The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  “We’ll ask around,” Rafferty said. “The good news is, we’re done here. The lads are packing up, and then we’ll be out of your hair. Thanks for all your patience over the last—”

  Downstairs, the front door slammed and Melissa’s voice, fresh as summer, called out, “Hi, I’m home! Oof, this rain, it—” There was a startled silence.

  “That’s Melissa,” I said, standing up. “I’d better—” and while I was getting down to her and trying to explain what was going on, the cops came clumping down the stairs with their evidence bags and their cameras and whatever else, and Rafferty and Kerr shook all our hands on the doorstep and made more meaningless noises about how much they appreciated our cooperation, and then the door closed behind them and they were gone, leaving the three of us finally alone in the sudden high-ceilinged emptiness of the house.

  We went out onto the terrace to face the damage. The rain had stopped, just a haze in the air and the occasional leaf-drip rattling through a tree. That last strip of grass and poppies was gone: the garden was mud, nothing left but the lines of trees backed up against the side walls in what looked like a doomed last stand, broken by the jagged crater—shockingly wide and deep—where the wych elm had been. The uprooted bushes were lined up considerately along the back wall, in case we had plans for them. In one corner of the terrace was a neat pile of stuff the cops had apparently found along the way: shards of old china glazed in pretty blue and white patterns, a dirt-caked Barbie, a plastic seaside spade, an ornately whorled iron bracket thick with rust. The smell of turned earth was overwhelming, almost too rich and wild to breathe. In the furrows, tiny movement everywhere: worms curling, woodlice scurrying, ants clambering. At a safe distance from us, a couple of blackbirds and a robin darted and pecked.

  “We’ll replant the bushes tomorrow,” Melissa said. “And I can ring the garden center and have them come and put in grass, the sod or whatever they—”

  “No,” Hugo said gently. “Leave it.”

  “Toby and I will look after it, you won’t have to—”

  He reached out and put a hand on her head, lightly. “Shhh. We’ve had enough comings and goings.”

  After a moment she took a breath and nodded. “We’ll do the bushes. And get some new plants.”

  “Thank you, my dear. That would be wonderful.”

  We stood there for a long time, while the birds and the insects went about their business and the leftover raindrops ticked in the trees. The air was thin and chilly and the light was turning gray, but none of us could seem to find a reason to move.

  Seven

  Halfway through the next morning Leon showed up, and Susanna not long after. Hugo had gone for a nap and I had been wandering around the house picking up knickknacks and putting them down again, unable to settle to work or anything else, so I was relieved to see them, but that didn’t last. Rafferty and Kerr had been to see Susanna that morning and Leon the night before; they were both on edge, in their different ways, and for some reason I couldn’t work out Leon was in a bad mood with Susanna. “I rang you,” Susanna said to him, slinging her jacket over the back of a kitchen chair. “Like five times. I was going to give you a lift here.”

  Leon was unloading the dishwasher, banging plates down on the counter with unnecessary force, and didn’t look up. “I got the bus.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I did. Last night. So I could tell you what the cops asked me.”

  “Sallie had had a nightmare. I was dealing with that. And I didn’t need to know what they’d asked you. It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

  “It would have made a difference to me. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Well, we can talk now,” Susanna said coolly. “Outside, though. I want a smoke. Is that coffee still hot?”

  “Yeah,” I said, passing her a cup from the cupboard where I was putting the dishes away. “Jesus, Leon, keep it down. You’ll wake Hugo.”

  “No I won’t. He’s miles away.” But he toned down the banging. “What does Tom think about all this?” he asked Susanna. “Is he having fun?”

  Susanna poured herself coffee from the pot on the stove and headed to the fridge for milk. “He’s fine with it.”

  “I bet he’s going out of his tiny mind. This is probably the scariest thing that’s ever happened to him, isn’t it, except for the time he went wild and went an extra stop on the bus without paying and the inspector got on and he nearly shat himself—”

  “You,” Susanna said crisply, without turning from the fridge, “don’t have the faintest clue about Tom. It would take a whole lot more than this to make him lose his mind. Unlike some people.”

