The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  “They don’t. So don’t give them one. You especially.”

  “What? Why me?”

  “Because you’re the one who knew Dominic. If they get it into their heads that he came here to meet someone, who do you think they’re going to be looking into?” And when I rolled my eyes to the sky: “I know you’re all ‘Oh, the Guards are our friends, if you haven’t done anything wrong then you’ve got nothing to worry about.’ But just for now, it might be a good idea to pretend that’s not necessarily true. Just be boring for a while.”

  “That’s all right for you,” Leon said bitchily. “Some of us have more to our lives than kiddies and nightmares and—”

  “And that’s the other thing,” Susanna said. “Don’t say anything over the phone that you don’t want the cops hearing. Our phones could be tapped.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” I said.

  “Hang on,” Leon said, head snapping around. “That’s why you wouldn’t talk to me last night? And you’re telling me to stop being paranoid?”

  “They probably aren’t. But better safe than sorry.” I realized, with a small shock, that on some level Susanna was enjoying herself. Back in school, she had always been the smart one, the one who aced every exam effortlessly while I cruised happily along with my string of B’s and Leon didn’t seem to care one way or another, the one for whom teachers kept predicting great things. I had never thought much about it, except to cheerfully congratulate her when she did something impressive and to raise a mental eyebrow when she ditched the big PhD plans for a life of nappies and snot; but it occurred to me all of a sudden that that ferocious intelligence of hers had probably been craving a challenge for years.

  “Shit,” Leon said, suddenly whispering and wide-eyed. “What about the house? They could’ve planted anything, while they were searching—”

  I snorted. Susanna shook her head. “Nah. Apparently it’s a lot easier to get a warrant to tap someone’s phone than to bug someone’s house. They’d need something solid on us, which of course they don’t have.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” I asked.

  “The miracle of the internet.”

  “Remember last month?” Leon said, pressing his fingers into his eyes like they hurt. “I’d just got into town, and the whole mob was over for lunch, and we were sitting out here freaking out about Hugo? Here we thought we had problems then.”

  “We don’t have problems,” Susanna said. “Not any more than we had then, anyway.”

  Leon buried his face in his hands and started to laugh. There was a hysterical note to it.

  “Oh, get a grip. So detectives talked to you. The world didn’t collapse. And then they went away.”

  “They’ll come back.”

  “Maybe. And unless you say something incredibly thick, they’ll go away again.”

  Leon wiped his hands over his face. He had stopped laughing. “I want to go home,” he said. “Give me a lift.”

  “In a bit, yeah.” Susanna stood up and brushed off the seat of her jeans. “Come on. Let’s go replant that stuff.”

  * * *

  “They’ll come back,” Leon had said; except they didn’t, and I didn’t know what to think about that. I was constantly waiting for them, braced and listening for the knock at the door, and it made it impossible to sink back into our gentle green underwater world. There was something off about the sounds in the house: too loud, naked and raw, as if the windows had thinned and every bird-chirp or gust of wind or clatter of the neighbors’ bin was right inside with us, making me jump—I had gone back to shying like a wild horse at unexpected sounds. For a bad couple of days I was sure my hearing was going weird, before I realized: the acoustics of the garden had changed, wind and sounds barreling unchecked through the space where the wych elm had been, across the flat expanse of mud.

  They didn’t come back but they didn’t feel gone. We kept finding their spoor everywhere, pans stacked wrong in the kitchen cupboards, clothes misfolded, bottles changed around in the bathroom cabinet. It was like having some hidden interloper in the house, a goblin behind the skirting board or a sunken-eyed intruder crouched in the attic, sneaking out to wander the house eating our food and washing in our bathroom while we slept.

  Three days, four, five: no Rafferty on the doorstep, no phone call, nothing on the news even. The reporters had moved on; the flurry of messages on the alumni Facebook group (Jesus what’s the story there, I thought he went off howth head??? . . . Guys just so you know a couple of detectives called round to talk to me, don’t know what’s going on but they were asking all sorts about Dom . . . RIP buddy I’ll never forget that third try against Clongowes good times . . . What’s the story on the garden where he was found whose house is it?) had died down or gone offline. “Maybe the trail’s gone cold,” Leon said hopefully. “Or whatever they call it. They’ve put it on the back burner.”

