The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  “I’m hungry,” Sallie said, not loudly but for at least the fifth time.

  “You just had cake,” Susanna said, without looking at her. Out in the garden, brusque voices were calling back and forth, too distant for us to catch any words.

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “OK,” Susanna said. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a little plasticky orange pouch with a spout on it. “Here.”

  “I want one!” Zach demanded, popping up from the floor, where he had been drumming his feet on the fireguard and trying to beatbox.

  “You hate them.”

  “I want one.”

  “Are you going to eat it?”

  “What about medical students?” Tom said suddenly, perking up. He had been hovering around the living-room door, clutching his precious lists, looking for his big chance to hand them in to Teacher.

  “What,” Leon said, cutting him a withering glance without bothering to turn his head. He was slouched sideways in an armchair with his knees hooked over the arm, jiggling one foot in a fast insistent rhythm that I was trying not to look at.

  “The”—flapping his lists in the direction of the garden—“that. You know that apartment block behind the laneway? It’s got lots of students, right? And medical students, they’ve got a messed-up sense of humor. If a couple of them nicked a skull and mucked about with it for a while, scaring their mates, and then they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it, they could have tossed it down the tree.” He looked around triumphantly.

  “They’d want to have some aim,” Leon said sourly. “To get it through all the branches and all the leaves and straight down a hole that has to be, what, a couple of feet across. A medical student who’s also a world-class basketball player: that should narrow it down.”

  “Maybe they weren’t aiming for the tree. They were trying to throw it into the garden, to freak people out, and they missed.”

  “And got it through all the branches. And all the leaves. And straight down a hole that has to be—”

  “I don’t want this,” Sallie said. She was holding the packet out from her body and she looked like she was on the verge of tears.

  “You love that,” Susanna said. “Eat it.”

  “There’s snabbits in it.”

  “What are snabbits?”

  “They’re in there.”

  “No they aren’t. It’s carrots and apples and some other thing, parsnips or something.”

  “I don’t like snabbits.”

  “OK,” Susanna said, taking the pouch out of her hand. “I’ll get you a new one.” She headed out to the kitchen.

  “I’m just saying,” Tom said. “It’s not necessarily anything sinister. It could be just—”

  “A hippogriff could have dropped it,” Leon said. “On its way to the Forbidden Forest.”

  “That would be sinister,” Tom said, aiming for jollity. “The Forbidden Forest at the bottom of the garden.” No one laughed.

  My head was still throbbing, faintly but persistently, and my vision was glitching; I couldn’t tell what was in my hand, sevens and nines looked the same, eights and tens. “Oo,” Melissa said, laying down a fan of cards. “Rummy.” She smiled up at me and gave me a small, steadying nod. I tried to smile back.

  Susanna came back with what looked to me like the same orange plastic pouch. “Here,” she said. “I got you one with no snabbits.” Sallie grabbed the packet, retreated to a corner of the sofa and started sucking feverishly on the spout.

  “The garden’s swarming,” Susanna said to the rest of us, low, glancing over at Zach and Sallie to make sure they weren’t listening. “Guys in white coveralls and hoods and face masks, like in some sci-fi movie where the virus just got out of the lab. Taking photos. They’re putting up a thing, a canvas gazebo thing. With plastic sheets on the ground. Down by the strawberry bed.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Leon said. He tossed down his cards, swung himself out of the armchair and started circling the room. “This is fucked up. What the fuck are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to set up camp here until they finish whatever the fuck it is they’re doing out there?”

  Tom was making frantic warning grimaces and jerking his head sideways towards Zach and Sallie. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Leon said.

  “Knock it off,” Susanna said. “And relax. This is not the end of the world.”

  “Don’t tell me to relax. Of all the stupid bloody things to say—”

  “Go have a smoke.”

  “I can’t go have a smoke. There are cops all over the—”

  “Yuck,” Zach said, shoving his orange pouch into Susanna’s hand.

  “Don’t tell me yours has snabbits too.”

