The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  I considered just not telling him. He loved Melissa; it would break his heart. I could probably get away with it for a day or two, come up with reasons why she wasn’t home in the evenings—stocktaking, sick mother—and by that time I might have some clue what I was going to do about all of this . . . I didn’t have the energy. “No,” I said. “She’s gone gone. Permanently.”

  “What?” Hugo’s head came around sharply and he stared at me. “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  After a long moment he put down the coffeemaker, added a dash of milk to his cup and brought it to the table. He sat down opposite me—hands folded around the cup, dressing gown falling open to show flannel pajamas buttoned up wrong, unblinking gray eyes magnified by his glasses—and waited.

  Once I started talking I couldn’t stop. It all came out, in a jumble—my memory of the night was pretty hazy, dislocated pieces resurfacing out of any order as I talked, but the gist of it came through clearly enough. The only thing I left out was that last step, that final revelation. Probably Hugo—steadily sipping his coffee, saying nothing—would figure it out, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.

  “So”—I was babbling, I had said everything at least twice—“that was when they went home, or wherever, right after that? And I thought Melissa would be upstairs, but . . . I tried to ring her, I haven’t tried yet this morning, but now I don’t know if I even should—like obviously I want to fix things, but I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen but maybe she’s actually better off not being around for it . . .”

  I finally managed to shut up. In the immense silence—staring down into my untouched coffee—it dawned on me, too late, what a terrible, shitty thing I had done by throwing all this into Hugo’s lap. He only had a couple of months, couldn’t I have found a way not to fuck them up with my godawful mess? I couldn’t look at him; I was afraid I would see him broken, face stunned and crumpled, tears streaming. I kept my head down and scraped with my thumbnail at a nonexistent stain on the table: soft grayed wood, the place where the grain curved around a dark spot to make a shape like a wide-mouthed cartoon ghost. All the times I’d sat here, toast and jam, geography projects, drunken parties, and now this.

  “Right,” Hugo said, putting down his cup with a bang. His voice startled me into looking up: it had the old fullness and authority I remembered from when I was a kid, oak-solid, the voice that had always stopped us in our tracks and put an instant end to our bickering or wrecking. “This has gone far enough.”

  I couldn’t say anything. All of a sudden I was humiliatingly close to tears.

  “Don’t waste another thought on it. I’ll sort it out.” He leaned a palm on the table and pushed himself to standing. “But first, we both need something to eat. We’re going to have an omelet—yes, yes you are, I know you don’t want it but you’ll thank me afterwards. We are going to enjoy it in peace. And then you’re going to go take a shower, and I’m going to deal with this mess before it gets completely out of hand.”

  I knew it couldn’t be done, and yet a part of me couldn’t help believing him. Tall and shadow-faced against the flood of brightness through the windows, hand crooked around his cane, hair straggling on his shoulders and robe flowing, he looked like a figure from a tarot card, dense with omens. I still couldn’t talk. I wiped the heel of my hand across my eyes.

  Hugo hobbled to the fridge and started taking things out: eggs, butter, milk. “With ham and cheese, I think, and spinach . . . Probably what you really need is a dirty great fry-up, but we don’t have the materials.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I really am.”

  He ignored that. “Come here and chop this. I don’t trust my hand.”

  I went obediently to the counter, found a knife and started on the ham. The painkillers were kicking in; my head wasn’t throbbing as badly, but it felt loose and overrun with drifting things, cobwebs and fog and thistledown.

  Hugo broke four eggs into a bowl and started whisking. “Now,” he said, his voice lightening. “The surprise; what I was waiting to tell you until you were a bit more awake. You won’t believe it.”

  I did my best to play along; I owed him that, at least. “Oh yeah?”

  “I think I’ve cracked Mrs. Wozniak.”

  The grin on his face was wide and real. “You’re joking,” I said.

