In the Woods

by Tana French

  Tana French

  holes, splashes around the top, faint brownish patches where it lay just beneath the surface. I had been bracing myself quite hard for this, actually. I think I’d had some vague idea that seeing the evidence would trigger a dramatic flash flood of memories; I hadn’t exactly expected to end up in a fetal position on the basement floor, but there was a reason I’d picked a moment when no one was likely to come looking for me. In the event, though, I realized with a definite sense of anticlimax that none of this stuff looked even remotely familiar—except, of all things, Peter’s Donkey Kong game, which was presumably only there for fingerprint comparison and which ignited a brief and fairly useless flare of memory (me and Peter sitting on sunlit carpet working a button each, concentrated and elbowing, Jamie leaning over our shoulders and yelping excited instructions) so intense I could practically hear the game’s brisk, bossy chirrups and beeps. The clothes, though I knew they were mine, rang no bells whatsoever. It seemed inconceivable that I had actually got up one morning and put them on. All I could see was the pathos of them—how small the T-shirt was, the Biro Mickey Mouse on the toe of one runner. Twelve had seemed terrifyingly grown up, at the time. I picked up the T-shirt bag between finger and thumb and turned it over. I had read about the rips across the back, but I had never seen them before, and somehow I found them more shocking even than those terrible shoes. There was something unnatural about them—the perfect parallels, the neat shallow arcs; a stark, implacable impossibility. Branches? I thought, staring blankly down at them. Had I jumped out of a tree, or ducked through bushes, and somehow caught my shirt on four sharp twigs at once?

  My back itched, between the shoulder blades.

  Suddenly and compulsively, I wanted to be somewhere else. The low ceiling pressed down claustrophobically and the dusty air was hard to breathe; it was oppressively quiet, only the odd ominous vibration in the walls when a bus went past outside. I practically threw all the stuff back into the box, heaved it onto its shelf and snatched up the shoes, which I had left on the floor, ready to send to Sophie.

  It was only then that it hit me, there in the chilly basement with halfforgotten cases all around and tiny sharp crackles coming from the box as the plastic bags settled: the immensity of what I had set in motion. Somehow, what with everything that was on my mind, I had failed to think this through. The old case seemed such a private thing that I had forgotten it In the Woods 103

  could have implications in the outside world, too. But I (what the hell, I wondered, had I been thinking?) was about to take these shoes up to the buzzing incident room and put them in a padded envelope and tell one of the floaters to take them to Sophie.

  It would have happened anyway, sooner or later—missing-child cases are never closed, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of running the old evidence through new technology. But if the lab managed to get DNA off the runners, and especially if they somehow matched it to the blood from the altar stone, this would no longer be just a minor lead in the Devlin case, a long shot between us and Sophie: the old case would explode back into active status. Everyone from O’Kelly up would want to make a huge deal of this shiny new high-tech evidence: the police never give up, no unsolved case is ever closed, the public can rest assured that behind the scenes we are moving in our own mysterious ways. The media would leap on the possibility of a serial child-killer in our midst. And we would have to follow through; we would need DNA samples from Peter’s parents and Jamie’s mother and—oh, God—from Adam Ryan. I looked down at the shoes and had a sudden mental image of a car, brakes come loose, drifting down a hill: slowly at first, harmless, almost comic, then gathering momentum and transforming into a merciless wrecking ball. 7

  W e took Mark back to the site and left him to brood darkly in the back of the car while I talked to Mel and Cassie had a quick word with their housemates. When I asked her how she’d spent Tuesday night, Mel went sunburn-red and couldn’t look at me, but she said she and Mark had talked in the garden till late, ended up kissing and spent the rest of the night in his room. He had only left her once, for no more than two minutes, to go to the bathroom. “We’ve always got on great—the others used to take the piss out of us about it. I guess it was on the cards.” She also confirmed that Mark occasionally spent the night away from the house, and that he’d told her he slept in Knocknaree wood: “I don’t know if any of the others would know that, though. He’s kind of private about it.”

  “You don’t find it a little odd?”

