In the Woods (8 page)

I don’t want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past, smiling sadly at the world from behind a bittersweet veil of cigarette smoke and memories. Knocknaree didn’t leave me with night terrors or impotence or a pathological fear of trees or any of the other good stuff that, in a made-for-TV movie, would have led me to a therapist and redemption and a more communicative relationship with my supportive but frustrated wife. To be honest, I could go for months on end In the Woods 43

without ever thinking about it. Occasionally some newspaper or other would run a feature on missing people and there they would be, Peter and Jamie, smiling from the cover of a Sunday supplement in grainy photographs made premonitory by hindsight and overuse, between vanished tourists and runaway housewives and all the mythic, murmuring ranks of Ireland’s lost. I’d see the article and notice, detachedly, that my hands were shaking and it was hard to breathe, but this was purely a physical reflex and only lasted a few minutes anyway.

I suppose the whole thing must have had its effects on me, but it would be impossible—and, to my mind, pointless—to figure out exactly what they were. I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are; and a few weeks later I went to boarding school, which shaped and scarred me in far more dramatic, obvious ways. It would feel naïve and basically cheesy to unweave my personality, hold up a strand and squeal: Golly, look, this one’s from Knocknaree! But here it was again, all of a sudden, resurfacing smugly and immovably in the middle of my life, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

“That poor kid,” Cassie said suddenly, out of nowhere. “That poor, poor little kid.”

The Devlins’ house was a flat-fronted semi-d with a patch of grass in front, exactly like all the others on the estate. All of the neighbors had made frantic little declarations of individuality via ferociously trimmed shrubs or geraniums or something, but the Devlins just mowed their lawn and left it at that, which in itself argued a certain level of originality. They lived halfway up the estate, five or six streets from the site; far enough that they had missed the uniforms, the techs, the morgue van, all the terrible, efficient bustle that in one glance would have told them everything they needed to know.

When Cassie rang the bell, a man about forty answered. He was a few inches shorter than me, starting to thicken around the middle, with neatly clipped dark hair and big bags under his eyes. He was wearing a cardigan and khaki trousers and holding a bowl of cornflakes, and I wanted to tell him that this was all right, because I already knew what he would learn over the next few months: this is the kind of thing people remember in agony all 44

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their lives, that they were eating cornflakes when the police came to tell them their daughter was dead. I once saw a woman break down on the witness stand, sobbing so hard they had to call a recess and give her a sedative shot, because when her boyfriend was stabbed she was at a yoga class.

“Mr. Devlin?” Cassie said. “I’m Detective Maddox, and this is Detective Ryan.”

His eyes widened. “From Missing Persons?” There was mud on his shoes, and the hems of his trousers were wet. He must have been out looking for his daughter, somewhere in the wrong fields, come in to get something to eat before he tried again and again.

“Not exactly,” Cassie said gently. I mostly leave these conversations to her, not just out of cowardice but because we both know she is much better at it. “May we come in?”

He stared at the bowl, put it down clumsily on the hall table. A little milk slopped onto sets of keys and a child’s pink cap. “What do you mean?”

he demanded; fear put an aggressive edge on his voice. “Have you found Katy?”

I heard a tiny sound and looked over his shoulder. A girl was standing at the foot of the stairs, holding on to the banister with both hands. The interior of the house was dim even in the sunny afternoon, but I saw her face, and it transfixed me with a bright shard of something like terror. For an unimaginable, swirling moment I knew I was seeing a ghost. It was our victim; it was the dead little girl on the stone table. I heard a roaring noise in my ears. A split second later, of course, the world righted itself, the roaring subsided and I realized what I was seeing. We wouldn’t be needing the ID shot. Cassie had seen her as well. “We’re not sure yet,” she said. “Mr. Devlin, is this Katy’s sister?”

“Jessica,” he said hoarsely. The little girl edged forward; without taking his eyes from Cassie’s face, Devlin reached back, caught her shoulder and pulled her into the doorway. “They’re twins,” he said. “Identical. Is this—

Have you—Did you find a girl who looks like this?” Jessica stared somewhere between me and Cassie. Her arms hung limply by her sides, hands invisible under an oversized gray sweater.

