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 know those artsy types, couldn’t watch ’em. If we had even one solid thing on him—a witness, DNA, anything—then you’re dead right: he’d’ve been my best bet. But we didn’t. And same as Susanna, he’s from a good family, well-off, nice middle-class accent; he’s good-looking but not enough to come across as a smug prick, he’s articulate, intelligent, likable . . . Get him into a decent suit, get rid of the stupid hairdo, and he’d come across great. That nice normal boy, a killer? Ah, no.”
Rows of blank black windows in the apartment block; something in the light made them look broken out, jagged holes onto emptiness, dust thickening on ripped-down posters and overturned chairs. No sound anywhere, not a far-off motorcycle or a shout or a snatch of music.
“You, though,” Rafferty said, utterly matter-of-fact. “I could get somewhere with you.”
This is the amazing part: for a split second I almost laughed in his face. Me of all people, for God’s sake, who the hell would ever believe— Maybe I should see it as some kind of triumph of the human spirit: even after everything, there was some tiny fragment of my mind that really believed I was still me.
“The little stuff makes a big difference,” Rafferty explained. “Like the eyelid, you know that thing it does, the . . . ?”—gesturing with a finger—“And the limp. The way you slur your words a bit—only when you’re under pressure, like, most of the time no one would even notice, but God knows you’d be under pressure on the stand. The way you get twitchy, jumpy. The way you stumble, get your sentences tangled up. And the way sometimes it seems like you’re not really tuned in; that out-of-focus look you get.” Leaning in: “Listen, man, I’m not slagging you. In normal life, with people who know you, none of that matters. But juries don’t like that stuff. They think it means there’s something wrong with you. And once they think that, it’s only a wee little skip and a jump to you being a killer.”
The trees moving, tiny subtle clicks and shifts, where there was no wind. Branch-shadows scrawled violent as earthquake-cracks across the bare earth. Smell of burning tires, stronger.
“And there’s the memory,” Rafferty added. “Susanna or Leon, they could get up there and swear they had nothing to do with what happened to Dominic; all they’d have to do is convince a jury they were telling the truth. You, man, it wouldn’t matter whether you convinced the jury or not. We’d be able to prove your memory was cabbaged. Nothing that came out of your mouth would matter a damn.”
I said, much too loud, “None of that is my fault.” Which I knew was ludicrous but it came out of me anyway, ripped its way out— “It wasn’t my fucking choice.”
Rafferty said, gently, “So what?”
“So you don’t, you don’t get to, to use it against me”—the rising anger was so overwhelming it tongue-tied me, fucking moron, way to prove Rafferty’s point, wanted to punch myself—“you don’t get to act like it, it, it— That doesn’t count.”
“It would’ve, though,” Rafferty pointed out matter-of-factly.
I couldn’t answer that; I could barely breathe. “I’m not saying I would’ve ever taken things that far,” he reassured me. “I wouldn’t’ve. Hand to God. I’m not in the business of sending innocent men down for murder. But the thing is, I didn’t need to. I just needed Hugo to think I would. That’s why I went for you over Leon. Because Hugo knew as well as I did, if you got into a courtroom, you’d be fucked.”
He said something else to me then. I can still see the equivocal spark of a smile lighting his face and I’ve spent hundreds or maybe thousands of hours trying to remember what it was he said but I can’t, because just as he started saying it I realized that I was about to punch him in the face, and just as he finished saying it I hit him.