faking a suicide note, back before phones, would’ve been a lot dicier. On the other hand, though, I knew the Guards could track it. Not precisely, not like now with GPS, but they could tell the general area from what towers it pinged off. That guy had been all over the news, the one who killed his wife and he got caught because his phone wasn’t where he said he was, remember him? I did a lot of reading about that. I thought about telling Dominic to turn his phone off because I was scared he’d take photos of me blowing him, or something, but in the end I decided that was a bad idea. The cops would still track his phone to this area, but if it turned off here, they’d figure this was where something had gone wrong. If the phone went on to somewhere else, they’d know he’d been somewhere in this general area for a while, but they’d also know he’d left. They might figure he’d just been wandering around here trying to decide whether to do himself in or not—maybe he’d been thinking about the canal and then changed his mind, right? He knew other people who lived around this area, anyway; there was no reason the cops should tie it to us.”
That calm, absorbed voice, breaking down the details of an interesting problem. “Even if worst came to worst and they somehow tracked him to here, like if someone had seen him going down the laneway, I had a plan for that. I was going to burst into tears and confess that he’d come over to tell me he was crazy about me, and I’d turned him down, and he’d stormed off all upset yelling about how I’d be sorry. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d have to do. Leon would back me up.”
“We had the story all rehearsed,” Leon said, “just in case. I was really, really hoping we wouldn’t need it, though. If they’d got that close, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to keep it together.”
“You would’ve been fine,” Susanna said. “Either way, though, that phone needed to go somewhere good and suicide-y. At first I thought about Bray Head—I mean, Dominic; there’s no way he would’ve gone to the Northside, even to kill himself. But Howth Head is nearer and it gets more suicides, and from what I could figure out about the currents, it was more plausible that his body wouldn’t be found if he went off Howth Head. So Leon headed off with the phone.”
“Why Leon?” I asked. Personally, given the choice, I would have trusted Susanna with a job like that over Leon any day. I would have trusted me with the job over Leon, but they had decided I was unfit even for that.
“Thanks a bunch,” Leon said.
“No one’s going to notice a young guy walking on his own late at night,” Susanna said. “A girl, though, yeah. Someone might have remembered me. I really didn’t want to dump more stuff on Leon—I even thought about sticking my hair up under a hat and pretending I was a guy, but if someone had sussed me, that they would have remembered.”
“I didn’t mind,” Leon said. “Honestly. You made it so easy.” To me: “She had everything planned out for me. Every step.”
“That’s the least I could do. You got the shitty end of the stick, all the way.” Susanna was looking over at him with that glow of pure admiration and warmth that I had caught before, once or twice, and never understood. “All the hardcore parts. And you handled every second of it perfectly. You were a fucking gladiator.”
“Because of you,” Leon said. “The stuff you thought of, there’s no way it would ever have occurred to me. I’d have got us caught in, like, a day. She said”—to me—“I couldn’t get a taxi from here to Howth, because the taxi man might remember me. So I walked into town and got a taxi to Baldoyle. I said something to the taxi man about ‘Jesus, everyone else is still going strong, I’ve got work in the morning’ but apart from that I kept my mouth shut. I pretended to doze off against the window, so he wouldn’t get all chatty. Su even had that planned out.”
“The cops were definitely going to try and trace Dominic’s movements that night,” Susanna said. “They’d want to find out how he got to Howth. They’d know he hadn’t walked,