for the sky— “That archaeologists use, on those shows. The one that—” I mimed a sweeping motion. “Use that. If it finds anything, go ahead and dig. If it doesn’t, then you can leave the garden alone.”
Rafferty turned his eyes on me. They were golden as a hawk’s and with the same impersonal, impartial ruthlessness, a creature simply doing what he was for. I realized that I was terrified of him. “Ground-penetrating radar,” he said. “We do use that, yeah. But that’s when we’re sweeping a large area, like a field or a hillside, for something big—a gravesite, say, or a cache of weapons. Here, we don’t know what we’re looking for; it could be something this size.” Thumb and finger an inch apart. “If we go in with the GPR, we’ll be digging every time it picks up a rock, or a dead mouse. It’ll work out the same in the end; it’ll just take a lot longer.”
“Then no,” I said. “No way. We haven’t done anything wrong. You can’t just come in here and, and wreck the whole place—”
Hugo sat down, heavily, at the table.
“It’s bloody unfair on you, all right,” Rafferty said, gently, so that my voice turned into pathetic bluster. “I see it all the time, in this job: people who did nothing wrong, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of a sudden we’re showing up and ruining their day—or their garden. And you’re right, it’s not OK. Thing is, we don’t have a choice. There’s someone dead here. We need to figure out what happened.”
“So find other ways to do it. It’s not our fault he’s dead, or she, or—”
“I can get a warrant if you’d rather,” Rafferty said, still just as mildly, “but that won’t be till tomorrow, and I’ll need to leave someone here till then. It’ll just stretch out the whole thing. If you give us the go-ahead to start now, we can aim to be out of here within a couple of days.”
“I would appreciate it very much,” Hugo said, cutting me off—I wasn’t sure what I had started to say—“if you could wait an hour or two before getting to work. The rest of the family is here for lunch, and they won’t be any happier about this idea than Toby and I are. It would make things simpler for everyone if you could wait until they leave.”
Rafferty transferred that gaze to him. “I can do that,” he said. “We need to go find ourselves some lunch anyway, sure. How would half-three suit you? Would they be gone by then?”
“I can make sure they are.” Hugo reached for his cane and leaned the other hand on the table to heave himself upright. There were dark bags under his eyes. “Toby, would you carry in the cake plate, please?”
* * *
At three o’clock Hugo announced that he was getting tired. It took what felt like hours for everyone to get the hint—let me help with the washing-up, no really I want to, are you sure you’ll be all right with all of them hanging about—“Honestly, Louisa,” Hugo finally said, with a hint of exasperation, “what do you think the Guards are going to do, start cracking heads? And how much help do you think you’d be if they did?” But finally all the food had been covered with clingfilm and organized carefully in the fridge, and Hugo and Melissa and I had been given full lawyerly instructions on exactly what to do if the cops did this or that or the other, and they all flooded out the door, still talking, and left us alone.
The three of us stood together at the French doors and watched the cops work. They started at the back wall. There were five of them, Rafferty and two uniformed guys and a uniformed woman and someone in coveralls, all of them with wax jackets and wellies and shovels. Even through the glass and the distance I thought I could hear the crunch of blades into earth. In a shockingly short time the strawberry bed was a ragged heap, great clumps of Queen Anne’s lace and bellflowers tossed aside, pale roots straggling, and there was a wide strip of dark churned-up earth across the bottom of the garden. The cops moved back and forth along it, stopping to pick something up and examine it and confer over it and drop it again, in no hurry. Above them, clouds hung