“That hoodie wasn’t—I didn’t keep my stuff locked up. It was just lying around. Even if it, if that’s the cord, anyone could’ve taken it out. At a party or anywhere. Dominic could’ve.”
“And garroted himself?” Kerr inquired, with a grin. “I’m not sure that’s a thing, man.”
“We’ve heard from multiple sources,” Rafferty said, “that Dominic was a right prick to your cousin Leon. Leon told us himself, sure. He didn’t want to, he dodged around it for a while—which is interesting; like we were saying before, ye’re protective of each other, right? But he let it slip in the end.”
I just bet he had. I tried to keep my eyes off Rafferty’s, find familiar objects that would turn this real. Chipped red enamel teapot on the windowsill, checked tea towel hanging askew from the handle of the oven door. Ruffled orange marigolds in a cracked mug.
“He wasn’t a nice fella, this Dominic, was he? The stories people told us . . . I thought I’d seen a bit of bullying at my school, but man, some of this stuff gave me the shivers.” Screwing up his eyes worriedly, rubbing at his jaw: “How come you didn’t tell us that, last time? You said Dominic was ‘a good guy.’ Got on with everyone.”
“I didn’t know. About the bad stuff. I knew he sometimes gave Leon a bit of grief, but I thought it was just minor crap.”
“Half your school told us about it. You’re the person who was closest to Leon, and you’re telling me you missed the whole thing?”
“Leon didn’t tell me. No one told me. I don’t read minds.”
Rafferty cocked a wry eyebrow at me: Come on. “D’you feel like shit about it?” Kerr asked me. “I would.”
“What could I have—” That hum in the air, pressing into my ears. Kerr picking something off a side tooth, hard curious eyes on me. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Well, put a stop to it,” Rafferty said reasonably. “I wouldn’t say you’re the type to stand by and let your cousin take that kind of shite. Amn’t I right?”
“Probably not. If I’d known about it. Only I didn’t.”
They left that there for a moment. Kerr examined whatever he had found on his tooth. Rafferty balanced his phone carefully on its edge on the table.
“I’d bet,” he said—almost absently, all his attention on the delicate business of the phone—“I’d bet money that you only meant to give Dominic a scare. You don’t seem like a killer to me, not at all, and I’ve met plenty. You were only planning on shaking him up a bit, nothing serious, just warning him: Don’t you ever fuck with my cousin again. Which needed doing, and there’s not a decent person in the world who’d think less of you for it.” Glancing up at me, golden eyes lit to wildness by a rogue streak of sun: “I’m serious about that, man. I wasn’t just talking, before, when I said sticking by your family is the most important thing in the world. If even half the shit we heard about Dominic was true, then you had to put a stop to it. You had no choice.”
Jasmine creepers swinging dizzily outside the window, back and forth. A watercolor off-kilter on the wall, swallows in a heart-stopping nosedive. Crazy slants of sunlight across the table.
“Only the thing about garrotes is, people underestimate them. Look them up on the internet, every page about them has a million warnings: don’t ever try this on a real person, the neck’s fragile and easily damaged, even if you think you’re just practicing or messing about you could kill someone just like that.” He took his fingers off the phone and it fell flat with a bang. “But teenage boys, they don’t take much heed of warnings. They’re invincible: Ah, I know what I’m doing, it’ll be grand . . . And they don’t know their own strength. It’d be very, very easy for that to go just a little bit wrong. Pull a tiny bit too hard, for one second too long, and all of a sudden it’s too late.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t help it; everything else in the room had dissolved into a seething speckled blur.
“If that’s what happened,” Rafferty said gently, “we need to know now. Before the DNA results come back. If we get ahead of it right now, I can keep it low-key: go to the prosecutor, explain the whole story, come back with a manslaughter charge or maybe even assault. But once we’ve got DNA, it’s out of my hands. Everyone’s going to go in with all guns blazing: the prosecutor, my gaffer, the brass, everyone. They’re not going to lowball a slam-dunk murder case.”
None of it was sinking in; my mind had seized up, completely and violently as a spasming muscle. I said—my voice felt like it belonged to someone else—“I want you to leave now.”
There was a long silence, while the two of them watched me. My hands were trembling. Then Rafferty sighed, a long regretful sigh, and pushed back his chair.
“It’s up to you,” he said, pocketing his phone. I had expected a fight, and somehow the fact that I wasn’t getting one terrified me even more. “I tried, anyway. And you’ve still got my card, right? If you change your mind, you ring me straightaway.”
“You fancy giving us a DNA sample?” Kerr asked, closing his notebook with a showy one-handed flip.
“No,” I said. “Not unless you get a, a warrant or whatever you—”
“No need,” Kerr said, grinning at me. “The lads took a sample off you back in April, when you got burgled. For elimination purposes. We can use that, no problem. I just wanted to see what you’d say.”
And he touched two fingers to his temple in a salute and strolled off towards the front door, whistling.
“Ring me,” Rafferty said quietly. “Any time of the day or night, I don’t mind. But do it. Yeah? Once this window closes, it’s closed for good.”
“Come on, man,” Kerr called from the hallway. “Places to go, people to see.”
“Day or night,” Rafferty said. He gave me a nod and headed after Kerr.
* * *
?I waited till I heard the front door close; then I went out to the hallway, tiptoeing for some reason, to make sure they were really gone. Even after I heard their car zoom off—too fast for the street—I stayed there, hands pressed against the cracking white paint of the door, small cold drafts sliding in around its edges to eddy at my neck and my ankles. Here I’d been leaping at the thought of them giving me something new; careful what you wish for.
Now that they were gone and I could think again, I realized Rafferty had been talking bollocks. Slam-dunk murder case, my arse. He had been ignoring me because I was right: even if all his DNA results and hoodie-cord comparisons came back positive, any one of at least a dozen people could have garroted Dominic with that cord. The fuzzy sort-of-motive he had lobbed at me, Dominic bullying Leon, that pointed at Leon a lot more directly than it did at me. Leon had been a skinny little weed of a kid, but that didn’t matter. The best part is you don’t have to be bigger or stronger than your victim. He could be a horse of a man, but as long as you get the jump on him . . .
The terrible part was that Rafferty had to know all that too; and yet he was sure, sure enough to try strong-arming me into a confession, that it hadn’t been Leon, hadn’t been any of those dozen people, it had been me. And I understood, with a savage splintering sensation deep inside my breastbone, exactly why. Me six months ago, clear-eyed and clear-voiced, sitting up straight and smart, answering every question promptly and directly and with total unthinking confidence: every cell of me had carried a natural and absolute credibility; accusing me of murder would have been ridiculous. Me now, slurring, babbling, droopy-eyed and drag-footed, jumping and trembling at every word from the detectives: defective, unreliable, lacking any credibility or authority or weight, guilty as hell.