  She shrugged clumsily, rubbing at the back of her neck. “He’s an intense guy. That’s one of the things I like about him.” God, she was young; I had a sudden urge to pat her shoulder and remind her to use protection. The rest of the housemates told Cassie that Mark and Mel had been the last ones left in the garden Tuesday night, that they had come out of his room together the next morning and that everyone had spent the first few hours of the day, until Katy’s body turned up, mercilessly giving them grief about it. They also said Mark sometimes stayed out, but they didn’t know where he went. Their version of “an intense guy” ranged from “a little weird” through “a total slave driver.”

  We got more plasticky sandwiches from Lowry’s shop and had lunch sitting on the estate wall. Mark was organizing the archaeologists into some new activity, gesturing in big militant jerks like a traffic cop. I could hear Sean complaining vociferously about something, and everyone else yelling at him to shut up and stop skiving and get a grip.

  “I swear to God, Macker, if I find it on you, I’m going to shove it so far up your hole—”

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  “Ooh, Sean’s PMS-ing.”

  “Have you checked up your hole?”

  “Maybe the cops took it away with them, Sean, better lie low for a while.”

  “Get to work, Sean,” Mark shouted across.

  “I can’t work without my fucking trowel !”

  “Borrow one.”

  “Spare over here,” someone yelled. A trowel flew spinning from hand to hand, light spiking off the blade, and Sean caught it and settled down to work, still grumbling.

  “If you were twelve,” Cassie said, “what would get you out here in the middle of the night?”

  I thought of the faint gold circle of light, bobbing like a will-o’-the-wisp among the severed tree roots and the shards of ancient walls; the silent watcher in the wood. “We did it a couple of times,” I said. “Spent the night in our tree house. This was all wood back then, right up to the road.” Sleeping bags on rough boards, torch-beams close against comic books. A rustle, and the beams skidding up to cross on a pair of golden eyes, rocking wild and luminous only a few trees away; all of us yelling, and Jamie leaping up to fire a spare satsuma as the thing bounded away with a crash of leaves—

  Cassie glanced at me over her juice carton. “Yeah, but you were with your mates. What would get you out here on your own?”

  “Meeting someone. A dare. Possibly getting something important that I’d forgotten here. We’ll talk to her friends, see if she said anything to them.”

  “This wasn’t a random thing,” Cassie said. The archaeologists had put the Scissor Sisters back on and one of her feet swung, absently, in time with the beat. “Even if it wasn’t the parents. This guy didn’t go out and pick up the first vulnerable kid he saw. He put a lot of planning into this. He wasn’t just looking to kill a kid; he was after Katy.”

  “And he knew the place pretty well,” I said, “if he could find the altar stone in the dark, carrying a body. It’s looking more and more like a local boy.” The wood was gay and sparkly in the sunlight, all birdsong and flirting leaves; I could feel the rows upon rows of identical, trim, innocuous houses ranged behind me. This fucking place, I almost said, but I didn’t. After the sandwiches we went looking for Auntie Vera and the cousins. It was a hot, still afternoon, but the estate had an eerie Marie Celeste emptiness, all 106

  Tana French

  the windows tightly closed and
not a single kid playing; they were all inside, confused and antsy and safe under their parents’ eyes, trying to eavesdrop on the adult whispers and find out what was going on. The Foleys were an unprepossessing bunch. The fifteen-year-old settled into an armchair and folded her arms, hitching up her bust like someone’s mammy, and gave us a pale, bored, supercilious stare; the ten-year-old looked like a cartoon pig and chewed gum with her mouth open, wriggling her rump on the sofa and occasionally flicking the gum out on her tongue and then back into her mouth again. Even the youngest was one of those deeply unnerving toddlers who look like bonsai adults: it had a prim, pudgy face with a beaky nose, and it stared at me from Vera’s lap, its lips pursing, and then retracted its chin disapprovingly into the folds of its neck. I had a nasty conviction that, if it said anything, its voice would be a deep, fortya-day rasp. The house smelled of cabbage. I could not fathom why on earth Rosalind and Jessica would choose to spend any time there, and the fact that they had bothered me.

