The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  “If we wanted to live here,” Susanna said, with a swift warning side-glance at him. “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Well, yeah. If. And obviously we’d need to work out all the—”

  Out in the garden, Zach screamed. He and Sallie had been yelling off and on the whole time, but this was something else: this was a hoarse, raw shriek of pure terror.

  Before I managed to register what I had heard, Susanna was on her feet and throwing herself out of the room. Tom was close behind her. “What the fuck—” Leon said, and then he and I and Melissa were up and after them.

  Zach and Sallie were standing at the bottom of the garden. Both of them were rigid, arms out in shock, and by this time both of them were screaming, Sallie’s piercing inhuman high note rising above Zach’s ragged howls. My feet thumping on the ground, my breath loud in my ears. Wave of birds lifting from the trees. And on the bright green grass in front of Zach and Sallie a brown and yellow object that, although I had never seen a real one in my life, I understood without the need for a single thought was a human skull.

  In my memory the world stopped. Everything hung motionless and weightless above the slowly turning earth, suspended in a vast silence that went on and on, so that I had time to take in every detail: Susanna’s red-gold hair frozen in mid-swing against the gray sky, Zach’s mouth wide, the slant of Leon’s body as he skidded to a stop. I was reminded, strangely, of nothing so much as the moment when I had flicked on the light in my living room and the two burglars had turned to stare at me. One blink, one glance to the side, and when you look again everything is different: the trees and the garden wall and the people all looked like themselves, but they were made of some new and alien material; the world looked unchanged, and yet somehow I was standing in an entirely different place.

  Five

  Susanna swooped Sallie onto her hip, grabbed Zach’s arm in the same movement and hustled the pair of them back up the garden, talking firm reassuring bullshit all the way. Sallie was still screaming, the sound jolting with Susanna’s footsteps; Zach had switched to yelling wildly, lunging at the end of Susanna’s arm to get back to us. When the kitchen door slammed behind them, the silence came down over the garden thick as volcanic ash.

  The skull lay on its side in the grass, between the camomile patch and the shadow of the wych elm. One of the eyeholes was plugged with a clot of dark dirt and small pale curling roots; the lower jaw gaped in a skewed, impossible howl. Clumps of something brown and matted, hair or moss, clung to the bone.

  The four of us stood there in a semicircle, as if we were gathered for some incomprehensible initiation ceremony, waiting for a signal to tell us how to begin. Around our feet the grass was long and wet, bowed under the weight of the morning’s rain.

  “That’s,” I said, “that looks human.”

  “It’s fake,” Tom said. “Some Halloween thing—”

  Melissa said, “I don’t think it’s fake.” I put my arm around her. She brought up a hand to take mine, but absently: all her focus was on the thing.

  “Our neighbors put a skeleton out,” Tom said. “Last year. It looked totally real.”

  “I don’t think it’s fake.”

  None of us moved closer.

  “How would a fake skull get in here?” I asked.

  “Teenagers messing around,” Tom said. “Throwing it over the wall, or out of a window. How would a real skull get in here?”

  “It could be old,” Melissa said. “Hundreds of years, even thousands. And Zach and Sallie dug it up. Or a fox did.”

  “It’s fake as fuck,” Leon said. His voice was high and tight and angry; the thing had scared the shit out of him. “And it’s not funny. It could have given someone a heart attack. Stick it in the bin, before Hugo sees it. Get a shovel out of the shed; I’m not touching it.”

  Tom took three swift paces forwards, went down on one knee by the thing and leaned in close. He straightened up fast, with a sharp hiss of in-breath.

  “OK,” he said. “I think it’s real.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” Leon said, jerking his head upwards. “There’s no way, like literally no possible—”

  “Take a look.”

  Leon didn’t move. Tom stepped back, wiping his hands on his trousers as if he had touched it.

  The run down the garden had left my scar throbbing, a tiny pointed hammer knocking my vision off-kilter with every blow. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do was stay perfectly still, all of us, wait till something came flapping down to carry this back to whatever seething otherworld had discharged it at our feet; that if any of us shifted a foot, took a breath, that chance would be lost and some dreadful and unstoppable train of events would be set in motion.

  “Let me see,” Hugo said quietly, behind us. All of us jumped.

  He moved between us, his stick crunching rhythmically into the grass, and leaned over to look. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Zach was right.”

  “Hugo,” I said. He seemed like salvation, the one person in the world who would know how to undo this so we could all go back inside and talk about the house some more. “What do we do?”

  He turned his head to look at me over his shoulder, pushing up his glasses with a knuckle. “We call the Guards, of course,” he said gently. “I’ll do it in a moment. I just wanted to see for myself.”

  “But,” Leon said, and stopped. Hugo’s eyes rested on him for a moment, mild and expressionless, before he bent again over the skull.

  * * *

  I was expecting detectives, but they were uniformed Guards: two big thick-necked blank-faced guys about my age, alike enough that they could have been brothers, both of them with Midlands accents and yellow hi-vis vests and the kind of meticulous politeness that everyone understands is conditional. They arrived fast, but once they were there they didn’t seem particularly excited about the whole thing. “Could be an animal skull,” said the bigger one, following Melissa and me down the hall. “Or old remains, maybe. Archaeology, like.”

