The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  “Because of you,” Leon said. “The stuff you thought of, there’s no way it would ever have occurred to me. I’d have got us caught in, like, a day. She said”—to me—“I couldn’t get a taxi from here to Howth, because the taxi man might remember me. So I walked into town and got a taxi to Baldoyle. I said something to the taxi man about ‘Jesus, everyone else is still going strong, I’ve got work in the morning’ but apart from that I kept my mouth shut. I pretended to doze off against the window, so he wouldn’t get all chatty. Su even had that planned out.”

  “The cops were definitely going to try and trace Dominic’s movements that night,” Susanna said. “They’d want to find out how he got to Howth. They’d know he hadn’t walked, by how fast the phone switched towers—ideally Leon would’ve walked the whole way, but it’s three hours minimum, so that would’ve been cutting it pretty fine, and we couldn’t risk him getting lost and having to ask for directions. I figured the cops would check taxis, and once they couldn’t put Dominic in any of those, they’d figure either he’d hitched a lift from someone who didn’t want to come forward, or else he’d got a dodgy taxi—a fake one, or an unlicensed guy borrowing his mate’s taxi, or maybe someone who wasn’t supposed to be working because he was on the dole or an asylum-seeker. That was all fine. But if they turned up a guy who didn’t match Dominic’s description, taking a taxi from here to Howth and back again in the middle of that night, they’d probably pay attention.”

  “I walked from Baldoyle,” Leon said. “I didn’t go all the way up Howth Head, because in the dark? along that cliff path? No thank you. I just went up a little way, till I was sure no one could see me, and then I sent the text. I was terrified it wouldn’t go through, the reception wouldn’t be good enough, but it was fine. Once I saw ‘Sent’ I wiped my fingerprints off the phone and threw it as hard as I could.”

  “Even if it hadn’t gone out to sea, that wouldn’t have mattered,” Susanna said. “Dominic could’ve ditched it on his way up the cliff path.”

  “And then I just went home,” Leon said. “I walked as far as Kilbarrack and picked up a taxi. On the way out I’d been wearing a white hoodie over a blue one, and on the way back I swapped them around and put on a baseball cap. So even if the cops went asking and both the taxi drivers remembered me, it wouldn’t sound like the same guy.”

  “Your idea,” I said to Susanna, who nodded, turning onto her side to watch Leon.

  “I told the driver to drop me in flatland in Ranelagh—Su had the actual road picked out, I don’t remember. This time I told him I’d had a fight with my girlfriend. And then I ‘went to sleep’ against the window again.”

  He turned his glass in his hands, watching the firelight slide along its curve. “That was the weirdest part of the whole thing,” he said. “That taxi ride. Up until then it had been all about getting things done: get this right, don’t forget that, don’t fuck that up, go go go. And then all of a sudden it was over; there was nothing left to do. There was just . . . the rest of our lives, without Dominic. With this instead.” He drew a long breath. “The driver had some oldies station on the radio, really low. REM. David Bowie. It was still dark, but the sky on one side was just starting to turn the tiniest bit gray and for some reason that made it look like the earth was tilting. Like the taxi wheels were off the ground and we were floating. There was this one bright star, low on the horizon. It was beautiful.”

  Susanna had her head down in her elbow on the arm of the sofa, watching him. “I felt the same thing,” she said. To me: “After he left I dumped my sandwich-bag stuff down the hole. I threw in a ton of earth and leaves, too, to cover up the smell. And I put the ladder and the rope and the gloves away, and smoothed out the holes the ladder had left under the tree, and hung Hugo’s jacket back in the coat cupboard. And then I just sat in my room, with the lights off in case you or Hugo went to the jacks. I went over it all in my head, to check if there was anything I’d missed, but there wasn’t. There was nothing else I could do. Even if I’d wanted to undo it all, I couldn’t have.”

  Her eyes had slipped away from us, to the fire. “It was really peaceful. It shouldn’t have been; I should have been climbing the walls on adrenaline, or losing my mind with remorse, or something. Right? Me with all my moral crusades, and now I’d killed someone. But I just sat by the window and looked out at the garden. It looked different—not in a bad way; just different.” She thought about it for a while. “Clearer, maybe? I wanted to put the rest of the world on pause and just sit there for a year or two, watching.”

