In the Woods

by Tana French

  Tana French

  panic and I would end up whipping my head back and forth like a cartoon character, terrified that the one face I missed might be one of them. “I doubt it, though. There was a lot of blood.”

  Cassie was putting the shell in her pocket; she glanced up at me for a second. “I don’t know the details.”

  “I’ll leave you the file,” I said. Annoyingly, it took an effort to say it, as if I were handing over my diary or something. “See what you think.”

  The tide was starting to come in. Sandymount beach slopes so gradually that at low tide the sea is almost invisible, a tiny gray edge far off on the horizon; it swoops in dizzyingly fast, from all directions at once, and sometimes people get stranded. In a few minutes it would be up to our feet.

  “We’d better head back,” Cassie said. “Sam’s coming over for dinner, remember?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said, without much enthusiasm. I do like Sam—

  everyone likes Sam, except Cooper—but I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for other people. “Why did you invite him?”

  “The case?” she said sweetly. “Work? Dead person?” I made a face at her; she grinned back.

  The two sticky toddlers in the stroller were whacking at each other with luridly colored toys. “Britney! Justin!” the mother screamed over their yells.

  “Shurrup or I’ll kill the fucking pair of yous!” I got an arm around Cassie’s neck and managed to pull her a safe distance away before we both burst out laughing.

  I did eventually settle in to boarding school, by the way. When my parents dropped me off for the beginning of second year (me weeping, begging, clutching the car door handle as the disgusted housemaster plucked me up by the waist and prized my fingers away one by one) I recognized that, no matter what I did or how I pleaded, they were never going to let me come home. After that I stopped being homesick.

  I had very little choice. My unrelenting misery in first year had worn me almost to breaking point (I had grown used to flashes of dizziness every time I stood up, moments when I couldn’t remember a classmate’s name or the way to the dining hall), and even thirteen-year-old resilience has its limits; a few more months of that and I would probably have ended up having some kind of embarrassing nervous breakdown. But when it comes to the In the Woods 119

  crunch I have, as I say, excellent survival instincts. That first night of second year I sobbed myself to sleep, and then I woke up the next morning and decided that I would never be homesick again.

  After that I found it, to my slight surprise, quite easy to settle in. Without really paying attention, I had picked up much of the bizarre, inbred school slang (“scrots” for juniors, “mackos” for teachers), and my accent went from County Dublin to Home Counties within a week. I made friends with Charlie, who sat next to me in geography and had a round solemn face and an irresistible chuckle; when we got old enough, we shared a study and experimental joints that his brother at Cambridge gave him and long, confused, yearning conversations about girls. My academic work was mediocre at best—I had bent myself so fiercely to the idea of school as an eternal, inescapable fate that I had trouble imagining anything beyond it, so it was hard to remember why I was supposed to be studying—but I turned out to be a pretty good swimmer, good enough for the school team, which got me a lot more respect from both masters and boys than good exam results would have. In fifth year they even made me a prefect; I tend to attribute this, like my Murder appointment, to the fact that I looked the part.

  I spent a lot of the holidays at Charlie’s home in Herefordshire, learning to drive on his dad’s old Mercedes ( jolting country roads, the windows wide open, Bon Jovi blaring on the car stereo and both of us singing along out of tune at the top of our lungs) and falling in love with his sisters. I found I no longer particularly wanted to go home. The house in Leixlip was flimsy and dark and smelled of damp, and my mother had arranged my stuff all wrong in my new bedroom; it felt awkward and temporary, like hurriedly assembled refugee accommodation, not like a home. All the other kids on the street had dangerous-looking haircuts and made unintelligible fun of my accent.

  My parents had noticed the change in me, but rather than being pleased that I had settled in at school, as you’d expect, they seemed taken aback, nervous of the unfamiliar, self-contained person I was becoming. My mother tiptoed around the house and asked me timidly what I would like for my tea; my father tried to start man-to-man chats that always ran aground, after much throat-clearing and newspaper-rattling, on my vacant, passive silence. I understood, rationally, that they had sent me to boarding school to protect me from the unrelenting waves of journalists and futile 120

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  police interviews and curious classmates, and I was aware that this had probably been an excellent decision; but some part of me believed, unassailably and wordlessly and perhaps with a fleck of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had—simply by surviving—

  become a freak of nature.

