an awkward curled grip that made me tense up. “Thanks.”
“How’s he doing?”
I made some kind of noncommittal noise.
“Tell him I was asking after him.”
“Will do.”
“Come here,” Dec said, in a different tone. “Was that Hugo’s gaff on the news?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus. I thought it was, all right, but . . . What the fuck?”
“You know that old elm tree? The big one, down towards the bottom of the garden? Susanna’s kid found a skull in there. Down a hole in the trunk.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s probably old. They say the tree’s like two hundred years old; the skull could’ve got there any time. They’re cutting down the tree, though. There’s Guards all over the place.”
“Fuck,” Dec said. “Are they giving you hassle?”
“Nah. They’ve been fine. They asked us a bunch of questions, but we don’t know anything about it, so now they’re basically leaving us alone. It’s a pain in the hole, but whatever. I guess they’ve got to do their job.”
“Listen, me and Sean were going to come down this week. Do you still want us to? Or do you not need anyone else buzzing around?”
Actually I very badly wanted to see them, but I knew I didn’t have enough bandwidth to cope with them as well as a garden full of cops; I would end up stammering, losing the thread of the conversation, making an idiot of myself. I felt a fresh stab of annoyance with Rafferty and his buddies. “Maybe wait till the cops go. With any luck they’ll be out of here soon; I’ll give you a bell then and we can plan, yeah?”
“No problem. It’s not like I’m doing anything else. Sean’s been great, him and Audrey have been inviting me over for dinner and all, but seeing them all lovey-dovey and happy, you know what I mean? It just makes me—”
There was a tap at the French doors: Rafferty, peeling off a pair of thin latex gloves. “Gotta go,” I said to Dec. “I’ll let you know about this week,” and I hung up and went to the door.
“Afternoon,” Rafferty said, smiling at us and dusting his hands together. “So: the tree’s done. We’ll get rid of the wood for you; the tree surgeon’s going to take it away.”
“Did you find anything?” Hugo asked, polite as a shop owner, Have you found everything you need?
“It was useful, yeah.” He scraped his feet carefully on the doormat and came inside. “Before I forget: we tracked down your homeless fella, the one who used to doss down in the laneway? I asked around, found a couple of lads who used to work this area. One of them remembered him. Bernard Gildea. I’d love to be able to tell you he got his life back on track, lived happily ever after, but he wound up getting taken into a hospice. Cirrhosis. He died in 1994.”
“Oh, no,” Hugo said. He looked genuinely distressed. “He seemed like a decent man, underneath the drink. Well-read—occasionally he would ask if we had a book to spare, and I’d find something to give him—he liked non-fiction, World War I stuff. He always seemed to me like someone who, if just one or two rolls of the dice had gone differently . . .”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Rafferty said. “And I’m afraid I’ve got more. The garden’s going to have to come up.”
“Come up?” Hugo said, after a blank moment. “What do you mean?”
“We’re going to have to dig it up. Not the rest of the trees, and we’ll try to put back whatever plants we can, once we’re done, but we’re not gardeners. You might be able to apply for compensation—”
I said, a lot louder than I expected, “Why?”
“Because we don’t know what we might find there,” Rafferty explained, reasonably. He was still talking to Hugo. “Probably, I’ll be honest with you, we’ll find nothing relevant at all, and you’ll be left cursing us out of it for wrecking your beautiful garden for no reason. But look at it from our side. There were human remains in that tree. We’ve got no way of knowing if there are other human remains somewhere else in the garden, or maybe a murder weapon. Probably not, but I can’t run an investigation on ‘probably not.’ I can’t go back to my gaffer with ‘probably not.’ I’ve got to know for certain.”
“That radar machine,” I said. The thought of the garden, razed, bare dirt rucked up like a bomb site, tangles of roots reaching