The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  “Way ahead of you there, champ,” Susanna said, raising an eyebrow. “I did. After that happened, I told Leon the whole thing. Not that I expected him to jump in and put a stop to it, but I needed someone to walk me to work in the mornings and meet me outside when I finished—which was pretty humiliating: like I was a little kid who couldn’t handle the big bad world. And I knew Leon wouldn’t think I was being a wimp, because he knew what Dominic was like.”

  “Oh, I did,” Leon said. “I knew exactly what he was like. He was still giving me some of the same old shite, by the way; he was well able to handle more than one victim at a time. Multitasking; he’d have done well in management. But at least I was getting a lot less of it. He’d only really ever picked on me when he had his buddies around—it was some kind of chimpanzee thing, displaying dominance for the other males—and now that no one wanted to be around him, he didn’t bother as much. Just casual stuff, in passing. Knocking my coffee down my chest, that kind of thing.”

  “But,” Susanna said, with a glance of real affection, “Leon was horrified. Outraged. ‘That bastard, we’re not going to let him get away with this . . .’ I think if I’d let him he would’ve rushed right out to teach Dominic a lesson, and that wouldn’t have ended well—no offense, Leon—”

  “None taken,” Leon said cheerfully. “He’d have eaten me for breakfast.”

  “Instead Leon convinced me to go talk to the cops. I took some convincing, but seeing how furious he was . . . that made me twig that yeah, actually, I wasn’t overreacting, this genuinely was a big deal, and it was about time someone stuck a spoke in that fucker’s wheel. And like he pointed out, we weren’t in school any more; I didn’t have to worry about everyone finding out and me being a leper.” She was smiling over at Leon. “He went with me and held my hand while we waited, and everything.”

  “I’m so ashamed about that,” Leon said, covering his face with his hands. “God. Every time I think of it, I want to ring you up and apologize. I don’t even know what I thought they’d do. Go give him a stern talking-to. Scare him into backing off.”

  “It’s OK,” Susanna said. “Seriously. I actually expected them to do something, too. Pair of middle-class spoiled brats that we were.”

  “What, they didn’t?” I said. “Like, nothing at all?” This sounded completely bizarre. Martin and Flashy Suit had been pretty useless, but at least they had made some kind of effort.

  “Laughed in my face,” Susanna said. “They wouldn’t even take a statement, or a report, or whatever they call it.”

  “Why not? What was their problem?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t have any evidence. The lump on my head was gone by that time. No texts, no emails, no notes, no witnesses. Just she-said-he-said, and apparently what she said didn’t count for much. In fairness, I don’t think it was just because I was a girl. Dominic was a rich kid from a fancy school, his parents would’ve gone ballistic and hired big-shot lawyers and filed a million complaints . . . The cops didn’t want to get into that mess, not with zero evidence. So they patted me on the head and told me he was probably just having a laugh, and I should go home and concentrate on having a nice relaxing summer, instead of getting myself all worked up about fellas.”

  “Which seemed a teeny bit insensitive at the time,” Leon said, shaking another cigarette out of the packet, “but actually it was the best thing that could have happened. If there had been a report on file . . .”

  “So that was that,” Susanna said. She put out her smoke and pushed the ashtray across the coffee table to Leon. “If the cops wouldn’t touch it, then there wasn’t much point in going to my parents, either, even if I had wanted to—what were they going to do, grab a cop and march him out to arrest Dominic? go talk to his parents, so Mummy and Daddy could be outraged at the thought that their precious prince had done anything bad? And the school wasn’t even involved any more. I was pretty much out of options.”

  “You were about to go to college,” I said. I knew it might come out wrong and piss her off, but I needed to hear that I had had no choice. “You could have got in anywhere. Hadn’t you applied to Edinburgh, or somewhere?”

