The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  But the solicitor kept banging on about how it was my only chance of avoiding a murder conviction and an automatic life sentence, so in the end I went with it. I think, or maybe I just want to think, that I did it mainly for my parents’ sake. I couldn’t shake the image of my mother stepping into the Ivy House, Toby? Toby are you all right?, the cold draft through the open garden door; the thing lying on the earth, the moment of horror, the dizzying confusion when she saw Rafferty’s face; rushing through dusty rooms and up dark staircases, Toby! voice rising and cracking, Toby!; and, at last, me, doing my best to die right there in front of her, just not quite able to cross that final borderline.

  So I got up there on the stand, stripped and splayed and did my little dance in front of the world. I shook and hyperventilated, right on cue, as my barrister took me through the burglary step by step. I stumbled through in-depth descriptions of every single humiliating aftereffect (And what happened when you tried to go outside alone? And when the credit-card company asked for your middle name you couldn’t remember it, is that right? And we can see that your eyelid droops, is that a result of . . . ?). I lost my train of thought and had to ask for questions to be repeated. When someone dropped a notebook I jumped practically out of my seat. I stammered and slurred my way through Hugo’s death, jammed up so badly that my barrister had to ask for a break when it came to the fight with Rafferty. I tried not to look at the jury’s faces as they carefully assessed just how much of a wreck I was, at the pretty blonde in the front row and her big pitying eyes. On cross-examination the prosecutor went after me hard, trying to push the line that I was faking it, but he backed off fast when it became clear that I wasn’t at all, that I was in fact on the verge of breaking down utterly.

  The prosecution’s version was that I had held a grudge against Rafferty over Hugo’s death, and when he had shown up looking for info to cement Hugo’s reputation as a murderer, I had lost my temper and gone for him. I suppose there was an element of truth in that version, too, but the jury—after almost three days of deliberation—preferred my barrister’s. There was, after all, no arguing with the fact that I was comprehensively fucked up. I was the only one who got the irony: all the things that Rafferty had explained would work against me, the slurring and the jumpiness and the glazed look and the inability to focus, those were the things that saved me. The verdict (eleven to one: there was one big, shaven-headed guy whose jaded stare said he wasn’t buying any of it) was manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.

  The verdict meant, as my solicitor explained to me, that the judge could sentence me to anything he chose, from probation to life. I was lucky. The judge could hardly let me walk away from a dead detective, but he took into account my unblemished record, my immense potential to contribute to society, my supportive family (he knew my father and Phil professionally, although distantly enough that he hadn’t felt the need to recuse himself), the fact that my mental state and social background were likely to make prison an unduly harsh environment for me. He sentenced me to twelve years, ten of them suspended, and sent me to the Central Mental Hospital, where I could receive the appropriate treatment to make sure I fulfilled all that potential someday. I didn’t need Susanna to point out to me that, if I had been some tracksuited skanger from a family of dole rats, the whole thing would have played out very differently.

  * * *

  Susanna came to visit me a few times, actually, while I was in the hospital. The first time I assumed she was there to suss out whether I was planning to rat out her and Leon to the shrinks. I wasn’t. Not out of love or nobility or anything, and not out of the cheerful nonchalance with which I’d covered for Tiernan, Hey why not? who’s getting hurt?; just because it felt like enough damage had already been done all around. If anything could be salvaged, I liked the idea of helping to salvage it.

  Susanna looked good. She had come straight from college; she was wearing a pale-blue T-shirt and skinny jeans and old runners, and she looked young and energetic and studenty. In the visiting room—ratty armchairs splotched with tea stains and gum, bolted-down coffee table, vaguely unsettling art-therapy paintings of distorted flowerpots—she seemed like an alien beamed in from another world; but then, all the visitors did.

  She didn’t try to hug me. “You look better,” she said. “Like you’re getting some sleep.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “They have pills for that.” Susanna still wasn’t my favorite person. I’m sure she would argue that she had done her level best to keep all of us out of trouble and it was hardly her fault that I had decided to beat up a cop, but I had a hard time seeing it that way.