  With the exception of the toddler, though, they all told the same story. Rosalind and Jessica, and sometimes Katy, spent the night there every few weeks or so (“I’d love to have them more often, of course I would,” said Vera, pinching tensely at a corner of a slipcover, “but I simply can’t, not with my nerves, you know”); less often, Valerie and Sharon stayed with the Devlins. Nobody was sure whose idea this particular sleepover had been, although Vera thought vaguely that it might have been Margaret who suggested it. On Monday night Rosalind and Jessica had come over somewhere around half past eight, watched television and played with the baby (I couldn’t imagine how; the kid had barely moved all the time we were there, it must have been like playing with a large potato), and gone to bed around eleven, sharing a camp bed in Valerie and Sharon’s room. This, apparently, was where the trouble had started: unsurprisingly, they had all four been up talking and giggling most of the night. “Now they’re lovely girls, Officers, I’m not saying that, but sometimes the young people don’t realize how much of a strain they can put on us old folks, isn’t that right?” Vera tittered frantically and nudged the middle kid, who squirmed further away on the sofa. “I had to go in to them half a dozen times to tell them to be quiet—I can’t bear noise, you know. It must have been half past two in the morning, can you imagine, before they finally went off to sleep. And by that time, of course, my nerves were in such a state that I couldn’t In the Woods 107

  settle at all, I had to get up and make myself a cup of tea. I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I was shattered the next morning. And then when Margaret rang, sure, we were all going frantic, weren’t we, girls? But I never imagined . . . sure, I thought she was only . . .” She pressed a thin, twitching hand over her mouth.

  “Let’s go back to the night before,” Cassie said to the oldest kid. “What did you and your cousins talk about?”

  The kid—Valerie, I think—rolled her eyes and pulled up her lip to show what a stupid question this was. “Stuff.”

  “Did you talk about Katy at all?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Rosalind was saying how brilliant it was that she was going to ballet school. I don’t see what’s so great about it.”

  “What about your aunt and uncle? Did you mention them?”

  “Yeah. Rosalind was saying they’re horrible to her. They never let her do anything.”

  Vera gave a breathless little hoot. “Oh, now, Valerie, don’t be saying that!

  Sure, Officers, Margaret and Jonathan would do anything for those girls, they’ve themselves worn out—”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. I guess that’s why Rosalind ran away, because they were too nice to her.”

  Cassie and I both started to jump on this at once, but Vera got there first.

  “Valerie! What did I tell you? We don’t talk about that. It was all a misunderstanding, only. Rosalind was a very bold girl to be worrying her poor parents like that, but it’s all forgiven and forgotten. . . .”

  We waited for her to run down. “Why did Rosalind run away?” I asked Valerie.

  She twitched one shoulder. “She was sick of her dad bossing her around. I think maybe he hit her or something.”

  “Valerie! Now, Officers, I don’t know where she’s getting this. Jonathan would never lay a finger on those children, so he wouldn’t. Rosalind’s a sensitive girl; she had an argument with her daddy, and he didn’t realize how upset she was. . . .”

  Valerie sat back and stared at me, a smug smile creeping through the professional boredom. The middle kid wiped her nose on her sleeve and examined the result with interest.

  “When was this?” Cassie asked.

  “Ah, I wouldn’t remember. A long time ago—last year, I think it was—”

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  “May,” said Valerie. “This May.”

  “How long was she gone?”

  “Like three days. The police came and everything.”

  “And where had she been, do you know?”

  “She went off somewhere with a fella,” Valerie said, smirking.

  “She did not,” Vera snapped shrilly. “She was only saying that to frighten her poor mother, God forgive her. She was staying with that friend of hers from school—what’s her name, Karen. She came home after the weekend and no harm done.”

  “Whatever,” Valerie said, doing the one-shouldered shrug again.

  “Want my tea,” the toddler stated firmly. I had been right: it had a voice like a bassoon.

  This, in all probability, explained something I had been meaning to check out: why Missing Persons had been so quick to assume that Katy was a runaway. Twelve is borderline, and normally they would have given her the benefit of the doubt, started the search and the media fireworks immediately rather than waiting the twenty-four hours. But running away tends to spread through families, the younger children getting the idea from the older. When Missing Persons ran the Devlins’ address through their system, they would have come up with Rosalind’s escapade and assumed that Katy had done the same thing, had a spat with her parents and stormed off to a friend’s house; that she, like Rosalind, would be back as soon as she calmed down, and no harm done.

