It was the leftover cake from Sunday’s pickup lunch. He had even brought a knife. He spread out the clingfilm on his lap and sliced the cake into two neat halves. “There,” he said, handing me mine, on a paper napkin.
We ate in silence. The cake was jam sponge and it tasted startlingly, almost humiliatingly delicious, childhood rush of sugar and comfort. It was still raining, wind blowing small erratic spatters at the windscreen. A woman went by with a little kid in a bright yellow raincoat, the kid jumping in puddles, the woman shooting us a suspicious look from under the hood of her puffy jacket.
“Now,” Hugo said, brushing crumbs and powdered sugar off his jumper into his hand. “Do you want to ring your cousins and let them know?”
“Shit,” I said. Somehow this hadn’t even occurred to me, but of course, Rafferty would be zooming over to interrogate them as soon as he finished fucking up the Ivy House. “Yes. I should do that now.”
“Here,” Hugo said, balling up the clingfilm and the napkins and handing the whole thing to me. “You can find a bin for this, while you’re at it—don’t forget the cigarette butts. I might close my eyes for a moment. We’ve got a while, haven’t we, before we can go home?”
He turned the radio on to Lyric FM—something peaceful, string quartet—and leaned his head back against the headrest. I got out of the car, turned up my jacket collar against the rain and went looking for a bin while I rang Susanna.
She picked up fast. “What’s up?”
“There was a whole skeleton in there. In the tree. And the cops found out who it is. Remember Dominic Ganly?”
Silence.
“Su?” I didn’t remember Susanna being remotely matey with Dom, she hadn’t been his type, but given the effect he had had on girls— “Are you OK?”
“Fine. I just didn’t expect it to be someone we knew.” In the background, horrible cacophony of someone banging on a piano— “Zach! Knock it off! —Do they know what happened to him?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. They say maybe he could have been”—the word felt unreal, a bright migraine flare rippling out dangerously across everything—“he could have been murdered.”
Sharply: “Could have been? Or he was?”
“Could have been. They don’t know. What he died of, even.”
A second of silence. “So they think he could have got in there by himself.”
“That’s what Rafferty said. It sounds crazy to me, how the fuck—”
“Well, plenty of ways,” Susanna said. Zach was still smashing the piano, but faintly now, farther away; she had left him to it. “Maybe he was up the tree, he slipped and he broke his neck falling into the hole. Maybe he was off his face on something and thought he had to go down there to look for dwarf treasure, and then he couldn’t get out and he, I don’t know, suffocated. Choked on vomit.”
“The detectives asked that. Whether he ever did drugs.”
“There you go. What did you say?”
I turned my shoulder to the rain, trying to keep it off my phone. “I said yeah. I wasn’t going to fuck about. They would’ve found out anyway.”
“Right,” Susanna said. There was an absent note to her voice; she was thinking hard. “Or maybe he actually did kill himself.”
“Why the fuck would he kill himself in our tree? And how?”
“Overdose, maybe. And I haven’t got a clue why. I barely knew him. That’s not our problem; the detectives can figure it out.”
“Yeah, that’s the other reason I’m calling. They interviewed me, or interrogated me, or whatever they call it. And Hugo. And now they’re searching the house. They threw us out.”
That got Susanna’s attention. “Searching the house? What for?”
“How would I know?” I had finally managed to find a bin; I jammed the rubbish into it. “Because Dominic ‘had links to’ it, they said. I’m just giving you the heads-up: whenever they get finished, they’re probably going to show up at your place.”
“Those pricks threw you out? Where are you? Where’s Hugo?”
“Only for an hour and a half. We’re just hanging out in the car. Hugo’s having a nap. It’s fine.”
A second while she decided whether to get really pissed off or save it. In the end: “What did they ask you?”
“About Dominic, basically. What he was like, how well I knew him. Whether he was depressed that summer. How much he was at the house. Stuff like that.”
Susanna went silent again. I could practically hear her mind whirring.
“They weren’t shitty about it, or anything. It was fine. I just thought you’d want to know before they show up on your doorstep.”
“I do, yeah. Thanks, Toby. Seriously.” A breath. Briskly: “Listen. I’ll let you know when they’ve been and gone. Then we can take it from there.”
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about—take what where? what exactly did she think we could do about any of this? “Yeah. OK.”
“Got to go. See you later, or tomorrow. Meanwhile, just remember: they’re allowed to lie to you. And they’re not your buddies.”
I wanted to ask why exactly she thought her knowledge of cops beat mine, but— “Su. Hang on.”
“Yeah?”
“The first time the three of us got stoned. On the terrace. Remember?”
“You told Leon I’d turned into a fairy. He was freaking out.”
“Yeah. Was Dominic there too?”
“No. Why would he be?”
“I couldn’t remember who it was. I thought maybe him.”
“There wasn’t anyone else there,” Susanna said. There was a note in her voice that I couldn’t read; bafflement, curiosity, what? “It was just the three of us.”
No it wasn’t, I almost said, but the ugly twist in my stomach stopped me. “Right,” I said. “I guess that stuff was stronger than I thought.”
“I think it must’ve been pure skunk or something. I even started believing I’d turned into a fairy. I was getting worried about how I’d turn back, except I figured you probably had a plan and you wouldn’t let me get stuck that way.”
“God, no.” That actually got a smile out of me. “I had the antidote all ready.”
“There you go. Talk later. Bye.”
Leon’s phone was busy. I had wandered far enough in search of the bin that it took me a while to find my way back to the car—indistinguishable wet shabby side streets, tiny empty gardens, I had a nasty mental image of having to ring Hugo to ask him where he was—but when I finally found it he still had his head back on the headrest, eyes closed. He looked asleep. I leaned on someone’s garden wall and lit another cigarette before I tried Leon again. This time his phone rang out.
It was half-one. I figured surely to Jesus the cops had finished whatever they were doing in the study by now, and even if they hadn’t, that was their problem. I threw my cigarette into a puddle and headed for the car.
* * *
?Rafferty met us at the door like a host—come in, great timing, just finished the study, up you come! shepherding us down the hall past a glimpse of some uniform squatting to rifle through the coffee-table clutter, sweeping us up the stairs and into the study, there you go, we’ll keep you updated! And he was gone, with a firm click of the door behind him.
The study looked subtly, undefinably off-kilter, the wooden elephants lined up too neatly on the mantelpiece, the patterns of book spines all wrong on the shelves, everything half an inch out of place. It made me want to back out the door. “Well,” Hugo said, after a moment, blinking at the pile of paper he had left behind. “Where were we?”
I went through the census PDFs like an automaton: pick a street, pick a house number, click on original census form, skim the names, back button and move on to the next house. I had no idea what I was seeing. Footsteps thumping back and forth overhead, in my room; thud of a drawer closing. Somehow it hadn’t sunk in till then what search the house actually meant, and the thought of Rafferty pawing through Melissa’s underwear sent me into an impotent rage that almost stupefied me, left me staring at the laptop screen, blind and panting.