  “Ooo,” Leon said, into the chilly silence that followed.

  “How’s Carsten doing?” I asked. Whatever this was, I didn’t feel like dealing with it. Between the bad nights and the Xanax I was exhausted, a thick leaden exhaustion that I’d thought I’d left behind in my apartment, and my head hurt in a petty nagging way that wasn’t quite worth a painkiller.

  Leon grimaced. “He keeps wanting to come over. I keep saying no, because I’m not having him anywhere near this mess. He’d go all overprotective and get stroppy with the cops.” A snide look under his lashes at Susanna, who was unlikely to suffer from spousal overprotectiveness and who ignored him. “I’ve never gone this long without seeing him. Not since the day we met. I hate it.”

  “You can just go home, you know,” Susanna pointed out. “Any time you want.”

  “No I can’t. Not now. It’ll look like I’m doing a runner because I’ve got something to hide.”

  “It’ll look like you’re going home. To your boyfriend and your job. Like you were going to anyway.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well then.” Susanna dug a packet of Marlboro Lights out of the depths of her bag. “Come on.”

  The rain was still holding off, if only barely. A lean gray cat, which had been stalking a blackbird among the ridges of mud, streaked away and scrambled over a wall at the sight of us. “What a mess,” Susanna said. She had brought out an old dishtowel; she dropped it on the terrace and scuffed it around with her foot, soaking up leftover rain. “We should replant all that stuff, before it dies.”

  “Melissa and I are going to do it when she gets home,” I said.

  “How’s Melissa with all this?”

  “Fine. Glad they’re out of our hair.”

  “Well,” Susanna said. She tossed the towel towards the door and dropped down to sit at the top of the steps, moving over to make room for me beside her. “More or less.”

  “Oh, God,” Leon said, sinking down on her other side. The week’s events had apparently hit him right in the fashion sense: his forelock hung over his face in a childish, neglected flop and he was wearing a misshapen gray jumper that didn’t go with his edgy distressed jeans. “I hate cops. I didn’t like them even before I got arrested, and now I swear to God, just the sight of them—”

  “You got arrested?” I said. “What for?”

  “Nothing. It was years ago. In Amsterdam.”

  “I didn’t know you even could get arrested in Amsterdam. What’d you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. It was stupid. I had a fight with— You know what, it doesn’t even matter, it all got sorted out in a couple of hours. The point is, I could really do with a nice big spliff right now.”

  “Here,” I said, tossing him my cigarette packet. “Best I can do.” I was kind of enjoying this, actually, after all Leon’s little jabs about how there was no way I could cope with a tough situation; not that I had handled the detectives like a champ or anything, but at least I wasn’t having the vapors and practically demanding smelling salts. “Just breathe. You’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t fucking patronize me. I’m so not in the mood.” But he took a cigarette and bent his head to his lighter. Hi
s hand was shaking.

  “Were they mean to you?”

  “Just fuck off.”

  “No, seriously. Were they? They were fine with me.” A little too fine, actually—the thought of Kerr’s slowed-down sympathy still twisted my stomach—but that was none of Leon’s business.

  “No, they weren’t mean. They don’t have to be. They’re detectives. They’re scary no matter what.”

  “They were totally considerate to me,” Susanna said. “They gave me a ring in advance and everything, to check what time I’d have the kids out of the way. What did they ask you?”

  Leon threw my smoke packet back to me. “What Dominic was like. How I got on with him. How everyone else got on with him. How much he was over here. Stuff like that.”

  “Me too. What did you say?”

  Leon shrugged. “I said he was around every now and then, he was your typical loud rich rugby-head, but I don’t remember a lot about him because I basically didn’t give a fuck about him. He was Toby’s friend, not mine.”

