The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  “Baby,” I said, leaving the rest of the dishes and going to her. “It’s fine. I swear.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m not going to wreck my head over it. I’m just interested. And I’d love to get Hugo some answers. I know I’ll probably find out bugger-all, but what the hell, you know?”

  Melissa looked half convinced, but only half. The radio was playing “Little Green Apples,” Dean Martin’s voice turning the happy words somehow mournful and nostalgic, a song for a long dark road far from home; all of a sudden I wanted her close. “Come here,” I said, taking the tablecloth out of her hands and tossing it back on the table. “Dance with me.”

  After a moment she drew a long breath and her body relaxed against mine. I tightened my arms around her and we swayed in slow circles. Candle-flames fluttering and winking out one by one, wind moving through the invisible treetops with a ceaseless sea-sound and nudging at the door.

  We could get married in the garden, a good landscaper would have it knocked into shape inside a week. I knew from Sean that you had to give a few months’ notice to get married but Hugo could hang on that long, I knew he would, with that to keep him going, or maybe they had some kind of exemption for emergencies? My mother would cry her way through the whole thing, my father would be smiling for the first time in months; Sean and Dec would gleefully slag the shite out of me, Zach would find a way to smash the wedding cake, Carsten would turn out to be an eight-foot Uncle Fester type who made somber pronouncements in an incomprehensible accent; Miriam would perform some chakra-based ceremony to guarantee a long and happy marriage and we would all dance till dawn. We could invite the detectives, Martin’s missus could disapprove of the decor and Rafferty seemed like the type who would disappear early with someone’s exotic second cousin . . . Melissa sighed against my shoulder. I buried my face in her hair.

  Eight

  And then, finally, the detectives came back. They came the next morning, while I was fighting with the radiators—the autumn chill had come in hard, Hugo felt the cold badly, all the radiators needed bleeding but of course no one knew where the key was so I was struggling with a wrench and some old towels and I was covered in dust and WD-40. Rafferty and Kerr on the doorstep were ironed and smooth-shaven, spic-and-span and ready to take on the world.

  “Morning,” Kerr said cheerfully. “I’d say you thought we’d abandoned you, yeah? Did you miss us?”

  “He’s only messing,” Rafferty told me. “No one ever misses us. We’re used to it; doesn’t even sting any more.”

  “Oh,” I said, after an idiotic pause. “Come in. My uncle’s upstairs working, I’ll just—”

  “Ah, no,” Rafferty said, wiping his feet on the doormat. “Leave him to it. We only need a few minutes, sure; we’ll be gone before you know it. Will we go into the kitchen?”

  I offered them tea or coffee, got them glasses of water instead, washed the dirt off my hands and sat down at the table opposite them while Kerr got out his notebook and Rafferty surveyed the garden (dead leaves everywhere, thin chilly sunlight glittering on scraps of plastic blown in by the night’s wind) and bullshitted me about how great it looked with the new plants in. The sight of them had hit me with the old full-body flinch, but this time it hadn’t left me paralyzed. If they were back, it had to be because they had something new, and if my luck was in and I played this right, they were going to share it.

  “Just to confirm,” Rafferty said, once we were all nice and settled. “We took this away with us the other week, remember? You said it was yours?”

  He swiped through his phone and held it out to me: a photo of the old red hoodie, spread out on a white surface beside its paper bag. Someone had attached a labeled tag to it, which felt somehow both sinister and ridiculous.

  “It might have been,” I said. “I mean, I had a red hoodie, but I’m not sure it was exactly—”

  “Your cousins both say you had one like this.”

  “I guess. Lots of people had red hoodies, though. I can’t say for sure if this one was—”

  “Hang on,” Rafferty said, taking the phone back. “This might help.” He swiped again and held out the phone.

  Me, sitting among daisies with my back against a tree trunk and a can of something in my hand, smiling up at the camera. I looked so young—slight, floppy-haired, open-faced—I had to close my eyes for a second. I wanted to yell at that guy to run, far and fast, before I caught up with him and it was too late.

