“First off”—Rafferty held up one finger—“he lived here, full-time, and he worked from home. He had the best access to the tree. Any of the rest of ye, you were never here on your own; you’d have had to work around Hugo and each other, somehow get the body in there without being spotted. Hugo had plenty of time here alone.”
Second finger. “He was a big guy. Even by the time we got here, you could tell by looking at him: he used to be strong. Your cousins, no way either of them could get an eighty-five-kilo body up that tree and down that hole, not on their own. But Hugo . . .”
He hadn’t mentioned me. I was strong, I wanted to shout at him, I played rugby, I was fit as fuck, I could have done anything. My cigarette tasted of mildew. I jammed it out on the terrace.
“And,” Rafferty said. Third finger. “The first time I was talking to all of you; in the sitting room, the day the skull turned up, remember that? There was one thing that stuck with me, out of that conversation. Your nephew, Zach: he said he’d tried to climb that tree before, but his mammy or Hugo always made him get down. And then, two minutes later, your cousin Susanna said your parents didn’t let you climb the tree when ye were kids, but Hugo did. Meaning before Dominic was in there, Hugo had no problem with kids going up in that tree. After Dominic was put there, he did.”
Hugo had known all along. I suppose the truth is that I’ve never been a man of action. Don’t rock the boat; everything will come right in the end, if you just let it . . . He must not have known which one or two or all three of us it had been, not for sure—that careful probing in the car, I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened—but he had known enough.
“You didn’t spot that, no?”
“No.”
“Why would you, I suppose. Not your job.”
“No.”
“And,” Rafferty said—four fingers waving, long pleasurable drag on his smoke—“not to get too graphic, but it’s hard to miss a decomposing body. There was a load of muck and leaves dumped in on top of it, so that would’ve masked the smell a bit, and it was cold enough that autumn and winter; but still. Hugo would’ve gone investigating, and got the shock of his life, unless he already knew exactly what was stinking up his garden.”
With a slow strange flowering in my stomach I realized: Hugo hadn’t just known. All of us gathered in the living room, Zach buzzing around looking for trouble, and Hugo had beckoned him over and whispered something in his ear; and Zach had got a big grin on his face and shot off to the garden, where he had gone straight up the one tree he had never been allowed to climb.
I told him there’s treasure hidden in the garden. More than that: he had told Zach exactly where to look. Maybe not in so many words, in case Zach ratted him out, but he wouldn’t have needed to. Out you go, we’ll all be busy in here for a while, you can look anywhere you want, anywhere at all . . .
Once the three of us started making noises about what was going to happen to the house, Hugo had realized: if he died and left that skeleton out there, it would be like leaving us with a live landmine in the garden. It needed a controlled explosion, and so (It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath) he had quietly made his plans and set them in motion. His method struck me as being a bit hard on Zach, even if he was a tough little bastard, but I supposed Hugo hadn’t had much option: he could hardly have gone rooting around in that tree himself, or sent anyone else, without arousing suspicion.
Obviously I should have done it years ago. But it would take a certain kind of person to do that, wouldn’t it, and apparently I’m not that kind; or wasn’t, anyway, until now . . .
He had nearly left it too late for the final step, the confession—I wondered if when we got around to clearing his things we would find a handwritten one