The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  I badly wanted a cigarette. I hadn’t been smoking long enough to build up a serious addiction, but what with the situation—cops to the left of me, journalists to the right, and there I was, stuck in the middle with my nonsmoker act—I hadn’t had one since the night before, and it had been a bastard of a day already. I pulled off the main road and turned corners till I found a cul-de-sac lined with spindly trees and little old-person cottages. “Can we just hang on here for a minute?” I said, switching off the ignition, already fumbling for my cigarettes. “I really need one of these.”

  “I almost punched him,” Hugo said, startling me. He had taken the news and the plan quietly, just a nod and a careful note on his papers before he put them aside, barely a word on our way out the door or on the drive. “That Rafferty man. I know it’s not his fault, it has to be done, but still. The thought of him and his men prodding and peering through my house—not that I have anything I want to hide, but that’s beside the point, it’s our home— Just in that second, when he said it, I very nearly—” The sudden rise and roll of his shoulders: for a fleeting moment I saw the size of him, the breadth of his back, the reach of his arms. “A part of me wishes I had.”

  “I did try to stop them,” I said, although I wasn’t sure this really counted as true. “From searching the house. Or at least from throwing us out.”

  Hugo sighed. “I know. It’s all right. Probably it’s good for us to get out of the house for a bit.” He leaned his head back against the headrest and ran a hand over his face, roughly, eyes squeezed tight. “I couldn’t tell what the detective was thinking, not a glimmer. He’s very hard to read, isn’t he—which I suppose is his job. What did he ask you?”

  “Just about Dominic. What he was like. How much time he spent at the house.”

  “He asked me the same.” Rafferty had talked to Hugo in the study, while Kerr made pleasant chitchat with me in the living room (genealogy, leading into Kerr’s great-uncle who had had some involvement or other in the 1916 Rising) to gloss over the fact that he was supervising me. It had taken long enough that I had got violently, unreasonably twitchy, what the hell were they talking about up there while Kerr—apparently oblivious—droned on and on and on? “I barely remember him, though, this boy Dominic. God knows I’ve been trying. I don’t know whether he just didn’t leave much of an impression, or whether my memory . . . I think it was a bit frustrating for the detective.”

  “That’s his problem,” I said. The cigarette was improving my mood, but I still wasn’t feeling very charitable towards Rafferty.

  “The photo rang a bell, but not much more than that. I do remember one of your class committing suicide the summer you all left school, but I didn’t think it was someone who was particularly close to any of you.”

  “He wasn’t. He hung around with the same crowd as me, was all.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was a good bloke, basically. Kind of a party animal. He wasn’t over at the house a lot, I don’t think. Probably that’s why you don’t remember him.”

  “Poor boy,” Hugo said. “I’d really like to know the story behind him ending up in that tree. I’m not being prurient, at least I don’t think I am; but there he was, and here I am, with his death getting right in the middle of mine. Maybe it’s childish, but I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened.”

  “Well,” I said. “If the cops do their job, we should all know the story soon enough.”

  A wry twist of his mouth. “Not necessarily soon enough for me.”

  “You’ve got time,” I said, ludicrously. “I mean, the doctors didn’t, it’s not like they gave you a deadline. You’re not getting worse, or . . .” I couldn’t keep it up.

  Hugo didn’t look at me. His hair had grown: it was down to his shoulders, thick rumpled locks streaked dark and gray. His hands lay on his lap, huge square capable hands, loose as rubber gloves.

  “I can feel it, you know,” he said. “Just this last week or so. My body turning away from all this. Focusing its energy on doing something else, some new process. Something that I don’t understand and have no idea how to go about, but my body knows and is busy at it. At first I told myself it was psychological—from hearing that Susanna’s Swiss expert couldn’t do anything—but it’s not.”

  There was nothing I could say. I wanted to reach out and take his arm, physically hold him there, but I knew I wasn’t solid enough myself to make any difference.

  After a moment he drew a long breath. “Well, there you are. Give me one of those, would you?”

  I held the lighter for him. “On the other hand,” he said in a different tone, cocking an eyebrow at me as he bent to the flame, “it’s good to see you on the opposite trajectory. Even in these few weeks, there’s been a real change.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I had finished my cigarette; I threw the butt out of the window. “Well.”

  “No?”

  “I guess. But”—I didn’t know I was going to say it till I heard the words, today was all out of whack, still that dazzled feel like being in a simulator, everything too brightly colored and hanging in mid-air—“even if stuff gets better, like my leg or whatever, so what? Because that’s not the point. The point is, even if I end up running a marathon, I’m not the same person any more. That’s the point.”

  Hugo thought about that for a while. “I have to say”—he blew smoke carefully out his window—“you seem pretty much yourself to me.”

  “Well,” I said. This was nice, inasmuch as it meant I was doing a decent job of faking it, but given Hugo’s condition it was hard to put too much weight on it. “That’s good.”

  “No, I know you’re putting in the effort. I can see that—no, not that anyone else would notice, it’s only because I’m living with you and I’ve known you all your life. But that’s not what I mean.” It took him two tries to get the cigarette out the window to tap ash. “Fundamentally, under all that, you still seem like Toby. Battered and cracked, of course, but essentially the same person.”

