heart-stopping nosedive. Crazy slants of sunlight across the table.
“Only the thing about garrotes is, people underestimate them. Look them up on the internet, every page about them has a million warnings: don’t ever try this on a real person, the neck’s fragile and easily damaged, even if you think you’re just practicing or messing about you could kill someone just like that.” He took his fingers off the phone and it fell flat with a bang. “But teenage boys, they don’t take much heed of warnings. They’re invincible: Ah, I know what I’m doing, it’ll be grand . . . And they don’t know their own strength. It’d be very, very easy for that to go just a little bit wrong. Pull a tiny bit too hard, for one second too long, and all of a sudden it’s too late.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t help it; everything else in the room had dissolved into a seething speckled blur.
“If that’s what happened,” Rafferty said gently, “we need to know now. Before the DNA results come back. If we get ahead of it right now, I can keep it low-key: go to the prosecutor, explain the whole story, come back with a manslaughter charge or maybe even assault. But once we’ve got DNA, it’s out of my hands. Everyone’s going to go in with all guns blazing: the prosecutor, my gaffer, the brass, everyone. They’re not going to lowball a slam-dunk murder case.”
None of it was sinking in; my mind had seized up, completely and violently as a spasming muscle. I said—my voice felt like it belonged to someone else—“I want you to leave now.”
There was a long silence, while the two of them watched me. My hands were trembling. Then Rafferty sighed, a long regretful sigh, and pushed back his chair.
“It’s up to you,” he said, pocketing his phone. I had expected a fight, and somehow the fact that I wasn’t getting one terrified me even more. “I tried, anyway. And you’ve still got my card, right? If you change your mind, you ring me straightaway.”
“You fancy giving us a DNA sample?” Kerr asked, closing his notebook with a showy one-handed flip.
“No,” I said. “Not unless you get a, a warrant or whatever you—”
“No need,” Kerr said, grinning at me. “The lads took a sample off you back in April, when you got burgled. For elimination purposes. We can use that, no problem. I just wanted to see what you’d say.”
And he touched two fingers to his temple in a salute and strolled off towards the front door, whistling.
“Ring me,” Rafferty said quietly. “Any time of the day or night, I don’t mind. But do it. Yeah? Once this window closes, it’s closed for good.”
“Come on, man,” Kerr called from the hallway. “Places to go, people to see.”
“Day or night,” Rafferty said. He gave me a nod and headed after Kerr.
* * *
I waited till I heard the front door close; then I went out to the hallway, tiptoeing for some reason, to make sure they were really gone. Even after I heard their car zoom off—too fast for the street—I stayed there, hands pressed against the cracking white paint of the door, small cold drafts sliding in around its edges to eddy at my neck and my ankles. Here I’d been leaping at the thought of them giving me something new; careful what you wish for.
Now that they were gone and I could think again, I realized Rafferty had been talking bollocks. Slam-dunk murder case, my arse. He had been ignoring me because I was right: even if all his DNA results and hoodie-cord comparisons came back positive, any one of at least a dozen people could have garroted Dominic with that cord. The fuzzy sort-of-motive he had lobbed at me, Dominic bullying Leon, that pointed at Leon a lot more directly than it did at me. Leon had been a skinny little weed of a kid, but that didn’t matter. The best part is you don’t have to be bigger or stronger than your victim. He could be a horse of a man, but as long as you get the jump on him . . .
The terrible part was that Rafferty had to know all that too; and yet he was sure, sure enough to try strong-arming me into a confession, that it hadn’t been Leon, hadn’t been any of those dozen people, it had been me. And I understood, with a savage splintering sensation deep inside my