The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  “They make everything so difficult,” Hugo said, flash of frustration, head going back. “So bloody awkward, all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense, like children playing games and we’re forced to play along—” Another draft flooded in around the door and he shivered hard. “And this weather. It’s not even October yet, surely I should be able to feel my feet in my own study?”

  “I’ll finish the radiators now,” I said. “That’ll help.”

  “I suppose so.” He leaned a hip against the banisters, with a wince, so he could let go of the rail to pull his dressing gown tighter. “Shouldn’t we be starting on dinner? Is Melissa home yet?”

  “It’ll be lunchtime soon,” I said carefully, after a second. “I’ll bring something up once I’ve done the rads, OK?”

  “Well,” Hugo said irritably, after a confused pause, “I suppose you might as well,” and he managed to shuffle around, inch by inch, and hauled himself back up the stairs and into his study and banged the door.

  * * *

  By the time I got it together enough to bring lunch he seemed OK again, at least by whatever metric we were using at that stage. He ate his toasted sandwich, anyway, and showed me a couple of pages he’d deciphered from Mrs. Wozniak’s Victorian relative’s boring diary (the cook had burned the roast beef, some kid had shouted a rude word at him on the street, children nowadays were deficient in moral training). The strange thing—I watched Hugo, from my table, as he peered gamely at the next page of the diary—was that although the illness was paring him away with brutal rapacity, he didn’t seem smaller. He had lost an awful lot of weight, his clothes hung in folds, but somehow that only emphasized the massiveness of his frame. He was like one of those giant skeletons of elk or bear from an unimaginable prehistoric time, dominating vast museum galleries, alone and unfathomable.

  He perked up a bit when Melissa got home, teasing her about the dinner ingredients she’d brought (“Paella, good heavens, you’re like a travel agent for the taste buds”) and enjoying her story about the happy old eccentric who had shown up in the shop with an armful of totally unsellable handmade scarves in tie-dyed silk and insisted on giving Melissa one to keep. The scarf was enormous, purple and gold, and Hugo draped it around his shoulders and sat laughing at the kitchen table like a magician in a child’s game. More and more, Melissa was the one who brought out the best of him.

  He knew it, too. “I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he said to her—out of the blue, over our rummy game that evening, clutter of cards and mismatched mugs and biscuits on the coffee table, fire crackling merrily—“how glad I am to have you here. I know what a sacrifice it must be, and I don’t think there’s any proper way I can put it into words, what it’s meant to me. But I wanted to say it all the same.”

  “I wasn’t sure I should come, at first,” Melissa said. She was curled on the sofa with her feet on my lap; I was keeping them warm with my free hand. “Showing up on your doorstep, in the middle of all this. And then just staying on. I’ve wondered dozens of times if I should get out of the way. But . . .” She turned up her palm to the room, a small gesture like releasing something: Here we are.

  “I’m delighted you’re here,” Hugo said. “It’s made me very happy—both you yourself, and also the chance to watch Toby being all grown up and settled in a relationship. It’s like the weekends when I had Zach and Sallie: such a lovely progression from all those holidays when Toby and Susanna and Leon would come to stay. The next episode; life moving on. Probably this is fanciful, but I feel as if it’s given me just a glimpse into what it might have been like to have children of my own.”

  The valedictory tone of all this was making me twitchy; I wanted the subject changed. “Why didn’t you?” I asked. Susanna and Leon and I had speculated on that a few times, over the years. I thought Hugo had better sense than to screw up his serene, ordered existence with a bunch of screaming brats; Susanna thought he had some mysterious semi-detached long-term relationship, maybe with a woman who lived abroad and only came to Dublin every couple of months; Leon, inevitably, thought he was gay, and that by the time the country had grown up enough for him to come out, he had felt like it was too late. Honestly, any of those would have made sense.

