The Likeness

“I thought it was you,” he said into my hair. His voice was low and shaking. “I thought it was you.”

2

I didn’t actually spend the next three days watching crap telly, the way I’d said to Frank. I’m not good at sitting still to begin with, and when I’m edgy I need to move. So-I’m in this job for the thrills, me-I cleaned. I scrubbed, hoovered and polished every inch of my flat, down to the baseboards and the inside of the cooker. I took down the curtains, washed them in the bath and pegged them to the fire escape to dry. I hung my duvet off the windowsill and whacked it with a spatula to get the dust out. I would have painted the walls, if I’d had paint. I actually considered putting on my dork disguise and finding a DIY shop, but I’d promised Frank, so I cleaned the back of the cistern instead.

And I thought about what Frank had said to me. You, of all people… After Operation Vestal I transferred out of Murder. DV might not be much of a challenge by comparison, but God it’s peaceful, although I know that’s a strange word to choose. Either someone hit someone or he didn’t; it’s as simple as that, and all you have to do is figure out which one it is and how to make them knock it off. DV is straightforward and it’s unequivocally useful, and I wanted that, badly. I was so bloody tired of high stakes and ethical dilemmas and complications.

You, of all people; have you gone desk on me? My nice work suit, ironed and hung on the wardrobe door ready for Monday, made me feel queasy. Finally I couldn’t look at it any more. I threw it in the wardrobe and slammed the door on it.

And of course I thought, all the time, under everything I did, about the dead girl. I felt like there must have been some clue in her face, some secret message in a code only I could read, if I had just had the wits or the time to spot it. If I’d still been in Murder I would have nicked a crime-scene shot or a copy of her ID, taken it home with me to look at in private. Sam would have brought me one if I’d asked, but I didn’t.

Somewhere out there, sometime in these three days, Cooper would be doing the autopsy. The idea bent my brain.

I had never seen anyone who looked anything like me before. Dublin is full of scary girls who I swear to God are actually the same person, or at least come out of the same fake-tan bottle; me, I may not be a five-star babe but I am not generic. My mother’s father was French, and somehow the French and the Irish combined into something specific and pretty distinctive. I don’t have brothers or sisters; what I mainly have is aunts, uncles and large cheerful gangs of second cousins, and none of them look anything like me.

My parents died when I was five. She was a cabaret singer, he was a journalist, he was driving her home from a gig in Kilkenny one wet December night and they hit a slick patch of road. Their car flipped three times-he was probably speeding-and lay upside down in a field till a farmer saw the lights and went to investigate. He died the next day; she never made it into the ambulance. I tell people this early on, to get it out of the way. Everyone always gets either tongue-tied or gooey (“You must miss them so much”), and the better we know each other, the longer they feel the gooey stage needs to last. I never know how to answer, given that I was five and that it was more than twenty-five years ago; I think it’s safe to say I’m more or less over it. I wish I remembered them enough to miss them, but all I can miss is the idea, and sometimes the songs my mother used to sing me, and I don’t tell people about that.

I was lucky. Thousands of other kids in that situation have slipped through the cracks, fallen into foster care or nightmare industrial schools. But on their way to the gig my parents had dropped me off to spend the night in Wicklow with my father’s sister and her husband. I remember phones ringing in the middle of the night, quick footsteps on stairs and urgent murmuring in the corridor, a car starting, people going in and out for what seemed like days, and then Aunt Louisa sitting me down in the dim living room and explaining that I was going to stay there for a while longer, because my mother and father weren’t coming back.

She was a lot older than my father, and she and Uncle Gerard don’t have kids. He’s a historian; they play bridge a lot. I don’t think they ever really got used to the idea that I lived there-they gave me the spare room, complete with a high double bed and small breakable ornaments and an inappropriate print of Venus Rising, and looked faintly worried when I got old enough that I wanted to put up posters of my own. But for twelve and a half years they fed me, sent me to school and gymnastics classes and music lessons, patted me vaguely but affectionately on the head whenever I was within reach, and left me alone. In exchange, I made sure they didn’t find out when I mitched off school, fell off things I shouldn’t have been climbing, got detention or started to smoke.