  “There’s no such thing as snabbits. It’s just disgusting.”

  “I asked you if you were going to eat it. You said—”

  “If I eat it I’ll puke.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake—”

  There was a tap at the door, and a man stuck his head in. “Afternoon,” he said. “I’m Mike Rafferty; Detective Mike Rafferty. Sorry about all this hassle.”

  We all came up with some shapeless polite nonsense. Leon had stopped pacing; Melissa’s hand was suspended in mid-air, cards fanned.

  “I appreciate that,” Rafferty said. “I’m sure this isn’t how you were planning on spending your Saturday afternoon. We’ll be out of your way as soon as possible.”

  He was maybe in his early forties; tall, a bit over six foot, with a thin, rangy build that managed to look strong and agile all the same, as if he was a black belt in some obscure martial art that we weren’t cool enough to have heard of. He had rough dark hair and a long, lean, bony face carved deeply with smile lines, and a discreetly excellent gray suit.

  “I just have to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right. Everyone OK with that? Anyone feeling a bit too shaken up right now, prefer to wait till later?”

  Now was apparently fine with everyone. Leon leaned against the window frame, hands stuffed deep in his pockets; Susanna took up her place on the sofa again, an arm around Sallie, murmuring something in her ear. Melissa swept the cards into a pile.

  “Great,” Rafferty said. “That’ll help us out a lot. OK if I sit here?” He turned Leon’s armchair to give a good view of us all, and sat down.

  His presence was doing bad things to me. On the surface he was nothing at all like Martin or Flashy Suit, but still there was something, something about the economy of movement and the easy friendly tone leaving no option of refusal and giving away absolutely nothing, that brought it all back: polluting hospital air burrowing into every pore, my head clogged with pain and with a thick haze like demolition dust, the pleasant blank faces watching me and waiting. My hands were shaking. I clasped them between my knees.

  “As you’ve probably gathered from all the action,” Rafferty said, “that’s a human skull out there in your garden. So far we don’t know a lot more than that. These two were the ones who found it?”

  “My son,” Susanna said, “and my daughter.” Sallie was pressed against her, the pouch thing still firmly stuck in her mouth. Zach was hanging over the back of the sofa, staring.

  Rafferty nodded, examining them. “Which of them’s more likely to be able to tell me how it happened? Kids this age, some of them make great witnesses, better than adults: good observers, good clear account of events, no messing about. Other kids, they’re so busy playing cute or shy or stubborn, they can barely make a sentence, and when they do it’s mostly rubbish. Which of your two—”

  “Me,” Zach said loudly, scrambling over the back of the sofa and nearly kicking Susanna in the face. “I’m the one who found it.”

  Rafferty gave him a long look. “This isn’t like explaining to your teacher why Jimmy hit Johnny in the playground. This is serious business. You think you can manage to give me a clear
account?”

  “Course I can. I’m not stupid.”

  “Right,” Rafferty said, pulling out a notebook and a pen. His hands seemed wrong for a detective, long and muscular, with scars and heavy calluses like he spent a lot of time sailing in hard weather. “Let’s hear it.”

  Zach arranged himself cross-legged on the sofa and took a breath. “OK,” he said. “So Uncle Hugo told us to go out in the garden and look for treasure. So Sallie went and looked in the strawberry patch, which, duhhh, we go in there all the time so if there was treasure there we would have found it already? And I went to look in the hole in the tree.”

  Rafferty was nodding along, grave and intent. “That’s the big elm tree? The one right next to where you left the skull?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Had you been up that tree before?”

  “We’re not allowed.”

  “So why today?”

  “All the grownups were having some big serious talk. So . . .” Zach grinned, at Susanna, who made a wry face at him.

  Rafferty let the edge of a matching grin slip out. “So you knew you wouldn’t get caught.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And I stuck my arm down the hole—”

  “Hang on,” Rafferty said, lifting his pen. “If you’d never been up that tree before, how did you know it had a hole in it? You can’t see the hole from the ground.”