  “You did the right thing calling us, either way,” said the other guy. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Hugo and Leon and Tom were still in the garden, standing well back. “Now,” said the bigger guy, nodding to them, “let’s have a look at this,” and he and his mate squatted on their hunkers beside the skull, trousers stretching across their thick thighs. I saw the moment when their eyes met.

  The big one took a pen out of his pocket and inserted it into the empty eyehole, carefully tilting the skull to one side and the other, examining every angle. Then he used the pen to hook back the long grass from the jaw, leaning in to inspect the teeth. Leon was gnawing ferociously on a thumbnail.

  When the cop looked up his face was even blanker. “Where was this found?” he asked.

  “My great-nephew found it,” Hugo said. Of all of us, he was the calmest; Melissa had her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, Leon was practically jigging with tension, and even Tom was white and stunned-looking, hair standing up like he’d been running his hands through it. “In a hollow tree, he says. I assume it was this one here, but I don’t know for certain.”

  All of us looked up at the wych elm. It was one of the biggest trees in the garden, and the best for climbing: a great misshapen gray-brown bole, maybe five feet across, lumpy with rough bosses that made perfect handholds and footholds to the point where, seven or eight feet up, it split into thick branches heavy with huge green leaves. It was the same one I’d broken my ankle jumping out of, when I was a kid; with a horrible leap of my skin I realized that this thing could have been in there the whole time, I could have been just inches away from it.

  The big cop glanced at his mate, who straightened up and, with surprising agility, hauled himself up the tree trunk. He braced his feet and hung on to a branch with one hand while he pulled a slim pen-shaped torch from his pocket; shone it into the split of the trunk; poi
nted it this way and that, peering, mouth hanging open. Finally he thumped down onto the grass with a grunt and gave the big cop a brief nod.

  “Where’s your great-nephew now?” the big cop asked.

  “In the house,” Hugo said, “with his mother and his sister. His sister was with him when he found it.”

  “Right,” the cop said. He stood up, putting his pen away. His face, tilted to the sky, was distant; with a small shock I realized he was thrilled. “Let’s go have a quick word with them. Can you all come with me, please?” And to his mate: “Get onto the Ds and the Bureau.”

  The mate nodded. As we trooped into the house, I glanced over my shoulder one last time: the cop, feet stolidly apart, swiping and jabbing at his phone; the wych elm, vast and luxuriant in its full summer whirl of green; and on the ground between them the small brown shape, barely visible among the daisies and the long grass.

  * * *

  Susanna was on the sofa, with an arm around each kid. She was even paler than normal, but she looked composed enough, and the kids had stopped screaming. They gave the cop matching opaque stares from the safety of Susanna’s arms.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” the cop said. “I’d like a word with this young man, if he’s feeling able for it.”

  “He’s fine,” Susanna said. “Aren’t you?”

  “He is, of course,” said the cop heartily. “He’s a big boy. What’s your name, sonny?”

  Zach wriggled out of Susanna’s arm and looked at the cop warily. “Zach,” he said.

  “And what age are you?”

  “Six.”

  The cop pulled out a notebook and squatted awkwardly by the coffee table, as close to Zach as he could get. “Aren’t you great for finding that yoke out there? That’s a big tree for a little fella like you to be climbing.”

  Zach rolled his eyes, not too obviously.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Zach, however, had apparently decided he didn’t like this guy. He shrugged and dug his toe into the rug, watching the pile ruck up.

  “What was the first thing you did when you went out into the garden, say? Did you go straight for the tree? Or were you doing something else first?”

  Shrug.

  “Were you playing a game, yeah? Were you being Tarzan?”

  Eye-roll.

  “Zach,” Susanna said evenly. “Tell the Guard what happened.”

  Zach drew a line in the rug with his toe and examined it.

  “Zach,” Tom said.

  “That’s all right,” the cop said easily, although he didn’t look pleased. “You can talk to the detectives when they get here, if you’d rather do that.” The word detectives sent a flicker through the room; I heard a quick catch of breath, couldn’t tell where it came from. “What about this young lady here? Can you tell me what happened?”

  Zach shot Sallie a vicious look. Her chin started to wobble and she buried her face in Susanna’s stomach.

  “Right,” the cop said, cutting his losses and straightening up. “We’ll leave that for later; they’re a bit shaken up, sure, who wouldn’t be. Was it you they came to, Mrs. . . . ?”

  “Hennessy. Susanna Hennessy.” Susanna had one hand on the back of Sallie’s neck and the other on Zach’s shoulder, tight enough that he squirmed. “The rest of us were in here. We heard them scream, so we all ran out to the garden.”

  “And that yoke out there. When you ran out, was it where it is now? On the grass near the tree?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone touch it? Apart from your son?”

  “Sal,” Susanna said gently. “Did you touch it?” Sallie shook her head, into Susanna’s top.

  “Anyone else?”

  We all shook our heads.

  The cop wrote something in his notebook. “And are you the resident here?” he asked Susanna.

