“I wasn’t sure whether to bring it back now, or leave it for a while. You’ve had a rough enough couple of weeks as it is.” And when I glanced up sharply: “What with the . . .” He tilted his head towards the back of the house, the garden.
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” I supposed it made sense, that he would know about Dominic; it fit with my vague ideas about detectives, shouting salty accounts of their day at each other across desks heaped with coffee mugs and illegible paperwork.
“Last thing you needed, I’d say. A shock like that.”
“It’s been weird, all right.”
Martin pointed a finger at me like I’d said something insightful. “No shit, Toby. Weird is the word. Inside, what, five months? you’re burglarized, you’re nearly killed, and a skeleton turns up in your back garden? What are the odds?”
“The burglary and nearly getting killed were part of the same thing,” I said, more sharply than I meant to. “Not two separate things. And the skeleton wasn’t in my garden.”
To my surprise, Martin leaned back in the chair and laughed. “You’re in a lot better nick than you were,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
For some reason I felt like I shouldn’t admit it. Bloody Susanna, with her dark hints about The Man being against us; I’d rolled my eyes, but some of it must have seeped in. “I’m doing OK,” I said.
“Good good”—heartily, slapping the arm of the chair—“I’m only delighted. Still, but: you see where I’m coming from, right, Toby? If you were some skobe from down the flats, this’d be all in a day’s work to you: burglary, assault, dead body, that’d be just your average year. A decent young fella like yourself, but, never been near the cops before except for those speeding tickets”—why would he have bothered finding out about my speeding tickets? years back, but I still felt a rush of guilt, snared!—“that’s a different story. It could be a massive coincidence, all right. But I’ve got to ask myself: what if it’s not?”
After a moment where I stared at him, with no idea what to say to this: “You’re the one who said it, Toby. You hit the nail on the head there. It’s weird.”
“Wait,” I said. There was a strange sensation going on inside my head, like the vertiginous zoom of going through a tunnel too fast, too close to the walls— “You think— Wait. You think someone, someone killed Dominic—”
“That’s the way the lads’re thinking at the moment. Nothing definite, yet, so that could change, but that’s what they’re looking at for now.”
“—and then the, the, the person, they came after me?”
Martin swirled his whiskey and watched me.
“But. I mean, why? Ten years later? And why would they anyway, to begin with, why would they want to—”
“We don’t know why Dominic was killed yet,” Martin pointed out reasonably. “If he was killed. Once we figure that out, we might have a better idea what they would and wouldn’t want to do. Any ideas there?”
“No. The other guys, the other detectives, they already asked me about him. I told them everything I can remember.” That rushing feeling was building. I took a big swig of my whiskey, hoping it would clear my head. It didn’t.
“Anything you were both involved in that might’ve upset someone?”
“Like what?”
Shrug. “Giving the class loser a bit of hassle, maybe. We’ve all done it, sure: only messing, no real harm in it. But that type tends to hold a grudge, get obsessive . . .”
“I wasn’t like that. I didn’t bully people.”
“Dominic did?”
“A bit. Sometimes. No worse than a lot of other guys.”
“Mm.” Martin considered that, rearranging his legs at a better angle to the fire. “How about drugs?”
“Like what?”
“Like a deal that went bad, say. Or someone got into the hard stuff, or had a bad trip or an OD, and blamed the two of ye for it.”
“No,” I said. “I never sold anything. And there was never—” This didn’t feel like a conversation I wanted to have with a detective. “Nothing like that.”
“Right enough.” Martin lifted his glass to his eye and squinted at the fire through it. “The other possibility,” he said, “is revenge.”
“Revenge?” I said, after a second of utter bafflement. “For what?”
“Rafferty heard you had a few problems with Dominic Ganly.”
“What? No I didn’t.” And when he lifted a skeptical eyebrow: “Who said I did?”
“The lads’ve been hearing it around,” Martin said, with a vague wave of his hand. “It’s been coming up in the interviews, here and there. One of those things where everyone heard it from someone else, no one’s sure where it started.”
“I never had problems with Dominic. We weren’t best buddies or anything, but we got on fine.”
“Fair enough,” Martin said equably. “Fact is, though, if the Murder lads heard that—true or not—someone else might have heard it too. And believed it.”
“And . . .” I wasn’t keeping up here, car-crash pileup of new information jamming my brain— “And what? Someone thought it was my fault Dominic killed himself? So they came after me?”
“Could’ve done. Or else they didn’t think he killed himself.”
“They thought I killed him?”
Martin shrugged, eyes on me.
“That’s crazy.” And, after a long moment when he said nothing and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say: “No. Their accents, the guys who hit me. They were skangers. Dominic didn’t know anyone like that. Definitely no one who would have been close enough to him to want revenge. No way.”
“He knew people who could’ve hired someone.”
“But that’s crazy,” I said again. “Ten years later? Why would they, all of a sudden, how would they even know how to—”
Martin sighed. “Maybe I’ve just been in this game too long,” he said. “I’ve seen it happen to other fellas: too many years always looking for the link, they start seeing links everywhere. This one guy, yeah? Totally convinced that his murder case in Sallynoggin was connected to a bar fight in Carlow. Would’ve bet his house on it, like. Hundreds of hours interviewing the shite out of the poor Carlow fuckers, checking alibis, prints, getting warrants for DNA, the lot. All because both cases had a Budweiser baseball cap found nearby. His nickname’s still ‘Bud.’”
I couldn’t grin back. “Am I a,” I said. The word felt both too ludicrous and too explosive even to say, a big red cartoon button that at one touch might detonate the whole house. “Do they think I did this? The other detectives?”
Glancing up from the fire, perplexed: “You mean are you a suspect?”
“I guess. Yeah. Am I?”
“Course you are. If someone killed Ganly, it was someone who had access to this garden. Only a handful of people had access within the time frame. They’re all going to be suspects.”
“But,” I said. My heart was pounding horribly, shaking me right through; I was sure he would hear it in my voice. I’d known all that, somewhere in the back of my mind, obviously I’d known, but to hear it said straight out like that— “But I didn’t do anything.”
He nodded.
“Do they think I did?”
“Haven’t a clue. To be honest with you, I don’t think they’re that far along. They’re just throwing theories around and seeing what sticks; they haven’t settled on one yet.”
“Do you think I did?”
“Haven’t thought about it,” Martin said cheerfully. “It’s not my case; I don’t get paid enough to have theories on other people’s. I only care if it’s got something to do with my burglary-assault.” And when I couldn’t stop staring at him: “Come on, man. If I thought you were a murderer, would I be sitting here drinking your whiskey and having the chats?”
“I don’t know.”
He stared back at me. Aggrieved, on a rising note of belligerence: “Hang on. I’m out in the rain, on my night off, doing you a favor”—he was pointing at the candlestick bag, which I had completely forgotten—“and you’re accusing me of bullshitting you?”