“Please, Mr. Devlin,” Cassie said. “We need to come in and speak with you and your wife in private.” She flicked a glance at Jessica. Devlin looked down, saw his hand on her shoulder and moved it away, startled. It stayed frozen in midair, as if he had forgotten what to do with it. In the Woods 45

He knew, by that point; of course he knew. If she had been found alive, we would have said so. But he moved back from the door automatically and made a vague gesture to one side, and we went into the sitting room. I heard Devlin say, “Go back upstairs to your Auntie Vera.” Then he followed us in and closed the door.

The terrible thing about the sitting room was how normal it was, how straight out of some satire on suburbia. Lace curtains, a flowery four-piece suite with those little covers on the arms and headrests, a collection of ornate teapots on top of a sideboard, everything polished and dusted to an immaculate shine: it seemed—victims’ homes and even crime scenes almost always do—far too banal for this level of tragedy. The woman sitting in an armchair matched the room: heavy in a solid shapeless way, with a helmet of permed hair and big, drooping blue eyes. There were deep lines from her nose to her mouth.

“Margaret,” Devlin said. “They’re detectives.” His voice was taut as a guitar string, but he didn’t go to her; he stayed by the sofa, fists clenched in the pockets of his cardigan. “What is it?” he demanded.

“Mr. and Mrs. Devlin,” Cassie said, “there’s no easy way to say this. The body of a little girl has been found on the archaeological site beside this estate. I’m afraid we think she’s your daughter Katharine. I’m so sorry.”

Margaret Devlin let out her breath as if she’d been hit in the stomach. Tears began to fall down her cheeks, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Are you sure?” Devlin snapped. His eyes were huge. “How can you be sure?”

“Mr. Devlin,” Cassie said gently, “I’ve seen the little girl. She looks exactly like your daughter Jessica. We’ll be asking you to come see the body tomorrow, to confirm her identity, but there’s no doubt in my mind. I’m sorry.”

Devlin swung towards the window, away again, pressed a wrist against his mouth, lost and wild-eyed. “Oh, God,” said Margaret. “Oh, God, Jonathan—”

“What happened to her?” Devlin cut in harshly. “How did she—how—”

“I’m afraid it looks as if she was murdered,” Cassie said. Margaret was heaving herself up out of the chair, in slow, underwater movements. “Where is she?” The tears were still pouring down her face, but her voice was eerily calm, almost brisk.

“She’s with our doctors,” Cassie said gently. If Katy had died differently, we might have taken them to her. But as it was, her skull smashed open, her 46

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face covered in blood . . . At the post-mortem, the morgue guys would wash off at least that gratuitous layer of horror.

Margaret looked around, dazed, patting mechanically at the pockets of her skirt. “Jonathan. I can’t find my keys.”

“Mrs. Devlin,” Cassie said, putting a hand on her arm. “I’m afraid we can’t take you to Katy yet. The doctors need to examine her. We’ll let you know as soon as you can see her.”

Margaret twitched away from her and moved in slow motion towards the door, dragging a clumsy hand across her face to smear the tears away. “Katy. Where is she?” Cassie shot a glance of appeal over her shoulder at Jonathan, but he was leaning both palms against the windowpane and staring out, unseeing, breathing too fast and too hard.

“Please, Mrs. Devlin,” I said urgently, trying to unobtrusively get between her and the door. “I promise we’ll take you to Katy as soon as we can, but at the moment you can’t see her. It’s simply not possible.”

She stared at me, red-eyed, her mouth hanging open. “My baby,” she gasped. Then her shoulders slumped and she started to weep, in deep, hoarse, unrestrained sobs. Her head fell back and she let Cassie take her gently by the shoulders and ease her back into her chair.

“How did she die?” Jonathan demanded, still staring fixedly out the window. The words were blurred, as if his lips were numb. “What way?”

“We won’t know that until the doctors have finished examining her,” I said. “We’ll keep you informed of every development.”

I heard light footsteps running down the stairs; the door flew open, and a girl stood in the doorway. Behind her Jessica was still in the hall, sucking a lock of hair and staring in at us.

“What is it?” said the girl breathlessly. “Oh, God . . . is it Katy?”

Nobody answered. Margaret pressed a fist to her mouth, turning her sobs into terrible choking sounds. The girl looked from face to face, her lips parted. She was tall and slim, with chestnut curls tumbling down her back, and it was hard to tell how old she was—eighteen or twenty, maybe, but she was made up far more expertly than any teenager I’d ever known, and she was wearing tailored black trousers and high-heeled shoes and a white shirt that looked expensive, with a purple silk scarf flung round her neck. She had a kind of vital, electric presence that filled the room. In that house, she was utterly, startlingly incongruous.