  “No, I’m pretty sure. Haskins, our diary fellow? In November of 1887, he starts grousing about his wife landing him with her family’s problems. He’s such a complainer that I didn’t take much notice at first, almost skipped the whole section, but luckily I stuck with it. The wife’s sister in Clare—yes, can you see why my ears pricked up?—she wants to send her sixteen-year-old daughter to stay with the Haskinses, in Tipperary, for a few months. Haskins’s main complaint is that he’ll be stuck with the expense of feeding this girl, but he’s also puffing up with outrage because she might corrupt his children—who are three, four and seven at this point, so I would have thought fairly difficult to corrupt. Unless . . .” He cocked an eyebrow at me, dropping butter into the frying pan, Have you got it?

  It took me a while to fish anything out of the morass in my head. “She was pregnant?”

  “Well, it’s hard to be positive of anything—Haskins was so furious that his handwriting turns into a complete snarl, double underlining everywhere—but from all the mentions of shame and disgrace and wantonness, I think she was. Pass me the salt and pepper, would you?”

  I handed them over. His serenity was starting to freak me out. I wondered if he had forgotten the entire conversation; if we would have to have it all over again that evening, when Melissa didn’t come home.

  “Thanks. And”—happily salting and peppering away—“can you guess the niece’s surname?”

  “McNamara?”

  “It was indeed. Elaine McNamara.” He was smiling, squinting at the cooker dial as he adjusted the gas burner just so, but I could see the depth of his satisfaction. “She hasn’t shown up in any of the family trees so far, has she? Or has she?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “We’ll track her down. So then”—pouring the eggs into the pan, fizzle and hiss—“I’m afraid I got impatient and started skimming ahead, looking for any mention of any O’Hagans—just to confirm the theory. And sure enough, a few weeks into 1888, Mrs. Haskins is suggesting that their lovely neighbors the O’Hagans might be willing to ‘conceal Elaine’s shame.’ It would have been easy as pie—plenty of lying on birth records, back then: the O’Hagans could just go to the registrar and put down the baby as their own, no need to prove where they’d got him. Our man Haskins isn’t mad about the idea—he thinks it would be letting Elaine off too lightly, she won’t comprehend the full something, I think it’s ‘magnitude,’ of her transgression; he wants to send her to a mother-and-baby home. But I think we can be pretty sure his wife won that argument in the end.”

  The peaceful run of his voice, the savory smell of the eggs cooking, bright chill blue of the sky outside the French doors. I thought of my first day back here, the two of us in his study, rain at the windowpane and my mind wandering off among the knickknacks as he talked.

  “And that’s as far as I got,” Hugo said, “before I heard you getting up. All the same, though: a good morning’s work, I think.”

  His glance at me was almost shy. “That’s amazing,” I said, managing a big smile. “Congratulations.”

  “To you, too. We did it together. We should have a glass of something to celebrate—is there any prosecco, anything like that? Or would that be too much for your head?”

  “No, that sounds great. I bet we’ve got something somewhere.”

  “Now, of course”—he sprinkled grated cheese into the pan, a big handful, topped it with the chopped ham—“I have to work out how to tell Mrs. Wozniak.”

  “She should be over the moon,” I said. I found
a bottle of prosecco in the booze cabinet; not chilled, but what the hell. “This is what she was after, isn’t it? It’s not like you’ve found a murderer in the family tree.”

  Hugo gave me a thoughtful glance over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, “unless I’ve got this all wrong, that baby was Amelia Wozniak’s grandfather—Edward O’Hagan, the one who emigrated to America. He only died in 1976; it’s quite likely that she knew him well. Except with this, it may feel as if she didn’t know him that well after all. He wasn’t Edward O’Hagan, he was Edward McNamara. An entirely different person, in some ways if not all. And”—scattering spinach into the pan—“that new person comes with an awful lot of grief attached, a lot of injustice. That sixteen-year-old being sent away from her family in disgrace, having her baby taken away whether she liked it or not, was Amelia’s great-grandmother. And all of that grief and injustice is bound up with Amelia’s existence. Without it she might have been Amelia McNamara, or she might never have existed at all.”

