“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’ve got to try.”

Daniel leaned his head back against the stone of the wall and sighed. All of a sudden, he looked terribly tired. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose you do.”

“It’s your call,” I said. “You can tell me what happened right now, while I’m not wired: I’ll be gone by the time the others get home, and if it comes to arrests it’ll be your word against mine. Or I can stay here, and you can take the chance that I’ll get something on tape.”

He ran a hand over his face and straightened up, with an effort. “I’m perfectly aware, you know,” he said, glancing at his cigarette as if he had forgotten he was holding it, “that a return to normality may not be possible for us, at this point. I’m aware, in fact, that our entire plan was probably unfeasible right from the start. But, like you, we have no choice but to try.”

He dropped the smoke on the flagstones and put it out with the toe of his shoe. That frozen detachment was starting to slip into place over his face, the formal mask he used with outsiders, and there was a crisp note of finality in his voice. I was losing him. As long as we were talking like this, I had a chance, no matter how small; but any second now he was going to get up and go back indoors, and that would be the end of that.

If I had thought it would work, I would have got down on my knees on the flagstones and begged him to stay. But this was Daniel; my only chance was logic, cold hard reason. “Look,” I said, keeping my voice even, “you’re raising the stakes a whole lot higher than they need to be. If I get something on tape, then, depending what it is, it could mean jail time for all four of you-one on murder, and three on accessory or even conspiracy. Then what’s left? What have you got to come back to? Given the way Glenskehy feels about you, what are the odds that the house will even be standing when you get out?”

“We’ll have to take that chance.”

“If you tell me what happened, I’ll fight your corner all the way. You’ve got my word.” Daniel would have had every right to give me a sardonic look for that, but he didn’t. He was watching me with what appeared to be mild, polite interest. “Three of you can walk away from this, and the fourth can face manslaughter charges instead of murder. There wasn’t any premeditation here: this happened during an argument, nobody wanted Lexie to die, and I can vouch for the fact that all of you cared about her and that whoever stabbed her was under extreme emotional duress. Manslaughter gets maybe five years, maybe even less. Then it’s over, whoever it is gets out, and you can all four put this whole thing behind you and go back to normal.”

“My knowledge of the law is patchy,” Daniel said, leaning over to pick up his glass, “but as far as I know-and correct me if I’m wrong-nothing said by a suspect during questioning is admissible in evidence unless the suspect has been cautioned to that effect. Out of curiosity, how are you planning to administer a caution to three people who have no idea that you’re a police officer?” He rinsed out the glass again and held it up to the light, squinting, to check that it was clean.

“I’m not,” I said. “I don’t need to. Whatever I get on tape was never going to be admissible in court, but it can be used to get an arrest warrant and it can be used in a formal interview. How long do you think Justin, for example, will hold out if he’s arrested at two in the morning and questioned by Frank Mackey for twenty-four hours, with a tape of him describing Lexie’s murder playing in the background?”

“An interesting question,” Daniel said. He tightened the cap on the whiskey bottle, placed it carefully on the bench beside the glass.

My heart was going like hoofbeats. “Never go all in on a bad hand,” I said, “unless you’re absolutely positive you’re a stronger player than your opponent. How sure are you?”

He gave me a vague look that could have meant anything. “We should go in now,” he told me. “I suggest we tell the others that we spent the afternoon reading and recovering from our hangovers. Does that sound about right to you?”

“Daniel,” I said, and then my throat closed up; I could hardly breathe. Until he glanced down, I didn’t even realize that my hand was on his sleeve.

“Detective,” Daniel said. He was smiling at me, just a little, but his eyes were very steady and very sad. “You can’t have both. Don’t you remember what we were talking about, just a few minutes ago-the inevitability of sacrifice? One of us, or a detective: you can’t be both. If you had ever truly wanted to be one of us, wanted it more than anything else, you never would have made a single one of those mistakes, and we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

He laid his hand over mine, removed it from his sleeve and placed it in my lap, very gently. “In a way, you know,” he said, “strange and impossible though it may seem, I very much wish you had chosen the other way.”

“I’m not trying to ruin you,” I said. “There’s no way I can claim to be on your side, but compared to Detective Mackey, or even Detective O’Neill… If it’s left up to them-and unless you and I work together, it will be; they’re the ones running the investigation, not me-all four of you will be serving the maximum for murder. Life sentences. I’m doing my best here, Daniel, not to let that happen. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m doing everything I can.”

A leaf had fallen from the ivy into the trickle of water and got caught on one of the little steps, shaking against the current. Daniel picked it out carefully and turned it between his fingers. “I met Abby when I started Trinity,” he said. “Quite literally; it was on registration day. We were in the exam hall, hundreds of students queuing for hours-I should have brought something to read, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it would take so long-shuffling along under all those gloomy old paintings, and everyone whispering for some reason. Abby was in the next queue. She caught my eye, pointed to one of the portraits and said, ‘If you let your eyes go loose, doesn’t he look exactly like one of the old fellas out of the Muppets?’ ”

He shook water off the leaf: droplets flying, bright as fire in the crisscrossing sunbeams. “Even at that age,” he said, “I was aware that people found me unapproachable. I had no problem with that. But Abby didn’t seem to feel that way, and that intrigued me. She told me later that she was almost petrified with shyness, not of me in particular but of everyone and everything there-an inner-city girl from foster homes, thrown in amongst all those middle-class boys and girls who took college and privilege so completely for granted-and she decided that, if she was going to pluck up the courage to talk to someone, it might as well be the most forbidding-looking person she could find. We were very young then, you know.

“Once we’d finally got ourselves registered, she and I went for a coffee together, and then we arranged to meet again the next day-well, when I say arranged, Abby told me, ‘I’m going on the library tour tomorrow at noon, see you there,’ and walked off before I could answer either way. By that time I already knew that I admired her. It was a novel sensation, for me; I don’t admire many people. But she was so determined, so vivid; she made everyone I had met before seem pale and shadowy by comparison. You’ve probably noticed”-Daniel smiled faintly, glancing up at me over his glasses-“that I have a tendency to keep myself at some distance from life. I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living-and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known. Then Abby reached straight through the glass and caught my hand. It was like an electric shock. I remember watching her walk off across Front Square-she was wearing this awful fringed skirt that was much too long for her, she looked drowned in it-and realizing that I was smiling…