“When did it end?”
I saw what he was getting at, but— “No. Ages before he— And I think he dumped her. Either way, he wasn’t torn up about it or anything. That wasn’t why . . .” I stopped. I was getting mixed up.
“About that,” Rafferty said. “When you heard he’d killed himself. Did that make sense to you? Or were you surprised?”
“I don’t—” My bedroom upstairs, rolling over with a grunt to grab my insistent phone, Dec’s voice: Did you hear? About Dominic? “I mean, yeah, I was shocked. He didn’t seem like the type, at all. But everyone knew he hadn’t got the course he wanted, like for college? He wanted to do Business, I think, but he didn’t get the points in the Leaving Cert. And he was pretty upset about that. So he’d been kind of off, that summer.”
“Depressed?”
“Not really. More like angry, a lot of the time. Like he was taking it out on the rest of us who’d got into the courses we wanted.”
“Angry,” Rafferty repeated thoughtfully. “That cause any problems?”
“Like what?”
“Dominic get into any fights? Piss anyone off?”
“Not exactly. Mostly he was just kind of a bollix, like getting nasty with people out of nowhere? But nobody held it against him. We all got it.”
“That’s pretty understanding,” Rafferty said. “For a bunch of teenage boys.”
I did some kind of shrug. The truth was that I at least hadn’t thought very much about Dominic, that summer, except for the odd moment of pity tinged with smugness. My mind had been on college, freedom, a week in Mykonos with Sean and Dec; Dominic’s strops (pinning Darragh O’Rourke against the wall and shouting in his face, after some harmless comment, then storming off when the rest of us broke it up) had been low on my priority list.
“Looking back, do you think he might have been in worse shape than you realized? Teenagers, they don’t always know how to spot the signs that someone’s in real trouble. They’re all half mental anyway; even when someone’s falling apart, they just figure it’s more of the same.”
“I guess he could have been,” I said, after a moment. “He was definitely . . .” I couldn’t come up with the right way to describe it, the raw, splintered, unpredictable energy that had made me start avoiding Dominic that summer. “He was off.”
“Put it this way. If one of your friends right now started acting the way Dominic was that summer, would you be worried?”
“I guess. Yeah. I would be.”
“Right,” Rafferty said. He was leaning forwards, hands clasped between his knees, gazing at me like I was making some valuable contribution to the investigation. “When did he start acting out of character? Ballpark, even.”
“I don’t . . .” It had been years since I’d thought about any of this. “I mean, I wouldn’t swear to this. At all.” Rafferty nodded understandingly. “But I think it sort of started around the Leaving Cert orals, so April? And then it got way worse in June, with the written exams. He knew he’d fucked up. Like, most of us? we were all stressing about how we’d done, except a few nerds who knew they’d got a million points; one day we’d be all ‘Yeah, I should be fine’ and the next we’d be like ‘Oh shit, what if . . .’ But Dominic was like, ‘I’m fucked.’ End of. And it was obviously wrecking his head. And when the results came out in August and yeah, he actually had done as badly as he thought, then he got even worse.”
“Why’d he do so badly? You said he wasn’t thick.”
“He wasn’t. He just hadn’t studied. He”—hard to explain—“Dominic’s parents were rich. They kind of, I guess they spoiled him? Like he always had everything, cool phones and cool holidays and designer gear, and before sixth year they bought him a BMW?” Sudden vague memory of resentment, my dad had laughed in my face, Better start saving— “I think it just, like, genuinely never occurred to him that he might not get something he wanted. Including whatever course he wanted. So he didn’t bother studying. And by the time it hit him, it was too late.”
“Did he ever do drugs?” And, wryly, when I hesitated: “Toby. It’s been ten years. Even if I was looking to bang people up for a bit of hash or a few pills, which I’m not, the statute of limitations ran out years back. And I haven’t cautioned you; anything you say wouldn’t be admissible in evidence. I just need to get a feel for what was going on in Dominic’s life.”
“Yeah,” I said, after a moment. “He did drugs sometimes.”
“What kinds?”
“I know he did hash, and E. And coke, sometimes.” Dominic had liked coke, a lot. It hadn’t been all that common, back in school, but when there was some around it had been his more often than not, and he had been good about sharing with the host: clap on my shoulder during a party, C’mon over here, Henno, I need a word, sneaking to the bottom of the garden snickering and swearing as our feet sank into mud, lines chopped out on a rusty little garden table. “There could’ve been other stuff, I don’t know. That’s all I saw him with. And he wasn’t some junkie, or anything. Just . . . when it was going.”
“Your basic teenage experimenting,” Rafferty said, nodding. Kerr was writing away. “Any hassle there, do you know? A dealer he didn’t pay, someone who ripped him off, anything like that?”
“Not that I know about. But I probably wouldn’t have known anyway.”
“That’s right. You weren’t friends friends.” He left that there for a moment that made me vaguely uneasy. “Was Dominic ever at this house?”
“Yeah,” I said. This felt like something I shouldn’t admit, but there didn’t seem to be much choice. “Me and my cousins, we used to stay here during the holidays? And we’d have parties? I mean, not like mad raves or, I mean Hugo was right here, but he’d stay upstairs—we’d just have a bunch of mates over, put on music, hang out and talk and maybe dance—”
“And drink,” Rafferty put in, grinning. “And the other stuff. Let’s be honest here.”
“Yeah. Sometimes. We weren’t, like not a drug den or orgies or anything, but . . . I mean, this wasn’t when we were like twelve, I’m talking when we were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen? Mostly it was just a few cans, or someone would have a bottle of vodka or—and I guess sometimes people would have hash or whatever—”
I knew I was stammering and babbling, I could see Kerr’s face getting a subtle look of very sympathetic understanding like it was dawning on him that I was a bit unfortunate. I wanted to grab him by the collar and shout in his face, get it into his thick head that that was nothing to do with me, it was all because of two worthless skanger pricks and he should be fucking giving them that look, not me. Everything inside my head was ricocheting.
Somewhere in there, although I can’t pinpoint it exactly, had been the moment when all this turned real. Up until then it had been basically an outrageous pain in the arse—horrible, sure, obviously, and grotesque, presumably this poor guy (or girl, whatever) hadn’t planned on having his skull fished out of a tree and God knew what kind of tragic story had gone on there, but it would have been really fucking nice if he had picked some other tree; but, apart from in the geographical sense, nothing to do with us. Even through the first half of this conversation, I had had the same feeling, even when Rafferty said the skeleton wasn’t old, even when he showed me the photo—Dominic, Jesus Christ, didn’t see that coming, how the fuck did he wind up in there? It had taken a while to sink in that we weren’t spectators any more; we were, somehow, inside this.
“And Dominic came to these parties?” Rafferty asked.
“Yeah. Not always, but I guess most of them.”
“How many?”