“Thank God for that,” I said, leaning across to kiss her, “or you’d never put up with me,” and felt her smile against my mouth.
We went back to poking through the samples so I could take the piss out of the weirder ones, and after a few minutes Hugo came clumping downstairs in his dressing gown, knuckling his eyes, and we made him a hot chocolate and Melissa dug a packet of sustainable oat-based biscuits out of the bag. Neither of us mentioned Martin’s visit. The next morning, opening the bin to toss something in, I saw the candlestick: sticking out of the rubbish where it had been shoved deep and hard, plastic bag twisted around it tight as a garrote.
* * *
?I walked Melissa to work, hung around within earshot while Hugo took his shower, installed him in the study and then told him I was going for a wander around the garden to clear my head. He gave me a vague smile and a wave and turned back to his desk. I wasn’t positive he had registered what I had said, or even who I was.
The wind had died down, leaving rumpled drifts of leaves against the walls. The replanted bushes and the stuff Melissa had brought from the garden center looked disgruntled and out of place; some of them were starting to wither. My mother’s sapling leaned at a dispirited angle in a corner, still in its pot—so far no one had worked up the nerve to plant it in that gaping crater. I hadn’t taken my Xanax the night before and everything felt jagged and discordant, every branch too savagely outlined against the gray sky, the breeze setting off sharp mechanical rattles among the dead leaves. I put a big oak tree between me and Hugo’s study window, and pulled out my phone.
I hadn’t held out much hope that I still had a number for Susanna’s razor-happy blond friend Faye—I had flirted with her for a while, that summer when she was in and out of the Ivy House, even snogged her a couple of times, but I had carefully backed away when I spotted the crazy—but there it was, somehow, transferred down through all the phones I’d had over the past ten years. I leaned against the tree trunk and dialed. It was like being a teenager with a crush, hands sweating, heart racing through my back against the rough bark, praying she hadn’t changed her number.
“Hello?”
“Faye?” Warm but diffident, just enough pleasure without eagerness: “It’s Toby, Toby Hennessy. Susanna’s cousin. I don’t know if you remember me—”
“Course I do. Toby. Wow. Hi.” Friendly, but with distance. I couldn’t tell whether my name had come up on her phone or whether I’d been deleted along the way.
“It’s been a while. How’re you doing?”
“Great, yeah. Everything’s good. How’ve you been?”
She sounded a whole lot more together than I remembered. In the background, a phone ringing, a man’s brisk voice reeling off some business patter: she was at work. “Yeah, good here, too.” And into the neutral silence that followed: “I’m just ringing because—well, I’m pretty sure you know all the stuff that’s been going on at my uncle Hugo’s house.”
“Pretty much, yeah. I saw bits on the news. And then a couple of detectives came to talk to me about it.”
Not Susanna; the two of them were out of touch, then, which gave me more leeway. “Me too. That’s actually why I called you. They mentioned they were going to talk to you, and I mean, they’re pretty intimidating guys. I didn’t like the idea of them giving you hassle. I just wanted to check that you’re OK.”
That thawed Faye’s voice a notch or two. “Ah, yeah. It was fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Really. They weren’t intimidating at all. Maybe because I was in France with my parents for most of that September, so it’s not like I knew anything about whatever happened. They mostly wanted to know about me spending nights at your uncle’s house, do you remember that? I wasn’t getting on with my parents, and when we fought I’d sneak out my window and come over?”
“Oh, yeah. I remember.” Putting a touch of amused tenderness in my voice. “And we’d all stay up half the night talking, and be late to our jobs in the morning. It was worth it.”
She laughed, a little. “Yeah. Well. The detectives, I guess they’re interested in the key to the garden door? That went missing that summer? They wanted to know how Susanna would let me in; when I had to start coming in the front.”
“They asked me all that stuff, too. I haven’t got a clue. I felt like a total idiot. Did you remember?”
“Sort of. I know the key went missing at a party, because Susanna tried to let me in the day after and she couldn’t, and she was all freaked out—I was like, ‘Don’t worry, some eejit probably just took it for a laugh,’ but she was all, ‘Now we’re going to have to change the locks, except Hugo won’t get around to it and whoever it was will be able to wander in whenever he feels like it . . .’ I don’t have a clue when the party was, though, so I’m not sure how much help I was.”
“More than me, anyway,” I said, with a rueful grin. I couldn’t believe how light I sounded, how at ease; I felt like some ice-cool private investigator. “I think I was a complete waste of their time. No wonder they got kind of stroppy with me. I’m glad they were nice to you.”
“Oh, no! Are you all right? And Susanna?”
Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed. “More or less,” I said. “I mean, it’s a bit of a headwrecker, obviously, thinking about Dominic being there all this time. And we’d love to know why he ended up there, of all the places in the world.”
“It’s beautiful, that garden. A really peaceful place. I can understand that part.”
No hesitation, no uncertainty: she still took for granted it had been suicide. The detectives hadn’t said anything to her about murder. They had saved that for us, which wasn’t reassuring. “Jesus, all the same,” I said. “Poor Dominic. Whatever was going on in his head, I wish he’d found a better way to deal with it. He was a good guy.” And waited.
A small pause. “You think?”
I wondered if Dominic had hooked up with her and then dumped her—she had been pretty, in a fragile skittery way, wide blue eyes that could barely hold yours for a moment before her head ducked away with a delicate flick that I had found very sexy. Or— “Well, yeah. I mean, he wasn’t a saint, but I don’t remember having any problems with him.”
“No, I know you guys were friends. Just, I thought . . .”
“What?”
“Never mind. It’s been so long, I’ve probably got it all mixed up.”
What? “Look,” I said—quieter, little bit unsure, little bit vulnerable. “I should probably tell you something. I had an accident a couple of months back; I took a pretty bad bang on the head. Ever since then, my memory’s not . . . I mean, there’s stuff that I should remember, but I don’t.”
“Oh, God.” Faye’s voice had changed, gone all shocked and compassionate; I had her. “I’m really sorry. Are you OK?”
“Basically, yeah. The doctors say it’ll sort itself out, but till then, it’s kind of scary, you know? Just . . . if I’m forgetting something, help me out. Because I really don’t—I mean, this isn’t the kind of situation where you want to be in the dark. And I’m pretty lost here.”
I threw in all the heartfelt stumbling appeal I could, and it worked. “I just got the impression Dominic had been a bit of a bastard to your cousins. Is all. And I assumed you wouldn’t be happy about it. But I don’t know the ins and outs, maybe you—”
“A bastard to my cousins? Like how?” And when she didn’t answer: “Faye, I really need a hand. I don’t want to put my foot in it with Susanna or Leon—never mind the detectives. Please.”
“I don’t remember the details. Honestly. I had a lot of stuff of my own going on, that year.”