The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  She checked the level in her glass against the light. “So I made the most of it. I made him promise to walk, in case anyone saw his car. I made him promise not to tell anyone; I said if I heard even the tiniest rumor, then the deal was off. And if he texted me or rang me or anything, the deal was off. He was all, ‘Sure, babe, no problem, swear on my life’—he was obviously planning to tell the world afterwards, but I was OK with that. He went, ‘I don’t need to text you, because you know you don’t get to change your mind. And you don’t need to worry about letting me in, I’ll be here.’ And he waved the key at me and winked, and headed off.”

  In the window behind her the sky was dimming, rusty leaves hanging heavy with rain on the chestnut trees. “He was never even the smallest bit suspicious,” Susanna said, “you know that? I made sure I looked totally terrified and disgusted—not that that was difficult—and he was getting such a kick out of that, he didn’t have room for anything else. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he had.”

  The room was getting chilly; the fire had burned low. Leon reached over to the pile of firewood and tossed in a log, sending up a soft crunching sound and a shower of orange sparks.

  “So then,” Susanna said, “all we had to do was wait till Monday.”

  “You were our big worry,” Leon said, to me. “Hugo was always in bed with the lights out by half-eleven, like clockwork. The factory was still being turned into apartments, there was no one living there yet, and the neighbors were all about a hundred and ten; they went to bed after the nine o’clock news, and even if they got up and looked out the window, they were mostly blind as bats. But if you’d decided to stay up late, surfing porn or whatever you used to do on Hugo’s computer, we’d have been in big trouble.”

  “Well,” Susanna said, tiny smile over the rim of her glass. “Not that big a worry.”

  “What?” I demanded. I had sat bolt upright. “What did you do to me?”

  “Oh my God, relax on the jacks,” Leon said, eyebrows arched. “We didn’t do anything.”

  “We just got in a bottle of vodka, Sunday night,” Susanna said. “And a bit of hash. And the two of us didn’t have very much of either one.”

  “You didn’t even notice,” Leon told me. “You got ossified. At one stage you were swinging from a tree branch, giggling and telling us you were Monkey Man.”

  “And we made sure you were up bright and early for work on Monday morning. It wasn’t easy, but we did it.”

  “You were in bits. Green. I think you were actually puking. You wanted to pull a sickie, but we wouldn’t let you.”

  “So by eleven on Monday night,” Susanna said, “you were just about falling over. We were in here, watching TV, Newsnight or something there was no way you would hang around for. You were bitching at us to switch over, but we wouldn’t, so eventually you gave up and headed off to bed. We were pretty sure you’d stay there.”

  “Well that’s good,” I said. Not even the bumbler on the sidelines; just an object to be got out of the way so they wouldn’t trip over it in the middle of important business, an irritating toy that needed its battery run down to keep it inert while the action went on. And I had trundled off, with barely a nudge to start me going, down the path they had mapped out for me. They had known me so well. “I wouldn’t have wanted to, to, to cramp your style.”

  “You didn’t,” Susanna assured me. “You behaved yourself perfectly. Everything behaved itself, actually. My other main worry had been rain—the last thing I wanted was Dominic trying to bring things indoors—”

  “He wouldn’t have,” Leon said, licking flakes of sausage roll off his fingers. “You think he was planning to stop at a blow job? No way would he have wanted to be anywhere you could scream for help.”

  “True enough,” Susanna said. “But he might not have shown up if it was raining; he might have wanted to reschedule. That would’ve been a pain in the arse.”

  “Having to get me out of the way all over again,” I said. “Bummer.”

  “We’d have managed,” Susanna said. “But we were lucky. It was a lovely night. Chilly, but not even a cloud. As soon as you and Hugo stopped moving around, we got ready—”

  “I think that was the worst bit, actually,” Leon said. “Su putting on Hugo’s jacket and making sure she had her sandwich bag of bits to throw down the tree—that bag was disgusting, do you know that? It looked like a DIY kit for a voodoo doll.” Susanna snorted. “And me finding dark clothes so Dominic wouldn’t see me, and putting the garrote in my pocket and checking like eight times to make sure it wasn’t tangled . . . The whole thing felt impossible. I was positive that any minute I would blink and it would all be gone, and I’d be waking up in my bed like, Oh my God, that was the weirdest dream! But it kept on and on being real.”