  “He wasn’t my friend,” I said.

  “Well, he definitely wasn’t mine. The only reason we knew him was through you.”

  “It’s not like Dominic Ganly would’ve normally hung out with the likes of me and Leon,” Susanna said. “God forbid.”

  “He wasn’t my bloody friend. He was a guy I knew. Why does everyone keep—”

  “Is that what you said to the cops?”

  “Yeah. Basically.”

  An approving nod. “Smart.”

  What? “It’s not smart. It’s true.”

  “I’m just going to keep saying I don’t remember anything about anything, ever,” Leon said. He was smoking his cigarette fast, in short sharp drags. “I don’t care; they can’t prove I do. The less we give them, the better. They’re looking to pin it on someone, and I’d rather it wasn’t me, thanks very much.”

  “What the fuck have you been watching?” I wanted to know. The coffee and the cigarette were helping my headache and my fatigue and the overall sense of low-level prickling unease, but not a lot. “‘Pin it on someone’—pin what? They don’t even know what happened to him.”

  “On the news they said ‘treating the death as suspicious.’ And ‘anyone with any information, contact the Guards.’”

  “It is suspicious,” Susanna said. She didn’t look particularly worried about it: comfortably cross-legged, hands wrapped around her coffee cup, face tilted to the sky as if it were a beautiful day. “He was down a bloody tree. That doesn’t mean he was murdered. It just means they want to find out how he got there.”

  “They told me they think he was murdered,” Leon said.

  “Course they did. They wanted to see what you’d do. Did you freak out?”

  “No, I didn’t freak out. I asked them why they thought that.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “They didn’t. Of course. They just asked me if I knew any reason why anyone would want to kill him.”

  “And?”

  “And I said no. Obviously.”

  “Did you?” Susanna asked, with mild surprise. “I said he was kind of upsetting people, that summer. He was a nice guy, but something was obviously going on with him. That could cut either way—it could be a reason why someone would kill him, or a reason why he’d kill himself—but that’s Rafferty’s problem to figure out, not mine.”

  “I told them the same thing,” I said.

  Leon threw up his hands. “Oh, great, now they’re going to think I was lying—”

  “No they’re not,” Susanna said. “They’re not stupid. People remember different things; they know that. Did they ask if you remembered the night he went missing?”

  “Oh yeah,” Leon said. “I said no, nuh-uh, nothing. They kept on pushing, they were giving me these worried looks, like that was really suspicious—Are you sure, come on, you must remember something, think back . . . Who remembers some random night ten years ago? If I had, that would’ve been suspicious.”

  “I said yes,” Susanna said serenely, finding a cigarette. “I remember it because it wasn’t some random night, it was the night Dominic went missing. So afterwards everyone was talking about what they’d been doing—OhmyGod, I was just sitting in bed texting my BFF and poor poor Dominic was out there feeling so alone, if only I had rung him then maybe blah blah blah . . . The four of us were here. We had dinner and watched telly, and then Hugo went to bed and the three of us stayed up talking for a while, and then we went to bed around midnight.”

  “Wait,” I said. I had just managed to put my finger on something that had been bothering me. “How come they thought he’d killed himself back then? And now they don’t? I mean, if there were good reasons at the time, then why do they think—”

  “He sent a text to everyone in his phone, remember?” Susanna said. “The night he went missing; late, like three or four in the morning. Just saying, ‘Sorry.’ You must’ve got one. I even did—I don’t even know why Dominic and I had each other’s number, maybe from when I was tutoring him for the French orals? I remember because it woke me up and I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just figured he’d texted the wrong person and went back to sleep.”

  I did have some kind of muddled memory of this, or at least I thought I did, not that that was worth very much seeing as I also remembered Dominic’s funeral. “I think I got one,” I said.

  “It was a huge deal,” Leon said. “Who’d got that text and who hadn’t. Personally I think about half the people who claimed they’d got one were bullshitting so they could pretend they’d been best buddies with Dominic. Lorcan Mullan? Please. No way did Dominic Ganly even know Lorcan existed, never mind have his number.”