  Hugo considered that, rearranging the cards in his hand. He had a blanket over his knees, like an old man, in spite of the fire and the fact that I had actually managed to get the radiators working. “If I’m truthful,” he said, “it’s hard to put my finger on it. Some of it was the oldest cliché in the book—I was engaged, she broke it off, I skulked back home to lick my wounds and swore off women forever. It would be easy to blame everything on that, wouldn’t it?” Glancing up at us, a fleeting smile. “But that happens to an awful lot of people, and mostly they get over it in a year or two. I did too, really—it’s not that I’ve been carrying a torch all these years—but by that time there were your grandparents getting older, your grandfather’s arthritis was getting worse, they needed someone to look after them; and I was right there, with no other responsibilities, while all the others had moved out and had wives and little ones . . . I suppose the truth is that I’ve never been a man of action.” That quirk of a smile again, eyebrow lifting. “A man of inertia, more like. Don’t rock the boat; everything will come right in the end, if you just let it . . . And every year, of course, it got harder to make any changes. Even after your grandparents died, when I could have done anything I wanted—traveled the world, got married, started a family—it turned out that there wasn’t really anything I wanted enough to make that leap.”

  He picked out a card, examined it, tucked it back. “The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.” And looking up smiling, pushing his glasses up his nose: “And with all that philosophizing, I’ve forgotten whose go it was. Did I just put . . .”

  His voice stopped. When the pause lasted too long I glanced up from my cards. He was staring at the door, wide-eyed, so intently that I whipped around to see if something or someone was there: nothing.

  When I turned back Hugo was still staring. He licked his lips, again and again. “Hugo,” I said, too loudly. “Are you OK?”

  One arm reached out, rigid, fingers grotesquely clawed.

  I was off the sofa, cards scattering everywhere, mugs going over as I crashed past the coffee table. Melissa and I made it to him at the same time, threw ourselves on our knees beside him. I was afraid to touch him in case I made it worse. He was blinking and blinking; that distorted arm made great meaningless raking motions in front of him, so taut and determined they seemed almost deliberate.

  So this was it: this sudden, one moment pushing up your glasses and considering the king of spades, the next moment gone. After the months of fear and tension and wondering, here it was, this quick and this simple. “An ambulance,” I said, although I knew they wouldn’t make it in time. My heart felt too huge for my chest. “You ring. Fast.”

  “It’s a seizure,” Melissa said calmly. She was looking up into Hugo’s face, a light, firm hand on his shoulder. “He doesn’t need an ambulance. Hugo, you’re having a seizure. It’s all right; it’ll be over in a minute.”

  No way to tell whether he had heard her. Raking, blinking. A line of spit trailed from one corner of his mouth.

  It was a few seconds before I could take in that he wasn’t dying in front of us. “But,” I said. Some distant part of me remembered the shitbird neurologist’s lecture, small words and a disdainful headmaster gaze— “We’re supposed to call the ambulance anyway. For a first seizure.”

  “It’s not the first. He’s been having them for a while now.” At my stunned look: “Those times when he’s staring into space and he doesn’t hear you for a minute? I thought you knew.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I told him to tell the doctors. I don’t k
now if he did.” She was stroking Hugo’s shoulder, a slow steadying rhythm. “It’s OK,” she said quietly. “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

  Gradually the raking movement got looser and vaguer, till his arm fell on his lap, twitched a few times and lay limp. The lip-licking stopped. His eyes closed and his head lolled sideways, as if he had simply dozed off in his chair after dinner.

  Merry pop and spit of firewood. Brown puddles of tea spreading across the coffee table, dripping onto the carpet. I was light-headed, my heartbeat running wild.

  “Hugo,” Melissa said gently. “Can you look at me?”

  His eyelids trembled. His eyes opened: bleary and drowsy, but he was seeing her.

  “You had a seizure. It’s over now. Do you know where you are?”

  He nodded.

  “Where?”

  His mouth moved as if he were chewing and for a dreadful second I thought it was beginning again, but he said—scratchy, slurred—“Living room.”

