Authors: Tana French
“Right,” he said, pulling tape out of his pocket and starting to stick the paper to the wall in our corner of the incident room. “Here’s what I’ve been doing all this time.”
It was a huge map of Knocknaree, beautifully detailed: houses, hills, the river, the wood, the keep, all sketched in fine pen and ink with the delicate, flowing precision of a children’s-book illustrator. It must have taken him hours. Cassie whistled.
“Thank you, thankyouverymuch,” Sam said in a deep Elvis voice, grinning. We both abandoned our stacks of reports and went over for a closer look. Much of the map had been divided into irregular blocks, shaded in colored pencil—green, blue, red, a few in yellow. Each block held a tiny, mysterious jumble of abbreviations: Sd J. Downey–GII 11/97; rz ag–ind 8/98. I cocked an interrogative eyebrow at Sam.
“I’ll explain it now.” He bit off another piece of tape and secured the last corner. Cassie and I sat on the edge of the table, where we were close enough to see the details.
“OK. See this?” Sam pointed to two parallel dashed lines curving across the map, cutting through the wood and the dig. “That’s where the motorway’s going to be. The government announced the plans in March of 2000
and bought the land off local farmers over the next year, under a compulsory purchase order. Nothing dodgy there.”
“Well,” Cassie said. “Depending on your point of view.”
“Shhh,” I told her. “Just look at the pretty picture.”
“Ah, you know what I mean,” Sam said. “Nothing you wouldn’t expect. Where it gets interesting is the land around the motorway. That was all agricultural land, too, up until late 1995. Then, bit by bit, over the next four 170
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years, it started getting bought up and rezoned, from agricultural to industrial and residential.”
“By clairvoyants who knew where the motorway was going to be, five years before it was announced,” I said.
“That’s not actually that dodgy either,” Sam said. “There was talk about a motorway coming into Dublin from the southwest—I’ve found newspaper articles—starting in about 1994, when the economic boom kicked in. I talked to a couple of surveyors, and they said this was the most obvious route for a motorway, because of topography and settlement patterns and a load of other things. I didn’t understand the whole of it, but that’s what they said. There’s no reason why property developers couldn’t have done the same thing—got wind of the motorway and hired surveyors to tell them where it was likely to go.”
Neither of us said anything. Sam glanced from me to Cassie and flushed slightly. “I’m not being naïve. Yeah, they might have been tipped off by someone in government—but, then again, they might not. Either way, it’s not something we can prove, and I don’t think it means anything to our case.” I tried not to smile. Sam is one of the most efficient detectives on the squad, but it was very sweet, somehow, how earnest he was about it all.
“Who bought the land?” Cassie asked, relenting.
Sam looked relieved. “A bunch of different companies. Most of them don’t exist, not really; they’re just holding companies, owned by other companies that are owned by other companies. That’s what’s been taking all my time—trying to find out who actually owns the bloody land. So far I’ve traced each buy back to one of three companies: Global Irish Industries, Futura Property Consultants and Dynamo Development. The blue bits here are Global, see; the green ones are Futura, and the red are Dynamo. I’m having a hell of a time finding out who’s behind them, though. Two of them are registered in the Czech Republic, and Futura’s in Hungary.”
“Now that does sound dodgy,” Cassie said. “By any definition.”
“Sure,” Sam said, “but it’s most likely tax evasion. We can pass all this on to the Revenue, but I don’t see how it can have anything to do with our case.”
“Unless Devlin had found out about it and was using it to put pressure on someone,” I said.
Cassie looked skeptical. “Found out how? And he would’ve told us.”
“You never know. He’s weird.”
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“You think everyone’s weird. First Mark—”
“I’m only getting to the interesting bit,” said Sam. I made a face at Cassie and turned towards the map before she could make one back. “So by March of 2000, when the motorway is announced, these three companies own almost all the land around this section of it. But four farmers had held out—
those are the yellow bits. I tracked them down; they’re in Louth now. They’d seen what way things were going, and they knew these buyers were offering pretty good prices, above the going rate for agricultural land; that was why everyone else had taken the money. They talked it over—they’re all mates, these four—and decided to hold on to their land and see if they could work out what was going on. When the motorway plans were announced, obviously, they copped why these fellas wanted their land so badly: for industrial estates and residential developments, now that the motorway was going to make Knocknaree accessible. So these lads figured they’d get the land rezoned themselves, double or triple its value overnight. They applied to the county council for rezoning—one of them applied four times—and got refused, every time.”
