The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  And: assuming Faye hadn’t imagined or misinterpreted the whole thing, what exactly had been going on between Dominic and my cousins? I couldn’t remember him ever paying much attention to Susanna—Dom hadn’t gone for the nerdy type: he had occasionally cracked some dirty joke or tossed out some sexist comment so he could laugh at her Outraged Feminist mode, but he had hardly been the only person who did that. I did remember him giving Leon shit now and then, but again, it had been routine shit, the kind Leon had been taking from plenty of people ever since we were about twelve—fag jokes, lisps and limp wrists; when I happened to be around I had told the guys to back off, but it hadn’t seemed like a particularly big deal. Given the state Dominic had been in that summer, though, who knew: could he have ramped things up a level or two? Although surely Leon would have told me, surely I couldn’t have missed or forgotten that—

  I wasn’t about to ask either Susanna or Leon the story. Martin’s visit had shifted, very subtly, the way I thought about them, about our positions on this new surreal chessboard where we had somehow found ourselves; even though I knew that was probably exactly what Martin had been aiming for, I couldn’t help it. Instead I rang Sean and asked him when would suit him and Dec to come over.

  * * *

  They came the next evening, which moved me more than I could have told them even if I had wanted to. I got the message across by giving Sean shit for having gained a few pounds and giving Dec shit about Jenna—“Man, there’s what, half a million women in Dublin? At least one of them has to be single and sane, but no—”

  “And have low standards,” Sean pointed out.

  “There’s that.”

  “What are you on about?” Dec demanded, injured. “I’m employed and I’ve got all my hair. That’s more than a lot of blokes.”

  “You’re a narky bollix,” I told him. “I wouldn’t put up with you.”

  “I’m not a— Melissa. Honestly, now. Am I a narky bollix?”

  “You’re lovely.”

  “See?”

  “What else is she going to say? She’s a nice person, you’re sitting right there—”

  The kitchen table where we had spent so many teenage evenings, loaded now with bright-patterned serving bowls—pasta, salad, Parmesan—and scraped plates and half-full wineglasses, tousled orange flowers and tarnished silver candlesticks. Hugo was laughing, chin propped on his woven fingers, candlelight flickering in his glasses, “—they’ve always been like this—” aside to Melissa, who was laughing too, sunshiny in a yellow dress. I threaded my fingers through hers on the table and gave her hand a squeeze.

  “At least I’m not a fat bastard,” Dec said, to Sean.

  Sean stuck out his belly and gave it an affectionate pat. “All muscle.”

  “Jesus, dude,” I said. “You’d want to get onto that or you won’t fit into your wedding dress.”

  “He won’t fit into the wedding photos—”

  They had brought Hugo presents, the same way they had brought me presents in the hospital: fancy chocolates, books, DVDs, Armagnac—even I had forgotten that he liked Armagnac, but Dec had a long story about how when we were fifteen we had raided the booze cupboard and practically killed ourselves on swig after massive swig of it, no one willing to be the one who backed out: “Toby looked like he was about to explode, bright red, tears coming out—I called him a big pussy-boy, excuse the language, and went for it, right? next thing I know the room’s actually going round, I thought I was having a brain hemorrhage— I know you knew, Hugo, the three of us were gee-eyed, but fair play to you, you never said a word—”

  “Well,” Hugo said, smiling, leaning sideways to fumble the bottle out of the present bag, “now you can have all the Armagnac you like, and enjoy it properly. Toby, would you fetch glasses?”

  Sean and Dec got up with me, to clear the table. “The garden’s in bits,” I said, nodding towards the doors as I passed. “We’ve been trying to put stuff back in, but I think we might actually be making it worse.”

  “It’ll grow back,” Sean said. “A load of grass seed, bunch of wildflower seeds . . .”

  We hadn’t mentioned Dominic all evening. Sean and Dec had stayed far from it: asked Hugo about how he was feeling and how his treatment was going, told funny stories about work, Sean had pulled up phone snaps of his and Audrey’s engagement party (“Oh my goodness, look at her, all grown up, I’m still picturing a little slip of a thing with braces . . .”). I had been biting my tongue hard, twitching with impatience for the right moment, and I couldn’t afford to wait any longer: for all I knew Sean and Dec were planning on leaving right after the Armagnac. “That hole there,” I said. “That was the tree where . . . That big elm, remember?”

