The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  “Why?” Leon asked sharply.

  Rafferty transferred his gaze to him and gave him a long thoughtful look. “There are some other things we’re interested in, down that hole.”

  “Like more bones?” Zach demanded, wide-eyed. “A whole skeleton?”

  “We won’t know till we get in there. I’ve been trying to find a way around cutting down the tree, but no dice. We’ve got to document everything, record every step; we can’t just pull out whatever’s in there by the handful.” He saw the looks on our faces. “I know it’s like we’re smashing a family heirloom, but we don’t have a choice. There’s a tree surgeon on the way.”

  “In for a penny . . .” Hugo said, half to himself. And to Rafferty: “That’s fine. Do whatever you need to do.”

  “Can you tell when it’s from?” Leon asked. He was still leaning against the window frame, seemingly at ease, but something in the line of his shoulders told me that every cell of him was practically shorting out with tension. “The skull?”

  “Not my area,” Rafferty said. “But we’ve got the state pathologist out there, and we’re bringing in a forensic archaeologist. They’ll be able to tell us more.”

  “Or what happened to it? I mean, was it, was the person . . . ? How did they . . . ?”

  “Ah,” said Rafferty, giving him a startlingly charming smile that crinkled his eyes into invisibility. “That’s the million-euro question.”

  “Do we need to stay here?” Susanna asked.

  He looked surprised. “Oh, God, no. You can go wherever you like—apart from the garden, obviously. Was someone making a list of names and phone numbers? In case I need to get in touch with any of you again?”

  Tom produced his lists, and Rafferty was appropriately impressed. “Thanks very much for your time,” he told us all, folding them carefully away and standing up. “I know this is a nasty situation, and it’s been a big shock, and I appreciate you helping us out in the middle of it all. If you’d like to talk to anyone about it, I’ll put you in touch with our Victim Support advocates, and they can find you someone who—”

  None of us apparently felt the need for professional assistance to unpack our feelings about finding a skull in the back garden. “Here,” Rafferty said, putting a small neat stack of business cards on the coffee table. “If you change your minds about that, or you think of anything, or you want to ask me anything, give me a ring.”

  Hand on the door, he turned, remembering. “That key, the one to the garden door. Are there any more copies we could borrow? Would a neighbor have one, or your brothers maybe?”

  “There used to be another one here,” Hugo said. He was starting to look tired. “It went missing, somewhere along the way.”

  “Any idea when?”

  “Years ago. I couldn’t even begin to narrow it down.”

  “No problem,” Rafferty said. “If we need extras, we’ll get them cut. I’ll keep you updated.” And he was gone, closing the living-room door gently behind him.

  “Well,” Hugo said, on a deep breath, after a moment of silence. “This should be interesting.”

  “I told you,” Leon said. He was gnawing his thumbnail again, and his nostrils flared with every breath. “I told you we should dump it in the bin and forget the whole bloody thing.”

  “You can’t do that,” Tom said. “There could be a family out there, wondering—”

  “I thought you thought it was med students.”

  “The detective’s nice,” Melissa said. “Was he more like what you expected, Hugo?”

  “Definitely.” Hugo smiled at her. “And much more confidence-inspiring than the other ones. I’m sure he’ll get all this sorted out in no time. Meanwhile”—glancing around—“you three should let your parents know what’s happened, shouldn’t you?”

  Leon and Susanna and I, by unspoken but wholehearted agreement, hadn’t rung our parents, but I realized with a sinking feeling that Hugo was right, it wasn’t like we could keep this contained within the house forever. “Oh God,” Susanna said. “They’re going to want to come over.”

  “I’m starving,” Zach said.

  “Jesus,” Leon said, in a stunned voice that sounded suddenly very young. “There’s people out there filming.”

  There was a general rush to the windows. Sure enough, standing with her back to our front steps was a brunette in a snazzy coral trench coat, talking into a microphone. On the pavement across the road, a skinny guy in a parka was huddled over a video camera pointed at her. A restless wind had come up, tossing the trees into bewildering whirls of green.

