In the Woods

by Tana French

  “Can you tell whether she was facing towards him or away from him?”

  Cassie asked.

  “The indications are that she may have been prone when the harder blow was struck: there was considerable bleeding, and the flow was directed inwards across the left side of the face, with some pooling apparent around the central line of the nose and mouth.” This was good news, if I can use the term at all in this context: there would be blood at the scene, if we ever found it. Also, it meant we were probably looking for someone left-handed, and, while this wasn’t Agatha Christie and real cases seldom hinge on that kind of thing, at this point any tiny lead was an improvement.

  “There was a struggle—prior to this blow, I may add: it would have rendered her unconscious immediately. There are defensive wounds to the 86

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  hands and forearms—bruising, abrasions, three broken fingernails on the right hand—probably inflicted by the same weapon as she warded off blows.” He lifted one of her wrists between finger and thumb, turned over her arm to show us the scrapes. Her fingernails had been clipped off short and taken away for analysis; on the back of her hand was a stylized flower with a smiley face in the middle, drawn in faded marker. “I also found bruising around the mouth and toothmarks on the insides of the lips, consistent with the perpetrator pressing a hand over her mouth.”

  Outside, down the corridor, a woman’s high voice was giving out about something; a door slammed. The air in the autopsy room felt thick and too still, hard to breathe. Cooper glanced around at us, but nobody said anything. He knew this wasn’t what we wanted to hear. In a case like this, the one thing you can hope for is that the victim never knew what was happening.

  “When she was unconscious,” Cooper said coolly, “some material, probably plastic, was placed around her throat and twisted at the top of the spine.” He tilted her chin back: there was a faint, broad mark around her neck, striated where the plastic had buckled into folds. “As you see, the ligature mark is well defined, hence my conclusion that it was put in place only when she had been immobilized. She shows no signs of strangulation, and I consider it unlikely that the ligature was tight enough to cut off the airway; however, petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes and on the surface of the lungs indicates that she did in fact die of anoxia. I would hypothesize that something along the lines of a plastic bag was placed over her head, twisted at the back of the neck and held in place for several minutes. She died of suffocation, complicated by blunt-force trauma to the head.”

  “Hang on,” Cassie said suddenly. “So she wasn’t raped after all?”

  “Ah,” Cooper said. “Patience, Detective Maddox; we’re coming to that. The rape was post-mortem, and was performed using an implement of some kind.” He paused, discreetly enjoying the effect.

  “Post-mortem?” I said. “You’re sure?” This was a relief in the obvious way, eliminating some of the most excruciating mental images; but, at the same time, it did imply a special level of wacko. Sam’s face was pulled into an unconscious grimace.

  “There are fresh abrasions to the exterior of the vagina and to the first three inches of the interior, and a fresh tear in the hymen, but there was no bleeding and no inflammation. Post-mortem, beyond a doubt.” I felt the In the Woods 87

  collective, panicky flinch—none of us wanted to see this, the thought was obscene—but Cooper gave us a tiny amused glance and stayed where he was, at the head of the table.

  “What kind of implement,” Cassie said. She was staring at the mark on Katy’s throat, intent and expressionless.

  “Inside the vagina we found particles of earth and two minute splinters of wood, one severely charred, the other overlaid with what appears to be thin, clear varnish. I would postulate something at least four inches in length and approximately one to two inches in diameter, made of lightly varnished wood, with considerable wear, a burn mark of some kind and no sharp edges—a broom handle, something along those lines. The abrasions were discrete and well defined, implying a single insertion. I found nothing to suggest that there was also penile penetration. The rectum and mouth showed no signs of any sexual assault.”

  “So no body fluids,” I said grimly.

  “And there appeared to be no blood or skin beneath her fingernails,” said Cooper, with faint, pessimistic satisfaction. “The tests are incomplete, of course, but I feel I should warn you not to place too much hope in the possibility of DNA samples.”