  Zach shrugged. “I tried climbing that tree a load of times before, only my mum or Uncle Hugo always yelled at me to get down. A couple of times I got high enough up that I saw the hole. And one time I saw a squirrel come out of it.”

  “Ever notice anything in there? Apart from the squirrel?”

  “Nah.”

  “Ever put your hand in there before? Or a stick, or anything?”

  “Nah.”

  “Why today?”

  “Because I was looking for treasure.”

  “Fair enough,” Rafferty said. “So you stuck your arm down the hole . . .”

  “Yeah. And first there was just all leaves and muck and wet stuff, like hairy stuff—” Zach’s eyes snapped wide as he realized.

  “Moss, probably,” Rafferty said easily. “What next?”

  “And then there was something big, like smooth. It felt weird. And there was a hole in it so I stuck my fingers in the hole and pulled it out, and at first I thought it was like a big eggshell, like from an ostrich egg? And it smelled like dirt. And I was going to throw it at the wall so it would smash. Only then I turned it around and there were teeth.” Zach shuddered from head to feet, an irresistible spasm. Susanna’s hand went out towards his shoulder and stopped. “Actual teeth.”

  “Yeah,” Rafferty said. “There are. What’d you do next?”

  “I threw it. Onto the grass. Not trying to smash it; I just wanted to get rid of it. And I yelled and I got down out of the tree, I fell the last part but I didn’t get hurt. And Sallie started screaming and then Mum and everyone came.”

  He was hunched over, hands tucked tight into the crooks of his knees, eyes flicking away from the memory. For a second I actually felt sorry for the little bastard.

  “Well done,” Rafferty said, giving Zach a nod. “You were right: you’re a good witness. At some point I’ll get this typed up and I’ll need you to sign it, but for now, that’s exactly what I need. Thanks.”

  Zach took a deep breath and relaxed a notch or two. Rafferty had a good voice, rich and warm with a windswept tinge of Galway, like some rugged islandman in an old movie who would probably end up with Maureen O’Hara. I was willing to bet that this guy got more hoop than he could handle. To Sallie: “Now let’s see you give it a try. Can you remember what happened?”

  Sallie was snuggled in tight against Susanna, watching the whole thing with solemn unreadable eyes over her orange pouch. She took it out of her mouth and nodded.

  “Off you go.”

  “I was looking for treasure and Zach was up the tree and then he threw a thing on the grass. And he was yelling. And it was a skull and I yelled too because I was scared it was a ghost.”

  “And then?”

  “Then everyone came and Mummy took us inside.”

  “Well done,” Rafferty said, smiling at her.

  “Is it a ghost?”

  “Duhhh,” Zach said, under his breath. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” He seemed to have recovered.

  “No,” Rafferty said gently. “We’ve got a special machine that tells us exactly what something is, and we’ve gone over every bit of that skull. There’s no ghost there, any more than there is in this.” He touched his notepad. “It’s only a piece of bone.”

  Sallie nodded.

  “You want to check this for ghosts?” He waved the notepad at her.

  That got a head-shake and the tip of a smile. “Phew,” Rafferty said. “I left my machine outside. When was the last time anyone else was up that tree? A gardener, maybe? Someone trimming the branches?”

  “No gardener,” Hugo said. “I don’t exactly keep the place in show condition—well, you’ve seen that for yourself. What little I want doing, I do myself. I don’t trim the trees.”

  “We used to climb it,” I said, enunciating carefully to keep the slurring down. I felt like I needed to make some kind of mark on this conversation. “Me and Susanna and Leon”—pointing—“when we were kids.”

  Rafferty turned to look at me. “When were you last up there?”

  “I broke my ankle jumping out of it. When I was nine. After that our parents didn’t let us climb it any more.”

