other than Hugo. Everyone had a theory. Miriam was telling my mother, at ninety miles a minute, about Celtic boundary rituals and human sacrifice, although it wasn’t clear how she thought the Celts would have got a skull into a two-hundred-year-old tree; my mother was countering with something about the Victorians’ complicated relationship with vigilante justice. Leon—not eating, hyper to the point where I wondered whether he had got his hands on some speed—was winding Louisa up with an ornate story about a local hurler who had sold his soul to the devil, via an improbable ceremony, in exchange for champion-level skill (“No, I swear, I heard it years ago, just no one knew where the skull had landed—”), while Louisa gave him a jaded look and tried to decide whether to call him on it. Even my father, who as far as I knew hadn’t strung together more than two sentences since Hugo got sick, was earnestly explaining to Melissa just how far a fox could drag a heavy object.
I wasn’t as into this as the rest of them. I wasn’t really capable of seeing detectives as an intriguing distraction, and the fact that the others had that luxury was making me feel increasingly sour and left out. Phil and Louisa had brought Camembert, which was stinking up the whole room. My appetite was gone again.
“Clearly,” Oliver said, pointing the tomato fork at me, “clearly it must date from before 1926. Your grandparents were avid gardeners, you know, out there planting and pruning and whatnot all year round, and your great-grandmother was the same. Not to be crude about it, but if there had been a body in the garden in their time, decomposing, they couldn’t have missed it. But the previous owner was an old woman, bedridden for years. When my grandparents bought the place, the garden was in a terrible state—brambles and nettles up to here, my grandmother used to tell me how when they came to view the house she shredded her best polka-dot stockings, ha! A whole army could have rotted away out there, and no one would have noticed. D’you see?”
“We don’t know that it was an entire body,” Phil pointed out from across the table, reaching for the Camembert. “Or that the tree is where it decomposed. For all we know, someone had a skull they wanted to get rid of—”
“Then where did the rest go? If you find a skull lying about, you call the Guards—the peelers, the bobbies, whatever they were called back then. Exactly like Hugo did. The only reason you’d get rid of it is if you had a whole body that you weren’t supposed to have. And what was going on, not long before 1926? Who might have found themselves in possession of a dead body?”
I was losing track of all this: like Hugo’s genealogy mystery, too many tributaries of possibility and inference, I couldn’t hold on to all of them at once. The crowded room wasn’t helping, bodies and movement everywhere, unpredictable roars from the chainsaw making me jump every time. Melissa caught my eye, over my father’s shoulder, and gave me a tiny encouraging smile. I managed to grin back.
“The Civil War,” Oliver said triumphantly. “Guerrilla warfare; summary executions. Someone got caught informing, vanished amid the general Sturm und Drang. I’d put money on it: that body dates from 1922. Anyone fancy taking that bet? Toby?”
My phone buzzed in my pocket: Dec. “Sorry,” I said to my uncles, “I have to take this,” and escaped to the kitchen.
Hugo, hip braced against the counter, was sliding a large sponge cake out of its box. Out in the garden, chunks of splintered wood were everywhere, the cops were clustered at the door of the tent, and the wych elm was down to a stump.
“Hey,” I said, into the phone.
“Hey,” Dec said. Hearing his voice actually made me smile. “Long time.”
“I know. How’re you doing? Sean told me about Jenna.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not great, but I’ll live. And yeah, before you say it, I fucking know you told me so.”
“We fucking did. Just be glad you got out with all your organs. Did you ever wake up in a bath full of ice?”
“Fuck off. How’ve you been getting on?”
“Fine. Chilling, mostly. Richard’s letting me take a bit of time off, so I’m just hanging out here.”
“Sean said about Hugo. I’m really sorry, man.”
“I know.” I moved farther away from Hugo, who was painstakingly slicing the cake, knife held in