Authors: Tana French
“And they went out to the road.”
Mark shrugged. “They cut down that way, diagonal across the site, but I didn’t see where they ended up. The trees got in the way.”
“Do you think whoever it was saw your fire?”
“How would I know?”
“OK, Mark,” Cassie said, “this is important. Did you see a car go past around that time? Or maybe a car stopped on the road?”
Mark took his time. “Nah,” he said, finally and definitely. “A couple went past when I first got there, but nothing after about eleven. They go to bed early around there; all the lights on the estate are out by midnight.”
If he was telling the truth, then he had just done us a huge favor. Both the kill site and the secondary scene—wherever Katy’s body had been hidden through Tuesday—were almost definitely within walking distance of the estate, quite probably on it, and our field of suspects no longer included most of the population of Ireland. “Are you sure you would have noticed if a car had gone past?” I asked.
“I noticed the torch, didn’t I?”
“Which you’ve only just remembered,” I said.
His lip curled. “My memory’s grand, thanks. I didn’t think it was important. This was Monday night, yeah? I didn’t even pay much attention. I thought it was someone heading home from a mate’s house, maybe, or one of the local kids going to meet someone—they hang out on the site at night, sometimes. Not my problem, either way. They weren’t giving me any hassle.”
At this point Bernadette, the squad administrator, tapped on the interviewroom door; when I opened it, she said disapprovingly, “Detective Ryan, there’s a telephone call for you. I told the person you couldn’t be disturbed, 100
Tana French
but she said it was important.” Bernadette has been with Murder for something like twenty-four years, her entire working life. She has a petulant marsupial face, five work outfits (one for each day of the week, which is helpful if you’re too tired to remember what day it is) and, we all think, a Smithersstyle hopeless passion for O’Kelly. There’s a squad sweepstakes on when they’ll finally get together.
“Go ahead,” said Cassie. “I can finish up here—Mark, we just need to take your statement. Then we can give you a lift back to work.”
“I’ll take the bus.”
“No you won’t,” I said. “We need to verify your alibi with Mel, and it’s not exactly verification if you have a chance to talk to her first.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Mark snapped, thudding back in his chair. “I’m not making it up. Ask anyone. It was all round the team before we even got up.”
“Don’t worry, we will,” I said cheerfully, and left him and Cassie to it. I went back to the incident room and waited for Bernadette to put the call through, which she did in her own time, to show me it wasn’t her job to come looking for me. “Ryan,” I said.
“Detective Ryan?” She sounded breathless and bashful, but I knew the voice instantly. “It’s Rosalind. Rosalind Devlin.”
“Rosalind,” I said, flipping my notebook open and hunting for a pen.
“How are you?”
“Oh, I’m fine.” A small, brittle laugh. “Well, actually, no, I’m not. I’m devastated. But I think we’re all still in shock, really. It hasn’t sunk in yet. You never imagine something like this happening, do you?”
“No,” I said gently. “I know how you must be feeling. Can I do anything to help?”
“I was wondering . . . do you think I could come in and talk to you sometime? Only if it’s no trouble. There’s something I need to ask you.” A car went by in the background; she was outside somewhere, on a mobile or a pay phone.
“Of course. This afternoon?”
“No,” she said hastily. “No—not today. You see, they’ll be back any minute, they’ve only gone to . . . to view the . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Could I come tomorrow? Sometime in the afternoon?”
“Whenever you like,” I said. “Let me give you my mobile number, OK?
In the Woods 101
Then you can reach me any time you need to. Just give me a ring tomorrow, and we’ll meet up.”
She took it down, murmuring the numbers under her breath. “I have to go,” she said hurriedly. “Thank you, Detective Ryan. Thank you so much,”
and, before I could say good-bye, she was gone.
I checked the interview room: Mark was writing, and Cassie had managed to make him laugh. I flipped my fingernails against the glass. Mark’s head snapped up, and Cassie threw me a tiny smile and a fractional shake of her head: apparently they were managing to get by without me. This, as you might expect, was fine with me. Sophie would be waiting for the blood sample we’d promised her; I left Cassie a “Back in 5” Post-it on the door of the interview room, and went down to the basement.