  “That’s you,” Rafferty said. “Right?”

  “Yeah. Where did—”

  “About when, would you say?”

  “That’s the garden here, in summer. It might be the summer after we left school. Where did you get—”

  “That’d match the date stamp, all right. See what you’re wearing?”

  Jeans, white T-shirt under an unzipped red hoodie. “Yeah.”

  “Would you say that’s the same hoodie we took with us?”

  “I don’t know. It could be.”

  “Same-shape pockets,” Rafferty pointed out, leaning over to swipe between the two photos. “Same-width cuffs. Same leather tag on the zip pull. Same little round logo there on the left breast. Same binding at the base of the hood, see inside there? The white with the black stripe?”

  “Right,” I said. “Yeah. It looks like the same one.”

  “Not exactly like, though,” Kerr said. “Spot the difference.”

  I already knew I wasn’t going to find whatever it was they were talking about. They waited patiently while I swiped back and forth, feeling stupider every second. “I don’t have a clue,” I said finally, handing the phone back to Rafferty.

  “No?” He kept it in his hand, turning it deftly like a conjuror’s deck. “No problem. It’s only a small thing. I’d say we can go ahead and confirm that that’s your hoodie, yeah?”

  “I guess,” I said, eventually. “Probably.”

  Kerr wrote that down. “It’s not a trap, man,” Rafferty said, amused. “We’re not going to arrest you for possession of a controlled hoodie. Your cousins were the same way: I don’t know, might be his, might not, lot of hoodies out there, have you checked how many of this model were sold in Ireland . . . They’re pretty protective of you, aren’t they?”

  That wasn’t the word I would have used, at least not that week. “I guess so,” I said.

  He pointed a finger at me. “Don’t be saying that like it’s no big deal. That’s a wonderful thing to have. Friends are great, but when the chips are down, it’s blood that counts. Look at you, sure, moving in here to look after your uncle when he needs you. That’s what it’s all about: sticking by your family.”

  “I do my best,” I said, moronically.

  Rafferty nodded approvingly. “That’s what your cousins say, all right. It means a lot to them, you being here, you know that? They’re not surprised, though: they say you’ve always been pretty protective of them, too.”

  That seemed unlikely, at least from Leon, although who knew what he was playing at— “I suppose. I try.”

  “Good man.” With a finger-snap, remembering: “Speaking of looking after your uncle, I meant to say to you: maybe have a bit of a look at the security in this place, yeah?”

  “What? Why?” Flash of animal terror, Martin’s hints about revenge, my patio door splintered and gaping open—

  “Ah, no, we’re not thinking anyone’s planning on coming after you.” Kerr snorted. “But we found a load of other stuff down that tree, as well as the remains. Lots of acorns, hazelnuts—I’d say you’ve got a few pissed-off squirrels out there, trying to work out what happened to their stash. Half a dozen old lead soldiers, did you have those as a kid?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” The adrenaline was subsiding, leaving me feeling slightly sick.

  “Jesus,” Rafferty said, grinning. “I’m dating myself. They must’ve belo
nged to your dad, then, or one of your uncles—they all remember stashing stuff down there, when they were kids. The soldiers were all together, with a bit of rag round them, might’ve been a cloth bag before it rotted away; one of the four of them hiding his best stuff from his brothers, looks like. I’ll have to find out who to give them back to. There’s a bunch of marbles, too. And this. You know what this is?”

  The phone again. That same white surface; a long brass key, crusted with bits of dirt and attached to a keyring, along with a black metal silhouette of a German shepherd.

  “That’s the key to the garden door,” I said, “or anyway it looks like it. The one that went missing, that summer. It was down inside the tree?”

  “It was, yeah,” Rafferty said. “And it fits the garden door. That’s what I’m telling you: your uncle should’ve changed that lock when the key went missing. If he didn’t bother, then who knows how many other keys to the other doors are floating around out there? The last thing he needs right now is a burglary.”

  “Right,” I said. “OK. I’ll get onto that.”

