this, it was humiliating and disgusting and unsafe, but now that I had finally found an upside to my fuckedupness I had every intention of milking it for all it was worth. “Yeah. Probably I should’ve just told them that, but . . .”
And sure enough, after the smallest flicker of silence: “That was the one where Audrey’s mate Nessa spent half the night crying in the jacks,” Sean said easily. He was rinsing plates, ready for the dishwasher. “Because she’d snogged Jason O’Halloran a couple of days earlier, and he was blanking her. It wasn’t one of the big ones, not a lot of people there—it was like a few days after the Leaving Cert results and the college offers, so everyone was partied out. There was the three of us and your cousins, and Audrey brought Nessa and Lara—”
“Leon had those three emo mates of his,” Dec said, grinning. “Sitting in a corner playing Dungeons and Dragons or whatever they were at. And a few of Susanna’s shower turned up—the little blond one, and the mouthy one with the mad hair?”
“And a few of the lads,” Sean said. “Dominic was there, all right. And Jason, obviously. And I remember Bren was giving out because Nessa was taking up the jacks, and if Bren was there then I’d say Rocky and Mal were too—”
Melissa had gone quiet, one foot curled under her, eyes dark in the dim light and moving back and forth among us. “That rings bells, all right,” I said. “Nessa locking herself in the jacks. And didn’t we make Leon a hash cake?”
“Yeah,” Sean said, face lighting up with pleasure—look, we’re helping, Toby’s getting better before our very eyes! “It turned out crap, it didn’t even look like a cake, but it did the job. One of the emo mates ate like four slices and couldn’t stop giggling about the floor tiles.”
Hugo was still fumbling with the bottle, trying to uncork it but his grip kept slipping. Melissa reached out a hand and he passed it to her, with a small tight grimace.
“Hang on, but,” Dec said. “Why are the cops even asking about that party? That was ages before Dominic went missing.”
“Something about the key to the door in the garden wall, I think,” I said. “It went missing at the party; they want to know who could’ve taken it.”
“They asked me about the key, yeah. If I knew where it was kept—they knew I was staying here off and on, the summer before that. Did you tell them?”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t hidden or anything, though, the key; it was just on a hook by the door. Anyone who went down there would’ve seen it.”
“I remember it, all right,” Sean said. “On a big keyring with a black dog on it. Metal.”
“That’s the one. I’ve been going mental trying to remember if I saw anyone with it, at that party, but . . .” I shrugged. “Yeah. Well.”
Dec and Sean looked at each other. “I didn’t,” Sean said. “If I’d seen anyone messing with it, I’d’ve stopped them.”
“Me neither,” Dec said. “Wasn’t that the party where we couldn’t even go down that end of the garden? It was all dug up and mucky? Hugo, you were putting something in, rocks—”
Hugo glanced up as if Dec had startled him, but he said readily enough, “The rock garden, it must have been. I’m sure that was that summer—you three helped me, do you remember?” I did remember that, vaguely, hauling rocks in happy summer sun, chart music bopping from the open windows, Hugo cocking his head, Maybe a little more to the right, what do you think— “It turned out pretty well, in the end.”
“That’ll be it,” Dec said. “Bren tried to go down there, and he tripped over into a hole and got his lovely expensive jeans all mucky, so after that we all stayed up this end. That’s why Bren was pissed off about Nessa hogging the jacks: he wanted to take off his jeans and give them a rinse.”
“In the end he did it in here, remember?” Sean said, grinning. “Waving the jeans like”—stripper whirl, hip-swing—“and the girls all screaming, and then Rocky and Mal grabbed the jeans off him and threw them up a tree.”
“My goodness,” Hugo said, smiling. “I missed all the excitement. I had a large stockpile of industrial-strength earplugs, back then. Thank you, my dear—” to Melissa, who had poured the Armagnac and was passing glasses.