He tapped one of the yellow blocks, half full of tiny calligraphic notes. Cassie and I leaned forward to read them: M. Cleary, app rz ag–nd: 5/2000
ref, 11/2000 ref, 6/2001 ref, 1/2002 ref; sd M. Cleary–FPC 8/2002; rz ag–ind 10/2002. Cassie took it in with a brief nod and leaned back on her hands, her eyes still on the map. “So they sold up,” she said quietly.
“Yeah. For around the same price as the others got—good for agricultural land, but a long way under the going rate for industrial or residential. Maurice Cleary wanted to stay put, out of sheer bloody-mindedness as much as anything else—said he wasn’t going to be forced off his land by any eejit in a suit—but he got a visit from some fella from one of the holding companies, who explained to him that they’d be building a pharmaceutical plant backing onto his farm and they couldn’t guarantee that chemical waste wouldn’t seep into the water and poison his cattle. He took it as a threat—I don’t know whether he was right or not, but he sold up anyway. As soon as the Big Three bought the land—under various other names, but it all traces back to them—they applied for rezoning, and got it.”
Cassie laughed, a small angry breath.
“Your Big Three had the county council in their pockets all the way,” I said.
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“Looks like.”
“You’ve talked to the county councilors?”
“Ah, yeah. For all the good it did me. They were very polite and all, but they talked in circles. They could keep going for hours without giving me a single straight answer.” I slid my eyes sideways and caught Cassie’s covert, amused glance: Sam, living with a politician, should have been used to this by now. “They said the rezoning decisions were—hang on . . .” He flipped pages in his notebook. “ ‘Our decisions were on all occasions intended to further the best interests of the community as a whole, as determined based upon the information made available to us at the relevant points in time, and were not impacted by any form of favoritism.’ This wasn’t part of a letter or anything; your man actually said that to me. In conversation, like.”
Cassie mimed sticking a finger down her throat.
“How much does it take to buy a county council?” I asked. Sam shrugged. “For that many decisions, over that amount of time, it must have added up to a decent old figure. The Big Three had a lot of money sunk in that land, one way or another. They wouldn’t have been best pleased at the idea of the motorway moving.”
“How much damage would it actually do them?”
He pointed to two dotted lines, just cutting across the northwest corner of the map. “According to my surveyors, that’s the nearest logical alternative route. That’s the one Move the Motorway wants. It’s a good two miles away, four or five in some places. The land to the north of the original route would still be accessible enough, but these lads all have plenty on the south side as well, and its value would go right down. I talked to a couple of estate agents, pretended I was interested in buying; they all said industrial land right on the motorway was worth up to twice as much as industrial land three miles off it. I haven’t done the exact maths, but it could add up to millions in the difference.”
“That’d be worth a few threatening phone calls,” Cassie said softly.
“There are people,” I said, “to whom that would be worth a few extra grand for a hit man.”
Nobody said anything for a few moments. Outside, the drizzle was starting to clear; a watery shaft of sun fell across the map like a helicopter’s searchlight, picked out a stretch of the river, rippling with delicate penstrokes and shaded over with a dull red haze. Across the room, the floater manning the tip line was trying to get rid of someone too voluble to let him In the Woods 173
finish his sentences. Finally Cassie said, “But why Katy? Why not go after Jonathan?”
“Too obvious, maybe,” I said. “If Jonathan had been murdered, we’d have gone straight after any enemies he might have made through the campaign. With Katy, it can be set up to look like a sex crime, so our attention is diverted away from the motorway angle, but Jonathan still gets the message.”
“Unless I can find out who’s behind these three companies, though,”
Sam said, “I’ve hit a dead end. The farmers don’t know any names, the county council claims they don’t either. I’ve seen a couple of deeds of sale and applications and that, but they were signed by lawyers—and the lawyers say they can’t release their clients’ names to me without permission from the clients.”
