In the Woods

by Tana French

  “Did they strike you as dangerous?”

  I thought about this for a while, as we crawled down Northumberland Road. “Depends what you mean,” I said. “We were wary of them, but I think that was mainly because of their image, not because they ever did anything to us. I remember them being fairly tolerant of us, actually. I can’t see them having made Peter and Jamie disappear.”

  “Who were the girls? Were they interviewed?”

  “What girls?”

  Cassie flicked back to Mrs. Fitzgerald’s statement. “She said ‘courting.’

  I’d say it’s a safe bet that involved girls.”

  She was right, of course. I wasn’t too clear on the exact definition of

  “courting,” but I was pretty sure it would have excited a fair amount of comment if Jonathan Devlin and his mates had been doing it with each other. “They’re not in the file,” I said.

  “What about you, do you remember them?”

  We were still on Northumberland Road. The rain was sheeting down the windows so heavily it looked like we were underwater. Dublin was built for pedestrians and carriages, not for cars; it’s full of tiny winding medieval streets, rush hour lasts from seven in the morning till eight at night, and at the first hint of bad weather the whole city goes into prompt, thorough gridlock. I wished we had left a note for Sam.

  “I think so,” I said eventually. It was nearer to a sensation than to a memory: powdery lemon bonbons, dimples, flowery perfume. Metallica and Sandra, sitting in a tree . . . “One of them might have been called Sandra.”

  Something inside me flinched at the name—acrid taste like fear or shame at the back of my tongue—but I couldn’t find why.

  Sandra: round-faced and buxom, giggles and pencil skirts that rode up when she perched on the wall. She seemed very grown up and sophisticated to us; she must have been all of seventeen or eighteen. She gave us sweets In the Woods 79

  out of a paper bag. Sometimes there was another girl there, tall, with big teeth and lots of earrings—Claire, maybe? Ciara? Sandra showed Jamie how to put on mascara, in a little heart-shaped mirror. Afterwards Jamie kept blinking, as though her eyes felt strange, heavy. “You look pretty,” Peter said. Later Jamie decided she hated it. She washed it off in the river, scrubbing away the panda rings with the hem of her T-shirt.

  “Green light,” Cassie said quietly. I inched forward another few feet. We stopped at a newsagent’s and Cassie ran in and got the papers, so we could see what we were dealing with. Katy Devlin was front-page news in every one of them, and they all seemed to be focusing on the motorway link—knocknaree protest leader’s daughter murdered, that kind of thing. The large tabloid reporter (whose story was headlined dig bigwig’s daughter slaughter, a hyphen away from libel) had thrown in a few coy references to Druidic ceremonies but stayed clear of full-scale Satanism hysteria; she was obviously waiting to see which way the wind blew. I hoped O’Kelly would do his stuff well. Nobody, thank Christ, had mentioned Peter and Jamie, but I knew it was only a matter of time. We palmed off the McLoughlin case (the one we had been working till we got this call: two God-awful little rich boys who had kicked another to death when he jumped the queue for a late-night taxi) on Quigley and his brand-new partner McCann, and went to find ourselves an incident room. The incident rooms are too small and always in demand, but we had no trouble getting one: children take priority. By that time Sam had got in—he had been held up in traffic as well; he has a house somewhere in Westmeath, a couple of hours out of town, which is as near as our generation can afford to buy—so we grabbed him and briefed him, with full harmonies and the official hair-clip story, while we set up the incident room.

  “Ah, Jesus,” he said, when we finished. “Tell me it wasn’t the parents.”

  Every detective has a certain kind of case that he or she finds almost unbearable, against which the usual shield of practiced professional detachment turns brittle and untrustworthy. Cassie, though nobody else knows this, has nightmares when she works rape-murders; I, displaying a singular lack of originality, have serious trouble with murdered children; and, apparently, family killings gave Sam the heebie-jeebies. This case could turn out to be perfect for all three of us.

