to—” She pulled herself up, one knee on the counter, to grab a cracked bowl from a high cupboard shelf. “This’ll have to do. Who is that guy, anyway?”
“I think that’s Maurice Devine,” my father said, rubbing his neck with a grimace. “Social historian. He used to help Hugo out when people wanted more in-depth things. Reports. Whatever you call them. It’s incredible, how many people showed up. I didn’t realize Hugo was so—”
“It’s a great turnout,” Tom said with an air of originality, sticking his head in the door. “Su, have you got that ashtray? He’s using the fireplace, and your mum’s about to lose the plot altogether.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Susanna said, straightening her skirt. To my dad on her way past, tapping her cheekbone: “Lipstick, right there. Tom’s mum got you.”
“Any more sandwiches out there?” Oliver demanded, over Tom’s shoulder.
“On the way,” my father said, and he straightened up and carefully picked up the tray and followed them out to the living room.
* * *
That day felt like it lasted weeks. But finally, finally, the sandwiches and the reminiscences had all been got through, the guests had trickled away, Susanna and Tom had swept the yawning complaining kids off home, my father and the uncles had cried while they picked out a memento each, my mother and the aunts had (over my protests) tidied everything up and loaded the dishwasher and wiped down the dining-room table and debated at length over who should return the glasses to the caterers and God help me hoovered the entire downstairs, and I had the house to myself again.
I didn’t cry for Hugo, over the next few days. This felt shameful, a spit in the face of everything he had done and yet another marker of just how fucked up I was, but I couldn’t do it. I actually tried—put on his favorite Leonard Cohen album, broke open a leftover bottle of wine and thought about everything he had lost, the fact that I would never see him again, all of it—but nothing happened. His absence was enormous and tangible, as if a part of the house was gone, and yet on an emotional level his death didn’t seem to exist.
My mother had been right about the detectives only keeping their mouths shut through the funeral. Two days later it was all over the news websites, via a neatly worded press release: Hugo Hennessy, the man in whose garden the remains of eighteen-year-old Dominic Ganly had recently been found, had died of natural causes; detectives were not pursuing any other lines of inquiry in connection with the case. The websites padded this out with lavish bumph about Dominic’s rugby achievements, generic quotes from classmates, and whatever info on Hugo they could scrounge up, some bits more accurate than others. One website had misheard and had Hugo down as a gynecologist, which led to frenzied hysteria in the comments section when someone wondered if he had been performing kitchen-table abortions and Dominic had threatened to report him after Hugo operated on his girlfriend. Within hours this had turned into fact, to the point where even a correction from the website didn’t change people’s minds (So what it doesn’t take a Dr.!!! And we already no he was a murderer not much of a stretch 2 think he wd murder babies as well! He got off 2 litely shd be rotting in jail and a bunch of angry red emojis). The other comments sections weren’t much better (“Oh, God, comments sections,” Susanna said; “cesspits. Never read them”): the general consensus seemed to be that it was deeply suspicious that Hugo had never married, and that he had murdered Dominic after Dominic rejected his advances.
I thought a lot about what my father had said, that week. Back in the hospital I had been convinced that I needed a plan, either to protect myself or to turn myself in and make some kind of deal, but now I couldn’t remember why. The thing about not pursuing other lines of inquiry: that might have been thrown out there to lull me into a false sense of security, but either way, it didn’t seem like there was a lot Rafferty could do to me. Even if he found some hard evidence, surely a confession from someone else would count as reasonable doubt? And it didn’t seem like handing myself in would make the world a better place in any way. On the contrary: the situation was hard