  8

  Sam arrived bang on time, looking like a kid on a first date—he had even slicked down his fair hair, ineffectually, with a cowlick at the back—and carrying a bottle of wine. “There you go,” he said, presenting it to Cassie. “I didn’t know what you were cooking, but the guy in the shop said this will go with just about anything.”

  “That’s perfect,” Cassie told him, turning down the music (Ricky Martin, in Spanish; she has this boppy mix that she turns up loud when she’s cooking or doing housework) and heading for the wardrobe to find wineglass equivalents. “I’m only making pasta anyway. Corkscrew’s in that drawer. Rob, sweetie, you have to actually stir the sauce, not just hold the spoon in the pan.”

  “Listen, Martha Stewart, am I doing this or are you?”

  “Neither, apparently. Sam, are you having wine or are you driving?”

  “Maddox, it’s tinned tomatoes and basil, it’s hardly haute cuisine—”

  “Did they surgically remove your palate at birth, or did you have to cultivate such an utter lack of refinement? Sam, wine?”

  Sam looked a little bemused. Sometimes Cassie and I forget that we can have that effect on people, especially when we’re off duty and in a good mood, which we were. I know this sounds odd, given what we had been doing all day, but in the squads with a high horror quota—Murder, Sex Crime, Domestic Violence—either you learn to switch off or you transfer to Art and Antiques. If you let yourself think too much about the victims (what went through their minds in their last seconds, all the things they’ll never do, their devastated families), you end up with an unsolved case and a nervous breakdown. I was, obviously, having a harder time than usual switching off; but it was doing me good, the comforting routine of making dinner and annoying Cassie.

  “Um, yes, please,” Sam said. He looked around awkwardly for somewhere to put his coat; Cassie took it and tossed it on the futon. “My uncle has a house in Ballsbridge—yeah, yeah, I know,” he said, as we both gave 122

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  him mock-impressed looks,“and I still have a key. I sometimes stay the night if I’m after having a few pints.” He looked from one to the other of us, waiting for us to comment.

  “Good,” said Cassie, diving into the wardrobe again and coming up with a glass tumbler that said nutella on the side. “I hate when some people are drinking and some aren’t. It makes the conversation go all lopsided. What the hell did you do to Cooper, by the way?”

  Sam laughed, relaxed and rummaged for the corkscrew. “I swear, that wasn’t my fault. My first three cases all came in at five in the evening; I rang him just when he was getting home.”

  “Uh-oh,” Cassie said. “Bad Sam.”

  “You’re lucky he’ll talk to you,” I said.

  “Barely,” said Sam. “He still pretends he can’t remember my name. He calls me Detecti
ve Neary or Detective O’Nolan—even on the stand. Once he called me a different name every time he mentioned me, and the judge got so confused he almost declared a mistrial. Thank God he likes the pair of ye.”

  “It’s Ryan’s cleavage that does it,” said Cassie, nudging me out of the way with her hip and throwing a handful of salt into the pan of water.

  “I’ll buy a Wonderbra,” Sam said. He uncorked the bottle deftly, poured the wine and put glasses into our free hands. “Cheers, lads. Thanks for inviting me over. Here’s to a quick solve and no nasty surprises.”

  After dinner we got down to business. I made coffee; Sam insisted on washing up. Cassie had the post-mortem notes and photos spread out on her coffee table, an old wooden chest beeswaxed to a shine, and she was sitting on the floor flipping back and forth, eating cherries from the fruit bowl with her other hand. I love watching Cassie when she’s concentrating. Utterly focused, she is as absent and unselfconscious as a child—twisting a finger in a curl at the back of her head, pulling her legs into effortlessly odd angles, flipping a pen around her mouth and abruptly pulling it out to murmur something to herself.

  “While we’re waiting for Miss Cleo over there,” I said to Sam—Cassie gave me the finger without looking up—“how was your day?”

  Sam was rinsing plates with neat, bachelor efficiency. “Long. Hold music, and all these civil servants telling me I needed to speak to someone else and then putting me through to voicemail. It’s not going to be as easy as it In the Woods 123

  sounds, finding out who owns that land. I did talk to my uncle, asked him if this Move the Motorway was actually having any effect.”

