The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  “The best part is,” Rafferty said, “you don’t have to be bigger or stronger than your victim. He could be a horse of a man, but as long as you get the jump on him and you’ve got half-decent upper-body strength, he’s fucked.”

  They both smiled at me, across the table. “Honest to God,” Rafferty said, “I’m amazed people aren’t garroting each other every day of the week. It’s easy as pie.”

  “But,” I said. My heartbeat was going like a woodpecker, high in my throat. “You don’t know for sure that that”—the photo—“even has anything to do with, with Dominic. It could be from when we were kids. Maybe it got snagged on a, something inside the hole—”

  Rafferty considered that, turning the phone between his fingers, frowning at it. “You think that’s likely?”

  “Well. It’s got to be more likely than a, a garrote. All the stuff you said there, I didn’t have a clue about any of that. Most people wouldn’t. How would anyone even think of it?”

  “True enough,” Rafferty said, nodding. “Fair point. One problem with it being part of your kiddie games, though.”

  Swiping at the phone again, long fingers, easy economical movements. “See this?”

  Me leaning back against that tree trunk, cheerfully grinning away. Rafferty tapped the screen. “There’s a drawstring on your hood. Black, looks like paracord. But here . . .”

  Swipe. The hoodie they’d taken away, spread on its white table. “Notice anything?”

  He waited until I said it. “There’s no drawstring.”

  “There isn’t. And”—swipe: the squiggle of cord—“black paracord. The length is consistent with a standard hoodie drawstring.”

  There was a silence. Something had happened to the air in the kitchen: it felt magnetized, charged, humming with a buzz like a microwave’s. It took a few seconds for it to sink in: I had gone from a suspect to the suspect.

  Rafferty and Kerr were both looking at me, peaceful expectant looks with no urgency, like they could wait all day to hear whatever fascinating things I had to offer.

  I said, “Do I have to keep talking to you about this?”

  “Course you don’t,” Rafferty said, surprised. “You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. You can tell us to bugger off any time you like. Only why would you?”

  If you’re ever uncomfortable with what they’re asking, my father had told us all, Phil had told us, over and over, if it ever sounds like there’s even a chance they might suspect you of anything, if they ever caution you, stop talking straightaway and ring one of us. But if there was anything else these guys might give me, anything at all, I needed it.

  “Because,” I said. “It sounds like you’re saying I, that you think I killed Dominic. And I didn’t. I never touched him.”

  Shaking his head: “I’m not saying you killed him. I’m saying your hoodie string was used to kill him. You can see how we need to hear what you think about that.”

  I felt light-headed and utterly unreal, as if my chair and the tiles under my feet had dematerialized and I was rocking amid that humming air. “But,” I said. “But that’s all guessing. You don’t know that drawstring came from my hoodie. You don’t know it was meant for a, a garrote. You don’t know anyone used it on Dominic. And even if someone did, that doesn’t mean it was me. Because it wasn’t.”

  “True,” Rafferty said, nodding. “All fair points. We don’t know anything for definite, not at this stage. Luckily for all of us, though, most of that is stuff we can prove, one way or the other. It might take a bit of time—”

  “I nudged the lab,” Kerr said, aside to Rafferty in a carefully judged undertone. “They said probably this week.”

  “Ah, lovely,” Rafferty said. “Not that much time, so. The way it works, right? if that cord was wrapped tight around Dominic’s neck, he’ll have left skin cells on it, all along the center length. That means DNA. It’ll be degraded, obviously, after being down a damp tree for ten years, but our techs are first-rate; they’ll still get there, it’s just taking them that bit longer. And if someone was pulling on those loops, same thing: he’ll have left skin cells all over them.”

  “Hang on,” I said. I wanted just a second where I could think without their eyes on me. I wanted a smoke break. “Wait. If that was my hoodie cord, if, then my, my skin cells would be on it anyway. On the ends. Right where the loops are.”

