examined it.
“Zach,” Tom said.
“That’s all right,” the cop said easily, although he didn’t look pleased. “You can talk to the detectives when they get here, if you’d rather do that.” The word detectives sent a flicker through the room; I heard a quick catch of breath, couldn’t tell where it came from. “What about this young lady here? Can you tell me what happened?”
Zach shot Sallie a vicious look. Her chin started to wobble and she buried her face in Susanna’s stomach.
“Right,” the cop said, cutting his losses and straightening up. “We’ll leave that for later; they’re a bit shaken up, sure, who wouldn’t be. Was it you they came to, Mrs. . . . ?”
“Hennessy. Susanna Hennessy.” Susanna had one hand on the back of Sallie’s neck and the other on Zach’s shoulder, tight enough that he squirmed. “The rest of us were in here. We heard them scream, so we all ran out to the garden.”
“And that yoke out there. When you ran out, was it where it is now? On the grass near the tree?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone touch it? Apart from your son?”
“Sal,” Susanna said gently. “Did you touch it?” Sallie shook her head, into Susanna’s top.
“Anyone else?”
We all shook our heads.
The cop wrote something in his notebook. “And are you the resident here?” he asked Susanna.
“I am,” Hugo said. He had moved slowly and carefully around the rest of us to lower himself into his armchair. “These three are my niece and my nephews, Tom is my niece’s husband, and Melissa is Toby’s girlfriend. The two of them are staying with me at the moment, but usually it’s just me.”
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Hugo Hennessy.”
“And how long have you been living here?”
“All my life, with the odd gap here and there. It was my parents’ house, and my grandparents’.”
“So it’s been in the family since when?”
Hugo considered that, rubbing absently at one of his radiotherapy bald spots. “1925, I think. It might have been 1926.”
“Mm-hm,” the cop said, examining what he’d written. “Would you have any idea how old that tree is? Did you plant it?”
“Goodness, no. It was old when I was a child. It’s a wych elm; they can live for centuries.”
“And that yoke out there. Any idea who it might be?”
Hugo shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”
The cop looked around the rest of us. “Anyone else? Any ideas?”
We all shook our heads.
“Right,” the cop said. He closed his notebook and tucked it away in a pocket. “Now, I have to tell you, we might need to be here for a while.”
“How long?” Susanna asked sharply.
“No way to know at this stage. We’ll keep you informed. And we’ll try to minimize the disturbance. Is there any other entrance to the garden, besides through the house? So we don’t have to be coming in and out on you?”
“There’s a door in the back wall of the garden,” Hugo said, “leading out onto the laneway. I’m not sure where the key—”
“Kitchen cupboard,” Leon said. “I saw it last week, I’ll get it—” and he slipped away as swiftly as a shadow.
“That’s great,” the cop said. His eye moved around the room and stopped on Tom. “Mr. . . . ?”
“Farrell. Thomas Farrell.”
“Mr. Farrell, I’m going to ask you to make us a list of the name and contact details of everyone here. We’ll also need a list of who’s lived in this house, as far back as any of you know, and the dates—doesn’t need to be exact at this point, just ‘Granny Hennessy lived here from, we’ll say, 1950 till she died in 2000,’ that kind of thing. Can you do that?”
“No problem,” Tom said promptly. Even in the middle of all this, it sent a sharp flare of outrage through me—fair enough, Hugo was obviously not well and Leon looked like a refugee from a Sex Pistols tribute band and Susanna was covered in kids, but I was standing right there, I was family and Tom wasn’t, why the fuck was this guy skipping over me?
Leon came back with the key. “Here,” he said, holding it out to the cop. “I don’t know if it’ll work, no one ever uses that door so it might have gone all—”
“Thanks very much,” the cop said, pocketing it. “I’m going to ask you all to stay in this room here for a while. If you need to use the toilet or the kitchen, obviously, that’s no problem, but the garden’ll be off limits until further notice. The detectives will