like a week later. And a couple of minutes after that, the garden door opened and there he was. Strolling in, hands in his pockets, looking around like he was there to buy the place.”
“Wait,” I said. I was a couple of steps behind. “Leon had the, my, the hoodie cord? Leon did it?”
“That,” Susanna said, so sharply that it startled me, “was not the original plan. I was going to do it. Wait behind the tree, pick a moment when Dominic had his back to me, and bang. Leon was only supposed to help with the cleanup.”
“But once we talked it over,” Leon said gently, sitting up, “it was obvious that wasn’t a good plan. It would have been way too risky; way too much chance he’d turn around at the wrong moment, or he’d never get into the right position at all. It would have been stupid.”
“I should have known from the start,” Susanna said. “The way I was picturing it, all clean and arm’s-length—literally: I wouldn’t even have had to touch him till he was dead—it doesn’t work that way. What we were trying to do, it’s not small stuff. If you want something like that, you have to get messy.”
I wasn’t sure how drunk she was—only a glass and a half, but I had gone heavy on the pour, I had wanted the two of them nice and loose. In the firelight her eyes were dark and opaque, full of sliding reflections.
“I never wanted you to get messy too,” she said to Leon. “I didn’t want you to be stuck doing the dirty work. But I couldn’t think of any way to make it work the other way round.”
“I didn’t want you doing your half, either,” Leon said. They were turned towards each other, intent, intimate; for a moment it was as if they had forgotten I was there. “But we didn’t have much choice.”
Only, I wanted to say, of course they had had a choice. If there had been three of us, the three of us together, we could have come up with something— Even this had seemed better to them than letting me be part of it.
“What?” I said, too loudly. “What happened?”
They turned to look at me. It occurred to me that maybe I should be frightened. A pair of murderers, spilling their guts to me; in a TV show I would never have left that room alive. I couldn’t find a part of me that cared.
“We did it together,” Leon said. “It was much safer that way. One of us to get Dominic into position under the tree, and keep him still and keep him distracted—”
“That was me,” Susanna said.
“And once she had him where we needed him,” Leon said, “I snuck up behind him. That part was awful—I had to go slowly, because if he heard me we were fucked, but I didn’t want to leave Su there a second longer than I had to—”
“It worked perfectly,” Susanna said, cutting him off. “I’d say he never even knew what hit him, except there was definitely a moment when he did. I saw it. I was basically eye to eye with him; as soon as he went down, I got on top of him and shoved a big wad of my jacket—well, Hugo’s jacket—into his mouth. As far down his throat as I could get it. Probably we didn’t really need that, the garrote would have been fine on its own, but I wanted it so that neither of us would ever be sure who had actually got the job done. That felt like the least I could do for Leon. And I wanted Dominic’s DNA on that jacket anyway.” She glanced over at me, cool pale face, a wisp of smoke rising past her cheek. I thought: What am I listening to? What is this? “And, if I’m honest,” she said, “I wanted to do it.”
“I couldn’t believe how quick it was,” Leon said. “I’d had these awful images of it taking forever, you know in horror films where every time you think the baddie’s dead they come back to life and attack again? I was terrified I wouldn’t be strong enough— But all it took was a minute or two. That was it.” He held up a finger and thumb, a fraction apart. “This much time.”
“It was ugly,” Susanna said, “but it was fast. Once we were sure his heart had stopped beating, the next thing was getting him into