  “And,” Rafferty said, ignoring that, “we’ve tracked down the hoodie manufacturers. They’re finding us the specs on the cord they used for that model, so we can see if it’s consistent with what we’ve got. If it’s not, that doesn’t mean much either way—maybe there was one odd batch, or maybe the cord got replaced along the way—but if it’s a match, that’s interesting.”

  “That hoodie wasn’t—I didn’t keep my stuff locked up. It was just lying around. Even if it, if that’s the cord, anyone could’ve taken it out. At a party or anywhere. Dominic could’ve.”

  “And garroted himself?” Kerr inquired, with a grin. “I’m not sure that’s a thing, man.”

  “We’ve heard from multiple sources,” Rafferty said, “that Dominic was a right prick to your cousin Leon. Leon told us himself, sure. He didn’t want to, he dodged around it for a while—which is interesting; like we were saying before, ye’re protective of each other, right? But he let it slip in the end.”

  I just bet he had. I tried to keep my eyes off Rafferty’s, find familiar objects that would turn this real. Chipped red enamel teapot on the windowsill, checked tea towel hanging askew from the handle of the oven door. Ruffled orange marigolds in a cracked mug.

  “He wasn’t a nice fella, this Dominic, was he? The stories people told us . . . I thought I’d seen a bit of bullying at my school, but man, some of this stuff gave me the shivers.” Screwing up his eyes worriedly, rubbing at his jaw: “How come you didn’t tell us that, last time? You said Dominic was ‘a good guy.’ Got on with everyone.”

  “I didn’t know. About the bad stuff. I knew he sometimes gave Leon a bit of grief, but I thought it was just minor crap.”

  “Half your school told us about it. You’re the person who was closest to Leon, and you’re telling me you missed the whole thing?”

  “Leon didn’t tell me. No one told me. I don’t read minds.”

  Rafferty cocked a wry eyebrow at me: Come on. “D’you feel like shit about it?” Kerr asked me. “I would.”

  “What could I have—” That hum in the air, pressing into my ears. Kerr picking something off a side tooth, hard curious eyes on me. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Well, put a stop to it,” Rafferty said reasonably. “I wouldn’t say you’re the type to stand by and let your cousin take that kind of shite. Amn’t I right?”

  “Probably not. If I’d known about it. Only I didn’t.”

  They left that there for a moment. Kerr examined whatever he had found on his tooth. Rafferty balanced his phone carefully on its edge on the table.

  “I’d bet,” he said—almost absently, all his attention on the delicate business of the phone—“I’d bet money that you only meant to give Dominic a scare. You don’t seem like a killer to me, not at all, and I’ve met plenty. You were only planning on shaking him up a bit, nothing serious, just warning him: Don’t you ever fuck with my cousin again. Which needed doing, and there’s not a decent person in the world who’d think less of you for it.” Glancing up at me, golden eyes lit to wildness by a rogue streak of sun: “I’m serious about that, man. I wasn’t just talking, before, when I said sticking by your family is the most important thing in the world. If even half the shit we heard about Dominic was true, then you had to put a stop to it. You had no choice.”

  Jasmine creepers swinging dizzily outside the window, back and forth. A watercolor off-kilter on the wall, swallows in a he
art-stopping nosedive. Crazy slants of sunlight across the table.

  “Only the thing about garrotes is, people underestimate them. Look them up on the internet, every page about them has a million warnings: don’t ever try this on a real person, the neck’s fragile and easily damaged, even if you think you’re just practicing or messing about you could kill someone just like that.” He took his fingers off the phone and it fell flat with a bang. “But teenage boys, they don’t take much heed of warnings. They’re invincible: Ah, I know what I’m doing, it’ll be grand . . . And they don’t know their own strength. It’d be very, very easy for that to go just a little bit wrong. Pull a tiny bit too hard, for one second too long, and all of a sudden it’s too late.”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t help it; everything else in the room had dissolved into a seething speckled blur.

