The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad #2)

by Tana French

up here, Lex.” Frank and Sam hadn’t told me, maybe they’d never seen, the most important thing about these four: just how close they were. The phone videos hadn’t been able to catch the power of it, any more than they’d caught the house. It was like a shimmer in the air between them, like glittering web-fine threads tossed back and forth and in and out until every movement or word reverberated through the whole group: Rafe passing Abby her smokes almost before she glanced around for them, Daniel turning with his hands out ready to take the steak dish in the same second that Justin brought it through the door, sentences flicked onto each other like playing cards with never a fraction of a pause. Rob and I used to be like that: seamless. My main feeling was that I was fucked. These four had harmonies close as the most polished a cappella group on the planet, and I had to pick up my

She didn’t have a lot of furniture: a bookshelf, a narrow wooden wardrobe with helpful strips of tin on the shelves to tell you what went where (HATS, STOCKINGS), a crap plastic lamp on a crap bedside table, and a wooden dressing table with dusty scrollwork and a three-way mirror, which reflected my face at confusing angles and gave me the creeps in all the predictable ways. I considered covering it up with a sheet or something, but that would have taken some explaining, and anyway I couldn’t shake the feeling that the reflection would keep doing its own thing behind there, just the same.

They probably had no more clue about real-life families than I did. I should have spotted from the beginning that this was one of the things they had in common—Daniel orphaned, Abby fostered out, Justin and Rafe exiled, Lexie Godknowswhat but not exactly close to her parents. I’d skimmed over it because it was my default mode too. Consciously or subconsciously, they had collected every paper-thin scrap they could find and built their own patchwork, makeshift image of what a family was, and then they had made themselves into that.

“The Marches. They made it, to suit themselves. When they were given the land and they built that house, they brought people in to work for them— maids, gardeners, stable hands, gamekeepers . . . They wanted their servants on their land, under their thumb, so they could keep them in line, but not too nearby; they didn’t want to be smelling the stink of the peasants.” There was a vicious, disgusted twist to the corner of his mouth. “So they built a village for the servants to live in. Like someone having a swimming pool put in, or a conservatory, or a stable full of ponies: just a little luxury, to make life more comfortable.” “That’s no way to look at human beings,” Sam agreed. “It’s a long time ago, though.” “A long time ago, yeah. Back when the Marches had a use for Glenskehy. And now that it’s not serving their pleasure any more, they’re standing by and watching it die.”