“I walked from Baldoyle,” Leon said. “I didn’t go all the way up Howth Head, because in the dark? along that cliff path? No thank you. I just went up a little way, till I was sure no one could see me, and then I sent the text. I was terrified it wouldn’t go through, the reception wouldn’t be good enough, but it was fine. Once I saw ‘Sent’ I wiped my fingerprints off the phone and threw it as hard as I could.”
“Even if it hadn’t gone out to sea, that wouldn’t have mattered,” Susanna said. “Dominic could’ve ditched it on his way up the cliff path.”
“And then I just went home,” Leon said. “I walked as far as Kilbarrack and picked up a taxi. On the way out I’d been wearing a white hoodie over a blue one, and on the way back I swapped them around and put on a baseball cap. So even if the cops went asking and both the taxi drivers remembered me, it wouldn’t sound like the same guy.”
“Your idea,” I said to Susanna, who nodded, turning onto her side to watch Leon.
“I told the driver to drop me in flatland in Ranelagh—Su had the actual road picked out, I don’t remember. This time I told him I’d had a fight with my girlfriend. And then I ‘went to sleep’ against the window again.”
He turned his glass in his hands, watching the firelight slide along its curve. “That was the weirdest part of the whole thing,” he said. “That taxi ride. Up until then it had been all about getting things done: get this right, don’t forget that, don’t fuck that up, go go go. And then all of a sudden it was over; there was nothing left to do. There was just . . . the rest of our lives, without Dominic. With this instead.” He drew a long breath. “The driver had some oldies station on the radio, really low. REM. David Bowie. It was still dark, but the sky on one side was just starting to turn the tiniest bit gray and for some reason that made it look like the earth was tilting. Like the taxi wheels were off the ground and we were floating. There was this one bright star, low on the horizon. It was beautiful.”
Susanna had her head down in her elbow on the arm of the sofa, watching him. “I felt the same thing,” she said. To me: “After he left I dumped my sandwich-bag stuff down the hole. I threw in a ton of earth and leaves, too, to cover up the smell. And I put the ladder and the rope and the gloves away, and smoothed out the holes the ladder had left under the tree, and hung Hugo’s jacket back in the coat cupboard. And then I just sat in my room, with the lights off in case you or Hugo went to the jacks. I went over it all in my head, to check if there was anything I’d missed, but there wasn’t. There was nothing else I could do. Even if I’d wanted to undo it all, I couldn’t have.”
Her eyes had slipped away from us, to the fire. “It was really peaceful. It shouldn’t have been; I should have been climbing the walls on adrenaline, or losing my mind with remorse, or something. Right? Me with all my moral crusades, and now I’d killed someone. But I just sat by the window and looked out at the garden. It looked different—not in a bad way; just different.” She thought about it for a while. “Clearer, maybe? I wanted to put the rest of the world on pause and just sit there for a year or two, watching.”
Curled up like that, dreamy in the dimness, hair mussed against the faded red of the sofa, she should have looked like her old childhood self, tired from a day of playing; Leon, propped against the armchair with his legs sprawled anyhow, should have looked like that sparky little boy, smudge-faced and scrape-kneed. They almost did. We had been so close, back then, a closeness too fundamental even to think about. I couldn’t work out how they had got so far away.
“Finally my phone went off with a text,” Susanna said. “And then I heard yours through the floor, and then Leon’s—he had to leave it here; I didn’t like that, because what if anything went wrong and we couldn’t get in touch, but if the cops went sniffing around we couldn’t have Leon’s phone pinging in Howth. I gave it a minute before I looked—in case the police went checking times on phones and they could somehow tell what time I’d read the text; I didn’t want it to look like I’d been waiting for it. And there it was.”
And I had slept happily through it all. I had barely turned over to stretch out an arm when the phone beeped, check the text, What the hell? and back to sleep.
“After a while Leon got home and told me it had all gone fine,” Susanna said. “It was getting bright outside. We were both starving, so I made sandwiches and tea—”
“Whispering at the kitchen table,” Leon said, “giggling like a pair of little kids sneaking down for a midnight feast. I was light-headed. The food tasted amazing; I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything that delicious.”
“And then we went to bed,” Susanna said. “Probably we should have been tossing and turning and having nightmares, but actually I don’t think I’ve ever slept that hard.”
“Oh, my God. Like I’d been hit with a baseball bat. I think I would’ve slept twenty-four hours straight, only Su came in and dragged me out of bed for work.”
“Well, we couldn’t be late,” Susanna said. “We needed to act completely normal. It wasn’t hard. All we had to do was go along with everyone else: did you get a text from Dominic Ganly, OMG what was that all about, has anyone talked to him? Oh no what if he’s done something stupid!!” She raised herself on her elbow and reached for another cigarette. “From there on, it kind of did itself.”
I tried to think back to that autumn. It seemed impossible that I hadn’t noticed anything; I had been happily wrapped up in college and making new friends and various sports clubs and going out but surely something would have registered, they had killed someone, surely I couldn’t have missed that? Surely they should have been different, branded or haunted or something? “Weren’t you scared?” I asked. “That you’d get caught?”
“Probably we should have been,” Susanna said, shaking Leon’s lighter. “But no, not really. You’ve got to remember, we were used to being scared. It was basically our default mode, by that stage. And ‘Oh noes, the cops might possibly figure out that Dominic didn’t kill himself and they might possibly tie it to us and they might possibly get enough evidence to arrest us and we might possibly be found guilty’ was a lot less scary than ‘Dominic Ganly is going to rape me or kill me any day now.’”
“I was scared, off and on,” Leon said. “When I thought about it too much. It wasn’t like they would have had to look very hard for him—obviously—and once they found him, that would’ve been it for us. The only thing that saved us was that they weren’t looking this way at all.”
“We were lucky,” Susanna said. “Dominic thought he was so smart, never texting me anything dodgy, so I’d have no proof. But if his phone had been full of vile texts to me, the cops would have taken one look and dived on me.”
“But,” I said, “the cops did come here. Didn’t they?” At this point nothing my memory came up with felt reliable, but all the same I was positive there’d been an afternoon, I’d been hungover and heading out to meet up with the guys for a cure, two culchie-types in suits on the doorstep holding out ID and asking pointless questions, I’d forgotten all about it till now—
“Yeah, they did,” Susanna said. “About a week in. They talked to everyone who’d known him, but I got special treatment—I guess one of my mates must’ve told them he’d been hitting on me, and the cops wanted to know the story. Thank God it wasn’t the same guys I’d tried to report him to—those were just normal Guards, the kind with uniforms. The ones who came to talk to me were detectives, in suits, like Rafferty and Kerr. I mean, the uniform guys had probably forgotten all about me by that time, but still, that actually would’ve been scary.”