bed?” I asked. He seemed practically himself again, almost bizarrely so, but I couldn’t really see going back to our game of rummy; even if he was able for it, I wasn’t.
“What I’d like,” Hugo said, “is to sit here for a while. With you two. If that’s all right.”
Melissa got a cloth and mopped up the spilled tea; I collected the cards, wiped tea off them with a dampened paper towel and stacked them ready for some other time. Then we went back to our places on the sofa, Melissa curled against me, my arm holding her close, her fingers woven through mine.
We didn’t talk. Melissa gazed into the fire, its light throwing warm flickers over the soft curve of her cheek. Hugo stroked the blanket over his legs absently, with one thumb, as if it were a pet. Occasionally he glanced up and smiled at us, reassuring: Look, I’m fine. We sat there for a long time, while rain ticked quietly against the windows and a moth whirled halfheartedly around the standing lamp and the fire burned down to glowing gems of ash.
* * *
I hadn’t, I suppose, taken much notice of Melissa’s mood that evening. I had vaguely registered that she was quiet, even before the thing with Hugo, but I had more than enough going on already; she was the one blessed thing in my world that didn’t seem to require vigilance. So it took me completely by surprise when—after we had seen Hugo safely into his room and tracked the familiar sounds of him puttering about and going to bed, and I was pulling off my jumper in our bedroom—she said, “The detectives came to talk to me. At the shop.”
“What?” I was so startled I dropped the jumper. “Which detectives? Like, Martin and, and—” I couldn’t remember Flashy Suit’s name. “Or these ones? Rafferty and Thing, Kerr?”
“Rafferty and Kerr.” Melissa had her back to me, putting her cardigan on a hanger. Her reflection—pale hair, pale dress, pale slender arms—rippled like a ghost in the window. “I never expected them to want to talk to me, since I hadn’t even met any of you back when . . . I don’t know how they knew where I work. They had me put the Closed sign on the shop door—the scarf woman actually originally came along while they were there and she wouldn’t go away, she kept rattling the door handle; I wanted to go tell her I’d be open again in a few minutes, but Detective Kerr wouldn’t let me. He kept saying, ‘No, leave her, she’ll give up in a minute,’ but she was there for ages, she had her face pressed up against the glass peering in—”
Places to go, people to see. “What the hell did they want?”
“They showed me some photos.”
I could have kicked Rafferty’s teeth in. “Yeah? Of what?”
“A hoodie they found here. And you when you were younger, wearing it. And the drawstring out of it.” Melissa’s voice was very clear and controlled. She was looking at the cardigan, carefully straightening the shoulder seams, not at me. “They found that inside the tree. They think it was—”
“I know, yeah. They showed me the same photos.”
That snapped her head around. “When?”
“This morning.”
“You weren’t going to tell me.”
“I wasn’t going to waste your time with that kind of bollocks. Why were they showing you the photos? What did they want?”
“They wanted to know whether you’d ever mentioned Dominic Ganly to me. And whether I’d ever seen you make anything like that, the thing with the loops. Whether you ever make knots like those. And”—eyes on the cardigan as she hung it in the wardrobe, no change in that even voice, only the smallest flicker of her lashes—“whether I’d ever known you to be violent. I said no, obviously. Never.”
I was, ironically, working hard to stop myself from punching a wall or putting my foot through the wardrobe door or something equally dramatic and pointless. I picked my jumper up off the floor and folded it very neatly.
“They knew about that man last year. The one who wouldn’t leave me alone, until you ran him off. They wanted to know exactly what you did: whether you touched him when you were getting rid of him, whether you threatened to beat him up. I said no, but they kept pushing: are you serious, any normal man would be raging, he’d need to get the message across loud and clear, did your fella honestly not