  “I guess,” I said. I was having a hard time working up much sympathy. I would have swapped my own problems, or his, for Mrs. Wozniak’s existential crisis any day.

  “Well, who knows, maybe she’ll see it your way. But I’d rather go about it delicately, just in case.” It took him a couple of tries, but he got the omelet folded over. “It’s not today’s problem, anyway. We’ll have to decipher the rest of the diary first—I’d like to find out what happened to Elaine in the end, and see if we can get any kind of lead on the baby’s father. At some point we can ask Mrs. Wozniak whether there are any male-line descendants floating around, for Y-DNA matching; but for now maybe you could start on the parish records, try to find out whether Elaine eventually married? I doubt any husband would have been the baby’s father, or why wouldn’t she just marry him in the first place—more likely he was ineligible, one way or another—but it’s worth looking into.”

  “OK,” I said. Apparently we were supposed to go right back to our comfy routine and pretend that none of last night had happened, although I couldn’t imagine how Hugo thought that was going to work in practice. Never mind how on earth he thought he was going to sort everything out: I was starting to wonder if his plan had been some illness-generated delusion involving the bat-signal or a Rafferty voodoo doll or something. Was it possible that he hadn’t worked out what was going on? That he thought the only problems here were a cousin-spat and a relationship rocky patch, everyone under stress and being silly, just need a good firm talking-to? “Cheers. Here’s to us.”

  “And to Elaine McNamara.” Hugo took the glass from me and stepped aside to let me turn the omelet out of the heavy pan. “Poor child.”

  I surprised myself by wolfing down my half of the omelet, fast enough that Hugo laughed at me. “There are more eggs, if you’re still hungry.”

  “You were right,” I said. “I needed that.”

  “Of course I was. Maybe next time I tell you something”—smiling at me, over his glass—“you’ll stop fussing and take my word for it.” And as I scraped up the last bite: “Now go find your cigarettes, would you? Since we’re being decadent.”

  We sat there quietly, smoking a cigarette and then another, topping up our prosecco glasses. Hugo’s head was tilted back and his eyes half-closed, gazing up at the ceiling with grave, dreamy calm. Faint trail of cries from wild geese somewhere, carrying all the flavor of autumn, first frost and turf smoke. Hugo’s big hand tapping ash into the chipped saucer we were using as a makeshift ashtray, sunlight bringing the battered wood of the table alive with an impossible holy glow.

  * * *

  I stayed in the shower for a very long time. The night before was right inside my skin; no matter how hard I scrubbed, I still caught the stench of stale booze, stale hash, garden earth. Finally I gave up and just stood there with the water turned up as hard and as hot as it would go, letting it hammer down on my head.

  Now that I was on my own the stoneover had rushed back up, a nasty mishmash of physical and mental, all-consuming sapping despair and a sense of doom that seemed to come not from my mind but from deep inside my stomach and my spine. Melissa had been right all along, going after answers was the stupidest thing I could possibly have done, and now it was too late.

  Part of me was still clinging to the slim chance that I had got it all wrong, and if I could just clear my head I would be able to figure out the real story. No matter how hard I scrabbled, though, every trail looped me around to the same place: me with the hoodie, me the only one who could have had the key to let Dominic in, me the only one for whom he would have come when he was called (Hey dude got a couple of lines, I owe you, want to come over sometime?), me not in my room that night. And, starker than any of that: who else could it have been? Susanna and Leon both thought it had been me. Hugo: not a chance. There had been no one else in the house. Of course Dominic could have swiped the key and cunningly brought in his own garrote, and his own murderer, but even in my desperation that seemed a tad implausible and there I was again, looping back around to that same nightmare place.