  “If that’s what happened,” Rafferty said gently, “we need to know now. Before the DNA results come back. If we get ahead of it right now, I can keep it low-key: go to the prosecutor, explain the whole story, come back with a manslaughter charge or maybe even assault. But once we’ve got DNA, it’s out of my hands. Everyone’s going to go in with all guns blazing: the prosecutor, my gaffer, the brass, everyone. They’re not going to lowball a slam-dunk murder case.”

  None of it was sinking in; my mind had seized up, completely and violently as a spasming muscle. I said—my voice felt like it belonged to someone else—“I want you to leave now.”

  There was a long silence, while the two of them watched me. My hands were trembling. Then Rafferty sighed, a long regretful sigh, and pushed back his chair.

  “It’s up to you,” he said, pocketing his phone. I had expected a fight, and somehow the fact that I wasn’t getting one terrified me even more. “I tried, anyway. And you’ve still got my card, right? If you change your mind, you ring me straightaway.”

  “You fancy giving us a DNA sample?” Kerr asked, closing his notebook with a showy one-handed flip.

  “No,” I said. “Not unless you get a, a warrant or whatever you—”

  “No need,” Kerr said, grinning at me. “The lads took a sample off you back in April, when you got burgled. For elimination purposes. We can use that, no problem. I just wanted to see what you’d say.”

  And he touched two fingers to his temple in a salute and strolled off towards the front door, whistling.

  “Ring me,” Rafferty said quietly. “Any time of the day or night, I don’t mind. But do it. Yeah? Once this window closes, it’s closed for good.”

  “Come on, man,” Kerr called from the hallway. “Places to go, people to see.”

  “Day or night,” Rafferty said. He gave me a nod and headed after Kerr.

  * * *

  I waited till I heard the front door close; then I went out to the hallway, tiptoeing for some reason, to make sure they were really gone. Even after I heard their car zoom off—too fast for the street—I stayed there, hands pressed against the cracking white paint of the door, small cold drafts sliding in around its edges to eddy at my neck and my ankles. Here I’d been leaping at the thought of them giving me something new; careful what you wish for.

  Now that they were gone and I could think again, I realized Rafferty had been talking bollocks. Slam-dunk murder case, my arse. He had been ignoring me because I was right: even if all his DNA results and hoodie-cord comparisons came back positive, any one of at least a dozen people could have garroted Dominic with that cord. The fuzzy sort-of-motive he had lobbed at me, Dominic bullying Leon, that pointed at Leon a lot more directly than it did at me. Leon had been a skinny little weed of a kid, but that didn’t matter. The best part is you don’t have to be bigger or stronger than your victim. He could be a horse of a man, but as long as you get the jump on him . . .

  The terrible part was that Rafferty had to know all that too; and yet he was sure, sure enough to try strong-arming me into a confession, that it hadn’t been Leon, hadn’t been any of those dozen people, it had been me. And I understood, with a savage splintering sensation deep inside my breastbone, exactly why. Me six months ago, clear-eyed and clear-voiced, sitting up straight and smart, answering every question promptly and directly and with total unthinking confidence: every cell of me had carried a natural and absolute credibility; accusing me of murder would have been ridiculous. Me now, slurring, babbling, droopy-eyed and drag-footed, jumping and trembling at every word from the detectives: defective, unreliable, lacking any credibility or authority or weight, guilty as hell.

  With a rush of fury that took my breath away I wondered if this had been Leon’s plan all along: to leave me damaged, drooling into my baby food or beeping into machines; to turn me into something that could so easily and naturally be dumped with the blame, when it came.

  It had almost worked. A couple of months earlier, if Rafferty had tapped me on the shoulder and called me by name, I would have gone without a fight: why not? what was there left to save? Plead guilty, walk out of my life and leave all the wreckage behind: it would have come almost as a relief. Now, though, things had changed. I could feel my luck turning, rising, a low slow drumbeat somewhere deep in the fabric of the house. I might not be clear on what exactly was going on here, but I was very clear on one thing, which was that there was no way in hell I was going to lie back and let myself be carted off to jail.

