by Tana French
The calm of her, explaining it point by point, like she was going through a problem from our geometry homework. The whole scene seemed unreal, wavering on the air, ready to dissipate and leave us fourteen and sprawled in front of the TV, with Hugo in the other armchair humming over his book. “I thought about doing it up the mountains, somewhere good and remote, and just leaving him there. Or on Howth Head or Bray Head, and shoving the body into the water. But the problem with anything like that was that it relied way too much on luck. Up the mountains, you’ve got dog-walkers and hikers and poachers; someone could have wandered past at the wrong moment, or tripped over the body the next day. In the water, even if I got the tides right and he didn’t wash up, he could have been spotted by a boat. I don’t like relying on luck.”
She tilted the wine bottle towards me; when I shook my head, she shrugged and topped up her own glass. “Once I thought about it long enough,” she said, “I realized the safest way was to keep the whole thing under control, as much as possible. Which meant keeping both the murder and the body in a place that I had at least some control over. Which meant”—a lift of her chin to the house, the garden—“here.”
“Here,” I said. “You decided to use the Ivy House.” I knew this didn’t say anything good about me, but this was the part that actually shocked me.
“Well, the house was out, obviously, because of the smell. It had to be the garden, and as far down the back as possible. I thought about burying him, but digging a deep enough hole would have taken forever, and I wasn’t sure it could even be done—remember how Hugo kept running into hard ground and rock, when he was digging for the rock garden? Plus, if anyone ever found him buried, that would put the kibosh on the suicide angle—he couldn’t exactly have buried himself. And then”—a little smile—“I remembered the wych elm. The hole. I climbed up there, one day when all you guys were out, and got down inside it. And sure enough: room for two of me. It wouldn’t eliminate the luck factor—the wych elm could have been taken down by a storm two weeks later—but it would minimize it.” She leaned over to pour for Leon. “The only thing was, I’d have to get Dominic in there. And for that I was going to need help. I’d have been happier getting it done on my own, but . . .”
And finally, finally, here it was. I could barely breathe. I said, “So you came to us.”
They both stared at me, utterly blank-faced.
“Me and Leon.”
The silence felt wrong. The cigarettes and the fire had built up a thick pall of smoke in the air. “What?” I said.
Susanna said, “I went to Leon.”
“Then when—” I didn’t know how to ask the question: when had I got involved, how? “How did I—”
“Toby,” Susanna said, gently. “You didn’t do anything. You never even knew about it.”
“But,” I said, after a very long moment. My mind had been knocked totally blank. It wouldn’t go in; was she lying, how much of this whole story was made up, why would she— “You said. When we were stoned. You said you went to my room, that night, you said where was I—”
“Yeah, that was probably shitty of me. But the way you were going at Leon— We were all just about keeping it together as it was. If you’d kept hammering at him, and he’d cracked and spilled everything, specially with Melissa there . . . I had to shut you up. That was the only way I could think of.”
“And when you, after that, then you said Leon thought I’d done it. That was just to, that was, what the hell was that?”
“You did?” Leon demanded. “Why? You said he thought I’d done it.”
“Look,” Susanna said, irritated. “I was doing my best, on the fly, with what you have to admit was a total clusterfuck of a situation. I was just trying to keep everything under control. The two of you were winding each other up; I needed to keep you separated till things settled down. And I needed you both on your toes. The last thing we needed was you”—me—“getting all chummy with the cops, and you”—Leon—“getting into a row with him and letting something slip.” To me, when I didn’t answer: “I’m telling you now.”
“Right,” I said. Both of them were looking at me with a kind of curious pity. “OK.”
“You didn’t do anything. I swear.”
I knew I should be practically collapsing with relief. No life sentence hanging over my head, no lurid stain on my soul, I could go back to Melissa with clean hands . . . All I could feel was, absurdly, devastated. I had got attached, more than I had realized, to the idea of myself as the dragon-slayer. With that gone, I was right back to useless victim.
