breastbone, exactly why. Me six months ago, clear-eyed and clear-voiced, sitting up straight and smart, answering every question promptly and directly and with total unthinking confidence: every cell of me had carried a natural and absolute credibility; accusing me of murder would have been ridiculous. Me now, slurring, babbling, droopy-eyed and drag-footed, jumping and trembling at every word from the detectives: defective, unreliable, lacking any credibility or authority or weight, guilty as hell.
With a rush of fury that took my breath away I wondered if this had been Leon’s plan all along: to leave me damaged, drooling into my baby food or beeping into machines; to turn me into something that could so easily and naturally be dumped with the blame, when it came.
It had almost worked. A couple of months earlier, if Rafferty had tapped me on the shoulder and called me by name, I would have gone without a fight: why not? what was there left to save? Plead guilty, walk out of my life and leave all the wreckage behind: it would have come almost as a relief. Now, though, things had changed. I could feel my luck turning, rising, a low slow drumbeat somewhere deep in the fabric of the house. I might not be clear on what exactly was going on here, but I was very clear on one thing, which was that there was no way in hell I was going to lie back and let myself be carted off to jail.
I still couldn’t quite believe that Leon was actually planning to take things that far, but it certainly looked that way. That photo of me conveniently wearing the exact hoodie that had provided the garrote: that had come from somewhere very close to home. And it was a good clear image, none of the pixelated blur off an old dumbphone. None of us had had smartphones, back in school, and the others hadn’t had digital cameras, either. But I had. My eighteenth birthday, January of our final year in school, my mother reaching to run her hand over my head, smiling: Now when we’re away this summer you can send us proper photos, promise? And of course the camera had bounced around Hugo’s place with everyone snapping whatever caught their eye, and occasionally I had remembered to upload a bunch of stuff and delete the inevitable shots of somebody’s hairy arse and send the most wholesome ones to my mother. And then somewhere along the way I had got a smartphone, and the camera had knocked around half-forgotten until finally it landed in a drawer in my apartment, and there it had stayed until someone decided he needed it very badly.
What Leon had been neglecting was that I knew him very very well and I knew how he worked. He never could keep his mouth shut, not all the way: if something was on his mind he wouldn’t tell you straight out but he would skitter around the edges of it, coming back to poke at it again and again, just like he had with Hugo’s will. If I gave him enough chances, he would give me hints.
One of the big questions, of course, was where Susanna fit into all this. It was hard to imagine her being in on it. She had been a well-behaved kid, the type who handed everything in on time with footnotes and never talked back to teachers, much more likely to tell a responsible adult about bullying than to start constructing a garrote. And while she definitely had the organizational drive to mastermind just about anything, she didn’t have even Leon’s pathetic half-arsed excuse for a grudge against me; I couldn’t believe she would have set me up for all these various forms of nightmare just for the hell of it. Equally, though, it was hard to imagine her being quite as oblivious as I had been. Somewhere along the way, she would have spotted something, guessed something.
She had always been much more guarded than Leon, much harder to read or to trick or to wrong-foot, but I knew her too and I knew her weak spot: she really liked being the clever one. If she had known about this and I hadn’t, she would have a hard time resisting the chance to rub it in.
And I had one advantage over both of them: they thought I was fucked up—which was true, but not to the extent they imagined, not any more. All those stammers and memory