I rearranged myself against my wall and made a face at him; he winked at me. He had played straight into this girl’s hands, years before she ever came on the scene. Any slip she made when she ran into that old acquaintance and started trawling for info, any off-kilter pause, any reluctance to meet up again: Well, you know she did have that nervous breakdown…
“In February 2002, though,” Frank said, switching from blue marker to red, “Alexandra Madison shows up again. She pulls her UCD records and uses them to wangle her way into Trinity to do a PhD in English. We don’t have a clue who this girl actually is, what she was doing before then, or how she hit on the Lexie Madison ID. We ran her prints: she’s not in the system.”
“You might want to widen the net,” I said. “There’s a decent chance she’s not Irish.”
Frank glanced at me sharply. “Why’s that?”
“When Irish people want to hide, they don’t hang around here. They go abroad. If she was Irish, she’d have run into someone from her mammy’s bingo club inside a week.”
“Not necessarily. She was living a pretty isolated life.”
“As well as that,” I said, keeping my voice level, “I take after the French side. Nobody thinks I’m Irish, till I open my mouth. If I didn’t get my looks here, odds are neither did she.”
“Great,” O’Kelly said, heavily. “Undercover, DV, Immigration, the Brits, Interpol, the FBI. Anyone else who might want to join the party? The Irish Countrywomen’s Association? The Vincent de Paul?”
“Any chance of getting an ID off her teeth?” Sam asked. “Or a country, even? Can’t you tell where dental work was done?”
“The young woman in question had excellent teeth,” Cooper said. “I am not, of course, a specialist in the field, but she had no fillings, crowns, extractions or other readily identifiable work.”
Frank arched an inquiring eyebrow at me. I gave him my best puzzled look.
“The two bottom front teeth overlap slightly,” Cooper said, “and one top molar is significantly misaligned, implying that she had no orthodontic work done as a child. I would hazard that the possibility of dental identification is practically nonexistent.” Sam shook his head, frustrated, and went back to his notebook.
Frank was still eyeballing me, and it was getting on my nerves. I shoved myself off the wall, opened my mouth wide at him and pointed at my teeth. Cooper and O’Kelly gave me identical horrified looks.
“No, I don’t have fillings,” I told Frank. “See? Not that it matters anyway.”
“Good girl,” Frank said approvingly. “Keep flossing.”
"That’s lovely, Maddox,” O’Kelly said. “Thanks for sharing. So in autumn of 2002 Alexandra Madison goes into Trinity, and in April 2005 she turns up murdered outside Glenskehy. Do we know what she was doing in between?”
Sam stirred and looked up, put down his pen. “Her PhD, mostly,” he said. “Something to do with women writers and pseudonyms; I didn’t understand the whole of it. She was doing grand, her supervisor says-a bit behind schedule, but what she came up with was good. Up until September she was living in a bedsit off the South Circular Road. She paid her way with student loans, grants, and by working in the English department and in Caffeine, in town. She had no known criminal activity, no debts except the loan for her college fees, no dodgy activity on her bank account, no addictions, no boyfriend or ex-boyfriend”-Cooper raised an eyebrow-“no enemies and no recent arguments.”
“So no motive,” Frank said musingly, to the whiteboard, “and no suspects.”
“Her main associates,” Sam said evenly, “were a bunch of other postgrads: Daniel March, Abigail Stone, Justin Mannering and Raphael Hyland.”
“Bloody silly name,” said O’Kelly. “He a poof, or a Brit?” Cooper closed his eyes briefly in distaste, like a cat.
“He’s half English,” Sam said; O’Kelly gave a smug little grunt. “Daniel has two speeding tickets, Justin has one, apart from that they’re all clean as a whistle. They don’t know Lexie was using an alias-or if they do, they’ve said nothing. According to them, she was estranged from her family and didn’t like talking about her past. They don’t even know where she was from; Abby thinks maybe Galway, Justin thinks Dublin, Daniel gave me a snotty look and told me that ‘wasn’t really of interest’ to him. They’re the same about her family. Justin thinks her parents were dead, Rafe says divorced, Abby says she was illegitimate…”"
“Or maybe none of the above,” Frank said. “We already know our girl wasn’t above telling a few little white ones.”