“I’ll call Dad,” I said, too loudly. “He’ll come right down. Don’t say anything till—”
“No you won’t,” Hugo said—distracted, shoving at a sleeve that wouldn’t go right. “Do you hear me? You won’t go bothering your father, or your uncles, or your cousins. Just let me get this done in peace.”
“He needs a lawyer,” I said, to Rafferty. “You can’t talk to him without one.”
He turned up his palms. “It’s his call.”
“He can’t make that call. He’s not, his mind isn’t— He’s been getting confused. Forgetting things.”
“Toby,” Hugo said, with a flash of irritation. “Please stop this.”
“I’m serious. He’s, he’s not”—the word came back to me—“he’s not competent to make that kind of decision.”
“We don’t determine competence,” Kerr said, rolling one shoulder and wincing at the crack. “That’s for the court to deal with.”
“If things go that far,” Rafferty put in.
“Yeah, if. All we know right now is, Mr. Hennessy wants to tell us something, so we need to take his statement.”
“But he’s imagined the whole thing. He didn’t kill anyone. It’s a, some kind of hallucination, it’s—” Hugo was fumbling at coat buttons—“Hugo, please.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Hugo told me, with something between amusement and annoyance, “but honestly, Toby, I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“If it’s a hallucination,” Rafferty told me, “then there’s nothing to worry about. We’ll sort it out, no problem, bring him straight home.”
“He’s dying,” I said, too desperate for tact. “The doctor said he should be in hospice. You can’t just throw him in a cell and—”
Kerr laughed at me, a big bark. “Jesus, man, who said anything about a cell? Relax on the jacks. At this stage we’re only going for a chat.”
“Your uncle’s free to go at any time,” Rafferty said. “Worst-case scenario, worst case, he’ll be home sometime tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“It’s not like anyone would oppose a bail application,” Kerr explained, cheeringly. “He’s hardly a flight risk.”
“For heaven’s sake, Toby,” Hugo said. “Everything’s fine. Don’t fuss at us.”
“You just chill out here,” Kerr told me, moving towards the door. “Maybe pour yourself a nice little drink, take your mind off things. No point in you getting all het up over nothing.”
Hugo swung his scarf off a hook and wrapped it around his neck. “Now,” he said. “Shall we?”
Rafferty opened the door and the wind came flowing in, cold and lush with autumn. Hugo smiled at me. “Come here,” he said, and when I came, cupped the back of my neck in his hand and gave me a little shake. “Don’t worry. Get to work on that diary, have something interesting for me when I get home. And for God’s sake sort things out with Melissa, won’t you?”
“Hugo,” I said, but he had already let go of me and was stepping out into the sunlight and the tremble of yellow leaves, with Rafferty and Kerr at his shoulders.
* * *
?I sat down heavily on the stairs and stayed there for a long time. I understood what Hugo was doing, obviously. He had thought it over, calmly done the unbearable math: he was prepared to bet he had little enough time left that, what with bail and the slow legal system, he wouldn’t be going to prison. He had decided it was worth spending a couple of his remaining days in interview rooms, worth going down in history as the Elm Tree Killer or whatever the tabloids came up with, to save me.
On this I didn’t really agree with him, but I couldn’t imagine what to do about it. I did think about jumping in a taxi and chasing them down to the police station to throw my own confession into the mix, but even apart from the visceral terror of that idea, I couldn’t figure out the logistics: I didn’t know what station they were at, and I wasn’t sure how to confess to something I didn’t remember. It felt like the vast majority of my thought processes had shut down.
I didn’t for a second consider the possibility that Hugo was telling the truth. Of course no one knows anyone inside out, no matter how much we’d love to believe it, but I did know Hugo well enough to be sure of a few things, one of which was that he wouldn’t garrote anyone. I was a lot more sure of that when it came to him than when it came to myself—which in itself seemed to say everything that needed to be said.
Finally, on obedient autopilot, I went up to the study. The volume of Haskins’s diary that Hugo had been working on was open on his desk, a handful of the yellowed pages helpfully tagged with Post-its. Hugo’s transcript was laid out beside it. The transcript was patchy, big blank spaces everywhere; he had been skipping around, looking for the exciting bits. I sat down at his desk and got to work filling in the gaps.
It was slow frustrating work any day, but my eyes were blurry and skidding from the hangover and my concentration was shot to hell; every sentence seemed to take about half an hour, all the pages were covered with tiny inkblots jumping merrily. Heard Georgie read from his schoolbook. His reading is most satisfactory but still wants something of liveliness. I demonstrated by reading him a story by—???—to both of our great merriment . . . A fine day and came home from mass with an appetite, hoped to dine well but . . . and more bitching about the cook. Outbreak of measles in the town and we hear that the—something, Sullivans’?—youngest child is near death, but—something something something—hope . . .
The afternoon went on and on and on and Hugo didn’t come back. At some point, eyes and mind whirling, I rang Melissa—I told myself she deserved to know what had happened, but of course I was actually hoping she would come flying back to be by my side through this fresh crisis. No answer. I didn’t leave a message; this didn’t feel like the kind of thing that belonged on voicemail.
To-day I expected to travel to Limerick but the rain having flooded the road I could not. I was greatly disappointed and out of—humor?—with my wife . . . It was almost six o’clock, surely they should be done taking his statement by now, how much of an epic could it be? I tried Hugo’s mobile, but it rang out. I dug through pockets and drawers till I found Rafferty’s card and—heart slamming—rang his number: straight to voicemail.
I had got to the Elaine McNamara crisis, and Haskins was working himself into a moral tizzy. On the one hand we may as Caroline says teach her to become chaste virtuous and—industrious? Yet this seems a small penance for her sin . . . I flipped ahead: this went on for pages.
Dimming sky outside the window, evening chill striking through the glass. Hugo had been very firm about not telling anyone, but I was losing my mind. Susanna was probably still in a snit with me, but she was the only person who might have some sensible ideas about what to do.
It took a few rings before she decided to pick up. “Toby.” Cool, wary. “How’s the head?”
“Listen,” I said. “Something’s happened.”
When I had finished there was a silence. In the background Sallie was singing, peacefully and slightly off-key: Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout . . .
“OK,” Susanna said eventually. “Right. Have you talked to Leon?”
“Not yet. Just you.”
“Good. Don’t tell anyone else. Leave it.”
“Why?”
Splashing water: Sallie was in the bath. “Well. I don’t know about your dad, but mine’s pretty stressed out already. No point in upsetting him more when this could all blow over by morning.”
“You don’t think they’re going to notice Hugo’s been arrested?”
“He hasn’t been, yet. You’re jumping the gun. Here, Sal, put some soap on it—”
“He confessed. Of course he’s going to be—”
“People make false confessions all the time. The detectives aren’t going to just take Hugo’s word for it. They check—whether his story matches their evidence, whether he knows things only the killer could know. All that stuff.”