“Scanlon doesn’t,” Kerr said, aside to Rafferty. “Now he figures it was cannibal Satanists.”
“Jesus,” Rafferty said, finger to his mouth half-hiding the grin. “Poor little bastard. When he realizes what this job is actually like, he’s going to be devastated. So”—brisk again—“first thing we needed to do was figure out who the skeleton belonged to. The pathologist said it was a white male, aged between sixteen and twenty-two at the time of death—they can narrow that down pretty well, in young people: they go by the teeth, the ends of the long bones. He was a big guy, somewhere between six foot and six foot three, and he’d probably been physically active—something about the places where the ligaments would’ve been attached to the bone; it’s amazing what they can work out. She said he’d broken his collarbone at some point, but it was well healed up, nothing to do with his death.”
He looked over at me hopefully, like I might have something to contribute. I didn’t. I was starting to be bothered by the fact that these guys were talking to me on my own: why? why not everyone at once, like last time? sure, not everyone was around, but Hugo was right upstairs, there was no reason why he shouldn’t be in on this, unless—
“And,” Rafferty said, “he had modern dental work. Done sometime in the past fifteen years.”
Another pause. I had had myself almost completely convinced that my mother was right and this was some Victorian taking out his embezzling business partner, or the mustachioed villain who had seduced his daughter. I didn’t like the way this was going at all.
“So that made our job a lot easier. We keep a database of missing persons; we went in there, searched for tall young white males who went missing from the Dublin area fifteen years ago or less. That narrowed it down to five. After that, all we had to do was compare dental records. I’m just after getting the results.”
He pulled out his phone, swiped and tapped: leisurely, at ease, elbow resting on the arm of the chair. “Here,” he said, leaning across the coffee table to hand me the phone. “Does this fella ring any bells?”
The guy in the photo was wearing a rugby jersey and grinning, arm thrown around someone who had been cropped out. He was maybe eighteen, broad-shouldered and good-looking, with rough fair hair and a cocky slouch and yes, I knew him straightaway but clearly there had been some mistake—
“That’s Dominic Ganly,” I said. “But that’s, it’s not him. I mean, the tree guy. It’s not him.”
“How do you know this fella in the photo?”
I was suddenly ferociously aware of Kerr, watching me, a notebook somehow materialized in his hand and his pen poised. “From school. He was in my class. But—”
“Were you good mates?”
“Not really. I mean”—I couldn’t think, this didn’t make any sense, they had it all wrong—“we got on fine, we hung out with the same, the same crowd, but we weren’t friends friends? Like we didn’t do stuff just us, or—”
“How long did you know him?”
“Hang on,” I said. “Wait.”
Two bland, interested faces, turned towards me.
“Dominic died. I mean, not like that, not in our— He killed himself, the summer after we left school. He jumped off Howth Head.”
“How do you know?” Rafferty asked.
“Everyone said it,” I said, after a baffled silence. I knew there had been something about his phone, text messages, something, couldn’t remember the details—
“Looks like everyone was wrong,” Rafferty said. “His body was never found; the Howth Head assumption was just based on the information they had at the time. His dental records are an exact match to our guy in the tree. And your friend Dominic, he broke his collarbone during a rugby match, when he was fifteen”—I remembered that, suddenly, Dom lounging in the back of the classroom with his arm in a sling—“and the X-rays on that match as well. We’re running DNA, just to be sure, but it’s him.”
“Then what the hell—” But I was sure I had been at Dominic’s funeral, positive: school choir singing, sniffles from the pews, a scrawny blond mother turned grotesque by the tug-of-war between weeping and industrial quantities of Botox; rugby jersey spread carefully on the rich mahogany of the coffin— “What happened to him? Why was he, why, how did he get into our tree?”
“That’s what we’d love to know,” Rafferty said. “Any ideas?”
“No. I haven’t got a— It’s crazy.” I ran my hands over my head, trying to clear it. “Are you—I mean, do you think someone killed him?”
“Could’ve done,” Rafferty said matter-of-factly. “We don’t know the cause of death; all we can say is his head wasn’t bashed in—you probably noticed that yourself, sure. So he could’ve gone down that tree himself, one way or another. Or not. We’re keeping open minds for now; just finding out a bit more about him, seeing if that gives us a clearer picture. You hung out with him, yeah?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. Sort of.” There had been maybe a dozen of us who ran as a loose crowd, basically because we were in the same class and we were all popular or cool or whatever you want to call it. I had been at one end of the group, Dominic had been at the other; we had hung out by default rather than by active choice, but there was no way I could have come up with the words to explain that. My brain was stuttering, over and over, computer in a loop of crash and reboot and crash: skull on the grass, clot of dirt and roots in the eye socket, Dominic yawning at his desk with his head down over his phone, skull on the grass—
“What was he like?”
“I don’t know. Just a regular guy.”
“Was he smart? Thick?”
“Not really. I mean, not either one. Like he didn’t do great in school, but not because he was seriously thick? He just, he couldn’t be arsed.” Skull, dirt clot, yawn, I had been sitting under that tree just a few days before—
“Nice guy? Sound?”
“Yeah. Definitely. He, Dominic was a good guy.”
“Did he get on with people?”
Kerr was writing all this down and I had no idea why, what had I even said that was worth recording? “Yeah. He did.”
“He was popular? Or just harmless?”
“Popular. He was I guess really confident? Out, out—” Outgoing, I meant, couldn’t find it— “Always on for a laugh or, you know, action, like a party or whatever. And he was good at rugby, so that always helps, but I mean it wasn’t just that—” The rhythm of this was getting to me, no let-up, every answer seized and turned straight into a new question; like being back in the hospital, trapped in the bed, my head throbbing and Martin and Flashy Suit asking on and on—
“Anyone you can think of who didn’t get on with him?”
Actually I had a vague memory of Dominic taking the piss out of Leon, but a lot of guys had taken the piss out of Leon back then, and under the circumstances I didn’t think I should go into this. “Not really.”
“What about girls? He do well there?”
“Oh yeah. They threw themselves at him. It was kind of a, a thing? Like a joke? Whatever girl we were all into, Dom was the one who’d get with her first.”
“We all know that guy,” Rafferty said, grinning. “The bastard. He piss anyone off with that? Rob anyone’s girlfriend, maybe?”
“No way. Like I said, he was a good guy. He wouldn’t have hit on anyone’s girlfriend—bro code, you know? And the rest, the way girls were all into him . . . like I said, that was kind of a running joke. No one got upset about it.”
“Easy for you to say, man, if you weren’t on the wrong end of it. Dominic ever get a girl you were into?”
“Probably. I don’t remember.” This was true. I had been into just about every girl who was pretty or hot or both, back then; odds were Dominic had hooked up with at least some of them, but then I had done OK myself, so it hadn’t bothered me.
“Did he stick to the hit-and-run stuff? Or did he have a girlfriend of his own?”
“Not when he . . . Not that summer. I think he was maybe going out with someone for a while, like the year before? Maybe some girl from St. Therese’s, that’s our sister school? But it wasn’t, like, a big serious thing.”