said. “About a week in. They talked to everyone who’d known him, but I got special treatment—I guess one of my mates must’ve told them he’d been hitting on me, and the cops wanted to know the story. Thank God it wasn’t the same guys I’d tried to report him to—those were just normal Guards, the kind with uniforms. The ones who came to talk to me were detectives, in suits, like Rafferty and Kerr. I mean, the uniform guys had probably forgotten all about me by that time, but still, that actually would’ve been scary.”
“Jesus,” I said. The world I had been blithely bouncing through had been so utterly unrelated to this one running along its dark subterranean track, I couldn’t make the two of them click together in my mind. “What did you say?”
Susanna shrugged. “It wasn’t bad. They were nice to me. It’s not like I was a suspect; I was just number ninety-whatever on a list of friends and acquaintances they had to cross off. I basically told them what the uniform guys had told me: Dominic was just having a laugh, it was kind of a running joke. You could tell they believed it. I mean”—she held out her hands, matter-of-factly—“look at me, and look at Dominic. Then I got all upset because OMG what if he genuinely had been in love with me all along and I just didn’t realize it, and he couldn’t take the pain any more? So I cried a little bit. And they told me it wasn’t my fault either way and he’d been upset about his exam results, and not to be worrying about it. And then they went away.”
“And thank God you handled it that well,” Leon said, turning his head away from her to blow out a plume of smoke. “My God. They’d taken about five minutes with Toby and me—no one must have told them about the stuff Dominic did to me; not wanting to give the wrong impression of such a lovely guy, probably, or something idiotic like that. But they were in here with you for half an hour. The whole time I was up in my room, shaking so hard I couldn’t stand up. Pouring sweat. I was positive there would be a bang on the door any minute and we’d be hauled off to jail—I was wondering whether to slit my wrists while I still had the chance. If you’d let the smallest thing slip—if we had ever occurred to them as a possibility, even for a second—we would have been fucked. Megafucked.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said. For some reason Leon’s drama-queen shtick infuriated me more than ever; it felt like he was making a huge deal of this on purpose, to hammer home just how much I had missed. “It was self-defense, basically. Even if they had caught you, it’s not like they would have locked you up and thrown away the key. It’s not as simple now that you left him there for ten years, but if you’d just gone to the cops straightaway—”
Both of them started to laugh.
“What? What the fuck is funny?”
“Oh God,” Leon said, through a fresh gale of laughter. “This is why we didn’t bring you in on it.”
“Thank God,” Susanna said.
“What are you talking about?”
“‘Excuse me, Guard dude, I’ve like totally got something to tell you, right, but we’ll have to make it quick because I’m meeting the lads down the pub—’”
“Of course they would’ve locked us up,” Susanna said, like she was explaining something to Sallie. “We had zero evidence that it was self-defense; the police would only have had our word for it. You think they would’ve believed us?”
“Why not? Two of you, both telling the same story, and your mates would have backed you up—”
“Teenage girls,” Susanna said. “Probably hysterical or liars or both—the cops already thought I was hysterical. Why would anyone believe us?”
“And a queer,” Leon said. “I wasn’t out yet, but it would have taken them about two minutes to guess. Fags are hysterical too, you know, and vicious, not to mention morally bankrupt.”
“And on the other hand,” Susanna said, “you’ve got a fine handsome upstanding young rugby hero like Dominic Ganly.”
“OK, so he’d been a bit depressed,” Leon said, “but that was just because of his exam results and possibly because this ungrateful bitch”—Susanna waved—“refused to appreciate him the way he deserved. It wasn’t like he was mentally ill or anything. Nothing wrong with him but a