“We’d have managed,” Susanna said. “But we were lucky. It was a lovely night. Chilly, but not even a cloud. As soon as you and Hugo stopped moving around, we got ready—”
“I think that was the worst bit, actually,” Leon said. “Su putting on Hugo’s jacket and making sure she had her sandwich bag of bits to throw down the tree—that bag was disgusting, do you know that? It looked like a DIY kit for a voodoo doll.” Susanna snorted. “And me finding dark clothes so Dominic wouldn’t see me, and putting the garrote in my pocket and checking like eight times to make sure it wasn’t tangled . . . The whole thing felt impossible. I was positive that any minute I would blink and it would all be gone, and I’d be waking up in my bed like, Oh my God, that was the weirdest dream! But it kept on and on being real.”
“My worst part was the waiting,” Susanna said, taking one of Leon’s cigarettes. “Once we were in place. I was hanging about at the bottom of the garden—we didn’t want Dominic coming too close to the house, just in case anything went wrong, or you or Hugo looked out your windows. And Leon was behind the wych elm. And all we could do was wait. It was terrible.” With a glance at me, over the lighter: “I know you don’t like that we did it here. But I picked the garden partly because I thought being on our own turf would help us keep it together. We’re making this whole thing sound like a breeze, but it wasn’t.”
“I don’t think either of us had eaten in days,” Leon said. “Or slept. People kept having to say things to me three times because I couldn’t take them in; I couldn’t even hear them. Anything that made it even a tiny bit easier . . .”
“Except when it came down to it,” Susanna said, “the garden wasn’t actually all that comforting. All these little rattling scraping sounds—leaves falling off the trees, probably, but—”
“But always right in my ear,” Leon said, shuddering, “so I was leaping about like I was on a pogo stick. And the branches made patterns like things up in the trees, birds, people, snakes—I’d catch them out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked properly of course there’d be nothing there.”
“Our blood must have been about ninety percent adrenaline,” Susanna said. “My mind was speeding, what if he brings his car what if the garrote breaks what if he’s told someone what if this that the other . . . There was a second when I thought, really clearly, I am going to lose it. I am going to start screaming and not be able to stop.”
She blew a careful smoke ring and watched it waver upwards. “Which sounds pretty wussy,” she said, “unless you take into account what the last few months had been like. Anyway, I didn’t lose it. I bit my arm hard enough that it shocked me back together—I still had toothmarks like a week later. And a couple of minutes after that, the garden door opened and there he was. Strolling in, hands in his pockets, looking around like he was there to buy the place.”
“Wait,” I said. I was a couple of steps behind. “Leon had the, my, the hoodie cord? Leon did it?”
“That,” Susanna said, so sharply that it startled me, “was not the original plan. I was going to do it. Wait behind the tree, pick a moment when Dominic had his back to me, and bang. Leon was only supposed to help with the cleanup.”
“But once we talked it over,” Leon said gently, sitting up, “it was obvious that wasn’t a good plan. It would have been way too risky; way too much chance he’d turn around at the wrong moment, or he’d never get into the right position at all. It would have been stupid.”
“I should have known from the start,” Susanna said. “The way I was picturing it, all clean and arm’s-length—literally: I wouldn’t even have had to touch him till he was dead—it doesn’t work that way. What we were trying to do, it’s not small stuff. If you want something like that, you have to get messy.”
I wasn’t sure how drunk she was—only a glass and a half, but I had gone heavy on the pour, I had wanted the two of them nice and loose. In the firelight her eyes were dark and opaque, full of sliding reflections.
“I never wanted you to get messy too,” she said to Leon. “I didn’t want you to be stuck doing the dirty work. But I couldn’t think of any way to make it work the other way round.”
“I didn’t want you doing your half, either,” Leon said. They were turned towards each other, intent, intimate; for a moment it was as if they had forgotten I was there. “But we didn’t have much choice.”
Only, I wanted to say, of course they had had a choice. If there had been three of us, the three of us together, we could have come up with something— Even this had seemed better to them than letting me be part of it.
“What?” I said, too loudly. “What happened?”
They turned to look at me. It occurred to me that maybe I should be frightened. A pair of murderers, spilling their guts to me; in a TV show I would never have left that room alive. I couldn’t find a part of me that cared.
“We did it together,” Leon said. “It was much safer that way. One of us to get Dominic into position under the tree, and keep him still and keep him distracted—”
“That was me,” Susanna said.
“And once she had him where we needed him,” Leon said, “I snuck up behind him. That part was awful—I had to go slowly, because if he heard me we were fucked, but I didn’t want to leave Su there a second longer than I had to—”
“It worked perfectly,” Susanna said, cutting him off. “I’d say he never even knew what hit him, except there was definitely a moment when he did. I saw it. I was basically eye to eye with him; as soon as he went down, I got on top of him and shoved a big wad of my jacket—well, Hugo’s jacket—into his mouth. As far down his throat as I could get it. Probably we didn’t really need that, the garrote would have been fine on its own, but I wanted it so that neither of us would ever be sure who had actually got the job done. That felt like the least I could do for Leon. And I wanted Dominic’s DNA on that jacket anyway.” She glanced over at me, cool pale face, a wisp of smoke rising past her cheek. I thought: What am I listening to? What is this? “And, if I’m honest,” she said, “I wanted to do it.”
“I couldn’t believe how quick it was,” Leon said. “I’d had these awful images of it taking forever, you know in horror films where every time you think the baddie’s dead they come back to life and attack again? I was terrified I wouldn’t be strong enough— But all it took was a minute or two. That was it.” He held up a finger and thumb, a fraction apart. “This much time.”
“It was ugly,” Susanna said, “but it was fast. Once we were sure his heart had stopped beating, the next thing was getting him into the tree. We tied the rope under his armpits and did the pulley thing we’d practiced. I got him kind of draped over a big branch, and then the two of us climbed up and maneuvered him down the hole.”
“He was a lot more awkward than the sack of rocks, though,” Leon said, leaning for the wine bottle. “We put on gardening gloves, so we wouldn’t get DNA all over him, but they made us all fumbly, and we had to get the rope off him without dropping him, and his arms and legs kept going all over the place and his shoe came off—”
“Well, it wasn’t fun,” Susanna said, seeing the look on my face. “But if you’re going to get the vapors, I don’t think that’s the part to focus on. It’s not like anything we did made any difference to him at that point.”
She had misread me. It wasn’t that I was horrified. I just couldn’t get hold of it, my mind kept snagging—eye to eye with him, it was ugly but it was fast . . . I wanted more, wanted every detail, to squeeze tight like broken glass. I couldn’t find a way to ask.