The Likeness: A Novel by Tana French Page B

waist-to-hip ratio looks good—we can measure, just to be sure, but the weight difference gives us a little leeway there. Leg length looks good.”
He tapped the close-up. “These are important; people notice hands. Give us a look, Cassie?”
I held out my hands like he was going to cuff me. I couldn’t make myself look at the photo; I could barely breathe. This was one question to which Frank couldn’t already know the answer. This could be it: the difference that would slice me away from this girl, sever the link with one hard final snap and let me go home.
“Those right there,” Frank said appreciatively, after a long look, “may be the loveliest hands I’ve ever seen.”
“Extraordinary,” Cooper said with relish, leaning forwards to peer at me and AnonyGirl over his glasses. “The odds must be one in millions.”
“Anyone seeing any discrepancies?” Frank asked the room.
No one said anything. Sam’s jaw was tight.
“Gentlemen,” Frank said, with a flourish of his arm, “we have a match.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean we need to do anything with it,” said Sam.
O’Kelly was doing a sarcastic slow clap. “Congratulations, Mackey. Makes a great party trick. Now that we all know what Maddox looks like, can we get back to the case?”
“And can I stop standing here?” I asked. My legs were trembling like I’d been running and I was furiously pissed off with everyone in sight, including myself. “Unless you need me for inspiration.”
“You can, of course,” Frank said, finding a marker for the whiteboard. “So here’s what we’ve got. Alexandra Janet Madison, aka Lexie, registered as born in Dublin on the first of March 1979—and I should know, I registered her myself. In October 2000”—he started sketching a timeline, fast straight strokes—“she entered UCD as a psychology postgrad. In May of 2001, she dropped out of college due to stress-related illness and went to her parents in Canada to recover, and that should’ve been the end of her—”
“Hang on. You gave me a nervous breakdown ?” I demanded.
“Your thesis was getting on top of you,” Frank told me, grinning. “It’s a tough old world, academia; you couldn’t take the heat, so you got out of the kitchen. I had to get rid of you somehow.”
I rearranged myself against my wall and made a face at him; he winked at me. He had played straight into this girl’s hands, years before she ever came on the scene. Any slip she made when she ran into that old acquaintance and started trawling for info, any off-kilter pause, any reluctance to meet up again: Well, you know she did have that nervous breakdown . . .
“In February 2002, though,” Frank said, switching from blue marker to red, “Alexandra Madison shows up again. She pulls her UCD records and uses them to wangle her way into Trinity to do a PhD in English. We don’t have a clue who this girl actually is, what she was doing before then, or how she hit on the Lexie Madison ID. We ran her prints: she’s not in the system.”
“You might want to widen the net,” I said. “There’s a decent chance she’s not Irish.”
Frank glanced at me sharply. “Why’s that?”
“When Irish people want to hide, they don’t hang around here. They go abroad. If she was Irish, she’d have run into someone from her mammy’s bingo club inside a week.”
“Not necessarily. She was living a pretty isolated life.”
“As well as that,” I said, keeping my voice level, “I take after the French side. Nobody thinks I’m Irish, till I open my mouth. If I didn’t get my looks here, odds are neither did she.”
“Great,” O’Kelly said, heavily. “Undercover, DV, Immigration, the Brits, Interpol, the FBI. Anyone else who might want to join the party? The Irish Countrywomen’s Association? The Vincent de Paul?”
“Any chance of getting an ID off her teeth?” Sam asked. “Or a country, even? Can’t you tell where dental work was done?”
“The young woman in question