or something there was no way you would hang around for. You were bitching at us to switch over, but we wouldn’t, so eventually you gave up and headed off to bed. We were pretty sure you’d stay there.”
“Well that’s good,” I said. Not even the bumbler on the sidelines; just an object to be got out of the way so they wouldn’t trip over it in the middle of important business, an irritating toy that needed its battery run down to keep it inert while the action went on. And I had trundled off, with barely a nudge to start me going, down the path they had mapped out for me. They had known me so well. “I wouldn’t have wanted to, to, to cramp your style.”
“You didn’t,” Susanna assured me. “You behaved yourself perfectly. Everything behaved itself, actually. My other main worry had been rain—the last thing I wanted was Dominic trying to bring things indoors—”
“He wouldn’t have,” Leon said, licking flakes of sausage roll off his fingers. “You think he was planning to stop at a blow job? No way would he have wanted to be anywhere you could scream for help.”
“True enough,” Susanna said. “But he might not have shown up if it was raining; he might have wanted to reschedule. That would’ve been a pain in the arse.”
“Having to get me out of the way all over again,” I said. “Bummer.”
“We’d have managed,” Susanna said. “But we were lucky. It was a lovely night. Chilly, but not even a cloud. As soon as you and Hugo stopped moving around, we got ready—”
“I think that was the worst bit, actually,” Leon said. “Su putting on Hugo’s jacket and making sure she had her sandwich bag of bits to throw down the tree—that bag was disgusting, do you know that? It looked like a DIY kit for a voodoo doll.” Susanna snorted. “And me finding dark clothes so Dominic wouldn’t see me, and putting the garrote in my pocket and checking like eight times to make sure it wasn’t tangled . . . The whole thing felt impossible. I was positive that any minute I would blink and it would all be gone, and I’d be waking up in my bed like, Oh my God, that was the weirdest dream! But it kept on and on being real.”
“My worst part was the waiting,” Susanna said, taking one of Leon’s cigarettes. “Once we were in place. I was hanging about at the bottom of the garden—we didn’t want Dominic coming too close to the house, just in case anything went wrong, or you or Hugo looked out your windows. And Leon was behind the wych elm. And all we could do was wait. It was terrible.” With a glance at me, over the lighter: “I know you don’t like that we did it here. But I picked the garden partly because I thought being on our own turf would help us keep it together. We’re making this whole thing sound like a breeze, but it wasn’t.”
“I don’t think either of us had eaten in days,” Leon said. “Or slept. People kept having to say things to me three times because I couldn’t take them in; I couldn’t even hear them. Anything that made it even a tiny bit easier . . .”
“Except when it came down to it,” Susanna said, “the garden wasn’t actually all that comforting. All these little rattling scraping sounds—leaves falling off the trees, probably, but—”
“But always right in my ear,” Leon said, shuddering, “so I was leaping about like I was on a pogo stick. And the branches made patterns like things up in the trees, birds, people, snakes—I’d catch them out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked properly of course there’d be nothing there.”
“Our blood must have been about ninety percent adrenaline,” Susanna said. “My mind was speeding, what if he brings his car what if the garrote breaks what if he’s told someone what if this that the other . . . There was a second when I thought, really clearly, I am going to lose it. I am going to start screaming and not be able to stop.”
She blew a careful smoke ring and watched it waver upwards. “Which sounds pretty wussy,” she said, “unless you take into account what the last few months had been like. Anyway, I didn’t lose it. I bit my arm hard enough that it shocked me back together—I still had toothmarks