  “Hey!” Zach yelled, banging a palm on the windowpane. “Get lost!”

  Susanna caught his wrist, too late: the cameraman said something and the brunette turned to look at us, hair whipping across her face. “Get back,” Leon said sharply. Susanna reached out and slammed the shutters, heavy bangs reverberating up through the empty rooms of the house.

  * * *

  Around this point Zach and Sallie went into full whine overdrive about how hungry they were. Their bitching finally drove us all out to the kitchen, where Hugo and Melissa rummaged through the fridge and discussed options and decided on pasta with mushroom sauce. Susanna was on the phone to Louisa, trying to convince her not to come over (“No, Mum, he’s fine, anyway what would you do that we’re not doing already? . . . Because there are reporters out the front, and I don’t want them nabbing you and interrogating— Well then, watch it on the news tonight, and you’ll know as much as we do. No one’s telling us anything . . . No, Mum, I don’t have a clue who it—”) and holding Sallie back from the biscuit tin with her free hand. Tom was rattling on about some kiddie movie they’d seen, trying to draw Zach into the chat; Zach, drumming his hands on the counter and keeping a calculating eye on the biscuit tin, wasn’t biting.

  Leon and I stood at the French doors, looking out at the garden. The big uniformed cop was on the terrace with his hands clasped behind his back, looking official and presumably guarding the crime scene, but he was ignoring us and we ignored him. Down by the wych elm, Rafferty was deep in conversation with another suit and a stocky guy in a dilapidated overall who, judging by the gestures, was the tree surgeon. The skull was gone. There was a stepladder beside the tree and a person in hooded white coveralls on top of it, leaning sideways at a precarious angle to point a camera into the hole. The door in the back wall stood open—I hadn’t seen it opened in years—on the laneway: stone apartment-block wall, the other uniformed cop in the same official pose, glimpse of a white van. People moved in and out, between the laneway and the tree and the white canvas gazebo, with its festive pointed roof, that had materialized beside the strawberry bed. Bright blue latex gloves, hard plastic black case like a tool kit open in the grass, gray sky. Snap of wind in the crime-scene tape and the canvas.

  “All that stuff about the key to the garden door,” Susanna said in a low voice, at my shoulder. “That wasn’t because they need more copies. That was him finding out whether anyone else could get into the garden, or whether it’s just us.”

  “There was another one,” Leon said. “I remember it.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Didn’t it use to be on a hook beside the door?”

  Susanna glanced behind us at Zach and Sallie, whom Melissa and Hugo had somehow convinced to help slice mushrooms; Zach was making karate-chop noises as he slammed the knife down, and Sallie was giggling. “Someone took it, one summer. Wasn’t it Dec, when he stayed here?”

  “Dec didn’t need to sneak in the back. He came in the front door. What about that friend of yours, the weird blonde who kept showing up in the middle of the night? The cutter?”

  “Faye wasn’t weird. She had shit going on. And she didn’t have a key. She’d text me and I’d let her in.”

  “What happens,” Leon said. He was watching a small sturdy woman with graying hair and combats stumping out
of the tent to join the conference beneath the tree (the state pathologist? the forensic archaeologist? I had only a hazy idea of what either of those should look like, or for that matter what they did). “What happens if they find some evidence that the person was killed? What do they do then?”

  “Just going by experience,” I said, “they’ll show up a couple of times when we least want to see them, they’ll ask a shit-ton of questions about how it might be our fault that someone dumped a skull in our tree, and then they’ll disappear and leave us to pick up the pieces.”

  The vicious edge to my voice startled me. I hadn’t realized, till that moment, just how intensely I loathed having Rafferty and his pals there. It startled Leon and Susanna, too: their faces turning sharply towards me, uncertain silence. My hands were shaking again. I shoved them into my pockets and kept looking out at the garden.

