The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  “What, you sent so many fake emails there’s no way you’d remember a few more? To a guy who died not long after?”

  “No. I don’t—”

  “OK. Let’s try it this way. Did you ever send anyone a fake email, back when you were a teenager?”

  “Not that I remember,” I said. Actually I had a feeling that might not be true, me and Dec snickering at a school computer, Nah we have to tone it down he’ll never go for—

  “Huh,” Rafferty said. “Remember a guy called Lorcan Mullan? He was in your class?”

  “Yeah. What does he have to do with—”

  “He says in spring of sixth year he got a few emails from a girl who fancied him. She wouldn’t tell him her name, just that she’d seen him around and thought he was hot. Lorcan wasn’t a big hit with the ladies—skinny and spotty, from what he says—so he was only delighted. She dropped hints that she was on the hockey team, stuff like that, so he’d know she was fit, right? And after a couple of emails back and forth she said she wanted to meet up. They set up a time and a place, Lorcan put on his getting-laid shirt and half a can of body spray; but when he got there, it was just you and your mate Declan, pissing yourselves laughing.”

  It had been Dec’s idea. Dec bored in computer class, buzzing for trouble, getting that dangerous glitter to him: C’mere, let’s see who we can catch . . . It hadn’t been just Lorcan; it had been three or four guys, carefully chosen for gullibility and desperation and general loserhood, but apparently only Lorcan had been thick enough to go the whole way. “We were little shits back then,” I said. “All of us were. I bet someone tried to pull the same thing on me, at some stage.”

  “Ah, you could’ve been a lot worse,” Rafferty said, fairly. “Even Lorcan admits that. He was expecting the two of ye to tell the world, and he’d be slagged out of it till he had to change school or maybe leave the country. But as far as he could tell, you never said a word to anyone. You weren’t in it to destroy him, like some people would’ve been. You were just having a laugh.”

  Only we had said a word to someone, actually. Sean, not laughing along like we’d expected; instead (at his locker, stuffing books into his bag) giving us a look of mild disgust over his shoulder: Fuck’s sake. Lorcan? You want to fuck with someone, pick someone your own size. Give yourselves an actual challenge.

  “So,” Rafferty said. “Seems like you might’ve had the same kind of laugh at Dominic. He had been fucking with your cousins; he deserved it, right?”

  Surely we would have lost interest after Lorcan, moved on to some other dumb way to get our kicks. That had been Dec’s style; once would have been enough for him. And I would never have come up with the idea to start with if it hadn’t been for him, surely I wouldn’t have kept going on my own— But I had always cared about Sean’s opinion. That look of disgust had stung. Pick someone your own size.

  “The emails,” I said. I was so cold I couldn’t imagine ever being warm again. “The ones to Lorcan. Were they from, was it the same address as the ones to Dominic?”

  Rafferty gave me a long curious look. “You genuinely don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  After a moment, relenting: “We don’t know. Lorcan deleted the emails as soon as he found out he’d been had, and the server doesn’t keep data this long. Any chance you remember anything about the address you used? Even part of it?”

  “No.” Dec had been the one who set it up, huddled over the keyboard, giggling manically, kicking me to shut me up when I opened my mouth.

  “Pity,” Rafferty said, after a pause that felt endless. “Declan says he doesn’t either. He remembers the emails to Lorcan, all right—and a couple of others, by the way—but he says he never emailed Dominic. And I believe him, for whatever that’s worth.”

  I would have told Sean about it, surely I would have, if the whole point had been to show him I wasn’t just picking on rejects? Unless: unless Dominic had vanished before I could say anything, and I had thought it might be—even a little bit, even just maybe—because of my emails. Dominic, already half off the rails because of his exam results, realizing he’d been suckered like some idiot loser; not a big thing, but one thing too many . . . If I had thought there was even half a chance of that, I would have kept my mouth shut. Why upset people by coming clean? Not like it could do any good, not like we’d ever know for sure, not like there was any point in beating myself up thinking about it . . . Oh, you. Anything you feel bad about falls straight out of your head.

