what?” Dec asked. “Dominic robbed the key and then came back here to do himself in? Or someone else robbed it and brought him here?”
“I don’t have a clue what they’re thinking,” I said. “I don’t think they even know.”
“At least,” Sean pointed out—taking his seat, brushing water off his hands—“if they’re asking about the key, they think it was someone from outside. They’re not thinking one of you guys let him in and killed him. Which is nice.”
That hadn’t occurred to me, and while I liked the thought, I had a hard time believing it was quite so simple. “I don’t think anyone killed him,” I said. “Dominic Ganly, for God’s sake. Why would anyone want to?”
That was for Dec: he always loved having something to contradict. He went right for it. “Seriously? I mean”—pulling his chair up to the table, energized by the prospect of an argument—“I mean, OK, it’s unbelievable to think we know someone who might’ve possibly been murdered. But seeing as we do, right? seeing as, let’s face it, apparently we do, are you really that surprised that it was Dom?”
“You’re not?”
“Being really honest,” Dec said, “no. Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, or anything. But it’s been long enough now that we can probably say it, yeah? Dominic was kind of an arsehole.”
“Come on. We were all kind of arseholes. We were eighteen.”
Dec was shaking his head vigorously, shoving his forelock out of his face. “Nah nah nah. Not the same way.”
“Dec’s right,” Sean said. “For once. He was a douche.”
“He gave me hassle about my accent every single day. He used to pretend he couldn’t understand me.”
“We all gave each other hassle,” I said. “And nobody understands you anyway.”
“It wasn’t funny, man. Not at the time. The whole of first year, I was scared to open my gob if Dominic was around, because I knew he’d have everyone laughing at me. In the end Sean told him to fuck off”—he raised his glass to Sean, who nodded and raised his own—“and it got better after that, but still. Remember that time in third year, stuff was getting robbed out of the locker room? Dominic spread it around that it was me, because I was a skanger, right, and you know what they’re like, I was probably selling the stuff to buy gear . . . People believed him. People stopped asking me over to their gaffs, in case I walked out with their Xbox up my jumper.”
“Jesus,” I said. This didn’t fit the way I remembered Dominic at all—he hadn’t been a saint, or anything, but this kind of dedicated nastiness . . . “You’re sure it was him, who spread that around?”
“Yeah, I am. I called him out on it. He laughed in my face and asked me what I was going to do about it. Which obviously”—Dec was smiling, but not with a lot of humor—“what with him being twice my size, was nothing.”
I couldn’t help wanting to ask again, was he positive, all those years ago, maybe he had got mixed up— I had always taken it for granted that Dominic was just a regular decent guy, but when I got right down to it I wasn’t sure why. A few weeks earlier I would have said without a thought that I knew Dominic pretty well; now thinking about him felt like thinking about a stranger, someone I had sat opposite for years on a train to work, without ever having an actual conversation. “Jesus,” I said again. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, yeah. I didn’t want you knowing. The whole thing was humiliating enough, yeah? without you guys feeling like you needed to step in and rescue me.”
“I didn’t have a clue either,” Sean said quietly, aside to me. “I thought it had stopped after I told him to get fucked. No one would’ve said it to us.”
“I’m not saying this to bitch about Dominic,” Dec said. “It’s not like I’m scarred for life, or anything; I’m not crying into my Armagnac—which is gorgeous, by the way, Hugo, and I’m finally properly ashamed of the way I treated yours back in the day—” Hugo nodded. He was sipping his drink and watching us quietly; there was something about him and Melissa, the stillness, the eyes moving in shadow, that gave them a strange kind of resemblance. “I’m saying it because it wasn’t just me. There’s people, plenty of people, who Dominic did a lot worse to. And I’m not