In the Woods (37 page)

“All the publicity about Katy—the newspaper article, the fund-raiser . . . That could’ve set her off.”

“Cassie,” I said, taking a deep breath, “I’m just a simple small-town boy. I prefer to concentrate on the obvious. The obvious, right now, is Jonathan Devlin.”

“I’m only saying. It might come in useful.” She reached over and ruffled my hair, quickly and clumsily. “Go for it, small-town boy. Break a leg.”

Jonathan was home, alone. Margaret had taken the girls to her sister’s, he said, and I wondered how long ago and why. He looked awful. He had lost so much weight that his clothes and his face sagged loosely, and his hair was cut even shorter, tight to his head; it gave him a lonely, desperate look, somehow, and I thought of ancient civilizations where the bereaved offered their hair on loved ones’ funeral pyres. He motioned me to the sofa and took an armchair opposite me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. The house felt deserted; there was no smell of cooking food, no TV or washing machine in the background, no books left open on chair arms, nothing to imply that when I arrived he had been doing anything at all.

He didn’t offer me tea. I asked how they were getting on (“How do you In the Woods 227

think?”), explained that we were following up various leads, fended off his terse questions about specifics, asked if he had thought of anything else that might be relevant. The wild urgency I’d felt in the car had vanished as soon as he opened the door; I felt calmer and more lucid than I had in weeks. Margaret and Rosalind and Jessica could have come back at any moment, but somehow I was sure they wouldn’t. The windows were grimy, and the late-afternoon sun filtering through them slid confusingly off glass-fronted cabinets and the polished wood of the dining table, giving the room a streaky, underwater luminescence. I could hear a clock ticking in the kitchen, heavy and achingly slow, but apart from that there wasn’t a sound, even outside the house; all of Knocknaree might have gathered itself up and vanished into thin air, except me and Jonathan Devlin. It was just the two of us, facing each other across the little ringed coffee table, and the answers were so close I could hear them scuffling and twittering in the corners of the room; there was no need to hurry.

“Who’s the Shakespeare fan?” I asked eventually, putting my notebook away. It wasn’t relevant, obviously, but I thought it might lower his guard a little, and it had been intriguing me.

Jonathan frowned, irritated. “What?”

“Your daughters’ names,” I said. “Rosalind, Jessica, Katharine with an A; they’re all out of Shakespeare comedies. I assumed it was deliberate.”

He blinked, looking at me for the first time with something like warmth, and half-smiled. It was a rather engaging smile, pleased but shy, like a boy who’s been waiting for someone to notice his new Scout badge.

“Do you know, you’re the first person ever to pick up on that? Yeah, that was me.” I raised an encouraging eyebrow. “I went through a kind of selfimprovement patch, I suppose you’d call it, after we got married—trying to work my way through all the things you’re supposed to read: you know, Shakespeare, Milton, George Orwell. . . . I wasn’t mad about Milton, but Shakespeare— he was hard going, but I read my way through the lot, in the end. I used to tease Margaret that if the twins were a boy and a girl we’d have to call them Viola and Sebastian, but she said they’d be laughed out of it at school. . . .”

His smile faded and he looked away. I knew this was my chance, now while he liked me. “They’re beautiful names,” I said. He nodded absently.

“One more thing: are you familiar with the names Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?”

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Tana French

“Why?” Jonathan asked. I thought I caught a flicker of wariness in his eyes, but his back was to the window and it was hard to tell.

“They’ve been mentioned in the course of our investigation.”

His eyebrows went down sharply and I saw his shoulders stiffen like a fighting dog’s. “Are they suspects?”

“No,” I said firmly. Even if they had been, I wouldn’t have told him—

not just because of procedure, but because he was way too volatile. That furious, spring-loaded tension: if he was innocent, of Katy’s death at least, then one hint of uncertainty in my voice and he would probably have shown up on their doorsteps with an Uzi. “We’re just following up every lead. Tell me about them.”

He stared at me for another second; then he slumped, leaning back in the chair. “We were friends when we were kids. We’ve been out of touch for years now.”

“When did you become friends?”

