“Off you go.”
“I was looking for treasure and Zach was up the tree and then he threw a thing on the grass. And he was yelling. And it was a skull and I yelled too because I was scared it was a ghost.”
“And then?”
“Then everyone came and Mummy took us inside.”
“Well done,” Rafferty said, smiling at her.
“Is it a ghost?”
“Duhhh,” Zach said, under his breath. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” He seemed to have recovered.
“No,” Rafferty said gently. “We’ve got a special machine that tells us exactly what something is, and we’ve gone over every bit of that skull. There’s no ghost there, any more than there is in this.” He touched his notepad. “It’s only a piece of bone.”
Sallie nodded.
“You want to check this for ghosts?” He waved the notepad at her.
That got a head-shake and the tip of a smile. “Phew,” Rafferty said. “I left my machine outside. When was the last time anyone else was up that tree? A gardener, maybe? Someone trimming the branches?”
“No gardener,” Hugo said. “I don’t exactly keep the place in show condition—well, you’ve seen that for yourself. What little I want doing, I do myself. I don’t trim the trees.”
“We used to climb it,” I said, enunciating carefully to keep the slurring down. I felt like I needed to make some kind of mark on this conversation. “Me and Susanna and Leon”—pointing—“when we were kids.”
Rafferty turned to look at me. “When were you last up there?”
“I broke my ankle jumping out of it. When I was nine. After that our parents didn’t let us climb it any more.”
“Mm,” Rafferty said. His eyes—deep-set and an odd light shade of hazel, almost golden—rested on me thoughtfully. That look, practiced and assessing and opaque and so familiar, made my spine curl. I was suddenly viciously aware of my droopy eyelid. “Did you?”
“I don’t—” A flicker of memory, swinging my legs on a branch in semi-darkness, can of beer, someone laughing, but everything felt so dislocated and unreal that I couldn’t— “I’m not sure.”
“Yeah, we did,” Susanna said. “When our parents weren’t there. Hugo”—a fleeting smile between them—“always let us get away with a lot more.”
“It’s not like we were up there every day,” Leon said. “Or every week. But now and then, yeah.”
“When was the last time?”
Susanna and Leon looked at each other. “God, I don’t remember,” Leon said.
“Some party when we were teenagers, maybe?”
“That time when Declan was singing ‘Wonderwall’ and someone threw a can at him. Weren’t we all up there?”
“Was that that tree?”
“Had to be. The three of us and Dec, and wasn’t that girl there too, Whatshername who he liked? We wouldn’t all have fit in any of the other trees.”
“Declan who?” Rafferty asked.
“Declan McGinty,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
Rafferty nodded, writing down the name. I thought I could smell him, a keen outdoorsy tang like split pine. “Any idea what year that would’ve been?”
“I think that was the summer we left school,” Susanna said. “So ten years ago. But I’m not sure.” Leon shrugged.
“Ever do any exploring down the hole in the middle?”
Leon and Susanna and I looked at each other. “No,” Susanna said. “I mean, I glanced in a couple of times, when I was up there, but it looked manky; all wet dead leaves. I wasn’t going to go rooting around.”
“I think I poked a stick in there once,” Leon said. “When we were kids, like eight. Just to see how deep the hole was. I didn’t feel anything like . . . anything.”
“How deep was it?”
“Oh, God, I don’t remember. Deep enough.”
Rafferty glanced at me. “I don’t . . .” I said. My memory was fluttering and sparking; I was blindingly aware that I sounded like an idiot. “I don’t think so. Maybe.”
“What about you, Mr. Hennessy?” He meant Hugo. “Did you ever climb that tree, when you were a child?”
“Heavens, yes,” Hugo said. “The four of us—my brothers and I—we were up and down it all the time. I think we may even have hidden things in that hole, but I wouldn’t swear to it. My brothers might have better memories than I do.”
“We’ll check with them, so,” Rafferty said. “Do any of you have any ideas on who it could be? Now that you’ve had time to think it over?”
“I thought . . .” Tom said, tentatively. “I wondered about medical students. In the apartment block that backs onto the laneway. Taking a skull from college for a laugh, and throwing it down there.”
Rafferty nodded, apparently giving that serious consideration. “We’ll look into that. Any other ideas? Anyone you can think of who went missing in the area? Or maybe a houseguest who left without saying good-bye, a tradesman who didn’t come back to finish the job? It doesn’t have to be recent. That’s an old tree.”
“There was a homeless man,” Hugo said suddenly. “This is going back, oh, twenty-five years, maybe more— He used to sleep in the laneway, occasionally. He’d call to the door, my mother would give him sandwiches, fill his flask with soup, and then he’d set up camp. At some point he stopped coming. We didn’t think much of it at the time, he was never a regular visitor, but . . .”
“Can you describe him?”
“In his fifties, I’d say—although it’s hard to tell, isn’t it, with people who’ve had a rough life. Medium height, maybe five foot ten? Gray hair. Midlands accent. I think his name was Bernard. He was usually fairly drunk, but never aggressive or unpleasant, nothing like that.”
“Did he ever come into the garden?”
“Not that I know of. But the back wall isn’t exactly impregnable. It’s high, but if someone really wanted to get over, he could probably find a way.”
“Bernard,” Rafferty said, writing. “We’ll look into that. Any other possibilities?”
We all shook our heads. “Right,” Rafferty said. He closed the notebook and slid it into his pocket. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that tree’s going to have to come down.”
“Why?” Leon asked sharply.
Rafferty transferred his gaze to him and gave him a long thoughtful look. “There are some other things we’re interested in, down that hole.”
“Like more bones?” Zach demanded, wide-eyed. “A whole skeleton?”
“We won’t know till we get in there. I’ve been trying to find a way around cutting down the tree, but no dice. We’ve got to document everything, record every step; we can’t just pull out whatever’s in there by the handful.” He saw the looks on our faces. “I know it’s like we’re smashing a family heirloom, but we don’t have a choice. There’s a tree surgeon on the way.”
“In for a penny . . .” Hugo said, half to himself. And to Rafferty: “That’s fine. Do whatever you need to do.”
“Can you tell when it’s from?” Leon asked. He was still leaning against the window frame, seemingly at ease, but something in the line of his shoulders told me that every cell of him was practically shorting out with tension. “The skull?”
“Not my area,” Rafferty said. “But we’ve got the state pathologist out there, and we’re bringing in a forensic archaeologist. They’ll be able to tell us more.”
“Or what happened to it? I mean, was it, was the person . . . ? How did they . . . ?”
“Ah,” said Rafferty, giving him a startlingly charming smile that crinkled his eyes into invisibility. “That’s the million-euro question.”
“Do we need to stay here?” Susanna asked.
He looked surprised. “Oh, God, no. You can go wherever you like—apart from the garden, obviously. Was someone making a list of names and phone numbers? In case I need to get in touch with any of you again?”