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