows, but I didn’t have the energy to reassure him. Now I was out of that cottage, all I could feel was outrage, pure and simple. My face and my old name: it was like coming home one day and finding another girl coolly making dinner in your kitchen, wearing your comfiest jeans and singing along to your favorite CD. I was so furious I could barely breathe. I thought of that photo and I wanted to punch my smile straight off her face.

  “Well,” I said, when we caught up with Frank at the top of the field, “that was fun. Can I go to work now?”

  “DV must be a lot more entertaining than I thought,” Frank said, doing impressed, “if you’re in this much of a hurry. Sunglasses.”

  I left the glasses where they were. “Unless this girl was a victim of domestic violence, and I’m not seeing anything that points that way, she’s got sweet fuck-all to do with me. So you dragged me out here why, exactly?”

  “Hey, I’ve missed you, babe. Any excuse.” Frank grinned at me; I gave him a hairy look. “And you seriously figure she’s fuck-all to do with you? Let’s see you say that when we’re trying to ID her, and everyone you’ve ever known is freaking out and ringing up to give us your name.”

  All the anger deflated out of me, leaving a nasty hollow at the bottom of my stomach. Frank, the little bollocks, was right. As soon as this girl’s face went into the papers alongside an appeal for her real name, there would be a tidal wave of people who had known me as Lexie, her as Lexie, me as me, all of them wanting to know who was dead and who both of us had been if we weren’t in fact Lexie Madison, and general hall-of-mirrors overload. Believe it or not, that was the first time it hit me: there was no way in the world for this to be as easy as Don’t know her, don’t want to know her, thanks for wasting my morning, see you around.

  “Sam,” I said. “Is there any way you could hold off on putting her picture out for a day or two? Just till I can warn people.” I had no idea how I was going to word this one. See, Aunt Louisa, we found this dead girl and . . .

  “Interestingly,” Frank said, “now that you mention it, that fits right in with my little idea.” There was a jumble of moss-covered boulders piled in the corner of the field; he pulled himself backwards onto them and sat there, one leg swinging.

  I’d seen that gleam in his eyes before. It always meant he was about to come out, spectacularly casually, with something totally outrageous. “What, Frank,” I said.

  “Well,” Frank began, getting comfortable against the rocks and folding his arms behind his head, “we’ve got a unique opportunity here, haven’t we? Shame to waste it.”

  “We do?” Sam said.

  “We do?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Jesus, yeah.” That risky grin was starting at the corners of Frank’s mouth. “We’ve got the chance,” he said, taking his time, “we’ve got the chance to investigate a murder case from the inside. We’ve got the chance to place an experienced undercover officer smack in the middle of a murder victim’s life.”

  We both stared at him.

  “When have you ever seen anything like that before? It’s beautiful, Cass. It’s a work of art.”

  “Work of arse, more like,” I said. “What the hell are you on about, Frankie?”

  Frank spread his arms like it was obvious. “Look. You’ve been Lexie Madison before, right? You can be her again. You can—no, hang on, hear me out—if she’s not dead, just wounded, right? You can walk straight back into her life and pick up where she left off.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “This is why no Bureau and no morgue guys? This is why you made me dress like a dork? So nobody notices you have a spare?” I pulled my hat off and stuffed it back in my bag. Even for Frank, this had taken some fast thinking. Within seconds of arriving at the scene, he must have had this in his head.

  “You can get hold of info no cop would ever learn, you can get close to everyone she was close to, you can identify suspects—”

  “You want to use her as bait,” Sam said, too levelly.

  “I want to use her as a detective, mate,” Frank said. “Which is what she is, last time I checked.”

&nb
sp; “You want to put her in there so this fella will come back to finish the job. That’s bait.”

  “So? Undercovers are bait all the time. I’m not asking her to do anything I wouldn’t do myself in a heartbeat, if—”

  “No,” Sam said. “No way.”

  Frank raised an eyebrow. “What are you, her ma?”