  “Oh, God,” Susanna said. “And everyone claiming that as soon as they saw it they just knew, they had OMG a total premonition! Isabelle Carney was swearing to anyone who’d listen that she saw Dominic standing at the foot of her bed, glowing. I like to think that even Dominic would’ve had better taste than to waste his big apparition moment on an idiot like Isabelle Carney.” She tipped up her coffee cup to get the last of it. “Now presumably the cops figure, if someone killed him, they sent the text to make everyone think it was suicide. And it worked.”

  “But the whole Howth Head thing,” I said. “Everyone thought that. Where did that come from?”

  “They tracked the phone there,” Susanna said. “That was where the text was sent from, or where the phone last pinged a tower, or something. So everyone just assumed.”

  “Which means,” Leon said, “now the cops think he was murdered because if he just killed himself in our tree, God knows why he would do that but if, then how did his phone end up on Howth Head?”

  His voice was starting to rise again. “Chill out,” Susanna said. “Plenty of ways. He was going to jump off Howth Head, but then he couldn’t go through with it, so he threw the phone away and came back here and did whatever in the tree—”

  “Why here?”

  She shrugged. “Because here has more privacy than his place did, maybe. How would I know? Or else he never went to Howth at all, he just killed himself here—or OD’d or whatever—and then someone freaked out and did the phone thing so it wouldn’t be connected to them—”

  “Oh, great. Even if they do think that—which they won’t, because they’re cops, it’s not their job to think up innocent explanations—but if. They’re going to think it had to be one of us. What with it being our garden.”

  “No they’re not. If Dominic could get into the garden, then he could bring along someone else. Who could have watched him OD, or fall into the tree, or whatever, and then freaked out. Or who could’ve killed him, if you want to go that way.”

  Leon dragged his hands over his face. “Fucking hell,” he said.

  “How did he get into the garden?” I wanted to know. “Because the wall, I mea
n, remember the time Jason O’Halloran and that guy from Blackrock got into a fight, at the Halloween party? And Sean and I threw them out? Jason tried to climb over the wall and get back in, but he couldn’t do it. And he was a big guy. Even bigger than Dominic.”

  “Well, I suppose Dominic could have found a crate or something to stand on, or brought something along. But . . .” Susanna drew on her cigarette. Her profile, upturned to the gray sky, was clean and calm as a plaster saint’s. “I’m betting he didn’t. Remember how the cops were looking for extra keys to the garden door? And Hugo said there used to be one hanging beside the door, but it went missing? It disappeared sometime that summer. Like, a month or two before Dominic died.”

  “How come you didn’t say that to the cops when they asked?” I said. “Or to us?”

  “I didn’t remember then. Afterwards I went away and thought about it. What you said about Faye? My ‘weird blond cutter friend’?” Sidelong eyebrow-lift at me. “That reminded me. At the beginning of that summer, I used to sneak her in through the garden—I figured the less Hugo knew the better, he didn’t need her horrible parents giving him shit, plus I was eighteen so the less adults knew the better in general. By the end of the summer, though, I had to let her in the front, because the key was gone and I didn’t want to ask Hugo where he kept the spare.”

  “Did you say that to the cops today?” Leon asked.

  “Course.” Susanna put out her cigarette on the step and tucked the butt back into the packet. “I couldn’t give them an exact date, obviously, but still, they were very interested. Who knows; maybe Dominic was making plans.”

  “Oh, God,” Leon said, doubling over like his stomach hurt. “I really, really want that spliff. Have either of you got any?”

  “No,” Susanna said. “And neither will you, if you’re smart. Rafferty and his pals are going to be asking around about us. Possibly keeping an eye on us.”

  “So what?” I wanted to know. “You’ve been going on about how they don’t have any reason to think we did anything—”