  “Well,” Leon said, after a moment, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got no problem with them disappearing. The sooner the better.”

  “At least they’re being polite about the whole thing,” Susanna said. “If we were all on the dole and crammed into a council house . . .”

  “They’ve been out there for ages,” Melissa said, at the sink, hands full of lettuce. “We should see if they want tea.”

  “No,” all three of us said in unison.

  “Fuck them,” Leon said.

  “They probably have thermoses,” I said. “Or something.”

  “Maybe we should offer them some pasta,” Tom said.

  “No.”

  “One of the downsides of being young,” Hugo told us all, apparently apropos of nothing, “is that you worry too much. Really, you do. It’s all going to be fine.” He laid a hand on Sallie’s curls, smiling at us. “Worse things happen at sea, as they say. Now, where shall we eat?”

  We ate in the dining room—the thought of crime-scene dinner theater, as Leon put it, was well over everyone’s weirdness limit. The glossy old mahogany table was almost never used except for Christmas dinner, and I had to wipe off a film of dust. Susanna had closed the shutters on the garden and the overhead light was weak, leaving the room a smeared, confusing yellow. Nobody said very much; even Zach was subdued, picking through his pasta and pushing the mushrooms to one side without bitching about them. Sallie was yawning.

  “We should go, after this,” Susanna said, glancing at Tom. “Will you guys be OK?”

  “We’ll be fine,” Hugo said. “And I’m sure they’ll be packing up for the night soon enough, too. It’s you I’m worried about, leaving. Is that reporter woman still there?”

  “I doubt it,” Tom said. He slid open the doors to the living room, went to the window and put one eye to the crack between the shutters. “Gone,” he said, coming back to the table.

  “For now,” Leon said darkly.

  Somewhere, a sound started up: a low, nasty, animal snarl that built rapidly till it vibrated all through the air, making it impossible to tell where it was coming from. One by one, our heads lifted; Hugo laid down his fork. It took all of us a moment to recognize it for what it was: a chainsaw, out in the garden, setting to work.

  * * *

  When the daylight went, around eight, the cops went too. Rafferty came in to give us our update first, just like he had promised: “The tree surgeon hates my guts,” he said ruefully, picking chips of bark off his trousers. “That tree’s over two hundred years old, apparently, and there aren’t a lot of them left; Dutch elm disease got most of them. When I asked him to cut down a perfectly healthy one, I thought he was going to walk out on me. Didn’t blame him, either.”

  “Is it done?” Hugo asked.

  “Ah, God, no. We have to go slow: document everything, like I said. But we should have it done by the end of tomorrow. We’ll leave an officer here overnight.” At our blank stares: “It’s not that we think you’re in danger, nothing like that. We’re just ticking the boxes: we have to be able to say we had our eye on that tree the whole time. He’ll stay out in the garden, won’t be in your way at all.”

  The thought of one of these guys wandering around the garden while we slept made my teeth clench—I had been checking my watch more and more obsessively, maybe at six o’clock they would fuck off and leave us to ourselves again, maybe at seven, surely to Jesus they had to knock off by eight—but we very obviously didn’t have a say in this. “Does he need anything?” Melissa asked.

  “No, he’ll look after himself. Thanks very much.” Rafferty dropped the chips of wood into his jacket pocket and gave us a nod and the charm-smile, already turning towards the door. “See you in the morning.”

  Hugo almost never turned on the television, but we watched the nine o’clock news that night. The story was fairly high up, below the incomprehensible EU machinations and the Northern Ireland political spat but above the sports: the brunette in the coral coat doing her somber voice in front of our steps, human remains found in a Dublin garden, Gardaí are at the scene; a shot of the laneway, looking bleak and run-down with wind twitching the forlorn clusters of dead leaves at the bottom of the wall, white figure climbing out of the white van, crime-scene tape across the garden door; anyone with any information please contact the Gardaí.