  Rafferty sighed. “Looks like we’ll never know. And I’d only love to. Because, if those emails encouraged Dominic to keep chasing Susanna? And he got killed for it? Then no matter who did the actual killing, whoever wrote the emails helped to sucker Dominic into getting himself killed.”

  I couldn’t even come up with a flash of horror. Honestly it wasn’t Susanna I was tired of, not really; it was me, wronged innocent, white knight, cunning investigator, killer, selfish oblivious dick, petty provocateur, take your pick, what does it matter? it’ll all change again tomorrow, it’s all up for grabs. This formless thing, boneless, grotesque, squashed like Play-Doh into whatever shape the boss of the day wanted to see: I was sick of it.

  The garden was black and blue-white, trees swollen with ivy and still as monuments. The cat had slipped away somewhere. Birch seeds whirling weightless in the air, filling it like tiny flakes of snow or ash.

  Rafferty’s voice rang over and over, in my head. Still, it took me a minute to hear it: no matter who did the actual killing.

  I said, “You don’t think Hugo did it.”

  He didn’t turn to look at me. “I told you already. Everything points to him. And now I’ve got motive and a witness. If this went to a jury, I’d put decent money on a conviction.”

  “But you don’t think he did it.” I understood, in some distant lucid fragment of my mind, that I should be terrified. Even a year earlier I would have been no match for Rafferty; now, if he decided I was what he was after, he could take me apart methodically, piece by piece, until I confessed to killing Dominic and probably believed every word. All I could dredge up was a faint reflexive kick of animal fear.

  The air was so still that I could hear Rafferty’s small sigh. “A lot of the time, in this job,” he said, “you can tell what kind of mind you’re up against. You can feel them, out there.” A nod to the garden. “I could feel it strong, this time. Mostly it’s just some clown, you know? Some halfwit scumbag taking out a rival dealer, some arsehole who got drunk again and hit her too hard this time. This was different, from the start. Someone cool as ice, thinking twenty moves ahead. Someone who was never going to get spooked, or confused, or strong-armed. It never felt like Hugo.”

  I said, “Then why the hell did you arrest him?”

  A lift of one shoulder. “Intuition’s nice, and all, but I’ve got to go with the evidence. The evidence says it was him. If you know different, though . . .” He turned his head to me then. He was nothing but eyes and shadows. “If you’ve got anything that says it was someone else, and you don’t want Hugo going down as a murderer, you need to tell me.”

  I said, “I didn’t kill Dominic.”

  He nodded, unsurprised. “But you wrote those emails—shush, man, we both know it. You’re no holy innocent, in all this. Your uncle, unless I’m way off base, he was a good man. You owe him this much.”

  So that was what he was here for. Not for me, after all; to convince me to rat out Leon and Susanna.

  I almost did it. Why not? Fuck the pair of them; let them deal with Rafferty settling in on their terraces and offering them smokes and unpicking their seams, let Susanna wangle her way out of this if she was so smart. She had been happy to dangle me in front of him, look over here, shiny! But more than that, much more: they had left me out. I could have been like them, changed, tempered. I could have come to that night in my apartment as someone who could come o
ut of it unbroken, if only they had believed in me enough to bring me along.

  Except all of that seemed to matter less than the lack of surprise in Rafferty’s voice. It had taken me that long to realize. I said, “You never thought I had done it.”

  “Nah. It never felt like you, either, whatever about that hoodie. I know”—raising his voice a touch, when I started to say something—“I know that was ten years back, and I know about the head injury. But right deep down, past all that, people are what they are. And this thing didn’t feel like you.”

  “Even when you came with the photos. You made it sound like you were about to arrest me. You were just, you were—” Here I had been thinking of him as an opponent, the brilliant adversary I was somehow going to outfox, en garde! I hadn’t been an opponent to him. I hadn’t even been a person, only a convenient thing that he could nudge carefully into whatever position suited his strategy. “You were using me as bait. To get Hugo to confess.”

  A one-shouldered shrug. “It worked.”

  “If it hadn’t? What would you have done? Would you have arrested me? Locked me up?”

  Rafferty said, “I want my man. Or my woman.”