  I had nothing to fight it off with. The only counter-arguments were that I didn’t remember it and that I wasn’t that kind of guy, and how much were those worth? In court maybe, even probably—come on, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know my client’s DNA was all over the garrote but look at him, such a nice blond boy from such a nice rich family, so handsome, never been in trouble in his life, does he seem like a killer to you; if I could do something about the eyelid-droop and keep the slur out of my voice, I might even get away with it. But here, with nothing but the merciless drum of water and the curling steam and the tortured squealing of the pipes, it was different. What was or wasn’t in my mind, what I thought I was: those were worthless.

  Two hands to turn the key in the rusted lock, whispered Come on in dude and Dominic’s grin in a slash of moonlight. Bite of the garrote into flesh, choking sounds, feet scrabbling futilely in the dirt. The impossible weight of a body that had to be dragged across an endless expanse of grass, my own panting terrifyingly loud in my ears, hands slipping, darkness, frantic, I can’t do it— I had no idea which snippets were memory and which stemmed from some dark hallucinatory process deeper than imagination, involuntary and uncontrollable, simmering with a power and a reality all its own.

  Every one of them felt like a violation: alien, lunatic, forced on me. How could I be thinking these things, me? I belonged in a different world, pints with the lads, smartly managed Twitter arguments, croissants in bed with Melissa on lazy rainy Sundays. It took me a while to figure out why the feeling was horribly familiar. I was still standing in the shower staring at nothing—had been standing there for probably half an hour, the water was going cold—when it came back to me: the bland-faced doctor droning away, my first day in the hospital, neurologist seizures occupational therapist like those had something to do with me; the slow terrible drop as I began to understand that they did, that this was my life now.

  Eventually the water got cold enough that my teeth were chattering. I was drying off when I heard it: discreet rat-tat at the front door; a pause; and then Hugo’s even murmur, woven with another voice. The tone was easy and pleasant, no urgency there, but I knew that voice straight through walls and floors, would have known its lightest word anywhere, like a lover: Rafferty.

  My legs almost went from under me. So soon. I had known it had to come someday but I had been expecting a few weeks, months, some idiot part of me had actually dared to hope I might get away with it. For a second I thought of doing a runner—Hugo would keep them talking, I could drop out a window and go over the back wall and— Even before I finished the thought I knew how ludicrous it was: and what, go off grid and live in a cave in the Wicklow Mountains? Instead I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could, fumbling buttons, at the very least I didn’t need to be shivering in my boxers when they came for me— Deny, I told myself, heading down the stairs in what felt li
ke slow motion, so light-headed with terror and nausea and the strangeness of it all that I had to clutch the banister, deny deny deny and get a lawyer, they can’t prove anything . . .

  Rafferty and Kerr and Hugo were in the hall. Their heads turned, sharply and simultaneously, towards me on the stairs. The detectives were dressed for autumn, long overcoats and Kerr had a hat that belonged on Al Capone; Hugo—I half-noticed it without being able to work out what it meant—had changed out of his pajamas and dressing gown, into sort-of-decent tweed trousers and a clean shirt and jumper. There was something unsettling in the way the three of them were arranged, standing apart, positioned precisely as chess pieces against the geometry of the floor tiles.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Toby,” Rafferty said—cheerily, completely at ease, as if the last time had never happened. “I like the haircut. Listen, your uncle’s going to come down to the station with us for a bit. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back to you safe and sound.”

  “What?” I said, after a blank moment. “Why?”

  “We need to take a statement,” Kerr said.

  “But,” I said. I was confused. All three of them were looking at me as if I had walked in on some private transaction, a business deal, a drug deal, something where I was irrelevant and unwanted. “You can do that here.”

  “Not this time,” Rafferty explained genially. “It varies.”

  I didn’t get this; I didn’t like it. “He’s sick,” I said. “He’s got—”

  “I know, yeah. We’ll take good care of him.”

  “He’s been having seizures.”

  “That’s good to know. We’ll keep an eye out.” To Hugo: “Do you need any medication for that?”

  “I have it here,” Hugo said, touching his breast pocket.

  “Hugo,” I said. “What’s going on?”