Only now there was a dead detective in my garden and his blood all over my hands, and I couldn’t see a single thing that luck could do for me. Even if I managed to scrape a hole in the earth and bury him, they would come looking. He would have told someone where he was going, he would have left his car somewhere nearby, they would track his phone. I wasn’t Susanna who could spin cunning cover-up plans; there was no room here to play misdirection games, claim it could have been this or that someone else. I was going to prison.
And even if I somehow didn’t: I had killed someone, and I always would have. It was always going to be like this. There was no undoing this, no talking my way out, no fixing it or apologizing it away, no smoothing off the sharp edges or planing it down so it could be tucked away into some smaller, manageable box. Instead it would grind me away till I fit around its own immutable shape.
What I had failed to recognize after that night in my apartment—even though it had been right there, and crucial, the whole time—was that no one had been dead. That was why that spark had refused to go out: ruined, half-witted, staggering, I had still been alive. While there’s life there’s hope: banal enough to make you retch, and yet it had turned out to be true. Now Rafferty was dead and there was no place left for luck or miracles or last chances. This was the blank wall of rock, the final word against which there was no appeal. I was done.
I swallowed the pills with palmfuls of water from the bathroom tap—I thought about vodka or wine, just to make sure, a parting glass, but the idea made my stomach churn and I couldn’t risk throwing up the whole mess. Then I stripped off my clothes—bloody, muddy, shedding trickles of dirt and birch seeds as I dropped them on the bedroom floor—pulled on a clean T-shirt and pajama bottoms and got into bed. The sheets were freezing and clammy. I curled up tight, wincing as I hit bruised spots, and wrapped the duvet over my head.
I thought of Melissa, a time when she had had the flu and had sat up in my bed flushed with fever and chattering with daffy, determined brightness, while I brought her soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers and herbal tea and read her Winnie-the-Pooh off my phone with her head on my chest. I thought of my mother sitting cross-legged on the floor playing Snap with me, ponytail falling forwards over her shoulder, hand hovering and an unconscious half grin lighting her face; of my father leaning back in his armchair in lamplight to give some school essay of mine his serious, unhurried attention, This is very good, I like the way you’ve constructed your argument . . . I would have liked to lie there for longer; I would have liked time to go back through every good memory, all the pints and messing with Sean and Dec, all the wild college nights, the girls and the holidays and the bedtime stories, even the Ivy House summers with Hugo and Susanna and Leon. But I was exhausted to the marrow, body and mind, I was fading in and out, and as the bed warmed up and the pills kicked in I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. The last thing I remember thinking is how terribly sad it was that it should be so easy, in the end, to go to sleep.
Thirteen
I didn’t get the job done, obviously. Somewhere in there I apparently left Melissa a long meandering voicemail made up mainly of apologies and incomprehensible slurred gibberish. When Melissa heard it she rang my parents, who rushed over to the Ivy House, where they found Rafferty dead in the garden in a puddle of blood and me only mostly dead in my bed in a puddle of puke. I can’t even begin to imagine what the next few hours were like. I woke up back in the hospital, feeling like I had the mother of all hangovers and had been kicked repeatedly in the stomach, with that sickness-and-disinfectant reek soaked into me all over again and a uniformed cop glaring grimly from the chair beside my bed.
At first I thought I was back in the aftermath of that night in my apartment, and I couldn’t work out why the cop was so pissed off with me about it. The realization that my head wound was healed to a scar sent me into such a panic—how long had I been here?!—that a nurse had to come and give me a shot. When a couple of detectives strolled in for a chat, I was so off my face that all I could do was stare dreamily at them and ask if they had found my car and if they would mind checking that my feet were still there.
It took a while before I got things straight enough to be questioned—which in practice, under strict orders from the fancy solicitor my parents had hired for me, meant saying “No comment” an awful lot of times to a pair of detectives who, behind the careful blank expressions, clearly wanted to rip me to pieces and piss on the leftovers. But one of the few intelligible bits of that voicemail to Melissa had been something along the lines of snuck up on me, thought he was a burglar, scared the shit out of . . . and then more mumbling and sorry I’m so sorry (having to listen to that voicemail being played in a courtroom was, in the face of some stiff competition, definitely one of the worst moments of the whole thing). By the time I recovered enough to have any idea what had happened, the story had solidified itself, in basically the form that my defense eventually used at the trial: Rafferty calling by to see if I could back up Susanna’s story; the open door (my mother and Louisa and the postman all testified to having found the door unlocked or even swinging open, over the previous few weeks; apparently the postman had lectured me about it, but he didn’t think I’d taken it in); the startle on the dark terrace, the poor triggered PTSD sufferer flashing back to the attack that had devastated his life, lashing out in a frenzy of what he truly believed to be self-defense (expert testimony from the shitbird neurologist and from several psychologists, as well as some pretty crushing stuff from my family and Melissa), and then horror-stricken to the point of suicide when he snapped out of his trance of terror and saw Rafferty’s bloodied face.
It had some kind of truth to it, I suppose, in its own tangled, oblique way. My solicitor took me through it methodically, relentlessly, like a strict old-fashioned tutor drilling a backward student in Latin declensions. At first I refused point-blank even to think about testifying. It wasn’t only, or even mostly, what Rafferty had said—if you got into a courtroom, you’d be fucked. It was simpler than that. There were very few things left in the world that seemed like they would make me feel worse, but expanding on the finer details of my fuckedupitude to an audience consisting of my family and my friends and Melissa and assorted media and the entire world was pretty much top of the list.