  “I’m the lead investigator on this case, and I’m saying no way.”

  “You might want to think about it for more than ten seconds, pal, before you—”

  I might as well not have been there. “Hello?” I said.

  They turned and stared at me. “Sorry,” Sam said, somewhere between sheepish and defiant.

  “Hi,” Frank said, grinning at me.

  “Frank,” I said, “this is officially the looniest idea I’ve ever heard in my life. You are off your bloody trolley. You are up the wall and tickling the bricks. You are—”

  “What’s loony about it?” Frank demanded, injured.

  “Jesus,” I said. I ran my hands through my hair and turned full circle, trying to figure out where to start. Hills, fields, spaced-out uniforms, cottage with dead girl: this wasn’t some messed-up dream. “OK, just for starters, it’s impossible. I’ve never even heard of anything like this before.”

  “But that’s the beauty of it,” Frank explained.

  “If you go under as someone who actually exists, it’s for like half an hour, Frank, and it’s to do something specific. It’s to do a drop-off or a pickup or something, from a stranger. You’re talking about me jumping right into the middle of this girl’s life, just because I look a bit like her—”

  "A bit ?”

  “Do you even know what color her eyes are? What if they’re blue, or—”

  “Give me some credit, babe. They’re brown.”

  “Or what if she programs computers, or plays tennis? What if she’s left-handed? It can’t be done. I’d be burned inside an hour.”

  Frank pulled a squashed pack of smokes out of his jacket pocket and fished out a cigarette. He had that glint in his eye again; he loves a challenge. “I have every faith in you. Want a smoke?”

  “No,” I said, even though I did. I couldn’t stop moving, up and down and around the patch of long grass between us. I don’t even like her, I wanted to say, which made no sense at all.

  Frank shrugged and lit up. “Let me worry about whether it’s possible. It might not be, I’ll grant you that, but I’ll figure that out as we go along. What’s next?”

  Sam was looking away, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, leaving me to it. “Next,” I said, “it’s somewhere out on the other side of unethical. This girl must have family, friends. You’re going to tell them she’s alive and well and just needs a few stitches, while she’s lying on a table in the morgue with Cooper slicing her open? Jesus, Frank.”

  “She’s living under a fake name, Cass,” Frank said, reasonably. “You really think she’s in touch with her family? By the time we track them down, this will all be over. They’ll never know the difference.”

  “So what about her mates? The uniforms said she lives with a bunch of others. What if she’s got a boyfriend?”

  “The people who care about her,” Frank said, “will want us to catch the guy who did this to her. Whatever it takes. That’s what I’d want.” He blew smoke up at the sky.

  Sam’s shoulders shifted. He thought Frank was just being smart-arsed. But Sam’s never done undercover, he had no way of knowing: undercovers are different. There is nothing they won’t do, to themselves or anyone else, to take their guy down. There was no point in arguing with Frank on this one, because he meant what he had said: if his kid were killed, and someone kept that from him in order to get the guy, he would take it without a murmur. It’s one of the most powerful lures of undercover, the ruthlessness, no borderlines; strong stuff, strong enough to take your breath away. It’s one of the reasons I left.

  “And then what?” I said. “When it’s over. You tell them, ‘Oops, by the way, we forgot to mention, that’s a ringer; your mate died three weeks ago?’ Or do I keep being Lexie Madison till I can die of old age?”

  Frank squinted into the sun, considering this. “Your wound can get infected,” he said, brightening. “You’ll go into the ICU and the doctors will try everything modern medicine can offer, but no go.”

  “Jesus Christ on a bike,” I said. I felt like this was all I had said, all morning long. “What on earth is making this seem like a good idea to you?”

  “What’s next?” Frank asked. “Come on, hit me.”

  “Next,” Sam said, still looking away down the lane, “it’s bloody dangerous.”

  Frank raised one eyebrow and tilted his head at Sam, giving me a wicked private grin. For an off-balance second I had to stop myself grinning back.

