“Let’s go. It’s lovely out. Who do we ask?”
It was lovely out: clean brand-new springtime, a warm generous breeze that smelled of apple blossom and fresh grass, little white puffs of cloud in a blue sky. The lavender bushes on either side of the path were in bloom; birds were everywhere, loud and jubilant.
“Wow,” Susanna said, turning to look back at the building: immense and sprawling, gray, Victorian, with pointed gables and bay windows.
“Yeah. It’s impressive, all right.”
“I think I was expecting some modern thing. Super-discreet. Something that could be a community center, or a block of flats. This place is like, ‘Fuck you, we’ve got a madwoman in the attic and we don’t care who knows it.’”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. She glanced over at me with a half smile. “Do they treat you OK?”
“No complaints.”
“Can they hear us out here? I mean, it’s not bugged or anything?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said.
“Seriously.”
“They don’t have the budget to bug anything. There’s him.” I lifted my chin at the large nurse standing on the terrace, rocking peacefully on his heels and keeping one eye on us and the other on three guys playing cards on the grass. “That’s it.”
Susanna nodded. She turned and we headed down the path, gravel crunching under our feet, Susanna tilting her face up to catch the sun.
“How are my parents doing?” I asked.
“OK, as far as I can tell. Relieved. I know that sounds weird, but I think they were scared of things going a lot worse.”
“Yeah. So was I.”
Susanna nodded. “There’s one thing I wanted to tell you,” she said, after a moment. “About Dominic.”
“Right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about Dominic.
“I didn’t really clock it at first; not until a few months after we did it. Remember I told you how at the beginning of that summer, when I was just daydreaming about ways of doing it, I downloaded Firefox onto Hugo’s computer to do the research, instead of using his Internet Explorer?”
“Yeah.”
“So he wouldn’t find out I was searching for murder techniques.” Someone had dropped a Kit Kat wrapper; she picked it up and put it in her pocket. “But I mean, Hugo: how often do you think he went through his search history? You think he would even have registered if ‘making a garrote’ popped up? We could all have been watching orgy porn on there every day of the week, and he would never have noticed. And anyway, if that was all I was worried about, I could have just stuck to IE and cleared the history and the cookies and the temp files at the end of every session.”
“Right,” I said. I wasn’t sure what her point was. Susanna always had liked making things complicated; messing around downloading pointless browsers was exactly her style.
“Except that that would have shown. Not to Hugo, but if the cops had gone looking through that computer, they would’ve seen that someone had wiped everything. They wouldn’t have been able to tell what had been wiped, but it would’ve looked dodgy as hell. I could have come up with some story—forums for cutters, maybe—but once the cops got interested, I’m sure they could have subpoenaed records from the ISP or Google or somewhere. The big thing about downloading Firefox was that when I was done, I could just uninstall it, run a cleaner program, and it looked like nothing had ever happened. Totally normal search history, right there on IE, no gaps or anything. Nothing to make the cops look twice. Which was a good thing, and I’m delighted I did it that way. But the thing is, I did that before I ever got serious about killing Dominic.”
“So?” I said.
We had turned into the walkway, a series of arches overgrown with trailing creepers so that they made a long tunnel. It was cooler in there, shadowy, bees humming around white flowers.
“So when I started planning it for real,” Susanna said, “at first I thought I’d changed. Because of Dominic; what he was doing to me. I thought it had turned me ruthless. Not that I’ve got a problem with being ruthless—I don’t think.” She considered that for a moment. “Probably I should have loved that idea. It would mean that none of it was my fault, right? That wasn’t really me, it was what Dominic made me into. But I hated it. That might have been the worst part of all: the idea that I was who I was because of some random guy I just happened to meet, and if he’d gone looking for study help off someone else, or if he’d done Spanish instead of French, I’d be a different person. Like anyone could turn me into anything, and there would be nothing I could do about it. It fucked me up, for a while. It might be partly why I went through with it, I don’t know.”
She brushed away a tendril of vine, tucked it carefully into the trellis. “But once I realized that about the browser,” she said, “I was OK again. I’d been all ready to kill Dominic, and get it right, way before I ever thought about actually doing it. The stuff he did to me, the stuff that felt like it was turning me into someone else? It didn’t actually change who I was at all. I was always ruthless. It was just a question of what it would take to bring it out.”
She watched me, sunlight dappling her face as we walked, midges hovering. I thought of her as a little kid, Zach’s size maybe, sharing her M&M’s with me because I had cried when I spilled mine in our mud wallow. “Maybe,” I said. “You would know.”
“I do.”
I didn’t ask her the question that had been on my mind, which was whether I had been inside or outside that ruthlessness’s range; whether, if it had come down to it, she would have thrown me under the bus to save herself and Leon. There didn’t seem to be much point. I’m sure she’d only have told me there was no such if, it could never have come to that, she had had everything under control all the way; none of which would have answered the question. More to the point, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know.
Instead I asked, “Have you told Tom?” I had been wondering this, too. “About Dominic?”
“Nope,” Susanna said. “Not because I’m scared he’d turn us in, or leave me, or anything. He wouldn’t. But it would upset him and it would worry him, and I’m not going to dump that on his shoulders just so I can pat myself on the back about having no secrets in my marriage. And”—a cool glance at me—“neither is anyone else.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“You know what, though,” she said, a little farther down the walkway. “Sometimes I think he knows. About Dominic and about that doctor, too. Obviously there’s no way I can ask him, but . . . I wonder.” Another glance at me. “What about Melissa?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “And I’m not going to ask, either.”
“Yeah, don’t. Leave it.”
We had come out of the walkway; after the dimness the sun felt too bright, aggressive. “Hugo’s ashes,” I said. I hadn’t wanted to bring this up around my father. “He wanted them to go in the Ivy House garden. Did you, did anyone—”
“Yeah, your mum said. But”—breeze playing with a curl of her hair, she lifted a hand to tuck it behind her ear—“all our dads, they felt weird about that. After everything. There’s a lake where the four of them used to go for holidays, when they were kids? Up in Donegal? We drove up there, a few weeks back. We scattered his ashes in the lake. Which is probably illegal, but there was no one around. It’s a beautiful place.” A glance at me: “We would have waited for you, but . . .”
“We should go in,” I said. “Our time’s probably up.”
Susanna nodded. For a second I thought she was going to say something else, but then she turned around and headed towards the walkway. We walked back to the building in silence.
* * *