The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  I fumbled in a drawer as quietly as I could for my Xanax stash, and swallowed one dry. “Are you OK?” Melissa asked softly.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just checking that Chief Wiggum isn’t pissing in the flowerbeds,” and I slid back into bed beside her.

  Six

  The cops and the tree surgeon and the rest of the posse were back in the garden bright and early on Sunday morning, eating doughnuts and drinking out of thermoses (“See?” I said to Melissa, at our bedroom window, “thermoses”) and squinting up through fine drizzle at a thick gray sky. I wondered how hard it would have to rain to make them go away.

  We got dressed before breakfast, instead of going down in our bathrobes—no pretty little hair-brushing ritual today, Melissa gave her hair a fast going-over and pulled it back in a ponytail. In the kitchen Hugo was at the French doors, also dressed except for his slippers, his back to us and a mug steaming in his hand. “It’s incredible how fast they work,” he said. “That tree’ll be gone by lunchtime. Two hundred years, and: poof. I don’t know whether it’s terrifying or impressive.”

  “The faster they get it down,” Melissa pointed out, aiming for cheerful, “the sooner they’ll go away.”

  “True, of course. There’s porridge on the cooker, and coffee.”

  Melissa poured our coffee; I scooped porridge into bowls and threw in handfuls of blueberries. I was having trouble struggling up out of the Xanax, viscous fog dragging at my mind and my limbs, and the cops prowling the garden like a pack of feral dogs in the corner of my eye were more than I could handle; I wanted to get out of that room as fast as possible.

  “Hugo,” I said. “Do you want porridge?”

  Hugo hadn’t turned from the doors. “I spent a while looking up wych elms, last night,” he said, between sips of coffee. “I’d never thought much about them before, but it seemed inappropriate to know nothing about them now, somehow. Did you know that the Greeks believed there was one at the gates of the Underworld?”

  “No,” I said. The combats woman stuck her head out of the tent and said something, and the cops all vanished inside, ducking in one by one like clowns into a clown car. “I didn’t know that.”

  “They did. It sprang up where Orpheus stopped to play a lament after he’d failed to rescue Eurydice. ‘In the midst,’ Virgil says, ‘an elm, shadowy and vast, spreads its aged branches: the seat, men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging beneath every leaf.’”

  Melissa shivered, a small violent movement that made her clench the coffee mugs harder. “Lovely,” I said. “I feel better about this one being cut down.”

  “Apparently ‘the decoction of the bark of the root fomented, mollifieth hard tumors,’” Hugo informed us. “According to Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. I suppose I should try it, seeing as I’ll have plenty of root bark to hand, but I’m not sure how to decoct or foment, never mind how I would get it in there to do the mollifying. The elm also ‘cureth scurf and leprosy very effectually.’ If you should ever need it to.” I wondered if I could turn around and go back to bed.

  The tree surgeon fired up the chainsaw. “Goodness,” Hugo said, wincing. “I think that’s our cue to leave.”

  * * *

  I thought it would have been fairly obvious that Sunday lunch wasn’t a good plan, but around noon people started showing up, my parents (my mother hauling a plant pot containing an enthusiastic sapling as big as she was: “Red oak, he says it’s fast-growing so there won’t be a horrible gap for long, and in autumn the leaves should be wonderful—”), Phil and Louisa (bags of Marks & Spencer food), Leon and Miriam and Oliver (an enormous and disorganized bouquet), thank God Susanna had apparently decided to keep her lot away. I couldn’t tell whether they were all there because they thought they were providing emotional support, or because they needed to see for themselves what was going on, or just out of Pavlovian reflex: Sunday, Hugo’s, go! It felt like the doorbell never stopped ringing, everyone in turn crowding to the French doors to gape out at the carnage—huge branches strewn across the grass, sawdust flying, white-suited figures going up and down stepladders—and go through the same round of inevitable exclamations and questions, oh no look at the tree!! did they find anything else in there? they look awfully sinister, don’t they, those white outfits— do they know who it is yet?

