someone else, and you don’t want Hugo going down as a murderer, you need to tell me.”
I said, “I didn’t kill Dominic.”
He nodded, unsurprised. “But you wrote those emails—shush, man, we both know it. You’re no holy innocent, in all this. Your uncle, unless I’m way off base, he was a good man. You owe him this much.”
So that was what he was here for. Not for me, after all; to convince me to rat out Leon and Susanna.
I almost did it. Why not? Fuck the pair of them; let them deal with Rafferty settling in on their terraces and offering them smokes and unpicking their seams, let Susanna wangle her way out of this if she was so smart. She had been happy to dangle me in front of him, look over here, shiny! But more than that, much more: they had left me out. I could have been like them, changed, tempered. I could have come to that night in my apartment as someone who could come out of it unbroken, if only they had believed in me enough to bring me along.
Except all of that seemed to matter less than the lack of surprise in Rafferty’s voice. It had taken me that long to realize. I said, “You never thought I had done it.”
“Nah. It never felt like you, either, whatever about that hoodie. I know”—raising his voice a touch, when I started to say something—“I know that was ten years back, and I know about the head injury. But right deep down, past all that, people are what they are. And this thing didn’t feel like you.”
“Even when you came with the photos. You made it sound like you were about to arrest me. You were just, you were—” Here I had been thinking of him as an opponent, the brilliant adversary I was somehow going to outfox, en garde! I hadn’t been an opponent to him. I hadn’t even been a person, only a convenient thing that he could nudge carefully into whatever position suited his strategy. “You were using me as bait. To get Hugo to confess.”
A one-shouldered shrug. “It worked.”
“If it hadn’t? What would you have done? Would you have arrested me? Locked me up?”
Rafferty said, “I want my man. Or my woman.”
That spike of terror went through me again. He was like a raptor, not cruel, not good or evil, only and utterly what he was. The purity of it, unbreakable, was beyond anything I could imagine.
And this is one of the moments I come back to over and over, one of the things I can’t forgive myself; because a part of me did know better, a part of me knew I shouldn’t ask. But it seemed to me that an answer from him would make sense of everything, would be absolute and golden as an answer from some god. “Why me?” I said. “Why not Leon? He was the one who was being, who Dominic was bullying. Why not—”
Rafferty said, simply, “Because you were my best bet.”
My heart was going in great slow thumps. “Why?”
“You want to know?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“OK.” He rearranged himself, elbows on knees, getting comfortable to explain it all to me. “So the thing is: I could’ve gone for Leon, all right. As far as evidence goes, I had as much on him as I did on you. But—just like you said that day with the hoodie, remember?—none of it was solid; it was all circumstantial stuff. And with a circumstantial case, a lot of it comes down to what the jury thinks of the defendant. Say we got Susanna up on trial for this. Right? Lovely middle-class housewife. Well-spoken, from a good family. Married her college sweetheart; so devoted to her kids, she gave up her career for their sake. Not gorgeous or done-up, so she’s not an evil scheming bitch, but not ugly or fat or anything, so she’s not a disgusting loser. Educated, so she’s not a skanger, but not too educated, so she’s not some uppity elitist. Strong enough that you take her seriously, but not too strong—because you can bet she’d play it bang on—so she’s not an arrogant cow who needs taking down a peg. If we had no solid evidence, you think a jury would vote to convict?”
“Probably not.”
“Not a chance in hell. Now, Leon”—he wavered a hand—“maybe we’d have a shot there. Dodgy lifestyle and all that. Plenty of people still think the gays are a bit unbalanced, and you