  I still couldn’t quite believe that Leon was actually planning to take things that far, but it certainly looked that way. That photo of me conveniently wearing the exact hoodie that had provided the garrote: that had come from somewhere very close to home. And it was a good clear image, none of the pixelated blur off an old dumbphone. None of us had had smartphones, back in school, and the others hadn’t had digital cameras, either. But I had. My eighteenth birthday, January of our final year in school, my mother reaching to run her hand over my head, smiling: Now when we’re away this summer you can send us proper photos, promise? And of course the camera had bounced around Hugo’s place with everyone snapping whatever caught their eye, and occasionally I had remembered to upload a bunch of stuff and delete the inevitable shots of somebody’s hairy arse and send the most wholesome ones to my mother. And then somewhere along the way I had got a smartphone, and the camera had knocked around half-forgotten until finally it landed in a drawer in my apartment, and there it had stayed until someone decided he needed it very badly.

  What Leon had been neglecting was that I knew him very very well and I knew how he worked. He never could keep his mouth shut, not all the way: if something was on his mind he wouldn’t tell you straight out but he would skitter around the edges of it, coming back to poke at it again and again, just like he had with Hugo’s will. If I gave him enough chances, he would give me hints.

  One of the big questions, of course, was where Susanna fit into all this. It was hard to imagine her being in on it. She had been a well-behaved kid, the type who handed everything in on time with footnotes and never talked back to teachers, much more likely to tell a responsible adult about bullying than to start constructing a garrote. And while she definitely had the organizational drive to mastermind just about anything, she didn’t have even Leon’s pathetic half-arsed excuse for a grudge against me; I couldn’t believe she would have set me up for all these various forms of nightmare just for the hell of it. Equally, though, it was hard to imagine her being quite as oblivious as I had been. Somewhere along the way, she would have spotted something, guessed something.

  She had always been much more guarded than Leon, much harder to read or to trick or to wrong-foot, but I knew her too and I knew her weak spot: she really liked being the clever one. If she had known about this and I hadn’t, she would have a hard time resisting the chance to rub it in.

  And I had one advantage over both of them: they thought I was fucked up—which was true, but not to the extent they imagined, not any more. All those stammers and memory glitches that had infuriated me so much, those w
ere about to come in useful. So much more tempting to let slip a smug little crumb of info to someone who wouldn’t remember it, would barely be able to articulate it if he did, would never be believed if he could.

  “Was that the door?” Hugo asked, on the stairs behind me—I’d been so focused, I’d missed the shuffle and thump of his approach altogether. “Is Melissa home already?”

  He had on his dressing gown, an old checked thing, over his trousers and jumper. “Oh,” I said. “No. It’s still early.”

  He blinked at the fanlight over the door, cold pale sun. “Oh. So it is. Then who was that?”

  “The detectives.”

  In a different tone, eyes going to me: “Ah.” And when I said nothing: “What did they want?”

  I almost told him. In so many ways it seemed like the natural thing to do, all my childhood rose up in me like a howl of longing to throw it at his feet: Hugo, help me, they think I killed him, what do I do? But that was the last thing he needed; and besides—bony wrists sticking out of the dressing-gown sleeves, caved-in slump of his chest, big hands clenched on the cane and the stair-rail—he was frail and he was fading and there was too little of him left to work whatever miracle I was craving. And, maybe most of all, I knew well that whatever he would want to do was very unlikely to have anything in common with what I wanted to do.

  “They think someone killed Dominic,” I said.

  After a pause: “Well. That’s not too unexpected.”

  “With a garrote. They think.”

  That made his eyebrows go up. “Good heavens. I can’t imagine they see that very often.” And after a moment: “Did they say who they suspect?”

  “I don’t think they have anyone in mind.”