Evidence storage procedures in the early 1980s, especially for cold cases, were not sophisticated. Peter and Jamie’s box was on a high shelf and I had never taken it down before, but I knew, from the lumpy shifting when I had pulled out the main file from the top, that there were other things in there, and those had to be whatever evidence Kiernan and McCabe and their team had collected. The case had four other boxes, but they were labeled, in neat black lettering as careful as a child’s: 2) Questionaires, 3) Questionaires, 4) Statements, 5) Leads. Either Kiernan or McCabe couldn’t spell. I tugged the main box off the shelf, dust-motes fountaining through the bare lightbulb’s glare, and dumped it on the floor.
It was half full of plastic evidence bags, furred with thick layers of dust that gave the objects inside a shadowy, sepia-toned look, like mysterious artifacts found by chance in a centuries-sealed chamber. I pulled them out gently, one by one, blew on them and laid them in a row on the flagstones. There was very little, for a major case. A child’s watch, a glass tumbler, a dull-orange Donkey Kong game, all coated in what looked like fingerprint powder. Various scraps of trace evidence, mainly dried leaves and chips of bark. A pair of white gym socks stippled with dark brown, with neat square holes where swatches had been razored out for testing. A grubby white T-shirt; faded denim shorts, the hems starting to fray. Last of all the runners, with their childish scuff marks and their stiff, black, buckled lining. They were the padded kind, but the blood had soaked almost all the way through: the outsides had tiny dark stains spreading from the stitching 102
Tana French
holes, splashes around the top, faint brownish patches where it lay just beneath the surface. I had been bracing myself quite hard for this, actually. I think I’d had some vague idea that seeing the evidence would trigger a dramatic flash flood of memories; I hadn’t exactly expected to end up in a fetal position on the basement floor, but there was a reason I’d picked a moment when no one was likely to come looking for me. In the event, though, I realized with a definite sense of anticlimax that none of this stuff looked even remotely familiar—except, of all things, Peter’s Donkey Kong game, which was presumably only there for fingerprint comparison and which ignited a brief and fairly useless flare of memory (me and Peter sitting on sunlit carpet working a button each, concentrated and elbowing, Jamie leaning over our shoulders and yelping excited instructions) so intense I could practically hear the game’s brisk, bossy chirrups and beeps. The clothes, though I knew they were mine, rang no bells whatsoever. It seemed inconceivable that I had actually got up one morning and put them on. All I could see was the pathos of them—how small the T-shirt was, the Biro Mickey Mouse on the toe of one runner. Twelve had seemed terrifyingly grown up, at the time. I picked up the T-shirt bag between finger and thumb and turned it over. I had read about the rips across the back, but I had never seen them before, and somehow I found them more shocking even than those terrible shoes. There was something unnatural about them—the perfect parallels, the neat shallow arcs; a stark, implacable impossibility. Branches? I thought, staring blankly down at them. Had I jumped out of a tree, or ducked through bushes, and somehow caught my shirt on four sharp twigs at once?
My back itched, between the shoulder blades.
Suddenly and compulsively, I wanted to be somewhere else. The low ceiling pressed down claustrophobically and the dusty air was hard to breathe; it was oppressively quiet, only the odd ominous vibration in the walls when a bus went past outside. I practically threw all the stuff back into the box, heaved it onto its shelf and snatched up the shoes, which I had left on the floor, ready to send to Sophie.
It was only then that it hit me, there in the chilly basement with halfforgotten cases all around and tiny sharp crackles coming from the box as the plastic bags settled: the immensity of what I had set in motion. Somehow, what with everything that was on my mind, I had failed to think this through. The old case seemed such a private thing that I had forgotten it In the Woods 103
could have implications in the outside world, too. But I (what the hell, I wondered, had I been thinking?) was about to take these shoes up to the buzzing incident room and put them in a padded envelope and tell one of the floaters to take them to Sophie.
