The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  * * *

  After he left I spent the next hour or so pacing in circles around the living room—not the awful step-and-drag treadmill, this was fast and jumpy and I wished I could smoke inside. Hugo hadn’t come downstairs, and I was praying he would stay asleep and Melissa’s trade fair would last a very long time. I needed to think.

  You’d assume the part where I was a murder suspect would have been at the top of my agenda, but actually that didn’t seem like the most important thing, not now that the initial startle had worn off. After all, Martin had a fair point, anyone who could have got to that tree had to be on the suspect list, and I really doubted I was about to be banged up for murder just because someone had told someone that someone said I had had unspecified problems with Dominic. But gradually the rest of what Martin had said was sinking in, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed obvious, inescapable, vibrating with a truth so vital it pulled like a great magnet: what had happened to Dominic was, had to be, connected somehow to that night.

  What I couldn’t fathom was how. I still couldn’t think of any way that either the misguided-revenge thing or the same guys coming back for me would make sense—after all, I had been out cold on the floor, if they had been there to kill me they could have done it easily (my feet shied away from the candlestick, a misshapen lump crouching in its plastic bag). But clearly there was someone out there—presumably the same someone who was trying to drop me in the shit—who knew exactly what the connection was. And, like Martin had said, the list wasn’t that long. The mates who could have taken the spare key to the garden door, sometime that summer—I wished I could narrow it down. My cousins. Hugo.

  None of them seemed remotely plausible, either as murderers or as Machiavellian frame-up artists. And yet; and yet. More and more clearly it was dawning on me (and Martin must have known, all along) that the old story about the burglars being after my car didn’t make sense. I had been out of my apartment all that day and half of that night, my car and my car keys had been right there for the taking; if they had been casing my place, then why would they have waited till I was home?

  Those drawers there, they went through those pretty hard. That old camera I’d got for my eighteenth birthday, gone. Photos of long-ago parties.

  They had been looking for something that had to do with Dominic’s death. The car, the TV, the Xbox, all that had been so much smoke and mirrors—look, just a bog-standard burglary, nothing to see here! They had waited till I was at home so that, if they couldn’t find what they were after, they could get it out of me—I didn’t want to think about how. Only I had woken up and come out fighting, and everything had gone wrong.

  Normally we’d have a fair idea who we’re after. This time, nothing’s ringing any bells. I’m feeling a bit guilty about that, to be honest with you . . . Martin had known from the start. Not about Dominic, obviously, but that this was no random burglary; those men had come to me not by chance, but by careful design.

  It should have felt even more horrifying this way—targeted, stalked, hunted down—but it didn’t. If they had come after me specifically, for something I’d done or something I had, then I wasn’t just roadkill, not just some object to be mown down because it happened to be in their way: I was real, a person; I had been the crucial factor at the heart of the whole thing, rather than a meaningless irrelevance to be ignored, tossed aside. And if I was a person within all this, then I could do something about it.

  My mind was working more clearly than it had in months, a stark crystalline clarity that took my breath away like snowy air. I had forgotten what it was like to think this way.

  I could hardly track down the burglars and force them to spill the story, my badass Liam Neeson fantasies notwithstanding. But the other end of the thread, the end that lay somewhere here in the Ivy House: that one I could find, maybe, and follow.

  Weather or no weather, I needed a cigarette. I threw on my coat and went out to the terrace. Wind roaring high in the trees, the light from the kitchen throwing the hillocks and valleys of mud into stark, distorted shadow. Leaves scuttling, rain shining on the terrace tiles. My heart was beating high in my throat and for some reason I caught myself grinning.

  * * *

  “What’s that?” Melissa said, nodding at the plastic bag—later, when she had got in cold-cheeked and windblown, and I had tucked her up on a sofa with blankets and hot chocolate, and I was listening to her trade-fair stories and rummaging through the bag of samples she had brought home.

  “Oh,” I said, looking up from what appeared to be a tiny knitted condom. “It’s your candlestick. The one the police took away. That detective, Martin, he brought it back.”

  “Why?” Melissa asked sharply.

  “They’re done with it. The forensic people.”

  “Why’d he come himself? Why not post it?”

  I didn’t want to tell her anything, not yet, not till I had something solid. “I think he was in the area,” I said.

  “What did he want to talk about?”

  She was sitting up straight, hot chocolate forgotten. “He didn’t, really,” I said, going back to the sample bag. “He just dropped it off and left. Is this a leprechaun condom?”

  Melissa laughed, relaxing. “It’s a finger puppet, silly! Look, it’s got a face, when did you ever see a condom with—”

  “I’ve seen weirder. I bet you can get—”

  “It’s wool!”

  With a little zap of panic I spotted the two empty whiskey glasses, which I had of course forgotten to take away, but Melissa either didn’t notice them or assumed Hugo and I had had a nightcap together. “So, kinky leprechauns,” I said. “What kind of trade fair was this, anyway?”

  “Oh, wild. People swinging from hand-blown chandeliers.”

  She was happy because I was joking around, and I only realized then just how deeply I had frozen at the first sight of Rafferty and Kerr, just how far I had receded back into some dark echoing space. “Filling Jacuzzis with organic bilberry-elderflower champagne,” I said. “I knew it.”

