The rain was still holding off, if only barely. A lean gray cat, which had been stalking a blackbird among the ridges of mud, streaked away and scrambled over a wall at the sight of us. “What a mess,” Susanna said. She had brought out an old dishtowel; she dropped it on the terrace and scuffed it around with her foot, soaking up leftover rain. “We should replant all that stuff, before it dies.”
“Melissa and I are going to do it when she gets home,” I said.
“How’s Melissa with all this?”
“Fine. Glad they’re out of our hair.”
“Well,” Susanna said. She tossed the towel towards the door and dropped down to sit at the top of the steps, moving over to make room for me beside her. “More or less.”
“Oh, God,” Leon said, sinking down on her other side. The week’s events had apparently hit him right in the fashion sense: his forelock hung over his face in a childish, neglected flop and he was wearing a misshapen gray jumper that didn’t go with his edgy distressed jeans. “I hate cops. I didn’t like them even before I got arrested, and now I swear to God, just the sight of them—”
“You got arrested?” I said. “What for?”
“Nothing. It was years ago. In Amsterdam.”
“I didn’t know you even could get arrested in Amsterdam. What’d you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. It was stupid. I had a fight with— You know what, it doesn’t even matter, it all got sorted out in a couple of hours. The point is, I could really do with a nice big spliff right now.”
“Here,” I said, tossing him my cigarette packet. “Best I can do.” I was kind of enjoying this, actually, after all Leon’s little jabs about how there was no way I could cope with a tough situation; not that I had handled the detectives like a champ or anything, but at least I wasn’t having the vapors and practically demanding smelling salts. “Just breathe. You’ll be fine.”
“Don’t fucking patronize me. I’m so not in the mood.” But he took a cigarette and bent his head to his lighter. His hand was shaking.
“Were they mean to you?”
“Just fuck off.”
“No, seriously. Were they? They were fine with me.” A little too fine, actually—the thought of Kerr’s slowed-down sympathy still twisted my stomach—but that was none of Leon’s business.
“No, they weren’t mean. They don’t have to be. They’re detectives. They’re scary no matter what.”
“They were totally considerate to me,” Susanna said. “They gave me a ring in advance and everything, to check what time I’d have the kids out of the way. What did they ask you?”
Leon threw my smoke packet back to me. “What Dominic was like. How I got on with him. How everyone else got on with him. How much he was over here. Stuff like that.”
“Me too. What did you say?”
Leon shrugged. “I said he was around every now and then, he was your typical loud rich rugby-head, but I don’t remember a lot about him because I basically didn’t give a fuck about him. He was Toby’s friend, not mine.”
“He wasn’t my friend,” I said.
“Well, he definitely wasn’t mine. The only reason we knew him was through you.”
“It’s not like Dominic Ganly would’ve normally hung out with the likes of me and Leon,” Susanna said. “God forbid.”
“He wasn’t my bloody friend. He was a guy I knew. Why does everyone keep—”
“Is that what you said to the cops?”
“Yeah. Basically.”
An approving nod. “Smart.”
What? “It’s not smart. It’s true.”
“I’m just going to keep saying I don’t remember anything about anything, ever,” Leon said. He was smoking his cigarette fast, in short sharp drags. “I don’t care; they can’t prove I do. The less we give them, the better. They’re looking to pin it on someone, and I’d rather it wasn’t me, thanks very much.”
“What the fuck have you been watching?” I wanted to know. The coffee and the cigarette were helping my headache and my fatigue and the overall sense of low-level prickling unease, but not a lot. “‘Pin it on someone’—pin what? They don’t even know what happened to him.”
“On the news they said ‘treating the death as suspicious.’ And ‘anyone with any information, contact the Guards.’”
“It is suspicious,” Susanna said. She didn’t look particularly worried about it: comfortably cross-legged, hands wrapped around her coffee cup, face tilted to the sky as if it were a beautiful day. “He was down a bloody tree. That doesn’t mean he was murdered. It just means they want to find out how he got there.”
“They told me they think he was murdered,” Leon said.
“Course they did. They wanted to see what you’d do. Did you freak out?”
“No, I didn’t freak out. I asked them why they thought that.”
“What’d they say?”
“They didn’t. Of course. They just asked me if I knew any reason why anyone would want to kill him.”
“And?”
“And I said no. Obviously.”
“Did you?” Susanna asked, with mild surprise. “I said he was kind of upsetting people, that summer. He was a nice guy, but something was obviously going on with him. That could cut either way—it could be a reason why someone would kill him, or a reason why he’d kill himself—but that’s Rafferty’s problem to figure out, not mine.”
“I told them the same thing,” I said.
Leon threw up his hands. “Oh, great, now they’re going to think I was lying—”
“No they’re not,” Susanna said. “They’re not stupid. People remember different things; they know that. Did they ask if you remembered the night he went missing?”
“Oh yeah,” Leon said. “I said no, nuh-uh, nothing. They kept on pushing, they were giving me these worried looks, like that was really suspicious—Are you sure, come on, you must remember something, think back . . . Who remembers some random night ten years ago? If I had, that would’ve been suspicious.”
“I said yes,” Susanna said serenely, finding a cigarette. “I remember it because it wasn’t some random night, it was the night Dominic went missing. So afterwards everyone was talking about what they’d been doing—OhmyGod, I was just sitting in bed texting my BFF and poor poor Dominic was out there feeling so alone, if only I had rung him then maybe blah blah blah . . . The four of us were here. We had dinner and watched telly, and then Hugo went to bed and the three of us stayed up talking for a while, and then we went to bed around midnight.”
“Wait,” I said. I had just managed to put my finger on something that had been bothering me. “How come they thought he’d killed himself back then? And now they don’t? I mean, if there were good reasons at the time, then why do they think—”
“He sent a text to everyone in his phone, remember?” Susanna said. “The night he went missing; late, like three or four in the morning. Just saying, ‘Sorry.’ You must’ve got one. I even did—I don’t even know why Dominic and I had each other’s number, maybe from when I was tutoring him for the French orals? I remember because it woke me up and I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just figured he’d texted the wrong person and went back to sleep.”
I did have some kind of muddled memory of this, or at least I thought I did, not that that was worth very much seeing as I also remembered Dominic’s funeral. “I think I got one,” I said.
“It was a huge deal,” Leon said. “Who’d got that text and who hadn’t. Personally I think about half the people who claimed they’d got one were bullshitting so they could pretend they’d been best buddies with Dominic. Lorcan Mullan? Please. No way did Dominic Ganly even know Lorcan existed, never mind have his number.”
“Oh, God,” Susanna said. “And everyone claiming that as soon as they saw it they just knew, they had OMG a total premonition! Isabelle Carney was swearing to anyone who’d listen that she saw Dominic standing at the foot of her bed, glowing. I like to think that even Dominic would’ve had better taste than to waste his big apparition moment on an idiot like Isabelle Carney.” She tipped up her coffee cup to get the last of it. “Now presumably the cops figure, if someone killed him, they sent the text to make everyone think it was suicide. And it worked.”
“But the whole Howth Head thing,” I said. “Everyone thought that. Where did that come from?”