  When I didn’t say anything: “Do you really feel so very different?”

  “Yes. Jesus, yeah, I fucking do. But it’s not even that.” I had never put this into words before, and even trying was making my hands shake; I could hardly breathe. “It’s not the actual ways I’ve changed. Probably I could handle those—I mean, they’re utterly shit, I fucking hate them, but I could . . . But it’s the fact of it. I never thought much about my, my personality before, but when I did, I took it for granted that it was mine, you know? That it was me? And now it’s like, I could wake up in the morning a, a, a Trekkie, or gay, or a mathematical genius, or one of those guys who shout at girls on the street to get their tits out? And I’d have no way to, to know it was coming. Or to do anything about it. Just . . . bam. There you go. Deal with it.”

  I stopped talking. My adrenaline was through the roof; every muscle was trembling.

  Hugo nodded. We sat there, not talking, for a while. When he moved, for a horrible second I wondered if he was going to put his arm around me or something, but instead he threw his cigarette out the window and bent to a cloth bag on the floor between his feet—I had vaguely registered him going into the kitchen (Rafferty trailing him unobtrusively) and coming back with it, on our way out, but I hadn’t paid much attention. “Here,” he said, coming up with a clingfilm-wrapped bundle. “You do need to eat, you know.”

  It was the leftover cake from Sunday’s pickup lunch. He had even brought a knife. He spread out the clingfilm on his lap and sliced the cake into two neat halves. “There,” he said, handing me mine, on a paper napkin.

  We ate in silence. The cake was jam sponge and it tasted startlingly, almost humiliatingly delicious, childhood rush of sugar and comfort. It was still raining, wind blowing small erratic spatters at the windscreen. A woman went by with a little kid in a bright yellow raincoat, the kid jumping in puddl
es, the woman shooting us a suspicious look from under the hood of her puffy jacket.

  “Now,” Hugo said, brushing crumbs and powdered sugar off his jumper into his hand. “Do you want to ring your cousins and let them know?”

  “Shit,” I said. Somehow this hadn’t even occurred to me, but of course, Rafferty would be zooming over to interrogate them as soon as he finished fucking up the Ivy House. “Yes. I should do that now.”

  “Here,” Hugo said, balling up the clingfilm and the napkins and handing the whole thing to me. “You can find a bin for this, while you’re at it—don’t forget the cigarette butts. I might close my eyes for a moment. We’ve got a while, haven’t we, before we can go home?”

  He turned the radio on to Lyric FM—something peaceful, string quartet—and leaned his head back against the headrest. I got out of the car, turned up my jacket collar against the rain and went looking for a bin while I rang Susanna.

  She picked up fast. “What’s up?”

  “There was a whole skeleton in there. In the tree. And the cops found out who it is. Remember Dominic Ganly?”

  Silence.

  “Su?” I didn’t remember Susanna being remotely matey with Dom, she hadn’t been his type, but given the effect he had had on girls— “Are you OK?”

  “Fine. I just didn’t expect it to be someone we knew.” In the background, horrible cacophony of someone banging on a piano— “Zach! Knock it off! —Do they know what happened to him?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway. They say maybe he could have been”—the word felt unreal, a bright migraine flare rippling out dangerously across everything—“he could have been murdered.”

  Sharply: “Could have been? Or he was?”

  “Could have been. They don’t know. What he died of, even.”

  A second of silence. “So they think he could have got in there by himself.”

  “That’s what Rafferty said. It sounds crazy to me, how the fuck—”

  “Well, plenty of ways,” Susanna said. Zach was still smashing the piano, but faintly now, farther away; she had left him to it. “Maybe he was up the tree, he slipped and he broke his neck falling into the hole. Maybe he was off his face on something and thought he had to go down there to look for dwarf treasure, and then he couldn’t get out and he, I don’t know, suffocated. Choked on vomit.”

  “The detectives asked that. Whether he ever did drugs.”

  “There you go. What did you say?”

  I turned my shoulder to the rain, trying to keep it off my phone. “I said yeah. I wasn’t going to fuck about. They would’ve found out anyway.”

  “Right,” Susanna said. There was an absent note to her voice; she was thinking hard. “Or maybe he actually did kill himself.”

  “Why the fuck would he kill himself in our tree? And how?”

  “Overdose, maybe. And I haven’t got a clue why. I barely knew him. That’s not our problem; the detectives can figure it out.”

  “Yeah, that’s the other reason I’m calling. They interviewed me, or interrogated me, or whatever they call it. And Hugo. And now they’re searching the house. They threw us out.”

  That got Susanna’s attention. “Searching the house? What for?”

  “How would I know?” I had finally managed to find a bin; I jammed the rubbish into it. “Because Dominic ‘had links to’ it, they said. I’m just giving you the heads-up: whenever they get finished, they’re probably going to show up at your place.”

  “Those pricks threw you out? Where are you? Where’s Hugo?”

  “Only for an hour and a half. We’re just hanging out in the car. Hugo’s having a nap. It’s fine.”

  A second while she decided whether to get really pissed off or save it. In the end: “What did they ask you?”

