Authors: Tana French
Tana French
memories are mainly arranged in rows—rows of gray-white dormitory beds, rows of echoing, bleach-smelling cold showers, rows of boys in archaic uniforms droning Protestant hymns about duty and constancy. To both of us, Sam’s childhood was something out of a storybook; we pictured it in pencil drawings, apple-cheeked children with a laughing sheepdog jumping around them. “Tell us about when you were little,” Cassie would say, snuggling into the futon and pulling her sleeves down over her hands to hold her hot whiskey.
In many ways, though, Sam was the odd man out in these conversations, and a part of me was pleased at this. Cassie and I had spent two years building our routine, our rhythm, our subtle private codes and indicators; Sam was, after all, there by our favor, and it seemed only fair that he should play a supporting role, present but not too present. It never seemed to bother him. He would stretch out on the sofa, tilting his whiskey glass to make the firelight throw spots of amber on his sweater, and watch and smile as Cassie and I argued over the nature of Time, or T. S. Eliot, or scientific explanations for ghosts. Adolescent conversations, no doubt, and made more so by the fact that Cassie and I brought out the brat in each other (“Bite me, Ryan,” she would say, narrowing her eyes at me across the futon, and I would grab her arm and bite her wrist till she yelled for mercy), but I had never had them in my adolescence and I loved them, I loved every moment. I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine. Don’t let me deceive you: the evenings may have been roast chestnuts around a cozy turf fire, but the days were a grim, tense, frustrating slog. Officially we were on the nine-to-five shift, but we were in before eight every morning, seldom left before eight at night, took work home with us—questionnaires to correlate, statements to read, reports to write. Those dinners started at nine o’clock, ten; it was midnight before we stopped talking shop, two in the morning by the time we had unwound enough to go to bed. We developed an intense, unhealthy relationship with caffeine and forgot what it was like not to be exhausted. On the first Friday evening, a very new floater called Corry said, “See you Monday, lads,” and got a round of sardonic laughter and slaps on the back, as well as a humorless “No, Whatsyourname, I’ll see you at eight tomorrow morning and don’t be late” from O’Kelly. Rosalind Devlin hadn’t come in to see me that first Friday, after all. In the Woods 139
Around five o’clock, edgy from waiting and unaccountably worried that something might have happened to her, I rang her mobile. She didn’t answer. She was with her family, I told myself, she was helping with the funeral arrangements or looking after Jessica or crying in her room; but that unease stayed with me, tiny and sharp as a pebble in my shoe. On the Sunday we went to Katy’s funeral, Cassie and Sam and I. The thing about murderers being irresistibly drawn to the graveside is mostly legend, but still, the off-chance was worth it, and anyway O’Kelly had told us to go on the grounds that it was good PR. The church had been built in the 1970s, when concrete was an artistic statement and when Knocknaree was supposed to become a major metropolis any day now; it was huge and chill and ugly, gauche semi-abstract Stations of the Cross, echoes creeping dismally up to the angled concrete ceiling. We stood at the back, in our best unobtrusive dark clothes, and watched as the church filled up: farmers holding flat caps, old women in headscarves, trendy teenagers trying to look blasé. The little white coffin, gold-trimmed and terrible, in front of the altar. Rosalind stumbling up the aisle, shoulders heaving, supported by Margaret on one side and Auntie Vera on the other; behind them Jonathan, glassy-eyed, guided Jessica towards the front pew.
Candles guttered in an unceasing draught; the air smelled of damp and incense and dying flowers. I was light-headed—I had forgotten to eat breakfast—and the whole scene had the glass-covered quality of memory. It took me awhile to realize that this was, in fact, for good reason: I had attended Mass here every Sunday for twelve years, had quite possibly sat through a memorial service for Peter and Jamie in one of the cheap wooden pews. Cassie blew into her hands, surreptitiously, to warm them. The priest was very young and solemn, trying painfully hard to rise to the occasion with his frail seminary arsenal of clichés. A choir of pale little girls in school uniforms—Katy’s schoolmates; I recognized some of the faces—huddled shoulder to shoulder, sharing hymn sheets. The hymns had been chosen to offer comfort, but the voices were thin and uncertain and a few girls kept breaking down. “Be not afraid, I go before you always; come, follow me. . . .”