  Curled up like that, dreamy in the dimness, hair mussed against the faded red of the sofa, she should have looked like her old childhood self, tired from a day of playing; Leon, propped against the armchair with his legs sprawled anyhow, should have looked like that sparky little boy, smudge-faced and scrape-kneed. They almost did. We had been so close, back then, a closeness too fundamental even to think about. I couldn’t work out how they had got so far away.

  “Finally my phone went off with a text,” Susanna said. “And then I heard yours through the floor, and then Leon’s—he had to leave it here; I didn’t like that, because what if anything went wrong and we couldn’t get in touch, but if the cops went sniffing around we couldn’t have Leon’s phone pinging in Howth. I gave it a minute before I looked—in case the police went checking times on phones and they could somehow tell what time I’d read the text; I didn’t want it to look like I’d been waiting for it. And there it was.”

  And I had slept happily through it all. I had barely turned over to stretch out an arm when the phone beeped, check the text, What the hell? and back to sleep.

  “After a while Leon got home and told me it had all gone fine,” Susanna said. “It was getting bright outside. We were both starving, so I made sandwiches and tea—”

  “Whispering at the kitchen table,” Leon said, “giggling like a pair of little kids sneaking down for a midnight feast. I was light-headed. The food tasted amazing; I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything that delicious.”

  “And then we went to bed,” Susanna said. “Probably we should have been tossing and turning and having nightmares, but actually I don’t think I’ve ever slept that hard.”

  “Oh, my God. Like I’d been hit with a baseball bat. I think I would’ve slept twenty-four hours straight, only Su came in and dragged me out of bed for work.”

  “Well, we couldn’t be late,” Susanna said. “We needed to act completely normal. It wasn’t hard. All we had to do was go along with everyone else: did you get a text from Dominic Ganly, OMG what was that all about, has anyone talked to him? Oh no what if he’s done something stupid!!” She raised herself on her elbow and reached for another cigarette. “From there on, it kind of did itself.”

  I tried to think back to that autumn. It seemed impossible that I hadn’t noticed anything; I had been happily wrapped up in college and making new friends and various sports clubs and going out but surely something would have registered, they had killed someone, surely I couldn’t have missed that? Surely they should have been different, branded or haunted or something? “Weren’t you scared?” I asked. “That you’d get caught?”

  “Probably we should have been,” Susanna said, shaking Leon’s lighter. “But no, not really. You’ve got to remember, we were used to being scared. It was basically our default mode, by that stage. And ‘Oh noes, the cops might possibly figure out that Dominic didn’t kill himself and they might possibly tie it to us and they might possibly get enough evidence to arrest us and we might possibly be found guilty’ was a lot less scary than ‘Dominic Ganly is going to rape me or kill me any day now.’”

  “I was scared, off and on,” Leon said. “When I thought about it too much. It wasn’t like they would have had to look very hard for him—obviously—and once they found him, that would’ve been it for us. The only thing that saved us was that they weren’t looking this way at all.”


  “We were lucky,” Susanna said. “Dominic thought he was so smart, never texting me anything dodgy, so I’d have no proof. But if his phone had been full of vile texts to me, the cops would have taken one look and dived on me.”

  “But,” I said, “the cops did come here. Didn’t they?” At this point nothing my memory came up with felt reliable, but all the same I was positive there’d been an afternoon, I’d been hungover and heading out to meet up with the guys for a cure, two culchie-types in suits on the doorstep holding out ID and asking pointless questions, I’d forgotten all about it till now—

  “Yeah, they did,” Susanna said. “About a week in. They talked to everyone who’d known him, but I got special treatment—I guess one of my mates must’ve told them he’d been hitting on me, and the cops wanted to know the story. Thank God it wasn’t the same guys I’d tried to report him to—those were just normal Guards, the kind with uniforms. The ones who came to talk to me were detectives, in suits, like Rafferty and Kerr. I mean, the uniform guys had probably forgotten all about me by that time, but still, that actually would’ve been scary.”

