“I don’t think anyone’s in on anything. What I do think is that Rosalind has been through just about enough for one lifetime, and that there’s not a chance in hell that she was an accomplice to her sister’s murder, so I don’t see the point of dragging her in here and putting her through even more trauma.”
Cassie sat back on the table and looked at me. There was an expression in her eyes that I couldn’t fathom. “Do you think,” she inquired eventually,
“that that little sap came up with this all by himself?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said, hearing echoes of O’Kelly in my voice but unable to stop myself. “Maybe Andrews or one of his buddies hired him. That would explain why he’s dodging the whole motive thing: he’s scared they’ll go after him if he rats them out.”
“Yeah, except we don’t have one single connection between him and Andrews—”
“Yet.”
“—and we do have one between him and Rosalind.”
“Did you hear me? I said, yet. O’Kelly’s on the financials and the phone records. When they come back, we’ll see what we’re dealing with and take it from there.”
“By the time the records come back, Damien’ll have calmed down and got himself a lawyer, and Rosalind will have seen the arrest on the news and she’ll be on her guard. We pull her in right now and we play them off each other till we find out what’s going on.”
I thought of Kiernan’s voice, or McCabe’s; of the vertiginous sensation as the ligaments of my mind gave way and I floated off into that soft, infinitely welcoming blue sky. “No,” I said, “we don’t. That girl is fragile, Maddox. She 350
Tana French
is sensitive and she is highly strung and she just lost a sister and she has no idea why. And your answer is to play her off her sister’s killer? Jesus, Cassie. We have a responsibility to look after that girl.”
“No we don’t, Rob,” Cassie said sharply. “No we don’t. That’s Victim Support’s job. We have a responsibility to Katy, and a responsibility to try and find out the truth about what the hell happened here, and that’s it. Anything else comes second.”
“And if Rosalind goes into a depression or has a nervous breakdown because we’ve been harassing her? Are you going to claim that’s Victim Support’s problem, too? We could damage her for life here, do you understand that? Until we have something a whole lot better than a minor coincidence, we leave that girl the hell alone.”
“Minor coincidence?” Cassie shoved her hands into her pockets, hard.
“Rob. If this were anyone but Rosalind Devlin, what would you be doing right now?”
I felt a wave of anger rising inside me, sheer fury with a thick, tangled quality to it. “No, Maddox. No. Don’t even try to pull that. If anything, it’s the other way around. You’ve never liked Rosalind, have you? You’ve been dying for a reason to go after her since day one, and now that Damien’s given you this pathetic shred of an excuse, you’re diving on it like a starving dog on a bone. My God, that poor girl told me a lot of women were jealous of her, but I have to say I gave you more credit than that. Apparently I was wrong.”
“Jealous of— Jesus Christ, Rob, you’ve got some nerve! I gave you more credit than to think you’d back off a fucking suspect just because you’re sorry for her, and you fancy her, and you’re pissed off with me for some bloody bizarre reason of your own—”
She was losing her temper fast, and I saw this with a hard pleasure. My anger is cold, controlled, articulate; it can smash a short-fuse explosion like Cassie’s to pieces any day. “I wish you’d keep your voice down,” I said.
“You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“Oh, you think? You’re an embarrassment to this entire fucking squad.”
She jammed her notebook into her pocket, pages crumpling. “I’m going to get Rosalind Devlin—”
“No you’re not. For Christ’s sake, act like a bloody detective, not like some hysterical teenager with a vendetta.”
In the Woods 351
“Yeah, I am, Rob. And you and Damien can do whatever you like, you can crawl up each other’s arse and die for all I care—”
“Well,” I said, “that certainly puts me in my place. Very professional.”
“What the fuck goes on in your head ?” Cassie yelled. She kicked the door shut behind her with a bang, and I heard the echoes reverberate, deep and ominous, up and down the corridor.
