With a rush of fury that took my breath away I wondered if this had been Leon’s plan all along: to leave me damaged, drooling into my baby food or beeping into machines; to turn me into something that could so easily and naturally be dumped with the blame, when it came.
It had almost worked. A couple of months earlier, if Rafferty had tapped me on the shoulder and called me by name, I would have gone without a fight: why not? what was there left to save? Plead guilty, walk out of my life and leave all the wreckage behind: it would have come almost as a relief. Now, though, things had changed. I could feel my luck turning, rising, a low slow drumbeat somewhere deep in the fabric of the house. I might not be clear on what exactly was going on here, but I was very clear on one thing, which was that there was no way in hell I was going to lie back and let myself be carted off to jail.
I still couldn’t quite believe that Leon was actually planning to take things that far, but it certainly looked that way. That photo of me conveniently wearing the exact hoodie that had provided the garrote: that had come from somewhere very close to home. And it was a good clear image, none of the pixelated blur off an old dumbphone. None of us had had smartphones, back in school, and the others hadn’t had digital cameras, either. But I had. My eighteenth birthday, January of our final year in school, my mother reaching to run her hand over my head, smiling: Now when we’re away this summer you can send us proper photos, promise? And of course the camera had bounced around Hugo’s place with everyone snapping whatever caught their eye, and occasionally I had remembered to upload a bunch of stuff and delete the inevitable shots of somebody’s hairy arse and send the most wholesome ones to my mother. And then somewhere along the way I had got a smartphone, and the camera had knocked around half-forgotten until finally it landed in a drawer in my apartment, and there it had stayed until someone decided he needed it very badly.
What Leon had been neglecting was that I knew him very very well and I knew how he worked. He never could keep his mouth shut, not all the way: if something was on his mind he wouldn’t tell you straight out but he would skitter around the edges of it, coming back to poke at it again and again, just like he had with Hugo’s will. If I gave him enough chances, he would give me hints.
One of the big questions, of course, was where Susanna fit into all this. It was hard to imagine her being in on it. She had been a well-behaved kid, the type who handed everything in on time with footnotes and never talked back to teachers, much more likely to tell a responsible adult about bullying than to start constructing a garrote. And while she definitely had the organizational drive to mastermind just about anything, she didn’t have even Leon’s pathetic half-arsed excuse for a grudge against me; I couldn’t believe she would have set me up for all these various forms of nightmare just for the hell of it. Equally, though, it was hard to imagine her being quite as oblivious as I had been. Somewhere along the way, she would have spotted something, guessed something.
She had always been much more guarded than Leon, much harder to read or to trick or to wrong-foot, but I knew her too and I knew her weak spot: she really liked being the clever one. If she had known about this and I hadn’t, she would have a hard time resisting the chance to rub it in.
And I had one advantage over both of them: they thought I was fucked up—which was true, but not to the extent they imagined, not any more. All those stammers and memory glitches that had infuriated me so much, those were about to come in useful. So much more tempting to let slip a smug little crumb of info to someone who wouldn’t remember it, would barely be able to articulate it if he did, would never be believed if he could.
“Was that the door?” Hugo asked, on the stairs behind me—I’d been so focused, I’d missed the shuffle and thump of his approach altogether. “Is Melissa home already?”
He had on his dressing gown, an old checked thing, over his trousers and jumper. “Oh,” I said. “No. It’s still early.”
He blinked at the fanlight over the door, cold pale sun. “Oh. So it is. Then who was that?”
“The detectives.”
In a different tone, eyes going to me: “Ah.” And when I said nothing: “What did they want?”
I almost told him. In so many ways it seemed like the natural thing to do, all my childhood rose up in me like a howl of longing to throw it at his feet: Hugo, help me, they think I killed him, what do I do? But that was the last thing he needed; and besides—bony wrists sticking out of the dressing-gown sleeves, caved-in slump of his chest, big hands clenched on the cane and the stair-rail—he was frail and he was fading and there was too little of him left to work whatever miracle I was craving. And, maybe most of all, I knew well that whatever he would want to do was very unlikely to have anything in common with what I wanted to do.
“They think someone killed Dominic,” I said.
After a pause: “Well. That’s not too unexpected.”
“With a garrote. They think.”
That made his eyebrows go up. “Good heavens. I can’t imagine they see that very often.” And after a moment: “Did they say who they suspect?”
“I don’t think they have anyone in mind.”
“They make everything so difficult,” Hugo said, flash of frustration, head going back. “So bloody awkward, all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense, like children playing games and we’re forced to play along—” Another draft flooded in around the door and he shivered hard. “And this weather. It’s not even October yet, surely I should be able to feel my feet in my own study?”
“I’ll finish the radiators now,” I said. “That’ll help.”
“I suppose so.” He leaned a hip against the banisters, with a wince, so he could let go of the rail to pull his dressing gown tighter. “Shouldn’t we be starting on dinner? Is Melissa home yet?”
“It’ll be lunchtime soon,” I said carefully, after a second. “I’ll bring something up once I’ve done the rads, OK?”
“Well,” Hugo said irritably, after a confused pause, “I suppose you might as well,” and he managed to shuffle around, inch by inch, and hauled himself back up the stairs and into his study and banged the door.
* * *
?By the time I got it together enough to bring lunch he seemed OK again, at least by whatever metric we were using at that stage. He ate his toasted sandwich, anyway, and showed me a couple of pages he’d deciphered from Mrs. Wozniak’s Victorian relative’s boring diary (the cook had burned the roast beef, some kid had shouted a rude word at him on the street, children nowadays were deficient in moral training). The strange thing—I watched Hugo, from my table, as he peered gamely at the next page of the diary—was that although the illness was paring him away with brutal rapacity, he didn’t seem smaller. He had lost an awful lot of weight, his clothes hung in folds, but somehow that only emphasized the massiveness of his frame. He was like one of those giant skeletons of elk or bear from an unimaginable prehistoric time, dominating vast museum galleries, alone and unfathomable.
He perked up a bit when Melissa got home, teasing her about the dinner ingredients she’d brought (“Paella, good heavens, you’re like a travel agent for the taste buds”) and enjoying her story about the happy old eccentric who had shown up in the shop with an armful of totally unsellable handmade scarves in tie-dyed silk and insisted on giving Melissa one to keep. The scarf was enormous, purple and gold, and Hugo draped it around his shoulders and sat laughing at the kitchen table like a magician in a child’s game. More and more, Melissa was the one who brought out the best of him.