to you and that was what the text was about . . . In the end I fell asleep. In the morning you were back.”
“But,” I said. Her fingers were hurting me. “You said you just ignored that text. That’s what you said.”
“I didn’t want to tell anyone. I didn’t want to sound like . . . I haven’t said it to the detectives. But where were you? How do you not remember?”
“That’s not,” I said. “I meant the night I got hit. In my apartment. The night with Dominic, when Dominic, I was in bed.”
“No.”
“I was.”
“No. I looked.”
I stared at her. She stared back. Somewhere deep in the house, faint and faraway enough that it came to me more as a sensation than as a sound, a door closed.
It seeped in slowly, drop by drop, through all the multiple layers of mess in my brain. Leon and Susanna IDing my hoodie, telling Rafferty I’d had problems with Dominic, giving him the photo: that wasn’t some Machiavellian plan to frame me. If they had been out to fuck me up, they could have done a lot better than that. They could have said anything they wanted—the story Susanna had just told, a made-up confession replete with lurid details; I with my smashed memory would have had no comeback. They had pointed Rafferty in my direction because they were scared that he was going to come after them, and—all those little jabs about me getting away with everything—they had no intention of taking the heat for me. They actually thought I had done it.
Which was ludicrous, batshit insane. Me, cheerful oblivious Labrador of a guy, lolloping happily along with the flow: I hadn’t been a killer. Beating Dominic up, sure, if I had known the whole story I would have been on for teaming up with Sean to dish out a few smacks. But a garrote: not just no but oh hell no, nothing in me could ever have come up with that, and they should have known, they of all people should have known me better than to think that of me for a single instant—
“Wait,” I said. “You think I . . . what?”
“I don’t think anything. I don’t, Toby. I just want to know.”
“Come on,” I said, quietly enough, I thought. “All this, this, this dancing around, fuck that. You two have something you want to say to me, you want to accuse me of something, then do it.”
“We’re not,” Leon said, his voice high and wobbly. “Honestly, Toby, we’re—”
“You little shit. You haven’t done enough to me?”
I was reaching to grab him again, he was flinching back, when I heard it. A noise up on the roof: wild volley of scrabbling, something big on the slates, claws? talons?
“What the hell?” I was off the terrace and backing into the garden before I knew it. Soft earth giving and slip-sliding under my feet, my voice almost a shout: “The hell was that?”
“What?” Leon hurrying after me, flailing as his ankle turned on a rock— “Jesus, what?”
“That noise. It’s on the roof.”
“Bird,” Susanna said, catching up with us and turning to look. “Or a bat.”
“No. Look. Look.”
High on the roof peak, black, crouched against the chimney stack. It was shaped like nothing, feathery flicks like wings sprouting from its head, it was shifting, gathering itself, and from the deliberate focus of its movements I would have sworn it was human. Rafferty, spying on us, clinging and listening, anywhere and everywhere— “That’s not a fucking bird, look at the size of it—”
“That’s its shadow, Jesus, Toby, calm down—”
“Those, on its head, what are those? What kind of bird—”
“Oh God,” Leon moaned, pitch rising. “Oh God—”
The thing raised itself and spread against the sky, out and out, beyond any bounds of possibility. Then it flung itself into thin air, straight towards us.
Leon and I were both yelling, hoarse strangled screams. I heard the rush of the thing coming at me as I ducked and stumbled, onto my hands and knees in the dirt. I felt the wind of it lift my hair, I smelled it wild and earthy and piney, I flinched from its talons swooping with perfect, merciless accuracy for the back of my neck—
I don’t know how long it took me to realize that it was gone. I had stopped screaming; Leon had subsided to a wild, choked panting. Beyond that, the garden was immensely silent.
I pulled myself up to sitting—not easy, I was shaking. The roofline was bare,