  “We’re a crazy bunch.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said, leaning across to kiss her, “or you’d never put up with me,” and felt her smile against my mouth.

  We went back to poking through the samples so I could take the piss out of the weirder ones, and after a few minutes Hugo came clumping downstairs in his dressing gown, knuckling his eyes, and we made him a hot chocolate and Melissa dug a packet of sustainable oat-based biscuits out of the bag. Neither of us mentioned Martin’s visit. The next morning, opening the bin to toss something in, I saw the candlestick: sticking out of the rubbish where it had been shoved deep and hard, plastic bag twisted around it tight as a garrote.

  * * *

  I walked Melissa to work, hung around within earshot while Hugo took his shower, installed him in the study and then told him I was going for a wander around the garden to clear my head. He gave me a vague smile and a wave and turned back to his desk. I wasn’t positive he had registered what I had said, or even who I was.

  The wind had died down, leaving rumpled drifts of leaves against the walls. The replanted bushes and the stuff Melissa had brought from the garden center looked disgruntled and out of place; some of them were starting to wither. My mother’s sapling leaned at a dispirited angle in a corner, still in its pot—so far no one had worked up the nerve to plant it in that gaping crater. I hadn’t taken my Xanax the night before and everything felt jagged and discordant, every branch too savagely outlined against the gray sky, the breeze setting off sharp mechanical rattles among the dead leaves. I put a big oak tree between me and Hugo’s study window, and pulled out my phone.

  I hadn’t held out much hope that I still had a number for Susanna’s razor-happy blond friend Faye—I had flirted with her for a while, that summer when she was in and out of the Ivy House, even snogged her a couple of times, but I h
ad carefully backed away when I spotted the crazy—but there it was, somehow, transferred down through all the phones I’d had over the past ten years. I leaned against the tree trunk and dialed. It was like being a teenager with a crush, hands sweating, heart racing through my back against the rough bark, praying she hadn’t changed her number.

  “Hello?”

  “Faye?” Warm but diffident, just enough pleasure without eagerness: “It’s Toby, Toby Hennessy. Susanna’s cousin. I don’t know if you remember me—”

  “Course I do. Toby. Wow. Hi.” Friendly, but with distance. I couldn’t tell whether my name had come up on her phone or whether I’d been deleted along the way.

  “It’s been a while. How’re you doing?”

  “Great, yeah. Everything’s good. How’ve you been?”

  She sounded a whole lot more together than I remembered. In the background, a phone ringing, a man’s brisk voice reeling off some business patter: she was at work. “Yeah, good here, too.” And into the neutral silence that followed: “I’m just ringing because—well, I’m pretty sure you know all the stuff that’s been going on at my uncle Hugo’s house.”

  “Pretty much, yeah. I saw bits on the news. And then a couple of detectives came to talk to me about it.”

  Not Susanna; the two of them were out of touch, then, which gave me more leeway. “Me too. That’s actually why I called you. They mentioned they were going to talk to you, and I mean, they’re pretty intimidating guys. I didn’t like the idea of them giving you hassle. I just wanted to check that you’re OK.”

  That thawed Faye’s voice a notch or two. “Ah, yeah. It was fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Really. They weren’t intimidating at all. Maybe because I was in France with my parents for most of that September, so it’s not like I knew anything about whatever happened. They mostly wanted to know about me spending nights at your uncle’s house, do you remember that? I wasn’t getting on with my parents, and when we fought I’d sneak out my window and come over?”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember.” Putting a touch of amused tenderness in my voice. “And we’d all stay up half the night talking, and be late to our jobs in the morning. It was worth it.”

  She laughed, a little. “Yeah. Well. The detectives, I guess they’re interested in the key to the garden door? That went missing that summer? They wanted to know how Susanna would let me in; when I had to start coming in the front.”

  “They asked me all that stuff, too. I haven’t got a clue. I felt like a total idiot. Did you remember?”

  “Sort of. I know the key went missing at a party, because Susanna tried to let me in the day after and she couldn’t, and she was all freaked out—I was like, ‘Don’t worry, some eejit probably just took it for a laugh,’ but she was all, ‘Now we’re going to have to change the locks, except Hugo won’t get around to it and whoever it was will be able to wander in whenever he feels like it . . .’ I don’t have a clue when the party was, though, so I’m not sure how much help I was.”

  “More than me, anyway,” I said, with a rueful grin. I couldn’t believe how light I sounded, how at ease; I felt like some ice-cool private investigator. “I think I was a complete waste of their time. No wonder they got kind of stroppy with me. I’m glad they were nice to you.”

  “Oh, no! Are you all right? And Susanna?”

  Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed. “More or less,” I said. “I mean, it’s a bit of a headwrecker, obviously, thinking about Dominic being there all this time. And we’d love to know why he ended up there, of all the places in the world.”

  “It’s beautiful, that garden. A really peaceful place. I can understand that part.”

  No hesitation, no uncertainty: she still took for granted it had been suicide. The detectives hadn’t said anything to her about murder. They had saved that for us, which wasn’t reassuring. “Jesus, all the same,” I said. “Poor Dominic. Whatever was going on in his head, I wish he’d found a better way to deal with it. He was a good guy.” And waited.