  “Jesus,” I said. The world I had been blithely bouncing through had been so utterly unrelated to this one running along its dark subterranean track, I couldn’t make the two of them click together in my mind. “What did you say?”

  Susanna shrugged. “It wasn’t bad. They were nice to me. It’s not like I was a suspect; I was just number ninety-whatever on a list of friends and acquaintances they had to cross off. I basically told them what the uniform guys had told me: Dominic was just having a laugh, it was kind of a running joke. You could tell they believed it. I mean”—she held out her hands, matter-of-factly—“look at me, and look at Dominic. Then I got all upset because OMG what if he genuinely had been in love with me all along and I just didn’t realize it, and he couldn’t take the pain any more? So I cried a little bit. And they told me it wasn’t my fault either way and he’d been upset about his exam results, and not to be worrying about it. And then they went away.”

  “And thank God you handled it that well,” Leon said, turning his head away from her to blow out a plume of smoke. “My God. They’d taken about five minutes with Toby and me—no one must have told them about the stuff Dominic did to me; not wanting to give the wrong impression of such a lovely guy, probably, or something idiotic like that. But they were in here with you for half an hour. The whole time I was up in my room, shaking so hard I couldn’t stand up. Pouring sweat. I was positive there would be a bang on the door any minute and we’d be hauled off to jail—I was wondering whether to slit my wrists while I still had the chance. If you’d let the smallest thing slip—if we had ever occurred to them as a possibility, even for a second—we would have been fucked. Megafucked.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” I said. For some reason Leon’s drama-queen shtick infuriated me more than ever; it felt like he was making a huge deal of this on purpose, to hammer home just how much I had missed. “It was self-defense, basically. Even if they had caught you, it’s not like they would have locked you up and thrown away the key. It’s not as simple now that you left him there for ten years, but if you’d just gone to the cops straightaway—”

  Both of them started to laugh.

  “What? What the fuck is funny?”

  “Oh God,” Leon said, through a fresh gale of laughter. “This is why we didn’t bring you in on it.”

  “Thank God,” Susanna said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “‘Excuse me, Guard dude, I’ve like totally got something to tell you, right, but we’ll have to make it quick because I’m meeting the lads down the pub—’”

  “Of course they would’ve locked us up,” Susanna said, like she was explaining something to Sallie. “We had zero evidence that it was self-defense; the police would only have had our word for it. You think they would’ve believed us?”

  “Why not? Two of you, both telling the same story, and your mates would have backed you up—”

  “Teenage girls,” Susanna said. “Probably hysterical or liars or both—the cops already thought I was hysterical. Why would anyone believe us?”

  “And a queer,” Leon said. “I wasn’t out yet, but it would have taken them about two minutes to guess. Fags are hysterical too, you know, and vicious, not to mention morally bankrupt.”

  “And on the other hand,” Susanna said, “you’ve got a fine handsome upstanding young rugby hero like Dominic Ganly.”

  “OK, so he’d been a bit depressed,” Leon said, “but that was just because of his exam results and possibly because this ungrateful bitch”—Susanna waved—“refused to appreciate him the way he deserved. It wasn’t like he was mentally ill or anything. Nothing wrong with him but a bit of boyish high spirits. He was a good guy—you said it yourself.” A sidelong glance at me. “Everyone loved him, or at least everyone who mattered. The papers were drooling over how wonderful he was, how full of potential, they made it sound like he was Cúchulainn come back to save the nation from itself . . . The whole country would have been out for our blood. They would probably have brought back the death penalty just for us. Of course I was terrified.”

  “I wasn’t,” Susanna said. “Not for a second. Beforehand, yeah, I was absolutely petrified, but not once he was gone. I was . . .”

  I waited, but after a moment she shook her head and laughed and put out her cigarette.

  “Well, yeah,” Leon said, and I caught a hint of a smile in his voice as well. “There was that, too.”

  “There was what?” I demanded.