  “I had, yeah,” Susanna said, unruffled. “And I was pretty sure I’d get in. I was thinking about going—I didn’t want to, I wanted to stay here, but anything to be safe, right? Except then Dominic came up to me in the kitchen, one day, and he went, ‘So I hear you’re thinking about Edinburgh’—who knows where he heard that.” A wry eyebrow-lift at me. “I babbled something, and he said, ‘Cool. I’ve always wanted an excuse to spend some time in Edinburgh.’ And he shot me the finger guns and wandered off.”

  Shrugging: “I mean, maybe he wouldn’t actually have followed me. Maybe he’d have forgotten I existed. But by that stage he was crazy enough that I believed him. God knows money wasn’t a problem for him, and it wasn’t like he had anything to stay here for. Even you guys were pulling away from him—not that I blamed you, believe me. He didn’t have any real friends, did he? Plenty of dudebro types all ready to hoot and cheer when he did something moronic, but no actual friends. Not like you had Sean and Dec.”

  “I guess not,” I said. I had never thought much about it, but I couldn’t remember Dominic ever hanging around with one or two people; he had been either at the center of a whooping crowd, or else—towards the end, mainly—sloping around on his own, with a fractured, roving glitter in his eye that made you want to stay far away.

  “So he wasn’t going to stick around Dublin just to hang with the lads. And I was so fucking terrified all the time, and so exhausted from being terrified, I couldn’t think straight. I was positive he’d track me down, and it would be even worse because I’d be away from home and my family. By that stage he didn’t feel like just some douche; he felt huge. Like a demon. Something that could find me anywhere.” With a glance at me: “You figure I should’ve gone anyway, and kept my fingers crossed. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I should’ve headed off to Outer Mongolia because some arsehole couldn’t handle not getting his way. Would you have?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The calm of her—of both of them, really, Leon lounging on the hearthrug and poking experimentally at one wet shoe—was unsettling me more and more. It wasn’t that I wanted them trembling and sobbing, but given where all this had led, it felt like they should at least be tense or jittery or something. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “I was pretty crazy myself, at that point,” Susanna said. “It was like being in a nightmare, that feeling where you have to get out but you can’t move fast enough and you can’t scream. I was cutting myself a lot. The only thing that made me feel any better was daydreaming about killing Dominic. I still wasn’t even considering actually doing it, but I had got a lot more realistic. Riddling him with machine-gun bullets felt stupid; like dropping a cartoon anvil on his head. I needed something that could be real.”

  “I didn’t know,” Leon said, to one of us or both, I couldn’t tell. “I mean, I knew, but I had no idea it had got that bad.”

  “It took me a while to find a way that would work,” Susanna said. “Dominic was twice my size, and I didn’t want anything where he would bleed because the cleanup would be too complicated, so that ruled out most stuff. I thought about poison, but it’s too dicey. Even if I managed to get something into him, most poisons take ages; he would’ve had time to go to the hospital, get treated, tell someone about me . . . I don’t even know how much time I spent reading true-crime websites, checking out methods. I know how to poison someone so it won’t come up on a tox screen—if I could have got my hands on succinylcholine—I know the best ways to drown someone, which would have been great if we’d had a lake in the garden . . . Finally I found out about garrotes. At first I couldn’t believe it was that easy, but I kept reading about it, and bit by bit it dawned on me: Holy shit. This could actually work.”

  And again, I should have kno
wn; I had known. It would never have occurred to me to go researching garrotes. It was, on the other hand, exactly Susanna’s style. My mind felt like it was turning inside out. I could have trusted myself, all along.

  “It was a good feeling,” Susanna said. “Not that it made any actual difference, but I’d been so totally fucking powerless . . . After that, when he’d grab my boob or whatever, and give me that big shitbird grin like What are you going to do about it, I’d be thinking Motherfucker I could garrote you any time I want.”

  “Oh my God, your face,” Leon said, to me. “Don’t look so shocked. I’d been daydreaming about feeding him into a wood chipper for years. And so would you have been.”

  My apartment, step and drag, unstoppable fantasy loop where I tracked down the burglars and karate-kicked them off tall buildings a thousand times a night. “I’m not looking shocked,” I said.