“Please,” she said, appealing to me. Her voice was high and clear and In the Woods 47

carrying, with a newsreader accent that didn’t match Jonathan and Margaret’s soft, small-town working-class. “What’s happened?”

“Rosalind,” Jonathan said. His voice came out rough, and he cleared his throat. “They found Katy. She’s dead. Someone killed her.”

Jessica made a small, wordless noise. Rosalind stared at him for a moment; then her eyelids fluttered and she swayed, one hand going out to the door frame. Cassie got an arm around her waist and supported her to the sofa.

Rosalind leaned her head back against the cushions and gave Cassie a weak, grateful smile; Cassie smiled back. “Could I have some water?” she whispered.

“I’ll get it,” I said. In the kitchen—scrubbed linoleum, varnished fauxrustic table and chairs—I turned on the tap and had a quick look around. Nothing noteworthy, except that one high cupboard held an array of vitamin tubs and, at the back, an industrial-size bottle of Valium with a label made out to Margaret Devlin.

Rosalind sipped the water and took deep breaths, one slim hand to her breastbone. “Take Jess and go upstairs,” Devlin told her.

“Please, let me stay,” Rosalind said, lifting her chin. “Katy was my sister—whatever happened to her, I can . . . I can listen to it. I’m all right now. I’m sorry for being so . . . I’ll be fine, really.”

“We’d like Rosalind and Jessica to stay, Mr. Devlin,” I said. “It’s possible they might know something that could help us.”

“Katy and I were very close,” Rosalind said, looking up at me. Her eyes were her mother’s, big and blue, with that touch of a droop at the outer corners. They shifted, over my shoulder: “Oh, Jessica,” she said, holding out her arms. “Jessica, darling, come here.” Jessica edged past me, with a flash of bright eyes like a wild animal’s, and pressed up against Rosalind on the sofa.

“I’m very sorry to intrude at a time like this,” I said, “but there are some questions we need to ask you as soon as possible, to help us find whoever did this. Do you feel able to talk now, or shall we come back in a few hours?”

Jonathan Devlin pulled over a chair from the dining table, slammed it down and sat, swallowing hard. “Do it now,” he said. “Ask away.”

Slowly we took them through it. They had last seen Katy on Monday evening. She had had a ballet class in Stillorgan, a few miles in towards the center of Dublin, from five o’clock till seven. Rosalind had met her at the bus stop at about 7:45 p.m. and walked her home. (“She said she’d had a 48

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lovely time,” Rosalind said, her head bent over her clasped hands; a curtain of hair fell across her face. “She was such a wonderful dancer. . . . She had a place in the Royal Ballet School, you know. She would have been leaving in just a few weeks. . . .” Margaret sobbed, and Jonathan’s hands gripped the arms of his chair convulsively.) Rosalind and Jessica had then gone to their Aunt Vera’s house, across the estate, to spend the night with their cousins. Katy had had her tea—baked beans on toast and orange juice—and then walked a neighbor’s dog: her summer job, to earn money towards ballet school. She had got back at approximately ten to nine, taken a bath and then watched television with her parents. She had gone to bed at ten o’clock, as usual during the summer, and read for a few minutes before Margaret told her to turn out the light. Jonathan and Margaret watched more television and went to bed a little before midnight. On his way to bed Jonathan, as a matter of routine, checked that the house was secure: doors locked, windows locked, chain on the front door.

At 7:30 the next morning, he got up and left for work—he was a senior teller in a bank—without seeing Katy. He noticed that the chain was off the front door, but he assumed that Katy, who was an early riser, had gone to her aunt’s house to have breakfast with her sisters and cousins. (“She does that sometimes,” Rosalind said. “She likes fry-ups, and Mum . . . Well, in the mornings Mum’s too tired to cook.” A terrible, rending sound from Margaret.) All the girls had keys to the front door, Jonathan said, just in case. At 9:20, when Margaret got up and went to wake Katy, she was gone. Margaret waited for a while, assuming, like Jonathan, that Katy had woken early and gone to her aunt’s; then she rang Vera, just to be sure; then she rang all Katy’s friends, and finally she rang the police. Cassie and I perched awkwardly on the edges of armchairs. Margaret cried, quietly but continuously; after awhile Jonathan went out of the room and came back with a box of tissues. A birdlike, pop-eyed little woman—