  “You checked the rest of the body for semen, too, right?” Cassie said. Cooper gave her an austere look and didn’t bother answering. “After death,” he said, “she was placed in much the same position in which we found her, lying on her left side. There was no secondary lividity, indicating that she remained in this pose for at least twelve hours. The relative lack of insect activity leads me to believe that she was in an enclosed space, or possibly wrapped tightly in some material, for a considerable proportion of the time before discovery of the body. All this will be included in my notes, of course, but for now . . . Do you have any questions?”

  The dismissal was delicate but clear. “Anything new on time of death?”

  I asked.

  “The gastrointestinal contents allow me to be a little more precise than I was at the scene—if, that is, you can determine the time of her last meal. She had eaten a chocolate biscuit only a few minutes before her death, and a full meal—the digestive process was fairly advanced, but beans appear to have been a component—approximately four to six hours earlier.”

  Baked beans on toast, at around eight. She had died somewhere between midnight and two o’clock, give or take. The biscuit must have come either 88

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  from the Devlins’ kitchen, sneaked on her way out of the house, or from her killer.

  “My team should have her cleaned up within a few minutes,” Cooper said. He straightened Katy’s head with a precise, satisfied flourish. “If you’d like to notify the family.”

  We stood outside the hospital and looked at one another. “Haven’t been to one of those in a while,” Sam said softly.

  “And now you remember why,” I said.

  “Post-mortem,” Cassie said, frowning absently back at the building.

  “What the hell was this guy doing?”

  Sam went off to find out more about the motorway, and I phoned the incident room and told two of the floaters to take the Devlins to the hospital. Cassie and I had already seen their first, crucial reaction to the news, we neither needed nor wanted to see it again; and we did need, urgently, to talk to Mark Hanly.

  “Want to bring him in?” I said, in the car. There was no reason why we couldn’t interrogate Mark in the finds shed, but I wanted him off his territory and on ours, partly as a form of unreasonable revenge for my ruined shoes.

  “Oh yeah,” said Cassie. “He said they only have a few weeks left, didn’t he? If I’ve got Mark right, the fastest way to get him talking is to waste his workday.”

  We used the drive to make O’Kelly a nice long list of reasons why we did not feel that Knocknaree For Satan had been responsible for Katy Devlin’s death. “Don’t forget ‘no ritual positioning,’ ” I said. I was driving again; I was still edgy enough that, without something to do, I would have chainsmoked all the way to Knocknaree.

  “And no . . . slaughtered . . . livestock,” Cassie said, writing.

  “He is not going to say that at the press conference. ‘We didn’t find a dead chicken’?”

  “Bet you a fiver he does. He won’t even miss a beat.”

  The day had changed while we were in with Cooper: the rain had spent itself and a hot, benevolent sun was already drying the roads. The trees on the shoulder were glittering with leftover raindrops, and when we got out of the car the air smelled new, washed clean, vital with wet earth and leaves. Cassie pulled off her sweater and tied it around her waist. In the Woods 89

  The archaeologists were spread out across the bottom half of the site, doing energetic things w
ith mattocks and shovels and wheelbarrows. Their jackets were thrown over rocks and some of the guys had stripped off their T-shirts, and—presumably in reaction to yesterday’s shock and hush—they were all in a giddy mood. A boom box was pumping out the Scissor Sisters at full volume, and they were singing along, in between mattock blows; one girl was using her shovel as a microphone. Three of them were having a water fight, shrieking and dodging with bottles and a hose. Mel heaved a full wheelbarrow up the side of a huge heap of earth, caught it expertly on her thigh while she changed her grip to empty it out. On her way back down, she got a hoseful of water in the face. “You bastards!” she screamed, dropping the wheelbarrow and chasing after the little redheaded girl holding the hose. The redhead shrieked and ran, but she caught a foot in the coils; Mel grabbed her in a headlock and they wrestled for the hose, laughing and spluttering, wide arcs of water flying everywhere.

  “Ah, deadly,” one of the guys called. “Lesbo action.”

  “Where’s the camera?”