  They looked at each other. The fire was burning low again, dull red patches pulsing amid blackened wood. The pall of smoke stirred idly, small eddies and swirls.

  “We both went a bit off the rails, I guess,” Leon said, “in different ways. Everything felt very weird; disorientating. The best way I can put it is that it felt like there was too much oxygen in the air, all of a sudden, and our bodies took a while to get used to it.”

  “I wasn’t off the rails, thanks very much,” Susanna said. “I was just having fun. It had been way too long since I’d been able to do that. Not just because of Dominic, to be fair. Even before him, everyone had me pegged as the good girl, all smart and serious and well-behaved; I didn’t feel like there was any way to break out of that, or even figure out whether I wanted to. And once Dominic started in on me . . . Jesus. It felt like if I did anything fun—like wore nice clothes, or went out, or got drunk, or had a laugh—that would be Dominic’s justification: You were off your face with your tits hanging out, obviously you wanted it. Or if not Dominic, someone else like him. Afterwards . . .” She shrugged. “That didn’t feel like so much of an issue. I mean, obviously Dominic’s opinion wasn’t an issue any more, but other people weren’t as scary either, because I knew I didn’t have to take their shit. Not that I was going to whip out the nuclear option any time someone cut in front of me in the bus queue, but just knowing I could actually do something made the world feel a lot less dangerous. And I definitely didn’t give a shit that I was supposed to be the good girl.”

  “I think you were well beyond calling yourself a good girl,” Leon said, grinning.

  “Past redemption,” Susanna said cheerfully, raising her glass. “So I just had a good time. Remember those hippies with the camper van? They took me to Cornwall and this guy called Athelstan was teaching me to play the dulcimer?”

  “Your parents were freaking out,” I said. Everything about this was bothering me. “They thought you were in a cult or something. Or abducted. Or losing your mind.”

  “Every kid has a right to some rebellion. I’d been angelic all through school. It evens out.” Rolling over to stretch out on her back on the sofa: “I’m still Facebook friends with Athelstan. He’s living in Portugal, in a yurt.”

  Leon got the giggles. “Don’t know what you’re laughing at,” Susanna told hi
m. “Who was your mate who used to go around wearing the big purple wings?”

  “Oh God, Eric! He was lovely. I wonder what happened to him. This one time, right, we were really stoned and we went into the Arts Block in Trinity late at night, just before they closed up? We were trying to get locked in for the night? Only the security guard spotted us and we were like playing hide-and-seek with him, all these masses of empty rooms and we kept hiding behind chairs, except Eric’s wings stuck out—”

  “Well, that sounds like a blast,” I said. My coffee buzz was long gone; I felt sick and headachy and miserably tired. “I’m glad you guys had so much fun.”

  “We’re not taking it lightly,” Susanna explained. “It’s just that we’ve had a while to get used to it.”

  “So how come you’re not living in a yurt and playing the dulcimer?” I asked. “If it was so liberating. How come you’re Mrs. Suburban Mummy?”

  “Ooo,” Leon said. “Someone’s feeling bitchy.”

  Susanna ignored my tone. “The thing was,” she said, “after a while I started noticing that it felt like what I did mattered. Like it had weight. I’d never felt that before. All those campaigns I got involved with in school, writing millions of letters for Amnesty and fundraising for places that had droughts, and they never changed anything; the guy was still stuck in some hellhole jail, the kids were still starving to death. I used to cry about that.” To me: “You caught me once. You thought I was a total idiot, but you were nice about it.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s good.” It occurred to me that I should be feeling some kind of sense of achievement. I had got what I was after, detectived my way to the answer that even big bad Rafferty hadn’t been able to get his hands on. I couldn’t work out why all of this felt like such an enormous letdown.

  “In a way you were probably right. I mean, yeah, I genuinely was crying for the guy being tortured in Myanmar, but I was also crying because it felt like I was nothing. Made of fluff. Feathers. I could bash myself to death against things and they wouldn’t budge an inch; they wouldn’t even notice I was there.” She took a sip of her wine. “Killing Dominic, though. Whatever you think about the moral issues, you have to admit it made a difference. A concrete one.”