and I got down out of the tree, I fell the last part but I didn’t get hurt. And Sallie started screaming and then Mum and everyone came.”
He was hunched over, hands tucked tight into the crooks of his knees, eyes flicking away from the memory. For a second I actually felt sorry for the little bastard.
“Well done,” Rafferty said, giving Zach a nod. “You were right: you’re a good witness. At some point I’ll get this typed up and I’ll need you to sign it, but for now, that’s exactly what I need. Thanks.”
Zach took a deep breath and relaxed a notch or two. Rafferty had a good voice, rich and warm with a windswept tinge of Galway, like some rugged islandman in an old movie who would probably end up with Maureen O’Hara. I was willing to bet that this guy got more hoop than he could handle. To Sallie: “Now let’s see you give it a try. Can you remember what happened?”
Sallie was snuggled in tight against Susanna, watching the whole thing with solemn unreadable eyes over her orange pouch. She took it out of her mouth and nodded.
“Off you go.”
“I was looking for treasure and Zach was up the tree and then he threw a thing on the grass. And he was yelling. And it was a skull and I yelled too because I was scared it was a ghost.”
“And then?”
“Then everyone came and Mummy took us inside.”
“Well done,” Rafferty said, smiling at her.
“Is it a ghost?”
“Duhhh,” Zach said, under his breath. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” He seemed to have recovered.
“No,” Rafferty said gently. “We’ve got a special machine that tells us exactly what something is, and we’ve gone over every bit of that skull. There’s no ghost there, any more than there is in this.” He touched his notepad. “It’s only a piece of bone.”
Sallie nodded.
“You want to check this for ghosts?” He waved the notepad at her.
That got a head-shake and the tip of a smile. “Phew,” Rafferty said. “I left my machine outside. When was the last time anyone else was up that tree? A gardener, maybe? Someone trimming the branches?”
“No gardener,” Hugo said. “I don’t exactly keep the place in show condition—well, you’ve seen that for yourself. What little I want doing, I do myself. I don’t trim the trees.”
“We used to climb it,” I said, enunciating carefully to keep the slurring down. I felt like I needed to make some kind of mark on this conversation. “Me and Susanna and Leon”—pointing—“when we were kids.”
Rafferty turned to look at me. “When were you last up there?”
“I broke my ankle jumping out of it. When I was nine. After that our parents didn’t let us climb it any more.”
“Mm,” Rafferty said. His eyes—deep-set and an odd light shade of hazel, almost golden—rested on me thoughtfully. That look, practiced and assessing and opaque and so familiar, made my spine curl. I was suddenly viciously aware of my droopy eyelid. “Did you?”
“I don’t—” A flicker of memory, swinging my legs on a branch in semi-darkness, can of beer, someone laughing, but everything felt so dislocated and unreal that I couldn’t— “I’m not sure.”
“Yeah, we did,” Susanna said. “When our parents weren’t there. Hugo”—a fleeting smile between them—“always let us get away with a lot more.”
“It’s not like we were up there every day,” Leon said. “Or every week. But now and then, yeah.”
“When was the last time?”
Susanna and Leon looked at each other. “God, I don’t remember,” Leon said.
“Some party when we were teenagers, maybe?”
“That time when Declan was singing ‘Wonderwall’ and someone threw a can at him. Weren’t we all up there?”
“Was that that tree?”
“Had to be. The three of us and Dec, and wasn’t that girl there too, Whatshername who he liked? We wouldn’t all have fit in any of the other trees.”
“Declan who?” Rafferty asked.
“Declan McGinty,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
Rafferty nodded, writing down the name. I thought I could smell him, a keen outdoorsy tang like split pine. “Any idea what year that would’ve been?”
“I think that was the summer we left school,” Susanna said. “So ten years ago. But I’m not sure.” Leon shrugged.
“Ever do any exploring down the hole in the middle?”
Leon and Susanna and I looked at each other. “No,” Susanna said. “I mean, I glanced in a couple of times, when I was up there, but it looked manky; all wet dead leaves. I wasn’t going to go rooting around.”