The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  Sean nodded, balling up the wet napkin and looking around for a bin. After a moment Dec said, “At least it’s not your wanking hand.” The burst of laughter from all three of us was just too loud and too long.

  By the time they left we were finishing off a bag of crisps and laughing easily again; Sean and I were advising Dec to take advantage of being in the hospital to get himself checked out for whatever lurid diseases Jenna had given him, and he was threatening to rat me out to the head nurse for drinking if I didn’t shut my gob; from the outside everything would have looked fine, completely fine, three great pals shooting the breeze and having a grand old time. But a while later, when I pulled out the hip flask—getting really fucked up felt like an excellent idea, and whatever the booze-and-meds cocktail ended up doing to me, I was fine with it—it looked ridiculous, its cocky silver curves ludicrously out of place amid all the uncompromising functionality and institutional hospital colors. It looked like a joke, a sneer straight in my face for actually thinking—stupid, pathetic—that all it would take was a few slugs of booze and ta-da! everything would be totally back to normal! The sour reek of the whisky turned my stomach, and I put it away again.

  * * *

  A few days later they let me go home. They had taken a staple remover to my head, leaving behind a long red scar surrounded by red dots where the staples had gone in, and disconnected me from my painkiller IV—I had been a bit nervous about that, but the pills they had given me instead were working OK, and anyway my ribs and my tailbone were a lot better and even the headache wasn’t constant any more. I had had a visit from a physiotherapist, who had given me a bunch of exercises that I had promptly forgotten and a card with an appointment time for some clinic somewhere, which I had promptly lost. I had also had a visit from a social worker or a counselor or something, a scrawny woman with enormous glasses and a gooey smile who had given me a huge sheaf of brochures about Brain Injury And You (very very simple block-figure covers in bright monochrome, diagrams of a block figure putting things into his Memory Filing Cabinet and taking them out again, explanations of why I should eat plenty of colorful vegetables, “At first I didn’t want to take naps after lunch, but they really help. I still get tired but I feel much better”—James from Cork, plus lots of helpful planners—Important Things to Do Today; Things That Went Well Today) and suggested that if I felt anger I should hang a towel from my washing line and whack it with a stick.

  I had also had another visit from the shitbird neurologist, which had been fun. All my questions (When can I go back to work? when can I go for a few pints? have sex? go to the gym?) had been either ignored completely or met with the same offhand, infuriating “When you feel ready,” which of course was exactly what I was asking to begin with: when was I going to feel ready? The exception was When can I drive? which it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask: the neurologist (pasty chins tucked down, eyebrows raised forbiddingly over his glasses, he just stopped short of wagging a finger in my face) had informed me that I was absolutely not allowed behind the wheel of a car, in case of seizures. After six months, if the seizures hadn’t materialized, I could come to him for a check-up and ask nicely if please sir I could have my license back. I was trying very hard not to think about the possibility of seizures, but at that moment my entire remaining brainpower had been concentrated on how passionately I wanted to kick the neurologist in the nads, so I had made it through the conversation without spiraling into horror (Things That Went Well Today!).

  My mother was due to come pick me up in an hour and I was wandering uselessly around my room, trying to make up my mind what the hell to do with the accumulation of stuff heaped on every surface. I didn’t think I wanted any of it (where had a blue plush rabbit even come from?) but maybe some of the food would look more appetizing when I was home and didn’t feel like going to the shops, and surely I would be up to reading some of this stuff at some point, and my mother’s flowers were in vases that she might want back . . . Two weeks earlier I would have cheerfully dumped the whole lot in the bin, told my mother I had no idea where her vases had gone, and bought her new ones.

  I was staring helplessly at the plush rabbit in my hands (would Melissa really have brought me this thing? would she expect me to keep it?) when there was a tap at the door and Detective Martin stuck his head around it.

  “Howya,” he said. “Gerry Martin; remember me?”

  “Oh,” I said, seizing gratefully on the opportunity to forget about the rabbit. “Sure. Did you find the guys?”

  “Jesus, man, give us a chance. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight.” He scanned the trolley table. “That’s a lot of Monster Munch you’ve got there.”

  “I know. My mother . . .”

  “Ah, the mammies,” Martin said indulgently. “Can’t beat ’em. Can I have a packet, can I? You’ve got enough there to feed an army.”

  “Sure. Take your pick.”

  He dug out a packet of roast-beef flavor and pulled it open. “Lovely. I’m only starving.” Through a mouthful: “We heard they were turning you loose, came in to give you a lift home. Bannon’s downstairs with the car.”

  “But,” I said, after a befuddled second. “My mother’s coming to get me.”

  “We’ll give her a bell, sure. Explain the change of plans. How long till you’re ready? Few minutes?”

  “But,” I said again. I couldn’t figure out a polite way to say But why?

  Martin picked up on it anyway. “We said before: we need you to have a look round your place, see what’s missing, if there’s anything that’s not yours that they left behind. Remember?”

  “Oh,” I said. I remembered, all right, but I had assumed they meant like a day or two after I got home. “Now?”