  “Good idea. Not that I’m complaining; it made our lives a lot easier, being able to check this key against the lock. The interesting part, right?”—leaning forwards, elbows on the table, getting into this—“the interesting part is where the key was. Dominic’s clothes were in tatters—time, mildew, animal and insect activity, they were mostly rags. The key was down near the side of his leg, but there’s no way to tell whether it was in his jeans pocket and fell out when the material rotted, or whether it was never in there to begin with. You can see how that makes a difference.”

  They both watched me: curious, assessing, waiting to see if I could do it. Kerr had a tiny smirk on his face. “Of course I can,” I said, too loud: their eyebrows went up. I flattened the bubble of rage and said, enunciating as clearly as I could, “If the key went into the tree separately from Dominic, then someone else was there when he died—unless he dropped the key by accident, while he was up the tree for some reason, and climbed in to get it. But if it was in Dominic’s pocket, then it points towards him getting into the garden and into the tree on his own.”

  “Well done,” Rafferty said, smiling.

  “Huh,” Kerr said. “You got there quicker than our fella Scanlan did, the one who thought this was cannibal Satanists, remember? I explained that to him three times, and he still didn’t get it.”

  You think someone killed Dominic, I’d said to Martin; and he’d said, That’s the way the lads’re thinking. “So,” I said, “he could have got in there by himself?”

  Rafferty shrugged, one corner of his mouth turning down wryly. “Just going by the remains, it could go either way. There was a load of muck in there with him, but that could be someone trying to cover him up or it could be just ten years’ worth of falling leaves and what-have-you. There’s no way to tell whether he went in dead or alive—he hadn’t been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in, or it would’ve been impossible for anyone to get him into that hole, but that’s as much as the pathologist can say. No unhealed injuries to the skeleton: he wasn’t beaten to death, if he was shot or stabbed it didn’t even nick the bone. Drug overdose is a possibility, specially since you told us about him experimenting—don’t worry, you weren’t the only one, plenty of his other mates said the same.” A hand going up, reassuring or quelling, although I hadn’t opened my mouth. “And he was in an odd position, down there. Legs bent up, arms jammed in front of him, neck vertebrae curled over like his head was tucked down—as far as we could tell, anyway: there was a bit of slippage, but most things held together OK. It could’ve been positional asphyxia: someone gets himself into a position where he can’t breathe properly—maybe because he was going after the key, like you said, or maybe he’s just off his face on something—he can’t get out of it, he suffocates. It was a tight space, specially for such a big fella.”

  He left a silence, waiting either for me to say something or for those images to get me good and rattled. “Jesus,” I said obligingly.

  “Or,” Rafferty said, “he could’ve died by himself, but had a hand getting into the tree. Say he ODs. Whoever he’s with—or maybe they’re not even with him, they just find him when it’s too late—they panic. Scared they’re going to get locked up for drugs, blamed for him dying. So they do something stupid—because they’re teenagers, and let’s face it, stupid shite is what panicked teenagers do—and they hide the body and hope it all goes away.”

  “Eejits,” Kerr said. He was doodling what looked like a county crest on his notepad. “That’s an offense, concealing a body. The statute of limitations probably expired years back, but, and it’s a lot less of an offense than murder.”

  “If you’ve got any reason to think it might’ve gone that way,” Rafferty said—glancing up at me, startling flash of gold—“any reason at all, even an inkling, then you need to tell me now. Today. Because right now, yeah? everyone’s got an open mind on what happened here. If someone steps up and explains that what we’ve got is an OD and a scared kid or two, then we’re all ready to take that on board. But if this drags on for a while, and my lads get it fixed in their heads that this was murder? It’s going to be a lot harder to convince them that it wasn’t.”

  He sounded so easy and reasonable, all of us on the same side working it out together, I almost wished I could give him what he was after. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t a clue.”

  “You’re sure. Because this isn’t the time to muck about.”

  “I don’t. I’m not.”