It would have happened anyway, sooner or later—missing-child cases are never closed, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of running the old evidence through new technology. But if the lab managed to get DNA off the runners, and especially if they somehow matched it to the blood from the altar stone, this would no longer be just a minor lead in the Devlin case, a long shot between us and Sophie: the old case would explode back into active status. Everyone from O’Kelly up would want to make a huge deal of this shiny new high-tech evidence: the police never give up, no unsolved case is ever closed, the public can rest assured that behind the scenes we are moving in our own mysterious ways. The media would leap on the possibility of a serial child-killer in our midst. And we would have to follow through; we would need DNA samples from Peter’s parents and Jamie’s mother and—oh, God—from Adam Ryan. I looked down at the shoes and had a sudden mental image of a car, brakes come loose, drifting down a hill: slowly at first, harmless, almost comic, then gathering momentum and transforming into a merciless wrecking ball. 7
W e took Mark back to the site and left him to brood darkly in the back of the car while I talked to Mel and Cassie had a quick word with their housemates. When I asked her how she’d spent Tuesday night, Mel went sunburn-red and couldn’t look at me, but she said she and Mark had talked in the garden till late, ended up kissing and spent the rest of the night in his room. He had only left her once, for no more than two minutes, to go to the bathroom. “We’ve always got on great—the others used to take the piss out of us about it. I guess it was on the cards.” She also confirmed that Mark occasionally spent the night away from the house, and that he’d told her he slept in Knocknaree wood: “I don’t know if any of the others would know that, though. He’s kind of private about it.”
“You don’t find it a little odd?”
She shrugged clumsily, rubbing at the back of her neck. “He’s an intense guy. That’s one of the things I like about him.” God, she was young; I had a sudden urge to pat her shoulder and remind her to use protection. The rest of the housemates told Cassie that Mark and Mel had been the last ones left in the garden Tuesday night, that they had come out of his room together the next morning and that everyone had spent the first few hours of the day, until Katy’s body turned up, mercilessly giving them grief about it. They also said Mark sometimes stayed out, but they didn’t know where he went. Their version of “an intense guy” ranged from “a little weird” through “a total slave driver.”
We got more plasticky sandwiches from Lowry’s shop and had lunch sitting on the estate wall. Mark was organizing the archaeologists into some new activity, gesturing in big militant jerks like a traffic cop. I could hear Sean complaining vociferously about something, and everyone else yelling at him to shut up and stop skiving and get a grip.
“I swear to God, Macker, if I find it on you, I’m going to shove it so far up your hole—”
In the Woods 105
“Ooh, Sean’s PMS-ing.”
“Have you checked up your hole?”
“Maybe the cops took it away with them, Sean, better lie low for a while.”
“Get to work, Sean,” Mark shouted across.
“I can’t work without my fucking trowel !”
“Borrow one.”
“Spare over here,” someone yelled. A trowel flew spinning from hand to hand, light spiking off the blade, and Sean caught it and settled down to work, still grumbling.
“If you were twelve,” Cassie said, “what would get you out here in the middle of the night?”
I thought of the faint gold circle of light, bobbing like a will-o’-the-wisp among the severed tree roots and the shards of ancient walls; the silent watcher in the wood. “We did it a couple of times,” I said. “Spent the night in our tree house. This was all wood back then, right up to the road.” Sleeping bags on rough boards, torch-beams close against comic books. A rustle, and the beams skidding up to cross on a pair of golden eyes, rocking wild and luminous only a few trees away; all of us yelling, and Jamie leaping up to fire a spare satsuma as the thing bounded away with a crash of leaves—
Cassie glanced at me over her juice carton. “Yeah, but you were with your mates. What would get you out here on your own?”
“Meeting someone. A dare. Possibly getting something important that I’d forgotten here. We’ll talk to her friends, see if she said anything to them.”
“This wasn’t a random thing,” Cassie said. The archaeologists had put the Scissor Sisters back on and one of her feet swung, absently, in time with the beat. “Even if it wasn’t the parents. This guy didn’t go out and pick up the first vulnerable kid he saw. He put a lot of planning into this. He wasn’t just looking to kill a kid; he was after Katy.”
“And he knew the place pretty well,” I said, “if he could find the altar stone in the dark, carrying a body. It’s looking more and more like a local boy.” The wood was gay and sparkly in the sunlight, all birdsong and flirting leaves; I could feel the rows upon rows of identical, trim, innocuous houses ranged behind me. This fucking place, I almost said, but I didn’t. After the sandwiches we went looking for Auntie Vera and the cousins. It was a hot, still afternoon, but the estate had an eerie Marie Celeste emptiness, all 106