“When our families moved out here. Nineteen seventy-two, it would have been. We were the first three families on the estate, up at the top end—

the rest was still being built. We had the whole place to ourselves. We used to play on the building sites, after the builders had gone home—it was like a huge maze. We would have been six, seven.”

There was something in his voice, some deep, accustomed undercurrent of nostalgia, that made me realize what a lonely man he was; not just now, not just since Katy’s death. “And how long did you remain friends?” I asked.

“Hard to say, exactly. We started going our separate ways when we were nineteen, about, but we kept in touch for a while longer. Why? What does this have to do with anything?”

“We have two separate witnesses,” I said, keeping my voice expressionless, “who say that, in the summer of 1984, you, Cathal Mills and Shane Waters participated in the rape of a local girl.”

He whipped upright, his hands jerking into fists. “What—what the fuck does that have to do with Katy? Are you accusing—what the fuck!”

I gazed blandly back and let him finish. “I can’t help noticing that you haven’t denied the allegation,” I said.

“And I haven’t admitted to a bloody thing, either. Do I need a lawyer for this?”

No lawyer in the world would let him say another word. “Look,” I said, leaning forward and switching to an easy, confidential tone, “I’m from the In the Woods 229

Murder squad, not Sex Crime. I’m only interested in a twenty-year-old rape if—”

“Alleged rape.”

“Fair enough, alleged rape. I don’t care either way unless it has some bearing on a murder. That’s all I’m here to find out.”

Jonathan caught his breath to say something; for a second I thought he was going to order me to leave. “We need to get one thing straight if you’re going to spend another second in my house,” he said. “I never laid a finger on any of my girls. Never.”

“Nobody’s accused you of—”

“You’ve been dancing around it since the first day you came here, and I don’t like insinuations. I love my daughters. I hug them good night. That’s it. I’ve never once touched any of them in any way that anyone could call wrong. Is that clear?”

“Crystal,” I said, trying not to let it sound sarcastic.

“Good.” He nodded, one sharp, controlled jerk. “Now, about this other thing: I’m not stupid, Detective Ryan. Just assuming that I did something that might land me in jail, why the hell would I tell you about it?”

“Listen,” I said earnestly, “we’re considering the possibility”—Bless you, Cassie—“that the victim might have had something to do with Katy’s death, as revenge for this rape.” His eyes widened. “It’s only an outside chance and we have absolutely no solid evidence, so I don’t want you to put too much weight on this. In particular, I don’t want you to contact her in any way. If we do turn out to have a case, that could ruin the whole thing.”

“I wouldn’t contact her. Like I said, I’m not stupid.”

“Good. I’m glad that’s understood. But I do need to hear your version of what happened.”

“And then what? You charge me with it?”

“I can’t guarantee you anything,” I said. “I’m certainly not going to arrest you. It’s not up to me to decide whether to file charges—that’s down to the prosecutor’s office and the victim—but I doubt she’ll be willing to come forward. And I haven’t cautioned you, so anything you say wouldn’t be admissible in court anyway. I just need to know how it happened. It’s up to you, Mr. Devlin. How badly do you want me to find Katy’s killer?”

Jonathan took his time. He stayed where he was, leaning forward, hands clasped, and gave me a long, suspicious glare. I tried to look trustworthy and not blink.

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Tana French

“If I could make you understand,” he said finally, almost to himself. He pulled himself restlessly up from the chair and went to the window, leaned back against the glass; every time I blinked his silhouette rose up in front of my eyelids, bright-edged and looming against the barred panes. “Have you any friends you’ve known since you were a little young fella?”

“Not really, no.”

“Nobody knows you like people you grew up with. I could run into Cathal or Shane tomorrow, after all this time, and they’d still know more about me than Margaret does. We were closer than most brothers. None of us had what you’d call a happy family: Shane never knew his da, Cathal’s was a waster who never did a decent day’s work in his life, my parents were both drunks. I’m not saying any of this as an excuse, mind you; I’m only trying to tell you what we were like. When we were ten we did the bloodbrothers thing—did you ever do that? cut your wrists, press them together?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I wondered, fleetingly, whether we had. It felt like the kind of thing we would have done.