  “My worst part was the waiting,” Susanna said, taking one of Leon’s cigarettes. “Once we were in place. I was hanging about at the bottom of the garden—we didn’t want Dominic coming too close to the house, just in case anything went wrong, or you or Hugo looked out your windows. And Leon was behind the wych elm. And all we could do was wait. It was terrible.” With a glance at me, over the lighter: “I know you don’t like that we did it here. But I picked the garden partly because I thought being on our own turf would help us keep it together. We’re making this whole thing sound like a breeze, but it wasn’t.”

  “I don’t think either of us had eaten in days,” Leon said. “Or slept. People kept having to say things to me three times because I couldn’t take them in; I couldn’t even hear them. Anything that made it even a tiny bit easier . . .”

  “Except when it came down to it,” Susanna said, “the garden wasn’t actually all that comforting. All these little rattling scraping sounds—leaves falling off the trees, probably, but—”

  “But always right in my ear,” Leon said, shuddering, “so I was leaping about like I was on a pogo stick. And the branches made patterns like things up in the trees, birds, people, snakes—I’d catch them out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked properly of course there’d be nothing there.”

  “Our blood must have been about ninety percent adrenaline,” Susanna said. “My mind was speeding, what if he brings his car what if the garrote breaks what if he’s told someone what if this that the other . . . There was a second when I thought, really clearly, I am going to lose it. I am going to start screaming and not be able to stop.”

  She blew a careful smoke ring and watched it waver upwards. “Which sounds pretty wussy,” she said, “unless you take into account what the last few months had been like. Anyway, I didn’t lose it. I bit my arm hard enough that it shocked me back together—I still had toothmarks like a week later. And a couple of minutes after that, the garden door opened and there he was. Strolling in, hands in his pockets, looking around like he was there to buy the place.”

  “Wait,” I said. I was a couple of steps behind. “Leon had the, my, the hoodie cord? Leon did it?”

  “That,” Susanna said, so sharply that it startled me, “was not the original plan. I was going to do it. Wait behind the tree, pick a moment when Dominic had his back to me, and bang. Leon was only supposed to help with the cleanup.”

  “But once we talked it over,” Leon said gently, sitting up, “it was obvious that wasn’t a good plan. It would have been way too risky; way too much chance he’d turn around at the wrong moment, or he’d never get into the right position at all. It would have been stupid.”

  “I should have known from the start,” Susanna said. “The way I was picturing it, all clean and arm’s-length—literally: I wouldn’t even have had to touch him till he was dead—it doesn’t work that way. What we were trying to do, it’s not small stuff. If you want something like that, you have to get messy.”

  I wasn’t sure how drunk she was—only a glass and a half, but I had gone heavy on the pour, I had wanted the two of them nice and
loose. In the firelight her eyes were dark and opaque, full of sliding reflections.

  “I never wanted you to get messy too,” she said to Leon. “I didn’t want you to be stuck doing the dirty work. But I couldn’t think of any way to make it work the other way round.”

  “I didn’t want you doing your half, either,” Leon said. They were turned towards each other, intent, intimate; for a moment it was as if they had forgotten I was there. “But we didn’t have much choice.”

  Only, I wanted to say, of course they had had a choice. If there had been three of us, the three of us together, we could have come up with something— Even this had seemed better to them than letting me be part of it.

  “What?” I said, too loudly. “What happened?”

  They turned to look at me. It occurred to me that maybe I should be frightened. A pair of murderers, spilling their guts to me; in a TV show I would never have left that room alive. I couldn’t find a part of me that cared.