  “And?” I said, trying not to sound cynical. I had nothing against Redmond O’Neill in particular—I had a vague image of a big, ruddy man with a shock of silver hair, but that was all—but I do have a firm general mistrust of politicians.

  “He said no. Basically, he says, they’re just a nuisance—” Cassie glanced up, raised an eyebrow. “I’m only quoting. They’ve been to court a few times, trying to stop the motorway; I’ve still to check the exact dates, but Red says the hearings were at the end of April, the beginning of June and the middle of July. That matches the phone calls to Jonathan Devlin.”

  “Apparently someone thought they were more than just a nuisance,” I said.

  “This last time in court, a few weeks ago, Move the Motorway got an injunction, but Red says it’ll be thrown out on appeal. He’s not worried.”

  “Well, that’s nice to know,” Cassie said sweetly.

  “That motorway will do a lot of good, Cassie,” Sam said gently.

  “There’ll be new houses, new jobs—”

  “I’m sure it will. I just don’t see why it couldn’t do all that good a few hundred yards to one side.”

  Sam shook his head. “I wouldn’t know, sure. I don’t understand all that stuff. But Red does, and he says it’s badly needed.”

  Cassie was opening her mouth to say something else, but I caught the glint in her eye. “Stop being a brat and profile,” I told her.

  “OK,” she said, as we brought over the coffee, “the main interesting thing is that it looks to me like this guy’s heart wasn’t in it.”

  “What?” I said. “Maddox, he smacked her twice over the head and then suffocated her. She was very, very dead. If he hadn’t been serious about it—”

  “No, hang on,” Sam said. “I want to hear this.” My job in the amateur profiling sessions is to play devil’s advocate, and Cassie is well able to shut me up if I get overenthusiastic, but Sam has an ingrained, old-fashioned chivalry that I find admirable as well as slightly annoying. Cassie shot me a wicked sideways look and smiled at him.

  “Thanks, Sam. As I was saying. Look at the first blow: it was only a tap, barely enough to knock her over, never mind knock her out. She had her back to him, she wasn’t moving, he could have smashed her head in; but he didn’t.”

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  “He didn’t know how much force it would take,” Sam said. “He hadn’t done this before.” He sounded unhappy. This may seem callous, but we often prefer the signs to point to a serial offender. That way there might be other cases to cross-check with, more evidence to collate. If our guy was a first-timer, we had nothing to go on but this.

  “Cass?” I said. “You think he’s a virgin?” I realized, as I said it, that I had no idea what I wanted the answer to be.

  She reached for the cherries absently, her eyes still on the notes, but I saw her eyelashes flicker: she knew what I was asking. “I’m not sure. He hasn’t done this often, or recently, or he wouldn’t have been this tentative about it. But he could have done it once or twice before, awhile ago. We can’t rule out a link to the old case.”

  “It’s unusual for a serial killer to take twenty years off,” I said.

  “Well,” Cassie said, “he wasn’t too crazy about doing it this time. She fights, he gets a hand over her mouth, he hits her again—maybe as she’s trying to crawl away, something like that—and this one knocks her out. But, instead of keeping on hitting her with the rock—even though they’ve been struggling and his adrenaline must be through the roof at this stage—he drops it and suffocates her. He doesn’t even strangle her, which would be a whole lot simpler: he uses a plastic bag, and from behind so he won’t have to see her face. He’s trying to distance himself from the crime, make it seem less violent. Gentler.” Sam grimaced.

  “Or he doesn’t want to make a mess,” I said.

  “OK, but then why hit her at all? Why not just jump her and stick the bag over her head? I think he wanted her out cold because he didn’t want to see her suffer.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t confident that he’d be able to subdue her unless he knocked her out right away,” I said. “Maybe he’s not very strong—or, again, he’s a first-timer and he doesn’t know what it’ll take.”

  “Fair enough. Maybe a little of all three. I agree that we’re looking for someone with no known history of violence—someone who never even got into fights in the schoolyard, wouldn’t be considered physically aggressive at all—and probably no history of sexual assault, either. I don’t think the rape was really a sex crime.”

