“How long?” Susanna asked sharply.
“No way to know at this stage. We’ll keep you informed. And we’ll try to minimize the disturbance. Is there any other entrance to the garden, besides through the house? So we don’t have to be coming in and out on you?”
“There’s a door in the back wall of the garden,” Hugo said, “leading out onto the laneway. I’m not sure where the key—”
“Kitchen cupboard,” Leon said. “I saw it last week, I’ll get it—” and he slipped away as swiftly as a shadow.
“That’s great,” the cop said. His eye moved around the room and stopped on Tom. “Mr. . . . ?”
“Farrell. Thomas Farrell.”
“Mr. Farrell, I’m going to ask you to make us a list of the name and contact details of everyone here. We’ll also need a list of who’s lived in this house, as far back as any of you know, and the dates—doesn’t need to be exact at this point, just ‘Granny Hennessy lived here from, we’ll say, 1950 till she died in 2000,’ that kind of thing. Can you do that?”
“No problem,” Tom said promptly. Even in the middle of all this, it sent a sharp flare of outrage through me—fair enough, Hugo was obviously not well and Leon looked like a refugee from a Sex Pistols tribute band and Susanna was covered in kids, but I was standing right there, I was family and Tom wasn’t, why the fuck was this guy skipping over me?
Leon came back with the key. “Here,” he said, holding it out to the cop. “I don’t know if it’ll work, no one ever uses that door so it might have gone all—”
“Thanks very much,” the cop said, pocketing it. “I’m going to ask you all to stay in this room here for a while. If you need to use the toilet or the kitchen, obviously, that’s no problem, but the garden’ll be off limits until further notice. The detectives will fill you in a bit more when they arrive. Are you all able to wait here for them? Does anyone have an appointment, anywhere you need to be?”
Nobody did. “That’s grand, so,” the cop said. “We appreciate your cooperation,” and he headed off, closing the living-room door a little too firmly behind him. His heavy footsteps thumped down the stairs to the kitchen.
“Well,” Hugo said. “He was a bit . . . , wasn’t he? A bit clumsy; callow, is that the word I’m looking for? I was expecting someone more—I don’t know, polished. Too many detective novels, I suppose. Do you think he knows what he’s doing?”
Leon said, “There’s that tape all round the garden. That blue and white stuff. It says ‘CRIME SCENE NO ENTRY.’”
No one said anything. After a moment Melissa sat down on the other sofa and reached for the pack of cards on the coffee table. “I think we could be here for a while,” she said. “Does anyone want to play rummy?”
* * *
?It took a very long time for the detectives to arrive. I fetched paper and pen from Hugo’s study, and Tom did up his lists—when did your granddad die again, Su? Hugo, do you remember what year you moved back in? do we put in the summers you guys stayed here? blah blah blah, like some awful lickarse aiming for best class project. Melissa and Hugo and I played hand after hand of rummy, very badly; Leon joined in, off and on, but he could barely stay still for one round before he gravitated back to the windows, where he pressed himself against the wall and stared furtively out at the road like a PI peering around a street corner. Susanna played some game on her phone with Sallie, a low nonstop current of blips and electronic music and sharp cartoony giggles. Zach was so hopped up on adrenaline that he’d gone full tweaker: manically circling the room, climbing furniture, making a furious variety of clicking and tocking and sucking noises that were driving me bananas. I was itching to stick out a foot and trip him up.
For some reason it seemed impossible to say a single word about the skull. It felt like there were a thousand questions I wanted to ask and angles I wanted to discuss, but I couldn’t put my finger on a single one, and the longer I left it the more unsayable it all seemed and the more dreamlike the entire situation felt, as if we had been in that room forever and would never be able to leave. “Toby,” Leon said. “Your deal. Come on.”
The doorbell rang. We all froze and looked at one another, but before any of us could do anything sensible we heard boots tramping up the hall and the front door opening. Male voices swapping brief unemotional comments, crackle of a radio, confusion of footsteps going back down the hall; then the kitchen door slamming.
“I’m hungry,” Sallie said, not loudly but for at least the fifth time.
“You just had cake,” Susanna said, without looking at her. Out in the garden, brusque voices were calling back and forth, too distant for us to catch any words.
“But I’m hungry.”
“OK,” Susanna said. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a little plasticky orange pouch with a spout on it. “Here.”
“I want one!” Zach demanded, popping up from the floor, where he had been drumming his feet on the fireguard and trying to beatbox.
“You hate them.”
“I want one.”
“Are you going to eat it?”
“What about medical students?” Tom said suddenly, perking up. He had been hovering around the living-room door, clutching his precious lists, looking for his big chance to hand them in to Teacher.
“What,” Leon said, cutting him a withering glance without bothering to turn his head. He was slouched sideways in an armchair with his knees hooked over the arm, jiggling one foot in a fast insistent rhythm that I was trying not to look at.
“The”—flapping his lists in the direction of the garden—“that. You know that apartment block behind the laneway? It’s got lots of students, right? And medical students, they’ve got a messed-up sense of humor. If a couple of them nicked a skull and mucked about with it for a while, scaring their mates, and then they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it, they could have tossed it down the tree.” He looked around triumphantly.
“They’d want to have some aim,” Leon said sourly. “To get it through all the branches and all the leaves and straight down a hole that has to be, what, a couple of feet across. A medical student who’s also a world-class basketball player: that should narrow it down.”
“Maybe they weren’t aiming for the tree. They were trying to throw it into the garden, to freak people out, and they missed.”
“And got it through all the branches. And all the leaves. And straight down a hole that has to be—”
“I don’t want this,” Sallie said. She was holding the packet out from her body and she looked like she was on the verge of tears.
“You love that,” Susanna said. “Eat it.”
“There’s snabbits in it.”
“What are snabbits?”
“They’re in there.”
“No they aren’t. It’s carrots and apples and some other thing, parsnips or something.”
“I don’t like snabbits.”
“OK,” Susanna said, taking the pouch out of her hand. “I’ll get you a new one.” She headed out to the kitchen.
“I’m just saying,” Tom said. “It’s not necessarily anything sinister. It could be just—”
“A hippogriff could have dropped it,” Leon said. “On its way to the Forbidden Forest.”
“That would be sinister,” Tom said, aiming for jollity. “The Forbidden Forest at the bottom of the garden.” No one laughed.
My head was still throbbing, faintly but persistently, and my vision was glitching; I couldn’t tell what was in my hand, sevens and nines looked the same, eights and tens. “Oo,” Melissa said, laying down a fan of cards. “Rummy.” She smiled up at me and gave me a small, steadying nod. I tried to smile back.