  I was, callously, very glad that Vera had been up all Monday night. Though it was almost too horrible to admit, I had had moments of worry about both Jessica and Rosalind. Jessica didn’t look very strong, but she definitely did look unbalanced, and the cliché about insanity lending strength has some basis in fact, and she could hardly have failed to be jealous of all the adulation Katy was getting. Rosalind was highly strung and fiercely protective of Jessica, and if Katy’s success had been sending Jessica further and further into her daze . . . I knew Cassie had been thinking the same things, but she hadn’t mentioned them either, and for some reason this had been getting on my nerves.

  “I want to know why Rosalind ran away from home,” I said, as we In the Woods 109

  headed back down the Foleys’ drive. The middle kid had her nose squashed up against the living-room window and was making faces at us.

  “And where she went,” said Cassie. “Can you talk to her? I think you’ll get more out of her than I would.”

  “Actually,” I said, a little awkwardly, “that was her on the phone, earlier. She’s coming in to see me tomorrow afternoon. She says there’s something she wants to talk about.”

  Cassie turned from stuffing her notebook into her satchel and gave me a long look I couldn’t read. For a moment I wondered if she was miffed that Rosalind had asked for me instead of her. We were both used to Cassie being the families’ favorite, and I felt a juvenile, shameful spark of triumph: Someone likes me best, so there. My relationship with Cassie has a brotherand-sister tinge that works well for us, but occasionally it does lead to sibling rivalry. But then she said, “Perfect. You can bring up the running-away thing without it seeming like a big deal.”

  She swung her satchel onto her back and we headed off down the road. She was looking out over the fields with her hands in her poc
kets, and I couldn’t tell whether she was annoyed with me for not telling her about Rosalind Devlin’s phone call earlier—which, in all fairness, I should have done. I gave her a little nudge with my elbow, testing. A few steps later she flipped up a foot behind her and kicked me in the arse.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon going door-to-door through the estate. Door-to-door is boring, thankless work, and the floaters already had it covered, but we wanted to get a feel for what the neighbors thought of the Devlins. The general consensus was that they were a decent family but kept themselves firmly to themselves, which hadn’t gone down very well: in a place the size and social class of Knocknaree, any kind of reserve is considered a general insult, half a step from the unforgivable sin of snobbery. But Katy herself was different: the Royal Ballet School place had made her Knocknaree’s pride, their own personal cause. Even the obviously poor households had sent someone to the fund-raiser, everyone needed to describe her dancing to us; a few people cried. A lot of people were part of Jonathan’s Move the Motorway campaign and gave us edgy, resentful looks when we asked about him. A few went into outraged speeches about how he 110

  Tana French

  was trying to stop progress and undermine the economy, and got special little stars beside their names in my notebook. Most people were of the opinion that Jessica wasn’t the full shilling. When we asked if they had seen anything suspicious, they offered us the usual set of local weirdos—an old guy who yelled at bins, two fourteen-year-olds with a reputation for drowning cats in the river—and irrelevant ongoing feuds and nonspecific things that went bump in the night. A number of people, none of them with any useful information, mentioned the old case; until the dig and the motorway and Katy came along, it had been Knocknaree’s one claim to fame. I thought I half-recognized a few names, a couple of faces. I gave them my best professional blank look. After an hour or so of this we got to 27 Knocknaree Drive and found Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald—still, incredibly, very much alive and kicking. Mrs. Fitzgerald was great. She was eighty-eight, skinny and half blind and bent almost double; she offered us tea, ignored our refusals and shouted to us from the kitchen while she prepared a loaded, trembling tray, and then demanded to know whether we had found her purse that some young one had robbed off her in town three months ago, and why not. It was a bizarre sensation, after reading her faded handwriting in the old file, to watch her complain about her swollen ankles (“I’m a martyr to them, so I am”) and indignantly refuse to let me take the tray. It was as if Tutankhamen or Miss Havisham had wandered into the pub one night and started bitching about the head on the pints.