kept quiet. Threw us the odd bit of info that pointed to Leon, or”—wry sideways glance—“to you. Just to mix it up a bit, keep us from zeroing in on Hugo. She knew it wouldn’t do anyone any harm in the long run; she’s got faith in the Guards, she figured we wouldn’t actually arrest the wrong fella—and even if we had, she could’ve just come forward then. Otherwise, she was planning to tell us after Hugo died.”
I just bet she had been. Only it had never occurred to her that Hugo might have plans of his own. She had taken him for granted, Hugo the way we’d always known him, gentle and dreamy, drifting with the current. She wasn’t that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.
“So,” Rafferty said, “getting back to your question: everything’s adding up nicely. At this point I’m just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, so I can file my report and close the case. I’ve been having a look into that story about Dominic chasing after Susanna, for example, make sure it checks out.”
Something, a flutter of something cold. Out in the garden, the cat—just a silhouette, now—flicked its head up sharply to stare, immobile, at some invisible thing in the air. “Does it?” I asked.
Rafferty wavered a hand. “Yes and no, to be honest with you. I mean, Susanna’s mates all confirm that he’d been at her, but they’re not consistent on the level of harassment. Some of them say it was just a laugh; some agree with her that it was a pain in the hole, but not a huge problem. A couple of them—the ones who were closest to her, funny enough—they say it was bad. Like, real bad.” With a glance at me: “So I’d love to know. How do you remember it?”
This was it, what he was here for, what he wanted out of me? There was nothing about him I could trust, nowhere to get a grip— “Like Susanna says,” I said, in the end. “Dominic was getting on her nerves, but it wasn’t a big thing.”
“Did you ever say anything to him? Tell him to back off?”
“No.” When Rafferty raised an eyebrow, surprised: “It didn’t seem like I needed to.”
Dryly: “Looks like you might’ve been wrong there, man.”
“Probably,” I said. In the last of the light his face was layered with swoops and slashes of shadow. The smells of earth and sodden leaves and burning were strengthening in the air.
“Here’s a thing,” Rafferty said—twisting out his cigarette, examining it carefully to make sure it was dead. “Might be connected, might not; I’d love to know. There were a handful of emails in Dominic’s account that were never traced. Anonymous emails, sent over the summer before he died. From a girl he’d been chasing, apparently. She was well into him, but she didn’t want to let on in public in case he was just winding her up, so she’d been shooting him down—are you following this? But at the same time, right, she wanted him to know that actually she fancied the arse off him.” With a grin, shadows deepening: “The drama, Jesus. Doesn’t it make you glad you’ll never have to be a teenager again?”
Waves of cold were sweeping over me, like something very bad was happening but I was too stupid to figure out what it was. “Yeah,” I said.
“Back when Dominic went missing, the emails didn’t seem like a big deal. Everyone agreed that all the girls were mad about him, no surprise that he’d be getting the odd love note, and he obviously wasn’t so mad about her that he’d have killed himself over her. The lads looking into it didn’t even bother tracing them.” An eye-roll and a humorous twist of his mouth to me, Bloody eejits, would you believe it? “When Susanna told me her story, though, I wondered if those emails might’ve been from her. She swears no, she never emailed him, but the circumstances fit nicely: Dominic coming on to this girl, her telling him to get fucked. Adds up, amn’t I right?”
Another pleasant glance at me, like we were colleagues discussing the case over a nice pint in some cozy pub. “I guess,” I said.
“You figure it was her?”
“I don’t know.” That cold was soaking into me, trickling deeper, something I should know here, something I was missing— “If she