said the other guy. “Better safe than sorry.”
Hugo and Leon and Tom were still in the garden, standing well back. “Now,” said the bigger guy, nodding to them, “let’s have a look at this,” and he and his mate squatted on their hunkers beside the skull, trousers stretching across their thick thighs. I saw the moment when their eyes met.
The big one took a pen out of his pocket and inserted it into the empty eyehole, carefully tilting the skull to one side and the other, examining every angle. Then he used the pen to hook back the long grass from the jaw, leaning in to inspect the teeth. Leon was gnawing ferociously on a thumbnail.
When the cop looked up his face was even blanker. “Where was this found?” he asked.
“My great-nephew found it,” Hugo said. Of all of us, he was the calmest; Melissa had her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, Leon was practically jigging with tension, and even Tom was white and stunned-looking, hair standing up like he’d been running his hands through it. “In a hollow tree, he says. I assume it was this one here, but I don’t know for certain.”
All of us looked up at the wych elm. It was one of the biggest trees in the garden, and the best for climbing: a great misshapen gray-brown bole, maybe five feet across, lumpy with rough bosses that made perfect handholds and footholds to the point where, seven or eight feet up, it split into thick branches heavy with huge green leaves. It was the same one I’d broken my ankle jumping out of, when I was a kid; with a horrible leap of my skin I realized that this thing could have been in there the whole time, I could have been just inches away from it.
The big cop glanced at his mate, who straightened up and, with surprising agility, hauled himself up the tree trunk. He braced his feet and hung on to a branch with one hand while he pulled a slim pen-shaped torch from his pocket; shone it into the split of the trunk; pointed it this way and that, peering, mouth hanging open. Finally he thumped down onto the grass with a grunt and gave the big cop a brief nod.
“Where’s your great-nephew now?” the big cop asked.
“In the house,” Hugo said, “with his mother and his sister. His sister was with him when he found it.”
“Right,” the cop said. He stood up, putting his pen away. His face, tilted to the sky, was distant; with a small shock I realized he was thrilled. “Let’s go have a quick word with them. Can you all come with me, please?” And to his mate: “Get onto the Ds and the Bureau.”
The mate nodded. As we trooped into the house, I glanced over my shoulder one last time: the cop, feet stolidly apart, swiping and jabbing at his phone; the wych elm, vast and luxuriant in its full summer whirl of green; and on the ground between them the small brown shape, barely visible among the daisies and the long grass.
* * *
Susanna was on the sofa, with an arm around each kid. She was even paler than normal, but she looked composed enough, and the kids had stopped screaming. They gave the cop matching opaque stares from the safety of Susanna’s arms.
“Sorry to disturb you,” the cop said. “I’d like a word with this young man, if he’s feeling able for it.”
“He’s fine,” Susanna said. “Aren’t you?”
“He is, of course,” said the cop heartily. “He’s a big boy. What’s your name, sonny?”
Zach wriggled out of Susanna’s arm and looked at the cop warily. “Zach,” he said.
“And what age are you?”
“Six.”
The cop pulled out a notebook and squatted awkwardly by the coffee table, as close to Zach as he could get. “Aren’t you great for finding that yoke out there? That’s a big tree for a little fella like you to be climbing.”
Zach rolled his eyes, not too obviously.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Zach, however, had apparently decided he didn’t like this guy. He shrugged and dug his toe into the rug, watching the pile ruck up.
“What was the first thing you did when you went out into the garden, say? Did you go straight for the tree? Or were you doing something else first?”
Shrug.
“Were you playing a game, yeah? Were you being Tarzan?”
Eye-roll.
“Zach,” Susanna said evenly. “Tell the Guard what happened.”
Zach drew a line in the rug with his toe and