  Dec paused, with a handful of plates, to look out. “Sort of. The detectives asked me that. Someone told them I’d been up there, at a party? Singing ‘Wonderwall’?”

  “Probably Susanna,” I said.

  “Tell her thanks a bunch from me. I remember being up a tree singing, all right—Jesus, I must’ve been fluthered—but I’m not an arborist, know what I mean? It could’ve been an elm or an oak or a bleeding Christmas tree for all I know.”

  “I think that must’ve been Leon’s birthday,” I said—I had no idea whether that was true or not. “The detectives went on about it a lot. They wanted to know who was there.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had Armagnac,” Melissa said, leaning towards Hugo to examine the bottle. “What’s it like?”

  “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” Sean said, over his shoulder from the sink. “It’s like a gorgeous woman, right? absolute stunner? who has a black belt in karate. If you treat her right, she’ll make you feel like you’re the king of the world. But if you don’t give her proper respect, she’ll kick seven shades of shite out of you. I can still feel the hangover.”

  Hugo was laughing. “If you’ve had cognac,” he said to Melissa, “it’s a bit like that, only richer; earthier. It’s powerful stuff, all right, if you’re fifteen and swigging right out of the bottle, but this is a wonderful one; bound to be smooth as butter. These boys don’t do things by halves.”

  They didn’t want to talk about Dominic. “I was shag-all use to the detectives,” I said. “I got the feeling they thought I was messing them around, but actually the problem is I haven’t got a clue about the party, due to my memory being pretty thoroughly fucked.” In the sudden stillness I gave a small wry shrug, keeping my eyes on the glasses I was putting in front of Hugo, so I wouldn’t have to see anyone’s face. It made my stomach lurch even to touch on this, it was humiliating and disgusting and unsafe, but now that I had finally found an upside to my fuckedupness I had every intention of milking it for all it was worth. “Yeah. Probably I should’ve just told them that, but . . .”

  And sure enough, after the smallest flicker of silence: “That was the one where Audrey’s mate Nessa spent half the night crying in the jacks,” Sean said easily. He was rinsing plates, ready for the dishwasher. “Because she’d snogged Jason O’Halloran a couple of days earlier, and he was blanking her. It wasn’t one of the big ones, not a lot of people there—it was like a few days after the Leaving Cert results and the college offers, so everyone was partied out. There was the three of us and your cousins, and Audrey brought Nessa and Lara—”

  “Leon had those three emo mates of his,” Dec said, grinning. “Sitting in a corner playing Dungeons and Dragons or whatever they were at. And a few of Susanna’s shower turned up—the little blond one, and the mouthy one with the mad hair?”

  “And a few of the lads,” Sean said. “Dominic was there, all right. And Jason, obviously. And I remember Bren was giving out because Nessa was taking up the jacks, and if Bren was there then I’d say Rocky and Mal were too—”

  Melissa had gone quiet, one foot curled under her, eyes dark in the dim light and moving back and forth among us. “That rings bells, all
right,” I said. “Nessa locking herself in the jacks. And didn’t we make Leon a hash cake?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said, face lighting up with pleasure—look, we’re helping, Toby’s getting better before our very eyes! “It turned out crap, it didn’t even look like a cake, but it did the job. One of the emo mates ate like four slices and couldn’t stop giggling about the floor tiles.”

  Hugo was still fumbling with the bottle, trying to uncork it but his grip kept slipping. Melissa reached out a hand and he passed it to her, with a small tight grimace.

  “Hang on, but,” Dec said. “Why are the cops even asking about that party? That was ages before Dominic went missing.”

  “Something about the key to the door in the garden wall, I think,” I said. “It went missing at the party; they want to know who could’ve taken it.”