  “How’s this place?”

  “It’s OK,” I said. It sort of was, actually. The first few weeks had been bad. Suicide watch, which in itself was enough to make the most stable person suicidal: mattress on a bare floor, tiny hatch in a metal door, stifling heat, lights never off. Unreadable stares everywhere, all of them pulsing with danger, doctors who might decide to shoot me full of some mindfuck drug if I made the wrong move, patients who might decide I was the devil and needed my face ripped off. Constant noise, always someone shouting or singing or banging something, all of it amplified by the bare institutional acoustics. And the dawning realization that this sentence had no end date; the judge’s two years were an illusion, I was there until the doctors thought I was cured, which might be years away or might be never.

  After the first shock wore off, though, I had settled in without too much trouble. No one tried to eat my face or drug me into catatonia. I had a room of my own (tiny, overheated, paint peeling) and I was considered low enough risk that I got to do stuff like go for walks in the grounds and do exercise classes. Even the indefinite stay had lost a lot of its horror once I realized that there was, really, nowhere else I particularly wanted to be.

  “Tom says hi,” Susanna said. “And the kids. Sallie and I made you cookies, but the nurse or guard or whatever took them away.”

  “Yeah. It’s in case you put drugs in them. Or a razor blade, or something.”

  “Right. I should’ve thought of that.” She glanced up at the camera hanging, very obviously, in one corner of the ceiling. “Mum and Dad send love, too. And Miriam and Oliver. Miriam says to hurry up and get better. She looked it up online and found out you can apply for a discharge after six months, so she’s expecting you home by Christmas.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “I told her it doesn’t work that way, but she says I’m underestimating the power of positive thinking. She’s already made an appointment for you with some guru guy who’s going to reiki the bad vibes out of your aura, or something.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “Tell her I’m getting worse.” In fact, I had no intention of applying for a discharge until those two years were up. Before that, even if I was approved, it would only get me transferred to prison. The hospital was no five-star hotel and some of the company left a lot to be desired, but the place was blessedly free from gang wars and shower-room rapes and all the feral nightmare that I (from my smug middle-class perspective, Susanna said in my head) associated with prison. All of us in the hospital had done various major shit, but with a few exceptions none of us were looking for trouble, and the seriously scary types were kept separate. A lot of people were schizophrenic, and they mainly hung out together, but there were a couple of depressives and a guy on the autism spectrum who were surprisingly good company. The autistic guy in particular was very restful to be around. All he wanted to do was talk for hours about Lord of the Rings, and he didn’t require any input or even any attention from me; I would sit by the dayroom window and look out at the gardens, wide lawns and decorous topiary and spreading oak trees, while his flat rhythmic monotone went on and on like running water.

  “Are we allowed to go outside?” Susanna asked suddenly. “In the garden?”

  “I guess,” I said. We were, actually, but there were a few of the guys I would have pre
ferred her not to run into, for my pride’s sake more than for hers.

  “Let’s go. It’s lovely out. Who do we ask?”

  It was lovely out: clean brand-new springtime, a warm generous breeze that smelled of apple blossom and fresh grass, little white puffs of cloud in a blue sky. The lavender bushes on either side of the path were in bloom; birds were everywhere, loud and jubilant.

  “Wow,” Susanna said, turning to look back at the building: immense and sprawling, gray, Victorian, with pointed gables and bay windows.

  “Yeah. It’s impressive, all right.”

  “I think I was expecting some modern thing. Super-discreet. Something that could be a community center, or a block of flats. This place is like, ‘Fuck you, we’ve got a madwoman in the attic and we don’t care who knows it.’”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed. She glanced over at me with a half smile. “Do they treat you OK?”

  “No complaints.”

  “Can they hear us out here? I mean, it’s not bugged or anything?”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” I said.

  “Seriously.”

