The Likeness

They were talking over each other, chattering like a bunch of teenagers bursting out of some huge exam, giddy with relief. “Oh, my God,” Justin said, closing his eyes and pressing his glass against his temple. “That fucking, fucking card game. My jaw still drops when I think about it. Daniel kept saying, ‘The only reliable alibi is an actual sequence of events-’ ”

“The rest of us could barely talk in sentences,” said Rafe, “and he’s waxing philosophical about the art of the alibi. I couldn’t have said ‘reliable alibi.’ ”

“-so he made us turn all the clocks back to eleven, just before it all went horrible, and go back into the kitchen and finish the washing up, and then he made us come in here and play cards. As if nothing had happened.”

“He played your hand as well as his,” Abby told me. “The first time you had a decent hand and he had a better one, he went all in for you and then knocked you out. It was surreal.”

“And he kept narrating,” Rafe said. He stretched for the vodka bottle and topped up his glass. In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling in his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night’s dancing. “ ‘Lexie’s raising, Lexie folds, Lexie would need another drink at this point, could someone please pass her the wine…’ He was like some nutcase who sits next to you in the park and feeds bites of sandwich to his imaginary friend. Once he’d got you out of the game he made us act out this little scene, you heading off on your walk and all of us waving bye-bye to thin air… I thought we were losing our minds. I remember sitting there, in that chair, politely saying good-bye to the door and thinking very clearly and calmly, So this is what insanity feels like.”

“It must have been three in the morning by then,” Justin said, “but Daniel wouldn’t let us go to bed. We had to sit there and keep playing Texas bloody Hold-’em, to the bitter end-Daniel won, of course, he was the only one who could concentrate, but it took him forever to wipe the rest of us out. Honestly, the cops must think we’re the worst poker players in history, I was folding on flush draws and raising on a ten high… I was so exhausted I was seeing double, and it all felt like a hideous nightmare, I kept thinking I had to wake up. We hung the clothes in front of the fire to dry and the room was like something out of The Fog, clothes steaming and the fire spitting and everyone chain-smoking Daniel’s horrible unfiltered things-”

“He wouldn’t let me go get normal ones,” said Abby. “He said we all needed to stay together, and anyway the cameras at the petrol station would show what time I’d come in and it would mess everything up… He was like a general.” Rafe snorted. “He was. The rest of us were shaking so much we could barely hold our cards-”

“Justin got sick at one stage,” Rafe said through a cigarette, waving out the match. “In the kitchen sink, charmingly enough.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Justin said. “All I could think of was you, lying there in the dark, all by yourself-” He reached out and squeezed my arm. I put up a hand to cover his for a second; his was cool and bony and trembling hard.

“That was all any of us could think about,” Abby said, “but Daniel… I could see how much it was taking out of him-his face had fallen in under the cheekbones, like he’d lost a stone since dinner, and his eyes looked wrong, all huge and black-but he was so calm, as if nothing had happened. Justin started cleaning up the sink-”

“He was still gagging,” Rafe said. “I could hear him. Out of the five of us, Lexie, I think you may have had the nicest evening.”

“-but Daniel told him to leave it; he said it would skew the timeline in our minds.”

“Apparently,” Rafe informed me, “the essence of the alibi is simplicity; the fewer steps one has to omit or invent, the less likely one is to make a mistake. He kept saying, ‘As it stands, all we need to do is remember that we went from the washing up to the card game, and eliminate the intervening events from our minds. They never happened.’ In other words, get back here and play your hand, Justin. The poor bastard was green.”

Daniel had been right, about the alibi. He was good at this; too good. In that second I thought of my flat, Sam scribbling and the air outside the windows dimming to purple and me profiling the killer: someone with previous criminal experience.

Sam had run background checks on every one of them, found nothing worse than a couple of speeding tickets. I had no way of knowing what checks Frank might have run, in his private, complex, off-the-record world; how much he had found and kept to himself, and how much had slipped past even him; who, out of all the contenders, was the best secret keeper of us all.