  “You mean they’ve ditched the whole thing,” I said. “Too difficult, let’s go work on something we can actually solve so we’ll look good to our boss.”

  “Or,” Susanna said, slicing open a huge bouquet of ragamuffiny crimson ranunculus flowers—we were in the kitchen; Hugo was napping—“that’s what they want people to think.”

  “Oh my God, you’re a little fucking ray of sunshine,” Leon snapped. “Do you know that?”

  “Just saying. Ignore me if you want.” She spread out the flowers on the counter. “Who brought these?”

  “Some woman in a red hat,” I said. “Julia Something.”

  “Juliana Dunne? Tall, with dark curly hair? I think she and Hugo had a thing going for a while, back when we were kids.”

  “They did not,” Leon said. He was sitting on a countertop, picking at a bowl of nuts and swinging one heel against a cupboard door. I wanted to tell him to stop, but in this mood it would only have made him worse.

  “They totally did. They had this huge fight, one time when we were like fourteen—well, Hugo didn’t fight exactly, because Hugo, but he actually raised his voice, and Juliana was yelling, and then she stormed out and slammed the door. That’s a couple fight.” To me: “Remember that?”

  “Not really,” I said. The whole thing sounded unlikely. I had a paranoid moment of wondering if Susanna was making it up to fuck with my head.

  She rolled her eyes, slicing stems. “Oh, you. I swear by the next week you’d forgotten it ever happened. Typical: anything you feel bad about just falls straight out of your head. We were up in Leon’s room, and they were in the hall? And we commando-crawled out onto the landing to eavesdrop? And then Juliana slammed out and we were holding our breaths, waiting for Hugo to go, but he looked up and snapped, ‘I hope the three of you have had your entertainment for the day,’ and then he went back into the kitchen and banged the door. And we were so ashamed of ourselves we stayed upstairs for the rest of the evening, and all we had for dinner was this Mars bar Leon had stashed somewhere. You seriously don’t remember that?”

  “I don’t,” Leon said flatly, rummaging through the nut bowl.

  “Maybe,” I said. It did sound sort of familiar, the more I thought about it—dust from the landing rug tickling my nose, Susanna’s quick breathing next to my ear; the three of us, afterwards, sitting on Leon’s floor staring guiltily at each other— “I guess so. Sort of.”

  “Huh,” Susanna said. Her glance at me had an unexpected sharp assessment that reminded me unpleasantly of Detective Martin. But before I could say anything she turned away, rapping Leon across the knuckles with a flower—“Quit doing that, other people like the cashews too, plus it’s disgusting”—and they were off into another round of bickering.

  Susanna was there because she had taken Hugo to radiotherapy—his last session, which somehow came with a shock of betrayal, the doctors blandly waving good-bye and turning away as the quicksand pulled him under; according to Susanna they had tried to push
hospice care, but Hugo had shut that right down. I wasn’t sure what Leon was doing there. He was around a lot more these days, bouncing in with sushi just when Hugo and Melissa and I were in the middle of cooking dinner, hovering around the study half the morning tinkering with Hugo’s knickknacks, flopping down on the floor and searching name lists for all of five minutes before popping up like a meerkat with some conversation opener, OhmyGod did my mother tell you she wants to learn the violin, it’s going to be horrendous, I bet the neighbors sue, I’ll have to go back to Berlin I don’t even care what the police think . . . Toby you know my friend Liam from school, well I ran into him yesterday turns out he’s editing this new magazine it’d be the perfect place for a piece on Melissa’s shop . . . There was a feverish, manic quality to it all that made me wonder if he was on something, although uppers seemed like an odd choice in the circumstances. “He’s having a difficult time,” Hugo said, when the door knocker banged yet again and I made some exasperated comment about ignoring him until he went away. “He’s highly strung to begin with, and all this at once . . . He’ll be fine in the end. Just bear with him meanwhile.”

