so we’d be used to doing it on grass and rocks. I think I could’ve done it in my sleep.”
“All the garden stuff was at night, obviously,” Susanna said. “Not just because of you and Hugo and the neighbors; because of Dominic. He’d used the key before; it wasn’t a big stretch to think he might use it again. We didn’t want him popping in some afternoon and catching us in the middle of garrote practice.” Leon snorted. “That would’ve been awkward. At least in the dark, even if he showed up, he wouldn’t be able to see us.”
“I think he might have been hanging around, actually,” Leon said, glancing up at her out of the corner of his eye. “A couple of nights, when we were out there, I heard noises. Something moving, out in the back laneway. Scraping, against the wall; a thump, one time. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare you—it might have been just foxes—”
“I heard it too,” Susanna said. “And a few mornings there was stuff moved around. The garden chairs would be turned upside down. Weird little piles of branches on the terrace. I don’t know what the fuck that was about.”
“That could have been foxes too. Or the wind.”
“It wasn’t,” Susanna said, taking a sip of her wine. “I saw him a couple of times, out my bedroom window, in the middle of the night—I wasn’t sleeping an awful lot. He’d wander around the garden. Break bits off the plants—one time he chewed on some of the rosemary and then spat it out. He’d push his face up against the dining-room windows, try the kitchen door.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. All this craziness bubbling and fizzing in every corner, while I snored a few feet away, happy and harmless and useless. The room was dim and uneasy with shadows. I wished I had switched on the lamps.
Susanna shrugged. “It didn’t make much difference, at that stage. I just pushed the chest of drawers in front of my bedroom door at night, and never went out of my room when you guys were all in bed.”
“You should have told me,” Leon said reproachfully.
“You didn’t tell me about the noises. I didn’t want to scare you, either.” To me: “Once we had the moves down, I made the real garrote. I needed something that wasn’t too thin, so it wouldn’t slice him and get blood everywhere—”
I said, “So you decided my hoodie cord would be perfect.”
She lifted an eyebrow. I wanted to slap that unbothered look right off her face, see it shatter into shock and pain. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“You didn’t have any hoodies of your own, no?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Susanna said, exasperated. “I wasn’t trying to frame you. I just didn’t particularly want to go to jail over this, thanks very much. I figured if the cops found Dominic, and if they twigged that someone had killed him, the only way I could get us out of it without dumping anyone else in the shite was by making the whole thing as confusing as I could. Mix it up, get a load of people in the frame; if they couldn’t narrow it down, they couldn’t do anything to anyone. My DNA was going to be on him. Leon had a motive—it would’ve taken the cops about ten minutes to find out about the stuff Dominic had done to him. I was going to wear one of Hugo’s jackets and make sure to get some of Dominic’s DNA on it. I had a few other random bits to throw down the tree—some hairs of Faye’s, and a couple of cigarette butts and a shopping list that I’d picked up on the street, and a tissue where your mate Sean had blown his nose. I kept them in a sandwich bag, in my underwear drawer. I wonder if the cops found them.” A nod to me: “And your hoodie cord. It wasn’t personal.”
“And you made sure you had a photo of me wearing the hoodie,” I said, “before you robbed the cord. So you could whip it out to give to the cops if you needed to. What did you take the photo on?”
“That camera you got for your birthday. My phone wouldn’t have been clear enough.”
“Right,” I said. “I figured.” The anger was much too vast and too cold for shouting. “So once you knew Hugo was dying and all this was going to come out, you needed the camera.”