  “We did it together,” Leon said. “It was much safer that way. One of us to get Dominic into position under the tree, and keep him still and keep him distracted—”

  “That was me,” Susanna said.

  “And once she had him where we needed him,” Leon said, “I snuck up behind him. That part was awful—I had to go slowly, because if he heard me we were fucked, but I didn’t want to leave Su there a second longer than I had to—”

  “It worked perfectly,” Susanna said, cutting him off. “I’d say he never even knew what hit him, except there was definitely a moment when he did. I saw it. I was basically eye to eye with him; as soon as he went down, I got on top of him and shoved a big wad of my jacket—well, Hugo’s jacket—into his mouth. As far down his throat as I could get it. Probably we didn’t really need that, the garrote would have been fine on its own, but I wanted it so that neither of us would ever be sure who had actually got the job done. That felt like the least I could do for Leon. And I wanted Dominic’s DNA on that jacket anyway.” She glanced over at me, cool pale face, a wisp of smoke rising past her cheek. I thought: What am I listening to? What is this? “And, if I’m honest,” she said, “I wanted to do it.”

  “I couldn’t believe how quick it was,” Leon said. “I’d had these awful images of it taking forever, you know in horror films where every time you think the baddie’s dead they come back to life and attack again? I was terrified I wouldn’t be strong enough— But all it took was a minute or two. That was it.” He held up a finger and thumb, a fraction apart. “This much time.”

  “It was ugly,” Susanna said, “but it was fast. Once we were sure his heart had stopped beating, the next thing was getting him into the tree. We tied the rope under his armpits and did the pulley thing we’d practiced. I got him kind of draped over a big branch, and then the two of us climbed up and maneuvered him down the hole.”

  “He was a lot more awkward than the sack of rocks, though,” Leon said, leaning for the wine bottle. “We put on gardening gloves, so we wouldn’t get DNA all over him, but they made us all fumbly, and we had to get the rope off him without dropping him, and his arms and legs kept going all over the place and his shoe came off—”

  “Well, it wasn’t fun,” Susanna said, seeing the look on my face. “But if you’re going to get the vapors, I don’t think that’s the part to focus on. It’s not like anything we did made any difference to him at that point.”

  She had misread me. It wasn’t that I was horrified. I just couldn’t get hold of it, my mind kept snagging—eye to eye with him, it was ugly but it was fast . . . I wanted more, wanted every detail, to squeeze tight like broken glass. I couldn’t find a way to ask.

  “It sounds awful,” Leon said, topping up Susanna’s wineglass, “but honest to God, he didn’t feel like a person any more. That was the freaky part. Dominic was just gone. The body, that was just a thing, this huge floppy object that we had to get rid of. Sometimes for a second I almost forgot why; it was like some bizarre impossible task out of a fairy tale, and if we didn’t get it done by sunrise then the witch would turn us to stone.”

  “God,” Susanna said. “It was a million times more hassle than the actual killing part. It felt like it took forever. I couldn’t even think about what we would do if it didn’t work.”

  “And then that fucking garrote.”

  “Oh God, the garrote. We finally got him stuffed in there, right? we were still up the tree? and Leon took out the garrote—”

  “I’d put it in my pocket while we did the hoisting bit—”

  “We were supposed to undo the knots and put the cord down the hole in the tree,” Susanna said. “Only the bloody knots wouldn’t come undone. They must have tightened when we did the job.”

  “The gloves didn’t help. After a bit we got desperate and took them off, but it didn’t make any difference, those knots were like rocks—”

  “The two of us sitting on a branch like a pair of monkeys, working away at one knot each, going frantic—”

  “—fingernails breaking off—”

  “And finally,” Susanna said, with an exasperated glance, “Leon bloody panicked and threw it down the hole anyway.”

