“No,” I said. “Honestly. Sorry.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was apologizing for, but after another moment of the stare, Martin relented. More gently: “Two favors, actually. That there”—the candlestick—“I could’ve posted that out to you. But I think you’re a decent young fella, and you’ve had a bad enough time the last while. So I figured you deserved a heads-up—off the record, like. If you didn’t have any beef with Ganly, then you need to have a good think about why someone would be going around saying you do.”
“I don’t know why. I don’t even know who would—”
But he was shooting his cuff to look at his watch, levering himself out of the chair: “Jesus, it’s later than I thought. I’d better be heading, before the missus decides I’ve run off with some young one—ah, no, only messing, she knows me better than that. She’ll think I’ve run off to the sunshine, Lanzarote or somewhere. I can’t be doing with this weather, it wrecks my head—” Glancing across at me, swinging his coat on: “What was that?”
“I don’t get it. All of it. What’s going on.”
Martin stopped patting his pockets and looked at me. “If you had nothing to do with this,” he said (if?), “then at least one of your family or your mates did. And they’re trying to drop you in the shit. And if I was you, I’d be putting all my time into finding out who and why. Like, starting right now.”
* * *
?After he left I spent the next hour or so pacing in circles around the living room—not the awful step-and-drag treadmill, this was fast and jumpy and I wished I could smoke inside. Hugo hadn’t come downstairs, and I was praying he would stay asleep and Melissa’s trade fair would last a very long time. I needed to think.
You’d assume the part where I was a murder suspect would have been at the top of my agenda, but actually that didn’t seem like the most important thing, not now that the initial startle had worn off. After all, Martin had a fair point, anyone who could have got to that tree had to be on the suspect list, and I really doubted I was about to be banged up for murder just because someone had told someone that someone said I had had unspecified problems with Dominic. But gradually the rest of what Martin had said was sinking in, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed obvious, inescapable, vibrating with a truth so vital it pulled like a great magnet: what had happened to Dominic was, had to be, connected somehow to that night.
What I couldn’t fathom was how. I still couldn’t think of any way that either the misguided-revenge thing or the same guys coming back for me would make sense—after all, I had been out cold on the floor, if they had been there to kill me they could have done it easily (my feet shied away from the candlestick, a misshapen lump crouching in its plastic bag). But clearly there was someone out there—presumably the same someone who was trying to drop me in the shit—who knew exactly what the connection was. And, like Martin had said, the list wasn’t that long. The mates who could have taken the spare key to the garden door, sometime that summer—I wished I could narrow it down. My cousins. Hugo.
None of them seemed remotely plausible, either as murderers or as Machiavellian frame-up artists. And yet; and yet. More and more clearly it was dawning on me (and Martin must have known, all along) that the old story about the burglars being after my car didn’t make sense. I had been out of my apartment all that day and half of that night, my car and my car keys had been right there for the taking; if they had been casing my place, then why would they have waited till I was home?
Those drawers there, they went through those pretty hard. That old camera I’d got for my eighteenth birthday, gone. Photos of long-ago parties.
They had been looking for something that had to do with Dominic’s death. The car, the TV, the Xbox, all that had been so much smoke and mirrors—look, just a bog-standard burglary, nothing to see here! They had waited till I was at home so that, if they couldn’t find what they were after, they could get it out of me—I didn’t want to think about how. Only I had woken up and come out fighting, and everything had gone wrong.
Normally we’d have a fair idea who we’re after. This time, nothing’s ringing any bells. I’m feeling a bit guilty about that, to be honest with you . . . Martin had known from the start. Not about Dominic, obviously, but that this was no random burglary; those men had come to me not by chance, but by careful design.
It should have felt even more horrifying this way—targeted, stalked, hunted down—but it didn’t. If they had come after me specifically, for something I’d done or something I had, then I wasn’t just roadkill, not just some object to be mown down because it happened to be in their way: I was real, a person; I had been the crucial factor at the heart of the whole thing, rather than a meaningless irrelevance to be ignored, tossed aside. And if I was a person within all this, then I could do something about it.
My mind was working more clearly than it had in months, a stark crystalline clarity that took my breath away like snowy air. I had forgotten what it was like to think this way.
I could hardly track down the burglars and force them to spill the story, my badass Liam Neeson fantasies notwithstanding. But the other end of the thread, the end that lay somewhere here in the Ivy House: that one I could find, maybe, and follow.
Weather or no weather, I needed a cigarette. I threw on my coat and went out to the terrace. Wind roaring high in the trees, the light from the kitchen throwing the hillocks and valleys of mud into stark, distorted shadow. Leaves scuttling, rain shining on the terrace tiles. My heart was beating high in my throat and for some reason I caught myself grinning.
* * *
?“What’s that?” Melissa said, nodding at the plastic bag—later, when she had got in cold-cheeked and windblown, and I had tucked her up on a sofa with blankets and hot chocolate, and I was listening to her trade-fair stories and rummaging through the bag of samples she had brought home.
“Oh,” I said, looking up from what appeared to be a tiny knitted condom. “It’s your candlestick. The one the police took away. That detective, Martin, he brought it back.”
“Why?” Melissa asked sharply.
“They’re done with it. The forensic people.”
“Why’d he come himself? Why not post it?”
I didn’t want to tell her anything, not yet, not till I had something solid. “I think he was in the area,” I said.
“What did he want to talk about?”
She was sitting up straight, hot chocolate forgotten. “He didn’t, really,” I said, going back to the sample bag. “He just dropped it off and left. Is this a leprechaun condom?”
Melissa laughed, relaxing. “It’s a finger puppet, silly! Look, it’s got a face, when did you ever see a condom with—”
“I’ve seen weirder. I bet you can get—”
“It’s wool!”
With a little zap of panic I spotted the two empty whiskey glasses, which I had of course forgotten to take away, but Melissa either didn’t notice them or assumed Hugo and I had had a nightcap together. “So, kinky leprechauns,” I said. “What kind of trade fair was this, anyway?”
“Oh, wild. People swinging from hand-blown chandeliers.”
She was happy because I was joking around, and I only realized then just how deeply I had frozen at the first sight of Rafferty and Kerr, just how far I had receded back into some dark echoing space. “Filling Jacuzzis with organic bilberry-elderflower champagne,” I said. “I knew it.”
“We’re a crazy bunch.”