  Which was more or less what Susanna said, too, except in less comforting terms. She and I were in the kitchen, cleaning up after Sunday lunch—which was getting more of a lunatic vibe every time: no one had managed to come up with new theories to replace the Civil War informer and the Celtic boundary sacrifice, or at least not theories that they liked enough to share, so everyone was putting a lot of energy into pretending the whole thing had never happened. To make sure there was never a second of tricky silence, my dad and all the uncles were laboriously dredging up childhood-escapade memories, and everyone else was laughing too hard. Leon sounded like something out of a monkey house; the reason I was doing cleanup was because I couldn’t stand being in the room with him any longer. “I thought you told Leon not to do drugs for a while,” I said, when another frenetic whoop filtered through from the living room.

  “He’s not.” Susanna was covering leftovers, with one eye on Zach and Sallie, who were happily digging a trench in the battlefield out back.

  “Then what’s his excuse?” I was rearranging the fridge, trying to make room. There were a lot of leftovers. No one except Oliver had eaten much.

  “He’s just tense. And you’re not helping. Quit picking on him.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “Come on. Rolling your eyes every time he opens his mouth—”

  I shoved out-of-date cheddar to the back of a shelf. “He sounds like fucking Whatshername out of Friends. He’s giving me a headache.”

  “Listen,” Susanna said, scooping potatoes into a smaller bowl. “You want to be careful with Leon. He’s scared enough of the cops already. You making snide comments about ‘I hope you keep it together better than this around Rafferty’ isn’t helping.”

  I hadn’t thought anyone had overheard that. “I was joking, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m not sure he’s really in a funny-ha-ha mood.”

  “Well, that’s his problem.”

  That got a flick of her eyebrow, but she said easily enough, “Sure. But when Leon gets too stressed . . . Remember that time, we were like nine, and he broke that weird old barometer thing my dad had on his desk? And you kept poking at him, Oh my God, you’re in so much trouble, Uncle Phil loves that thing, he’s gonna be sooo mad— Remember that?”

  I wasn’t sure. “You make me sound like a total little shit. I wasn’t that bad.”

  “Nah, not a little shit. You were only messing; you never worried about getting in trouble—you always talked your way out of it anyway—so I don’t think you got that Leon worried about it a lot. By the time my dad got home Leon was in a total panic, and he took one look at my dad and yelled, ‘Toby ate the mints out of your desk drawer!’ Do you seriously not remember?”

  I thought I did, sort of, maybe. Leon’s open mouth and his hands uselessly scrabbling to piece broken edges together, Susanna picking fragments of glass out of the rug, me breathing clouds of extra-strong mint as I watched—except surely I had gone to find glue, I had tried to help, hadn’t I? “Sort of,” I said. “What happened in the end?”

  “You talked your way out of that one, too.” Wry glance over her shoulder. “Of course. The adorable sheepish grin and ‘Oh, I was pretending I was you, Uncle Phil, I was going to sit at your desk and write a brief saying it was against the law for my teacher to give homework, but I know you always need to eat lots of mints when you write briefs . . .’ And Dad laughed, and then of course he couldn’t give out. I have to say, though, you put him in a good enough mood that he didn’t actually get too pissed off about the barometer. So it all worked out in the end.”

  “So what’s your point?” Another screech from the living room, Jesus— “You think if Leon, if I wind him up, he’s going to, what? Sic the cops on me?”

  Susanna shrugged, deftly ripping clingfilm. “Well, not on purpose. But he’s not thinking straight. If you get him scared and pissed off enough, who knows what he might come out with. So you probably want to bear that in mind, and lay off him. Because you might not be able to talk your way out of that one.”

  “Oh come on.” I laughed; she didn’t react. “He wouldn’t. This isn’t kids with mints; this is real shit. Leon knows that.”

  Susanna turned, a bowl in each hand, and gave me a straight look on her way to the fridge. She said, “You know, Leon doesn’t always like you that much.”

  What? “Well,” I said, after a moment. “That’s not my problem, either.”

  Susanna’s eyebrow went up, but before she could say anything Tom stuck his head in the door. “Hey,” he said cheerily. “Come back in, you have to hear this, your dad was telling us about—” And then, his eyes going past us to the garden: “Oh Jesus. Su. Look at that.”

  Zach was getting up from a full-length fall, or maybe a dive, into their trench. He was grinning and coated from head to toe in muck. Sallie wasn’t much better. She pulled a length of muddy hair in front of her face and examined it with interest. “Mummy!” she yelled. “We’re dirty!”

