The Likeness

By Thursday Frank was firing questions at me: where do you sit for breakfast? where do you keep the salt? who gives you a lift into college on Wednesday mornings? what room is your supervisor’s office? If I missed one, he zeroed in on that area, worked around it from every angle he had-photos, anecdotes, phone video, audio footage of interviews-till it felt like my own set of memories and the answer rolled off my tongue automatically. Then he went back to the question barrage: where did you spend the Christmas before last? what day of the week is your turn to buy food? It was like having a human tennis-ball machine on my sofa.

I didn’t tell Sam this-it made me feel guilty, somehow-but I enjoyed that week. I like a challenge. It did occasionally occur to me that I was in a deeply weird situation and that it was only likely to get weirder. This case had a level of Möbius strip that made it hard to keep things straight: Lexies everywhere, sliding into each other at the edges till you started to lose track of which one you were talking about. Every now and then I had to catch myself back from asking Frank how she was doing.

***

Frank’s sister Jackie was a hairdresser, so on Friday evening he brought her over to the flat, to cut my hair. Jackie was skinny, bleached blonde and totally unimpressed by her big brother. I liked her.

“Ah, yeah, you could do with a trim all right,” she told me, giving my fringe a professional riffle with long purple nails. “How do you want it?”

“Here,” Frank said, fishing out a crime-scene shot and passing it to her. “Can you do it to match this?”

Jackie held the photo between thumb and fingertip and gave it a suspicious look. “Here,” she said. “Is your woman dead?”

“That’s confidential,” Frank said.

“Confidential, me arse. Is that your sister, love?”

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “This is Frank’s gig. I’m only getting dragged along for the ride.”

“You wouldn’t want to mind him. Here-” She took another look at the photo and held it out to Frank at arm’s length. “That’s bleeding disgusting, so it is. Would you not think of doing something decent, Francis? Sorting out the traffic, something useful like that. Took me two hours to get into town from-”

“Would you ever just cut, Jackie?” Frank demanded, raking his hair exasperatedly so that it stood up in tufts. “And stop wrecking my head?” Jackie’s eyes slid sideways to mine and we shared a tiny, mischievous, female grin.

“And remember,” Frank said belligerently, noticing, “keep your mouth shut about this. Clear? It’s crucial.”

“Ah, yeah,” Jackie said, pulling a comb and scissors out of her bag. “Crucial. Go and make us a cup of tea, will you? That’s if you don’t mind, love,” she added, to me.

Frank shook his head and stamped off to the sink. Jackie combed my hair down over my eyes and winked at me.

When she was finished I looked different. I had never had my fringe cropped that short before; it was a subtle thing, but it made my face younger and barer, gave it the big-eyed, deceptive innocence of a model’s. The longer I stared in the bathroom mirror, that night while I got ready for bed, the less it looked like me. When I hit the point where I couldn’t remember what I had looked like to begin with, I gave up, gave the mirror the finger and went to bed.

***

On Saturday afternoon Frank said, “I think we’re just about good to go.”

I was lying back on the sofa with my knees hooked over the arm, going through the photos of Lexie’s tutorial groups one last time and trying to look blasé about this whole thing. Frank was pacing: the closer you get to the start of an operation, the less he sits down.

“Tomorrow,” I said. The word burned in my mouth, a wild clean burn like snow, taking my breath away.

“Tomorrow afternoon-we’ll start you off with a half day, ease you into it. I’ll let the housemates know this evening, make sure they’re all there to give you a nice warm welcome. Think you’re ready?”

I couldn’t imagine what, on an operation like this, could possibly constitute “ready.” “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

“Let’s hear it once more: what’s your goal for Week One?”

“Not to get caught, mainly,” I said. “And not to get killed.”

“Not mainly; only.” Frank snapped his fingers in front of my eyes on his way past. “Hey. Concentrate. This is important.”

I put the photos down on my stomach. “I’m concentrating. What?”