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  “We haven’t a clue,” Cassie said, through a mouthful of marker cap; she was scribbling a timeline of Katy’s last day across the whiteboard. “We might have a better idea once Cooper comes back with the results from the post, but right now it’s wide open.”

  “We don’t need you to look into the parents, though,” I said. I was BluTacking crime-scene photos to the other side of the board. “We want you to take the motorway angle—trace the phone calls to Devlin, find out who owns the land around the site, who has a serious stake in the motorway staying put.”

  “Is this because of my uncle?” Sam asked. He has a tendency to directness that I’ve always found slightly startling, in a detective. Cassie spat out the marker cap and turned to face him. “Yeah,” she said.

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  We all knew what she was asking. Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved. To an outside eye there is basically no difference between the two main parties, which occupy identical self-satisfied positions on the far right of the spectrum, but many people are still passionate about one or the other because of which side their great-grandfathers fought on during the Civil War, or because Daddy does business with the local candidate and says he’s a lovely fella. Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonized is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.

  And a huge amount of the corruption centers on that primal, clichéd Irish passion, land. Property developers and politicians are traditionally bosom buddies, and just about every major land deal involves brown envelopes and inexplicable rezoning and complicated transactions through offshore accounts. It would be a minor miracle if there weren’t at least a few favors to friends woven into the Knocknaree motorway, somewhere. If there were, it was unlikely that Redmond O’Neill didn’t know about them, and equally unlikely that he would want them to come out.

  “No,” Sam said, promptly and firmly. “No problem.” Cassie and I must have looked dubious, because he glanced back and forth between us and laughed. “Listen, lads, I’ve known him all my life. I lived with them for a couple of years when I first came up to Dublin. I’d know if he was into anything dodgy. He’s straight as a die, my uncle. He’ll help us out any way he can.”

  In the Woods 81

  “Perfect,” Cassie said, and went back to the timeline. “We’re having dinner at my place. Come over around eight and we’ll swap updates.” She found a clean corner of whiteboard and drew Sam a little map of how to get there. By the time we had the incident room organized, the floaters were starting to arrive. O’Kelly had got us about three dozen of them, and they were the cream of the crop: up-and-comers, alert and smooth-shaven and dressed for success, tipped to make good squads as soon as the openings arose. They pulled out chairs and notebooks, slapped backs and resurrected old in-jokes and chose their seats like kids on the first day of school. Cassie and Sam and I smiled and shook hands and thanked them for joining us. I recognized a couple of them—an uncommunicative dark guy from Mayo called Sweeney, and a well-fed Corkman with no neck, O’Connor or O’Gorman or something, who compensated for having to take orders from two nonCorkonians by making some incomprehensible but clearly triumphalistic comment about Gaelic football. A lot of the others looked familiar, but the names went straight out of my head the moment their hands slid away from mine, and the faces merged into one big, eager, intimidating blur. I’ve always loved this moment in an investigation, the moment before the first briefing begins. It reminds me of the focused, private buzz before a curtain goes up: orchestra tuning, d
ancers backstage doing last-minute stretches, ears pricked for the signal to throw off their wraps and leg warmers and explode into action. I had never been in charge of an investigation anything like this size before, though, and this time the sense of anticipation just made me edgy. The incident room felt too full, all that primed and cocked energy, all those curious eyes on us. I remembered the way I used to look at Murder detectives, back when I was a floater praying to be borrowed for cases like this one: the awe, the bursting, almost unbearable aspiration. These guys—a lot of them were older than I was—seemed to me to have a different air about them, a cool, unconcealed assessment. I’ve never liked being the center of attention. O’Kelly slammed the door behind him, slicing off the noise instantaneously. “Right, lads,” he said, into the silence. “Welcome to Operation Vestal. What’s a vestal when it’s at home?”

  Headquarters picks the names for operations. They range from the obvious through the cryptic to the downright weird. Apparently the image of 82

  Tana French

  the little dead girl on the ancient altar had piqued someone’s cultural tendencies. “A sacrificial virgin,” I said.

