“No.”
“And,” Rafferty said—four fingers waving, long pleasurable drag on his smoke—“not to get too graphic, but it’s hard to miss a decomposing body. There was a load of muck and leaves dumped in on top of it, so that would’ve masked the smell a bit, and it was cold enough that autumn and winter; but still. Hugo would’ve gone investigating, and got the shock of his life, unless he already knew exactly what was stinking up his garden.”
With a slow strange flowering in my stomach I realized: Hugo hadn’t just known. All of us gathered in the living room, Zach buzzing around looking for trouble, and Hugo had beckoned him over and whispered something in his ear; and Zach had got a big grin on his face and shot off to the garden, where he had gone straight up the one tree he had never been allowed to climb.
I told him there’s treasure hidden in the garden. More than that: he had told Zach exactly where to look. Maybe not in so many words, in case Zach ratted him out, but he wouldn’t have needed to. Out you go, we’ll all be busy in here for a while, you can look anywhere you want, anywhere at all . . .
Once the three of us started making noises about what was going to happen to the house, Hugo had realized: if he died and left that skeleton out there, it would be like leaving us with a live landmine in the garden. It needed a controlled explosion, and so (It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath) he had quietly made his plans and set them in motion. His method struck me as being a bit hard on Zach, even if he was a tough little bastard, but I supposed Hugo hadn’t had much option: he could hardly have gone rooting around in that tree himself, or sent anyone else, without arousing suspicion.
Obviously I should have done it years ago. But it would take a certain kind of person to do that, wouldn’t it, and apparently I’m not that kind; or wasn’t, anyway, until now . . .
He had nearly left it too late for the final step, the confession—I wondered if when we got around to clearing his things we would find a handwritten one tucked away, just in case. Even in that moment I had room to be glad that he had left it so long. Melissa and I had made him happy enough that he had wanted every day he could have.
“And then”—Rafferty held up all five fingers, like a wave or a salute—“the DNA results came back. Remember that big old jacket we took, when we searched the house? The one Hugo said was his?”
“Yeah.”
“Dominic’s DNA was on that. On the inside, right here.” Tapping his right side. “Not blood, but then we don’t think he bled. Could’ve been saliva. Now, anyone could’ve worn that jacket, or Dominic could’ve got his DNA on it when he was in the house sometime. But when you add it to everything else we’d got . . .”
God but Susanna had been good. Only eighteen and that sharp, that far ahead. When the suicide story finally fell through, her Plan B had been right there waiting—Mix it up, get a load of people in the frame—and probably Plan C and D and all the rest, too. I wondered what, exactly, she would have done if the cops had arrested Hugo back then, or me, or Leon; or if they had gone after her.
“So,” Rafferty said, “when Hugo rang us that day, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. And he knew details we hadn’t released. We asked him how he got the body down the tree trunk, yeah? He said he tied a rope round Dominic’s chest, threw the rope over a branch, used that to haul the body up till he could climb a stepladder and guide it down the hole; and right enough, there were rope fibers all over Dominic’s shirt. And he told us one of Dominic’s shoes came off along the way, he had to grope around in the bushes for it and toss it in after him. And sure enough, Dominic had one shoe off; it was in the tree, all right, but up somewhere around his waist. That’s what we look for, when someone comes in confessing. Bits and bobs he wouldn’t know unless he was telling the truth.”
Except, of course, Hugo could have known. A noise in the garden, deep in the night; muffled urgent voices, drag of the stepladder. Hugo waking, wondering, finally unsettled enough by some tension distorting the air that he got up and went to the window.
He hadn’t gone out to them. Maybe he hadn’t understood or believed what he was seeing, till the news about Dominic went round. Or maybe he had known straightaway, and for his own reasons—safest for us, safest for his own peace, years of observing from the outside (one gets into the habit of being oneself)—he had decided to stay where he was. I wondered how much I had ever understood Hugo.
Darkness, Susanna bundled in his gardening jacket, Leon probably in something of mine. He hadn’t known which of us he was seeing. Hadn’t wanted to know: he could have checked which of us were gone from our beds, but he hadn’t done it. Creaks and rustles downstairs as Leon slipped out to make the trek to Howth; the long wait, the sharp pings of our phones as the Sorry text came in. More waiting, on and on. The soft key-rattle of Leon coming in, whispers in the dawn. Bedroom doors shutting. Silence.
In the morning Hugo had smiled peacefully at us all over breakfast, asked us what we had planned for the day. At the end of the month he had waved us off to college and new lives, Good luck! Enjoy! And he had gone back into the Ivy House and closed the door behind him.
Ten years, living with that in his garden. His gift to us. I wished, so violently I could have howled, that he were there. I wanted to talk to him.
“The only question,” Rafferty said, “was motive.” He was playing with the conkers again, tossing one and catching it dexterously overhand. “Hugo wouldn’t say. Just ‘It seemed necessary at the time’ and ‘Why do you need to know?’ Claiming his memory was banjaxed, getting irritable when we pushed—‘Do you know how much of my brain has been shoved aside by tumor cells? Would you like to see the scans? I can barely remember my own brothers’ names, never mind things that happened ten years ago . . .’”
He was a good mimic. The specific fall and rhythm of Hugo’s voice, all its warm rough edges, spread over the garden. The thickening darkness flickered like static in the air.
“Kerr thought it was about Dominic bullying your cousin Leon, but I didn’t buy it. If it had happened a year earlier, maybe. But when you’d all left school? When Leon never had to see Dominic again in his life? Hugo wasn’t the type to kill for revenge.” Glance at me: “Or was he? Do I have him all wrong?”
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t.”
“Yeah. So that was a missing piece. Not a big one, not a big deal—we can close cases without a motive—but I don’t like missing pieces. Look at that—” The cat had made its way as far as the second piece of meat and was crouching to eat, more leisurely this time, one wary eye on us. “He’s relaxing already. Give him a bit of time, and you’ve got yourself a cat.”
“I don’t want a cat.”
“Cats are great, man. And a pet would take you out of yourself, give you someone else to think about. Do you good.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Rafferty found his cigarette packet and flipped out another, squinting in the half-dark to see how many he had left. “And then,” he said, “Hugo died—God rest. So it looked like I was stuck with that missing piece. That left me in a bit of a bind: close the case, or no?”
He tilted the packet at me. I shook my head; he shrugged, tucking it away. “Only then,” he said, “your cousin Susanna came to see me.”
What? “When?”
“Two days ago.”