I gave her plenty of time to leave. Then I went out for a cigarette—Damien could look after himself, like a big boy, for a few more minutes. It was starting to get dark and it was still raining, thick apocalyptic sheets. I turned up the collar of my jacket and squashed uncomfortably into the doorway. My hands were shaking. Cassie and I had had fights before, of course we had; partners argue as ferociously as lovers. Once I got her so furious that she slammed her hand down on her desk and her wrist swelled up, and we didn’t speak for almost two days. But even that had been different; utterly different.
I threw away my soggy cigarette half-smoked and went back inside. Part of me wanted to send Damien off for processing and go home and let Cassie deal with that when she came back to find us gone, but I knew I didn’t have that luxury: I needed to find out his motive, and I needed to do it in time to prevent Cassie from giving Rosalind the third degree. Damien had started to catch up with events. He was almost frantic with anxiety, biting at his cuticles and jiggling his knees, and he couldn’t stop asking me questions: What would happen next? He was going to jail, right?
For how long? His mother was going to have a heart attack, she had this heart condition. . . . Was jail really dangerous, was it like on TV? I hoped, for his sake, that he didn’t watch Oz.
Whenever I came too close to the subject of motive, though, he shut down: curled in on himself like a hedgehog, stopped meeting my eyes and started claiming memory loss. The argument with Cassie seemed to have thrown me off my rhythm; everything felt terribly unbalanced and irritating, and try as I might I couldn’t get Damien to do anything but stare at the table and shake his head miserably.
“All right,” I said at last. “Let me get a little background straight. Your father died nine years ago, is that correct?”
352
Tana French
“Yeah.” Damien glanced up tentatively. “Almost ten; it’s his tenth anniversary at the end of October. Can I . . . when we’re finished here, can I, like, get bailed out?”
“Bail can only be decided by a judge. Does your mother work?”
“No. She’s got this, I told you . . .” He gestured vaguely towards his chest. “She gets disability. And my dad, he left us some . . . Oh, God, my mother!” He shot upright. “She’s gonna be going crazy— What time is it?”
“Relax. We spoke to her earlier; she knows you’re helping us with our inquiries. Even with the money your father left, it can’t be easy to make ends meet.”
“What? . . . Um, we do OK.”
“All the same,” I said, “if someone offered you a lot of money to do a job for him, you’d be tempted, wouldn’t you?” Fuck Sam, and fuck O’Kelly: if Uncle Redmond had hired Damien, I needed to know now. Damien’s eyebrows drew together in what looked like genuine confusion. “What?”
“I could name you a few people who had several million reasons to go after the Devlin family. The thing is, Damien, they aren’t the kind to do their own dirty work. They’re the type who use hired help.”
I paused, giving Damien a chance to say something. He merely looked dazed.
“If you’re afraid of someone,” I told him, as gently as I could, “we can protect you. And if someone hired you to do this, then you’re not the real killer, are you? He is.”
“What—I didn’t—what? You think someone paid me to, to . . . Jesus! No!”
His mouth was open in pure, shocked indignation. “Well, if it wasn’t for money,” I inquired, “then why was it?”
“I told you, I don’t know! I don’t remember!”
&nbs
p; For an extremely unpleasant instant, it occurred to me to wonder whether he might, in fact, have lost a segment of his memory; and, if so, why and where. I dismissed the thought. We hear this one all the time, and I had seen the look on his face when he skipped the trowel: that had been deliberate.
“You know, I’m doing my best to help you here,” I said, “but there’s no way for me to do that when you’re not being honest with me.”
“I’m being honest! I don’t feel good—”
“No, Damien, you’re not,” I said. “And here’s how I know. Do you remember those photos I showed you? Remember the one of Katy with her In the Woods 353
face hanging off? That was taken at the post-mortem, Damien. And the post-mortem told us exactly what you did to that little girl.”
“I already told you—”
I leaned across the table, fast, into his face. “And then, Damien, this morning, we found the trowel in the tools shed. How bloody stupid do you think we are? Here’s the part you skipped: after you killed Katy, you undid her combats and you pulled down her underwear and you shoved the handle of that trowel inside her.”
Damien’s hands went to the sides of his head. “No—don’t—”
“And you’re trying to tell me that just happened ? Raping a little kid with a trowel doesn’t just happen, not without a damn good reason, and you need to stop fucking around and tell me what that reason was. Unless you’re just one sick little pervert. Is that it, Damien? Are you?”
