The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  “Oh, he was happy all right,” Leon said. “Not the angst-ridden type, our Toby.”

  “What was he like? Was he nice?”

  “I was a saint,” I said. “I studied twenty-four hours a day and spent my spare time reading bedtime stories to orphans and saving baby seals.”

  “Shh, silly. You’re never serious about this. I’m asking them.”

  “Toby was basically Toby,” Susanna said. “Eighteen, so he was a bit louder and more obnoxious, but he’s always been very much himself.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

  “Was he loud and obnoxious?” Melissa asked Leon.

  “We’re probably the worst people to ask,” Susanna said, rolling over onto her stomach to find her glass. “We know each other too well; we don’t really look at each other properly.”

  “I’d have loved to have cousins like that.” Melissa had her head snuggled into the hollow of my shoulder, listening with the same milky, wondering gaze she used to have when I told her those childhood stories. “Mine are nice, but we never saw each other much. It must have been lovely to be so close.”

  “Well,” Leon said. “It’s not like we were close close. When we were little, yeah, but by the time we were eighteen . . . not so much.”

  What? “Of course we were,” I said. “We were spending the whole holidays together here—”

  “Right, and during term time we barely hung out at all. And it’s not like we spent the holidays snuggled up together pouring out our hearts to each other.”

  I wasn’t sure what to think about this. As far as I was concerned, the old bond had hung on right through secondary school, until college hit and we all went our separate ways—I had felt exactly the same as always about the two of them, I’d assumed they felt the same about me, why wouldn’t they? I couldn’t tell whether Leon was rewriting history to make himself feel better about whatever he was trying to pull on me, or whether I had genuinely missed some subtle but crucial shift along the way.

  “Well, we still loved each other and all that stuff,” Susanna said, seeing my face. “We just weren’t bestest buddies. That’s natural enough.”

  “What about you two?” Melissa asked. “Were you basically the same back then?”

  “I was a total nerd,” Susanna said cheerfully. “And a space cadet. Someone could be mocking me right to my face, or hitting on me, and the whole thing would go straight over my head. I like to think I’m a bit more copped on these days, but then I would, wouldn’t I?”

  “And I was a loser,” Leon said crisply, flicking ash.

  “You weren’t,” Susanna said, instantly and firmly. “You were great. Smart and kind and funny and brave and all the good stuff.”

  She was smiling at him. Her face had a warmth, an unconcealed glow of something like admiration, that startled me: Leon? what had been so great about Leon? He smiled back, but wryly. “Course I was,” he said. “Unfortunately, no one noticed except you.” To Melissa: “I was the kid who got his head flushed down the jacks and found shites in his lunchbox.”

  “Poor Leon.” Melissa reached out a hand to squeeze his. I couldn’t tell whether she was actually a bit tipsy or whether she was putting it on. If she was, she was surprisingly good at it. “That’s horrible.”

  He squeezed her hand back. “I survived.”

  “Did Toby take good care of you?”

  “He wasn’t bad, actually,” Susanna said. “He brought us along to the good parties. Warned me when some guy chatting me up was a wanker. Basically, he kept me clued in enough that I didn’t make a complete tit of myself, at least not too often. He was even fairly tactful about it. Mostly.”

  “That’s funny,” Melissa said dreamily. “I wouldn’t have expected him to be like that.”

  I curled a strand of her hair round my finger. “What did you expect?”

  “I imagined you a little bit thoughtless. So busy with your own things, you wouldn’t really notice anyone else’s problems.”

  “Hey!” I said, mock-wounded.

  “I don’t mean in a bad way. Just bouncing along, with your head full of so much that there wasn’t room to realize . . . Lots of teenagers are like that.” To the others: “Was he?”

  I actually was mildly unsettled by this. It was looking like Melissa was right, but I wasn’t clear on how she would know that stuff: even if I had been a self-absorbed teenage brat, that had been years before I met her.

  “Well,” Susanna said. “He was kind of oblivious sometimes. But there was no malice in it. Just being a teenager. Like you said.”