  “Oh, yeah. Now’s when you’ll notice anything out of place. And you’ll want to get the gaff back in order, and you can’t do that till you’ve done the look-round.” Back in order— It hadn’t even occurred to me to think about what shape my apartment might be in. Overturned furniture, carpet spiky with dried blood, flies buzzing— “Get it over with now, go back to normal. Easier all round.” He threw a few more Monster Munch into his mouth.

  “Right,” I said. The thought of walking into that with Martin and Flashy Suit sharp-eyed at my shoulder was bad, but it was a lot better than having my mother there, all big compassionate eyes and arm-squeezes, plus I was pretty sure she was planning to spend the car ride trying yet again to convince me to move back home for a while. “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Beautiful. Here”—picking up the holdall my mother had brought me and swinging it onto the bed—“you’ll want the books, and that vase there looks like it cost someone a few bob. The rest can go in the bin, am I right?”

  * * *

  Going back into my apartment was worse than I had expected. It wasn’t the horror-film extravaganza I had been picturing: in the living room the furniture was perfectly arranged, the carpets and the sofa had been cleaned (although I could still make out the shadows of bloodstains and spatters, across a shockingly wide area), every surface was immaculate and glossy, not a speck of dust anywhere; the drawers from my sideboard were neatly stacked in a corner, next to carefully aligned piles of the papers and cables and CDs that had been inside them; there was even a big vase of curly purple and white flowers on the table. Sun and leaf-shadows poured over it all.

  It was the air that was wrong. Without realizing it, I had gone in there reaching for the faint, familiar smell of home—toast, coffee, my aftershave, the basil plant my mother had given me, the fresh-cotton scent of the candles Melissa sometimes lit. All that was gone, wiped away; in its place was the thick scent of the flowers and a throat-coating chemical underlay, and I was sure that at the back of my nose I caught the sweaty, milky odor of the guy who had rushed me. The place didn’t smell abandoned; it smelled intensely, feverishly occupied, by someone who wasn’t me and didn’t want me there. It was like stretc
hing out a hand to your dog and seeing him back away, hackles rising.

  “Take your time,” Martin said, at my elbow. “We know this is tough on you. Need to sit down?”

  “No. Thanks. I’m fine.” I braced my left leg harder; if it buckled on me now, I was going to rip the bloody thing right off—

  “Your mam must’ve done a cleanup,” Flashy Suit said. “We didn’t leave it in this good nick. Fingerprint dust everywhere.”

  “They had gloves,” I said, mechanically. I had just realized that half the drawers were broken, shards of wood sticking out, sides hanging loose.

  “Sure,” Martin said, “but we didn’t know that then. And anyway, they could’ve taken them off at some stage, while you were out cold. Better safe, amn’t I right?” He arranged himself comfortably against the wall by the living-room door, hands in his pockets. “Have a look around, tell me if you spot anything missing. In your own time.”

  “The TV,” I said. I’d been expecting it but it still looked impossible, the big blank space on my wall, as though if I blinked hard enough my TV would surely be back in its place. “And the Xbox. And my laptop, unless someone put it away somewhere—it was probably on the coffee table—”

  “No laptop,” Martin said. “Anything on it that anyone might have wanted?”

  “No. I mean, my credit-card numbers would have been on there somewhere, but they could have just taken my—” The top of the sideboard was bare. “Shit. My wallet. It should be, I keep it right over there—”

  “Gone,” Flashy Suit said. He had his notebook out again, pen poised and ready. “Sorry. We’ve canceled the cards and put a flag on them, so we’ll be notified if anyone tries to use them, but so far no dice.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Anything else?” Martin asked.

  My eye kept being pulled back to the bloodstain shadows on the carpet. The memory caught me like a singeing crackle of electricity: clogged snuffle of my breath, pain, green curtains, a gloved hand reaching down— “The candlestick,” I said—I was glad to hear that my voice sounded normal, even casual. “I had a candlestick. Black metal, about this big, shaped like one of those twisted railings with a, a, a petal thing at the top—” I couldn’t make myself tell them how I had brought it out of the bedroom with me, the big hero all ready to smash the living shit out of the bad guys. “It was there, on the floor.”

  “We’ve got that,” Martin said. “Took it for forensics. We think it’s what they hit you with”—indicating his temple. “We’ll get it back to you once the Tech Bureau’s done with it.”

  The scar on my head itched, suddenly and viciously. “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Anything else? Anything here that shouldn’t be?”

  I looked around. My books were all wrong in the bookshelf; I didn’t want to ask whether it was the burglars who had spilled them out, or the detectives searching. “I don’t think so. Not that I can see.”

  “Those drawers there,” Martin said, pointing. “They went through those pretty hard. When we got here, the papers and that were all over the floor.” Another fizz-zap of memory, crawling through rubble that rustled and slid under me— “Any idea what they might’ve been after?”

