“I was so disappointed when I found out that wasn’t true,” Leon said. “Wouldn’t it have made everything so much simpler? If he’d just done the job himself?”
“The other thing I needed to clean up,” Susanna said, “was the computer history. Back when I’d started thinking about real ways of doing it, I’d used Hugo’s computer to do the research. So there were ‘how to make a garrote’ pages all over the browser history. And if the cops started poking around, I definitely didn’t want them finding those.”
“I think we all had things in that browser history that we wouldn’t have wanted anyone finding,” Leon said, arching an eyebrow.
“I had a big piece of luck there, though. I hadn’t wanted Hugo finding weird searches in his history, either. He used Internet Explorer for his browser, right? the way most people did back then? So back when I started doing the research, I’d downloaded Firefox and used that instead. Which meant that, once I was done, all I had to do was uninstall Firefox, run a cleaner, and boom: computer clean as a whistle. Which was nice.”
She finished her wine. “Still, though, I knew if there was a full-on murder investigation, I’d be screwed. The cops aren’t stupid; if they started seriously looking, there was no way I could cover up well enough to be safe. I needed it to look like suicide, right from the start. That was doable—Dominic was such a mess, no one would be too surprised. But for that to work, the body couldn’t be found, at least not till it had decomposed enough to get rid of the garrote marks.”
The calm of her, explaining it point by point, like she was going through a problem from our geometry homework. The whole scene seemed unreal, wavering on the air, ready to dissipate and leave us fourteen and sprawled in front of the TV, with Hugo in the other armchair humming over his book. “I thought about doing it up the mountains, somewhere good and remote, and just leaving him there. Or on Howth Head or Bray Head, and shoving the body into the water. But the problem with anything like that was that it relied way too much on luck. Up the mountains, you’ve got dog-walkers and hikers and poachers; someone could have wandered past at the wrong moment, or tripped over the body the next day. In the water, even if I got the tides right and he didn’t wash up, he could have been spotted by a boat. I don’t like relying on luck.”
She tilted the wine bottle towards me; when I shook my head, she shrugged and topped up her own glass. “Once I thought about it long enough,” she said, “I realized the safest way was to keep the whole thing under control, as much as possible. Which meant keeping both the murder and the body in a place that I had at least some control over. Which meant”—a lift of her chin to the house, the garden—“here.”
“Here,” I said. “You decided to use the Ivy House.” I knew this didn’t say anything good about me, but this was the part that actually shocked me.
“Well, the house was out, obviously, because of the smell. It had to be the garden, and as far down the back as possible. I thought about burying him, but digging a deep enough hole would have taken forever, and I wasn’t sure it could even be done—remember how Hugo kept running into hard ground and rock, when he was digging for the rock garden? Plus, if anyone ever found him buried, that would put the kibosh on the suicide angle—he couldn’t exactly have buried himself. And then”—a little smile—“I remembered the wych elm. The hole. I climbed up there, one day when all you guys were out, and got down inside it. And sure enough: room for two of me. It wouldn’t eliminate the luck factor—the wych elm could have been taken down by a storm two weeks later—but it would minimize it.” She leaned over to pour for Leon. “The only thing was, I’d have to get Dominic in there. And for that I was going to need help. I’d have been happier getting it done on my own, but . . .”
And finally, finally, here it was. I could barely breathe. I said, “So you came to us.”
They both stared at me, utterly blank-faced.
“Me and Leon.”
The silence felt wrong. The cigarettes and the fire had built up a thick pall of smoke in the air. “What?” I said.
Susanna said, “I went to Leon.”
“Then when—” I didn’t know how to ask the question: when had I got involved, how? “How did I—”
“Toby,” Susanna said, gently. “You didn’t do anything. You never even knew about it.”
“But,” I said, after a very long moment. My mind had been knocked totally blank. It wouldn’t go in; was she lying, how much of this whole story was made up, why would she— “You said. When we were stoned. You said you went to my room, that night, you said where was I—”
“Yeah, that was probably shitty of me. But the way you were going at Leon— We were all just about keeping it together as it was. If you’d kept hammering at him, and he’d cracked and spilled everything, specially with Melissa there . . . I had to shut you up. That was the only way I could think of.”
“And when you, after that, then you said Leon thought I’d done it. That was just to, that was, what the hell was that?”
“You did?” Leon demanded. “Why? You said he thought I’d done it.”
“Look,” Susanna said, irritated. “I was doing my best, on the fly, with what you have to admit was a total clusterfuck of a situation. I was just trying to keep everything under control. The two of you were winding each other up; I needed to keep you separated till things settled down. And I needed you both on your toes. The last thing we needed was you”—me—“getting all chummy with the cops, and you”—Leon—“getting into a row with him and letting something slip.” To me, when I didn’t answer: “I’m telling you now.”
“Right,” I said. Both of them were looking at me with a kind of curious pity. “OK.”
“You didn’t do anything. I swear.”
I knew I should be practically collapsing with relief. No life sentence hanging over my head, no lurid stain on my soul, I could go back to Melissa with clean hands . . . All I could feel was, absurdly, devastated. I had got attached, more than I had realized, to the idea of myself as the dragon-slayer. With that gone, I was right back to useless victim.
But it was more than that. Susanna and Leon had known me since we were born. They had known me since long before we were capable of masks or concealments; since we were our first, our pristine and unaltered selves. They had seen in me, all that time ago, something that made me unfit to be the dragon-slayer, unfit even to be the squire on the sidelines holding the spare swords; fit only to bumble about in the background, to be wheeled out if a convenient distraction was needed and then steered off into the wings again.
“But,” I said. “Why not?”
“You wouldn’t have been on for it,” Leon said. “Dominic hadn’t done anything to you.”
“Well but,” I said, “but that wouldn’t have mattered. He was doing stuff to Su. If you’d told me—”
“She’d already told you once, remember? You hadn’t been a whole lot of help. Why would we bother trying again?”
“She hadn’t told me told me. Not properly. She’d just, she said, she only—”
“It wasn’t even that,” Susanna said. “Even if I hadn’t tried telling you before, I wouldn’t have brought you in at this point. I mean, we were talking about killing someone; one of your mates. That’s pretty extreme, and extreme isn’t really your style, is it? Let’s face it, there’s like a ninety-nine percent chance you would’ve been horrified. You would’ve said I was totally overreacting, I was out of my mind, I should go to my parents or go to the police, or just go somewhere else for college—”
“All the things you said just now, in fact,” Leon pointed out dryly.