by Tana French
And then, too, it was so excruciating, that first phase of Operation In the Woods 143
Vestal. The case was, though we refused to admit this even to ourselves, going nowhere. Every lead I found ran me into a dead end; O’Kelly kept giving us rousing, arm-waving speeches about how we couldn’t afford to drop the ball on this one and when the going gets tough the tough get going; the papers were screaming for justice and printing photo enhancements of what Peter and Jamie would look like today if they had unfortunate haircuts. I was as tense as I have ever been in my life. But perhaps the real reason I find it so difficult to talk about those weeks is that—in spite of all that, and of the fact that I know this to be a self-indulgence I cannot afford—I miss them still.
Little things. We pulled Katy’s medical records, of course, straight away. She and Jessica had been a couple of weeks premature, but Katy, at least, had rallied well, and until she was eight and a half she had had nothing but the normal childhood stuff. Then, out of nowhere, she had started getting sick. Stomach cramping, projectile vomiting, diarrhea for days on end; once she had ended up in the emergency room three times in one month. A year ago, after a particularly bad attack, the doctors had done an exploratory laparotomy—the surgery Cooper had spotted, the one that had kept her out of ballet school. They had diagnosed “idiopathic pseudo-obstructive bowel disease with atypical lack of distension.” Reading between the lines, I got the sense that this meant they had ruled out everything else and had absolutely no idea what was wrong with this kid.
“Munchausen by proxy?” I asked Cassie, who was reading over my shoulder, arms folded on the back of my chair. She and I and Sam had staked out a corner of the incident room, as far as possible from the tip line, where we could have a modicum of privacy as long as we kept our voices down. She shrugged, made a face. “It could be. But there’s stuff that doesn’t fit. Most Munchausen mothers have a background around the edges of medicine—nurse’s aide, something like that.” Margaret, according to the background check, had left school at fifteen and worked in Jacobs’s biscuit factory until she got married. “And check out the admission records. Half the time Margaret’s not even the one bringing Katy into the hospital: it’s Jonathan, Rosalind, Vera, once it’s a teacher. . . . For Munchausen-by-proxy mothers, the whole point is the attention and sympathy they get from doctors and nurses. She wouldn’t let someone else be at the center of all that.”
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“So we rule out Margaret?”
Cassie sighed. “She doesn’t match the profile, but that’s not definitive; she could be the exception. I just wish we could have a look at the other girls’ records. These mothers don’t usually target one kid and leave the others alone. They skip from kid to kid, to avoid suspicion, or else they start with the oldest and then move on to the next when the first one gets old enough to kick up a fuss. If it’s Margaret, there’ll be something weird in the other two’s files—like maybe this spring, when Katy stopped getting sick, something went wrong with Jessica. . . . Let’s ask the parents if we can look at them.”
“No,” I said. All the floaters seemed to be talking at once and the noise was like a heavy fog coating my brain; I couldn’t focus. “So far, the Devlins don’t know they’re suspects. I’d rather keep it that way, at least until we have something solid. If we go asking them for Rosalind and Jessica’s medical records, it’s bound to tip them off.”
“Something solid,” Cassie said. She looked down at the pages spread out on the table, the jumble of computerized headings and scribbled handwriting and photocopy-smudges; at the whiteboard, which had already blossomed into a multicolored tangle of names, phone numbers, arrows and question marks and underlining.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
The Devlin girls’ school records had that same ambiguous, mocking quality. Katy was bright but not outstanding, solid Bs with the occasional C in Irish or A in PE; no behavioral problems bigger than a tendency to talk in class, no red flags except the stark patches of absence. Rosalind was more intelligent, but also more erratic: streams of straight As, broken up by clumps of Cs and Ds and frustrated teachers’ comments about lacking effort and skipping class. Jessica’s file, unsurprisingly, was the thickest. She had been in the
“special” class since she and Katy were nine, but Jonathan had apparently hassled the health board and the school into running a battery of tests on her: her IQ was somewhere between 90 and 105, and there were no neurological problems. “Nonspecific learning disability with autistic features,” the file claimed.
“What do you think?” I asked Cassie.
“I think this family just keeps getting weirder. Going by this, you’d swear that, if one of them’s being abused, it’s Jessica. Perfectly normal kid up until In the Woods 145
she’s around seven; then all of a sudden, bam, her schoolwork and her social skills start going downhill. That’s way too late for the onset of autism, but it’s a textbook reaction to some kind of ongoing abuse. And Rosalind—all that upsy-downsy stuff could just be normal teenage mood swings, but it could also be a response to something weird going on at home. The only one who looks just fine—well, fine psychologically—is Katy.”
Something dark loomed up in the corner of my vision and I whipped around, sending my pen skittering across the floor. “Whoa,” Sam said, startled. “It’s only me.”
