“It’s bloody unfair on you, all right,” Rafferty said, gently, so that my voice turned into pathetic bluster. “I see it all the time, in this job: people who did nothing wrong, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of a sudden we’re showing up and ruining their day—or their garden. And you’re right, it’s not OK. Thing is, we don’t have a choice. There’s someone dead here. We need to figure out what happened.”
“So find other ways to do it. It’s not our fault he’s dead, or she, or—”
“I can get a warrant if you’d rather,” Rafferty said, still just as mildly, “but that won’t be till tomorrow, and I’ll need to leave someone here till then. It’ll just stretch out the whole thing. If you give us the go-ahead to start now, we can aim to be out of here within a couple of days.”
“I would appreciate it very much,” Hugo said, cutting me off—I wasn’t sure what I had started to say—“if you could wait an hour or two before getting to work. The rest of the family is here for lunch, and they won’t be any happier about this idea than Toby and I are. It would make things simpler for everyone if you could wait until they leave.”
Rafferty transferred that gaze to him. “I can do that,” he said. “We need to go find ourselves some lunch anyway, sure. How would half-three suit you? Would they be gone by then?”
“I can make sure they are.” Hugo reached for his cane and leaned the other hand on the table to heave himself upright. There were dark bags under his eyes. “Toby, would you carry in the cake plate, please?”
* * *
?At three o’clock Hugo announced that he was getting tired. It took what felt like hours for everyone to get the hint—let me help with the washing-up, no really I want to, are you sure you’ll be all right with all of them hanging about—“Honestly, Louisa,” Hugo finally said, with a hint of exasperation, “what do you think the Guards are going to do, start cracking heads? And how much help do you think you’d be if they did?” But finally all the food had been covered with clingfilm and organized carefully in the fridge, and Hugo and Melissa and I had been given full lawyerly instructions on exactly what to do if the cops did this or that or the other, and they all flooded out the door, still talking, and left us alone.
The three of us stood together at the French doors and watched the cops work. They started at the back wall. There were five of them, Rafferty and two uniformed guys and a uniformed woman and someone in coveralls, all of them with wax jackets and wellies and shovels. Even through the glass and the distance I thought I could hear the crunch of blades into earth. In a shockingly short time the strawberry bed was a ragged heap, great clumps of Queen Anne’s lace and bellflowers tossed aside, pale roots straggling, and there was a wide strip of dark churned-up earth across the bottom of the garden. The cops moved back and forth along it, stopping to pick something up and examine it and confer over it and drop it again, in no hurry. Above them, clouds hung thick and gray, unmoving.
“This,” Hugo said, “I didn’t see coming.” He was leaning one shoulder against the door frame at an angle that made him look at ease, even cocky, but I could see his bad leg wobbling. “I should have.”
A head popped up over the back wall; then a hand, holding a phone, flailing slightly as the guy tried to keep his balance on whatever he was standing on. “What the hell?” I said.
“Reporter,” Hugo said grimly. “There were a couple out front this morning, before you two came down. One of them tried to interview Mrs. O’Loughlin next door, on her way out, but she was having none of it.”
My first thought was to charge down there and make the guy fuck off, but the cops were in the way, and they were ignoring him completely. The guy managed to steady his arm long enough to snap a couple of photos, and dropped down behind the wall again. After a moment a different head appeared, complete with arm and phone.
“They’re taking turns giving each other a leg up,” Melissa said, moving back from the window.
“Little rats,” Hugo said, with real anger. “Out the front is one thing; this is private. Can’t the Guards get rid of them? Are they just going to stand there?”
The second guy got his shots and disappeared. We waited, but apparently that was it for the moment. The cloud had lowered and the light was changing, turning dim and bruised, uneasy.
The cops finished going over their strip of earth and started digging up a fresh one. It took them a while to uproot the biggest rosemary bush, but they got there in the end. After a while Rafferty came loping over and asked us, pleasantly and without feeling any need to give us a reason, if we could find somewhere else to be.
* * *
?All Monday it rained, dense vertical uncompromising rain. I had taken another Xanax the night before and it had given me fucked-up dreams—the big uniformed guy on overnight guard duty had somehow got into my and Melissa’s room, he was sitting on the chair in the corner playing with his phone, face puffy and unhealthy in the blue-white light; I kept jerking awake looking for him, drifting back into an unsettled doze-dream where Melissa and I gave up and moved to the spare room, only to find the cop waiting there, lounging against our old fort, phone in hand.
Walking Melissa to the bus stop, heads bent against the rain, not talking. Faffing aimlessly around the house with Hugo, loading the dishwasher and unloading the washing machine, while in the background the cops (cocooned in their wax jackets, rivulets streaming off their sleeves and the brims of their hoods) jammed shovels into the earth and tugged at daisy clumps with grim endurance. The dryer was broken, which hadn’t been a problem when we could hang washing out on the line, but now the line had been taken down and hung in sad loops from a hook on the garden wall, the end drooping into the mud below. Hugo only had one drying rack and when that filled up we draped the rest of the wash on chair-backs and radiators, giving the dining room a downtrodden tenement feel. It was a long time before we finally managed to get it together to head up to his study and start work.
I was going through the 1901 census on Hugo’s laptop—some Australian guy couldn’t find a great-grandmother who should have been living somewhere near Fishamble Street, I was checking the original forms to see if it was a transcription problem. At his desk, Hugo turned pages in a slow rhythm, with long gaps where I couldn’t tell whether he was considering something or getting distracted by the faint shovel-thwacks and sporadic voices from below the window (louder all the time, as the cops worked their way up the garden), or whether he had just forgotten what he was doing. My eyes were glitching again, fatigue or the Xanax or whatever, the words on the page kept doubling. Neither of us was getting a lot done.
Around lunchtime there was a knock on the door: Leon, with fancy Italian sandwiches from some place in town. I thought for sure he would lose the plot when he saw the garden—almost half gone now, the canvas tent marooned in a sea of mud—but he just shook his head, jaw tight, and threw the sandwiches onto the kitchen counter with a little too much force. “Fuck’s sake,” he said. “This is getting way out of hand.”
I got down three plates and passed them to him. “No shit.”
“We should tell them to fuck off.”
“I did. They said they’d get a warrant.” I was in no mood for Leon giving me hassle. “What would you have done?”
“Oh, chill. I’d have done exactly the same thing. Of course.” A quick, disarming smile. “How’s Hugo dealing?”
I wondered if he was there to nudge Hugo about making his will—the skull had knocked the whole house thing right out of our heads, and no one had brought it up since. “OK. Pissed off.”
“What I’d love to know”—Leon shook a sandwich out of its paper bag—“is what he thinks this is all about.”
A sideways glance at me. “I don’t know,” I said, finding water glasses. “That homeless guy he was talking about, the cops tracked him down. It isn’t him.”
“And? Has Hugo got any other ideas?”
“We haven’t really talked about it.”
“You haven’t asked him?”
“No. Why would I?”