The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  The upside was that it turned out to be true, what I’d told Martin: I had no desire at all to go after Tiernan. I kept waiting for the rage, the urge to track him down and beat the living shit out of him, but it never came. Maybe it was just that emptiness, or maybe all those sessions with the hospital shrinks had done their job, who knows; or maybe it was that, deep down, I was less sure than I would have loved to be that Tiernan had had anything to do with the break-in. At heart Tiernan was intensely careful of himself. Sneaking a couple of paintings into a show had had him shitting bricks; just the thought of anything that might involve jail time would have given him a heart attack, and I wasn’t sure losing a job would have been a big enough upheaval to change that. Whatever the reason, my overwhelming feeling about Tiernan was that I never wanted to think about him again. If I could have had a very specific lobotomy to slice every memory of his existence out of my brain, I would have done it.

  My apartment was still there, rented out (by my parents) to a nice young couple, teachers or nurses or something like that. I had no intention of taking it back. The rent was enough that, even with my laughable salary, I could afford to live basically wherever I wanted, given that I needed very little else. In the hospital a big topic of conversation had been the things people were going to do when they got out (poker tournaments, island-hopping in Greece, escort services), but that had been mainly from the guys who were going nowhere; those of us who had an actual shot at the outside world had had a much harder time picturing it. Now that I was there, it didn’t seem any more real or more accessible than it had from the hospital. I couldn’t think of anything that I particularly wanted to do, except hole up in my new apartment clicking on random internet links and watching an awful lot of bad TV.

  Somehow, though, I couldn’t stay put. My PTSD had faded a lot—the cognitive therapy or just time, I don’t know, but I didn’t leap at loud noises or people coming up behind me any more. I could go out walking, even in the dark. The only thing that was still a problem was being at home at night. When I first moved into a new place I would be fine, but over a few months—as if I could feel at the back of my neck some searcher gradually closing in, some tracking circle homing tighter and tighter—I would start to get edgy: first double-checking locks and alarms, then lying awake with my ears straining, then pacing my apartment till the sky paled outside the windows. At that point I would give the landlord my notice and find somewhere else to live, and the cycle would start all over again.

  It did occur to me—somewhere deep in the core of those nights, pacing another cheap rental carpet, the silence crammed with the hum of too many people sleeping on every side—to wonder whether I ever left that first hospital. The Ivy House, when I think about it, seems heartbreakingly improbable, a murmuring haven from a battered childhood book, suffused in all my memories with a golden haze that has something frighteningly numinous about it; could that place really have existed, in this drab grinding vapid world of Twitterstorms and carb-counting, gridlock and Big Brother? and Hugo, wandering vague and shabby and benevolent through its rooms, could he have been real? did I ever have cousins at all? In the morning, jammed onto the Luas with hundreds of other commuters steaming rain and swiping manically at their phones, I know that’s nonsense, but at night: I can’t stop myself from wondering, with a stunning rush of grief, whether everything since that night has been no more than a last burst of light from a dying star, the last rogue fizzles of electricity along the shorting wires.

  In the end, I suppose, it doesn’t matter, or anyway not as much as you’d think. Either way, after all, here I am: in yet another apartment that smells of unfamiliar meals, too high off the ground, too many bare hundred-watt bulbs, too many locked windows and doors. And while sometimes I can’t stop my mind from reaching for the alternate realities (pacing the wooden floorboards of that white Georgian house, drowsy baby snuffling on my shoulder, Melissa asleep in the next room) I’m very aware that, of all the possibilities, this is at least far from the worst.

  Maybe this is why I still consider myself a lucky person: now more than ever, I can’t afford not to. If I’ve realized nothing else, you see, in the long strange time since that April night, I’ve realized this: I used to believe that luck was a thing outside me, a thing that governed only what did and didn’t happen to me; the speeding car that swerved just in time, the perfect apartment that came on the market the same week I went looking. I believed that if I were to lose my luck I would be losing a thing separate from myself, fancy phone, expensive watch, something valuable but in the end far from indispensable; I took for granted that without it I would still be me, just with a broken arm and no south-facing windows. Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I?

  Acknowledgments

  I owe huge thanks to the amazing Darley Anderson and everyone at the agency, especially Mary, Emma, Pippa, Rosanna and Kristina; Andrea Schulz, my wonderful editor, whose enormous skill, patience and wisdom have made this book so much better than I thought it could be; Ben Petrone, who is just plain great, and everyone at Viking; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Katy Loftus, for her faith in this book and for putting her finger on the one thing that would make the most difference; my brother, Alex French, for the computer bits and for sending me the link to the case of Bella in the Wych Elm; Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for the medical bits; Ellen at ancestrysisters.com, for genealogy help; Dave Walsh, for his enormous help with the intricacies of police procedure; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro and Sue Fletcher, who set all this in motion; Oonagh Montague, Ann-Marie Hardiman, Jessica Ryan, Karen Gillece, Noni Stapleton and Kendra Harpster, for talks, laughs, drinks, moral support, practical support and all the other essentials; David Ryan, I’m vilifying you, for God’s sake, pay attention; Sarah and Josie Williams, for being meeptastic; my mother, Elena Lombardi; my father, David French; and as always, beyond words, my husband, Anthony Breatnach.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: As of May 25, 2018, Susanna’s line on this page is outdated: with the repeal of the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, pregnant women will have the legal right to give or refuse consent to medical treatment.

  About the Author

  Tana French is also the author of In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbor, The Secret Place and The Trespasser. Her books have won awards including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Dublin with her family.

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