Chill out, it’s all under control. Susanna made me so tired I could have put my head down on my knees and slept.
“According to her”—stretching out his legs, settling to the story—“Dominic had been giving her a bit of hassle, that year. Nothing serious; just trying to convince her to go out with him, not taking no for an answer. She complained about it to Hugo. Probably she made it sound worse than it was, she says; teenage girls, you know how they exaggerate, something’s the end of the world one day and they’ve forgotten it the next . . . Susanna feels pretty bad about that. She just wanted to blow off steam, but Hugo must’ve taken her up wrong. Thought Dominic was some kind of pervert predator. Hugo was protective of the three of you, was he?”
One golden eye slipping sideways to me, bright in the lighter’s flare. “Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah. I got that, all right. So there was the motive. And—just in case I had any doubts left—Susanna told me she saw him, that night. Out here.”
“What,” I said.
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Huh,” Rafferty said. “I thought she would’ve. Something that big, she wouldn’t come to you?”
“Apparently not.”
If Rafferty caught the bitter edge, he didn’t show it. “The night Dominic went missing,” he said, “late. Susanna got woken up by a text on her phone: the famous ‘sorry’ text. She couldn’t go back to sleep. Then she heard a noise out in the back garden, so she went to her window to see what was going on. It was Hugo, dragging something big across the grass; too dark for her to see what, exactly. At the time she thought he couldn’t sleep, so he was doing a bit of work on this rock garden he’d been putting in—apparently Hugo suffered from insomnia, did he?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, either way. That’s what Susanna assumed—sure, why would she think anything else? I asked her if it could’ve been you or Leon out there, but she said no, Hugo was much bigger than either of you and he had long hair back then, no way could she have confused you for him.”
Which was gracious of her. “I asked could it have been someone else,” Rafferty said, “and she said yeah, that was possible, it could’ve been some other big guy with long hair. She wasn’t watching for long. She thought about going out and giving Hugo a hand, but she had work in the morning, so she just went back to bed. When she heard Dominic had killed himself off Howth Head, it never even occurred to her to connect it up with Hugo messing about in his rock garden—that’s fair enough, sure, isn’t it?”
He cocked an eye at me. “I guess,” I said.
“She copped on when we identified the skeleton, though. She’s no fool, your cousin.”
“No,” I said. “She isn’t.”
“No. But she wasn’t going to say anything then, and wreck Hugo’s last couple of months. So she just kept quiet. Threw us the odd bit of info that pointed to Leon, or”—wry sideways glance—“to you. Just to mix it up a bit, keep us from zeroing in on Hugo. She knew it wouldn’t do anyone any harm in the long run; she’s got faith in the Guards, she figured we wouldn’t actually arrest the wrong fella—and even if we had, she could’ve just come forward then. Otherwise, she was planning to tell us after Hugo died.”
I just bet she had been. Only it had never occurred to her that Hugo might have plans of his own. She had taken him for granted, Hugo the way we’d always known him, gentle and dreamy, drifting with the current. She wasn’t that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.
“So,” Rafferty said, “getting back to your question: everything’s adding up nicely. At this point I’m just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, so I can file my report and close the case. I’ve been having a look into that story about Dominic chasing after Susanna, for example, make sure it checks out.”
Something, a flutter of something cold. Out in the garden, the cat—just a silhouette, now—flicked its head up sharply to stare, immobile, at some invisible thing in the air. “Does it?” I asked.
Rafferty wavered a hand. “Yes and no, to be honest with you. I mean, Susanna’s mates all confirm that he’d been at her, but they’re not consistent on the level of harassment. Some of them say it was just a laugh; some agree with her that it was a pain in the hole, but not a huge problem. A couple of them—the ones who were closest to her, funny enough—they say it was bad. Like, real bad.” With a glance at me: “So I’d love to know. How do you remember it?”
This was it, what he was here for, what he wanted out of me? There was nothing about him I could trust, nowhere to get a grip— “Like Susanna says,” I said, in the end. “Dominic was getting on her nerves, but it wasn’t a big thing.”
“Did you ever say anything to him? Tell him to back off?”
“No.” When Rafferty raised an eyebrow, surprised: “It didn’t seem like I needed to.”
Dryly: “Looks like you might’ve been wrong there, man.”
“Probably,” I said. In the last of the light his face was layered with swoops and slashes of shadow. The smells of earth and sodden leaves and burning were strengthening in the air.
“Here’s a thing,” Rafferty said—twisting out his cigarette, examining it carefully to make sure it was dead. “Might be connected, might not; I’d love to know. There were a handful of emails in Dominic’s account that were never traced. Anonymous emails, sent over the summer before he died. From a girl he’d been chasing, apparently. She was well into him, but she didn’t want to let on in public in case he was just winding her up, so she’d been shooting him down—are you following this? But at the same time, right, she wanted him to know that actually she fancied the arse off him.” With a grin, shadows deepening: “The drama, Jesus. Doesn’t it make you glad you’ll never have to be a teenager again?”
Waves of cold were sweeping over me, like something very bad was happening but I was too stupid to figure out what it was. “Yeah,” I said.
“Back when Dominic went missing, the emails didn’t seem like a big deal. Everyone agreed that all the girls were mad about him, no surprise that he’d be getting the odd love note, and he obviously wasn’t so mad about her that he’d have killed himself over her. The lads looking into it didn’t even bother tracing them.” An eye-roll and a humorous twist of his mouth to me, Bloody eejits, would you believe it? “When Susanna told me her story, though, I wondered if those emails might’ve been from her. She swears no, she never emailed him, but the circumstances fit nicely: Dominic coming on to this girl, her telling him to get fucked. Adds up, amn’t I right?”
Another pleasant glance at me, like we were colleagues discussing the case over a nice pint in some cozy pub. “I guess,” I said.
“You figure it was her?”
“I don’t know.” That cold was soaking into me, trickling deeper, something I should know here, something I was missing— “If she was actually into him, why would she email him? Instead of just, like, hooking up with him?”
Rafferty shrugged. “Maybe she was nervous he was taking the piss, like she said. Or maybe she was playing hard to get. Or maybe she wasn’t into him, she was trying to make him slip up and do something that she could use as proof that he was harassing her—email her a dick pic, whatever. Or maybe she didn’t even know what she wanted.” Grinning again: “Teenage girls are mental, amn’t I right?”
“I guess.”
“That’s what everyone tells me, anyhow. So I wondered, at first. But then,” Rafferty said—easily, comfortably, leaning back on his elbows to enjoy the view of the garden—“I remembered those tweets. I already knew someone—not Susanna—who thought it was great craic playing with made-up identities online, to mess with people. And who was good at it.”
Another wave of cold hit me. It was coming up from the ground, into my bones. I couldn’t feel my feet.
“You sent Dominic those emails, am I right?”