  “Next,” I said, “it’s too late anyway. Byrne and Doherty and Whatsisname with the dog all know there’s a dead woman in there. You’re telling me you can get all three of them to keep their mouths shut, just because it suits you? Whatsisname’s probably told half of Wicklow already.”

  “Whatsisname is Richard Doyle, and I’m not planning on getting him to keep his mouth shut. As soon as we’re done here, I’m going to go congratulate him on saving this young woman’s life. If he hadn’t shown great presence of mind by calling us immediately, the outcome could have been tragic. He’s a hero, and he can tell as many people as he likes. And you saw Byrne, babe. That’s not a happy little member of our glorious brotherhood. If I hint that there might be a transfer in it for him, not only will he keep his mouth shut, he’ll keep Doherty’s shut too. Next?”

  “Next,” I said, “it’s pointless. Sam’s worked dozens of murders, Frank, and he’s solved most of them, without needing to pull any wack-job stunts. This thing you’re talking about would take weeks to set up—”

  “Days, anyway,” Frank amended.

  “—and by that time he’ll have someone. At least, he will if you don’t fuck up his investigation by getting everyone to pretend there’s no murder to begin with. All this will do is waste your time and mine and everyone else’s.”

  “Would it fuck up your investigation?” Frank asked Sam. “Just hypothetically speaking. If you told the public—just for, say, a couple of days—that this was an assault, not a murder. Would it?”

  Eventually Sam sighed. “No,” he said. “Not really, no. There’s not that much difference in investigating attempted murder and actual murder. And, like Cassie said, we’ll have to keep this pretty quiet for a few days anyway, till we find out who the victim is, so things don’t get too confused. But that’s not the point.”

  “OK,” Frank said. “Then here’s what I suggest. Mostly you guys have a suspect within seventy-two hours, right?”

  Sam said nothing.

  “Right?”

  “Right,” Sam said. “And there’s no reason why this should be different.”

  “No reason at all,” Frank agreed, pleasantly. “Today’s Thursday. Just through the weekend, we keep our options open. We don’t tell civilians it’s a murder. Cassie stays home, so there’s no chance of the killer getting a glimpse of her, and we’ve got our ace up the sleeve if we decide to use it. I find out everything I can about this girl, just in case—that would need doing anyway, am I right? I won’t get in your way, you’ve got my word on that. Like you said, you’re bound to have someone in your sights by Sunday night. If you do, then I back off, Cassie goes back to DV, everything goes back to standard procedure, no harm done. If by any chance you don’t . . . well, we’ve still got all our options.”

  Neither of us answered.

  “I’m only asking for three days, guys,” Frank said. “No commitment to anything. What damage can that do?”

  Sam looked marginally reassured by this, but I wasn’t, because I knew how Frank works: a series of little tiny steps, each one looking perfectly safe and innocuous until suddenly, bam, you’re smack in the middle of something you really did not want to deal with. “But why, Frank?” I asked. “Answer me that and yeah, fine, I’ll spend a gorgeous spring weekend sitting in my flat watching crap telly instead of going out with my boyfriend like a normal human being. You’re talking
about throwing huge amounts of time and manpower at something that could well turn out to be completely pointless. Why?”

  Frank whipped a hand up to shade his eyes so he could stare at me. “Why?” he repeated. “Jesus, Cassie! Because we can. Because nobody in the history of police work has ever had a chance like this. Because it would be bloody amazing. What, you’re not seeing that? What the fuck is wrong with you? Have you gone desk on me?”

  I felt like he had hauled off and punched me in the stomach. I stopped pacing and turned away, looking out over the hillside, away from Frank and Sam and from the uniforms twisting their heads into the cottage to gawp at wet dead me.

  After a moment Frank said behind me, softer, “Sorry, Cass. I just wasn’t expecting that. From the Murder gang, sure, but not from you, of all people. I didn’t think you meant . . . I thought you were just covering all the bases. I didn’t realize.”