  Rafferty left that for a minute, in case I changed my mind. When I didn’t, he sighed regretfully. “All right. Then, like I said, we’ve got nothing to say whether it was accident, suicide or murder. Except we also found this. Near his right arm.” He swiped at his phone again and laid it on the table in front of me.

  White background, a right-angled ruler in one corner. In the middle was a long, complicated black squiggle. It took me a moment to work out what it was: some kind of cord, tied in a loop at each end.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “No way to know for sure. Any ideas?”

  The first thing that sprang to mind was our childhood creations, complicated rigs for shuttling notes and supplies, hours of climbing and arguing and testing and one time a branch had broken and an entire illicit apple tart had landed smack on Susanna’s head . . . “We used to rig up ropes across the garden,” I said, “when we were kids. Like, to pass stuff between windows and trees and our tent? That could have, maybe that fell down the hole?”

  Kerr made a faint noise that could have been a snort, but when I looked over he was doodling away. “Could have,” Rafferty said, politely. “Except if this went in there years before Dominic did, you’d expect it to be under him. Not up by his arm. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe. I guess.”

  “I would, anyway. Any other ideas?”

  “Maybe . . .” I didn’t want to say it but it was inescapable, the two loops— “I mean, it sounds crazy but handcuffs? Like, someone used that to tie Dominic up? Or he was planning on tying up someone else?”

  “Not bad,” Rafferty said—thoughtful, rubbing one ear, cocking his head to examine the photo. “There’s about sixty centimeters of cord between those loops, though. That’s not going to restrain anyone too well. Unless—” His head snapping up, eureka, finger pointing at me, Can you get it?

  “I guess it could’ve gone around his waist?” I said. “Or around, like, a tree or something?”

  Rafferty sighed ruefully, deflating. “That’s what I was thinking, for a second there. Now that I look at it again, though . . . See the knots? For cuffs, you’d want slipknots, right? So that if he struggled, the cuffs would tighten. Those there, those are poacher’s knots. Very secure, won’t slide, won’t pull undone even on a slippery rope, won’t shake loose if they’re unloaded, won’t low
er the rope’s breaking point. Someone wanted that cord to take a lot of strain, but they didn’t want the loops tightening.”

  “It’s mad, the things you learn on this job,” Kerr said, leaning in for a look. “I’d never heard of a poacher’s knot before.”

  “You need to spend more time on boats,” Rafferty told him, grinning. “I could tie a poacher’s knot by the time I was eight. You ever sail, Toby?”

  “A bit. My uncle Phil and aunt Louisa, they’ve got a boat; we used to go out with them when we were kids, but I never really got into it—” I didn’t like the feel of this. “What is that thing?”

  “No more guesses?”

  “No. I’m all out.”

  “Like I said, too early to know for sure. But personally,” Rafferty said, reaching out to delicately adjust the phone so it was exactly parallel to the table edge, “personally, I think it’s a homemade garrote.”

  I stared at him.

  “One of the loops goes around each of your palms.” He held up his hands, closed them into fists. “You cross your arms, like this. And then—” Out of nowhere, fast as a leopard, he lunged sideways behind Kerr, flung a loop of imaginary cord over Kerr’s head and jerked his fists apart. Kerr clutched his throat, dropped his jaw, bugged his eyes. The whole thing was so brutal and so astonishing that I sent my chair scudding back from the table, nearly going over sideways, before I could stop myself.

  “Then if you can take him down backwards,” Rafferty said—over Kerr’s head to me, fists still clenched, arms taut—“even better. A kick to the back of his knee, or just a good pull”—miming it, Kerr following along—“and he’s going down, his chin’s folding over the cord, his whole body weight’s added to the pressure. And just like that . . .”

  Kerr let his head drop limply, tongue lolling. “The end,” Rafferty said. He opened his hands and relaxed back into his chair. “Quick, quiet and effective. The victim can’t even shout for help.”

  “And no blood,” Kerr said, reaching for his water glass, “not with a cord that thick. A wire would cut his throat, you’re left with a whole mess to clean up, but that cord’s just going to block off the air flow. Might take a minute longer, but less hassle in the long run.”