The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  What I meant was, obviously, Do you believe Hugo did it, and of course Rafferty knew that. He kept me waiting; played with a pile of conkers Zach and Sallie had left on the terrace, turned one of them in his hand, considering. The light was dimming, darkness sifting down like a haze of fine dust in the air.

  “Put it like this,” he said, in the end, balancing the conker neatly on top of the pile. “Hugo was top of our suspect list from the start. Before we ID’d the body, even.”

  “Why?”

  “First off”—Rafferty held up one finger—“he lived here, full-time, and he worked from home. He had the best access to the tree. Any of the rest of ye, you were never here on your own; you’d have had to work around Hugo and each other, somehow get the body in there without being spotted. Hugo had plenty of time here alone.”

  Second finger. “He was a big guy. Even by the time we got here, you could tell by looking at him: he used to be strong. Your cousins, no way either of them could get an eighty-five-kilo body up that tree and down that hole, not on their own. But Hugo . . .”

  He hadn’t mentioned me. I was strong, I wanted to shout at him, I played rugby, I was fit as fuck, I could have done anything. My cigarette tasted of mildew. I jammed it out on the terrace.

  “And,” Rafferty said. Third finger. “The first time I was talking to all of you; in the sitting room, the day the skull turned up, remember that? There was one thing that stuck with me, out of that conversation. Your nephew, Zach: he said he’d tried to climb that tree before, but his mammy or Hugo always made him get down. And then, two minutes later, your cousin Susanna said your parents didn’t let you climb the tree when ye were kids, but Hugo did. Meaning before Dominic was in there, Hugo had no problem with kids going up in that tree. After Dominic was put there, he did.”

  Hugo had known all along. I suppose the truth is that I’ve never been a man of action. Don’t rock the boat; everything will come right in the end, if you just let it . . . He must not have known which one or two or all three of us it had been, not for sure—that careful probing in the car, I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened—but he had known enough.

  “You didn’t spot that, no?”

  “No.”

  “Why would you, I suppose. Not your job.”

  “No.”

  “And,” Rafferty said—four fingers waving, long pleasurable drag on his smoke—“not to get too graphic, but it’s hard to miss a decomposing body. There was a load of muck and leaves dumped in on top of it, so that would’ve masked the smell a bit, and it was cold enough that autumn and winter; but still. Hugo would’ve gone investigating, and got the shock of his life, unless he already knew exactly what was stinking up his garden.”

  With a slow strange flowering in my stomach I realized: Hugo hadn’t just known. All of us gathered in the living room, Zach buzzing around looking for trouble, and Hugo had beckoned him over and whispered something in his ear; and Zach had got a big grin on his face and shot off to the garden, where he had gone straight up the one tree he had never been allowed to climb.

  I told him there’s treasure hidden in the garden. More than that: he had told Zach exactly where to look. Maybe not in so many words, in case Zach ratted him out, but he wouldn’t have needed to. Out you go, we’ll all be busy in here for a while, you can look anywhere you want, anywhere at all . . .

  Once the three of us started making noises about what was going to happen to the house, Hugo had realized: if he died and left that skeleton out there, it would be like leaving us with a live landmine in the garden. It needed a controlled explosion, and so (It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath) he had quietly made his plans and set them in motion. His method struck me as being a bit hard on Zach, even if he was a tough little bastard, but I supposed Hugo hadn’t had much option: he could hardly have gone rooting around in that tree himself, or sent anyone else, without arousing suspicion.

  Obviously I should have done it years ago. But it would take a certain kind of person to do that, wouldn’t it, and apparently I’m not that kind; or wasn’t, anyway, until now . . .

  He had nearly left it too late for the final step, the confession—I wondered if when we got around to clearing his things we would find a handwritten one tucked away, just in case. Even in that moment I had room to be glad that he had left it so long. Melissa and I had made him happy enough that he had wanted every day he could have.

