The confusion looked real, but I knew her too well by now to think that meant anything. Yet another thing I should have copped, of course Leon would never have been able to plan something like that, but Susanna— “The break-in. That was to get the camera, so you could give the photo to the cops. I should have figured that out ages ago, shouldn’t I? Did you have a good laugh at what a moron I was?”
“The break-in?”
“At my place. The, when I— Was this how you wanted it to go? Because I didn’t sort out Dominic for you? Did you want me to end up like this, like a, a—”
“Toby,” Susanna said. “I uploaded that photo and emailed it to myself the same day I took it. Why would I just leave it on someone else’s camera?” When I couldn’t answer: “You thought the break-in was me? You thought I got you beaten up?”
Leon let out an extravagant snort. “That’s all they took,” I said. My heart was going in great erratic thuds. “Besides the, the obvious stuff, the big stuff, the telly and the car. Only the camera. Why would they, who wants a shitty old—”
“Jesus Christ, Toby. No.”
“Then what, why would they, why—”
“Listen. That was in spring, the break-in. Right? Hugo wasn’t even sick yet. I had no idea any of this was coming. And even if I’d lost the photo, you think I would, what, put an ad on the internet for burglars to ransack your place and hope the camera was in there somewhere and the photo was still on it after ten years? Instead of just calling around and asking if you still had that old camera, oh look at all these great photos can I borrow it and put them on my computer?”
I felt much too stupid to exist. Of course she was right, blindingly right and anyone with half a functioning brain would have thought of all that, but then that had been the problem for a while now, hadn’t it. “Right,” I said. “Of course. Sorry.”
“Jesus, Toby. For God’s sake.”
It seemed a bit rich for her to get miffed over being accused of burglary, given the rest of the conversation, but I wasn’t getting into that. I felt sick; too many Mars bars, the sugary residue of them flooding my mouth with saliva like I was about to throw up. “OK,” I said. “I get it. Leave it. What did you do next?”
Susanna stared me out of it for another moment, but then she gave me an exasperated head-shake and let it drop. “So,” she said—resettling herself under her blanket, getting back into the swing of the story—“that was everything basically planned out. All I had to do was get Dominic in the right place at the right time. A few weeks earlier it would have been easy enough to set up a meeting, he was practically squatting here, but since Leon’s birthday party he hadn’t been around as much—at least not during the day. And I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. He wasn’t going to be happy with wandering around the garden forever.”
I wanted to get up and walk out, away from the two of them and this godawful wreck of a conversation. I couldn’t remember why I had ever imagined this would be a good idea.
“So,” Susanna said, “I had to get creative. I hadn’t been going out in the garden by myself, but I started doing it every chance I got. Pruning rosebushes, stuff like that—I know fuck-all about rosebushes; I probably killed them. But it did the job. After a few days of that, I was out there one afternoon when something shoved right up against my arse, hard, and Dominic asked if I liked it like that.”
“That guy,” Leon said, taking another sausage roll, “watched way too much bad internet porn.”
“I nearly went face-first into the rosebushes,” Susanna said, “which could have ended badly. I got lucky: I grabbed hold of a bush and got my balance back. Ripped up my hand on the thorns, but I didn’t even notice till later. When I turned around to Dominic, he went, ‘Surprise!’” With a wry twitch of her mouth: “I swear he was grinning at me. Great big satisfied grin, like he’d done something clever and he was expecting a medal. He went, ‘Happy to see me?’
“I said, ‘I don’t like surprises.’ He thought that was very