  “Yes. How do you feel?”

  His face was white and clammy; even his hands looked too pale. “Don’t know. Tired.”

  “That’s all right. Just stay put for a bit, till you feel better.”

  “Do you want some water?” I asked, finally coming up with something useful I could do.

  “Don’t know.”

  I hurried to the kitchen anyway and filled a glass at the tap, my hands shaking, water splashing everywhere. My face in the dark window over the sink was stunned stupid, mouth hanging open and eyes round.

  When I got back to the living room, Hugo looked better: head up, some of the color back in his face. Melissa had found a paper napkin and was cleaning the trail of drool off his chin. “Oh,” he said, and took the glass in his good hand. “Thank you.”

  “Do you remember what happened?” I asked.

  “Not really. Just . . . everything looked strange, all of a sudden. Different. Frightening. And that’s all.” With an edge of fear that he couldn’t quite hide: “What did I do?”

  “Not a lot,” I said easily. “A bit of staring, a few weird arm things. No movie-type flailing around, nothing like that.”

  “Have you had ones like this before?” Melissa asked.

  “I think so. Once.” Hugo took another sip of water, wiped the corner of his mouth where some of it had leaked out. “A couple of weeks ago. In bed.”

  “You should have called us,” I said.

  “I didn’t really realize. What had happened. And what could you have done?”

  “Still,” Melissa said. “If it happens again, call us. Please?”

  “All right, my dear.” He covered her hand with his for a moment. “I promise.”

  “Did you tell the doctor?”

  “Yes. He gave me things. Medicine. Warned me they might not work, though.” He struggled to heave himself straighter in the chair. “And he started all that about hospice again. I said no, of course. Absolutely not.”

  “Do you want to go to bed?” I asked. He seemed practically himself again, almost bizarrely so, but I couldn’t really see going back to our game of rummy; even if he was able for it, I wasn’t.

  “What I’d like,” Hugo said, “is to sit here for a while. With you two. If that’s all right.”

  Melissa got a cloth and mopped up the spilled tea; I collected the cards, wiped tea off them with a dampened paper towel and stacked them ready for some other time. Then we went back to our places on the sofa, Melissa curled against me, my arm holding her close, her fingers woven through mine.

  We didn’t talk. Melissa gazed into the fire, its light throwing warm flickers over the soft curve of her cheek. Hugo stroked the blanket over his legs absently, with one thumb, as if it were a pet. Occasionally he glanced up and smiled at us, reassuring: Look, I’m fine. We sat there for a long time, while rain ticked quietly against the windows and a moth whirled halfheartedly around the standing lamp and the fire burned down to glowing gems of ash.

  * * *

  I hadn’t, I suppose, taken much notice of Melissa’s mood that evening. I had vaguely registered that she was quiet, even before the thing with Hugo, but I had more than enough going on already; she was the one blessed thing in my world that didn’t seem to require vigilance. So it took me completely by surprise when—after we had seen Hugo safely into his room and tracked the familiar sounds of him puttering about and going to bed, and I was pulling off my jumper in our bedroom—she said, “The detectives came to talk to me. At the shop.”

  “What?” I was so startled I dropped the jumper. “Which detectives? Like, Martin and, and—” I couldn’t remember Flashy Suit’s name. “Or these ones? Rafferty and Thing, Kerr?”

  “Rafferty and Kerr.” Melissa had her back to me, putting her cardigan on a hanger. Her reflection—pale hair, pale dress, pale slender arms—rippled like a ghost in the window. “I never expected them to want to talk to me, since I hadn’t even met any of you back when . . . I don’t know how they knew where I work. They had me put the Closed sign on the shop door—the scarf woman actually originally came along while they were there and she wouldn’t go away, she kept rattling the door handle; I wanted to go tell her I’d be open again in a few minutes, but Detective Kerr wouldn’t let me. He kept saying, ‘No, leave her, she’ll give up in a minute,’ but she was there for ages, she had her face pressed up against the glass peering in—”

  Places to go, people to see. “What the hell did they want?”