  “And then”—Rafferty held up all five fingers, like a wave or a salute—“the DNA results came back. Remember that big old jacket we took, when we searched the house? The one Hugo said was his?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dominic’s DNA was on that. On the inside, right here.” Tapping his right side. “Not blood, but then we don’t think he bled. Could’ve been saliva. Now, anyone could’ve worn that jacket, or Dominic could’ve got his DNA on it when he was in the house sometime. But when you add it to everything else we’d got . . .”

  God but Susanna had been good. Only eighteen and that sharp, that far ahead. When the suicide story finally fell through, her Plan B had been right there waiting—Mix it up, get a load of people in the frame—and probably Plan C and D and all the rest, too. I wondered what, exactly, she would have done if the cops had arrested Hugo back then, or me, or Leon; or if they had gone after her.

  “So,” Rafferty said, “when Hugo rang us that day, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. And he knew details we hadn’t released. We asked him how he got the body down the tree trunk, yeah? He said he tied a rope round Dominic’s chest, threw the rope over a branch, used that to haul the body up till he could climb a stepladder and guide it down the hole; and right enough, there were rope fibers all over Dominic’s shirt. And he told us one of Dominic’s shoes came off along the way, he had to grope around in the bushes for it and toss it in after him. And sure enough, Dominic had one shoe off; it was in the tree, all right, but up somewhere around his waist. That’s what we look for, when someone comes in confessing. Bits and bobs he wouldn’t know unless he was telling the truth.”

  Except, of course, Hugo could have known. A noise in the garden, deep in the night; muffled urgent voices, drag of the stepladder. Hugo waking, wondering, finally unsettled enough by some tension distorting the air that he got up and went to the window.

  He hadn’t gone out to them. Maybe he hadn’t understood or believed what he was seeing, till the news about Dominic went round. Or maybe he had known straightaway, and for his own reasons—safest for us, safest for his own peace, years of observing from the outside (one gets into the habit of being oneself)—he had decided to stay where he was. I wondered how much I had ever understood Hugo.

  Darkness, Susanna bundled in his gardening jacket, Leon probably in something of mine. He hadn’t known which of us he was seeing. Hadn’t wanted to know: he could have checked which of us were gone from our beds, but he hadn’t done it. Creaks and rustles downstairs as Leon slipped out to make the trek to Howth; the long wait, the sharp pings of our phones as the Sorry text came in. More waiting, on and on. The soft key-rattle of Leon coming in, whispers in the dawn. Bedroom doors shutting. Silence.

  In the morning Hugo had smiled peacefully at us all over breakfast, asked us what we had planned for the day. At the end of the month he had waved us off to college and new lives, Good luck! Enjoy! And he had gone back into the Ivy House and closed the door behind him.

  Ten years, living with that in his garden. His gift to us. I wished, so violently I could have howled, that he were there. I wanted to talk to him.

  “The only question,” Rafferty said, “was motive.” He was playing with the conkers again, tossing one and catching it dexterously overhand. “Hugo wouldn’t say. Just ‘It seemed necessary at the time’ and ‘Why do you need to know?’ Claiming his memory was banjaxed, getting irritable when we pushed—‘Do you
know how much of my brain has been shoved aside by tumor cells? Would you like to see the scans? I can barely remember my own brothers’ names, never mind things that happened ten years ago . . .’”

  He was a good mimic. The specific fall and rhythm of Hugo’s voice, all its warm rough edges, spread over the garden. The thickening darkness flickered like static in the air.

  “Kerr thought it was about Dominic bullying your cousin Leon, but I didn’t buy it. If it had happened a year earlier, maybe. But when you’d all left school? When Leon never had to see Dominic again in his life? Hugo wasn’t the type to kill for revenge.” Glance at me: “Or was he? Do I have him all wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “He wasn’t.”

