tell what the detective was thinking, not a glimmer. He’s very hard to read, isn’t he—which I suppose is his job. What did he ask you?”
“Just about Dominic. What he was like. How much time he spent at the house.”
“He asked me the same.” Rafferty had talked to Hugo in the study, while Kerr made pleasant chitchat with me in the living room (genealogy, leading into Kerr’s great-uncle who had had some involvement or other in the 1916 Rising) to gloss over the fact that he was supervising me. It had taken long enough that I had got violently, unreasonably twitchy, what the hell were they talking about up there while Kerr—apparently oblivious—droned on and on and on? “I barely remember him, though, this boy Dominic. God knows I’ve been trying. I don’t know whether he just didn’t leave much of an impression, or whether my memory . . . I think it was a bit frustrating for the detective.”
“That’s his problem,” I said. The cigarette was improving my mood, but I still wasn’t feeling very charitable towards Rafferty.
“The photo rang a bell, but not much more than that. I do remember one of your class committing suicide the summer you all left school, but I didn’t think it was someone who was particularly close to any of you.”
“He wasn’t. He hung around with the same crowd as me, was all.”
“What was he like?”
“He was a good bloke, basically. Kind of a party animal. He wasn’t over at the house a lot, I don’t think. Probably that’s why you don’t remember him.”
“Poor boy,” Hugo said. “I’d really like to know the story behind him ending up in that tree. I’m not being prurient, at least I don’t think I am; but there he was, and here I am, with his death getting right in the middle of mine. Maybe it’s childish, but I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened.”
“Well,” I said. “If the cops do their job, we should all know the story soon enough.”
A wry twist of his mouth. “Not necessarily soon enough for me.”
“You’ve got time,” I said, ludicrously. “I mean, the doctors didn’t, it’s not like they gave you a deadline. You’re not getting worse, or . . .” I couldn’t keep it up.
Hugo didn’t look at me. His hair had grown: it was down to his shoulders, thick rumpled locks streaked dark and gray. His hands lay on his lap, huge square capable hands, loose as rubber gloves.
“I can feel it, you know,” he said. “Just this last week or so. My body turning away from all this. Focusing its energy on doing something else, some new process. Something that I don’t understand and have no idea how to go about, but my body knows and is busy at it. At first I told myself it was psychological—from hearing that Susanna’s Swiss expert couldn’t do anything—but it’s not.”
There was nothing I could say. I wanted to reach out and take his arm, physically hold him there, but I knew I wasn’t solid enough myself to make any difference.
After a moment he drew a long breath. “Well, there you are. Give me one of those, would you?”
I held the lighter for him. “On the other hand,” he said in a different tone, cocking an eyebrow at me as he bent to the flame, “it’s good to see you on the opposite trajectory. Even in these few weeks, there’s been a real change.”
“Yeah,” I said. I had finished my cigarette; I threw the butt out of the window. “Well.”
“No?”
“I guess. But”—I didn’t know I was going to say it till I heard the words, today was all out of whack, still that dazzled feel like being in a simulator, everything too brightly colored and hanging in mid-air—“even if stuff gets better, like my leg or whatever, so what? Because that’s not the point. The point is, even if I end up running a marathon, I’m not the same person any more. That’s the point.”
Hugo thought about that for a while. “I have to say”—he blew smoke carefully out his window—“you seem pretty much yourself to me.”
“Well,” I said. This was nice, inasmuch as it meant I was doing a decent job of faking it, but given Hugo’s condition it was hard to put too much weight on it. “That’s good.”
“No, I know you’re putting in the effort. I can see that—no, not that anyone else would notice, it’s only