The Wych Elm by Tana French

Author:Tana French [French, Tana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241985670
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

8

And then, finally, the detectives came back. They came the next morning, while I was fighting with the radiators – the autumn chill had come in hard, Hugo felt the cold badly, all the radiators needed bleeding but of course no one knew where the key was so I was struggling with a wrench and some old towels and I was covered in dust and WD-40. Rafferty and Kerr on the doorstep were ironed and smooth-shaven, spic-and-span and ready to take on the world.

‘Morning,’ Kerr said cheerfully. ‘I’d say you thought we’d abandoned you, yeah? Did you miss us?’

‘He’s only messing,’ Rafferty told me. ‘No one ever misses us. We’re used to it; doesn’t even sting any more.’

‘Oh,’ I said, after an idiotic pause. ‘Come in. My uncle’s upstairs working, I’ll just—’

‘Ah, no,’ Rafferty said, wiping his feet on the doormat. ‘Leave him to it. We only need a few minutes, sure; we’ll be gone before you know it. Will we go into the kitchen?’

I offered them tea or coffee, got them glasses of water instead, washed the dirt off my hands and sat down at the table opposite them while Kerr got out his notebook and Rafferty surveyed the garden (dead leaves everywhere, thin chilly sunlight glittering on scraps of plastic blown in by the night’s wind) and bullshitted me about how great it looked with the new plants in. The sight of them had hit me with the old full-body flinch, but this time it hadn’t left me paralysed. If they were back, it had to be because they had something new, and if my luck was in and I played this right, they were going to share it.

‘Just to confirm,’ Rafferty said, once we were all nice and settled. ‘We took this away with us the other week, remember? You said it was yours?’

He swiped through his phone and held it out to me: a photo of the old red hoodie, spread out on a white surface beside its paper bag. Someone had attached a labelled tag to it, which felt somehow both sinister and ridiculous.

‘It might have been,’ I said. ‘I mean, I had a red hoodie, but I’m not sure it was exactly—’

‘Your cousins both say you had one like this.’

‘I guess. Lots of people had red hoodies, though. I can’t say for sure if this one was—’

‘Hang on,’ Rafferty said, taking the phone back. ‘This might help.’ He swiped again and held out the phone.

Me, sitting among daisies with my back against a tree trunk and a can of something in my hand, smiling up at the camera. I looked so young – slight, floppy-haired, open-faced – I had to close my eyes for a second. I wanted to yell at that guy to run, far and fast, before I caught up with him and it was too late.

‘That’s you,’ Rafferty said. ‘Right?’

‘Yeah. Where did—’

‘About when, would you say?’

‘That’s the garden here, in summer. It might be the summer after we left school. Where did you get—’

‘That’d match the date stamp, all right.

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