  Finally they had all satisfied their curiosity, or else the bursts of noise from the chainsaw got too much for them, and we could move to the living room. Obviously we were expected to come up with lunch, but there was no way in hell I was going to cook up a nice roast or whatever in that kitchen, and Hugo and Melissa clearly felt the same way. We dug through the shopping bags and dumped baguettes, cheese, ham, tomatoes and whatever else on the dining-room table, along with all the clean plates and forks we could find.

  The room had a skittery, unsettled fizz to it. None of us had any idea what we were supposed to be thinking or feeling or saying in a situation like this one, and everyone had seized, with a messy combination of relief and shame, on the chance of focusing on something other than Hugo. Everyone had a theory. Miriam was telling my mother, at ninety miles a minute, about Celtic boundary rituals and human sacrifice, although it wasn’t clear how she thought the Celts would have got a skull into a two-hundred-year-old tree; my mother was countering with something about the Victorians’ complicated relationship with vigilante justice. Leon—not eating, hyper to the point where I wondered whether he had got his hands on some speed—was winding Louisa up with an ornate story about a local hurler who had sold his soul to the devil, via an improbable ceremony, in exchange for champion-level skill (“No, I swear, I heard it years ago, just no one knew where the skull had landed—”), while Louisa gave him a jaded look and tried to decide whether to call him on it. Even my father, who as far as I knew hadn’t strung together more than two sentences since Hugo got sick, was earnestly explaining to Melissa just how far a fox could drag a heavy object.

  I wasn’t as into this as the rest of them. I wasn’t really capable of seeing detectives as an intriguing distraction, and the fact that the others had that luxury was making me feel increasingly sour and left out. Phil and Louisa had brought Camembert, which was stinking up the whole room. My appetite was gone again.

  “Clearly,” Oliver said, pointing the tomato fork at me, “clearly it must date from before 1926. Your grandparents were avid gardeners, you know, out there planting and pruning and whatnot all year round, and your great-grandmother was the same. Not to be crude about it, but if there had been a body in the garden in their time, decomposing, they couldn’t have missed it. But the previous owner was an old woman, bedridden for years. When my grandparents bought the place, the garden was in a terrible state—brambles and nettles up to here, my grandmother used to tell me how when they came to view the house she shredded her best polka-dot stockings, ha! A whole army could have rotted away out there, and no one would have noticed. D’you see?”

  “We don’t know that it was an entire body,” Phil pointed out from across the table, reaching for the Camembert. “Or that the tree is where it decomposed. For all we know, someone had a skull they wanted to get rid of—”

  “Then where did the rest go? If you find a skull lying about, you call the Guards—the peelers, the bobbies, whatever they were called back then. Exactly like Hugo did. The only reason you’d get rid of it is if you had a whole body that you weren’t supposed to have. And what was going on, not long before 1926? Who might have found themselves in possession of a dead body?”

  I was losing track of all this: like Hugo’s genealogy mystery, too many tributaries of possibility and inference, I couldn’t hold on to all of them at once. The crowded room wasn’t helping, bodies and movement everywhere, unpredictable roars from the chainsaw making me jump every time. Melissa caught my eye, over my father’s shoulder, and gave me a tiny encouraging smile. I managed to grin back.

  “The Civil War,” Oliver said triump
hantly. “Guerrilla warfare; summary executions. Someone got caught informing, vanished amid the general Sturm und Drang. I’d put money on it: that body dates from 1922. Anyone fancy taking that bet? Toby?”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket: Dec. “Sorry,” I said to my uncles, “I have to take this,” and escaped to the kitchen.

  Hugo, hip braced against the counter, was sliding a large sponge cake out of its box. Out in the garden, chunks of splintered wood were everywhere, the cops were clustered at the door of the tent, and the wych elm was down to a stump.

  “Hey,” I said, into the phone.

  “Hey,” Dec said. Hearing his voice actually made me smile. “Long time.”

  “I know. How’re you doing? Sean told me about Jenna.”

  “Yeah, well. It’s not great, but I’ll live. And yeah, before you say it, I fucking know you told me so.”

