“What? Why?” Flash of animal terror, Martin’s hints about revenge, my patio door splintered and gaping open—
“Ah, no, we’re not thinking anyone’s planning on coming after you.” Kerr snorted. “But we found a load of other stuff down that tree, as well as the remains. Lots of acorns, hazelnuts—I’d say you’ve got a few pissed-off squirrels out there, trying to work out what happened to their stash. Half a dozen old lead soldiers, did you have those as a kid?”
“No. I don’t think so.” The adrenaline was subsiding, leaving me feeling slightly sick.
“Jesus,” Rafferty said, grinning. “I’m dating myself. They must’ve belonged to your dad, then, or one of your uncles—they all remember stashing stuff down there, when they were kids. The soldiers were all together, with a bit of rag round them, might’ve been a cloth bag before it rotted away; one of the four of them hiding his best stuff from his brothers, looks like. I’ll have to find out who to give them back to. There’s a bunch of marbles, too. And this. You know what this is?”
The phone again. That same white surface; a long brass key, crusted with bits of dirt and attached to a keyring, along with a black metal silhouette of a German shepherd.
“That’s the key to the garden door,” I said, “or anyway it looks like it. The one that went missing, that summer. It was down inside the tree?”
“It was, yeah,” Rafferty said. “And it fits the garden door. That’s what I’m telling you: your uncle should’ve changed that lock when the key went missing. If he didn’t bother, then who knows how many other keys to the other doors are floating around out there? The last thing he needs right now is a burglary.”
“Right,” I said. “OK. I’ll get onto that.”
“Good idea. Not that I’m complaining; it made our lives a lot easier, being able to check this key against the lock. The interesting part, right?”—leaning forwards, elbows on the table, getting into this—“the interesting part is where the key was. Dominic’s clothes were in tatters—time, mildew, animal and insect activity, they were mostly rags. The key was down near the side of his leg, but there’s no way to tell whether it was in his jeans pocket and fell out when the material rotted, or whether it was never in there to begin with. You can see how that makes a difference.”
They both watched me: curious, assessing, waiting to see if I could do it. Kerr had a tiny smirk on his face. “Of course I can,” I said, too loud: their eyebrows went up. I flattened the bubble of rage and said, enunciating as clearly as I could, “If the key went into the tree separately from Dominic, then someone else was there when he died—unless he dropped the key by accident, while he was up the tree for some reason, and climbed in to get it. But if it was in Dominic’s pocket, then it points towards him getting into the garden and into the tree on his own.”
“Well done,” Rafferty said, smiling.
“Huh,” Kerr said. “You got there quicker than our fella Scanlan did, the one who thought this was cannibal Satanists, remember? I explained that to him three times, and he still didn’t get it.”
You think someone killed Dominic, I’d said to Martin; and he’d said, That’s the way the lads’re thinking. “So,” I said, “he could have got in there by himself?”
Rafferty shrugged, one corner of his mouth turning down wryly. “Just going by the remains, it could go either way. There was a load of muck in there with him, but that could be someone trying to cover him up or it could be just ten years’ worth of falling leaves and what-have-you. There’s no way to tell whether he went in dead or alive—he hadn’t been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in, or it would’ve been impossible for anyone to get him into that hole, but that’s as much as the pathologist can say. No unhealed injuries to the skeleton: he wasn’t beaten to death, if he was shot or stabbed it didn’t even nick the bone. Drug overdose is a possibility, specially since you told us about him experimenting—don’t worry, you weren’t the only one, plenty of his other mates said the same.” A hand going up, reassuring or quelling, although I hadn’t opened my mouth. “And he was in an odd position, down there. Legs bent up, arms jammed in front of him, neck vertebrae curled over like his head was tucked down—as far as we could tell, anyway: there was a bit of slippage, but most things held together OK. It could’ve been positional asphyxia: someone gets himself into a position where he can’t breathe properly—maybe because he was going after the key, like you said, or maybe he’s just off his face on something—he can’t get out of it, he suffocates. It was a tight space, specially for such a big fella.”
He left a silence, waiting either for me to say something or for those images to get me good and rattled. “Jesus,” I said obligingly.
“Or,” Rafferty said, “he could’ve died by himself, but had a hand getting into the tree. Say he ODs. Whoever he’s with—or maybe they’re not even with him, they just find him when it’s too late—they panic. Scared they’re going to get locked up for drugs, blamed for him dying. So they do something stupid—because they’re teenagers, and let’s face it, stupid shite is what panicked teenagers do—and they hide the body and hope it all goes away.”
“Eejits,” Kerr said. He was doodling what looked like a county crest on his notepad. “That’s an offense, concealing a body. The statute of limitations probably expired years back, but, and it’s a lot less of an offense than murder.”
“If you’ve got any reason to think it might’ve gone that way,” Rafferty said—glancing up at me, startling flash of gold—“any reason at all, even an inkling, then you need to tell me now. Today. Because right now, yeah? everyone’s got an open mind on what happened here. If someone steps up and explains that what we’ve got is an OD and a scared kid or two, then we’re all ready to take that on board. But if this drags on for a while, and my lads get it fixed in their heads that this was murder? It’s going to be a lot harder to convince them that it wasn’t.”
He sounded so easy and reasonable, all of us on the same side working it out together, I almost wished I could give him what he was after. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t a clue.”
“You’re sure. Because this isn’t the time to muck about.”
“I don’t. I’m not.”
Rafferty left that for a minute, in case I changed my mind. When I didn’t, he sighed regretfully. “All right. Then, like I said, we’ve got nothing to say whether it was accident, suicide or murder. Except we also found this. Near his right arm.” He swiped at his phone again and laid it on the table in front of me.
White background, a right-angled ruler in one corner. In the middle was a long, complicated black squiggle. It took me a moment to work out what it was: some kind of cord, tied in a loop at each end.
“What is it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No way to know for sure. Any ideas?”
The first thing that sprang to mind was our childhood creations, complicated rigs for shuttling notes and supplies, hours of climbing and arguing and testing and one time a branch had broken and an entire illicit apple tart had landed smack on Susanna’s head . . . “We used to rig up ropes across the garden,” I said, “when we were kids. Like, to pass stuff between windows and trees and our tent? That could have, maybe that fell down the hole?”
Kerr made a faint noise that could have been a snort, but when I looked over he was doodling away. “Could have,” Rafferty said, politely. “Except if this went in there years before Dominic did, you’d expect it to be under him. Not up by his arm. Wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe. I guess.”
“I would, anyway. Any other ideas?”