The official story was that the coma had knocked out Lexie's short-term memory: she remembered nothing about the attack, very little about the days before. "Which has side benefits," Frank pointed out. "If you fuck up some detail, you can just look upset and murmur something helpless about the coma, and everyone'll be too embarrassed to push you." Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had told my aunt and uncle and my friends that I was going off to do a training course--I kept it vague--and wouldn't be around for a few weeks. Sam had smoothed over my exit from work by having a chat with Quigley, the Murder squad's resident mistake, and telling him in confidence that I was taking a career break to finish my degree, which meant I would be covered if anyone spotted me hanging around town looking studenty. Quigley basically consists of a large arse and a large mouth, and he never liked me much. Within twenty-four hours it would be all over the grapevine that I was taking time out, probably with a few flourishes (pregnancy, psychosis, crack addiction) thrown in for good measure.

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 Mobius 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 ?"