  That spike of terror went through me again. He was like a raptor, not cruel, not good or evil, only and utterly what he was. The purity of it, unbreakable, was beyond anything I could imagine.

  And this is one of the moments I come back to over and over, one of the things I can’t forgive myself; because a part of me did know better, a part of me knew I shouldn’t ask. But it seemed to me that an answer from him would make sense of everything, would be absolute and golden as an answer from some god. “Why me?” I said. “Why not Leon? He was the one who was being, who Dominic was bullying. Why not—”

  Rafferty said, simply, “Because you were my best bet.”

  My heart was going in great slow thumps. “Why?”

  “You want to know?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “OK.” He rearranged himself, elbows on knees, getting comfortable to explain it all to me. “So the thing is: I could’ve gone for Leon, all right. As far as evidence goes, I had as much on him as I did on you. But—just like you said that day with the hoodie, remember?—none of it was solid; it was all circumstantial stuff. And with a circumstantial case, a lot of it comes down to what the jury thinks of the defendant. Say we got Susanna up on trial for this. Right? Lovely middle-class housewife. Well-spoken, from a good family. Married her college sweetheart; so devoted to her kids, she gave up her career for their sake. Not gorgeous or done-up, so she’s not an evil scheming bitch, but not ugly or fat or anything, so she’s not a disgusting loser. Educated, so she’s not a skanger, but not too educated, so she’s not some uppity elitist. Strong enough that you take her seriously, but not too strong—because you can bet she’d play it bang on—so she’s not an arrogant cow who needs taking down a peg. If we had no solid evidence, you think a jury would vote to convict?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Not a chance in hell. Now, Leon”—he wavered a hand—“maybe we’d have a shot there. Dodgy lifestyle and all that. Plenty of people still think the gays are a bit unbalanced, and you know those artsy types, couldn’t watch ’em. If we had even one solid thing on him—a witness, DNA, anything—then you’re dead right: he’d’ve been my best bet. But we didn’t. And same as Susanna, he’s from a good family, well-off, nice middle-class accent; he’s good-looking but not enough to come across as a smug prick, he’s articulate, intelligent, likable . . . Get him into a decent suit, get rid of the stupid hairdo, and he’d come across great. That nice normal boy, a killer? Ah, no.”

  Rows of blank black windows in the apartment block; something in the light made them look broken out, jagged holes onto emptiness, dust thickening on ripped-down posters and overturned chairs. No sound anywhere, not a far-off motorcycle or a shout or a snatch of music.

  “You, though,” Rafferty said, utterly matter-of-fact. “I could get somewhere with you.”

  This is the amazing part: for a split second I almost laughed in his face. Me of all people, for God’s sake, who the hell would ever believe— Maybe I should see it as some kind of triumph of the human spirit: even after everything, there was some tiny fragment of my mind that really believed I was still me.

  “The little stuff makes a big difference,” Rafferty explained. “Like the eyelid, you know that thing it does, the . . . ?”—gesturing with a finger—“And the limp. The way you slur your words a bit—only when you’re under pressure, like, most of the time no one would even notice, but God knows you’d be under pressure on the stand. The way you get twitchy, jumpy. The way you stumble, get your sentences tangled up. And the way sometimes it seems like you’re not really tuned in; that out-of-focus look you get.” Leaning in: “Listen, man, I’m not slagging you. In normal life, with people who know you, none of that matters. But juries don’t like that stuff. They think it means there’s something wrong with you. And once they think that, it’s only a wee little skip and a jump to you being a killer.”

  The trees moving, tiny subtle clicks and shifts, where there was no wind. Branch-shadows scrawled violent as earthquake-cracks across the bare earth. Smell of burning tires, stronger.

  “And there’s the memory,” Rafferty added. “Susanna or Leon, they could get up there and swear they had nothing to do with what happened to Dominic; all they’d have to do is convince a jury they were telling the truth. You, man, it wouldn’t matter whether you convinced the jury or not. We’d be able to prove your memory was cabbaged. Nothing that came out of your mouth would matter a damn.”

  I said, much too loud, “None of that is my fault.” Which I knew was ludicrous but it came out of me anyway, ripped its way out— “It wasn’t my fucking choice.”