  “There,” Hugo said, when the newsreader moved on to football. “It’s all very interesting. I never thought I’d have a ringside seat at a criminal investigation. There are an awful lot of people involved, aren’t there?” He maneuvered himself up off the sofa, joint by joint, and reached for his cane. He seemed a lot less unsettled by the whole thing than the rest of us, which I supposed made a certain amount of sense. “If it’s going to start all over again in the morning, though, I need to get some sleep.”

  “Me too,” I said, switching off the telly. Melissa and I had started going to bed whenever Hugo did—we didn’t let him do the stairs by himself any more, if we could help it, and we liked to be within earshot when he was changing for bed—but although those made a convenient excuse, I couldn’t help being aware that I was also more exhausted than I’d been in weeks.

  On the landing outside our bedrooms we stood for a moment looking at one another, in the dim glow of the stained-glass pendant lamp, as if there was some crucial thing that needed to be said and we were all hoping someone else knew what it was. It had occurred to me a few times by this point that it would make sense to ask Hugo whether he had any idea who the skull could be, but there didn’t seem to be any way to do it.

  “Good night,” he said, smiling at us. “Sleep tight.” For a second I had the crazy impression that he was thinking about hugging us, but then he turned and went into his room and closed the door.

  “He seems OK about all this,” I said to Melissa, in our room, as we put away the pile of clean clothes I had brought up and left on our bed that morning. It felt like weeks ago.

  She nodded, rolling my socks into neat balls. “I think he is. It’s taking his mind off being sick.”

  “What about you? Are you OK with it? I mean, this really isn’t what you signed up for.”

  She thought about it, hands moving deftly, eyes down. “I’m not sure what I am,” she said, in the end. “I suppose it depends a lot on whether there are more bones in the tree or not.”

  “Baby,” I said. I stopped sliding T-shirts into a drawer and put my arms around her from behind, pulling her close. “I know it’s creepy as hell. But whatever’s in there, they’ll get rid of it tomorrow. You should’ve gone back to your place for the night.”

  Melissa shook her head, a quick decisive snap. “It’s not that. They’re just bones. I don’t think I believe in ghosts, and even if they’re out there, I don’t think the bones make any difference. I’d just like to know. A skull could have got there loads of ways. But a whole skeleton . . .”

  “Rafferty said the tree’s over two hundred years old. Even if there’s a skeleton in there, it’s Victorian or something.”

/>   “Then would it really be the Guards doing all this? Wouldn’t it be archaeologists?”

  “They might not be able to tell the age straight off. They probably have to do tests. And there is an archaeologist. Rafferty said so.”

  “You’re probably right.” She leaned back against my chest, hands coming up to cover mine. “I’d just like to know what we’re dealing with. That’s all.”

  I kissed the top of her head. “I know. Me too.”

  She tilted her head back to examine my face, upside down. “And you? Are you OK with all this?”

  “I’m fine.” And when her face stayed upturned, waiting for more: “Well, it’s not what I had planned for the weekend. And yeah, I’d love them to just disappear. But it’s not a problem. Just a pain in the arse.”

  Apparently I sounded convincing, or at least convincing enough. “Good,” Melissa said, smiling, and reached up an arm to pull my head down and kiss me, and then she went back to rolling socks.

  None of us slept well, though. Over and over, I twisted looking for a comfortable position and caught the dark shine of Melissa’s open eye, or was jolted out of a half-doze by the creak of a floorboard or the close of a drawer through the wall, in Hugo’s bedroom. At some point I got out of bed, too restless to stay still another second, and went to the window.

  Yellowish city-dark clouds, no stars, one golden rectangle of light in the towering wall of the apartment block. The wind had died down to a covert stirring in the ivy. Uncanny blue-white glow like a will-o’-the-wisp, below me: one of the uniformed cops, I couldn’t tell which, was leaning against an oak tree, wrapped in a big overcoat, doing something on his phone. On the other side of the garden, there was a fresh, shocking gap in the silhouette of the treeline: the wych elm’s whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.