  “A votary,” said Cassie.

  “Jesus fuck,” said O’Kelly. “Are they trying to make everyone think this was some cult thing? What the fuck are they reading up there?”

  Cassie gave them a rundown on the case, skipping lightly over the 1984

  connection—just an off-chance, something she could check out in her spare time—and we handed out jobs: go door-to-door through the estate, set up a tip line and a roster for manning it, get a list of all the sex offenders living near Knocknaree, check with the British cops and with the ports and airports to see if anyone suspicious had come over to Ireland in the last few days, pull Katy’s medical records, her school records, run full background checks on the Devlins. The floaters snapped smartly into action, and Sam and Cassie and I left them to it and went to see how Cooper was getting on. We don’t normally watch the autopsies. Someone who was at the crime scene has to go, to confirm that this is in fact the same body (it’s happened, toe tags getting mixed up, the pathologist ringing a startled detective to report his finding of death from liver cancer), but mostly we palm this off on uniforms or techs and just go through the notes and photos with Cooper afterwards. By squad tradition you attend the post-mortem in your first murder case, and although supposedly the purpose is to impress you with the full solemnity of your new job, nobody is fooled: this is an initiation rite, as harshly judged as any primitive tribe’s. I know an excellent detective who, after fifteen years on the squad, is still known as Secretariat because of the speed with which he left the morgue when the pathologist removed the victim’s brain. I made it through mine (a teenage prostitute, thin arms layered with bruises and track marks) without flinching, but I was left with no desire to repeat the experience. I go only in those few cases—ironically, the most harrowing ones—that seem to demand this small, sacrificial act of devotion. I don’t think anyone ever quite gets over that first time, really, the mind’s violent revolt when the pathologist slices the scalp and the victim’s face folds away from the skull, malleable and meaningless as a Halloween mask. Our timing was a little off: Cooper was just coming out of the autopsy room in his green scrubs, a waterproof gown held away from him between finger and thumb. “Detectives,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “What a sur-In the Woods 83

  prise. If only you’d let me know you were planning to come, I would of course have waited until you managed to fit us in.”

  He was being snotty because we were too late for the post-mortem. It was, in all fairness, not even eleven o’clock, but Cooper gets into work between six and seven, leaves by three or four, and likes you to remember it. His morgue assistants all hate him for this, which doesn’t bother him because he mostly hates them, too. Cooper prides himself on instant, unpredictable dislikes; as far as we’ve been able to figure out so far, he dislikes blond women, short men, anyone with more than two earrings and people who say “you know” too much, as well as various random people who don’t fit into any of these categories. Fortunately he had decided to like me and Cassie, or he would have made us go back to work and wait until he sent over the post-mortem results (handwritten—Cooper writes all his reports in spidery fountain pen, an idea I sort of like but don’t have the courage to try out in the squad room). There are days when I worry, secretly, that in a decade or two I might wake up and discover I’ve turned into Cooper.

  “Wow,” Sam said, trying. “Finished already?” Cooper gave him a chilly glance.

  “Dr. Cooper, I’m so sorry to burst in on you at this hour,” Cassie said.

  “Superintendent O’Kelly wanted to go over a few things, so we had a hard time getting away.” I nodded wearily and raised my eyes to the ceiling.

  “Ah. Well, yes,” Cooper said. His tone implied that he found it slightly tasteless of us to mention O’Kelly at all.

  “If by any chance you have a few moments,” I said, “would you mind talking us through the results?”

  “But of course,” Cooper said, with an infinitesimal, long-suffering sigh. Actually, like any master craftsman, he loves showing off his work. He held the autopsy-room door open for us and the smell hit me, that unique combination of death and cold and rubbing alcohol that sends an instinctive animal recoil through you every time. Bodies in Dublin go to the city morgue, but Knocknaree is outside the city limits; rural victims are simply brought to the nearest hospital, and the post-mortem is done there. Conditions vary. This room was windowless and grubby, layers of grime on the green floor-tiles and nameless stains in the old porcelain sinks. The two autopsy tables were the only things in the room that looked post-1950s; they were bright stainless steel, light flaring off those grooved edges.

