“—or else you would’ve wanted to beat him up, and by that point that wouldn’t have done any good. Dominic was way past being put off by a few punches. He would’ve just blamed it on me—the jinx again—and been even more set on taking me down.” And, with a cool glance at me: “And I couldn’t take the risk that you’d decide to wreck the whole thing. Warn Dominic, or—”
“I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have done anything to get you in trouble. I’d have—” I had no idea what I would have done.
“Take it as a compliment,” Susanna told me. “I knew you were too pure of heart to make a good killer. Leon, on the other hand—”
“I didn’t even have to think about it,” Leon said. “I mean, I did, because I didn’t fancy going to prison; but as soon as I knew Su had a proper plan, I was delighted to be in on it. I just wished she’d decided to do it years earlier.”
“I should have,” Susanna said, “with the stuff he was doing to you. But it honest-to-God had never occurred to me before. I don’t know if I was just too young, or if I needed to be pushed right to the edge before I could think of it. It’s probably good, though. When I was younger I would’ve fucked it up. Not prepared enough, and got us caught.”
“We were prepared, all right,” Leon said. “We practiced. Remember those rocks Hugo had got in, for the rock garden? One night you were out with the guys and Hugo had gone to a dinner party, and we loaded a bunch of those rocks into a sack till it weighed about the right amount. Then we got a rope out of the shed and tied it around the sack and threw it over a branch of the wych elm, and then I pulled on the rope while Susanna stood on the stepladder, beside the tree, and heaved the sack up. Between the two of us, we got it hauled up to the hole in the trunk.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Susanna said, “but we got there in the end. After that I had us lifting weights every day—well, Hugo’s rocks again—to build up our upper-body strength. And we trained with the garrote, too. Everything I’d read said it was OMG sooo dangerous, you can crush someone’s trachea before you know it, so I made practice garrotes out of jacks roll, so they’d break if we pulled them too tight.”
“We did it in our bedrooms with the lights off,” Leon said, “so we’d be able to do it in the dark. And out in the garden, so we’d be used to doing it on grass and rocks. I think I could’ve done it in my sleep.”
“All the garden stuff was at night, obviously,” Susanna said. “Not just because of you and Hugo and the neighbors; because of Dominic. He’d used the key before; it wasn’t a big stretch to think he might use it again. We didn’t want him popping in some afternoon and catching us in the middle of garrote practice.” Leon snorted. “That would’ve been awkward. At least in the dark, even if he showed up, he wouldn’t be able to see us.”
“I think he might have been hanging around, actually,” Leon said, glancing up at her out of the corner of his eye. “A couple of nights, when we were out there, I heard noises. Something moving, out in the back laneway. Scraping, against the wall; a thump, one time. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare you—it might have been just foxes—”
“I heard it too,” Susanna said. “And a few mornings there was stuff moved around. The garden chairs would be turned upside down. Weird little piles of branches on the terrace. I don’t know what the fuck that was about.”
“That could have been foxes too. Or the wind.”
“It wasn’t,” Susanna said, taking a sip of her wine. “I saw him a couple of times, out my bedroom window, in the middle of the night—I wasn’t sleeping an awful lot. He’d wander around the garden. Break bits off the plants—one time he chewed on some of the rosemary and then spat it out. He’d push his face up against the dining-room windows, try the kitchen door.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. All this craziness bubbling and fizzing in every corner, while I snored a few feet away, happy and harmless and useless. The room was dim and uneasy with shadows. I wished I had switched on the lamps.
Susanna shrugged. “It didn’t make much difference, at that stage. I just pushed the chest of drawers in front of my bedroom door at night, and never went out of my room when you guys were all in bed.”
“You should have told me,” Leon said reproachfully.
“You didn’t tell me about the noises. I didn’t want to scare you, either.” To me: “Once we had the moves down, I made the real garrote. I needed something that wasn’t too thin, so it wouldn’t slice him and get blood everywhere—”
I said, “So you decided my hoodie cord would be perfect.”
She lifted an eyebrow. I wanted to slap that unbothered look right off her face, see it shatter into shock and pain. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“You didn’t have any hoodies of your own, no?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Susanna said, exasperated. “I wasn’t trying to frame you. I just didn’t particularly want to go to jail over this, thanks very much. I figured if the cops found Dominic, and if they twigged that someone had killed him, the only way I could get us out of it without dumping anyone else in the shite was by making the whole thing as confusing as I could. Mix it up, get a load of people in the frame; if they couldn’t narrow it down, they couldn’t do anything to anyone. My DNA was going to be on him. Leon had a motive—it would’ve taken the cops about ten minutes to find out about the stuff Dominic had done to him. I was going to wear one of Hugo’s jackets and make sure to get some of Dominic’s DNA on it. I had a few other random bits to throw down the tree—some hairs of Faye’s, and a couple of cigarette butts and a shopping list that I’d picked up on the street, and a tissue where your mate Sean had blown his nose. I kept them in a sandwich bag, in my underwear drawer. I wonder if the cops found them.” A nod to me: “And your hoodie cord. It wasn’t personal.”
“And you made sure you had a photo of me wearing the hoodie,” I said, “before you robbed the cord. So you could whip it out to give to the cops if you needed to. What did you take the photo on?”
“That camera you got for your birthday. My phone wouldn’t have been clear enough.”
“Right,” I said. “I figured.” The anger was much too vast and too cold for shouting. “So once you knew Hugo was dying and all this was going to come out, you needed the camera.”
Susanna stared at me, eyebrows pulling together. “What?”
The confusion looked real, but I knew her too well by now to think that meant anything. Yet another thing I should have copped, of course Leon would never have been able to plan something like that, but Susanna— “The breakin. That was to get the camera, so you could give the photo to the cops. I should have figured that out ages ago, shouldn’t I? Did you have a good laugh at what a moron I was?”
“The break-in?”
“At my place. The, when I— Was this how you wanted it to go? Because I didn’t sort out Dominic for you? Did you want me to end up like this, like a, a—”
“Toby,” Susanna said. “I uploaded that photo and emailed it to myself the same day I took it. Why would I just leave it on someone else’s camera?” When I couldn’t answer: “You thought the breakin was me? You thought I got you beaten up?”
Leon let out an extravagant snort. “That’s all they took,” I said. My heart was going in great erratic thuds. “Besides the, the obvious stuff, the big stuff, the telly and the car. Only the camera. Why would they, who wants a shitty old—”
“Jesus Christ, Toby. No.”
“Then what, why would they, why—”
“Listen. That was in spring, the breakin. Right? Hugo wasn’t even sick yet. I had no idea any of this was coming. And even if I’d lost the photo, you think I would, what, put an ad on the internet for burglars to ransack your place and hope the camera was in there somewhere and the photo was still on it after ten years? Instead of just calling around and asking if you still had that old camera, oh look at all these great photos can I borrow it and put them on my computer?”
I felt much too stupid to exist. Of course she was right, blindingly right and anyone with half a functioning brain would have thought of all that, but then that had been the problem for a while now, hadn’t it. “Right,” I said. “Of course. Sorry.”