the tree. We tied the rope under his armpits and did the pulley thing we’d practiced. I got him kind of draped over a big branch, and then the two of us climbed up and maneuvered him down the hole.”
“He was a lot more awkward than the sack of rocks, though,” Leon said, leaning for the wine bottle. “We put on gardening gloves, so we wouldn’t get DNA all over him, but they made us all fumbly, and we had to get the rope off him without dropping him, and his arms and legs kept going all over the place and his shoe came off—”
“Well, it wasn’t fun,” Susanna said, seeing the look on my face. “But if you’re going to get the vapors, I don’t think that’s the part to focus on. It’s not like anything we did made any difference to him at that point.”
She had misread me. It wasn’t that I was horrified. I just couldn’t get hold of it, my mind kept snagging—eye to eye with him, it was ugly but it was fast . . . I wanted more, wanted every detail, to squeeze tight like broken glass. I couldn’t find a way to ask.
“It sounds awful,” Leon said, topping up Susanna’s wineglass, “but honest to God, he didn’t feel like a person any more. That was the freaky part. Dominic was just gone. The body, that was just a thing, this huge floppy object that we had to get rid of. Sometimes for a second I almost forgot why; it was like some bizarre impossible task out of a fairy tale, and if we didn’t get it done by sunrise then the witch would turn us to stone.”
“God,” Susanna said. “It was a million times more hassle than the actual killing part. It felt like it took forever. I couldn’t even think about what we would do if it didn’t work.”
“And then that fucking garrote.”
“Oh God, the garrote. We finally got him stuffed in there, right? we were still up the tree? and Leon took out the garrote—”
“I’d put it in my pocket while we did the hoisting bit—”
“We were supposed to undo the knots and put the cord down the hole in the tree,” Susanna said. “Only the bloody knots wouldn’t come undone. They must have tightened when we did the job.”
“The gloves didn’t help. After a bit we got desperate and took them off, but it didn’t make any difference, those knots were like rocks—”
“The two of us sitting on a branch like a pair of monkeys, working away at one knot each, going frantic—”
“—fingernails breaking off—”
“And finally,” Susanna said, with an exasperated glance, “Leon bloody panicked and threw it down the hole anyway.”
“Well, what were we supposed to do with it? We couldn’t exactly put it in the bin, the cops could have come searching, and it wouldn’t have burned properly, it was that nylon-y stuff—”
“Dump it in a bin halfway across town. Throw it in the canal. Anything. That garrote was the one thing that showed he’d been murdered. Without that, as long as they didn’t find him for a week or two, he could’ve killed himself, OD’d, just fallen in because he was drunk and an idiot—”
“Rafferty thought I had killed him,” I said. “Because of that garrote.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. Like I said, it wasn’t the plan.”
“Oh well then. That makes it all OK.”
“We tried to get it back out,” Leon said. “I stuck my arm down the hole and rummaged—it was disgusting, my fingers went in his mouth, it was like being bitten by a zombie. But I couldn’t find it; it must have slipped too far down. What were we supposed to do? Pull him back out and dive in there to find it?”
“In the end we gave up,” Susanna said. “We climbed down and collapsed under the tree like we’d been hit by tranquilizer darts. I’ve never been that exhausted in my life. Not even after labor. We would have gone to sleep right there if we could have.”
“I think I did,” Leon said. “I remember lying there with my face in the grass, panting like I’d been running, pouring sweat, and then next thing Su was shaking my shoulder and telling me to wake up because we had to deal with Dominic’s phone.”
“That phone was the main thing I was worried about, actually,” Susanna said. “I mean, it was also our biggest advantage—one text and we could point everyone towards suicide, just like that;