why you wouldn’t talk to me last night? And you’re telling me to stop being paranoid?”
“They probably aren’t. But better safe than sorry.” I realized, with a small shock, that on some level Susanna was enjoying herself. Back in school, she had always been the smart one, the one who aced every exam effortlessly while I cruised happily along with my string of B’s and Leon didn’t seem to care one way or another, the one for whom teachers kept predicting great things. I had never thought much about it, except to cheerfully congratulate her when she did something impressive and to raise a mental eyebrow when she ditched the big PhD plans for a life of nappies and snot; but it occurred to me all of a sudden that that ferocious intelligence of hers had probably been craving a challenge for years.
“Shit,” Leon said, suddenly whispering and wide-eyed. “What about the house? They could’ve planted anything, while they were searching—”
I snorted. Susanna shook her head. “Nah. Apparently it’s a lot easier to get a warrant to tap someone’s phone than to bug someone’s house. They’d need something solid on us, which of course they don’t have.”
“How do you know this stuff?” I asked.
“The miracle of the internet.”
“Remember last month?” Leon said, pressing his fingers into his eyes like they hurt. “I’d just got into town, and the whole mob was over for lunch, and we were sitting out here freaking out about Hugo? Here we thought we had problems then.”
“We don’t have problems,” Susanna said. “Not any more than we had then, anyway.”
Leon buried his face in his hands and started to laugh. There was a hysterical note to it.
“Oh, get a grip. So detectives talked to you. The world didn’t collapse. And then they went away.”
“They’ll come back.”
“Maybe. And unless you say something incredibly thick, they’ll go away again.”
Leon wiped his hands over his face. He had stopped laughing. “I want to go home,” he said. “Give me a lift.”
“In a bit, yeah.” Susanna stood up and brushed off the seat of her jeans. “Come on. Let’s go replant that stuff.”
* * *
“They’ll come back,” Leon had said; except they didn’t, and I didn’t know what to think about that. I was constantly waiting for them, braced and listening for the knock at the door, and it made it impossible to sink back into our gentle green underwater world. There was something off about the sounds in the house: too loud, naked and raw, as if the windows had thinned and every bird-chirp or gust of wind or clatter of the neighbors’ bin was right inside with us, making me jump—I had gone back to shying like a wild horse at unexpected sounds. For a bad couple of days I was sure my hearing was going weird, before I realized: the acoustics of the garden had changed, wind and sounds barreling unchecked through the space where the wych elm had been, across the flat expanse of mud.
They didn’t come back but they didn’t feel gone. We kept finding their spoor everywhere, pans stacked wrong in the kitchen cupboards, clothes misfolded, bottles changed around in the bathroom cabinet. It was like having some hidden interloper in the house, a goblin behind the skirting board or a sunken-eyed intruder crouched in the attic, sneaking out to wander the house eating our food and washing in our bathroom while we slept.
Three days, four, five: no Rafferty on the doorstep, no phone call, nothing on the news even. The reporters had moved on; the flurry of messages on the alumni Facebook group (Jesus what’s the story there, I thought he went off howth head??? . . . Guys just so you know a couple of detectives called round to talk to me, don’t know what’s going on but they were asking all sorts about Dom . . . RIP buddy I’ll never forget that third try against Clongowes good times . . . What’s the story on the garden where he was found whose house is it?) had died down or gone offline. “Maybe the trail’s gone cold,” Leon said hopefully. “Or whatever they call it. They’ve put it on the back burner.”
“You mean they’ve ditched the whole thing,” I said. “Too difficult, let’s go work on something we can actually solve so we’ll look good to our boss.”
“Or,” Susanna said, slicing open a huge bouquet of ragamuffiny crimson ranunculus flowers—we were in the kitchen; Hugo was napping—“that’s what they want