edges, spread over the garden. The thickening darkness flickered like static in the air.
“Kerr thought it was about Dominic bullying your cousin Leon, but I didn’t buy it. If it had happened a year earlier, maybe. But when you’d all left school? When Leon never had to see Dominic again in his life? Hugo wasn’t the type to kill for revenge.” Glance at me: “Or was he? Do I have him all wrong?”
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t.”
“Yeah. So that was a missing piece. Not a big one, not a big deal—we can close cases without a motive—but I don’t like missing pieces. Look at that—” The cat had made its way as far as the second piece of meat and was crouching to eat, more leisurely this time, one wary eye on us. “He’s relaxing already. Give him a bit of time, and you’ve got yourself a cat.”
“I don’t want a cat.”
“Cats are great, man. And a pet would take you out of yourself, give you someone else to think about. Do you good.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Rafferty found his cigarette packet and flipped out another, squinting in the half-dark to see how many he had left. “And then,” he said, “Hugo died—God rest. So it looked like I was stuck with that missing piece. That left me in a bit of a bind: close the case, or no?”
He tilted the packet at me. I shook my head; he shrugged, tucking it away. “Only then,” he said, “your cousin Susanna came to see me.”
What? “When?”
“Two days ago.”
Chill out, it’s all under control. Susanna made me so tired I could have put my head down on my knees and slept.
“According to her”—stretching out his legs, settling to the story—“Dominic had been giving her a bit of hassle, that year. Nothing serious; just trying to convince her to go out with him, not taking no for an answer. She complained about it to Hugo. Probably she made it sound worse than it was, she says; teenage girls, you know how they exaggerate, something’s the end of the world one day and they’ve forgotten it the next . . . Susanna feels pretty bad about that. She just wanted to blow off steam, but Hugo must’ve taken her up wrong. Thought Dominic was some kind of pervert predator. Hugo was protective of the three of you, was he?”
One golden eye slipping sideways to me, bright in the lighter’s flare. “Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah. I got that, all right. So there was the motive. And—just in case I had any doubts left—Susanna told me she saw him, that night. Out here.”
“What,” I said.
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Huh,” Rafferty said. “I thought she would’ve. Something that big, she wouldn’t come to you?”
“Apparently not.”
If Rafferty caught the bitter edge, he didn’t show it. “The night Dominic went missing,” he said, “late. Susanna got woken up by a text on her phone: the famous ‘sorry’ text. She couldn’t go back to sleep. Then she heard a noise out in the back garden, so she went to her window to see what was going on. It was Hugo, dragging something big across the grass; too dark for her to see what, exactly. At the time she thought he couldn’t sleep, so he was doing a bit of work on this rock garden he’d been putting in—apparently Hugo suffered from insomnia, did he?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, either way. That’s what Susanna assumed—sure, why would she think anything else? I asked her if it could’ve been you or Leon out there, but she said no, Hugo was much bigger than either of you and he had long hair back then, no way could she have confused you for him.”
Which was gracious of her. “I asked could it have been someone else,” Rafferty said, “and she said yeah, that was possible, it could’ve been some other big guy with long hair. She wasn’t watching for long. She thought about going out and giving Hugo a hand, but she had work in the morning, so she just went back to bed. When she heard Dominic had killed himself off Howth Head, it never even occurred to her to connect it up with Hugo messing about in his rock garden—that’s fair enough, sure, isn’t it?”
He cocked an eye at me. “I guess,” I said.
“She copped on when we identified the skeleton, though. She’s no fool, your cousin.”
“No,” I said. “She isn’t.”
“No. But she wasn’t going to say anything then, and wreck Hugo’s last couple of months. So she just