By this point I didn’t trust my own mind enough even to bother trying to remember. Anything I dredged up would more than likely be bollocks, thrown up by the same batch of scrambled synapses as my grandparents’ cremation. While Leon and Susanna clearly didn’t know for sure that I had killed Dominic, they seemed like the most likely people to know—even if they hadn’t made the connection—about whatever tangled set of circumstances might have brought me to that point. And so, one more time, I put on my Toby the Boy Detective disguise and I texted the two of them and asked them to come over some afternoon.
Probably it would have made more sense to leave Susanna out of it. With Leon I could cajole, guilt-trip, needle till I got something out of him. But even before my mind had been hit by a wrecking ball, Susanna could have run circles around me; if she wanted something kept from me, I would never get within a mile of it. I never even thought about leaving her out. The two of them were, after all, wound around the roots of my old, my own life. Somewhere deeper than thought, I believed that if anyone could open up a route back to that life, it had to be them. I suppose I could say, and in spite of everything it wouldn’t be a lie, that I needed them both there because I loved them.
I thought I was being cunningly casual about the invitation, but in hindsight it’s obvious that they knew. They showed up anyway. I’m still not sure, even after all this time, whether I should be grateful for that; whether they at least thought, one or both of them, that they were there to do me a favor.
* * *
?After all that time on my own sinking into the silent house, the energy of them came as a shock. Susanna had brought a bunch of sausage rolls, which she threw into the oven with a slam and a clatter of baking sheets, Leon had a big bag of mini Mars bars—Halloween was coming up; I had forgotten, till I saw the cartoon ghosts and vampires leering from the packet—and I had all the wine left over from the funeral do. “Classy combo,” Leon said, kneeling on the living-room floor and shoving aside drifts of paper and jumpers and plates so he could shake out the Mars bars onto the coffee table—it was cold, I had lit a fire, the living room was the only room that was warm. “You can say what you want about us, but we’ve got style.”
“Next time we can be terribly civilized and do tea and cucumber sandwiches and scones, if you want,” Susanna said, nudging him over to put down the plate of sausage rolls. “But we’ve all been in emergency mode for so long, what we need right now is comfort food. Tom and the kids and I have been living on pizza and Chinese takeaway. I’ll go back to being Organic Superfoods Mummy at some stage, but for now, fuck it.”
“What’s the problem?” I said, pulling the cork out of a bottle of red. “I like sausage rolls, I like Mars bars, I like wine, it’s all good. Red goes with pork, right?” I had prepared for this by drinking an awful lot of coffee and I was kind of on a high, a precarious brittle one that felt like speed cut with something dodgy.
“You look like shite,” Leon said to me, anxiously, leaning forwards to examine my face. “Are you OK?”
“Thanks, dude.”
“No, seriously. Are you eating?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’ve got every right to be pretty ragged,” Susanna said. “You got the worst of this. And you’ve been a trouper, all through.”
“And here you guys were giving me shite about not being able to handle it,” I said. “Remember that?”
“I know. I take it back. I’m sorry.” She thumped down on the sofa and reached for a bobbled woolen throw. “If I’d known how things were going to go, I’m not sure I’d have asked you to move in here.”
“I wouldn’t have come. Believe me.”
“We owe you.”
“Yeah. You do.”
“Have some of these,” Leon said worriedly, pushing the sausage rolls towards me. “While they’re hot.”
“No thanks,” I said. The smell of them was turning my stomach. What I actually craved, weirdly, was the Mars bars; I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth, but I wanted to cram them into my mouth three at a time. “Here.” I passed around wineglasses.
“To Hugo,” Susanna said, raising her glass.
“To Hugo,” Leon and I said.
We clinked glasses. “Ahhh,” Leon said. He settled on the hearthrug, leaning back against the armchair opposite mine, and kicked off his trainers and socks. “Excuse my feet, but I stood in a massive puddle and I’m squelching wet. I need to dry these.” He draped his socks over the hearth rail.
“Those had better be clean,” Susanna said.
“Don’t be giving me shite. You’re there in your socks—”
“Which don’t stink—”
“Neither do mine. Clean as a baby’s bum. Want to smell?” He waved a sock at Susanna, who mimed puking.
“You look good,” I said to Leon. He did. The pinched look had gone out of his face, his hair was gelled up and his stupid edgy wardrobe was back, which I didn’t personally consider a plus but it seemed to be an indicator that he was feeling better. “A lot less stressed.”
“I know,” he said, stretching out his feet to the fire and wiggling his toes happily. “I feel so much better. Is that awful? I can’t handle waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now that it’s actually dropped, I can deal with it.”
“What are you going to do now?” I asked, through a Mars bar. “When are you heading back to Berlin? Or are you heading back to Berlin?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“What about your job?” Susanna asked, taking a sausage roll. “And Carsten?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided. Leave me alone.” To me: “What about you? When are you going back to work?”
“I don’t know either,” I said. The creamy rush of the chocolate was hitting me as overwhelmingly and rapturously as coke. I took another one. “Give me a break. It’s only been like a week.”
“You should go back,” Leon said. “It’s not good for your head, being stuck here on your own all day.”
“Speaking of which,” Susanna said. “How’s Melissa?”
“Fine.”
“Where did she go, after the church? Did she have to be somewhere?”
“Melissa’s moved back to her place,” I said.
After a fractional pause: “Is it her mum?” Leon asked, hopefully.
“Nope,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she’s dumped me. I haven’t heard from her since the funeral.”
“But,” Leon said. He had sat bolt upright. “She was here the last time we were over. That awful night, two days before Hugo had the—”
“Yeah, I know. And when I went up to bed that night, she wasn’t here any more.”
Susanna was picking crumbs off her jumper; I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “Was it . . . ?” Leon asked. He had a sausage roll suspended in mid-air, halfway to his mouth. “The stuff we were talking about, that night. Was that what did it?”
“No shit, Sherlock. It’s kind of hard to blame her.”
Susanna said, “Does she think you killed Dominic?”
“I’m pretty sure she does,” I said. “Yeah.”
“Told you,” Susanna said, to Leon.
“Oh, no,” Leon said. He looked stricken. “I like Melissa.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So do I. A lot.”
“She was good for you. I thought you were going to marry her. I was hoping you would.”
“Right. Again, me too.”
Susanna asked, “Did Melissa ever actually say that she thinks you did it?”
“She didn’t need to.”
“So maybe she doesn’t,” Leon said. “Maybe that’s not why she left at all. I mean, all the stress, with Hugo, that can’t have been—”
“The thing is,” I said, and cleared my throat. This was all, not harder than I had expected exactly but so much stranger; I was about to ask them why I was a murderer, and it seemed impossible that my life had landed me here. “The thing is, it sounds weird but I think you’re kind of right, that’s not why she dumped me. I think she could actually handle me having done it—I mean, I know that sounds crazy but like you said, Melissa is pretty special, she’s—I think she might maybe be able to deal with that, depending on why it was. Only she doesn’t know. That’s got to be really scary for her. It could have been because I’m a, a total psycho, and I just hide it really well most of the time. And the thing is, is that I can’t tell her. Because I don’t remember. Any of it. So I’m pretty much fucked.”