  “Yeah. So that was a missing piece. Not a big one, not a big deal—we can close cases without a motive—but I don’t like missing pieces. Look at that—” The cat had made its way as far as the second piece of meat and was crouching to eat, more leisurely this time, one wary eye on us. “He’s relaxing already. Give him a bit of time, and you’ve got yourself a cat.”

  “I don’t want a cat.”

  “Cats are great, man. And a pet would take you out of yourself, give you someone else to think about. Do you good.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Rafferty found his cigarette packet and flipped out another, squinting in the half-dark to see how many he had left. “And then,” he said, “Hugo died—God rest. So it looked like I was stuck with that missing piece. That left me in a bit of a bind: close the case, or no?”

  He tilted the packet at me. I shook my head; he shrugged, tucking it away. “Only then,” he said, “your cousin Susanna came to see me.”

  What? “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  Chill out, it’s all under control. Susanna made me so tired I could have put my head down on my knees and slept.

  “According to her”—stretching out his legs, settling to the story—“Dominic had been giving her a bit of hassle, that year. Nothing serious; just trying to convince her to go out with him, not taking no for an answer. She complained about it to Hugo. Probably she made it sound worse than it was, she says; teenage girls, you know how they exaggerate, something’s the end of the world one day and they’ve forgotten it the next . . . Susanna feels pretty bad about that. She just wanted to blow off steam, but Hugo must’ve taken her up wrong. Thought Dominic was some kind of pervert predator. Hugo was protective of the three of you, was he?”

  One golden eye slipping sideways to me, bright in the lighter’s flare. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Yeah. I got that, all right. So there was the motive. And—just in case I had any doubts left—Susanna told me she saw him, that night. Out here.”

  “What,” I said.

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Huh,” Rafferty said. “I thought she would’ve. Something that big, she wouldn’t come to you?”

  “Apparently not.”

  If Rafferty caught the bitter edge, he didn’t show it. “The night Dominic went missing,” he said, “late. Susanna got woken up by a text on her phone: the famous ‘sorry’ text. She couldn’t go back to sleep. Then she heard a noise out in the back garden, so she went to her window to see what was going on. It was Hugo, dragging something big across the grass; too dark for her to see what, exactly. At the time she thought he couldn’t sleep, so he was doing a bit of work on this rock garden he’d been putting in—apparently Hugo suffered from insomnia, did he?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, either way. That’s what Susanna assumed—sure, why would she think anything else? I asked her if it could’ve been you or Leon out there, but she said no, Hugo was much bigger than either of you and he had long hair back then, no way could she have confused you for him.”

  Which was gracious of her. “I asked could it have been someone else,” Rafferty said, “and she said yeah, that was possible, it could’ve been some other big guy with long hair. She wasn’t watching for long. She thought about going out and giving Hugo a hand, but she had work in the morning, so she just went back to bed. When she heard Dominic had killed himself off Howth Head, it never even occurred to her to connect it up with Hugo messing about in his rock garden—that’s fair enough, sure, isn’t it?”

  He cocked an eye at me. “I guess,” I said.

  “She copped on when we identified the skeleton, though. She’s no fool, your cousin.”

  “No,” I said. “She isn’t.”

  “No. But she wasn’t going to say anything then, and wreck Hugo’s last couple of months. So she just kept quiet. Threw us the odd bit of info that pointed to Leon, or”—wry sideways glance—“to you. Just to mix it up a bit, keep us from zeroing in on Hugo. She knew it wouldn’t do anyone any harm in the long run; she’s got faith in the Guards, she figured we wouldn’t actually arrest the wrong fella—and even if we had, she could’ve just come forward then. Otherwise, she was planning to tell us after Hugo died.”

  I just bet she had been. Only it had never occurred to her that Hugo might have plans of his own. She had taken him for granted, Hugo the way we’d always known him, gentle and dreamy, drifting with the current. She wasn’t that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.