  “Here, is that a hickey on your neck?” the redhead shouted. “Lads, Mel’s got a hickey!” A burst of congratulatory whoops and laughter.

  “Fuck off,” Mel yelled, bright red and grinning.

  Mark called something sharp at them all and they shouted back, cheekily—“Ooo, touchy!”—and drifted back to work, shaking sparkling fans of water out of their hair. I felt a sudden, unexpected surge of envy, for the unselfconscious freedom of their shouting and tussling, the satisfying arc and thud of the mattocks, their muddy clothes left to dry in the sun as they worked; for the loose-limbed, efficient assurance of it all. “Not a bad way to make a living,” Cassie said, tipping her head back and smiling a private little smile up at the sky. The archaeologists had spotted us; one by one they lowered their tools and looked up, shielding their eyes against the sun with bare forearms. We picked our way across to Mark under their collective, startled gaze. Mel stood up out of a trench, puzzled, swiping hair off her face and leaving a muddy streak; Damien, kneeling among his protective phalanx of girls, still looked woebegone and faintly bedraggled, but Sean the sculptor perked up when he saw us, and waved his shovel. Mark leaned on his mattock like some taciturn old mountainy man, squinting at us inscrutably.

  “Yeah?”

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  “We’d like a word with you,” I said.

  “We’re working. Can it not wait till lunch?”

  “No. Bring your things; we’re going back to headquarters.”

  His jaw tightened and for a moment I thought he was going to argue, but then he tossed down the mattock, wiped his face with his T-shirt and headed off up the hill. “Bye,” I said to the archaeologists, as we followed him. Not even Sean answered.

  In the car Mark pulled out his tobacco packet. “No smoking,” I said.

  “What the fuck?” he demanded. “You both smoke. I saw you yesterday.”

  “Department cars count as workplaces. It’s illegal to smoke in them.” I wasn’t even making this up; it takes a committee to come up with something that ludicrous.

  “Ah, what the hell, Ryan, let him have a cigarette,” Cassie said. She added in a nicely judged undertone, “It’ll save us having to take him out for a smoke break for a few hours.” I caught Mark’s startled glance in the rearview mirror. “Can I have a rollie?” she asked him, twisting round to lean between the seats.

  “How long is this going to take?” he said.

  “That depends,” I told him.

  “On what? I don’t even know what this is about.”

  “We’ll get to that. Settle down and have your smoke before I change my mind.”

  “How’s the dig going?” Cassie asked sociably.

  One corner of Mark’s mouth twisted sourly. “How do you think? We’ve got four weeks to do a year’s work. We’ve been using bulldozers.”

  “And that’s not a good thing?” I said.

  He glared at me. “Do we look like the fucking Time Team?”

  The Time Team is a bunch of TV archaeologists with manic haircuts and an obsession with digging up entire medieval monasteries in three days. I wasn’t sure how to answer this one, given that as far as I was concerned Mark and his buddies did in fact look exactly like the fucking Time Team. Cassie turned on the radio; Mark lit up and blew a noisy, disgusted stream of smoke out of the window. It was obviously going to be a long day.

  . . .

  In the Woods 91

  I didn’t say much on the drive back. I knew it was very possible that Katy Devlin’s killer was sulking in the back seat of the car, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. In a lot of ways, of course, I would have loved him to be our guy: he had been getting right up my nose, and if it was him then we could get rid of this eerie, dicey case almost before it began. It could be over that afternoon; I could put the old file back in the basement—Mark, who in 1984 had been about five and living somewhere very far from Dublin, was not a viable suspect—collect my pat on the back from O’Kelly, take back the taxi-rank wankers from Quigley, and forget all about Knocknaree. And yet, somehow, that felt all wrong. Partly it was the crashing, embarrassing anticlimax of the idea—I had spent much of the past twenty-four hours trying to prepare myself for wherever this case might take me, and I had expected something a lot more dramatic than one interrogation and an arrest. It was more than that, though. I am not superstitious, but if the call had come in a few minutes earlier or later, after all, or if Cassie and I hadn’t just discovered Worms, or if we had wanted a smoke, this case would have gone to Costello or someone, never to us, and it seemed impossible that so powerful and heady a thing could be coincidence. I had a sense of things stirring, rearranging themselves in some imperceptible but crucial way, tiny unseen cogs beginning to shift. Deep down, I think—ironic as it may seem—a part of me couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. 6

