with a little too much force. “Fuck’s sake,” he said. “This is getting way out of hand.”
I got down three plates and passed them to him. “No shit.”
“We should tell them to fuck off.”
“I did. They said they’d get a warrant.” I was in no mood for Leon giving me hassle. “What would you have done?”
“Oh, chill. I’d have done exactly the same thing. Of course.” A quick, disarming smile. “How’s Hugo dealing?”
I wondered if he was there to nudge Hugo about making his will—the skull had knocked the whole house thing right out of our heads, and no one had brought it up since. “OK. Pissed off.”
“What I’d love to know”—Leon shook a sandwich out of its paper bag—“is what he thinks this is all about.”
A sideways glance at me. “I don’t know,” I said, finding water glasses. “That homeless guy he was talking about, the cops tracked him down. It isn’t him.”
“And? Has Hugo got any other ideas?”
“We haven’t really talked about it.”
“You haven’t asked him?”
“No. Why would I?”
Leon shrugged. “He’s the one who’s been living here for however long. If anyone has a clue about this, it’s probably him.”
“It was probably before he was even born. Your dad thinks it was some informer in the Civil War.”
Leon rolled his eyes. “Course he does. He’s hoping this is some major discovery and we’ll end up in the textbooks for changing the narrative of Irish history yada yada.” Another sideways glance, as he arranged the plates on the tray. The sandwiches were probably wonderful, but I hadn’t been hungry since the cops showed up and to me they just looked gross, all those folds of dark-red meat and globs of pale sweaty cheese. “What about you? What do you figure?”
The truth was that I didn’t have a theory, not even the germ of one. This had been bothering me, a lot, actually: everyone else had entire sagas, it felt like a glaring defect in my mind that it couldn’t come up with anything at all. I had tried, but every time I thought of the skull my mind ran aground on the flat, stunning, unbudging reality of it; there didn’t seem to be any way to think beyond or around it. It reminded me, with a deep sickening lurch in my stomach, of my few memories from right after the attack: disconnected images stripped of any context or meaning, only and vastly and unthinkably themselves. “I don’t have a clue,” I said. “Neither does anyone else. We don’t even know what they’ve found out there, how are we supposed to know how it got there?”
“Well, obviously we don’t know. I just mean ideas. Possibilities.”
“I don’t have ideas,” I said, putting down the glasses on the tray a little too hard, “because I don’t actually give a damn what happened. I just want those guys”—a jerk of my chin at the sodden cops outside—“to fuck off and not wreck Hugo’s last few months. That’s all I care about. OK?” Which shut Leon up, just like I had known it would.
I was expecting him to quiz Hugo, over the sandwiches, but maybe what I said had got through. Instead he babbled cheerfully about Ivy House memories from our childhood; after we finished eating, he took half of Hugo’s paper heap and lay facedown on the carpet with it, kicking his heels like a kid, occasionally waving a page to get our attention (“Oh my God, listen to this, this guy was named Aloysius Butt, I bet school was hell for him . . .”). When I came back up from making coffee, halfway through the afternoon, I heard their voices from the stairs, but by the time I opened the door they were peacefully absorbed in their work, Leon sucking the end of his pen with a contemplative whistling sound.
* * *
By Tuesday morning the garden was almost completely obliterated, one vast solid expanse of churned mud, with a last strip of grass and bobbing poppies at the very top like a bitter joke. It looked like some old battlefield, World War I, flung heaps of dirt and lopsided holes, thin cold rain falling; unrecoverable, nothing to be done except leave it alone in its silence and wait for the grass and poppies to grow back and cover it all.
Rafferty was missing, which somehow made things worse, like his guys were going to be there forever so there was no need for him to hang around. We made coffee and