  “About Dominic, basically. What he was like, how well I knew him. Whether he was depressed that summer. How much he was at the house. Stuff like that.”

  Susanna went silent again. I could practically hear her mind whirring.

  “They weren’t shitty about it, or anything. It was fine. I just thought you’d want to know before they show up on your doorstep.”

  “I do, yeah. Thanks, Toby. Seriously.” A breath. Briskly: “Listen. I’ll let you know when they’ve been and gone. Then we can take it from there.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about—take what where? what exactly did she think we could do about any of this? “Yeah. OK.”

  “Got to go. See you later, or tomorrow. Meanwhile, just remember: they’re allowed to lie to you. And they’re not your buddies.”

  I wanted to ask why exactly she thought her knowledge of cops beat mine, but— “Su. Hang on.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The first time the three of us got stoned. On the terrace. Remember?”

  “You told Leon I’d turned into a fairy. He was freaking out.”

  “Yeah. Was Dominic there too?”

  “No. Why would he be?”

  “I couldn’t remember who it was. I thought maybe him.”

  “There wasn’t anyone else there,” Susanna said. There was a note in her voice that I couldn’t read; bafflement, curiosity, what? “It was just the three of us.”

  No it wasn’t, I almost said, but the ugly twist in my stomach stopped me. “Right,” I said. “I guess that stuff was stronger than I thought.”

  “I think it must’ve been pure skunk or something. I even started believing I’d turned into a fairy. I was getting worried about how I’d turn back, except I figured you probably had a plan and you wouldn’t let me get stuck that way.”

  “God, no.” That actually got a smile out of me. “I had the antidote all ready.”

  “There you go. Talk later. Bye.”

  Leon’s phone was busy. I had wandered far enough in search of the bin that it took me a while to find my way back to the car—indistinguishable wet shabby side streets, tiny empty gardens, I had a nasty mental image of having to ring Hugo to ask him where he was—but when I finally found it he still had his head back on the headrest, eyes closed. He looked asleep. I leaned on someone’s garden wall and lit another cigarette before I tried Leon again. This time his phone rang out.

  It was half-one. I figured surely to Jesus the cops had finished whatever they were doing in the study by now, and even if they hadn’t, that was their problem. I threw my cigarette into a puddle and headed for the car.

  * * *

  Rafferty met us at the door like a host—come in, great timing, just finished the study, up you come! shepherding us down the hall past a glimpse of some uniform squatting to rifle through the coffee-table clutter, sweeping us up the stairs and into the study, there you go, we’ll keep you updated! And he was gone, with a firm click of the door behind him.

  The study looked subtly, undefinably off-kilter, the wooden elephants lined up too neatly on the mantelpiece, the patterns of book spines all wrong on the shelves, everything half an inch out of place. It made me want to back out the door. “Well,” Hugo said, after a moment, blinking at the pile of paper he had left behind. “Where were we?”

  I went through the census PDFs like an automaton: pick a street, pick a house number, click on original census form, skim the names, back button and move on to the next house. I had no idea what I was seeing. Footsteps thumping back and forth overhead, in my room; thud of a drawer closing. Somehow it hadn’t sunk in till then what search the house actually meant, and the thought of Rafferty pawing through Melissa’s underwear sent me into an impotent rage that almost stupefied me, left me staring at the laptop screen, blind and panting.

  Scrapes of furniture being moved, muffled voices through walls, feet going up and down the stairs. It went on and on. I knew I should be hungry and so should Hugo, but neither of us suggested making lunch.

  At some point, after what felt like days, Rafferty knocked on the
door. “Sorry, quick question,” he said. He had an armful of large brown paper bags with clear windows running down the sides. “Who owns these?”

  He spread out the bags on the rug for us to inspect. “I think this is mine,” Hugo said, pointing at what looked like a heavy khaki jacket, big pockets, worn and dirt-smudged. “I haven’t seen it in years. Where was it?”

  “Do you remember when you got it?”

  “Goodness . . . twenty years ago, it must be. I used to wear it for gardening, back when my parents were alive and we took that stuff more seriously.”

  “When did you see it last?”

  “I have no idea,” Hugo said tranquilly. “A long time ago. Do you need it?”

  “We’re going to have to take all of this, yeah.” Rafferty watched to see what we thought of that. His stubble had darkened, giving him a dashing renegade look. When neither of us said anything: “We’ll give you a receipt. Any of the rest ring a bell?”

  “That was mine,” I said, pointing to my old rugby jersey. “Back in school. And that”—a red hoodie—“that could’ve been mine too, I’m not sure? And I think those”—grubby pair of thick-soled black creepers—“were maybe Leon’s? And that was sort of everyone’s”—a cobwebby blue sleeping bag. “For when we slept out in the garden, when we were kids, or later for if friends stayed over. I don’t know about that”—a maroon wool scarf, dusty and bobbled. “I don’t remember seeing it before.”

  “Nor do I,” Hugo said, holding on to his desk so he could lean over to examine it more closely. “It might have been Leon’s, I suppose. Or it might have belonged to one of your friends. Teenagers strew things everywhere they go, don’t they?”