  But I had caught her straight warning stare at Leon. He had been about to say something, but instead he shut his mouth tight and concentrated on putting out the joint on the terrace. It was very strange, seeing the two of them as the enemy; unsettling to the core, like suddenly seeing the world through a dark distorting overlay, no way to know which version was the true one.

  Melissa had caught that look, too, or anyway she had caught something that told her to move on. “What about Dominic Ganly? What was he like?”

  “We didn’t know him very well,” Susanna said. “Toby saw a lot more of him.”

  “Toby says he never thought about him.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “He was just sort of there. Like what you said about not really noticing the people you see all the time. Or maybe you’re right and I was a bit oblivious.” I caught the snide arch of Leon’s eyebrow—You think?—but he kept his mouth shut.

  “I keep wondering about him,” Melissa said. “At first all I could think was Poor thing, poor boy—because he was practically a child, wasn’t he?”

  Leon moved sharply, but he turned it into reaching for the Rizla packet. Melissa was good at this. I hadn’t really expected her to be, and it gave me a sweet sharp thrill of triumph: the two of us, in this as a team, invincible.

  “Except then,” she said, “Sean and Declan were over for dinner the other night. And they really didn’t like Dominic.” To me: “Did they?”

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  “What did they say?” Susanna asked.

  “They didn’t really go into details,” Melissa said. “I think they didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. But they obviously thought he wasn’t a very good person.”

  Leon had started working on another joint; he didn’t look up from the lighter flame. “Were they right?” Melissa asked.

  “Sean and Dec are no idiots,” Susanna said, fishing a cucumber slice out of her glass to nibble on. “Or they weren’t back then, anyway; I haven’t seen them in a while. If they thought he was bad news—”

  “Well but,” I said, “in fairness, teenagers. Everything’s black and white. All it takes is one stupid fight, like I don’t know over a rugby match, and—”

  “Dominic,” Leon said, a little too sharply, “was a straight-up arsehole.”

  “Pretty much, yeah,” Susanna said. “From what I saw.”

  “What kind of arsehole?” Melissa asked.

  Susanna shrugged. “Your basic model. He was big and good-looking and popular and good at rugby—”

  “Which at our school,” Leon said, “meant you could get away with literally anything.”

  “Right. So he did. Bullied people, basically. Which didn’t make him unique; there was a lot of it about. Even in context, though, I remember him being fairly nasty.”

  I waited for Melissa to keep pushing—Why, what did he do, did he ever bully you—but she didn’t. Instead she sat up, brushing her hair out of her face, and reached for her glass. “Some people are just bad news,” she said. “I don’t like thinking that, but they are. The best thing you can do is stay far away from them. If you can.” I tried to catch her eye, but she wasn’t looking at me.

  Susanna laughed a little, up at the sky: dark blue now, a heavy moon hanging above the trees. �
�Amen,” she said.

  “OK,” I said, lifting a hand to get their attention. “Question. I’ve got a question. What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  “Oh my God, it’s like being ten,” Leon said. He was rolling with enormous care, bent over, nose almost touching his hands. “Truth or Dare. If I pick Dare, do I have to climb a tree and moon the neighbors again?”

  “Jesus, I’d forgotten that,” Susanna said. To Melissa: “Old Mrs. Whatsherface next door was out in her garden, but she didn’t have her glasses, so she couldn’t work out what she was seeing. She was there peering up at this shiny white arse—”

  Leon started to laugh. “‘Princess? Can you not get down? Here, kittykittykitty—’”

  “Leon was laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall out of the tree—”

  “Knock it off,” I said. “I’m serious.”

  “Jesus,” Susanna said, eyebrows arched. “What have you done? Have you been arms-dealing out of that gallery?”

  “Nothing goes out of this garden. I swear. I just want to know.”

  “What brought this on?”

