The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  A head popped up over the back wall; then a hand, holding a phone, flailing slightly as the guy tried to keep his balance on whatever he was standing on. “What the hell?” I said.

  “Reporter,” Hugo said grimly. “There were a couple out front this morning, before you two came down. One of them tried to interview Mrs. O’Loughlin next door, on her way out, but she was having none of it.”

  My first thought was to charge down there and make the guy fuck off, but the cops were in the way, and they were ignoring him completely. The guy managed to steady his arm long enough to snap a couple of photos, and dropped down behind the wall again. After a moment a different head appeared, complete with arm and phone.

  “They’re taking turns giving each other a leg up,” Melissa said, moving back from the window.

  “Little rats,” Hugo said, with real anger. “Out the front is one thing; this is private. Can’t the Guards get rid of them? Are they just going to stand there?”

  The second guy got his shots and disappeared. We waited, but apparently that was it for the moment. The cloud had lowered and the light was changing, turning dim and bruised, uneasy.

  The cops finished going over their strip of earth and started digging up a fresh one. It took them a while to uproot the biggest rosemary bush, but they got there in the end. After a while Rafferty came loping over and asked us, pleasantly and without feeling any need to give us a reason, if we could find somewhere else to be.

  * * *

  All Monday it rained, dense vertical uncompromising rain. I had taken another Xanax the night before and it had given me fucked-up dreams—the big uniformed guy on overnight guard duty had somehow got into my and Melissa’s room, he was sitting on the chair in the corner playing with his phone, face puffy and unhealthy in the blue-white light; I kept jerking awake looking for him, drifting back into an unsettled doze-dream where Melissa and I gave up and moved to the spare room, only to find the cop waiting there, lounging against our old fort, phone in hand.

  Walking Melissa to the bus stop, heads bent against the rain, not talking. Faffing aimlessly around the house with Hugo, loading the dishwasher and unloading the washing machine, while in the background the cops (cocooned in their wax jackets, rivulets streaming off their sleeves and the brims of their hoods) jammed shovels into the earth and tugged at daisy clumps with grim endurance. The dryer was broken, which hadn’t been a problem when we could hang washing out on the line, but now the line had been taken down and hung in sad loops from a hook on the garden wall, the end drooping into the mud below. Hugo only had one drying rack and when that filled up we draped the rest of the wash on chair-backs and radiators, giving the dining room a downtrodden tenement feel. It was a long time before we finally managed to get it together to head up to his study and start work.

  I was going through the 1901 census on Hugo’s laptop—some Australian guy couldn’t find a great-grandmother who should have been living somewhere near Fishamble Street, I was checking the original forms to see if it was a transcription problem. At his desk, Hugo turned pages in a slow rhythm, with long gaps where I couldn’t tell whether he was considering something or getting distracted by the faint shovel-thwacks and sporadic voices from below the window (louder all the time, as the cops worked their way up the garden), or whether he had just forgotten what he was doing. My eyes were glitching again, fatigue or the Xanax or whatever, the words on the page kept doubling. Neither of us was getting a lot done.

  Around lunchtime there was a knock on the door: Leon, with fancy Italian sandwiches from some place in town. I thought for sure he would lose the plot when he saw the garden—almost half gone now, the canvas tent marooned in a sea of mud—but he just shook his head, jaw tight, and threw the sandwiches onto the kitchen counter with a little too much force. “Fuck’s sake,” he said. “This is getting way out of hand.”

  I got down three plates and passed them to him. “No shit.”

  “We should tell them to fuck off.”

  “I did. They said they’d get a warrant.” I was in no mood for Leon giving me hassle. “What would you have done?”

  “Oh, chill. I’d have done exactly the same thing. Of course.” A quick, disarming smile. “How’s Hugo dealing?”

  I wondered if he was there to nudge Hugo about making his will—the skull had knocked the whole house thing right out of our heads, and no one had brought it up since. “OK. Pissed off.”