  “They asked me about the key, yeah. If I knew where it was kept—they knew I was staying here off and on, the summer before that. Did you tell them?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t hidden or anything, though, the key; it was just on a hook by the door. Anyone who went down there would’ve seen it.”

  “I remember it, all right,” Sean said. “On a big keyring with a black dog on it. Metal.”

  “That’s the one. I’ve been going mental trying to remember if I saw anyone with it, at that party, but . . .” I shrugged. “Yeah. Well.”

  Dec and Sean looked at each other. “I didn’t,” Sean said. “If I’d seen anyone messing with it, I’d’ve stopped them.”

  “Me neither,” Dec said. “Wasn’t that the party where we couldn’t even go down that end of the garden? It was all dug up and mucky? Hugo, you were putting something in, rocks—”

  Hugo glanced up as if Dec had startled him, but he said readily enough, “The rock garden, it must have been. I’m sure that was that summer—you three helped me, do you remember?” I did remember that, vaguely, hauling rocks in happy summer sun, chart music bopping from the open windows, Hugo cocking his head, Maybe a little more to the right, what do you think— “It turned out pretty well, in the end.”

  “That’ll be it,” Dec said. “Bren tried to go down there, and he tripped over into a hole and got his lovely expensive jeans all mucky, so after that we all stayed up this end. That’s why Bren was pissed off about Nessa hogging the jacks: he wanted to take off his jeans and give them a rinse.”

  “In the end he did it in here, remember?” Sean said, grinning. “Waving the jeans like”—stripper whirl, hip-swing—“and the girls all screaming, and then Rocky and Mal grabbed the jeans off him and threw them up a tree.”

  “My goodness,” Hugo said, smiling. “I missed all the excitement. I had a large stockpile of industrial-strength earplugs, back then. Thank you, my dear—” to Melissa, who had poured the Armagnac and was passing glasses.

  “So the cops think, what?” Dec asked. “Dominic robbed the key and then came back here to do himself in? Or someone else robbed it and brought him here?”

  “I don’t have a clue what they’re thinking,” I said. “I don’t think they even know.”

  “At least,” Sean pointed out—taking his seat, brushing water off his hands—“if they’re asking about the key, they think it was someone from outside. They’re not thinking one of you guys let him in and killed him. Which is nice.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me, and while I liked the thought, I had a hard time believing it was quite so simple. “I don’t think anyone killed him,” I said. “Dominic Ganly, for God’s sake. Why would anyone want to?”

  That was for Dec: he always loved having something to contradict. He went right for it. “Seriously? I mean”—pulling his chair up to the table, energized by the prospect of an argument—“I mean, OK, it’s unbelievable to think we know someone who might’ve possibly been murdered. But seeing as we do, right? seeing as, let’s face it, apparently we do, are you really that surprised that it was Dom?”

  “You’re not?”

  “Being really honest,” Dec said, “no. Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, or anything. But it’s been long enough now that we can probably say it, yeah? Dominic was kind of an arsehole.”

  “Come on. We were all kind of arseholes. We were eighteen.”

  Dec was shaking his head vigorously, shoving his forelock out of his face. “Nah nah nah. Not the same way.”

  “Dec’s right,” Sean said. “For once. He was a douche.”

  “He gave me hassle about my accent every single day. He used to pretend he couldn’t understand me.”

  “We all gave each other hassle,” I said. “And nobody understands you anyway.”

  “It wasn’t funny, man. Not at the time. The whole of first year, I was scared to open my gob if Dominic was around, because I knew he’d have everyone laughing at me. In the end Sean told him to fuck off”—he raised his glass to Sean, who nodded and raised his own—“and it got better after that, but still. Remember that time in third year, stuff was getting robbed out of the locker room? Dominic spread it around that it was me, because I was a skanger, right, and you know what they’re like, I was probably selling the stuff to buy gear . . . People believed him. People stopped asking me over to their gaffs, in case I walked out with their Xbox up my jumper.”

  “Jesus,” I said. This didn’t fit the way I remembered Dominic at all—he hadn’t been a saint, or anything, but this kind of dedicated nastiness . . . “You’re sure it was him, who spread that around?”

