clap on my shoulder during a party, C’mon over here, Henno, I need a word, sneaking to the bottom of the garden snickering and swearing as our feet sank into mud, lines chopped out on a rusty little garden table. “There could’ve been other stuff, I don’t know. That’s all I saw him with. And he wasn’t some junkie, or anything. Just . . . when it was going.”
“Your basic teenage experimenting,” Rafferty said, nodding. Kerr was writing away. “Any hassle there, do you know? A dealer he didn’t pay, someone who ripped him off, anything like that?”
“Not that I know about. But I probably wouldn’t have known anyway.”
“That’s right. You weren’t friends friends.” He left that there for a moment that made me vaguely uneasy. “Was Dominic ever at this house?”
“Yeah,” I said. This felt like something I shouldn’t admit, but there didn’t seem to be much choice. “Me and my cousins, we used to stay here during the holidays? And we’d have parties? I mean, not like mad raves or, I mean Hugo was right here, but he’d stay upstairs—we’d just have a bunch of mates over, put on music, hang out and talk and maybe dance—”
“And drink,” Rafferty put in, grinning. “And the other stuff. Let’s be honest here.”
“Yeah. Sometimes. We weren’t, like not a drug den or orgies or anything, but . . . I mean, this wasn’t when we were like twelve, I’m talking when we were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen? Mostly it was just a few cans, or someone would have a bottle of vodka or—and I guess sometimes people would have hash or whatever—”
I knew I was stammering and babbling, I could see Kerr’s face getting a subtle look of very sympathetic understanding like it was dawning on him that I was a bit unfortunate. I wanted to grab him by the collar and shout in his face, get it into his thick head that that was nothing to do with me, it was all because of two worthless skanger pricks and he should be fucking giving them that look, not me. Everything inside my head was ricocheting.
Somewhere in there, although I can’t pinpoint it exactly, had been the moment when all this turned real. Up until then it had been basically an outrageous pain in the arse—horrible, sure, obviously, and grotesque, presumably this poor guy (or girl, whatever) hadn’t planned on having his skull fished out of a tree and God knew what kind of tragic story had gone on there, but it would have been really fucking nice if he had picked some other tree; but, apart from in the geographical sense, nothing to do with us. Even through the first half of this conversation, I had had the same feeling, even when Rafferty said the skeleton wasn’t old, even when he showed me the photo—Dominic, Jesus Christ, didn’t see that coming, how the fuck did he wind up in there? It had taken a while to sink in that we weren’t spectators any more; we were, somehow, inside this.
“And Dominic came to these parties?” Rafferty asked.
“Yeah. Not always, but I guess most of them.”
“How many?”
I had no idea. “Maybe we had three or four parties that summer, and he came to two or three? And around the same the summer before that, and the one before that. But I don’t, I mean I’m just guessing?”
“Fair enough. It’s been a long time; we don’t expect anyone’s memory to be perfect. Just give us what you’ve got. If you don’t remember, that’s grand, go ahead and say that.” Rafferty smiled at me, all easy and reassuring. “Who would’ve invited him to the parties? Would that have been you? Or was he closer to one of your cousins?”
“Me, probably. I’d just send out a group text to all the guys.”
“Was he ever here apart from the parties? Like, did he ever call round on his own? Or with a few of your mates?”
“I’m not—” What flashed up in my mind was me and Leon and Susanna on the terrace, the first time we got stoned, the three of us giggling like maniacs and I was almost positive another laugh in the darkness, had that been Dominic’s catching chuckle, hadn’t it? “I think so. I can’t remember any, any specific times, but I think he was over now and then.”
“Would you remember the last time he was here?”
Dominic lying back on his elbows in the grass grinning across at Susanna, had it been Susanna? Dominic