  A small pause. “You think?”

  I wondered if Dominic had hooked up with her and then dumped her—she had been pretty, in a fragile skittery way, wide blue eyes that could barely hold yours for a moment before her head ducked away with a delicate flick that I had found very sexy. Or— “Well, yeah. I mean, he wasn’t a saint, but I don’t remember having any problems with him.”

  “No, I know you guys were friends. Just, I thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. It’s been so long, I’ve probably got it all mixed up.”

  What? “Look,” I said—quieter, little bit unsure, little bit vulnerable. “I should probably tell you something. I had an accident a couple of months back; I took a pretty bad bang on the head. Ever since then, my memory’s not . . . I mean, there’s stuff that I should remember, but I don’t.”

  “Oh, God.” Faye’s voice had changed, gone all shocked and compassionate; I had her. “I’m really sorry. Are you OK?”

  “Basically, yeah. The doctors say it’ll sort itself out, but till then, it’s kind of scary, you know? Just . . . if I’m forgetting something, help me out. Because I really don’t—I mean, this isn’t the kind of situation where you want to be in the dark. And I’m pretty lost here.”

  I threw in all the heartfelt stumbling appeal I could, and it worked. “I just got the impression Dominic had been a bit of a bastard to your cousins. Is all. And I assumed you wouldn’t be happy about it. But I don’t know the ins and outs, maybe you—”

  “A bastard to my cousins? Like how?” And when she didn’t answer: “Faye, I really need a hand. I don’t want to put my foot in it with Susanna or Leon—never mind the detectives. Please.”

  “I don’t remember the details. Honestly. I had a lot of stuff of my own going on, that year.”

  Softening my voice, a note of pain: “I know you did. I wish I’d been more help. I really wanted to be, but I didn’t know how, so I just froze up. Teenage guys are idiots.”

  “Ah, no, you were fine. I’m just saying, I should have been paying more attention to Susanna’s issues—specially when she was being so kind, letting me come over all the time; it’s not like we were best friends or anything, just that your house was closest and your uncle didn’t really stick his nose in the way someone’s parents would have . . . But I was so wrapped up in my own problems, you know? I just have this vague memory of Dominic giving them hassle. I thought he hit Leon, or something? And Susanna was upset? But like I said, I could have it all wrong—” The male voice in the background, asking some question. “Toby, I’ve got to go. Ring me any time if there’s anything else I might know. OK?”

  Under all the new composure and cheer and whatever else, she was still the same Faye. She totally meant it, but within half an hour she would have forgotten all about me, which was fine with me. “I will,” I said. “Thanks a million, Faye. You’re a star—as always. And you sound like you’re doing great. It’s good to hear.”

  “I am, yeah. Thanks. And I hope you feel better soon.”

  My hands were shaking so hard that it took me three tries to get my phone into my jeans pocket. I had never done anything like this before. The cunning maverick striking out on his lone enterprise had never been my thing; I had always been happy to drift along in someone else’s wake, joining in on whatever looked interesting and leaving the rest alone. It felt strange enough doing this to begin with, but I’d been unprepared for how well I would make it work, or for how good it would feel. And what made it even murkier and more confusing was how much of myself it had brought back: my old ease, my old charm, my old persuasiveness, but transformed in fundamental ways, strange distorted flashes reflected through a dark mirror.

  I could have used a Xanax, but I needed my h
ead clear. I lit a cigarette and took a very deep drag instead. A blackbird stopped pecking at the mud and turned one sharp merciless eye on me; I blew a long stream of smoke at it, and it took off in a riot of wings and skimmed away over the wall.

  I knew we had thrown a party at the beginning of July, that summer, once the Leaving Cert was done and our parents went off traveling and the three of us moved into Hugo’s. There had been one for Leon’s birthday, so that had to have been around the third week of August; and there had been another one sometime in September, a last hurrah before everyone went off to college at the beginning of October. That one was too late, if Faye had spent September in France. The first one was too early; we had only just moved in, she wouldn’t have had time to start showing up. That left Leon’s birthday.

  Leon hadn’t had a lot of friends to invite, but I was pretty sure a decent handful of my mates and Susanna’s had shown up, and probably some people who didn’t actually count as any of our mates—everyone knew the Ivy House parties were good ones. Sean and Dec would have been there, whichever of the other guys happened to be around, Susanna’s gaggle and likely a few of the cooler girls from her school who fancied bagging a rugby player. And Dominic, I was positive he had been there, for whatever that was worth: Dom laughing, glitter of moonlight and coke in his eyes, Leon in a headlock scrabbling uselessly at his arm, smell of jasmine and happy raucous singing everywhere in the swaying dark, For he’s a jolly good fellow!

  Which was the other thing. What Faye had said about Dominic giving Leon and Susanna hassle: could that possibly be what Martin had been on about? Faye had told Rafferty I wouldn’t have been happy about it, Rafferty had translated that into me having some big vendetta against Dominic? It felt like a stretch, but it was the closest I had to something that made sense.