“Clearly,” Oliver said, pointing the tomato fork at me, “clearly it must date from before 1926. Your grandparents were avid gardeners, you know, out there planting and pruning and whatnot all year round, and your great-grandmother was the same. Not to be crude about it, but if there had been a body in the garden in their time, decomposing, they couldn’t have missed it. But the previous owner was an old woman, bedridden for years. When my grandparents bought the place, the garden was in a terrible state—brambles and nettles up to here, my grandmother used to tell me how when they came to view the house she shredded her best polka-dot stockings, ha! A whole army could have rotted away out there, and no one would have noticed. D’you see?”
“We don’t know that it was an entire body,” Phil pointed out from across the table, reaching for the Camembert. “Or that the tree is where it decomposed. For all we know, someone had a skull they wanted to get rid of—”
“Then where did the rest go? If you find a skull lying about, you call the Guards—the peelers, the bobbies, whatever they were called back then. Exactly like Hugo did. The only reason you’d get rid of it is if you had a whole body that you weren’t supposed to have. And what was going on, not long before 1926? Who might have found themselves in possession of a dead body?”
I was losing track of all this: like Hugo’s genealogy mystery, too many tributaries of possibility and inference, I couldn’t hold on to all of them at once. The crowded room wasn’t helping, bodies and movement everywhere, unpredictable roars from the chainsaw making me jump every time. Melissa caught my eye, over my father’s shoulder, and gave me a tiny encouraging smile. I managed to grin back.
“The Civil War,” Oliver said triumphantly. “Guerrilla warfare; summary executions. Someone got caught informing, vanished amid the general Sturm und Drang. I’d put money on it: that body dates from 1922. Anyone fancy taking that bet? Toby?”
My phone buzzed in my pocket: Dec. “Sorry,” I said to my uncles, “I have to take this,” and escaped to the kitchen.
Hugo, hip braced against the counter, was sliding a large sponge cake out of its box. Out in the garden, chunks of splintered wood were everywhere, the cops were clustered at the door of the tent, and the wych elm was down to a stump.
“Hey,” I said, into the phone.
“Hey,” Dec said. Hearing his voice actually made me smile. “Long time.”
“I know. How’re you doing? Sean told me about Jenna.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not great, but I’ll live. And yeah, before you say it, I fucking know you told me so.”
“We fucking did. Just be glad you got out with all your organs. Did you ever wake up in a bath full of ice?”
“Fuck off. How’ve you been getting on?”
“Fine. Chilling, mostly. Richard’s letting me take a bit of time off, so I’m just hanging out here.”
“Sean said about Hugo. I’m really sorry, man.”
“I know.” I moved farther away from Hugo, who was painstakingly slicing the cake, knife held in an awkward curled grip that made me tense up. “Thanks.”
“How’s he doing?”
I made some kind of noncommittal noise.
“Tell him I was asking after him.”
“Will do.”
“Come here,” Dec said, in a different tone. “Was that Hugo’s gaff on the news?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus. I thought it was, all right, but . . . What the fuck?”
“You know that old elm tree? The big one, down towards the bottom of the garden? Susanna’s kid found a skull in there. Down a hole in the trunk.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s probably old. They say the tree’s like two hundred years old; the skull could’ve got there any time. They’re cutting down the tree, though. There’s Guards all over the place.”
“Fuck,” Dec said. “Are they giving you hassle?”
“Nah. They’ve been fine. They asked us a bunch of questions, but we don’t know anything about it, so now they’re basically leaving us alone. It’s a pain in the hole, but whatever. I guess they’ve got to do their job.”
“Listen, me and Sean were going to come down this week. Do you still want us to? Or do you not need anyone else buzzing around?”
Actually I very badly wanted to see them, but I knew I didn’t have enough bandwidth to cope with them as well as a garden full of cops; I would end up stammering, losing the thread of the conversation, making an idiot of myself. I felt a fresh stab of annoyance with Rafferty and his buddies. “Maybe wait till the cops go. With any luck they’ll be out of here soon; I’ll give you a bell then and we can plan, yeah?”
“No problem. It’s not like I’m doing anything else. Sean’s been great, him and Audrey have been inviting me over for dinner and all, but seeing them all lovey-dovey and happy, you know what I mean? It just makes me—”
There was a tap at the French doors: Rafferty, peeling off a pair of thin latex gloves. “Gotta go,” I said to Dec. “I’ll let you know about this week,” and I hung up and went to the door.
“Afternoon,” Rafferty said, smiling at us and dusting his hands together. “So: the tree’s done. We’ll get rid of the wood for you; the tree surgeon’s going to take it away.”
“Did you find anything?” Hugo asked, polite as a shop owner, Have you found everything you need?
“It was useful, yeah.” He scraped his feet carefully on the doormat and came inside. “Before I forget: we tracked down your homeless fella, the one who used to doss down in the laneway? I asked around, found a couple of lads who used to work this area. One of them remembered him. Bernard Gildea. I’d love to be able to tell you he got his life back on track, lived happily ever after, but he wound up getting taken into a hospice. Cirrhosis. He died in 1994.”
“Oh, no,” Hugo said. He looked genuinely distressed. “He seemed like a decent man, underneath the drink. Well-read—occasionally he would ask if we had a book to spare, and I’d find something to give him—he liked non-fiction, World War I stuff. He always seemed to me like someone who, if just one or two rolls of the dice had gone differently . . .”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Rafferty said. “And I’m afraid I’ve got more. The garden’s going to have to come up.”
“Come up?” Hugo said, after a blank moment. “What do you mean?”
“We’re going to have to dig it up. Not the rest of the trees, and we’ll try to put back whatever plants we can, once we’re done, but we’re not gardeners. You might be able to apply for compensation—”
I said, a lot louder than I expected, “Why?”
“Because we don’t know what we might find there,” Rafferty explained, reasonably. He was still talking to Hugo. “Probably, I’ll be honest with you, we’ll find nothing relevant at all, and you’ll be left cursing us out of it for wrecking your beautiful garden for no reason. But look at it from our side. There were human remains in that tree. We’ve got no way of knowing if there are other human remains somewhere else in the garden, or maybe a murder weapon. Probably not, but I can’t run an investigation on ‘probably not.’ I can’t go back to my gaffer with ‘probably not.’ I’ve got to know for certain.”
“That radar machine,” I said. The thought of the garden, razed, bare dirt rucked up like a bomb site, tangles of roots reaching for the sky— “That archaeologists use, on those shows. The one that—” I mimed a sweeping motion. “Use that. If it finds anything, go ahead and dig. If it doesn’t, then you can leave the garden alone.”
Rafferty turned his eyes on me. They were golden as a hawk’s and with the same impersonal, impartial ruthlessness, a creature simply doing what he was for. I realized that I was terrified of him. “Ground-penetrating radar,” he said. “We do use that, yeah. But that’s when we’re sweeping a large area, like a field or a hillside, for something big—a gravesite, say, or a cache of weapons. Here, we don’t know what we’re looking for; it could be something this size.” Thumb and finger an inch apart. “If we go in with the GPR, we’ll be digging every time it picks up a rock, or a dead mouse. It’ll work out the same in the end; it’ll just take a lot longer.”
“Then no,” I said. “No way. We haven’t done anything wrong. You can’t just come in here and, and wreck the whole place—”
Hugo sat down, heavily, at the table.