The Likeness: A Novel by Tana French Page B

till it bit to the bone.
And I knew how she had picked up the Lexie Madison ID. It was in my head bright and hard as broken glass, clear as if it had happened to me, and I didn’t like this either. Somewhere in town, at the bar in a crowded pub or flipping through clothes in a shop, and behind her: Lexie? Lexie Madison? God, I haven’t seen you in ages! And after that it would have been just a matter of playing it carefully and asking the right casual questions (It’s been so long, I can’t even remember, what was I doing last time I saw you?), picking her way delicately to everything she needed to know. She had been no dummy, this girl.
Plenty of murder cases turn into knock-down-drag-out battles of wits, but this was different. This was the first time I had felt like my real opponent wasn’t the murderer but the victim: defiant, clenching her secrets white-knuckle tight, and evenly, perfectly matched against me in every way, too close to call.
By Saturday lunchtime I had made myself nuts enough that I climbed up on the kitchen counter, took down my Official Stuff shoebox from the top of a cupboard, dumped the documents on the floor and went through them for my birth cert. Maddox, Cassandra Jeanne, female, six pounds ten ounces. Type of birth: single.
“Idiot,” I said, out loud, and climbed back up on the counter.
    * * *
That afternoon, Frank called round. At this stage I was so stir-crazy—my flat is small, I’d run out of stuff to clean—that I was actually glad to hear his voice over the intercom.
“What year is it?” I asked, when he reached the top of the stairs. “Who’s the president?”
“Quit bitching,” he said, giving me a one-armed hug around the neck. “You’ve got this whole lovely flat to play in. You could be a sniper stuck in a hide, not moving a muscle for days on end and pissing into a bottle. And I brought you supplies.”
He handed me a plastic bag. All the main food groups: chocolate biscuits, smokes, ground coffee and two bottles of wine. “You’re a gem, Frank,” I said. “You know me too well.” He did, too; four years on, and he had remembered I like Lucky Strike Lights. The feeling wasn’t a reassuring one, but then he hadn’t intended it to be.
Frank raised a noncommittal eyebrow. “Got a corkscrew?”
My antennae went up, but I can hold my booze fairly well, and Frank had to know I wasn’t stupid enough to get drunk with him. I threw him a corkscrew and rummaged for glasses.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, going to work on the first bottle. “I was scared I’d find you in some foul yuppie apartment with chrome surfaces.”
“On a cop’s salary?” Dublin housing prices are a lot like New York ones, except that in New York, you get New York for your money. My flat is one mid-sized room, on the top floor of a tall converted Georgian house. It has the original wrought-iron fireplace, enough room for a futon and a sofa and all my books, a tipsy slant to the floor in one corner, a family of owls living in the roof space, and a view of Sandymount beach. I like it.
“On two cops’ salaries. Aren’t you going out with our boy Sammy?”
I sat on the futon and held out the glasses for him to pour. “Only for a couple of months. We’re not at the living-in-sin stage yet.”
“I thought it was longer. He seemed pretty protective on Thursday. Is it true love?”
“None of your business,” I said, clinking my glass against his. “Cheers. Now: what are you doing here?”
Frank looked injured. “I thought you could use the company. I got to feeling guilty about leaving you stuck here, all on your own . . .” I gave him a dirty look; he realized it wasn’t working and grinned. “You’re too smart for your own good, do you know that? I didn’t want you getting hungry, or bored, or desperate for a smoke, and heading out to the shop. The odds are a thousand to one against you being spotted by anyone who knows our girl, but why take chances?”
This was