But it was more than that. Susanna and Leon had known me since we were born. They had known me since long before we were capable of masks or concealments; since we were our first, our pristine and unaltered selves. They had seen in me, all that time ago, something that made me unfit to be the dragon-slayer, unfit even to be the squire on the sidelines holding the spare swords; fit only to bumble about in the background, to be wheeled out if a convenient distraction was needed and then steered off into the wings again.
“But,” I said. “Why not?”
“You wouldn’t have been on for it,” Leon said. “Dominic hadn’t done anything to you.”
“Well but,” I said, “but that wouldn’t have mattered. He was doing stuff to Su. If you’d told me—”
“She’d already told you once, remember? You hadn’t been a whole lot of help. Why would we bother trying again?”
“She hadn’t told me told me. Not properly. She’d just, she said, she only—”
“It wasn’t even that,” Susanna said. “Even if I hadn’t tried telling you before, I wouldn’t have brought you in at this point. I mean, we were talking about killing someone; one of your mates. That’s pretty extreme, and extreme isn’t really your style, is it? Let’s face it, there’s like a ninety-nine percent chance you would’ve been horrified. You would’ve said I was totally overreacting, I was out of my mind, I should go to my parents or go to the police, or just go somewhere else for college—”
“All the things you said just now, in fact,” Leon pointed out dryly.
“—or else you would’ve wanted to beat him up, and by that point that wouldn’t have done any good. Dominic was way past being put off by a few punches. He would’ve just blamed it on me—the jinx again—and been even more set on taking me down.” And, with a cool glance at me: “And I couldn’t take the risk that you’d decide to wreck the whole thing. Warn Dominic, or—”
“I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have done anything to get you in trouble. I’d have—” I had no idea what I would have done.
“Take it as a compliment,” Susanna told me. “I knew you were too pure of heart to make a good killer. Leon, on the other hand—”
“I didn’t even have to think about it,” Leon said. “I mean, I did, because I didn’t fancy going to prison; but as soon as I knew Su had a proper plan, I was delighted to be in on it. I just wished she’d decided to do it years earlier.”
“I should have,” Susanna said, “with the stuff he was doing to you. But it honest-to-God had never occurred to me before. I don’t know if I was just too young, or if I needed to be pushed right to the edge before I could think of it. It’s probably good, though. When I was younger I would’ve fucked it up. Not prepared enough, and got us caught.”
“We were prepared, all right,” Leon said. “We practiced. Remember those rocks Hugo had got in, for the rock garden? One night you were out with the guys and Hugo had gone to a dinner party, and we loaded a bunch of those rocks into a sack till it weighed about the right amount. Then we got a rope out of the shed and tied it around the sack and threw it over a branch of the wych elm, and then I pulled on the rope while Susanna stood on the stepladder, beside the tree, and heaved the sack up. Between the two of us, we got it hauled up to the hole in the trunk.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Susanna said, “
but we got there in the end. After that I had us lifting weights every day—well, Hugo’s rocks again—to build up our upper-body strength. And we trained with the garrote, too. Everything I’d read said it was OMG sooo dangerous, you can crush someone’s trachea before you know it, so I made practice garrotes out of jacks roll, so they’d break if we pulled them too tight.”
“We did it in our bedrooms with the lights off,” Leon said, “so we’d be able to do it in the dark. And out in the garden, so we’d be used to doing it on grass and rocks. I think I could’ve done it in my sleep.”
“All the garden stuff was at night, obviously,” Susanna said. “Not just because of you and Hugo and the neighbors; because of Dominic. He’d used the key before; it wasn’t a big stretch to think he might use it again. We didn’t want him popping in some afternoon and catching us in the middle of garrote practice.” Leon snorted. “That would’ve been awkward. At least in the dark, even if he showed up, he wouldn’t be able to see us.”
