by how fast the phone switched towers—ideally Leon would’ve walked the whole way, but it’s three hours minimum, so that would’ve been cutting it pretty fine, and we couldn’t risk him getting lost and having to ask for directions. I figured the cops would check taxis, and once they couldn’t put Dominic in any of those, they’d figure either he’d hitched a lift from someone who didn’t want to come forward, or else he’d got a dodgy taxi—a fake one, or an unlicensed guy borrowing his mate’s taxi, or maybe someone who wasn’t supposed to be working because he was on the dole or an asylum-seeker. That was all fine. But if they turned up a guy who didn’t match Dominic’s description, taking a taxi from here to Howth and back again in the middle of that night, they’d probably pay attention.”
“I walked from Baldoyle,” Leon said. “I didn’t go all the way up Howth Head, because in the dark? along that cliff path? No thank you. I just went up a little way, till I was sure no one could see me, and then I sent the text. I was terrified it wouldn’t go through, the reception wouldn’t be good enough, but it was fine. Once I saw ‘Sent’ I wiped my fingerprints off the phone and threw it as hard as I could.”
“Even if it hadn’t gone out to sea, that wouldn’t have mattered,” Susanna said. “Dominic could’ve ditched it on his way up the cliff path.”
“And then I just went home,” Leon said. “I walked as far as Kilbarrack and picked up a taxi. On the way out I’d been wearing a white hoodie over a blue one, and on the way back I swapped them around and put on a baseball cap. So even if the cops went asking and both the taxi drivers remembered me, it wouldn’t sound like the same guy.”
“Your idea,” I said to Susanna, who nodded, turning onto her side to watch Leon.
“I told the driver to drop me in flatland in Ranelagh—Su had the actual road picked out, I don’t remember. This time I told him I’d had a fight with my girlfriend. And then I ‘went to sleep’ against the window again.”
He turned his glass in his hands, watching the firelight slide along its curve. “That was the weirdest part of the whole thing,” he said. “That taxi ride. Up until then it had been all about getting things done: get this right, don’t forget that, don’t fuck that up, go go go. And then all of a sudden it was over; there was nothing left to do. There was just . . . the rest of our lives, without Dominic. With this instead.” He drew a long breath. “The driver had some oldies station on the radio, really low. REM. David Bowie. It was still dark, but the sky on one side was just starting to turn the tiniest bit gray and for some reason that made it look like the earth was tilting. Like the taxi wheels were off the ground and we were floating. There was this one bright star, low on the horizon. It was beautiful.”
Susanna had her head down in her elbow on the arm of the sofa, watching him. “I felt the same thing,” she said. To me: “After he left I dumped my sandwich-bag stuff down the hole. I threw in a ton of earth and leaves, too, to cover up the smell. And I put the ladder and the rope and the gloves away, and smoothed out the holes the ladder had left under the tree, and hung Hugo’s jacket back in the coat cupboard. And then I just sat in my room, with the lights off in case you or Hugo went to the jacks. I went over it all in my head, to check if there was anything I’d missed, but there wasn’t. There was nothing else I could do. Even if I’d wanted to undo it all, I couldn’t have.”
Her eyes had slipped away from us, to the fire. “It was really peaceful. It shouldn’t have been; I should have been climbing the walls on adrenaline, or losing my mind with remorse, or something. Right? Me with all my moral crusades, and now I’d killed someone. But I just sat by the window and looked out at the garden. It looked different—not in a bad way; just different.” She thought about it for a while. “Clearer, maybe? I wanted