The Witch Elm

by Tana French

My mind was bouncing and dashing like a border collie and it was infectious,

said. Hugo’s road has that effect; it gives the impression of being there only on alternate Thursdays or to people with the mysterious talisman in their pockets, invisible the rest of the time and instantly forgotten once you leave it.

“Isn’t it grand, boys, to be bloody well dead? Let’s not have a sniffle—” I started to laugh. “Let’s have a bloody good cry,” Susanna joined in, and we all finished it together in style, cigarettes and bottle raised high: “And always remember the longer you live, the sooner you’ll bloody well die!”

Within a couple of years they had two kids and much of their conversation revolved around toilet training and school choices and various other things that made me want to get a vasectomy and go on a coke binge.

“Great study he’s got there,” Rafferty said, opening the living-room door for me. “Like something out of Sherlock Holmes. We should’ve given him a proper look at that skull, let him tell us if it came from a right-handed pipe welder with marriage problems and a Labrador.”

the one for whom teachers kept predicting great things. I had never thought much about it, except to cheerfully congratulate her when she did something impressive and to raise a mental eyebrow when she ditched the big PhD plans for a life of nappies and snot; but it occurred to me all of a sudden that that ferocious intelligence of hers had probably been craving a challenge for years.

“The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.”

he was well able to handle more than one victim at a time. Multitasking; he’d have done well in management.

“I thought about doing it up the mountains, somewhere good and remote, and just leaving him there. Or on Howth Head or Bray Head, and shoving the body into the water.

“Either way, though, that phone needed to go somewhere good and suicide-y. At first I thought about Bray Head—I mean, Dominic; there’s no way he would’ve gone to the Northside, even to kill himself. But Howth Head is nearer and it gets more suicides, and from what I could figure out about the currents, it was more plausible that his body wouldn’t be found if he went off Howth Head.

I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I?