  “We fucking did. Just be glad you got out with all your organs. Did you ever wake up in a bath full of ice?”

  “Fuck off. How’ve you been getting on?”

  “Fine. Chilling, mostly. Richard’s letting me take a bit of time off, so I’m just hanging out here.”

  “Sean said about Hugo. I’m really sorry, man.”

  “I know.” I moved farther away from Hugo, who was painstakingly slicing the cake, knife held in an awkward curled grip that made me tense up. “Thanks.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  I made some kind of noncommittal noise.

  “Tell him I was asking after him.”

  “Will do.”

  “Come here,” Dec said, in a different tone. “Was that Hugo’s gaff on the news?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus. I thought it was, all right, but . . . What the fuck?”

  “You know that old elm tree? The big one, down towards the bottom of the garden? Susanna’s kid found a skull in there. Down a hole in the trunk.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Yeah. I mean, it’s probably old. They say the tree’s like two hundred years old; the skull could’ve got there any time. They’re cutting down the tree, though. There’s Guards all over the place.”

  “Fuck,” Dec said. “Are they giving you hassle?”

  “Nah. They’ve been fine. They asked us a bunch of questions, but we don’t know anything about it, so now they’re basically leaving us alone. It’s a pain in the hole, but whatever. I guess they’ve got to do their job.”

  “Listen, me and Sean were going to come down this week. Do you still want us to? Or do you not need anyone else buzzing around?”

  Actually I very badly wanted to see them, but I knew I didn’t have enough bandwidth to cope with them as well as a garden full of cops; I would end up stammering, losing the thread of the conversation, making an idiot of myself. I felt a fresh stab of annoyance with Rafferty and his buddies. “Maybe wait till the cops go. With any luck they’ll be out of here soon; I’ll give you a bell then and we can plan, yeah?”

  “No problem. It’s not like I’m doing anything else. Sean’s been great, him and Audrey have been inviting me over for dinner and all, but seeing them all lovey-dovey and happy, you know what I mean? It just makes me—”

  There was a tap at the French doors: Rafferty, peeling off a pair of thin latex gloves. “Gotta go,” I said to Dec. “I’ll let you know about this week,” and I hung up and went to the door.

  “Afternoon,” Rafferty said, smiling at us and dusting his hands together. “So: the tree’s done. We’ll get rid of the wood for you; the tree surgeon’s going to take it away.”

  “Did you find anything?” Hugo asked, polite as a shop owner, Have you found everything you need?

  “It was useful, yeah.” He scraped his feet carefully on the doormat and came inside. “Before I forget: we tracked down your homeless fella, the one who used to doss down in the laneway? I asked around, found a couple of lads who used to work this area. One of them remembered him. Bernard Gildea. I’d love to be able to tell you he got his life back on track, lived happily ever after, but he wound up getting taken into a hospice. Cirrhosis. He died in 1994.”

  “Oh, no,” Hugo said. He looked genuinely distressed. “He seemed like a decent man, underneath the drink. Well-read—occasionally he would ask if we had a book to spare, and I’d find something to give him—he liked non-fiction, World War I stuff. He always seemed to me like someone who, if just one or two rolls of the dice had gone differently . . .”

  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Rafferty said. “And I’m afraid I’ve got more. The garden’s going to have to come up.”

  “Come up?” Hugo said, after a blank moment. “What do you mean?”

  “We’re going to have to dig it up. Not the rest of the trees, and we’ll try to put back whatever plants we can, once we’re done, but we’re not gardeners. You might be able to apply for compensation—”

  I said, a lot louder than I expected, “Why?”

  “Because we don’t know what we might find there,” Rafferty explained, reasonably. He was still talking to Hugo. “Probably, I’ll be honest with you, we’ll find nothing relevant at all, and you’ll be left cursing us out of it for wrecking your beautiful garden for no reason. But look at it from our side. There were human remains in that tree. We’ve got no way of knowing if there are other human remains somewhere else in the garden, or maybe a murder weapon. Probably not, but I can’t run an investigation on ‘probably not.’ I can’t go back to my gaffer with ‘probably not.’ I’ve got to know for certain.”

