up, and that wouldn’t have done anyone any good. I needed to end this thing. Dominic was well capable of killing me next time, and he had been waiting for me out there. I couldn’t tell myself he was just grabbing opportunities when he saw them, and I’d be OK if I managed to keep out of his way. He was coming after me. Even if I’d managed to get Hugo to change the lock, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Dominic had plans; concrete ones. So I needed concrete ones too.”
She said it so simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I spent a lot of time thinking it through. I knew actually killing him was going to be the easy part; the hard part was how to make sure I didn’t get caught. I think I did OK, for a kid.” Glancing up at us: “It startled me, you know that? how well I did. I’d always thought of myself as kind of a spacer, book-smart but not practical-smart, but once my back was up against the wall . . .”
“You did great,” Leon said, a little sadly. “You were amazing.”
Susanna took a sip of her wine. “The first thing I did—apart from staying out of the garden, obviously, and double-checking that the house was locked up at night—was start playing down Dominic’s bullshit to my friends. They didn’t know the whole story anyway—like I said, I was ashamed and embarrassed and all that good stuff—but they knew some of it, and I didn’t want anyone telling the cops, afterwards, that I’d been having problems with him. So I started making jokes about it, rolling my eyes, Oh God that idiot, it’s like having someone’s stupid puppy jumping all over you, you can’t really get mad about it but you totally want to smack him on the nose with a newspaper . . . And I started dropping sympathetic little comments about how the poor guy was really messed up about his results, he seemed like he might be having an actual breakdown, I hoped his parents would get him to see a therapist, you hear all these news stories about people killing themselves because they don’t get the course they wanted . . . And of course when you’re that age everyone loves drama, so within a few days there were rumors all over the place about Dominic being in counseling because he’d tried to hang himself.”
“I was so disappointed when I found out that wasn’t true,” Leon said. “Wouldn’t it have made everything so much simpler? If he’d just done the job himself?”
“The other thing I needed to clean up,” Susanna said, “was the computer history. Back when I’d started thinking about real ways of doing it, I’d used Hugo’s computer to do the research. So there were ‘how to make a garrote’ pages all over the browser history. And if the cops started poking around, I definitely didn’t want them finding those.”
“I think we all had things in that browser history that we wouldn’t have wanted anyone finding,” Leon said, arching an eyebrow.
“I had a big piece of luck there, though. I hadn’t wanted Hugo finding weird searches in his history, either. He used Internet Explorer for his browser, right? the way most people did back then? So back when I started doing the research, I’d downloaded Firefox and used that instead. Which meant that, once I was done, all I had to do was uninstall Firefox, run a cleaner, and boom: computer clean as a whistle. Which was nice.”
She finished her wine. “Still, though, I knew if there was a full-on murder investigation, I’d be screwed. The cops aren’t stupid; if they started seriously looking, there was no way I could cover up well enough to be safe. I needed it to look like suicide, right from the start. That was doable—Dominic was such a mess, no one would be too surprised. But for that to work, the body couldn’t be found, at least not till it had decomposed enough to get rid of the garrote marks.”
The calm of her, explaining it point by point, like she was going through a problem from our geometry homework. The whole scene seemed unreal, wavering on the air, ready to dissipate and leave us fourteen and sprawled in front of the TV, with Hugo in the other armchair humming over his book. “I thought about doing it up the mountains, somewhere good