  “What, because he used an object?” I said. “You know some of them can’t get it up.” Sam blinked, startled, took a sip of coffee to cover it.

  “Sure, but then he would’ve been more . . . thorough.” We all winced. In the Woods 125

  “From what Cooper said, it was a token gesture: one thrust, no sadism, no frenzy, only a couple of inches’ worth of abrasion, barely tore the hymen. And it was post-mortem.”

  “That could be by choice. Necrophilia.”

  “Jesus,” Sam said, putting the coffee down.

  Cassie looked for her cigarettes, changed her mind and took one of my strong ones. Her face, momentarily off guard as she tilted it to the lighter flame, looked tired and quenched; I wondered if that night she would dream about Katy Devlin, pinned down and trying to scream. “He’d have kept her for longer. And, again, there’d be signs of more comprehensive sexual assault. No: he didn’t want to do it. He did it because he had to.”

  “Staging a sex crime to put us on the wrong track?”

  Cassie shook her head. “I don’t know . . . If that was it, you’d expect him to make a point of it: strip her, pose her with her legs spread. Instead, he pulls her combats up again, zips them. . . . No, I was thinking maybe something more along the lines of schizophrenia. They’re almost never violent, but if you get one off his meds and in a full-on paranoid phase, you never know. He could have believed, for some reason of his own, that she had to be killed and raped, even though he hated doing it. That would explain why he tried not to hurt her, why he used an object, why it didn’t look more like a sex crime—he didn’t want her exposed, and he didn’t want anyone thinking of him as a rapist—even why he left her on the altar.”

  “How’s that?” I took the cigarette packet back and tilted it at
Sam, who looked like he could do with one, but he shook his head.

  “I mean, he could’ve dumped her in the wood or somewhere, where she might not have been found for ages, or even just on the ground. Instead, he went out of his way to put her on that altar. It could be a display thing, but I don’t think so: he didn’t pose her, except to leave her lying on her left side, so the head injury was hidden—again, trying to minimize the crime. I think he was trying to treat her with care, respect—keep her away from animals, make sure she was found soon.” She reached for the ashtray. “The good thing is, if it’s a schizophrenic falling apart, he should be fairly easy to spot.”

  “What about a hired killer?” I asked. “That would explain the reluctance, too. Someone—maybe the mystery phone caller—hired him to do it, but he didn’t have to like the job.”

  “Actually,” Cassie said, “a hired killer—not a professional; an amateur 126

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  who needed the money badly—might fit even better. Katy Devlin sounded like a fairly sensible kid, wouldn’t you say, Rob?”

  “She sounds like the most well-adjusted person in that whole family.”

  “Yeah, to me, too. Smart, focused, strong-willed—”

  “Not the type to go off at night with a stranger.”

  “Exactly. Especially not a stranger who’s clearly not all there. A schizophrenic going to pieces probably wouldn’t be able to act normal enough to get her to go anywhere with him. More likely this person is presentable, pleasant, good with kids—someone she’d known for a while. Someone she felt comfortable with. He didn’t seem like a threat.”

  “Or she,” I said. “How much did Katy weigh?”

  Cassie flipped through the notes. “Seventy-eight pounds. Depending on how far she was carried, yeah, a woman could have done it, but it would have to be a pretty strong woman. Sophie didn’t find any drag marks at the dump site. Just statistically speaking, I’d bet on a guy.”

  “But we’re eliminating the parents?” Sam said hopefully. She made a face. “No. Say one of them was abusing her and she was threatening to tell: either the abuser or the other parent could have felt she had to die, in order to protect the whole family. Maybe they tried to stage a sex crime but didn’t have the heart to do it thoroughly. . . . Basically, the only thing I’m more or less sure of is that we’re not looking for a psychopath or a sadist—our guy couldn’t dehumanize her and didn’t enjoy seeing her suffer. We’re looking for someone who didn’t want to do it, someone who felt he was doing it out of necessity. I don’t think he’ll insert himself into the investigation—he won’t be getting off on all the attention, nothing like that—and I don’t think he’ll do it again any time soon, not unless he feels threatened somehow. And he’s almost definitely local. A real profiler could probably be a lot more specific, but . . .”