He moved between us, his stick crunching rhythmically into the grass, and leaned over to look. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Zach was right.”
“Hugo,” I said. He seemed like salvation, the one person in the world who would know how to undo this so we could all go back inside and talk about the house some more. “What do we do?”
He turned his head to look at me over his shoulder, pushing up his glasses with a knuckle. “We call the Guards, of course,” he said gently. “I’ll do it in a moment. I just wanted to see for myself.”
“But,” Leon said, and stopped. Hugo’s eyes rested on him for a moment, mild and expressionless, before he bent again over the skull.
* * *
?I was expecting detectives, but they were uniformed Guards: two big thick-necked blank-faced guys about my age, alike enough that they could have been brothers, both of them with Midlands accents and yellow hi-vis vests and the kind of meticulous politeness that everyone understands is conditional. They arrived fast, but once they were there they didn’t seem particularly excited about the whole thing. “Could be an animal skull,” said the bigger one, following Melissa and me down the hall. “Or old remains, maybe. Archaeology, like.”
“You did the right thing calling us, either way,” said the other guy. “Better safe than sorry.”
Hugo and Leon and Tom were still in the garden, standing well back. “Now,” said the bigger guy, nodding to them, “let’s have a look at this,” and he and his mate squatted on their hunkers beside the skull, trousers stretching across their thick thighs. I saw the moment when their eyes met.
The big one took a pen out of his pocket and inserted it into the empty eyehole, carefully tilting the skull to one side and the other, examining every angle. Then he used the pen to hook back the long grass from the jaw, leaning in to inspect the teeth. Leon was gnawing ferociously on a thumbnail.
When the cop looked up his face was even blanker. “Where was this found?” he asked.
“My great-nephew found it,” Hugo said. Of all of us, he was the calmest; Melissa had her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, Leon was practically jigging with tension, and even Tom was white and stunned-looking, hair standing up like he’d been running his hands through it. “In a hollow tree, he says. I assume it was this one here, but I don’t know for certain.”
All of us looked up at the wych elm. It was one of the biggest trees in the garden, and the best for climbing: a great misshapen gray-brown bole, maybe five feet across, lumpy with rough bosses that made perfect handholds and footholds to the point where, seven or eight feet up, it split into thick branches heavy with huge green leaves. It was the same one I’d broken my ankle jumping out of, when I was a kid; with a horrible leap of my skin I realized that this thing could have been in there the whole time, I could have been just inches away from it.
The big cop glanced at his mate, who straightened up and, with surprising agility, hauled himself up the tree trunk. He braced his feet and hung on to a branch with one hand while he pulled a slim pen-shaped torch from his pocket; shone it into the split of the trunk; pointed it this way and that, peering, mouth hanging open. Finally he thumped down onto the grass with a grunt and gave the big cop a brief nod.
“Where’s your great-nephew now?” the big cop asked.
“In the house,” Hugo said, “with his mother and his sister. His sister was with him when he found it.”
“Right,” the cop said. He stood up, putting his pen away. His face, tilted to the sky, was distant; with a small shock I realized he was thrilled. “Let’s go have a quick word with them. Can you all come with me, please?” And to his mate: “Get onto the Ds and the Bureau.”
The mate nodded. As we trooped into the house, I glanced over my shoulder one last time: the cop, feet stolidly apart, swiping and jabbing at his phone; the wych elm, vast and luxuriant in its full summer whirl of green; and on the ground between them the small brown shape, barely visible among the daisies and the long grass.
* * *
?Susanna was on the sofa, with an arm around each kid. She was even paler than normal, but she looked composed enough, and the kids had stopped screaming. They gave the cop matching opaque stares from the safety of Susanna’s arms.
“Sorry to disturb you,” the cop said. “I’d like a word with this young man, if he’s feeling able for it.”
“He’s fine,” Susanna said. “Aren’t you?”
“He is, of course,” said the cop heartily. “He’s a big boy. What’s your name, sonny?”
Zach wriggled out of Susanna’s arm and looked at the cop warily. “Zach,” he said.
“And what age are you?”
“Six.”
The cop pulled out a notebook and squatted awkwardly by the coffee table, as close to Zach as he could get. “Aren’t you great for finding that yoke out there? That’s a big tree for a little fella like you to be climbing.”
Zach rolled his eyes, not too obviously.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Zach, however, had apparently decided he didn’t like this guy. He shrugged and dug his toe into the rug, watching the pile ruck up.
“What was the first thing you did when you went out into the garden, say? Did you go straight for the tree? Or were you doing something else first?”
Shrug.
“Were you playing a game, yeah? Were you being Tarzan?”
Eye-roll.
“Zach,” Susanna said evenly. “Tell the Guard what happened.”
Zach drew a line in the rug with his toe and examined it.
“Zach,” Tom said.
“That’s all right,” the cop said easily, although he didn’t look pleased. “You can talk to the detectives when they get here, if you’d rather do that.” The word detectives sent a flicker through the room; I heard a quick catch of breath, couldn’t tell where it came from. “What about this young lady here? Can you tell me what happened?”
Zach shot Sallie a vicious look. Her chin started to wobble and she buried her face in Susanna’s stomach.
“Right,” the cop said, cutting his losses and straightening up. “We’ll leave that for later; they’re a bit shaken up, sure, who wouldn’t be. Was it you they came to, Mrs. . . . ?”
“Hennessy. Susanna Hennessy.” Susanna had one hand on the back of Sallie’s neck and the other on Zach’s shoulder, tight enough that he squirmed. “The rest of us were in here. We heard them scream, so we all ran out to the garden.”
“And that yoke out there. When you ran out, was it where it is now? On the grass near the tree?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone touch it? Apart from your son?”
“Sal,” Susanna said gently. “Did you touch it?” Sallie shook her head, into Susanna’s top.
“Anyone else?”
We all shook our heads.
The cop wrote something in his notebook. “And are you the resident here?” he asked Susanna.
“I am,” Hugo said. He had moved slowly and carefully around the rest of us to lower himself into his armchair. “These three are my niece and my nephews, Tom is my niece’s husband, and Melissa is Toby’s girlfriend. The two of them are staying with me at the moment, but usually it’s just me.”
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Hugo Hennessy.”
“And how long have you been living here?”
“All my life, with the odd gap here and there. It was my parents’ house, and my grandparents’.”
“So it’s been in the family since when?”
Hugo considered that, rubbing absently at one of his radiotherapy bald spots. “1925, I think. It might have been 1926.”
“Mm-hm,” the cop said, examining what he’d written. “Would you have any idea how old that tree is? Did you plant it?”
“Goodness, no. It was old when I was a child. It’s a wych elm; they can live for centuries.”
“And that yoke out there. Any idea who it might be?”
Hugo shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”
The cop looked around the rest of us. “Anyone else? Any ideas?”
We all shook our heads.
“Right,” the cop said. He closed his notebook and tucked it away in a pocket. “Now, I have to tell you, we might need to be here for a while.”