In the Woods (6 page)

For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs’ hands away, shout at the hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals’ rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground 30

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river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live.

“I have that same T-shirt,” Cassie said quietly, at my shoulder. “Penney’s kids’ department.” I had seen it on her before, but I knew she wouldn’t wear it again. Violated, that innocence was too vast and final to allow any tongue-in-cheek claim of kinship.

“Here’s what I wanted to show you,” said Sophie briskly. She doesn’t approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps. She pointed to the edge of the stone. “Want gloves?”

“I won’t touch anything,” I said, and crouched in the grass. From this angle I could see that one of the girl’s eyes was a slit open, as if she was only pretending to be asleep, waiting for her moment to jump up and yell, Boo!

Fooled you! A shiny black beetle ticked a methodical path over her forearm. A groove about a finger wide had been carved around the top of the stone, an inch or two from the edge. Time and weather had worn it smooth, almost glossy, but in one place the maker’s handmade chisel had slipped, gouging a chunk out of the side of the groove and leaving a tiny, jagged overhang. A smear of something dark, almost black, clung to the underside.

“Helen here spotted it,” Sophie said. The girl tech glanced up and gave me a shy proud smile. “We’ve swabbed, and it’s blood—I’ll let you know if it’s human. I doubt it has anything to do with our body; her blood had dried by the time she was brought here, and anyway I’d bet this is years old. It could be animal, or it could be from some teenage scrap or whatever, but still, it’s interesting.”

I thought of the delicate hollow by Jamie’s wrist bone, the brown back of Peter’s neck bordered by white after a haircut. I could feel Cassie not looking at me. “I don’t see how it could be connected,” I said. I stood up—it was getting hard to balance on my heels without touching the table—and felt a quick head-rush.

Before we left the site I stood on the little ridge above the girl’s body and turned full circle, imprinting an overview of the scene on my mind: trenches, houses, fields, access and angles and alignments. Along the estate wall, a thin rim of trees had been left untouched, presumably to shield the In the Woods 31

residents’ aesthetic sensibilities from the uncompromisingly archaeological view. One had a broken piece of blue plastic rope heavily knotted around a high branch, a couple of feet dangling. It was frayed and mildewed and implied sinister Gothic history—lynch mobs, midnight suicides—but I knew what it was. It was the remnant of a tire swing.

Though I had come to think of Knocknaree as though it had happened to another and unknown person, some part of me had been here all along. While I doodled in Templemore or sprawled on Cassie’s futon, that relentless child had never stopped spinning in crazy circles on a tire swing, scrambling over a wall after Peter’s bright head, vanishing into the wood in a flash of brown legs and laughter.

There was a time when I believed, with the police and the media and my stunned parents, that I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.

3

Idon’t tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don’t see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories or to sympathetic and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either. My parents know, obviously, and Cassie, and a boarding-school friend of mine called Charlie—he’s a merchant banker in London now; we still keep in touch, occasionally—and this girl Gemma whom I went out with for a while when I was about nineteen (we spent a lot of our time together getting much too drunk, plus she was the intense angsty type and I thought it would make me sound interesting); nobody else.

When I went to boarding school I dropped the Adam and started using my middle name. I’m not sure whether this was my parents’ idea or mine, but I think it was a good one. There are five pages of Ryans in the Dublin phone book alone, but Adam is not a particularly common name, and the publicity was overwhelming (even in England: I used to scan furtively through the newspapers I was supposed to be using to light prefects’ fires, rip out anything relevant, memorize it later in a toilet cubicle before flushing it away). Sooner or later, someone would have made the connection. As it is, nobody is likely to link up Detective Rob and his English accent with little Adam Ryan from Knocknaree.

I knew, of course, that I should tell O’Kelly, now that I was working on a case that looked like it might be connected to that one, but to be frank I never for a second considered doing it. It would have got me booted off the case—you are very definitely not allowed to work on anything where you might be emotionally involved—and probably questioned all over again about that day in the wood, and I failed to see how this would benefit either the case or the community in general. I still have vivid, disturbing memories of being questioned the first time round: male voices with a rough undertow of frustration yammering faintly at the edges of my hearing, while in my mind white clouds drifted endlessly across a vast blue sky and wind sighed In the Woods 33

through some huge expanse of grass. That was all I could see or hear, the first couple of weeks afterwards. I don’t remember feeling anything about this at the time, but in retrospect the thought was a horrible one—my mind wiped clean, replaced by a test pattern—and every time the detectives came back and tried again it resurfaced, by some process of association, seeping in at the back of my head and frightening me into sullen, uncooperative edginess. And they did try—at first every few months, in the school holidays, then every year or so—but I never had anything to tell them, and around the time I left school they finally stopped coming. I felt that this had been an excellent decision, and I could not for the life of me see how reversing it at this stage would serve any useful purpose.

And I suppose, if I’m being honest, it appealed both to my ego and to my sense of the picturesque, the idea of carrying this strange, charged secret through the case unsuspected. I suppose it felt, at the time, like the kind of thing that enigmatic Central Casting maverick would have done. I rang Missing Persons, and they came up with a possible ID almost immediately. Katharine Devlin, aged twelve, four foot nine, slim build, long dark hair, hazel eyes, reported missing from 29 Knocknaree Grove (I remembered that, suddenly: all the streets in the estate called Knocknaree Grove and Close and Place and Lane, everyone’s post constantly going astray) at 10:15 the previous morning, when her mother went to wake her and found her gone. Twelve and up is considered old enough to be a runaway, and she had apparently left the house of her own accord, so Missing Persons had been giving her a day to come home before sending in the troops. They already had the press release typed up, ready to send to the media in time for the evening news. I was disproportionately relieved to have an ID, even a tentative one. Obviously I had known that a little girl—especially a healthy well-groomed little girl, in a place as small as Ireland—can’t turn up dead without someone coming forward to claim her; but a number of things about this case were giving me the willies, and I think a superstitious part of me had believed that this child would remain as nameless as if she had dropped from thin air and that her DNA would turn out to match the blood from my shoes and a variety of other X-Files–type stuff. We got an ID shot from Sophie—a Polaroid, taken from the least disturbing angle, to show to the family—and headed back to the Portakabins.