I had pushed him too hard. With dreary inevitability, Damien—who, after all, had had a long day—started to cry again.
We were there for a long time. Damien, his face in his hands, sobbed hoarsely and convulsively. I leaned against the wall, wondering what the hell to do with him and occasionally, when he stopped for breath, taking another desultory shot at the motive. He never answered; I’m not sure he heard me. The room was too hot and I could still smell the pizza, rich and nauseating. I couldn’t focus. All I could think about was Cassie, Cassie and Rosalind: whether Rosalind had agreed to come in; whether she was holding up all right; whether Cassie was going to knock on the door, any moment, and want to put her face to face with Damien.
Finally I gave up. It was half past eight and this was pointless: Damien had had enough, the best detective in the world couldn’t have got anything coherent out of him at this point, and I knew I should have spotted this long before. “Come on,” I said to him. “Get some dinner and some rest. We’ll try this again tomorrow.”
He looked up at me. His nose was red and his eyes were swollen half shut. “I can go . . . go home?”
You’ve just been arrested for murder, genius, what do you think. . . . I didn’t have the energy for sarcasm. “We’ll be holding you overnight,” I said. “I’ll get someone to take you over.” When I brought out the handcuffs, he stared at them as if they were some medieval implement of torture. The door of the observation room was open, and as we passed I saw O’Kelly standing in front of the glass, hands in his pockets, rocking back 354
Tana French
and forth on his heels. My heart gave a great thump. Cassie had to be in the main interview room: Cassie and Rosalind. For a moment I thought of going in there, but I rejected that idea instantly: I did not want Rosalind to associate me in any way with this whole debacle. I handed Damien—still dazed and white-faced, catching his breath in long shudders like a child who’s been crying too hard—over to the uniforms, and went home. 22
T he land line rang at about quarter to midnight. I dived for it; Heather has Rules about phone calls after her bedtime.
“Hello?”
“Sorry to ring so late, but I’ve been trying to reach you all evening,”
Cassie said.
I had switched my mobile to silent, but I had seen the missed calls. “I really can’t talk now,” I said.
“Rob, for fuck’s sake, this is important—”
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I said. “I’ll be in work at some point tomorrow, or you can leave me a note.” I heard the quick, painful catch of breath, but I put the phone down anyway.
“Who was that?” demanded Heather, appearing in the door of her room wearing a nightie with a collar and looking sleepy and cross.
“For me,” I said.
“Cassie?”
I went into the kitchen, found an ice tray and started popping cubes into a glass. “Ohhh,” said Heather knowingly, behind me. “You finally slept with her, didn’t you?”
I threw the ice tray back into the freezer. Heather does leave me alone if I ask her to, but it’s never worth it: the resultant sulks and flounces and lectures about her unique sensitivity last much longer than the original irritation would have.
“She doesn’t deserve that,” she said. This startled me. Heather and Cassie dislike each other—once, very early on, I brought Cassie home for dinner, and Heather was borderline rude all evening and then spent hours after Cassie left plumping up sofa cushions and straightening rugs and sighing noisily, while Cassie never mentioned Heather again—and I wasn’t sure where this sudden access of sisterhood was coming from.
“Any more than I did,” she added, and went back into her bedroom and 356
Tana French
banged the door. I took my ice to my room and made myself a strong vodka and tonic.
Not unnaturally, I couldn’t sleep. When light started to filter through the curtains, I gave up: I would go in to work early, I decided, see if I could find anything that would tell me what Cassie had said to Rosalind, start preparing the file on Damien to send to the prosecutor’s office. But it was still raining hard, traffic was already bumper to bumper, and of course the Land Rover threw a flat tire halfway down Merrion Road and I had to pull over and fumble about changing it, with rain pouring down my collar and all the drivers behind me leaning irately on their horns as if they would actually have been getting somewhere if it hadn’t been for me. I finally slapped my flasher on the roof, which shut most of them up.