  “I am,” Hugo said. He had moved slowly and carefully around the rest of us to lower himself into his armchair. “These three are my niece and my nephews, Tom is my niece’s husband, and Melissa is Toby’s girlfriend. The two of them are staying with me at the moment, but usually it’s just me.”

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Hugo Hennessy.”

  “And how long have you been living here?”

  “All my life, with the odd gap here and there. It was my parents’ house, and my grandparents’.”

  “So it’s been in the family since when?”

  Hugo considered that, rubbing absently at one of his radiotherapy bald spots. “1925, I think. It might have been 1926.”

  “Mm-hm,” the cop said, examining what he’d written. “Would you have any idea how old that tree is? Did you plant it?”

  “Goodness, no. It was old when I was a child. It’s a wych elm; they can live for centuries.”

  “And that yoke out there. Any idea who it might be?”

  Hugo shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”

  The cop looked around the rest of us. “Anyone else? Any ideas?”

  We all shook our heads.

  “Right,” the cop said. He closed his notebook and tucked it away in a pocket. “Now, I have to tell you, we might need to be here for a while.”

  “How long?” Susanna asked sharply.

  “No way to know at this stage. We’ll keep you informed. And we’ll try to minimize the disturbance. Is there any other entrance to the garden, besides through the house? So we don’t have to be coming in and out on you?”

  “There’s a door in the back wall of the garden,” Hugo said, “leading out onto the laneway. I’m not sure where the key—”

  “Kitchen cupboard,” Leon said. “I saw it last week, I’ll get it—” and he slipped away as swiftly as a shadow.

  “That’s great,” the cop said. His eye moved around the room and stopped on Tom. “Mr. . . . ?”

  “Farrell. Thomas Farrell.”

  “Mr. Farrell, I’m going to ask you to make us a list of the name and contact details of everyone here. We’ll also need a list of who’s lived in this house, as far back as any of you know, and the dates—doesn’t need to be exact at this point, just ‘Granny Hennessy lived here from, we’ll say, 1950 till she died in 2000,’ that kind of thing. Can you do that?”

  “No problem,” Tom said promptly. Even in the middle of all this, it sent a sharp flare of outrage through me—fair enough, Hugo was obviously not well and Leon looked like a refugee from a Sex Pistols tribute band and Susanna was covered in kids, but I was standing right there, I was family and Tom wasn’t, why the fuck was this guy skipping over me?

  Leon came back with the key. “Here,” he said, holding it out to the cop. “I don’t know if it’ll work, no one ever uses that door so it might have gone all—”

  “Thanks very much,” the cop said, pocketing it. “I’m going to ask you all to stay in this room here for a while. If you need to use the toilet or the kitchen, obviously, that’s no problem, but the garden’ll be off limits until further notice. The detectives will fill you in a bit more when they arrive. Are you all able to wait here for them? Does anyone have an appointment, anywhere you need to be?”

  Nobody did. “That’s grand, so,” the cop said. “We appreciate your cooperation,” and he headed off, closing the living-room door a little too firmly behind him. His heavy footsteps thumped down the stairs to the kitchen.

  “Well,” Hugo said. “He was a bit . . . , wasn’t he? A bit clumsy; callow, is that the word I’m looking for? I was expecting someone more—I don’t know, polished. Too many detective novels, I suppose. Do you think he knows what he’s doing?”

  Leon said, “There’s that tape all round the garden. That blue and white stuff. It says ‘CRIME SCENE NO ENTRY.’”

  No one said anything. After a moment Melissa sat down on the other sofa and reached for the pack of cards o
n the coffee table. “I think we could be here for a while,” she said. “Does anyone want to play rummy?”

  * * *

  It took a very long time for the detectives to arrive. I fetched paper and pen from Hugo’s study, and Tom did up his lists—when did your granddad die again, Su? Hugo, do you remember what year you moved back in? do we put in the summers you guys stayed here? blah blah blah, like some awful lickarse aiming for best class project. Melissa and Hugo and I played hand after hand of rummy, very badly; Leon joined in, off and on, but he could barely stay still for one round before he gravitated back to the windows, where he pressed himself against the wall and stared furtively out at the road like a PI peering around a street corner. Susanna played some game on her phone with Sallie, a low nonstop current of blips and electronic music and sharp cartoony giggles. Zach was so hopped up on adrenaline that he’d gone full tweaker: manically circling the room, climbing furniture, making a furious variety of clicking and tocking and sucking noises that were driving me bananas. I was itching to stick out a foot and trip him up.

  For some reason it seemed impossible to say a single word about the skull. It felt like there were a thousand questions I wanted to ask and angles I wanted to discuss, but I couldn’t put my finger on a single one, and the longer I left it the more unsayable it all seemed and the more dreamlike the entire situation felt, as if we had been in that room forever and would never be able to leave. “Toby,” Leon said. “Your deal. Come on.”

  The doorbell rang. We all froze and looked at one another, but before any of us could do anything sensible we heard boots tramping up the hall and the front door opening. Male voices swapping brief unemotional comments, crackle of a radio, confusion of footsteps going back down the hall; then the kitchen door slamming.