She didn’t look particularly worried about it: comfortably cross-legged, hands wrapped around her coffee cup, face tilted to the sky as if it were a beautiful day. “He was down a bloody tree. That doesn’t mean he was murdered. It just means they want to find out how he got there.”
“They told me they think he was murdered,” Leon said.
“Course they did. They wanted to see what you’d do. Did you freak out?”
“No, I didn’t freak out. I asked them why they thought that.”
“What’d they say?”
“They didn’t. Of course. They just asked me if I knew any reason why anyone would want to kill him.”
“And?”
“And I said no. Obviously.”
“Did you?” Susanna asked, with mild surprise. “I said he was kind of upsetting people, that summer. He was a nice guy, but something was obviously going on with him. That could cut either way—it could be a reason why someone would kill him, or a reason why he’d kill himself—but that’s Rafferty’s problem to figure out, not mine.”
“I told them the same thing,” I said.
Leon threw up his hands. “Oh, great, now they’re going to think I was lying—”
“No they’re not,” Susanna said. “They’re not stupid. People remember different things; they know that. Did they ask if you remembered the night he went missing?”
“Oh yeah,” Leon said. “I said no, nuh-uh, nothing. They kept on pushing, they were giving me these worried looks, like that was really suspicious—Are you sure, come on, you must remember something, think back . . . Who remembers some random night ten years ago? If I had, that would’ve been suspicious.”
“I said yes,” Susanna said serenely, finding a cigarette. “I remember it because it wasn’t some random night, it was the night Dominic went missing. So afterwards everyone was talking about what they’d been doing—OhmyGod, I was just sitting in bed texting my BFF and poor poor Dominic was out there feeling so alone, if only I had rung him then maybe blah blah blah . . . The four of us were here. We had dinner and watched telly, and then Hugo went to bed and the three of us stayed up talking for a while, and then we went to bed around midnight.”
“Wait,” I said. I had just managed to put my finger on something that had been bothering me. “How come they thought he’d killed himself back then? And now they don’t? I mean, if there were good reasons at the time, then why do they think—”
“He sent a text to everyone in his phone, remember?” Susanna said. “The night he went missing; late, like three or four in the morning. Just saying, ‘Sorry.’ You must’ve got one. I even did—I don’t even know why Dominic and I had each other’s number, maybe from when I was tutoring him for the French orals? I remember because it woke me up and I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just figured he’d texted the wrong person and went back to sleep.”
I did have some kind of muddled memory of this, or at least I thought I did, not that that was worth very much seeing as I also remembered Dominic’s funeral. “I think I got one,” I said.
“It was a huge deal,” Leon said. “Who’d got that text and who hadn’t. Personally I think about half the people who claimed they’d got one were bullshitting so they could pretend they’d been best buddies with Dominic. Lorcan Mullan? Please. No way did Dominic Ganly even know Lorcan existed, never mind have his number.”
“Oh, God,” Susanna said. “And everyone claiming that as soon as they saw it they just knew, they had OMG a total premonition! Isabelle Carney was swearing to anyone who’d listen that she saw Dominic standing at the foot of her bed, glowing. I like to think that even Dominic would’ve had better taste than to waste his big apparition moment on an idiot like Isabelle Carney.” She tipped up her coffee cup to get the last of it. “Now presumably the cops figure, if someone killed him, they sent the text to make everyone think it was suicide. And it worked.”
“But the whole Howth Head thing,” I said. “Everyone thought that. Where did that come from?”
“They tracked the phone there,” Susanna said. “That was where the text was sent from, or where the phone last pinged a tower, or something. So everyone just assumed.”
“Which means,” Leon said, “now the cops think he was murdered because if he just