“They could use you, man. Your boss—Richard, right?—he couldn’t stop telling me how great you are, how they’re lost without you.”
“That’s nice,” I said; and then, in case I had sounded sarcastic, “It’s good to hear.”
“He wasn’t just saying it, either,” Rafferty said, with a grin in his voice. “Have you looked at the gallery’s Twitter lately? There’s been maybe five tweets since the night you got attacked, and one of them says ‘Hello Maeve, could you check that these are going through? Thanks, Richard.’”
I managed to laugh. I really hadn’t thought about going back to work, not in a long time. It seemed inconceivable somehow, as though the gallery was in some inaccessible country or possibly a TV show I used to watch.
“You need to get back in there, save them from themselves. Is there seriously no one else there who knows how to work the internets?”
“Not really. I mean, they can check their email and shop online, but social media . . .”
“Huh,” Rafferty said. Lazy still, only half interested. “That’s mad. Because the other thing I noticed, about that Twitter account? Up until the week you got hit, there’s a load of other accounts following it, tweeting to it, retweeting your stuff. Dozens of them. After that week . . .” He arched an eyebrow at me, smile lines starting in his cheek. “It’s tumbleweed in there. Not a chirp out of any of those accounts. About the gallery or anything else.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, after a moment. “You got me. It’s pretty standard practice. Set up a bunch of ghost followers, whip up a bit of buzz . . .”
He laughed. “Is it? I kind of figured that, all right; nice to know I was on target. I’d say it’s good craic, as well.”
“I guess. It can be.”
“Ah, come on. All your imaginary skangers? Arguing about whether Gouger’s dole’ll get cut off if he makes it big as an artist?”
There was a silence.
Rafferty’s smile lines had deepened. “You should see the face on you. It’s OK, man: you can come clean. We already talked to your pal Tiernan. He was shitting bricks, but he calmed down once he realized we weren’t about to arrest him for distribution of a counterfeit skanger.”
“Right,” I said. I had tensed up hard, although I wasn’t sure why—what could he do to me, why would he care? Why was he even bringing this up? “OK.”
“He’s good, isn’t he? I don’t know a lot about art, but those paintings looked pretty decent to me.”
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
“Any chance they’ll ever get seen now?”
“I doubt it.”
“Pity. I suppose your man Tiernan can make more; still, but. I don’t blame you for not wanting them to go to waste. Those tweets, were they all you? Or did you have anyone else involved?”
“No. Just me.”
Rafferty nodded, unsurprised. “Fair play. They were good, those. Rang true, got you wondering what was the story with this Gouger fella, looking for updates . . . I’d have fallen for them myself. No wonder your man Richard wants you back. Look, there you go—”
He pointed his chin at the cat, which had reached the first slice of chicken and was wolfing it down in quick snaps that managed to be voracious and delicate at once. “A couple of weeks and you’ll have him eating out of your hand.”
“When did you find out?” I asked. “About Gouger?”
Rafferty shrugged, leaning to tap ash. “Jesus, ages back. A case like this, we look into everything about everybody. The signal-to-noise ratio is horrendous, but that’s grand, as long as we pick up the odd useful bit in there. We figured Gouger was irrelevant—got a good laugh out of him, end of.”
“OK,” I said. “I’m glad he gave you a laugh.”
“We take them where we can get them, in this job. There haven’t been a lot on this case.”
“What happens now?” I asked. “Like, is the case closed? Are you . . .”
What I meant was, obviously, Do you believe Hugo did it, and of course Rafferty knew that. He kept me waiting; played with a pile of conkers Zach and Sallie had left on the terrace, turned one of them in his hand, considering. The light was dimming, darkness sifting down like a haze of fine dust in the air.
“Put it like this,” he said, in the end, balancing the conker neatly on top of the pile. “Hugo was top of our suspect list from the start. Before