Tom produced his lists, and Rafferty was appropriately impressed. “Thanks very much for your time,” he told us all, folding them carefully away and standing up. “I know this is a nasty situation, and it’s been a big shock, and I appreciate you helping us out in the middle of it all. If you’d like to talk to anyone about it, I’ll put you in touch with our Victim Support advocates, and they can find you someone who—”
None of us apparently felt the need for professional assistance to unpack our feelings about finding a skull in the back garden. “Here,” Rafferty said, putting a small neat stack of business cards on the coffee table. “If you change your minds about that, or you think of anything, or you want to ask me anything, give me a ring.”
Hand on the door, he turned, remembering. “That key, the one to the garden door. Are there any more copies we could borrow? Would a neighbor have one, or your brothers maybe?”
“There used to be another one here,” Hugo said. He was starting to look tired. “It went missing, somewhere along the way.”
“Any idea when?”
“Years ago. I couldn’t even begin to narrow it down.”
“No problem,” Rafferty said. “If we need extras, we’ll get them cut. I’ll keep you updated.” And he was gone, closing the living-room door gently behind him.
“Well,” Hugo said, on a deep breath, after a moment of silence. “This should be interesting.”
“I told you,” Leon said. He was gnawing his thumbnail again, and his nostrils flared with every breath. “I told you we should dump it in the bin and forget the whole bloody thing.”
“You can’t do that,” Tom said. “There could be a family out there, wondering—”
“I thought you thought it was med students.”
“The detective’s nice,” Melissa said. “Was he more like what you expected, Hugo?”
“Definitely.” Hugo smiled at her. “And much more confidence-inspiring than the other ones. I’m sure he’ll get all this sorted out in no time. Meanwhile”—glancing around—“you three should let your parents know what’s happened, shouldn’t you?”
Leon and Susanna and I, by unspoken but wholehearted agreement, hadn’t rung our parents, but I realized with a sinking feeling that Hugo was right, it wasn’t like we could keep this contained within the house forever. “Oh God,” Susanna said. “They’re going to want to come over.”
“I’m starving,” Zach said.
“Jesus,” Leon said, in a stunned voice that sounded suddenly very young. “There’s people out there filming.”
There was a general rush to the windows. Sure enough, standing with her back to our front steps was a brunette in a snazzy coral trench coat, talking into a microphone. On the pavement across the road, a skinny guy in a parka was huddled over a video camera pointed at her. A restless wind had come up, tossing the trees into bewildering whirls of green.
“Hey!” Zach yelled, banging a palm on the windowpane. “Get lost!”
Susanna caught his wrist, too late: the cameraman said something and the brunette turned to look at us, hair whipping across her face. “Get back,” Leon said sharply. Susanna reached out and slammed the shutters, heavy bangs reverberating up through the empty rooms of the house.
* * *
?Around this point Zach and Sallie went into full whine overdrive about how hungry they were. Their bitching finally drove us all out to the kitchen, where Hugo and Melissa rummaged through the fridge and discussed options and decided on pasta with mushroom sauce. Susanna was on the phone to Louisa, trying to convince her not to come over (“No, Mum, he’s fine, anyway what would you do that we’re not doing already? . . . Because there are reporters out the front, and I don’t want them nabbing you and interrogating— Well then, watch it on the news tonight, and you’ll know as much as we do. No one’s telling us anything . . . No, Mum, I don’t have a clue who it—”) and holding Sallie back from the biscuit tin with her free hand. Tom was rattling on about some kiddie movie they’d seen, trying to draw Zach into the chat; Zach, drumming his hands on the counter and keeping a calculating eye on the biscuit tin, wasn’t biting.
Leon and I stood at the French doors, looking out at the garden. The big uniformed cop was on the terrace with his hands clasped behind his back, looking official and presumably guarding the crime scene, but he was ignoring us and we ignored him. Down by the wych elm, Rafferty was deep in conversation with another suit and a stocky guy in a dilapidated overall who, judging by the gestures, was the tree surgeon. The skull was gone. There was a stepladder beside the tree and a person in hooded white coveralls on top of it, leaning sideways at a precarious angle to point a camera into the hole. The door in the back wall stood open—I hadn’t seen it opened in years—on the laneway: stone apartment-block wall, the other uniformed cop in the same official pose, glimpse of a white van. People moved in and out, between the laneway and the tree and the white canvas gazebo, with its festive pointed roof, that had materialized beside the strawberry bed. Bright blue latex gloves, hard plastic black case like a tool kit open in the grass, gray sky. Snap of wind in the crime-scene tape and the canvas.
“All that stuff about the key to the garden door,” Susanna said in a low voice, at my shoulder. “That wasn’t because they need more copies. That was him finding out whether anyone else could get into the garden, or whether it’s just us.”
“There was another one,” Leon said. “I remember it.”
“Me too,” I said. “Didn’t it use to be on a hook beside the door?”
Susanna glanced behind us at Zach and Sallie, whom Melissa and Hugo had somehow convinced to help slice mushrooms; Zach was making karate-chop noises as he slammed the knife down, and Sallie was giggling. “Someone took it, one summer. Wasn’t it Dec, when he stayed here?”
“Dec didn’t need to sneak in the back. He came in the front door. What about that friend of yours, the weird blonde who kept showing up in the middle of the night? The cutter?”
“Faye wasn’t weird. She had shit going on. And she didn’t have a key. She’d text me and I’d let her in.”
“What happens,” Leon said. He was watching a small sturdy woman with graying hair and combats stumping out of the tent to join the conference beneath the tree (the state pathologist? the forensic archaeologist? I had only a hazy idea of what either of those should look like, or for that matter what they did). “What happens if they find some evidence that the person was killed? What do they do then?”
“Just going by experience,” I said, “they’ll show up a couple of times when we least want to see them, they’ll ask a shit-ton of questions about how it might be our fault that someone dumped a skull in our tree, and then they’ll disappear and leave us to pick up the pieces.”
The vicious edge to my voice startled me. I hadn’t realized, till that moment, just how intensely I loathed having Rafferty and his pals there. It startled Leon and Susanna, too: their faces turning sharply towards me, uncertain silence. My hands were shaking again. I shoved them into my pockets and kept looking out at the garden.
“Well,” Leon said, after a moment, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got no problem with them disappearing. The sooner the better.”
“At least they’re being polite about the whole thing,” Susanna said. “If we were all on the dole and crammed into a council house . . .”
“They’ve been out there for ages,” Melissa said, at the sink, hands full of lettuce. “We should see if they want tea.”
“No,” all three of us said in unison.
“Fuck them,” Leon said.
“They probably have thermoses,” I said. “Or something.”
“Maybe we should offer them some pasta,” Tom said.
“No.”