“I think he might have been hanging around, actually,” Leon said, glancing up at her out of the corner of his eye. “A couple of nights, when we were out there, I heard noises. Something moving, out in the back laneway. Scraping, against the wall; a thump, one time. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare you—it might have been just foxes—”
“I heard it too,” Susanna said. “And a few mornings there was stuff moved around. The garden chairs would be turned upside down. Weird little piles of branches on the terrace. I don’t know what the fuck that was about.”
“That could have been foxes too. Or the wind.”
“It wasn’t,” Susanna said, taking a sip of her wine. “I saw him a couple of times, out my bedroom window, in the middle of the night—I wasn’t sleeping an awful lot. He’d wander around the garden. Break bits off the plants—one time he chewed on some of the rosemary and then spat it out. He’d push his face up against the dining-room windows, try the kitchen door.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. All this craziness bubbling and fizzing in every corner, while I snored a few feet away, happy and harmless and useless. The room was dim and uneasy with shadows. I wished I had switched on the lamps.
Susanna shrugged. “It didn’t make much difference, at that stage. I just pushed the chest of drawers in front of my bedroom door at night, and never went out of my room when you guys were all in bed.”
“You should have told me,” Leon said reproachfully.
“You didn’t tell me about the noises. I didn’t want to scare you, either.” To me: “Once we had the moves down, I made the real garrote. I needed something that wasn’t too thin, so it wouldn’t slice him and get blood everywhere—”
I said, “So you decided my hoodie cord would be perfect.”
She lifted an eyebrow. I wanted to slap that unbothered look right off her face, see it shatter into shock and pain. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“You didn’t have any hoodies of your own, no?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Susanna said, exasperated. “I wasn’t trying to frame you. I just didn’t particularly want to go to jail over this, thanks very much. I figured if the cops found Dominic, and if they twigged that someone had killed him, the only way I could get us out of it without dumping anyone else in the shite was by making the whole thing as confusing as I could. Mix it up, get a load of people in the frame; if they couldn’t narrow it down, they couldn’t do anything to anyone. My DNA was going to be on him. Leon had a motive—it would’ve taken the cops about ten minutes to find out about the stuff Dominic had done to him. I was going to wear one of Hugo’s jackets and make sure to get some of Dominic’s DNA on it. I had a few other random bits to throw down the tree—some hairs of Faye’s, and a couple of cigarette butts and a shopping list that I’d picked up on the street, and a tissue where your mate Sean had blown his nose. I kept them in a sandwich bag, in my underwear drawer. I wonder if the cops found them.” A nod to me: “And your hoodie cord. It wasn’t personal.”
“And you made sure you had a photo of me wearing the hoodie,” I said, “before you robbed the cord. So you could whip it out to give to the cops if you needed to. What did you take the photo on?”
“That camera you got for your birthday. My phone wouldn’t have been clear enough.”
“Right,” I said. “I figured.” The anger was much too vast and too cold for shouting. “So once you knew Hugo was dying and all this was going to come out, you needed the camera.”
Susanna stared at me, eyebrows pulling together. “What?”
The confusion looked real, but I knew her too well by now to think that meant anything. Yet another thing I should have copped, of course Leon would never have been able to plan something like that, but Susanna— “The break-in. That was to get the camera, so you could give the photo to the cops. I should have figured that out ages ago, shouldn’t I? Did you have a good laugh at what a moron I was?”
“The break-in?”
“At my place. The, when I— Was this how you wanted it to go? Because I didn’t sort out Dominic for you? Did you want me to end up like this, like a, a—”
“Toby,” Susanna said. “I uploaded that photo and emailed it to myself the same day I took it. Why would I just leave it on someone else’s camera?” When I couldn’t answer: “You thought the break-in was me? You thought I got you beaten up?”
Leon let out an extravagant snort. “That’s all they took,” I said. My heart was going in great erratic thuds. “Besides the, the obvious stuff, the big stuff, the telly and the car. Only the camera. Why would they, who wants a shitty old—”
“Jesus Christ, Toby. No.”