It was almost eight o’clock when I made it into work. The phone, inevitably, rang just as I took off my coat. “Incident room, Ryan,” I said irritably. I was wet and cold and fed up and I wanted to go home and have a long bath and a hot whiskey; I did not want to deal with whoever this was.
“Get the fuck in here,” said O’Kelly. “Now.” And he hung up. My body understood first: I went cold all over, my breastbone tightened and it was hard to breathe. I don’t know how I knew. It was obvious that I was in trouble: if O’Kelly just wants your basic chat, he sticks his head in the door, barks, “Ryan, Maddox, my office,” and disappears again, to be in place behind his desk by the time you can follow. Phone summonses are reserved for when you are in for a bollocking. It could have been anything, of course—a great tip I had missed, Jonathan Devlin complaining about my bedside manner, Sam pissing off the wrong politician; but I knew it wasn’t. O’Kelly was standing up, his back to the window and his fists jammed into his pockets. “Adam fucking Ryan,” he said. “And it didn’t occur to you that this was something I should know?”
I was engulfed by a wave of terrible, searing shame. My face burned. I hadn’t felt it since school, this utter, crushing humiliation, the hollow clutch of your stomach when you know beyond any doubt you’ve been caught, snared, and there is absolutely nothing you can say to deny it or get out of it or make it any better. I stared at the side of O’Kelly’s desk and tried to find pictures in the grain of the fake wood, like a doomed schoolboy waiting for the cane to come out. I had thought of my silence as some gesture of proud, In the Woods 357
lonely independence, something some weatherbeaten Clint Eastwood character would have done, and for the first time I saw it for what it essentially was: shortsighted and juvenile and traitorous and stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Do you have any idea of the extent to which you may have fucked up this investigation?” O’Kelly asked coldly. He always becomes more eloquent when he’s angry, another reason I think he’s brighter than h
e pretends to be.
“Have a quick think about what a good defense attorney could do with this, just on the off-chance that it ever gets as far as a courtroom. A lead detective who was the only eyewitness and the only surviving victim in an unsolved related case—Jesus Christ. While the rest of us dream about pussy, defense attorneys dream about detectives like you. They can accuse you of anything from being incapable of running an unbiased investigation through being a potential suspect in one or both cases yourself. The media and the conspiracy shower and the anti-Garda mob will go wild. Within a week, not one person in the country will remember who’s supposed to be on trial here.”
I stared at him. The sucker punch, coming out of nowhere while I was still reeling from being found out, left me stunned and speechless. This will seem incredible, but I swear it had never occurred to me, not once in twenty years, that I could be a suspect in Peter and Jamie’s disappearance. There was nothing like that in the file, nothing. Ireland’s 1984 belonged more to Rousseau than to Orwell; children were innocents, fresh from God’s hand, it would have been an outrage against nature to suggest that they could be murderers as well. Nowadays, we all know there is no such thing as too young to kill. I was big for twelve, I had someone else’s blood in my shoes, puberty is a strange slippery unbalanced time. Suddenly and clearly I saw Cassie’s face, the day she came back from talking to Kiernan: that tiny twist to the corners of her mouth that said she was keeping something back. I needed to sit down.
“Every guy you’ve put away will demand a retrial on the basis that you have a record of withholding material evidence. Congratulations, Ryan: you just fucked up every case you’ve ever touched.”
“I’m off the case, then,” I said finally and stupidly. My lips felt numb. I had a sudden hallucinatory image of dozens of journalists yapping and screeching at the door of my apartment building, shoving microphones in my face and calling me Adam and demanding gory details. Heather would love it: enough melodrama and martyrdom to keep her going for months. Jesus.
358
Tana French
“No, you’re not off the fucking case,” O’Kelly snapped. “You’re not off the fucking case purely because I don’t want any smart-arse reporter getting curious about why I gave you the boot. The word from now on is damage control. You don’t interview a single witness, you don’t touch a single piece of evidence, you sit at your desk and try not to make anything any worse than it already is. We do everything we can to stop this getting out. And the day Donnelly’s trial is over, if there ever is a trial, you’re suspended from the squad pending investigation.”