“Shane was scared to cut himself, but Cathal talked him into it. He could sell holy water to the pope, Cathal.” He was smiling, a little; I could hear it in his voice. “When we saw The Three Musketeers on the telly, Cathal decided that would be our motto: all for one and one for all. We had to have each other’s back, he said, there was nobody else on our side. He was right, too.” His head turned towards me, a brief, measuring look. “What are you—thirty, thirty-five?”

I nodded.

“You missed the worst of it. When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn’t go into Daddy’s business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college—and we didn’t—that just put it off for a few years. We’d nothing to do only hang around, nothing to look forward to, nothing to aim for; nothing at all, except each other. I don’t know if you understand what a powerful thing that is. Dangerous.”

I wasn’t sure what I thought of the direction in which this appeared to be going, but I felt a sudden, unwelcome dart of something like envy. In school I had dreamed of friendships like this: the steel-tempered closeness of soldiers in battle or prisoners of war, the mystery attained only by men in extremis.

Jonathan took a breath. “Anyway. Then Cathal started going out with In the Woods 231

this girl—Sandra. It felt strange, at first: we’d all been out with girls here and there, but none of us had ever had a serious girlfriend before. But she was lovely, Sandra was; lovely. Always laughing, and this innocence about her—

I think probably she was my first love, as well. . . . When Cathal said she fancied me, too, wanted to be with me, I couldn’t believe my luck.”

“This didn’t strike you as—well, slightly odd, to say the least?”

“Not as odd as you’d think. It sounds mad now, yeah; but we’d always shared everything. It was a rule with us. This just felt like more of the same. I was going out with a girl for a while around the same time, sure, and she went with Cathal, not a bother on her—I think she only went out with me in the first place because he was taken. He was a lot better looking than I was.”

“Shane,” I said, “appears to have fallen out of the loop.”

“Yeah. That was where it all went wrong. Shane found out, and he went mental. He was always mad about Sandra, too, I think; but more than that, he felt like we’d betrayed him. He was devastated. We had huge rows about it practically every day, for weeks and weeks. Half the time he wouldn’t even talk to us. I was miserable, felt like everything was falling apart—you know how it is when you’re that age, any little thing is the end of the world. . . .”

He stopped. “What happened then?” I said.

“Then Cathal got it into his head that, since it was Sandra had come between us, it would have to be Sandra brought us together again. He was obsessed, wouldn’t stop talking about it. If we were all with the same girl, he said, it’d be the final seal on our friendship—like the blood-brothers thing, only stronger. I don’t know, any more, if he really believed that, or if he just . . . I don’t know. He had an odd streak in him, Cathal, especially when it came to things like . . . Well. I had my doubts, but he kept on and on about it, and of course Shane was behind him all the way. . . .”

“It didn’t occur to any of you to ask Sandra’s opinion about this?”

Jonathan let his head fall back against the glass, with a soft bump. “We should have,” he said quietly, after a moment. “God knows we should have. But we lived in a world of our own, the three of us. Nobody else seemed real—I was wild about Sandra, but it was the same way I was wild about Princess Leia or whoever else we fancied that week, not the way you love a real woman. Not an excuse—there’s no excuse for what we did, none. But a reason.”

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“What happened?”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “We were in the wood,” he said. “The four of us—I wasn’t with Claire any more. In this clearing where we used to go sometimes. I don’t know would you remember, but we had a beauty of a summer that year—hot as Greece or somewhere, never a cloud in the sky, bright till after ten at night. We spent every day outside, in the wood or hanging around at the edge of it. We were all burned black—I looked like an Italian student only for these mad white patches round my eyes from my sunglasses. . . .

“It was late one afternoon. We’d all been in the clearing all day, drinking and having a few joints. I think we were pretty much off our faces; not just the cider and the gear, but the sun, and the giddy way you get when you’re that age. . . . I’d been arm-wrestling with Shane—he was in a half-decent mood for once—and I’d let him win, and we were messing, pushing each other and fighting on the grass, you know the way young fellas do. Cathal and Sandra were yelling, cheering us on, and then Cathal started tickling Sandra—she was laughing and screaming. They rolled under our feet then; we went over in a heap on top of them. And all of a sudden Cathal yelled,