  “What I’d love to know”—Leon shook a sandwich out of its paper bag—“is what he thinks this is all about.”

  A sideways glance at me. “I don’t know,” I said, finding water glasses. “That homeless guy he was talking about, the cops tracked him down. It isn’t him.”

  “And? Has Hugo got any other ideas?”

  “We haven’t really talked about it.”

  “You haven’t asked him?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  Leon shrugged. “He’s the one who’s been living here for however long. If anyone has a clue about this, it’s probably him.”

  “It was probably before he was even born. Your dad thinks it was some informer in the Civil War.”

  Leon rolled his eyes. “Course he does. He’s hoping this is some major discovery and we’ll end up in the textbooks for changing the narrative of Irish history yada yada.” Another sideways glance, as he arranged the plates on the tray. The sandwiches were probably wonderful, but I hadn’t been hungry since the cops showed up and to me they just looked gross, all those folds of dark-red meat and globs of pale sweaty cheese. “What about you? What do you figure?”

  The truth was that I didn’t have a theory, not even the germ of one. This had been bothering me, a lot, actually: everyone else had entire sagas, it felt like a glaring defect in my mind that it couldn’t come up with anything at all. I had tried, but every time I thought of the skull my mind ran aground on the flat, stunning, unbudging reality of it; there didn’t seem to be any way to think beyond or around it. It reminded me, with a deep sickening lurch in my stomach, of my few memories from right after the attack: disconnected images stripped of any context or meaning, only and vastly and unthinkably themselves. “I don’t have a clue,” I said. “Neither does anyone else. We don’t even know what they’ve found out there, how are we supposed to know how it got there?”

  “Well, obviously we don’t know. I just mean ideas. Possibilities.”

  “I don’t have ideas,” I said, putting down the glasses on the tray a little too hard, “because I don’t actually give a damn what happened. I just want those guys”—a jerk of my chin at the sodden cops outside—“to fuck off and not wreck Hugo’s last few months. That’s all I care about. OK?” Which shut Leon up, just like I had known it would.

  I was expecting him to quiz Hugo, over the sandwiches, but maybe what I said had got through. Instead he babbled cheerfully about Ivy House memories from our childhood; after we finished eating, he took half of Hugo’s paper heap and lay facedown on the carpet with it, kicking his heels like a kid, occasionally waving a page to get our attention (“Oh my God, listen to this, this guy was named Aloysius Butt, I bet school was hell for him . . .”). When I came back up from making coffee, halfway through the afternoon, I heard their voices from the stairs, but by the time I opened the door they were peacefully absorbed in their work, Leon sucking the end of his pen with a contemplative whistling sound.

  * * *

  By Tuesday morning the garden was almost completely obliterated, one vast solid expanse of churned mud, with a last strip of grass and bobbing poppies at the very top like a bitter joke. It looked like some old battlefield, World War I, flung heaps of dirt and lopsided holes, thin cold rain falling; unrecoverable, nothing to be done except leave it alone in its silence and wait for the grass and poppies to grow back and cover it all.

  Rafferty was missing, which somehow made things worse, like his guys were going to be t
here forever so there was no need for him to hang around. We made coffee and toast and got out of the kitchen as fast as we could; when I got back from walking Melissa to the bus stop, Hugo and I went straight to work, with the study door closed and the curtains pulled. The study lights weren’t bright enough and it amplified the wartime feel, blackout, us hunched over and cold-fingered, flinching at every sound from outside.

  Sometime around eleven, when I was starting to rub at my cricked neck and wonder if I could be arsed facing the kitchen to make coffee, there was a knock at the study door and Rafferty stuck his head in.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Toby, could I have a quick word?”

  He was wearing another very nice suit, but he looked rough around the edges, hair rucked up and a heavy dark shadow on his jaw. For some reason that stubble unsettled me—the implication that he had been up all night, doing vital detective things that he wasn’t about to let me in on. “OK,” I said.