  “They showed me some photos.”

  I could have kicked Rafferty’s teeth in. “Yeah? Of what?”

  “A hoodie they found here. And you when you were younger, wearing it. And the drawstring out of it.” Melissa’s voice was very clear and controlled. She was looking at the cardigan, carefully straightening the shoulder seams, not at me. “They found that inside the tree. They think it was—”

  “I know, yeah. They showed me the same photos.”

  That snapped her head around. “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “You weren’t going to tell me.”

  “I wasn’t going to waste your time with that kind of bollocks. Why were they showing you the photos? What did they want?”

  “They wanted to know whether you’d ever mentioned Dominic Ganly to me. And whether I’d ever seen you make anything like that, the thing with the loops. Whether you ever make knots like those. And”—eyes on the cardigan as she hung it in the wardrobe, no change in that even voice, only the smallest flicker of her lashes—“whether I’d ever known you to be violent. I said no, obviously. Never.”

  I was, ironically, working hard to stop myself from punching a wall or putting my foot through the wardrobe door or something equally dramatic and pointless. I picked my jumper up off the floor and folded it very neatly.

  “They knew about that man last year. The one who wouldn’t leave me alone, until you ran him off. They wanted to know exactly what you did: whether you touched him when you were getting rid of him, whether you threatened to beat him up. I said no, but they kept pushing: are you serious, any normal man would be raging, he’d need to get the message across loud and clear, did your fella honestly not have the guts to do that . . . I wanted to tell them to leave, but I was afraid it would look like I was hiding something. They’re very— They make it hard to stand up to them, don’t they? I just kept saying no, no, no, and trying to keep calm, and in the end they gave up. Or at least they left.”

  “Well,” I said, coolly enough, when I could talk again. “It sounds like you put them back in their box. If they show up again, tell them to get lost. Or ring me and I’ll tell them.”

  “Toby.” Finally, a shake in her voice, and she turned to face me. “They think you killed Dominic.”

  I laughed, although even I could hear the harsh edge to it. “No they don’t. They don’t have any reason to. They don’t have even half a reason.
All they’ve got is a hoodie cord that anyone could have taken. They’re just trying to steamroller someone into confessing, so they can close their case. That’s why they hassled you: to put pressure on me. Not because they actually think you know anything, or they actually think I was violent—” My voice was rising. I took a breath.

  Melissa said, “They do, Toby. Maybe they don’t really think I know anything. But they think you killed him.”

  Her face, pale and intent and remote as the ghost in the glass. It hit me, with a stunning thump, that she might think the same thing. I wondered what the detectives had said to her that she wasn’t telling me.

  I said, “I didn’t kill Dominic.”

  “I know,” Melissa said, instantly and forcefully. “I know that. I never thought you did.”

  I believed her. The rush of relief and shame—how could I have thought, even for a second—took some of the tension out of me. “Well,” I said. “I guess now you can see how I need to do something about this.”

  Her face shut down. “Like what?”

  “Like talk to people. See if I can figure out what the hell actually happened. So we don’t have to put up with any more of this crap.”

  “No,” Melissa said sharply. I had heard that iron inflexibility in her voice only once before, when she was talking about her mother. “The only thing you need to do is stay as far as you can from all this awful stuff. Get a solicitor; let him deal with them. It’s not your problem. There’s no reason why you should get all tangled up in it. Leave it alone.”

  “Melissa, they straight out accused me of murder. I think that pretty definitely makes it my problem.”

  “No it’s not. Like you said, they don’t have any proof, and they’re never going to get any. All you have to do is ignore them, and sooner or later they’ll give up and go away.”

  “What if they don’t? What if they decide to double down and arrest me, and hope that makes me crack? I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy sitting here week after week wondering if today’s the day, if they’re going to pick the same moment when Hugo has some crisis—”