“Then what, why would they, why—”
“Listen. That was in spring, the break-in. Right? Hugo wasn’t even sick yet. I had no idea any of this was coming. And even if I’d lost the photo, you think I would, what, put an ad on the internet for burglars to ransack your place and hope the camera was in there somewhere and the photo was still on it after ten years? Instead of just calling around and asking if you still had that old camera, oh look at all these great photos can I borrow it and put them on my computer?”
I felt much too stupid to exist. Of course she was right, blindingly right and anyone with half a functioning brain would have thought of all that, but then that had been the problem for a while now, hadn’t it. “Right,” I said. “Of course. Sorry.”
“Jesus, Toby. For God’s sake.”
It seemed a bit rich for her to get miffed over being accused of burglary, given the rest of the conversation, but I wasn’t getting into that. I felt sick; too many Mars bars, the sugary residue of them flooding my mouth with saliva like I was about to throw up. “OK,” I said. “I get it. Leave it. What did you do next?”
Susanna stared me out of it for another moment, but then she gave me an exasperated head-shake and let it drop. “So,” she said—resettling herself under her blanket, getting back into the swing of the story—“that was everything basically planned out. All I had to do was get Dominic in the right place at the right time. A few weeks earlier it would have been easy enough to set up a meeting, he was practically squatting here, but since Leon’s birthday party he hadn’t been around as much—at least not during the day. And I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. He wasn’t going to be happy with wandering around the garden forever.”
I wanted to get up and walk out, away from the two of them and this godawful wreck of a conversation. I couldn’t remember why I had ever imagined this would be a good idea.
“So,” Susanna said, “I had to get creative. I hadn’t been going out in the garden by myself, but I started doing it every chance I got. Pruning rosebushes, stuff like that—I know fuck-all about rosebushes; I probably killed them. But it did the job. After a few days of that, I was out there one afternoon when something shoved right up against my arse, hard, and Dominic asked if I liked it like that.”
“That guy,” Leon said, taking another sausage roll, “watched way too much bad internet porn.”
“I nearly went face-first into the rosebushes,” Susanna said, “which could have ended badly. I got lucky: I grabbed hold of a bush and got my balance back. Ripped up my hand on the thorns, but I didn’t even notice till later. When I turned around to Dominic, he went, ‘Surprise!’” With a wry twitch of her mouth: “I swear he was grinning at me. Great big satisfied grin, like he’d done something clever and he was expecting a medal. He went, ‘Happy to see me?’
“I said, ‘I don’t like surprises.’ He thought that was very funny. He backed me up against the rosebushes and stuck his hand up my top. I said, ‘Hugo’s in the kitchen.’ Dominic didn’t like that. He took his hand back and said, ‘I’m gonna surprise you big-time, some night. Soon.’”
“Complete fucking psycho,” Leon said, through a mouthful. “Do you still think Su should have just headed off to Edinburgh? Without her around to lead him into temptation, abracadabra, Dominic would have transformed into a nice normal guy?”
“Up until then,” Susanna said, “I hadn’t been positive I’d actually be able to go through with it. But that made it easy. I said, ‘OK, I can’t stand this any more. You win. If I give you a blow job, will you leave me alone?’
“His jaw hit the floor. He looked like he genuinely couldn’t figure out what was going on, but after a second he went, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Yeah, as long as you swear on your life that afterwards you’ll never bother me again.’ You should’ve seen the grin on his face. He was all, ‘Yeah, totally, I swear!’—which was bullshit, of course he was planning to keep hassling me—‘Like, now?’ I said no, we’d get caught, Hugo would be out any minute. He’d have to come back late some night, like maybe Monday? And he said yeah, no problem, Monday night, deal. I said half-one in the morning—I thought he might kick up a fuss about that, but he would’ve said yes to anything.”