The Witch Elm - Tana French Page 0,177

if I could just clear my head I would be able to figure out the real story. No matter how hard I scrabbled, though, every trail looped me around to the same place: me with the hoodie, me the only one who could have had the key to let Dominic in, me the only one for whom he would have come when he was called (Hey dude got a couple of lines, I owe you, want to come over sometime?), me not in my room that night. And, starker than any of that: who else could it have been? Susanna and Leon both thought it had been me. Hugo: not a chance. There had been no one else in the house. Of course Dominic could have swiped the key and cunningly brought in his own garrote, and his own murderer, but even in my desperation that seemed a tad implausible and there I was again, looping back around to that same nightmare place.

I had nothing to fight it off with. The only counter-arguments were that I didn’t remember it and that I wasn’t that kind of guy, and how much were those worth? In court maybe, even probably—come on, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know my client’s DNA was all over the garrote but look at him, such a nice blond boy from such a nice rich family, so handsome, never been in trouble in his life, does he seem like a killer to you; if I could do something about the eyelid-droop and keep the slur out of my voice, I might even get away with it. But here, with nothing but the merciless drum of water and the curling steam and the tortured squealing of the pipes, it was different. What was or wasn’t in my mind, what I thought I was: those were worthless.

Two hands to turn the key in the rusted lock, whispered Come on in dude and Dominic’s grin in a slash of moonlight. Bite of the garrote into flesh, choking sounds, feet scrabbling futilely in the dirt. The impossible weight of a body that had to be dragged across an endless expanse of grass, my own panting terrifyingly loud in my ears, hands slipping, darkness, frantic, I can’t do it— I had no idea which snippets were memory and which stemmed from some dark hallucinatory process deeper than imagination, involuntary and uncontrollable, simmering with a power and a reality all its own.

Every one of them felt like a violation: alien, lunatic, forced on me. How could I be thinking these things, me? I belonged in a different world, pints with the lads, smartly managed Twitter arguments, croissants in bed with Melissa on lazy rainy Sundays. It took me a while to figure out why the feeling was horribly familiar. I was still standing in the shower staring at nothing—had been standing there for probably half an hour, the water was going cold—when it came back to me: the bland-faced doctor droning away, my first day in the hospital, neurologist seizures occupational therapist like those had something to do with me; the slow terrible drop as I began to understand that they did, that this was my life now.

Eventually the water got cold enough that my teeth were chattering. I was drying off when I heard it: discreet rat-tat at the front door; a pause; and then Hugo’s even murmur, woven with another voice. The tone was easy and pleasant, no urgency there, but I knew that voice straight through walls and floors, would have known its lightest word anywhere, like a lover: Rafferty.

My legs almost went from under me. So soon. I had known it had to come someday but I had been expecting a few weeks, months, some idiot part of me had actually dared to hope I might get away with it. For a second I thought of doing a runner—Hugo would keep them talking, I could drop out a window and go over the back wall and— Even before I finished the thought I knew how ludicrous it was: and what, go off grid and live in a cave in the Wicklow Mountains? Instead I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could, fumbling buttons, at the very least I didn’t need to be shivering in my boxers when they came for me— Deny, I told myself, heading down the stairs in what felt like slow motion, so light-headed with terror and nausea and the strangeness of it

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