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  Katy Devlin was naked under the merciless fluorescent lights and too small for the table, and she looked somehow much deader than she had the previous day; I thought of the old superstition that the soul lingers near the body for a few days, bewildered and unsure. She was gray-white, like something out of Roswell, with dark blotches of lividity down her left side. Cooper’s assistant had already sewn her scalp back together, thank God, and was working on the Y incision across her torso, big sloppy stitches with a needle the size of a sailmaker’s. I felt a momentary, crazy pang of guilt at being late, at leaving her all on her own—she was so small—through this final violation: we should have been there, she should have had someone to hold her hand while Cooper’s detached, gloved fingers prodded and sliced. Sam, to my surprise, crossed himself unobtrusively.

  “Pubescent white female,” Cooper said, brushing past us to the table and motioning the assistant away, “aged twelve, so I’m told. Height and weight both on the low side, but within normal limits. Scars indicating abdominal surgery, possibly an exploratory laparotomy, some time ago. No obvious pathology; as far as I can tell, she died healthy, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron.”

  We clustered around the table like obedient students; our footsteps threw small flat echoes off the tiled walls. The assistant leaned against one of the sinks and folded his arms, chewing stolidly on a piece of gum. One arm of the Y incision still gaped open, dark and unthinkable, the needle stuck casually through a flap of skin for safekeeping.

  “Any chance of DNA?” I asked.

  “One step at a time, if you please,” Cooper said fussily. “Now. There were two blows to the head, both ante-mortem—before death,” he added sweetly to Sam, who nodded solemnly. “Both were struck with a hard, rough object with protrusions but no distinct edges, consistent with the rock Ms. Miller presented to me for inspection. One was a light blow to the back of the head, near the crown. It caused a small area of abrasion and some bleeding, but no cracks to the skull.” He turned Katy’s head to one side, to show us the little bump. They had cleaned the blood off her face, to check for any injuries underneath, but there were still faint swipes of it across her cheek.
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  “So maybe she dodged, or she was running away from him while he was swinging,” Cassie said.

  We don’t have profilers. When we really need one we bring one over from England, but most of the time a lot of the Murder guys just use Cassie, on the In the Woods 85

  dubious basis that she studied psychology at Trinity for three and a half years. We don’t tell O’Kelly this—he considers profilers to be one step up from psychics, and only grudgingly lets us listen even to the English guys—but I think she’s probably fairly good at it, although presumably this is for reasons unrelated to her years of Freud and lab rats. She always comes up with a couple of useful new angles, and usually turns out to be quite close to the mark. Cooper took his time thinking about it, to punish her for interrupting. Finally he shook his head judiciously. “I consider that unlikely. Had she been moving when this blow was struck, one would expect peripheral grazing, but there was none. The other blow, in contrast . . .” He tilted Katy’s head to the other side and hooked back her hair with one finger. On her left temple a patch of skin had been shaved to expose a wide, jagged laceration, splinters of bone poking out. Someone, Sam or Cassie, swallowed.

  “As you see,” Cooper said, “the other blow was far more forceful. It landed just behind and above the left ear, causing a depressed skull fracture and a sizable subdural hematoma. Here and here”—he flicked his finger—

  “you’ll observe the peripheral grazing to which I referred, at the proximal edge of the primary impact point: as the blow was struck, she appears to have turned her head away, so the weapon skidded along her skull briefly before achieving its full impact. Do I make myself clear?”

  We all nodded. I glanced covertly across at Sam and was heartened by the fact that he looked like he was having a hard time, too.

  “This blow would have been sufficient to cause death within hours. However, the hematoma had progressed very little, so we can safely say that she died of other causes within a short time of receiving this injury.”