  “So,” Rafferty said, “getting back to your question: everything’s adding up nicely. At this point I’m just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, so I can file my report and close the case. I’ve been having a look into that story about Dominic chasing after Susanna, for example, make sure it checks out.”

  Something, a flutter of something cold. Out in the garden, the cat—just a silhouette, now—flicked its head up sharply to stare, immobile, at some invisible thing in the air. “Does it?” I asked.

  Rafferty wavered a hand. “Yes and no, to be honest with you. I mean, Susanna’s mates all confirm that he’d been at her, but they’re not consistent on the level of harassment. Some of them say it was just a laugh; some agree with her that it was a pain in the hole, but not a huge problem. A couple of them—the ones who were closest to her, funny enough—they say it was bad. Like, real bad.” With a glance at me: “So I’d love to know. How do you remember it?”

  This was it, what he was here for, what he wanted out of me? There was nothing about him I could trust, nowhere to get a grip— “Like Susanna says,” I said, in the end. “Dominic was getting on her nerves, but it wasn’t a big thing.”

  “Did you ever say anything to him? Tell him to back off?”

  “No.” When Rafferty raised an eyebrow, surprised: “It didn’t seem like I needed to.”

  Dryly: “Looks like you might’ve been wrong there, man.”

  “Probably,” I said. In the last of the light his face was layered with swoops and slashes of shadow. The smells of earth and sodden leaves and burning were strengthening in the air.

  “Here’s a thing,” Rafferty said—twisting out his cigarette, examining it carefully to make sure it was dead. “Might be connected, might not; I’d love to know. There were a handful of emails in Dominic’s account that were never traced. Anonymous emails, sent over the summer before he died. From a girl he’d been chasing, apparently. She was well into him, but she didn’t want to let on in public in case he was just winding her up, so she’d been shooting him down—are you following this? But at the same time, right, she wanted him to know that actually she fancied the arse off him.” With a grin, shadows deepening: “The drama, Jesus. Doesn’t it make you glad you’ll never have to be a teenager again?”

  Waves of cold were sweeping over me, like something very bad was happening but I was too stupid to figure out what it was. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Back when Dominic went missing, the emails didn’t seem like a big deal. Everyone agreed
that all the girls were mad about him, no surprise that he’d be getting the odd love note, and he obviously wasn’t so mad about her that he’d have killed himself over her. The lads looking into it didn’t even bother tracing them.” An eye-roll and a humorous twist of his mouth to me, Bloody eejits, would you believe it? “When Susanna told me her story, though, I wondered if those emails might’ve been from her. She swears no, she never emailed him, but the circumstances fit nicely: Dominic coming on to this girl, her telling him to get fucked. Adds up, amn’t I right?”

  Another pleasant glance at me, like we were colleagues discussing the case over a nice pint in some cozy pub. “I guess,” I said.

  “You figure it was her?”

  “I don’t know.” That cold was soaking into me, trickling deeper, something I should know here, something I was missing— “If she was actually into him, why would she email him? Instead of just, like, hooking up with him?”

  Rafferty shrugged. “Maybe she was nervous he was taking the piss, like she said. Or maybe she was playing hard to get. Or maybe she wasn’t into him, she was trying to make him slip up and do something that she could use as proof that he was harassing her—email her a dick pic, whatever. Or maybe she didn’t even know what she wanted.” Grinning again: “Teenage girls are mental, amn’t I right?”

  “I guess.”

  “That’s what everyone tells me, anyhow. So I wondered, at first. But then,” Rafferty said—easily, comfortably, leaning back on his elbows to enjoy the view of the garden—“I remembered those tweets. I already knew someone—not Susanna—who thought it was great craic playing with made-up identities online, to mess with people. And who was good at it.”

  Another wave of cold hit me. It was coming up from the ground, into my bones. I couldn’t feel my feet.

  “You sent Dominic those emails, am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

  Rafferty blew out air, exasperated and amused. “Ah, Toby. Come on. Not that again.”

  “I don’t.”