“Did you tell the doctor?”
“Yes. He gave me things. Medicine. Warned me they might not work, though.” He struggled to heave himself straighter in the chair. “And he started all that about hospice again. I said no, of course. Absolutely not.”
“Do you want to go to bed?” I asked. He seemed practically himself again, almost bizarrely so, but I couldn’t really see going back to our game of rummy; even if he was able for it, I wasn’t.
“What I’d like,” Hugo said, “is to sit here for a while. With you two. If that’s all right.”
Melissa got a cloth and mopped up the spilled tea; I collected the cards, wiped tea off them with a dampened paper towel and stacked them ready for some other time. Then we went back to our places on the sofa, Melissa curled against me, my arm holding her close, her fingers woven through mine.
We didn’t talk. Melissa gazed into the fire, its light throwing warm flickers over the soft curve of her cheek. Hugo stroked the blanket over his legs absently, with one thumb, as if it were a pet. Occasionally he glanced up and smiled at us, reassuring: Look, I’m fine. We sat there for a long time, while rain ticked quietly against the windows and a moth whirled halfheartedly around the standing lamp and the fire burned down to glowing gems of ash.
* * *
?I hadn’t, I suppose, taken much notice of Melissa’s mood that evening. I had vaguely registered that she was quiet, even before the thing with Hugo, but I had more than enough going on already; she was the one blessed thing in my world that didn’t seem to require vigilance. So it took me completely by surprise when—after we had seen Hugo safely into his room and tracked the familiar sounds of him puttering about and going to bed, and I was pulling off my jumper in our bedroom—she said, “The detectives came to talk to me. At the shop.”
“What?” I was so startled I dropped the jumper. “Which detectives? Like, Martin and, and—” I couldn’t remember Flashy Suit’s name. “Or these ones? Rafferty and Thing, Kerr?”
“Rafferty and Kerr.” Melissa had her back to me, putting her cardigan on a hanger. Her reflection—pale hair, pale dress, pale slender arms—rippled like a ghost in the window. “I never expected them to want to talk to me, since I hadn’t even met any of you back when . . . I don’t know how they knew where I work. They had me put the Closed sign on the shop door—the scarf woman actually originally came along while they were there and she wouldn’t go away, she kept rattling the door handle; I wanted to go tell her I’d be open again in a few minutes, but Detective Kerr wouldn’t let me. He kept saying, ‘No, leave her, she’ll give up in a minute,’ but she was there for ages, she had her face pressed up against the glass peering in—”
Places to go, people to see. “What the hell did they want?”
“They showed me some photos.”
I could have kicked Rafferty’s teeth in. “Yeah? Of what?”
“A hoodie they found here. And you when you were younger, wearing it. And the drawstring out of it.” Melissa’s voice was very clear and controlled. She was looking at the cardigan, carefully straightening the shoulder seams, not at me. “They found that inside the tree. They think it was—”
“I know, yeah. They showed me the same photos.”
That snapped her head around. “When?”
“This morning.”
“You weren’t going to tell me.”
“I wasn’t going to waste your time with that kind of bollocks. Why were they showing you the photos? What did they want?”
“They wanted to know whether you’d ever mentioned Dominic Ganly to me. And whether I’d ever seen you make anything like that, the thing with the loops. Whether you ever make knots like those. And”—eyes on the cardigan as she hung it in the wardrobe, no change in that even voice, only the smallest flicker of her lashes—“whether I’d ever known you to be violent. I said no, obviously. Never.”
I was, ironically, working hard to stop myself from punching a wall or putting my foot through the wardrobe door or something equally dramatic and pointless. I picked my jumper up off the floor and folded it very neatly.
“They knew about that man last year. The one who wouldn’t leave me alone, until you ran him off. They wanted to know exactly what you did: whether you touched him when you were getting rid of him, whether you threatened to beat him up. I said no, but they kept pushing: are you serious, any normal man would be raging, he’d need to get the message across loud and clear, did your fella honestly not have the guts to do that . . . I wanted to tell them to leave, but I was afraid it would look like I was hiding something. They’re very— They make it hard to stand up to them, don’t they? I just kept saying no, no, no, and trying to keep calm, and in the end they gave up. Or at least they left.”
“Well,” I said, coolly enough, when I could talk again. “It sounds like you put them back in their box. If they show up again, tell them to get lost. Or ring me and I’ll tell them.”
“Toby.” Finally, a shake in her voice, and she turned to face me. “They think you killed Dominic.”
I laughed, although even I could hear the harsh edge to it. “No they don’t. They don’t have any reason to. They don’t have even half a reason. All they’ve got is a hoodie cord that anyone could have taken. They’re just trying to steamroller someone into confessing, so they can close their case. That’s why they hassled you: to put pressure on me. Not because they actually think you know anything, or they actually think I was violent—” My voice was rising. I took a breath.
Melissa said, “They do, Toby. Maybe they don’t really think I know anything. But they think you killed him.”
Her face, pale and intent and remote as the ghost in the glass. It hit me, with a stunning thump, that she might think the same thing. I wondered what the detectives had said to her that she wasn’t telling me.
I said, “I didn’t kill Dominic.”
“I know,” Melissa said, instantly and forcefully. “I know that. I never thought you did.”
I believed her. The rush of relief and shame—how could I have thought, even for a second—took some of the tension out of me. “Well,” I said. “I guess now you can see how I need to do something about this.”
Her face shut down. “Like what?”
“Like talk to people. See if I can figure out what the hell actually happened. So we don’t have to put up with any more of this crap.”
“No,” Melissa said sharply. I had heard that iron inflexibility in her voice only once before, when she was talking about her mother. “The only thing you need to do is stay as far as you can from all this awful stuff. Get a solicitor; let him deal with them. It’s not your problem. There’s no reason why you should get all tangled up in it. Leave it alone.”
“Melissa, they straight out accused me of murder. I think that pretty definitely makes it my problem.”
“No it’s not. Like you said, they don’t have any proof, and they’re never going to get any. All you have to do is ignore them, and sooner or later they’ll give up and go away.”
“What if they don’t? What if they decide to double down and arrest me, and hope that makes me crack? I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy sitting here week after week wondering if today’s the day, if they’re going to pick the same moment when Hugo has some crisis—”
“What’s going to happen when they find out you’ve been asking questions? They’ll think you’re trying to find out who knows what because you’re nervous. And then they’ll go after you even harder, and that’ll undo all the good that—”