  “Mm,” Rafferty said. His eyes—deep-set and an odd light shade of hazel, almost golden—rested on me thoughtfully. That look, practiced and assessing and opaque and so familiar, made my spine curl. I was suddenly viciously aware of my droopy eyelid. “Did you?”

  “I don’t—” A flicker of memory, swinging my legs on a branch in semi-darkness, can of beer, someone laughing, but everything felt so dislocated and unreal that I couldn’t— “I’m not sure.”

  “Yeah, we did,” Susanna said. “When our parents weren’t there. Hugo”—a fleeting smile between them—“always let us get away with a lot more.”

  “It’s not like we were up there every day,” Leon said. “Or every week. But now and then, yeah.”

  “When was the last time?”

  Susanna and Leon looked at each other. “God, I don’t remember,” Leon said.

  “Some party when we were teenagers, maybe?”

  “That time when Declan was singing ‘Wonderwall’ and someone threw a can at him. Weren’t we all up there?”

  “Was that that tree?”

  “Had to be. The three of us and Dec, and wasn’t that girl there too, Whatshername who he liked? We wouldn’t all have fit in any of the other trees.”

  “Declan who?” Rafferty asked.

  “Declan McGinty,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

  Rafferty nodded, writing down the name. I thought I could smell him, a keen outdoorsy tang like split pine. “Any idea what year that would’ve been?”

  “I think that was the summer we left school,” Susanna said. “So ten years ago. But I’m not sure.” Leon shrugged.

  “Ever do any exploring down the hole in the middle?”

  Leon and Susanna and I looked at each other. “No,” Susanna said. “I mean, I glanced in a couple of times, when I was up there, but it looked manky; all wet dead leaves. I wasn’t going to go rooting around.”

  “I think I poked a stick in there once,” Leon said. “When we were kids, like eight. Just to see how deep the hole was. I didn’t feel anything like . . . anything.”

  “How deep was it?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t remember. Deep enough.”

  Rafferty glanced at me. “I don’t . . .” I said. My mem
ory was fluttering and sparking; I was blindingly aware that I sounded like an idiot. “I don’t think so. Maybe.”

  “What about you, Mr. Hennessy?” He meant Hugo. “Did you ever climb that tree, when you were a child?”

  “Heavens, yes,” Hugo said. “The four of us—my brothers and I—we were up and down it all the time. I think we may even have hidden things in that hole, but I wouldn’t swear to it. My brothers might have better memories than I do.”

  “We’ll check with them, so,” Rafferty said. “Do any of you have any ideas on who it could be? Now that you’ve had time to think it over?”

  “I thought . . .” Tom said, tentatively. “I wondered about medical students. In the apartment block that backs onto the laneway. Taking a skull from college for a laugh, and throwing it down there.”

  Rafferty nodded, apparently giving that serious consideration. “We’ll look into that. Any other ideas? Anyone you can think of who went missing in the area? Or maybe a houseguest who left without saying good-bye, a tradesman who didn’t come back to finish the job? It doesn’t have to be recent. That’s an old tree.”

  “There was a homeless man,” Hugo said suddenly. “This is going back, oh, twenty-five years, maybe more— He used to sleep in the laneway, occasionally. He’d call to the door, my mother would give him sandwiches, fill his flask with soup, and then he’d set up camp. At some point he stopped coming. We didn’t think much of it at the time, he was never a regular visitor, but . . .”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “In his fifties, I’d say—although it’s hard to tell, isn’t it, with people who’ve had a rough life. Medium height, maybe five foot ten? Gray hair. Midlands accent. I think his name was Bernard. He was usually fairly drunk, but never aggressive or unpleasant, nothing like that.”

  “Did he ever come into the garden?”

  “Not that I know of. But the back wall isn’t exactly impregnable. It’s high, but if someone really wanted to get over, he could probably find a way.”

  “Bernard,” Rafferty said, writing. “We’ll look into that. Any other possibilities?”

  We all shook our heads. “Right,” Rafferty said. He closed the notebook and slid it into his pocket. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that tree’s going to have to come down.”