  “Well, what were we supposed to do with it? We couldn’t exactly put it in the bin, the cops could have come searching, and it wouldn’t have burned properly, it was that nylon-y stuff—”

  “Dump it in a bin halfway across town. Throw it in the canal. Anything. That garrote was the one thing that showed he’d been murdered. Without that, as long as they didn’t find him for a week or two, he could’ve killed himself, OD’d, just fallen in because he was drunk and an idiot—”

  “Rafferty thought I had killed him,” I said. “Because of that garrote.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Like I said, it wasn’t the plan.”

  “Oh well then. That makes it all OK.”

  “We tried to get it back out,” Leon said. “I stuck my arm down the hole and rummaged—it was disgusting, my fingers went in his mouth, it was like being bitten by a zombie. But I couldn’t find it; it must have slipped too far down. What were we supposed to do? Pull him back out and dive in there to find it?”

  “In the end we gave up,” Susanna said. “We climbed down and collapsed under the tree like we’d been hit by tranquilizer darts. I’ve never been that exhausted in my life. Not even after labor. We would have gone to sleep right there if we could have.”

  “I think I did,” Leon said. “I remember lying there with my face in the grass, panting like I’d been running, pouring sweat, and then next thing Su was shaking my shoulder and telling me to wake up because we had to deal with Dominic’s phone.”

  “That phone was the main thing I was worried about, actually,” Susanna said. “I mean, it was also our biggest advantage—one text and we could point everyone towards suicide, just like that; faking a suicide note, back before phones, would’ve been a lot dicier. On the other hand, though, I knew the Guards could track it. Not precisely, not like now with GPS, but they could tell the general area from what towers it pinged off. That guy had been all over the news, the one who killed his wife and he got caught because his phone wasn’t where he said he was, remember him? I did a lot of reading about that. I thought about telling Dominic to turn his phone off because I was scared he’d take photos of me blowing him, or something, but in the end I decided that was a bad idea. The cops would still track his phone to this area, but if it turned off here, they’d figure this was where something had gone wrong. If the phone went on to somewhere else, they’d know he’d been somewhere in this general area for a while, but they’d also know he’d left. They might figure he’d just been wandering around here trying to decide whether to do himself in or not—maybe he’d been thinking about the canal and then changed his mind, right? He knew other people who lived around this area, anyway; there was no reason the cops should tie it to us.”

  That calm,
absorbed voice, breaking down the details of an interesting problem. “Even if worst came to worst and they somehow tracked him to here, like if someone had seen him going down the laneway, I had a plan for that. I was going to burst into tears and confess that he’d come over to tell me he was crazy about me, and I’d turned him down, and he’d stormed off all upset yelling about how I’d be sorry. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d have to do. Leon would back me up.”

  “We had the story all rehearsed,” Leon said, “just in case. I was really, really hoping we wouldn’t need it, though. If they’d got that close, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to keep it together.”

  “You would’ve been fine,” Susanna said. “Either way, though, that phone needed to go somewhere good and suicide-y. At first I thought about Bray Head—I mean, Dominic; there’s no way he would’ve gone to the Northside, even to kill himself. But Howth Head is nearer and it gets more suicides, and from what I could figure out about the currents, it was more plausible that his body wouldn’t be found if he went off Howth Head. So Leon headed off with the phone.”

  “Why Leon?” I asked. Personally, given the choice, I would have trusted Susanna with a job like that over Leon any day. I would have trusted me with the job over Leon, but they had decided I was unfit even for that.

  “Thanks a bunch,” Leon said.

  “No one’s going to notice a young guy walking on his own late at night,” Susanna said. “A girl, though, yeah. Someone might have remembered me. I really didn’t want to dump more stuff on Leon—I even thought about sticking my hair up under a hat and pretending I was a guy, but if someone had sussed me, that they would have remembered.”

  “I didn’t mind,” Leon said. “Honestly. You made it so easy.” To me: “She had everything planned out for me. Every step.”

  “That’s the least I could do. You got the shitty end of the stick, all the way.” Susanna was looking over at him with that glow of pure admiration and warmth that I had caught before, once or twice, and never understood. “All the hardcore parts. And you handled every second of it perfectly. You were a fucking gladiator.”