  “Well, because. I’ve been thinking, a lot. What with . . .” I waved a loose arm at the garden and the house and the universe in general. I wasn’t as wasted as I was pretending to be, but my arms and legs had an interesting will of their own and the lighted windows of the apartment block seemed to have detached themselves from the walls and were merrily jigging about. “Because, look, take Dominic. OK? He probably thought he was a good guy. And most people thought so too—I mean, I did, or at least I took it for granted that probably he was, because people mostly are, right? But what you’re saying there, and the stuff Sean and Dec were saying—it’s like, whoa . . . maybe not so good.” I pretended not to notice the sardonic up-glance from Leon. “And on the other hand, right, there’s Hugo. He’s a good person. I don’t know if he knows he’s a good person, but we do. I mean, there’s no guarantee that, once he’s gone, there won’t be people saying different. But at least we’ll be able to tell the world, if we need to obviously, that he was a good man. Because he is. So”—I had sort of forgotten where I was going with this—“so. You see what I mean.”

  “Not really,” Susanna said, topping up glasses and watching me with interest.

  “Well”—I found my place again—“right. So I have to wonder, right? I’ve always thought of myself as a decent guy. Yeah? But the shit I’ve done in my life, haven’t we all, but the shit I’ve done, is it bad enough that I don’t count as a good person? Or what?” I blinked back and forth between the two of them. “You haven’t been thinking about this stuff? Seriously?”

  “Nope,” Leon said, licking the edge of the Rizla in one deft sweep. “And I’m not planning to, thanks all the same.”

  “Well,” I said, after a moment. “I guess I’m seeing this differently. From a, an angle. Because I don’t know if anyone told you guys this, right, but I could have died, back in spring. With that thing, the break-in. I nearly died.”

  A small sound from Melissa, a quick breath. I didn’t look at her. “And that really fucks with your head. You know? Because I don’t know, if I had died, I don’t know whether I would have counted as a good person or not. I’m not talking about heaven and hell, I don’t . . . Just, it matters. To me. So I’d really like it if you’d think about it. Just for a few minutes. I’d like it a lot.”

  Susanna had turned her head to look at me; the turn shifted half her face into shadow, I couldn’t read her expression at all. “OK,” she said. “I’ll play. If you will.”

  “Thanks, Su,” I said, raising my glass to her and managing not to spill any. “I mean it. You’re a, a, a rock star. A trouper. Something.”

  “So let’s hear it. What’d you do?”

  I said, “You go first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. I need to hear other people’s first.”

  Susanna lay back with her arms behind her head and looked up at the sky. Curve of her throat, drape of the throw around her body, long lines of her outstretched legs, all whitened and chilled by the moonlight: she looked like a statue washed up on some lonely beach, never to be found. “OK,” she said. “I might have sort of killed someone.”

  Leon, in the middle of lighting the joint, choked and doubled over, hacking. “What,” I said.

  “Su—” Leon managed to wheeze, urgently.

  “Not Dominic,” Susanna said to both of us, amused. “Jesus. Pair of drama queens.”

  “What the fuck,” Leon croaked, watery-eyed and fanning himself.

  “Breathe.”

  “I almost had a heart attack.”

  “Have a sip of that.”

  “OK,” I said. “So who the hell did you kill? Or maybe sort of kill, or whatever?”

  “Well,” Susanna said. She arched her back to brush something out from under it, settled herself more comfortably. “Remember how I told you the consultant who delivered Zach was a total shit?”

  I remembered the conversation, all right, even if the details hadn’t stuck. “Yeah.”

  “Tip of the iceberg. Basically, he really enjoyed forcing me to do things I didn’t want to do, and he really enjoyed hurting me. He did stuff, every appointment—I hadn’t had a kid before, and since I was so young none of my friends had either, so at the time I had no idea it wasn’t standard. It didn’t even occur to me to walk out and find another doctor. But when I was having Sallie I went somewhere else, because fuck him, and duhhh, revelation, apparently the shit he’d been doing wasn’t standard after all.”

  “You never told me,” Leon said.