Simone Cameron caught my eye on her way back from Communion and gave me a tiny stiff nod; her golden eyes were bloodshot, monstrous. The family filed out of their pew one by one and laid mementoes on the coffin: a book from Margaret, a stuffed toy shaped like a ginger cat from Jessica, 140
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from Jonathan the pencil drawing that had hung above Katy’s bed. Last of all Rosalind knelt down and placed a pair of small pink ballet shoes, bound together by their ribbons, on the lid. She stroked the shoes gently and then bent her head onto the coffin and sobbed, her warm brown ringlets tumbling over the white and gold. A faint, inhuman wail rose from somewhere in the front pew.
Outside, the sky was gray-white and wind was whipping leaves off the trees in the churchyard. Reporters were leaning over the railings, cameras firing in swift bursts. We found a discreet corner and scanned the area and the crowd, but unsurprisingly no one rang any alarm bells. “Some turnout,”
Sam said quietly. He was the only one of us who had gone up for Communion. “Let’s get film off some of these lads tomorrow, check if anyone’s here who shouldn’t be.”
“He’s not here,” Cassie said. She dug her hands into her jacket pockets.
“Not unless he has to be. This guy won’t even be reading the newspapers. He’ll change the subject if anyone starts talking about the case.”
Rosalind, moving slowly down the church steps with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, raised her head and saw us. She shook off the supporting arms and ran across the grass, long black dress fluttering in the wind. “Detective Ryan . . .” She caught my hand in both of hers and raised a tear-stained face to me. “I can’t bear it. You have to catch the man who did this to my sister.”
“Rosalind!” Jonathan called hoarsely, somewhere, but she didn’t look away. Her hands were long-fingered and soft and very cold. “We’ll do everything we can,” I said. “Will you come in and talk to me tomorrow?”
“I’ll try. I’m sorry about Friday, but I couldn’t . . .” She glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I couldn’t get away. Please find him, Detective Ryan—
please. . . .”
I felt, more than heard, the spatter of the cameras. One of the photos—
Rosalind’s anguished, upturned profile, an unflattering shot of me with my mouth open—made it onto the front page of a tabloid the next morning, with please give my sister justice below it in letters an inch high, and Quigley gave me grief about it all week.
In the first two weeks of Operation Vestal we did everything you can think of, everything. Between us and the floaters and the local uniforms, we In the Woods 141
talked to everyone who lived within a four-mile radius of Knocknaree and anyone who had ever known Katy. There was one diagnosed schizophrenic on the estate, but he had never hurt anyone in his life, even when he was off his meds, which he hadn’t been in three years. We checked out every Mass card the Devlins got and tracked down every person who’d contributed towards Katy’s fees, and set up surveillance to see who brought flowers to lay on the altar stone.
We interviewed Katy’s best friends—Christina Murphy, Elisabeth McGinnis, Marianne Casey: red-eyed, shaky, brave little girls, with no useful information to offer, but I found them disconcerting nevertheless. I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes), but all the same: Katy’s friends had a poised, savvy awareness of the outside world that jarred with the happy animal oblivion I remembered enjoying at that age.
“We wondered if Jessica had a learning disability, maybe,” Christina said, sounding about thirty, “but we didn’t want to ask. Did . . . I mean, was it a pedophile that killed Katy?”
The answer to this appeared to be no. In spite of Cassie’s feeling that this hadn’t really been a sex crime, we checked out every convicted sex offender in south Dublin, as well as plenty whom we’ve never been able to convict, and we spent hours with the guys who have the thankless job of tracking and trapping pedophiles online. The guy we mostly talked to was called Carl. He was young and skinny, with a lined white face, and he told us that after eight months on this job he was already thinking of quitting: he had two kids under seven, he said, and he couldn’t look at them the same way any more, he felt too dirty to hug them good night after a day of doing what he did. The network, as Carl called it, was buzzing with speculation and titillation about Katy Devlin—I’ll spare you the details—and we read through hundreds of pages of chat transcripts, dispatches from a dark and alien world, but we came up empty. One guy seemed to empathize a little too strongly with Katy’s killer (“I think he just loved her to much she didn’t understand so he got upset”), but when she died he had been online, discussing the relative physical merits of East Asian versus European little girls. Cassie and I both got very drunk that night.