  “That radar machine,” I said. The thought of the garden, razed, bare dirt rucked up like a bomb site, tangles of roots reaching for the sky— “That archaeologists use, on those shows. The one that—” I mimed a sweeping motion. “Use that. If it finds anything, go ahead and dig. If it doesn’t, then you can leave the garden alone.”

  Rafferty turned his eyes on me. They were golden as a hawk’s and with the same impersonal, impartial ruthlessness, a creature simply doing what he was for. I realized that I was terrified of him. “Ground-penetrating radar,” he said. “We do use that, yeah. But that’s when we’re sweeping a large area, like a field or a hillside, for something big—a gravesite, say, or a cache of weapons. Here, we don’t know what we’re looking for; it could be something this size.” Thumb and finger an inch apart. “If we go in with the GPR, we’ll be digging every time it picks up a rock, or a dead mouse. It’ll work out the same in the end; it’ll just take a lot longer.”

  “Then no,” I said. “No way. We haven’t done anything wrong. You can’t just come in here and, and wreck the whole place—”

  Hugo sat down, heavily, at the table.

  “It’s bloody unfair on you, all right,” Rafferty said, gently, so that my voice turned into pathetic bluster. “I see it all the time, in this job: people who did nothing wrong, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of a sudden we’re showing up and ruining their day—or their garden. And you’re right, it’s not OK. Thing is, we don’t have a choice. There’s someone dead here. We need to figure out what happened.”

  “So find other ways to do it. It’s not our fault he’s dead, or she, or—”

  “I can get a warrant if you’d rather,” Rafferty said, still just as mildly, “but that won’t be till tomorrow, and I’ll need to leave someone here till then. It’ll just stretch out the whole thing. If you give us the go-ahead to start now, we can aim to be out of here within a couple of days.”

  “I would appreciate it very much,” Hugo said, cutting me off—I wasn’t sure what I had started to say—“if you could wait an hour or two before getting to work. The rest of the family is here for lunch, and they won’t be any happier about this idea than Toby and I are. It would make things simpler for everyone if you could wait until they leave.”

  Rafferty transferred that gaze to him. “I can do that,” he said. “
We need to go find ourselves some lunch anyway, sure. How would half-three suit you? Would they be gone by then?”

  “I can make sure they are.” Hugo reached for his cane and leaned the other hand on the table to heave himself upright. There were dark bags under his eyes. “Toby, would you carry in the cake plate, please?”

  * * *

  At three o’clock Hugo announced that he was getting tired. It took what felt like hours for everyone to get the hint—let me help with the washing-up, no really I want to, are you sure you’ll be all right with all of them hanging about—“Honestly, Louisa,” Hugo finally said, with a hint of exasperation, “what do you think the Guards are going to do, start cracking heads? And how much help do you think you’d be if they did?” But finally all the food had been covered with clingfilm and organized carefully in the fridge, and Hugo and Melissa and I had been given full lawyerly instructions on exactly what to do if the cops did this or that or the other, and they all flooded out the door, still talking, and left us alone.

  The three of us stood together at the French doors and watched the cops work. They started at the back wall. There were five of them, Rafferty and two uniformed guys and a uniformed woman and someone in coveralls, all of them with wax jackets and wellies and shovels. Even through the glass and the distance I thought I could hear the crunch of blades into earth. In a shockingly short time the strawberry bed was a ragged heap, great clumps of Queen Anne’s lace and bellflowers tossed aside, pale roots straggling, and there was a wide strip of dark churned-up earth across the bottom of the garden. The cops moved back and forth along it, stopping to pick something up and examine it and confer over it and drop it again, in no hurry. Above them, clouds hung thick and gray, unmoving.

  “This,” Hugo said, “I didn’t see coming.” He was leaning one shoulder against the door frame at an angle that made him look at ease, even cocky, but I could see his bad leg wobbling. “I should have.”