  “It wasn’t exactly coffee chitchat. You really don’t want to hear the gory details.”

  “I wouldn’t have cared. That’s awful, you dealing with that all by yourself—” He was bug-eyed stoned and looking really distressed. “Did you at least say it to Tom?”

  “Nope. He had enough going on. So did I; I didn’t even really think about it myself, not then.” Susanna smiled up at him. “I was OK, Leon. Honest to God. I knew I could deal with it, once I got a chance.”

  “And?” I said, reaching to take the joint off Leon; he had had plenty. I sneaked a glance at Melissa, who was presumably getting a lot more than she had bargained for here, but she was sitting quietly, cross-legged, with the blanket draped over her lap and her glass cupped in both hands, watching Susanna.

  “And I dealt with it,” Susanna said. “Once Sallie was born and things settled down, I had a think about what I wanted to do. Obviously if this guy had done this stuff to me, he’d done it to plenty of others—he was in his fifties, he must’ve had thousands of patients. So I made an appointment with him, under a fake name so he couldn’t go after me—no way was he going to remember my real one, after three years. I told him I’d been a patient of his before and I was going to file a complaint. He laughed in my face—surprise. So I told him I’d tracked down a couple of dozen of his other patients through an internet mummy board, and we were all filing complaints, and eight of them had been recording their appointments on their phones.”

  “Whoa,” I said. I could totally see her pulling it off: straight-backed and cool, ticking off points as meticulously as if she were giving a presentation. Susanna always had been a killer poker player. “What’d he say?”

  “He lost it. Not scared; furious. That was the amazing part: he wasn’t putting it on, he was genuinely outraged. He was jabbing his finger right in my face, threatening to have me committed, call Child Services and have my kids taken away. I told him I could upload that footage to the internet faster than he could make phone calls, and I asked what was he planning to do about the other twenty-six women, have the whole lot of us committed? And all the ones I hadn’t found yet, but they’d come forward once they heard about it? So he threw me out of his office. And”—Susanna held out her hand to me for the joint—“five days
later his death notice was up online. I don’t know if he had a heart attack or something, or if he did himself in. Either way, though, I’d say there’s an OK chance I had something to do with it.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Melissa said, although Susanna hardly looked in need of comforting. “It’s not as if you knew he had a heart condition or—”

  “Well, I mean”—she held in smoke, waving a hand at us to wait, blew it out over the garden—“he was kind of fat, and he did get all red in the face a lot. But nah, I didn’t know anything for a fact. I thought probably the best I could expect was that he’d quit his job, and more likely he wouldn’t even do that but at least he might get spooked and stop pulling that shit on people. I was kind of hoping, though.”

  “Why didn’t you just file an actual complaint?” I asked.

  Susanna laughed out loud, and to my surprise Leon snorted too. Even Melissa was looking at me like I had said something regrettably silly. “Are you serious?” Susanna asked. “To a board of his mates? He’d have said I was a hysterical woman making stuff up, end of story. There’s a decent chance he genuinely would’ve got me thrown in a mental hospital, or had the kids taken away. I mean, I guess I could’ve actually tracked down other people and convinced some of them to record appointments and whatever, but this was quicker and a lot less messy.”

  This conversation was turning out to be enlightening in ways I hadn’t expected. Apparently my image of Susanna—good girl, follow the rules, if anyone’s being bullied run and tell a teacher—was out of date.

  “His face was good,” Susanna said, rolling over onto her stomach to pass Leon the joint. “When I said about uploading the footage. I enjoyed that a lot.”

  I couldn’t figure out, through the muddle of booze and hash, just how horrified I should be. I felt like there was an excellent chance that she was exaggerating either the doctor’s villainy or his dreadful fate, or both, and a non-zero chance that she was making the whole thing up; but either way, the nonchalance got more unsettling the more I thought about it, and either way there was the question of why exactly she was telling this story. The only reason I could see was that she wanted me or Leon or both of us to hear, loud and clear: If you mess with me, I will fuck you up.