Leon shrugged. “He’s the one who’s been living here for however long. If anyone has a clue about this, it’s probably him.”
“It was probably before he was even born. Your dad thinks it was some informer in the Civil War.”
Leon rolled his eyes. “Course he does. He’s hoping this is some major discovery and we’ll end up in the textbooks for changing the narrative of Irish history yada yada.” Another sideways glance, as he arranged the plates on the tray. The sandwiches were probably wonderful, but I hadn’t been hungry since the cops showed up and to me they just looked gross, all those folds of dark-red meat and globs of pale sweaty cheese. “What about you? What do you figure?”
The truth was that I didn’t have a theory, not even the germ of one. This had been bothering me, a lot, actually: everyone else had entire sagas, it felt like a glaring defect in my mind that it couldn’t come up with anything at all. I had tried, but every time I thought of the skull my mind ran aground on the flat, stunning, unbudging reality of it; there didn’t seem to be any way to think beyond or around it. It reminded me, with a deep sickening lurch in my stomach, of my few memories from right after the attack: disconnected images stripped of any context or meaning, only and vastly and unthinkably themselves. “I don’t have a clue,” I said. “Neither does anyone else. We don’t even know what they’ve found out there, how are we supposed to know how it got there?”
“Well, obviously we don’t know. I just mean ideas. Possibilities.”
“I don’t have ideas,” I said, putting down the glasses on the tray a little too hard, “because I don’t actually give a damn what happened. I just want those guys”—a jerk of my chin at the sodden cops outside—“to fuck off and not wreck Hugo’s last few months. That’s all I care about. OK?” Which shut Leon up, just like I had known it would.
I was expecting him to quiz Hugo, over the sandwiches, but maybe what I said had got through. Instead he babbled cheerfully about Ivy House memories from our childhood; after we finished eating, he took half of Hugo’s paper heap and lay facedown on the carpet with it, kicking his heels like a kid, occasionally waving a page to get our attention (“Oh my God, listen to this, this guy was named Aloysius Butt, I bet school was hell for him . . .”). When I came back up from making coffee, halfway through the afternoon, I heard their voices from the stairs, but by the time I opened the door they were peacefully absorbed in their work, Leon sucking the end of his pen with a contemplative whistling sound.
* * *
?By Tuesday morning the garden was almost completely obliterated, one vast solid expanse of churned mud, with a last strip of grass and bobbing poppies at the very top like a bitter joke. It looked like some old battlefield, World War I, flung heaps of dirt and lopsided holes, thin cold rain falling; unrecoverable, nothing to be done except leave it alone in its silence and wait for the grass and poppies to grow back and cover it all.
Rafferty was missing, which somehow made things worse, like his guys were going to be there forever so there was no need for him to hang around. We made coffee and toast and got out of the kitchen as fast as we could; when I got back from walking Melissa to the bus stop, Hugo and I went straight to work, with the study door closed and the curtains pulled. The study lights weren’t bright enough and it amplified the wartime feel, blackout, us hunched over and cold-fingered, flinching at every sound from outside.
Sometime around eleven, when I was starting to rub at my cricked neck and wonder if I could be arsed facing the kitchen to make coffee, there was a knock at the study door and Rafferty stuck his head in.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Toby, could I have a quick word?”
He was wearing another very nice suit, but he looked rough around the edges, hair rucked up and a heavy dark shadow on his jaw. For some reason that stubble unsettled me—the implication that he had been up all night, doing vital detective things that he wasn’t about to let me in on. “OK,” I said.
“Thanks. Will we go down to the sitting room? So we don’t disturb your uncle’s work?”
Hugo nodded, vaguely—I wasn’t sure he really got what was going on—and turned back to his desk. I made a note of where I was in the census and followed Rafferty.
“What do you do?” he asked companionably, on our way downstairs. He was leading the way, which I was glad of, since it meant he couldn’t see me take the stairs, clutching the railing, foot lagging. “Yourself and your uncle?”
“He’s a genealogist. You know, like tracing people’s family trees? I’m just helping out while I’m here. I’m actually in PR.”
“Great study he’s got there,” Rafferty said, opening the living-room door for me. “Like something out of Sherlock Holmes. We should’ve given him a proper look at that skull, let him tell us if it came from a right-handed pipe welder with marriage problems and a Labrador.”
There was another man in the living room, settled comfortably in Hugo’s armchair. “Oh,” I said, stopping.
“This is Detective Kerr,” Rafferty said. “My partner.” Kerr nodded to me. He was short and stocky, big-shouldered, with an underhung bulldog face and buzzed hair not quite hiding the bald spot, and a suit that looked like he shopped in the same place as Rafferty. “Have a seat.”
He was already moving towards the other armchair, which left me on a sofa, knees up to my chin, gazing up at them. Kerr or someone had opened the shutters, which we had been keeping closed in case any more reporters showed up; they hadn’t, at least not right then, but the slice of street in the corner of my eye made me edgy. I tried to ignore it.
“You’ve been very patient about all of this,” Rafferty told me. “All of ye. We know it’s been a pain in the arse; we do get that. We wouldn’t put you through this if it wasn’t necessary.”
“I know,” I said.
“So”—he settled into the armchair—“let me tell you what we’ve been at, the last few days. You’re owed that much, amn’t I right?”
I made some meaningless noise.
“First off: we’re done with the garden. Bet you’re glad to hear that.”
Glad wasn’t exactly the right word. “Great.”
“Do you want us to try and put some of the plants back where they were? Or would you rather do it your own way?”
“We’ll deal with it,” I said. All I wanted was these guys gone. “Thanks.”
“Fair enough.” Leaning forwards, wide-legged, hands clasped between his knees, getting down to business and that was when I felt the first far-off blip of wariness: “So here’s the thing. There was a full human skeleton in your garden. You probably figured that out already, yeah?”
“I guess,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I had figured out. The thought of a whole skeleton, which should probably have made my skin crawl, seemed completely impossible, way too far outside reality for my mind to process.
“Don’t worry, it’s gone. The pathologist’s got it now.”
“Where was it?”
“Most of it was down the tree. We were missing one hand, so that looked interesting, but we found it buried under a bush—so we didn’t dig up the garden for nothing, if that’s any comfort. One of the uniform lads”—Rafferty couldn’t hold back a grin—“he was all into the idea that it was some Satanist thing, the Hand of Glory, yeah?” Kerr snorted. “He’s new. The pathologist found toothmarks on the hand, so she figures a rat dragged it off to work on it.”