His presence was doing bad things to me. On the surface he was nothing at all like Martin or Flashy Suit, but still there was something, something about the economy of movement and the easy friendly tone leaving no option of refusal and giving away absolutely nothing, that brought it all back: polluting hospital air burrowing into every pore, my head clogged with pain and with a thick haze like demolition dust, the pleasant blank faces watching me and waiting. My hands were shaking. I clasped them between my knees.
“As you’ve probably gathered from all the action,” Rafferty said, “that’s a human skull out there in your garden. So far we don’t know a lot more than that. These two were the ones who found it?”
“My son,” Susanna said, “and my daughter.” Sallie was pressed against her, the pouch thing still firmly stuck in her mouth. Zach was hanging over the back of the sofa, staring.
Rafferty nodded, examining them. “Which of them’s more likely to be able to tell me how it happened? Kids this age, some of them make great witnesses, better than adults: good observers, good clear account of events, no messing about. Other kids, they’re so busy playing cute or shy or stubborn, they can barely make a sentence, and when they do it’s mostly rubbish. Which of your two—”
“Me,” Zach said loudly, scrambling over the back of the sofa and nearly kicking Susanna in the face. “I’m the one who found it.”
Rafferty gave him a long look. “This isn’t like explaining to your teacher why Jimmy hit Johnny in the playground. This is serious business. You think you can manage to give me a clear account?”
“Course I can. I’m not stupid.”
“Right,” Rafferty said, pulling out a notebook and a pen. His hands seemed wrong for a detective, long and muscular, with scars and heavy calluses like he spent a lot of time sailing in hard weather. “Let’s hear it.”
Zach arranged himself cross-legged on the sofa and took a breath. “OK,” he said. “So Uncle Hugo told us to go out in the garden and look for treasure. So Sallie went and looked in the strawberry patch, which, duhhh, we go in there all the time so if there was treasure there we would have found it already? And I went to look in the hole in the tree.”
Rafferty was nodding along, grave and intent. “That’s the big elm tree? The one right next to where you left the skull?”
“Yeah.”
“Had you been up that tree before?”
“We’re not allowed.”
“So why today?”
“All the grownups were having some big serious talk. So . . .” Zach grinned, at Susanna, who made a wry face at him.
Rafferty let the edge of a matching grin slip out. “So you knew you wouldn’t get caught.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“And I stuck my arm down the hole—”
“Hang on,” Rafferty said, lifting his pen. “If you’d never been up that tree before, how did you know it had a hole in it? You can’t see the hole from the ground.”
Zach shrugged. “I tried climbing that tree a load of times before, only my mum or Uncle Hugo always yelled at me to get down. A couple of times I got high enough up that I saw the hole. And one time I saw a squirrel come out of it.”
“Ever notice anything in there? Apart from the squirrel?”
“Nah.”
“Ever put your hand in there before? Or a stick, or anything?”
“Nah.”
“Why today?”
“Because I was looking for treasure.”
“Fair enough,” Rafferty said. “So you stuck your arm down the hole . . .”
“Yeah. And first there was just all leaves and muck and wet stuff, like hairy stuff—” Zach’s eyes snapped wide as he realized.
“Moss, probably,” Rafferty said easily. “What next?”
“And then there was something big, like smooth. It felt weird. And there was a hole in it so I stuck my fingers in the hole and pulled it out, and at first I thought it was like a big eggshell, like from an ostrich egg? And it smelled like dirt. And I was going to throw it at the wall so it would smash. Only then I turned it around and there were teeth.” Zach shuddered from head to feet, an irresistible spasm. Susanna’s hand went out towards his shoulder and stopped. “Actual teeth.”
“Yeah,” Rafferty said. “There are. What’d you do next?”
“I threw it. Onto the grass. Not trying to smash it; I just wanted to get rid of it. And I yelled