tucked away, just in case. Even in that moment I had room to be glad that he had left it so long. Melissa and I had made him happy enough that he had wanted every day he could have.
“And then”—Rafferty held up all five fingers, like a wave or a salute—“the DNA results came back. Remember that big old jacket we took, when we searched the house? The one Hugo said was his?”
“Yeah.”
“Dominic’s DNA was on that. On the inside, right here.” Tapping his right side. “Not blood, but then we don’t think he bled. Could’ve been saliva. Now, anyone could’ve worn that jacket, or Dominic could’ve got his DNA on it when he was in the house sometime. But when you add it to everything else we’d got . . .”
God but Susanna had been good. Only eighteen and that sharp, that far ahead. When the suicide story finally fell through, her Plan B had been right there waiting—Mix it up, get a load of people in the frame—and probably Plan C and D and all the rest, too. I wondered what, exactly, she would have done if the cops had arrested Hugo back then, or me, or Leon; or if they had gone after her.
“So,” Rafferty said, “when Hugo rang us that day, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. And he knew details we hadn’t released. We asked him how he got the body down the tree trunk, yeah? He said he tied a rope round Dominic’s chest, threw the rope over a branch, used that to haul the body up till he could climb a stepladder and guide it down the hole; and right enough, there were rope fibers all over Dominic’s shirt. And he told us one of Dominic’s shoes came off along the way, he had to grope around in the bushes for it and toss it in after him. And sure enough, Dominic had one shoe off; it was in the tree, all right, but up somewhere around his waist. That’s what we look for, when someone comes in confessing. Bits and bobs he wouldn’t know unless he was telling the truth.”
Except, of course, Hugo could have known. A noise in the garden, deep in the night; muffled urgent voices, drag of the stepladder. Hugo waking, wondering, finally unsettled enough by some tension distorting the air that he got up and went to the window.
He hadn’t gone out to them. Maybe he hadn’t understood or believed what he was seeing, till the news about Dominic went round. Or maybe he had known straightaway, and for his own reasons—safest for us, safest for his own peace, years of observing from the outside (one gets into the habit of being oneself)—he had decided to stay where he was. I wondered how much I had ever understood Hugo.
Darkness, Susanna bundled in his gardening jacket, Leon probably in something of mine. He hadn’t known which of us he was seeing. Hadn’t wanted to know: he could have checked which of us were gone from our beds, but he hadn’t done it. Creaks and rustles downstairs as Leon slipped out to make the trek to Howth; the long wait, the sharp pings of our phones as the Sorry text came in. More waiting, on and on. The soft key-rattle of Leon coming in, whispers in the dawn. Bedroom doors shutting. Silence.
In the morning Hugo had smiled peacefully at us all over breakfast, asked us what we had planned for the day. At the end of the month he had waved us off to college and new lives, Good luck! Enjoy! And he had gone back into the Ivy House and closed the door behind him.
Ten years, living with that in his garden. His gift to us. I wished, so violently I could have howled, that he were there. I wanted to talk to him.
“The only question,” Rafferty said, “was motive.” He was playing with the conkers again, tossing one and catching it dexterously overhand. “Hugo wouldn’t say. Just ‘It seemed necessary at the time’ and ‘Why do you need to know?’ Claiming his memory was banjaxed, getting irritable when we pushed—‘Do you know how much of my brain has been shoved aside by tumor cells? Would you like to see the scans? I can barely remember my own brothers’ names, never mind things that happened ten years ago . . .’”
He was a good mimic. The specific fall and rhythm of Hugo’s voice, all its warm rough