  “Thanks. Will we go down to the sitting room? So we don’t disturb your uncle’s work?”

  Hugo nodded, vaguely—I wasn’t sure he really got what was going on—and turned back to his desk. I made a note of where I was in the census and followed Rafferty.

  “What do you do?” he asked companionably, on our way downstairs. He was leading the way, which I was glad of, since it meant he couldn’t see me take the stairs, clutching the railing, foot lagging. “Yourself and your uncle?”

  “He’s a genealogist. You know, like tracing people’s family trees? I’m just helping out while I’m here. I’m actually in PR.”

  “Great study he’s got there,” Rafferty said, opening the living-room door for me. “Like something out of Sherlock Holmes. We should’ve given him a proper look at that skull, let him tell us if it came from a right-handed pipe welder with marriage problems and a Labrador.”

  There was another man in the living room, settled comfortably in Hugo’s armchair. “Oh,” I said, stopping.

  “This is Detective Kerr,” Rafferty said. “My partner.” Kerr nodded to me. He was short and stocky, big-shouldered, with an underhung bulldog face and buzzed hair not quite hiding the bald spot, and a suit that looked like he shopped in the same place as Rafferty. “Have a seat.”

  He was already moving towards the other armchair, which left me on a sofa, knees up to my chin, gazing up at them. Kerr or someone had opened the shutters, which we had been keeping closed in case any more reporters showed up; they hadn’t, at least not right then, but the slice of street in the corner of my eye made me edgy. I tried to ignore it.

  “You’ve been very patient about all of this,” Rafferty told me. “All of ye. We know it’s been a pain in the arse; we do get that. We wouldn’t put you through this if it wasn’t necessary.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “So”—he settled into the armchair—“let me tell you what we’ve been at, the last few days. You’re owed that much, amn’t I right?”

  I made some meaningless noise.

  “First off: we’re done with the garden. Bet you’re glad to hear that.”

  Glad wasn’t exactly the right word. “Great.”

  “Do you want us to try and put some of the plants back where they were? Or would you rather do it your own way?”

  “We’ll deal with it,” I said. All I wanted was these guys gone. “Thanks.”

  “Fair enough.” Leaning forwards, wide-legged, hands clasped between his knees, getting down to business and that was when I felt the first far-off blip of wariness: “So here’s the thing. There was a full human skeleton in your garden. You probably figured that out already, yeah?”

  “I guess,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I had figured out. The thought of a whole skeleton, which should probably have made my skin crawl, seemed completely impossible, way too far outside reality for my mind to process.

  “Don’t worry, it’s gone. The pathologist’s got it now.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Most of it was down the tree. We were missing one hand, so that looked interesting, but we found it buried under a bush—so we didn’t dig up the garden for nothing, if that’s any comfort. One of the uniform lads”—Rafferty couldn’t hold back a grin—“he was all into the idea that it was some Satanist thing, the Hand of Glory, yeah?” Kerr snorted. “He’s new. The pathologist found toothmarks on the hand, so she figures a rat dragged it off to work on it.”

  “Scanlon doesn’t,” Kerr said, aside to Rafferty. “Now he figures it was cannibal Satanists.”

  “Jesus,” Rafferty said, finger to his mouth half-hiding the grin. “Poor little bastard. When he realizes what this job is actually like, he’s going to be devastated. So”—brisk again—“first thing we needed to do was figure out who the skeleton belonged to. The pathologist said it was a white male, aged between sixteen and twenty-two at the time of death—they can narrow that down pretty well, in young people: they go by the teeth, the ends of the long bones. He was a big guy, somewhere between six foot and six foot three, and he’d probably been physically active—something about the places where the ligaments would’ve been attached to the bone; it’s amazing what they can work out. She said he’d broken his collarbone at some point, but it was well healed up, nothing to do with his death.”

