Were they from, was it the same address as the ones to Dominic?”
Rafferty gave me a long curious look. “You genuinely don’t remember?”
“No.”
After a moment, relenting: “We don’t know. Lorcan deleted the emails as soon as he found out he’d been had, and the server doesn’t keep data this long. Any chance you remember anything about the address you used? Even part of it?”
“No.” Dec had been the one who set it up, huddled over the keyboard, giggling manically, kicking me to shut me up when I opened my mouth.
“Pity,” Rafferty said, after a pause that felt endless. “Declan says he doesn’t either. He remembers the emails to Lorcan, all right—and a couple of others, by the way—but he says he never emailed Dominic. And I believe him, for whatever that’s worth.”
I would have told Sean about it, surely I would have, if the whole point had been to show him I wasn’t just picking on rejects? Unless: unless Dominic had vanished before I could say anything, and I had thought it might be—even a little bit, even just maybe—because of my emails. Dominic, already half off the rails because of his exam results, realizing he’d been suckered like some idiot loser; not a big thing, but one thing too many . . . If I had thought there was even half a chance of that, I would have kept my mouth shut. Why upset people by coming clean? Not like it could do any good, not like we’d ever know for sure, not like there was any point in beating myself up thinking about it . . . Oh, you. Anything you feel bad about falls straight out of your head.
Rafferty sighed. “Looks like we’ll never know. And I’d only love to. Because, if those emails encouraged Dominic to keep chasing Susanna? And he got killed for it? Then no matter who did the actual killing, whoever wrote the emails helped to sucker Dominic into getting himself killed.”
I couldn’t even come up with a flash of horror. Honestly it wasn’t Susanna I was tired of, not really; it was me, wronged innocent, white knight, cunning investigator, killer, selfish oblivious dick, petty provocateur, take your pick, what does it matter? it’ll all change again tomorrow, it’s all up for grabs. This formless thing, boneless, grotesque, squashed like Play-Doh into whatever shape the boss of the day wanted to see: I was sick of it.
The garden was black and blue-white, trees swollen with ivy and still as monuments. The cat had slipped away somewhere. Birch seeds whirling weightless in the air, filling it like tiny flakes of snow or ash.
Rafferty’s voice rang over and over, in my head. Still, it took me a minute to hear it: no matter who did the actual killing.
I said, “You don’t think Hugo did it.”
He didn’t turn to look at me. “I told you already. Everything points to him. And now I’ve got motive and a witness. If this went to a jury, I’d put decent money on a conviction.”
“But you don’t think he did it.” I understood, in some distant lucid fragment of my mind, that I should be terrified. Even a year earlier I would have been no match for Rafferty; now, if he decided I was what he was after, he could take me apart methodically, piece by piece, until I confessed to killing Dominic and probably believed every word. All I could dredge up was a faint reflexive kick of animal fear.
The air was so still that I could hear Rafferty’s small sigh. “A lot of the time, in this job,” he said, “you can tell what kind of mind you’re up against. You can feel them, out there.” A nod to the garden. “I could feel it strong, this time. Mostly it’s just some clown, you know? Some halfwit scumbag taking out a rival dealer, some arsehole who got drunk again and hit her too hard this time. This was different, from the start. Someone cool as ice, thinking twenty moves ahead. Someone who was never going to get spooked, or confused, or strong-armed. It never felt like Hugo.”
I said, “Then why the hell did you arrest him?”
A lift of one shoulder. “Intuition’s nice, and all, but I’ve got to go with the evidence. The evidence says it was him. If you know different, though . . .” He turned his head to me then. He was nothing but eyes and shadows. “If you’ve got anything that says it was