  “You’ve got nothing to be self-righteous about.”

  “I know that. OK?”

  “And then,” Susanna said, ignoring this, “it got to August, and the Leaving Cert results came out. I only skimmed mine, you know that? I should’ve been over the moon with myself, but the only results I cared about were Dominic fucking Ganly’s, because if he’d done OK then he might pull himself together, but if he’d bombed then I was in deep shit. And of course he’d bombed.”

  “I got to tell her,” Leon said, on a stream of smoke. “When we went down to the school and got our results, I headed straight off, remember— What am I saying, of course you don’t, you were too busy jumping around making orangutan noises with Sean and Dec. But Dominic was just off in a corner, staring. He looked like he was about to pull out an AK-47. I barely even looked at my own results. All I could think was that now I had to tell Susanna.”

  “I figured my only option was to lock myself in my room for the rest of my life,” Susanna said. “Except even that wouldn’t work, because Leon’s birthday party was coming up like a week later, and of course Dominic was going to be there. I was petrified. I thought about saying I was too sick to go, but what was I going to do instead? Stay up in my room, where he could get me on my own any time he wanted? Hugo always put in earplugs for the parties, he wouldn’t have heard anything, and I could hardly stay in his room all night—I mean, I guess I could have, if I’d told him the whole story, but it felt like things had gone way past that. I could have gone back to my house, but the thought of being all on my own there scared the shit out of me.”

  She rearranged herself more comfortably, curled on her side, elbow propped on the arm of the sofa and her cheek leaning pensively on her hand. “But in the end,” she said, “it was totally fine. I dodged Dominic the whole way through the party, and he didn’t even come after me. I was so happy. The college place offers had just come out like two days before; I thought maybe there’d been a miracle and he’d actually got in somewhere decent, and that had sorted his head out . . . Only then I asked around and found out: nope, he’d got nothing. No offer at all. He’d only applied for the big-shot courses, no safety backup stuff for him. So that wasn’t reassuring.”

  I remembered that, awed hushed voices, Shit he got nothing at all? and the odd snarky joke about McDonald’s. Except at the party Dominic had seemed totally fine, louder than ever, bellowing with laughter, leaping off the kitchen table. I had meant to keep my mouth firmly shut so I didn’t get a punch in the face, but down at the bottom of the garden, the coke making me jabber: Dude that sucks about college, no I mean that really sucks, what are you going to do? And Dominic staring at me, eyes white-ringed in the moonlight: Like you give a shit. Like anyone gives a shit. I know you’re all laughing your arses off about this. You bunch of fuckers. And then he had laughed at the flash of fear on my face, punch in the arm that sent me staggering, Relax dude I’ll be fine, have some more of this!

  “And then,” Susanna said, “I found out he’d spent the party nicking the garden key.”

  She sighed. “That was what did it,” she said, “in the end. It meant he could get to me here, any time he wanted. Here.” An iron spike of outrage through her voice, a jerk of her head to the house, and for a moment I saw it the way it had been: warm, shabby, happy, us noisy and tangled in our fort and our contraptions, Hugo calling Dinner! up the stairs through a fog of savory smells.

  “And he did, too. A couple of days later Hugo sent me out to the garden to get rosemary, for something he was cooking. Remember where the rosemary bushes were? Right down the back? The second I leaned in to pick a bit, something came barreling out from behind that oak tree and rugby-tackled me. I went flat on my face in the strawberries. I got the wind knocked out of me and there was this huge weight squashing me flat, I couldn’t turn my head to look, but I knew who it was, obviously. I knew the smell of him, by that time; that shitty body spray, eau de jockstrap. He started fumbling under me, trying to undo my jeans. I was flailing around trying to dig my nails into him, but he got his other hand on my throat and started squeezing. And everything started to go all gray and fuzzy and faraway.”