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Hunt popped out of one of them as we approached, like the little man in old Swiss clocks. “Did you . . . I mean, it is definitely murder, is it? The poor child. Awful.”

“We’re treating it as suspicious,” I said. “What we’ll need to do now is have a quick word with your team. Then we’d like to speak to the person who found the body. The others can go back to work, as long as they stay outside the boundaries of the crime scene. We’ll speak with them later.”

“How will . . . Is there something to show where it—where they shouldn’t be? Tape, and all that.”

“There’s crime-scene tape in place,” I said. “If they stay outside it, they’ll be fine.”

“We’ll need to ask you for the lend of somewhere we can use as an onsite office,” Cassie said, “for the rest of the day and possibly a bit longer. Where would be best?”

“Better use the finds shed,” said Mark, materializing from wherever.

“We’ll need the office, and everywhere else is soupy.” I hadn’t heard the term before, but the view through the Portakabin doors—layers of mud crazed with boot prints, low sagging benches, teetering heaps of farming implements and bicycles and luminous yellow vests that reminded me uncomfortably of my time in uniform—provided a fair explanation.

“As long as it has a table and a few chairs, that’ll be fine,” I said.

“Finds shed,” said Mark, and jerked his head towards a Portakabin.

“What’s up with Damien?” Cassie asked Hunt.

He blinked helplessly, mouth open in a caricature of surprise. “What . . . Damien who?”

“Damien on your team. Earlier you said that Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but Damien wouldn’t be able to show Detective Ryan around. Why’s that?”

“Damien’s one of the ones who found the body,” said Mark, while Hunt was catching up. “Gave them a shock.”

“Damien what?” said Cassie, writing.

“Donnelly,” Hunt said happily, on sure ground at last. “Damien Donnelly.”

“And he was with someone when he found the body?”

“Mel Jackson,” Mark said. “Melanie.”

“Let’s go talk to them,” I said.

The archaeologists were still sitting around the table in their makeshift In the Woods 35

canteen. There were fifteen or twenty of them; their faces turned towards the door, intent and synchronized as baby birds’, when we came in. They were all young, early twenties, and they were made younger by their grungystudent clothes and by a windblown, outdoorsy innocence that, although I was pretty sure it was illusory, made me think of kibbutzniks and Waltons. The girls wore no makeup and their hair was in plaits or ponytails, tightened to be practical rather than cutesy; the guys had stubble and peeling sunburns. One of them, with a guileless teacher’s-nightmare face and a woolly cap, had got bored and started melting stuff onto a broken CD with a lighter flame. The result (bent teaspoon, coins, smoke-packet cellophane, a couple of crisps) was surprisingly pleasing, like one of the less humorless manifestations of modern urban art. There was a food-stained microwave in one corner, and a small inappropriate part of me wanted to suggest that he put the CD in it, to see what would happen.

Cassie and I started to speak at the same time, but I kept going. Officially she was the primary detective, because she was the one who’d said,

“We’ll have it”; but we have never worked that way, and the rest of the squad had grown used to seeing m & r scribbled under “Primary” on the case board, and I had a sudden, stubborn urge to make it clear that I was just as capable of leading this investigation as she was.

“Good morning,” I said. Most of them muttered something. Sculptor Boy said loudly and cheerfully, “Good afternoon!”—which, technically, it was—and I wondered which of the girls he was trying to impress. “I’m Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox. As you know, the body of a young girl was found on this site earlier today.”

One of the guys let his breath out in a little burst and caught it again. He was in a corner, sandwiched protectively between two of the girls, clutching a big steaming mug in both hands; he had short brown curls and a sweet, frank, freckled boy-band face. I was pretty sure this was Damien Donnelly. The others seemed subdued (except for Sculptor Boy) but not traumatized, but he was white under the freckles and holding the mug way too hard.

“We’ll need to talk to each of you,” I said. “Please don’t leave the site until we have. We may not have a chance to get to all of you for a while, so please bear with us if we need you to stay a bit late.”

“Are we, like, suspects?” said Sculptor Boy.

“No,” I said, “but we need to find out if you have any relevant information.”

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“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, and slumped back in his chair. He started to melt a square of chocolate onto the CD, caught Cassie’s eye and put the lighter away. I envied him: I have often wanted to be one of those people who can take anything, the more horrific the better, as a deeply cool adventure.

“One other thing,” I said. “Reporters will probably start arriving at any minute. Do not talk to them. Seriously. Telling them anything, even something that seems insignificant, could damage our whole case. We’ll leave you our cards, in case at any point you think of anything we should know. Any questions?”

“What if they offer us, like, millions?” Sculptor Boy wanted to know. The finds shed was less impressive than I’d expected. In spite of what Mark had said about taking away the valuable stuff, I think my mental image had included gold cups and skeletons and pieces of eight. Instead there were two chairs, a wide desk spread with sheets of drawing paper, and an incredible quantity of what appeared to be broken pottery, stuffed into plastic bags and crammed onto those perforated DIY metal shelves.

“Finds,” said Hunt, flapping a hand at the shelves. “I suppose . . . Well, no, maybe some other time. Some very nice jettons and clothing hooks.”