  “Holy shit,” Susanna said. “That’s impressive.”

  “How are we going to get them home? The car’s going to be—”

  “Bath,” Susanna said. “And there’s spare clothes upstairs. We’ll have to carry them up, or they’ll get muck all over— Kids! Enough dirt for today!”

  Zach and Sallie did the predictable bitching and begging, until finally Su and Tom scooped them up at arm’s length and lugged them towards the stairs, Sallie giggling and pawing muddy streaks onto Susanna’s cheeks while Susanna laughed and tried to dodge, Zach giving me a blank stare over Tom’s shoulder and reaching out to swipe a nice set of fingermarks right down the sleeve of my white T-shirt. “Well that looks fun,” Leon said, sliding past them into the kitchen. “Not. Shit, did I miss cleaning up?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oopsie.” Fingertips to rounded mouth. He was medium drunk. “I totally meant to help, I swear. But your dad is a funny, funny fucker. You thought we got up to stuff behind our parents’ backs? We were amateurs. This one time, right, they dressed up their neighbors’ dog as—”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that one.” My dad actually hated that story, I couldn’t remember why. If he was digging it out, he was getting desperate. “And all the other ones.”

  “Ooo,” Leon said, shaking the ice in his glass and giving me a look that, under the drunken glaze, seemed surprisingly sharp. “Who rattled your cage?”

  “I’m just not in the mood.”

  “Was Susanna saying things?” And when I didn’t answer: “Because I love her to bits, but OMG, when she wants to she can be the biggest headwrecker—”

  “No,” I said, and I brushed past him and headed back to the living room to find Melissa and see if she had any ideas about how to make all these people go away.
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  * * *

  The Sunday lunch, the hours in Hugo’s study, the evenings in front of the fire: to a passing glance, Hugo and Melissa and I would have looked like we’d fallen effortlessly back into our routine. Hugo had even got a step further with Mrs. Wozniak’s McNamara mystery: he had tracked down the new crop of cousins, one of whom had turned out to have a whole bunch of some ancestor’s illegible nineteenth-century diaries that we spent hours trying to decipher, mostly coming up with bitchy rants about stew quality and the guy’s mother-in-law. “Ah,” Hugo said with satisfaction, pulling up his chair to the stack of small battered volumes: yellowed pages, faded ink, brown leather binding rubbed at the edges. “I’m so much more at home with the old-school stuff. Centimorgans and megabases are all very well, but the software cuts out so many of the irrelevancies, and I like the irrelevancies. Give me a good messy old document that needs hours with a fine-tooth comb, and I’m a happy man.”

  But it wasn’t the same. Hugo was getting worse: not the final downslide, not yet, but it was getting close enough that its form was starting to coalesce, we could see the hulking outline of what it would be when it finally stepped out of the shadows. Melissa and I were doing more and more of the cooking—Hugo couldn’t stand for longer than a few minutes, couldn’t grip a knife strongly enough to cut anything tougher than butter, we found ourselves tacitly planning meals (stir-fries, risotto) that wouldn’t force him to sit at the table sawing clumsily away. When Phil called round they didn’t play draughts any more, and it took me longer than it should have to understand why not. There were times when I would become aware that the quiet rhythms of movement from Hugo’s side of the study had stopped, and when I glanced up I would see him staring into space, hands limp on his desk. Once I sat watching him like that for fifteen minutes; when I couldn’t stand it any longer and said, “Hugo?” it took me three tries before he finally turned—infinitely slowly, like someone drugged to the eyeballs—and looked at me with the same incurious, affectless gaze he would have given to a chair or a mug. Finally something switched on in his eyes, he blinked and said, “Yes? Did you find something?” and I came up with some babble, and gradually he found his way back. There were mornings when he came down in the same clothes he had been wearing the day before, crumpled into deep slept-in creases. When one evening I suggested tentatively that maybe I could help him change, he snapped, “Do you think I’m a fool?” and the glare he hit me with—a blast of pure undisguised disgust—shocked me so badly that I stammered something incoherent and buried my face in my book. The excruciating silence went on for what felt like forever before I heard his steps dragging out of the room and up the stairs. I was half afraid to go downstairs the next morning, but he turned from the cooker and smiled as if nothing had happened.