He was shaking. “Justin,” Abby said gently. “It’s OK.”

Justin pressed his fingers across his mouth, hard, and took a deep breath. “Well,” he said. “Anyway. Daniel could have been thundering up and down those stairs and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

“I heard him,” Rafe said. “I think I heard every single thing for a mile around, that night; even the tiniest noise somewhere down at the bottom of the garden practically made me jump out of my skin. The joy of criminal activity is that it gives you ears like a bat’s.” He shook his smoke packet, tossed it into the fireplace-Justin opened his mouth automatically and then closed it again-and took Abby’s off the coffee table. “Some of it made for very interesting listening.”

Abby’s eyebrows went up. She stuck her needle carefully into a hem, put the doll down and gave Rafe a long cool look. “Do you really want to go there?” she inquired. “Because I can’t stop you, but if I were you I’d think very, very hard before I opened that particular Pandora’s box.”

There was a long, fizzing silence. Abby folded her hands in her lap and watched Rafe calmly.

“I was drunk,” Rafe said, suddenly and sharply, into the silence. “Banjoed.”

After a second Justin said, to the coffee table, “You weren’t that drunk.”

“I was. I was legless. I don’t think I’ve ever been that drunk in my life.”

“No you weren’t. If you had been that drunk-”

“We had all been drinking pretty solidly for most of the night,” Abby said evenly, cutting him off. “Not surprisingly. It didn’t help; I don’t think any of us got much sleep. The next morning was pure nightmare. We were so upset and wrecked and hungover that we were practically dizzy, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t even see straight. We couldn’t decide whether to call the cops and report you missing, or what. Rafe and Justin wanted to do it-”

“Rather than leave you lying in a rat-infested hovel till some local yokel happened to stumble on you,” Rafe said through a cigarette, shaking Abby’s lighter. “Call us crazy.”

“-but Daniel said it would look weird; you were old enough to go for an early-morning walk or even skive off college for the day if you wanted to. He phoned your mobile-it was right there in the kitchen, obviously, but still, he figured there should be a call on it.”

“He made us have breakfast,” Justin said.

“Justin managed to get as far as the bathroom, that time,” said Rafe.

“We couldn’t stop fighting,” Abby said. She had picked up the doll again and was methodically, unconsciously plaiting its hair, over and over. “Whether we had to eat breakfast, whether to call the cops, whether we should leave for college like normal or wait for you to come back-I mean, the natural thing would have been for Daniel or Justin to wait for you while the rest of us headed in, but we couldn’t do it. The thought of splitting up-I don’t know if I can explain it, how badly that idea freaked us out. We were ready to kill each other-Rafe and I were screaming at each other, actually screaming-but the second someone suggested doing separate stuff, I literally went weak at the knees.”

“Do you know what I thought?” Justin said, very quietly. “I was standing there, listening to you three argue and looking out the window waiting for the police or someone to come, and I realized: it could be days. It could be weeks; this could go on for weeks, the waiting. Lexie could be there for… I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I could get through that day at college, never mind weeks. And I thought what we should really do was stop fighting and get a duvet and curl up under it, all four of us together, and turn the gas on. That was what I wanted to do.”

“We don’t even have gas,” Rafe snapped. “Don’t be such a bloody drama queen.”

“I think that was on all our minds-what we would do if you weren’t found right away-but nobody wanted to mention it,” Abby said. “It was actually a huge relief when the police showed up. Justin saw them first, out the window; he said, ‘Someone’s here,’ and we all froze, right in the middle of yelling at each other. Rafe and I started to go for the window, but Daniel said, ‘Everyone sit down. Now.’ So we all sat at the kitchen table, like we had just finished breakfast, and waited for the bell to ring.”

“Daniel answered it,” Rafe said, “of course. He was cool as ice. I could hear him out in the hall: Yes, Alexandra Madison lives here, and no we haven’t seen her since last night, and no there’s been no argument, and no we’re not worried about her, just unsure whether she’s coming to college today, and is there a problem, Officers, and this note of concern gradually seeping into his voice… He was perfect. It was absolutely terrifying.”

Abby’s eyebrows went up. “Would you have preferred him to be a babbling mess?” she inquired. “What do you think would have happened if you had answered that door?”

Rafe shrugged. He had started fiddling with the cards again.

“In the end,” Abby said, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, “I realized we could go out there-actually, it would look weird if we didn’t. It was Mackey and O’Neill-Mackey was leaning up against the wall and O’Neill was taking notes-and they scared the living shit out of me. The plain clothes, these expressions that told you absolutely nothing, the way they talked-like there was no hurry, they could take all the time they wanted… I’d been expecting those two eejits from Rathowen, and it was obvious straight away that these guys were not the same thing at all. They were so much smarter and so, so much more dangerous. I’d been thinking the worst was over, nothing could ever be as bad as that night. When I saw those two, that was when it hit me that this was only just beginning.”

“They were cruel,” Justin said suddenly. “Horribly, horribly cruel. They stretched it out forever, before they told us. We kept asking what had happened, and they just stared at us with these smug blank faces and wouldn’t give a straight answer-”

“ ‘What makes you think something might have happened to her?’ ” Rafe put in, doing a viciously accurate send-up of Frank’s lazy Dublin. “ ‘Did someone have a reason to hurt her? Was she afraid of someone?’ ”

“-and even when they did, the bastards didn’t tell us you were alive. Mackey just said something like, ‘She was found a few hours ago, not far from here. Sometime last night, she was stabbed.’ He deliberately made it sound like you were dead.”

“Daniel was the only one who kept his head,” Abby said. “I was about a second from bursting into tears; I’d been holding it back all morning in case it made my eyes look funny, and it was such a relief to finally be allowed to know what had happened… But Daniel said straight off, like a shot, ‘Is she alive?’ ”

“And they just left it,” Justin said. “They didn’t say a word, for what felt like forever; just stood there watching us, and waiting. I told you they were cruel.”

“Finally,” Rafe said, “Mackey shrugged and said, ‘Barely.’ It was like all of our heads had exploded. I mean, we had been primed for… well, the worst; we just wanted to get it over with, so we could go have our nervous breakdowns in peace. We were not ready for this. God knows what we might have come out with-we could have blown the whole thing right there-except that Abby, with impeccable timing, threw a fainting fit. I’ve been meaning to ask you, actually, was that real? Or was it all part of the plan?”

“Very little of this was part of anyone’s plan,” Abby said tartly, “and I did not faint. I got dizzy for a second. If you remember, I hadn’t had a lot of sleep.” Rafe laughed, nastily.

“Everyone jumped to catch her and sit her down and get water,” said Justin, “and by the time she was all right, we had pulled ourselves together-”

“Oh, we had, had we?” Rafe inquired, eyebrows going up. “You were still standing there opening and shutting your mouth like a goldfish. I was so terrified you would say something idiotic, I was babbling, the cops must have thought I was a total moron: where did you find her, where is she, when can we see her… Not that they answered, but at least I tried.”