  “They don’t have the budget to bug anything. There’s him.” I lifted my chin at the large nurse standing on the terrace, rocking peacefully on his heels and keeping one eye on us and the other on three guys playing cards on the grass. “That’s it.”

  Susanna nodded. She turned and we headed down the path, gravel crunching under our feet, Susanna tilting her face up to catch the sun.

  “How are my parents doing?” I asked.

  “OK, as far as I can tell. Relieved. I know that sounds weird, but I think they were scared of things going a lot worse.”

  “Yeah. So was I.”

  Susanna nodded. “There’s one thing I wanted to tell you,” she said, after a moment. “About Dominic.”

  “Right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about Dominic.

  “I didn’t really clock it at first; not until a few months after we did it. Remember I told you how at the beginning of that summer, when I was just daydreaming about ways of doing it, I downloaded Firefox onto Hugo’s computer to do the research, instead of using his Internet Explorer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he wouldn’t find out I was searching for murder techniques.” Someone had dropped a Kit Kat wrapper; she picked it up and put it in her pocket. “But I mean, Hugo: how often do you think he went through his search history? You think he would even have registered if ‘making a garrote’ popped up? We could all have been watching orgy porn on there every day of the week, and he would never have noticed. And anyway, if that was all I was worried about, I could have just stuck to IE and cleared the history and the cookies and the temp files at the end of every session.”

  “Right,” I said. I wasn’t sure what her point was. Susanna always had liked making things complicated; messing around downloading pointless browsers was exactly her style.

  “Except that that would have shown. Not to Hugo, but if the cops had gone looking through that computer, they would’ve seen that someone had wiped everything. They wouldn’t have been able to tell what had been wiped, but it would’ve looked dodgy as hell. I could have come up with some story—forums for cutters, maybe—but once the cops got interested, I’m sure they could have subpoenaed records from the ISP or Google or somewhere. The big thing about downloading Firefox was that when I was done, I could just uninstall it, run a cleaner program, and it looked like nothing had ever happened. Totally normal search history, right there on IE, no gaps or anything. Nothing to make the cops look twice. Which was a good thing, and I’m delighted I did it that way. But the thing is, I did that before I ever got serious about killing Dominic.”

  “So?” I said.

  We had turned into the walkway, a series of arches overgrown with trailing creepers so that they made a long tunnel. It was cooler in there, shadowy, bees humming around white flowers.

  “So when I started planning it for real,” Susanna said, “at first I thought I’d changed. Because of Dominic; what he was doing to me. I thought it had turned me ruthless. Not that I’ve got a problem with being ruthless—I don’t think.” She considered that for a moment. “Probably I should have loved that idea. It would mean that none of it was my fault, right? That wasn’t really me, it was what Dominic made me into. But I hated it. That might have been the worst part of all: the idea that I was who I was because of some random guy I just happened to meet, and if he’d gone looking for study help off someone else, or if he’d done Spanish instead of French, I’d be a different person. Like anyone could turn me into anything, and there would be nothing I could do about it. It fucked me up, for a while. It might be partly why I went through with it, I don’t know.”

  She brushed away a tendril of vine, tucked it carefully into the trellis. “But once I realized that about the browser,” she said, “I was OK again. I’d been all ready to kill Dominic, and get it right, way before I ever thought about actually doing it. The stuff he did to me, the stuff that felt like it was turning me into someone else? It didn’t actually change who I was at all. I was always ruthless. It was just a question of what it would take to bring it out.”

  She watched me, sunlight dappling her face as we walked, midges hovering. I thought of her as a little kid, Zach’s size maybe, sharing her M&M’s with me because I had cried when I spilled mine in our mud wallow. “Maybe,” I said. “You would know.”

  “I do.”

  I didn’t ask her the question that had been on my mind, which was whether I had been inside or outside that ruthlessness’s range; whether, if it had come down to it, she would have thrown me under the bus to save herself and Leon. There didn’t seem to be much point. I’m sure she’d only have told me there was no such if, it could never have come to that, she had had everything under control all the way; none of which would have answered the question. More to the point, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know.