  Rafferty said, gently, “So what?”

  “So you don’t, you don’t get to, to use it against me”—the rising anger was so overwhelming it tongue-tied me, fucking moron, way to prove Rafferty’s point, wanted to punch myself—“you don’t get to act like it, it, it— That doesn’t count.”

  “It would’ve, though,” Rafferty pointed out matter-of-factly.

  I couldn’t answer that; I could barely breathe. “I’m not saying I would’ve ever taken things that far,” he reassured me. “I wouldn’t’ve. Hand to God. I’m not in the business of sending innocent men down for murder. But the thing is, I didn’t need to. I just needed Hugo to think I would. That’s why I went for you over Leon. Because Hugo knew as well as I did, if you got into a courtroom, you’d be fucked.”

  He said something else to me then. I can still see the equivocal spark of a smile lighting his face and I’ve spent hundreds or maybe thousands of hours trying to remember what it was he said but I can’t, because just as he started saying it I realized that I was about to punch him in the face, and just as he finished saying it I hit him.

  I took him by surprise. The punch connected with a thick smack and he went over sideways onto the terrace. But he rolled with it, and by the time I scrambled to my feet—strange light-headed lucidity almost like joy lifting me, finally, finally—he was up again and coming at me, low, hands out and taut like a street fighter. He feinted to one side and then the other, grinning when I leaped to follow, beckoning me on.

  I charged at him. He ducked my wild swing, caught me by the arm on my way past, swung me around and let me go. I flailed backwards across the terrace and slammed up against the wall of the house. He came after me, pulled back a fist easy as that and jabbed me in the nose.

  Something burst; for a moment I was blind, blood poured down into my mouth. I inhaled it, choked, and then he was on me. He grabbed me in a headlock and started punching me in the ribs.

  I stamped down on his instep and heard his bark of pain. In the second he was off balance I got my foot up against the wall behind me and shoved myself off it.

  The pair of us shot st
aggering across the terrace, still clasped together. We went down the steps to the garden tangling in each other’s feet, overbalancing, and fell full length. Before I could get my bearings he was on top of me and shoving my face down into the dirt.

  He was bigger and ten times stronger than me. Earth pressed on my eyelids, earth filled my mouth. I couldn’t breathe.

  I almost went with it. I almost relaxed all my aching muscles and let him guide me down, among last year’s leaves and small winter-dreaming creatures, between long-lost treasures and tiny curled bones, into the dark earth. But the wild heat of him pressing against me, his breath harsh in my ear: that night in my apartment surged up inside me and all I could think was, with a roaring fury that ignited every cell in my body, Not this time.

  I got my knees under me, heaved myself up and over onto my back, and spat a burst of blood and dirt into his face. He jerked backwards and I got a foot in his stomach, shoved him off me, scrabbled away and up. He twisted to his feet like a cat and came charging at me, but I dug my heels into the ground and somehow this time I stayed standing. I grabbed hold of him and clung on.

  We lurched in circles in the near-darkness like some grotesque monster, many-limbed and grunting, fumbling blind. There was a nightmare slowness to it all, feet sinking and sticking in mud, hands clawing at hair and cloth and skin. My breath was bubbling and rasping; his was harsh as an animal’s, I felt his teeth press against my cheek, and even through the blood clogging my nose I would have sworn I smelled his wild pine scent. He was trying to knee me in the balls and I was bashing uselessly at the back of his head but neither of us could get enough distance, or enough purchase on the shifting ground, for a proper blow.

  He changed grip, grabbed me by the thigh and lifted me right off my feet. But I had an elbow around his neck, and when he slammed me down on my back I took him with me. In the same second that the wind was knocked out of me I heard his skull hit a rock, right beside my ear, with a terrible squelchy crack.

  I lay still, fighting for breath. He felt like a sack of wet cement holding me down. High above me misshapen gray birds flickered against the black sky and I thought they were the last thing I would ever see, but at last I managed to gasp in a great whoosh of air. I flailed at him, scrabbling and shoving, till I heaved him off me and dragged myself onto my knees.