  She examined her glass, picked something real or imaginary off the rim. Her face hadn’t changed, but it was a moment before she went on. “Luckily for me,” she said evenly, “right then Hugo stuck his head out the back door and called me. So Dominic rolled off me and grinned and whispered, ‘Rain check,’ and pulled my hair and oozed back off behind the oak tree.”

  “You know,” Leon said tightly, “sometimes I wish you’d picked a different method. Something slower and more painful.”

  “Hugo spotted that I was covered in dirt and bits of grass,” Susanna said, “but I said I’d tripped and he didn’t guess, because in fairness, who would. I did think about telling him—I was pretty seriously shaken up. To put it mildly. But . . .” A small shrug. “Hugo, you know? What was he going to do? He was hardly going to rush out and beat the shit out of Dominic. He couldn’t have if he’d tried.”

  You should have told me, I wanted to say. “Jesus,” I said, instead.

  “She didn’t tell me,” Leon said. “About that. Not then.”

  “You’d have gone for him,” Susanna said, “and got beaten up, and that wouldn’t have done anyone any good. I needed to end this thing. Dominic was well capable of killing me next time, and he had been waiting for me out there. I couldn’t tell myself he was just grabbing opportunities when he saw them, and I’d be OK if I managed to keep out of his way. He was coming after me. Even if I’d managed to get Hugo to change the lock, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Dominic had plans; concrete ones. So I needed concrete ones too.”

  She said it so simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I spent a lot of time thinking it through. I knew actually killing him was going to be the easy part; the hard part was how to make sure I didn’t get caught. I think I did OK, for a kid.” Glancing up at us: “It startled me, you know that? how well I did. I’d always thought of myself as kind of a spacer, book-smart but not practical-smart, but once my back was up against the wall . . .”

  “You did great,” Leon said, a little sadly. “You were amazing.”

  Susanna took a sip of her wine. “The first thing I did—apart from staying out of the garden, obviously, and double-checking that the house was locked up at night—was start playing down Dominic’s bullshit to my friends. They didn’t know the whole story anyway—like I said, I was ashamed and embarrassed and all that good stuff—but they knew some of it, and I didn’t want anyone telling the cops, afterwards, that I’d been having problems with him. So I started making jokes about it, rolling my eyes, Oh God that idiot, it’s like having someone’s stupid puppy jumping all over you, you can’t really get mad about it but you totally want to smack him on the nose with a newspaper . . . And I started dropping sympathetic little comments about how the poor guy was really messed up about his results, he seemed like he might be having an actual breakdown, I hoped his parents would get him to see a therapist,
you hear all these news stories about people killing themselves because they don’t get the course they wanted . . . And of course when you’re that age everyone loves drama, so within a few days there were rumors all over the place about Dominic being in counseling because he’d tried to hang himself.”

  “I was so disappointed when I found out that wasn’t true,” Leon said. “Wouldn’t it have made everything so much simpler? If he’d just done the job himself?”

  “The other thing I needed to clean up,” Susanna said, “was the computer history. Back when I’d started thinking about real ways of doing it, I’d used Hugo’s computer to do the research. So there were ‘how to make a garrote’ pages all over the browser history. And if the cops started poking around, I definitely didn’t want them finding those.”

  “I think we all had things in that browser history that we wouldn’t have wanted anyone finding,” Leon said, arching an eyebrow.

  “I had a big piece of luck there, though. I hadn’t wanted Hugo finding weird searches in his history, either. He used Internet Explorer for his browser, right? the way most people did back then? So back when I started doing the research, I’d downloaded Firefox and used that instead. Which meant that, once I was done, all I had to do was uninstall Firefox, run a cleaner, and boom: computer clean as a whistle. Which was nice.”

  She finished her wine. “Still, though, I knew if there was a full-on murder investigation, I’d be screwed. The cops aren’t stupid; if they started seriously looking, there was no way I could cover up well enough to be safe. I needed it to look like suicide, right from the start. That was doable—Dominic was such a mess, no one would be too surprised. But for that to work, the body couldn’t be found, at least not till it had decomposed enough to get rid of the garrote marks.”