glitches that had infuriated me so much, those were about to come in useful. So much more tempting to let slip a smug little crumb of info to someone who wouldn’t remember it, would barely be able to articulate it if he did, would never be believed if he could.
“Was that the door?” Hugo asked, on the stairs behind me—I’d been so focused, I’d missed the shuffle and thump of his approach altogether. “Is Melissa home already?”
He had on his dressing gown, an old checked thing, over his trousers and jumper. “Oh,” I said. “No. It’s still early.”
He blinked at the fanlight over the door, cold pale sun. “Oh. So it is. Then who was that?”
“The detectives.”
In a different tone, eyes going to me: “Ah.” And when I said nothing: “What did they want?”
I almost told him. In so many ways it seemed like the natural thing to do, all my childhood rose up in me like a howl of longing to throw it at his feet: Hugo, help me, they think I killed him, what do I do? But that was the last thing he needed; and besides—bony wrists sticking out of the dressing-gown sleeves, caved-in slump of his chest, big hands clenched on the cane and the stair-rail—he was frail and he was fading and there was too little of him left to work whatever miracle I was craving. And, maybe most of all, I knew well that whatever he would want to do was very unlikely to have anything in common with what I wanted to do.
“They think someone killed Dominic,” I said.
After a pause: “Well. That’s not too unexpected.”
“With a garrote. They think.”
That made his eyebrows go up. “Good heavens. I can’t imagine they see that very often.” And after a moment: “Did they say who they suspect?”
“I don’t think they have anyone in mind.”
“They make everything so difficult,” Hugo said, flash of frustration, head going back. “So bloody awkward, all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense, like children playing games and we’re forced to play along—” Another draft flooded in around the door and he shivered hard. “And this weather. It’s not even October yet, surely I should be able to feel my feet in my own study?”
“I’ll finish the radiators now,” I said. “That’ll help.”
“I suppose so.” He leaned a hip against the banisters, with a wince, so he could let go of the rail to pull his dressing gown tighter. “Shouldn’t we be starting on dinner? Is Melissa home yet?”
“It’ll be lunchtime soon,” I said carefully, after a second. “I’ll bring something up once I’ve done the rads, OK?”
“Well,” Hugo said irritably, after a confused pause, “I suppose you might as well,” and he managed to shuffle around, inch by inch, and hauled himself back up the stairs and into his study and banged the door.
* * *
By the time I got it together enough to bring lunch he seemed OK again, at least by whatever metric we were using at that stage. He ate his toasted sandwich, anyway, and showed me a couple of pages he’d deciphered from Mrs. Wozniak’s Victorian relative’s boring diary (the cook had burned the roast beef, some kid had shouted a rude word at him on the street, children nowadays were deficient in moral training). The strange thing—I watched Hugo, from my table, as he peered gamely at the next page of the diary—was that although the illness was paring him away with brutal rapacity, he didn’t seem smaller. He had lost an awful lot of weight, his clothes hung in folds, but somehow that only emphasized the massiveness of his frame. He was like one of those giant skeletons of elk or bear from an unimaginable prehistoric time, dominating vast museum galleries, alone and unfathomable.
He perked up a bit when Melissa got home, teasing her about the dinner ingredients she’d brought (“Paella, good heavens, you’re like a travel agent for the taste buds”) and enjoying her story about the happy old eccentric who had shown up in the shop with an armful of totally unsellable handmade scarves in tie-dyed silk and insisted on giving Melissa one to keep. The scarf was enormous, purple and gold, and Hugo draped it around his shoulders and sat laughing at the kitchen table like a magician in a child’s game. More and more, Melissa was the one who brought out the best of him.
He knew it, too. “I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he said to her—out of the blue, over our rummy