  He looked over at me hopefully, like I might have something to contribute. I didn’t. I was starting to be bothered by the fact that these guys were talking to me on my own: why? why not everyone at once, like last time? sure, not everyone was around, but Hugo was right upstairs, there was no reason why he shouldn’t be in on this, unless—

  “And,” Rafferty said, “he had modern dental work. Done sometime in the past fifteen years.”

  Another pause. I had had myself almost completely convinced that my mother was right and this was some Victorian taking out his embezzling business partner, or the mustachioed villain who had seduced his daughter. I didn’t like the way this was going at all.

  “So that made our job a lot easier. We keep a database of missing persons; we went in there, searched for tall young white males who went missing from the Dublin area fifteen years ago or less. That narrowed it down to five. After that, all we had to do was compare dental records. I’m just after getting the results.”

  He pulled out his phone, swiped and tapped: leisurely, at ease, elbow resting on the arm of the chair. “Here,” he said, leaning across the coffee table to hand me the phone. “Does this fella ring any bells?”

  The guy in the photo was wearing a rugby jersey and grinning, arm thrown around someone who had been cropped out. He was maybe eighteen, broad-shouldered and good-looking, with rough fair hair and a cocky slouch and yes, I knew him straightaway but clearly there had been some mistake—

  “That’s Dominic Ganly,” I said. “But that’s, it’s not him. I mean, the tree guy. It’s not him.”

  “How do you know this fella in the photo?”

  I was suddenly ferociously aware of Kerr, watching me, a notebook somehow materialized in his hand and his pen poised. “From school. He was in my class. But—”

  “Were you good mates?”

  “Not really. I mean”—I couldn’t think, this didn’t make any sense, they had it all wrong—“we got on fine, we hung out with the same, the same crowd, but we weren’t friends friends? Like we didn’t do stuff just us, or—”

  “How long did you know him?”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Wait.”

  Two bland, interested faces, turned towards me.

  “Dominic died. I mean, not like that, not in our— He killed himself, the summer after we left school. He jumped off Howth Head.”

  “How do you know?” Rafferty asked.

  “Everyone said it,” I said, after a baffled silence. I knew there had been something about his phone, text messages, something, couldn’t remember the details—

  “Looks
like everyone was wrong,” Rafferty said. “His body was never found; the Howth Head assumption was just based on the information they had at the time. His dental records are an exact match to our guy in the tree. And your friend Dominic, he broke his collarbone during a rugby match, when he was fifteen”—I remembered that, suddenly, Dom lounging in the back of the classroom with his arm in a sling—“and the X-rays on that match as well. We’re running DNA, just to be sure, but it’s him.”

  “Then what the hell—” But I was sure I had been at Dominic’s funeral, positive: school choir singing, sniffles from the pews, a scrawny blond mother turned grotesque by the tug-of-war between weeping and industrial quantities of Botox; rugby jersey spread carefully on the rich mahogany of the coffin— “What happened to him? Why was he, why, how did he get into our tree?”

  “That’s what we’d love to know,” Rafferty said. “Any ideas?”

  “No. I haven’t got a— It’s crazy.” I ran my hands over my head, trying to clear it. “Are you—I mean, do you think someone killed him?”

  “Could’ve done,” Rafferty said matter-of-factly. “We don’t know the cause of death; all we can say is his head wasn’t bashed in—you probably noticed that yourself, sure. So he could’ve gone down that tree himself, one way or another. Or not. We’re keeping open minds for now; just finding out a bit more about him, seeing if that gives us a clearer picture. You hung out with him, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes. Sort of.” There had been maybe a dozen of us who ran as a loose crowd, basically because we were in the same class and we were all popular or cool or whatever you want to call it. I had been at one end of the group, Dominic had been at the other; we had hung out by default rather than by active choice, but there was no way I could have come up with the words to explain that. My brain was stuttering, over and over, computer in a loop of crash and reboot and crash: skull on the grass, clot of dirt and roots in the eye socket, Dominic yawning at his desk with his head down over his phone, skull on the grass—