“Jesus.”
“What about journalists?” Cassie said suddenly.
Sam shook his head. “What about them?”
“You said there were articles about the motorway as far back as 1994. There must be journalists who followed the story, and they’d have a pretty good idea who bought up the land, even if they’re not allowed to print it. This is Ireland; there’s no such thing as a secret.”
“Cassie,” Sam said, his face lighting up, “you’re a gem. I’m buying you a pint for that.”
“Want to read my door-to-door reports for me instead? O’Gorman structures sentences like George Bush; most of the time I haven’t a clue what he’s on about.”
“Listen, Sam,” I said, “if this pans out, we’ll both be buying you pints for a very long time.” Sam bounded over to his end of the table, giving Cassie a clumsy, happy pat on the shoulder on his way, and started rooting through a file of newspaper clippings like a dog with a brand-new scent, and Cassie and I went back to our reports.
We left the map taped to the wall, where it got on my nerves for reasons I couldn’t quite define. It was the perfection of it, I think, the fragile, enchanting detail: tiny leaves curling in the wood, knobbly little stones in the wall of the keep. I suppose I had some kind of subconscious idea that one day I’d happen to glance up at it and catch two minute, laughing faces ducking out of sight among the pen-and-ink trees. Cassie drew a property developer, with a suit and horns and little dripping fangs, in one of the yellow 174
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patches; she draws like an eight-year-old, but I still jumped about a foot every time I caught the bloody thing leering at me in the corner of my eye. I had started trying—for the first time, really—to remember what had happened in that wood. I prodded tentatively around the edges of it, barely acknowledging even to myself what I was doing, like a kid picking at a scab but afraid to look. I went for long walks—mostly in the early hours of the morning, on nights when I wasn’t staying at Cassie’s and couldn’t sleep—
wandering through the city for hours in something like a trance, listening for delicate little noises in the corners of my mind. I would come to, dazed and blinking, to find myself staring up at the tacky neon sign of an unfamiliar shopping center, or the elegant gables of some Georgian home in the swankier part of Dun Laoghaire, with no idea how I had got there. To some extent, at least, it worked. Unleashed, my mind threw out great streams of images like a slide show running on fast forward, and gradually I learned the knack of reaching out to catch one as they flew past, holding it lightly and watching as it unfurled in my hands. Our parents bringing us into town to shop for First Communion clothes; Peter and I, natty in our dark suits, doubled over howling with unfeeling laughter when Jamie—
after a long, whispered battle with her mother—came out of the girls’ dressing room wearing a meringue and a look of horrified loathing. Mad Mick, the local nutter, who wore overcoats and fingerless gloves all year round and whispered to himself in an endless stream of small, bitter curses—Peter said Mick was crazy because when he was young he had done rude things with a girl and she was going to have a baby, so she hanged herself in the wood and her face went black. One day Mick started screaming, outside Lowry’s shop. The cops took him away in a police car, and we never saw him again. My desk in school, old deep-grained wood with an obsolete hole in the top for an inkwell, worn shiny and inlaid with years of doodles: a hurley stick, a heart with the initials inside scribbled over, des pearse was here 12/10/67. Nothing special, I know, nothing that helped with the case; barely worth mentioning. But remember, I was used to taking it for granted that the first twelve years of my life were more or less gone for good. To me every salvaged scrap seemed tremendously potent and magical, a fragment of Rosetta stone carved with just one tantalizing character.
And on occasion I did manage to remember something that, if not In the Woods 175
useful, could at least be called relevant. Metallica and Sandra, sitting in a tree . . . We, I realized gradually and with an odd sense of insult, had not been the only people who claimed the wood as our territory and brought our private business there. There was a clearing deep in the wood, not far from the old castle—first bluebells in spring, sword fights with whippy branches that left long red weals on your arms, a tangled clump of bushes that by the end of summer was heavy with blackberries—and sometimes, when we had nothing more interesting to do, we used to spy on the bikers there. I remembered only one specific incident, but it had the taste of habit: we had done this before.