  “Yeah, I am. I called him out on it. He laughed in my face and asked me what I was going to do about it. Which obviously”—Dec was smiling, but not with a lot of humor—“what with him being twice my size, was nothing.”

  I couldn’t help wanting to ask again, was he positive, all those years ago, maybe he had got mixed up— I had always taken it for granted that Dominic was just a regular decent guy, but when I got right down to it I wasn’t sure why. A few weeks earlier I would have said without a thought that I knew Dominic pretty well; now thinking about him felt like thinking about a stranger, someone I had sat opposite for years on a train to work, without ever having an actual conversation. “Jesus,” I said again. “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, yeah. I didn’t want you knowing. The whole thing was humiliating enough, yeah? without you guys feeling like you needed to step in and rescue me.”

  “I didn’t have a clue either,” Sean said quietly, aside to me. “I thought it had stopped after I told him to get fucked. No one would’ve said it to us.”

  “I’m not saying this to bitch about Dominic,” Dec said. “It’s not like I’m scarred for life, or anything; I’m not crying into my Armagnac—which is gorgeous, by the way, Hugo, and I’m finally properly ashamed of the way I treated yours back in the day—” Hugo nodded. He was sipping his drink and watching us quietly; there was something about him and Melissa, the stillness, the eyes moving in shadow, that gave them a strange kind of resemblance. “I’m saying it because it wasn’t just me. There’s people, plenty of people, who Dominic did a lot worse to. And I’m not saying any of them killed him—I actually don’t think anyone killed him, I think the Leaving Cert was the first time in his life that Dom couldn’t buy his way or bully his way into getting what he wanted, and he couldn’t handle it. I’m only saying: the idea of someone wanting to kill him isn’t actually that incredible.”

  “The way I remember it,” I said, “I always got on totally fine with him. The only thing is”—I wasn’t faking the suck of breath before I could keep going, this wasn’t easy—“I might not remember. And I feel like, I kind of think with everything that’s going on, I need to know.”

  “I don’t remember you ever having any problems with him,” Sean said, stretching to top up glasses. “I didn’t either. Not saying I liked him, but he never did anything to me personally.”

  “I thought,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m imagining it, or—
Did he give Leon a bit of hassle?”

  “Oh yeah,” Dec said. “Dominic was a prick to Leon; way worse than he was to me. I think he beat the shite out of him a couple of times.”

  Hugo moved, a sharp wince, covered it by raising his glass to his mouth. “Do you remember anything like that?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said, a little louder than I should have—not that there had been any accusation in his voice, he had sounded perfectly neutral, but still, the idea that I would have stood by while Leon got beaten up— “All I ever saw was a bit of slagging, the usual stuff, nothing like—”

  “I could have it all wrong,” Dec said. “I didn’t actually see anything. I’m just talking rumors, yeah?”

  “What about Susanna?” I asked. “Dom never picked on her, did he?”

  Dec shrugged. “I don’t remember him ever picking on girls. And it’s not like he even saw her that much.”

  “I think he might’ve actually tried chatting her up, at one stage,” Sean said, “but she put the kibosh on that fairly quick. Susanna’s sharp.”

  “I think,” Hugo said, “it’s time I was going to bed. No”—gently but very firmly, a hand coming down hard on my shoulder as I went to follow him, my mouth opening on some excuse about the jacks—“not tonight.” And when Sean and Dec stood up: “No, no, I’m not throwing you out. Stay and talk to Melissa and Toby; they could do with the company, cooped up here with a rickety old man like me.” He gave each of them a brief one-armed hug, smiling into their faces. “Thank you so much for coming. It’s been a wonderful evening, and it’s meant the world to me. Good night. Safe home.”

  We listened in silence to the slow thud and drag of him going up the stairs—“Hang on,” I said, lifting a hand, when Dec started to speak—and to the flickers of movement as he got ready for bed: crack of floorboards as he crossed the landing to the toilet, muffled thumps of footsteps back and forth in his room, finally the creak of bedsprings, all so faint that I would barely have heard them if I hadn’t known exactly what I was listening for. “OK,” I said, at last. “I think he’s fine.”