  Instead I asked, “Have you told Tom?” I had been wondering this, too. “About Dominic?”

  “Nope,” Susanna said. “Not because I’m scared he’d turn us in, or leave me, or anything. He wouldn’t. But it would upset him and it would worry him, and I’m not going to dump that on his shoulders just so I can pat myself on the back about having no secrets in my marriage. And”—a cool glance at me—“neither is anyone else.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.”

  “You know what, though,” she said, a little farther down the walkway. “Sometimes I think he knows. About Dominic and about that doctor, too. Obviously there’s no way I can ask him, but . . . I wonder.” Another glance at me. “What about Melissa?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “And I’m not going to ask, either.”

  “Yeah, don’t. Leave it.”

  We had come out of the walkway; after the dimness the sun felt too bright, aggressive. “Hugo’s ashes,” I said. I hadn’t wanted to bring this up around my father. “He wanted them to go in the Ivy House garden. Did you, did anyone—”

  “Yeah, your mum said. But”—breeze playing with a curl of her hair, she lifted a hand to tuck it behind her ear—“all our dads, they felt weird about that. After everything. There’s a lake where the four of them used to go for holidays, when they were kids? Up in Donegal? We drove up there, a few weeks back. We scattered his ashes in the lake. Which is probably illegal, but there was no one around. It’s a beautiful place.” A glance at me: “We would have waited for you, but . . .”

  “We should go in,” I said. “Our time’s probably up.”

  Susanna nodded. For a second I thought she was going to say something else, but then she turned around and headed towards the walkway. We walked back to the building in silence.

  * * *

  My parents visited all the time, of course, and Sean and Dec, and sometimes the aunts and uncles. Richard came once, but he was so upset that it ju
st made both of us feel worse. He had got it into his head that the whole thing was somehow his fault, that if he had pushed me to come back to work then I would have recovered faster (not true, and I told him so) and, more confusedly, that if he hadn’t been so angry with me about the Gouger thing then I wouldn’t have stayed late at work that night and wouldn’t have crossed paths with the burglars, or wouldn’t have been awake to hear them, or something. That one obviously wasn’t true either, but it came close enough to what a part of me believed that I had a hard time with it, which of course upset Richard even more. After that he wrote me every month like clockwork—scene gossip, descriptions of new artists he had discovered, wistful asides about what lovely things I would have done for the exhibition of found-object sculpture—but he didn’t come back, and I was glad of it.

  Leon wasn’t around; he had moved to Sweden, where he was working as a tour guide and from where he sent me postcards of national monuments with a few perky, meaningless lines scribbled on the backs. Melissa didn’t come either. She wrote me long, very sweet letters: lots of funny stories about the shop, like the ones she used to tell me when I was licking my wounds in my apartment; awful Megan the flatmate had finally managed to run her chichi café into the ground, which of course was everyone’s fault but hers, and now she was setting up as a life coach; Melissa had run into Sean and Audrey in town and their baby was completely adorable, the exact same laid-back expression as Sean, they couldn’t wait for me to meet him! In spite of the huge amounts of time and consideration and care that must have gone into the letters, there was something impersonal about them—they could equally well have been written to a classmate she hadn’t seen in ten years—and I wasn’t at all surprised when she mentioned (delicately, not making a big deal of it) that she was going to some concert with her boyfriend. I rewrote my answer half a dozen times, trying to make it clear with equal delicacy that I wasn’t angry, that I wanted her to have every happiness and while I wished with all my heart that I had been able to give it to her, now that that was impossible I hoped she could find it with someone else. Maybe I got the tone wrong, or maybe the new boyfriend was understandably not crazy about the idea of me; her letters didn’t stop but they got further apart, shorter, more impersonal, more like letters to some guy she had picked off a charity website. Still, I was one of the lucky ones. A lot of the guys, especially the ones who had been there for a decade or two, didn’t get letters or visitors at all.