  By the time we got back to work, Cassie had managed to extract the information that bulldozers were used only in emergencies because they destroy valuable archaeological evidence and that the Time Team were a bunch of unprofessional hacks, as well as the end of a rollie Mark had made her, which meant that if necessary we could match his DNA to the butts from the clearing without getting a warrant. It was pretty clear who was going to be the good cop today. I frisked Mark (clench-jawed, shaking his head) and put him in an interview room, while Cassie left our Satan-Free Knocknaree list on O’Kelly’s desk.

  We let Mark simmer for a few minutes—he slouched in his chair and drummed an increasingly irritable riff on the table with his index fingers—

  before we went in. “Hi again,” said Cassie cheerfully. “Do you want tea or coffee?”

  “No. I want to get back to my job.”

  “Detectives Maddox and Ryan, interviewing Mark Conor Hanly,”

  Cassie told the video camera, high up in a corner. Mark whipped round, startled; then he grimaced at the camera and eased back into his slump. I pulled up a chair, threw a sheaf of crime-scene shots on the table and ignored them. “You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be used in evidence. Got it?”

  “What the fuck— Am I under arrest?”

  “No. Do you drink red wine?”

  He shot me a brief, sarcastic glance. “Are you offering?”

  “Why don’t you want to answer the question?”

  “That is my answer. I drink whatever’s going. Why?” I nodded thought fully and wrote this down.

  “What’s with the tape?” Cassie asked curiously, leaning across the table to point at the masking tape wrapped around his hands. In the Woods 93

  “For blisters. Band-Aids don’t stay on, when you’re using a mattock in the rain.”

  “Couldn’t you just wear gloves?”

  “Some people do,” Mark said. His tone implied that these people lacked testosterone, in one way or another.

  “Would you have any objection to letting us see what’s underne
ath?” I said.

  He gave me a fishy look, but he unwound the tape, taking his time, and dropped it on the table. He held up his hands with a sardonic flourish. “See anything you like?”

  Cassie leaned farther forward on her arms, took a good look, gestured to him to turn his hands over. I couldn’t see any scrapes or fingernail marks, only the remains of large blisters, half healed, at the base of each finger.

  “Ow,” Cassie said. “How’d you get those?”

  Mark shrugged dismissively. “Usually I have calluses, but I was out for a few weeks there, hurt my back—had to stick to cataloguing finds. My hands went soft. When I went back to work, this is what I got.”

  “Must have driven you mental, not being able to work,” Cassie said.

  “Aye, it did all right,” Mark said briefly. “Shite timing.”

  I picked up the masking tape between finger and thumb and dropped it in the bin. “Where were you Monday night?” I asked, leaning against the wall behind Mark.

  “In the team house. Like I told you yesterday.”

  “Are you a member of Move the Motorway?” Cassie asked.

  “Yeah, I am. Most of us are. Your man Devlin came round a while back, asking us if we wanted to join up. It’s not illegal yet, as far as I know.”

  “So you know Jonathan Devlin?” I asked.

  “That’s what I just said. We’re not bosom buddies, but yeah, I know the man.”

  I leaned over his shoulder and flicked through the crime-scene photos, giving him glimpses but not leaving him time for a proper look. I found one of the more disturbing shots and flipped it across to him. “But you told us you didn’t know her.”

  Mark held the photo between the tips of his fingers and gave it a long, impassive look. “I told you I’d seen her around the dig but I didn’t know her name, and I don’t. Should I?”

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  “I think you should, yes,” I said. “She’s Devlin’s daughter.”