Sophie’s gang went over the Devlins’ house with a fine-tooth comb—
ostensibly collecting fibers and so on, for elimination purposes, but they 142
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reported back that they had found no bloodstains and nothing matching Cooper’s description of the rape weapon. I pulled financial records: the Devlins lived modestly (one family holiday, to Crete, four years earlier on a credit-union loan; Katy’s ballet lessons and Rosalind’s violin; a ’99 Toyota) and had almost no savings, but they weren’t in any debt, their mortgage was almost paid off, they had never even fallen into arrears on their phone bill. There was no dodgy activity on their bank account and no insurance policy on Katy’s life; there was nothing.
The tip line got a record number of calls, an incredible percentage of which were utterly useless: the people whose neighbors looked funny and refused to join the Residents’ Association, the people who had seen sinister men hanging around halfway across the country, the usual assorted whackjobs who had had visions of the murder, the other set of whackjobs explaining at length how this was God’s judgment on our sinful society. Cassie and I spent a full morning on one guy who rang up to tell us that God had punished Katy for her immodesty in exhibiting herself, dressed only in a leotard, to thousands of Irish Times readers. We had high hopes of him, actually—he refused to talk to Cassie, on the grounds that women shouldn’t be working and that her jeans were also immodest (the objective standard for female modesty, he informed me vehemently, was Our Lady of Fatima). But his alibi was impeccable: he had spent the Monday night in the minuscule red-light district off Baggot Street, drunk as a skunk, shrieking fire and brimstone at the hookers and writing down their clients’ plate numbers and getting forcibly removed by the pimps and starting all over again, until the cops had finally thrown him in a cell to sleep it off at around four in the morning. Apparently this happened every few weeks or so; everyone concerned knew the drill and was happy to confirm it, with the odd pungent remark about the guy’s probable sexual proclivities. Those were strange weeks, strange disjointed weeks. Even after all this time, I find it difficult to describe them to you. They were so full of little things, things that at the time seemed insignificant and disconnected as the jumble of objects in some bizarre parlor game: faces and phrases and sitting rooms and phone calls, all running together into a single strobe-light blur. It was only much later, in the stale cold light of hindsight, that the little things rose up and rearranged themselves and clicked neatly into place to form the pattern we should have seen all along.
And then, too, it was so excruciating, that first phase of Operation In the Woods 143
Vestal. The case was, though we refused to admit this even to ourselves, going nowhere. Every lead I found ran me into a dead end; O’Kelly kept giving us rousing, arm-waving speeches about how we couldn’t afford to drop the ball on this one and when the going gets tough the tough get going; the papers were screaming for justice and printing photo enhancements of what Peter and Jamie would look like today if they had unfortunate haircuts. I was as tense as I have ever been in my life. But perhaps the real reason I find it so difficult to talk about those weeks is that—in spite of all that, and of the fact that I know this to be a self-indulgence I cannot afford—I miss them still.
Little things. We pulled Katy’s medical records, of course, straight away. She and Jessica had been a couple of weeks premature, but Katy, at least, had rallied well, and until she was eight and a half she had had nothing but the normal childhood stuff. Then, out of nowhere, she had started getting sick. Stomach cramping, projectile vomiting, diarrhea for days on end; once she had ended up in the emergency room three times in one month. A year ago, after a particularly bad attack, the doctors had done an exploratory laparotomy—the surgery Cooper had spotted, the one that had kept her out of ballet school. They had diagnosed “idiopathic pseudo-obstructive bowel disease with atypical lack of distension.” Reading between the lines, I got the sense that this meant they had ruled out everything else and had absolutely no idea what was wrong with this kid.
“Munchausen by proxy?” I asked Cassie, who was reading over my shoulder, arms folded on the back of my chair. She and I and Sam had staked out a corner of the incident room, as far as possible from the tip line, where we could have a modicum of privacy as long as we kept our voices down. She shrugged, made a face. “It could be. But there’s stuff that doesn’t fit. Most Munchausen mothers have a background around the edges of medicine—nurse’s aide, something like that.” Margaret, according to the background check, had left school at fifteen and worked in Jacobs’s biscuit factory until she got married. “And check out the admission records. Half the time Margaret’s not even the one bringing Katy into the hospital: it’s Jonathan, Rosalind, Vera, once it’s a teacher. . . . For Munchausen-by-proxy mothers, the whole point is the attention and sympathy they get from doctors and nurses. She wouldn’t let someone else be at the center of all that.”