  The top right drawer was where I had had my hash and the leftover coke. Apparently the burglars had been considerate enough to take those, unless Martin was bluffing to see if I would lie to him—that affable, neutral face watching me, I couldn’t read anything off him— “No,” I said, pushing at what was left of my hair. “I mean, not that I can remember? Mostly it’s just stuff that doesn’t really belong anywhere else. Paperwork, the restore disks from my laptop, I’m not even sure what else was in there . . .”

  “Have a look through it anyway,” Martin suggested, only it wasn’t really a suggestion. “Maybe something’ll ring a bell.”

  Nothing did. Fish food from when I’d had a tank years back, a T-shirt I’d meant to return to the shop but had forgotten about, why would I have a Radiohead CD, had someone lent it to me, was someone out there bitching about how I had never given it back? I kind of thought there had been an ancient digital camera in there, but I couldn’t be sure and certainly couldn’t remember, when Martin asked, what photos had been on it—pre-college holiday in Mykonos with the guys maybe, long-ago parties, family Christmases? The sun was turning the room into a terrarium and the chemical smell was giving me a headache, but I didn’t want to suggest opening the patio door when the detectives weren’t complaining and anyway there was a new lock on it, shiny and not quite covering the pale splintered wood where the old one had been broken out, and I didn’t have the key. I had changed my mind about these guys being better company than my mother. At least I could have told her to leave.

  They took me through the apartment methodically, ruthlessly, room by room, drawer by drawer. My clothes were put away wrong, too. My grandfather’s watch was in fact gone: I gave the detectives a description, they promised to check the pawnbrokers and the antique shops and the cash-for-gold places. My condoms were gone too, but we all felt there was less chance of tracking those down, not that I wanted them back, if it would prevent those guys from reproducing I was happy to donate to the cause, we all had a good laugh about that. My head was killing me.

  “Right,” Martin said, at long last, giving Flashy Suit a glance that made him flip his notebook shut. “We’ll leave you to settle back in. Thanks for doing this, Toby. We appreciate it.”

  “Have you,” I said. We were in the bathroom: sparkly clean, bottles perfectly lined up, too small for the three of us. “Have you got any ideas? About who they were?”

  Martin scratched at his ear and grimaced. “Not really. I’m feeling a bit guilty about that, to be honest with you. Normally, by this time? we’d have a fair idea who we’re after: this fella always gets in using the same method, that fella empties the fridge onto the floor and has a shite in the bed, the other fella has a tattoo that matches a witness description . . . Not saying we’d always be able to put them away for it, but mostly we’d be pretty sure who they were. This time . . .” He shrugged. “Nothing’s ringing any bells.”

  “They might’ve been new on the job,” Flashy Suit said, a bit apologetically, tucking his pen away. “That’d explain why they lost the head so easily, too. Rookies.”

  “Could be,” Martin said. “How about you, Toby? Anything come to mind since we last talked?”

  By this time my head had cleared enough that I no longer suspected Gouger of being behind the break-in, but I did wonder about Tiernan. I’d heard enough of his rants (sheeple gallery owners without the guts to take on an artist till someone else had given him the stamp of approval, conniving female artists using their wiles and their tits to get gallery and media space over far more talented men, mindless trend-follower critics who wouldn’t recognize groundbreaking art if it introduced itself) to know that he was the type to find someone else to blame for his problems and then get pouty and obsessed about it, and he had presumably met plenty of dodgy guys with burglarizing experience during his travels for the exhibition. I still wasn’t about to tell the cops the whole saga, specially when I had nothing more than a vague suspicion, but I did wish I’d paid more attention to Tiernan’s youths when he brought them into the gallery. “No,” I said, easily enough. “I’ve gone back over everything, I don’t know how many times, but I’m not coming up with anything new.”

  Martin stayed put, watching me amiably, swinging the hand-towel ring back and forth with one finger. “No?”

  I couldn’t tell what that meant, whether he was just hoping to jog my memory or whether he was telling me he knew I was hiding something. Both of them felt enormous suddenly, in the small cramped space, I was backed up against the bath with no way out— “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

  After a moment Martin nodded. “Right, so,” he said cheerfully. “You’ve got our cards. Yeah?”


  “I guess—” I had some vague memory of them leaving me little cards, that first time in the hospital. I looked around the bathroom like they might have teleported into my sink.

  “Here you go,” Martin said, fishing in his pocket and handing me a white card, big clear type, fancy Garda seal. “You be sure and let us know if anything comes to you. Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I will.”

  “Great. We’ll be in touch. You relax, now; get some decent grub into you, have a couple of cans, leave the unpacking till later.” To Flashy Suit: “Will we head?”

  * * *

  My mother arrived practically as soon as the detectives left, of course, with bags of inexplicable shopping (the basics, bread and milk and whatever, mixed in with stuff like a knobbly beige object that she informed me was ginger, “just in case”). She didn’t stay long, and she didn’t make any helpful offers to find a carpenter to fix the sideboard drawers or anything. She was adapting, gradually and carefully, to this new landmined world where I was trapped, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful or to hate her for the implication that she thought it was permanent. She managed not to ask whether I would be all right on my own; when she hugged me at the door, I managed not to flinch.