“Jesus,” I said. My heart was racing. Cassie’s eyes, across the table, gave away nothing. I retrieved my pen. “I didn’t realize you were there. What’ve you got?”
“The Devlins’ phone records,” Sam said, waving a sheaf of paper in each hand. “Out and in.” He put the two bundles on the table and squared off the edges carefully. He had color-coded the numbers; the pages were striped with neat lines of highlighter pen.
“For how long?” Cassie asked. She leaned across the table, looking at the pages upside down.
“Since March.”
“That’s it? For six months?”
That was the first thing I had noticed, too: how thin the piles were. A family of five, three adolescent girls; surely the line should have been busy nonstop, someone constantly yelling for someone else to get off the phone. I thought of the underwater hush in the house the day Katy was found, Auntie Vera hovering in the hall. “Yeah, I know,” Sam said. “Maybe they use mobiles.”
“Maybe,” Cassie said. She didn’t sound convinced. I wasn’t either: almost without exception, when a family cuts itself off from the rest of the world it’s because something is badly wrong. “But that’s expensive. And there’s two phones in that house, one in the downstairs coat closet and one on the upstairs landing, with a cord long enough that you could take it into any of the bedrooms. You wouldn’t need to use a mobile for privacy.”
We had gone through Katy’s mobile records already. She had had an allowance, ten euros of credit every second Sunday. She had mostly used it on text messages to her friends, and we had reconstructed long, cryptically abbreviated conversations about homework, classroom gossip, American Idol; not one unidentified number, not one red flag.
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“What’s the highlighter?” I asked.
“I cross-referenced against the known associates, tried to split up the calls by family member. Looks like Katy’s the one used the phone most: all those numbers in yellow are her mates.” I flipped pages. The yellow highlighter took up at least half of each one. “The blue is Margaret’s sisters—
one in Kilkenny, Vera across the estate. The green’s Jonathan’s sister in Athlone, the nursing home where their mammy’s living, and committee members of Move the Motorway. The purple’s Rosalind’s friend Karen Daly, the one she stayed with when she ran away. The calls between them start to dry up after that. I’d say Karen wasn’t too pleased about being put in the middle of family hassle, except that she kept ringing Rosalind for a few weeks after; Rosalind just wasn’t ringing her back.”
“Maybe she wasn’t
allowed to,” I said. It might have been just the start Sam had given me, but my heart was still going too fast and there was a sharp, animal taste of danger in my mouth.
Sam nodded. “The parents might’ve seen Karen as a bad influence. Anyway, that’s all the calls accounted for, except a bunch from a phone company trying to get them to switch provider—and these three.” He spread out the pages of incoming calls: three stripes of pink highlighter. “The dates, times and lengths match what Devlin gave us. They’re all from pay phones.”
“Dammit,” Cassie said.
“Where?” I asked.
“City center. The first one’s on the quays, down near the Financial Services Centre; second one’s on O’Connell Street. Third one’s halfway between, also on the quays.”
“In other words,” I said, “our caller’s not one of the local boys who have their knickers in a twist over the value of their houses.”
“I wouldn’t say so. Going by the times, he’s ringing on his way home from the pub. I suppose a Knocknaree fella could drink in town, but it doesn’t sound likely, not as a regular thing. I’ll have the lads check, to make sure, but for now I’m guessing this is someone whose interest in the motorway is business, not personal. And if I was a betting man, I’d put money on him living somewhere along the quays.”
“Our killer’s almost definitely local,” Cassie said.
Sam nodded. “My boy could’ve hired a local to do the job, though. That’s what I’d have done.” Cassie caught my eye: the thought of Sam earnestly toddling off in search of a hit man was irresistible. “When I find In the Woods 147
out who owns that land, I’ll see if any of them have been talking to anyone from Knocknaree.”
“How are you getting on with that?” I asked.
“Ah, sure,” Sam said cheerfully and vaguely. “I’m working on it.”
“Hang on,” Cassie said suddenly. “Who does Jessica phone?”
“No one,” Sam said, “as far as I can tell,” and he patted the papers gently into a stack and took them away.
All that was on the Monday, almost a week after Katy had died. In that week, neither Jonathan nor Margaret Devlin had phoned us to ask how the investigation was going. I wasn’t complaining, exactly—some families ring four or five times a day, desperate for answers, and there are few things more excruciating than telling them we have none—but all the same: it was another small unsettling thing, in a case that was already much too full of them. Rosalind finally came in on Tuesday, at lunchtime. No phone call, no arrangement, just Bernadette informing me with faint disapproval that there was a young woman to see me; but I knew it was her, and the fact that she had shown up out of the blue like that smacked of desperation somehow, of some clandestine urgency. I dropped what I was doing and went downstairs, ignoring the inquiring raised eyebrows from Cassie and Sam. Rosalind was waiting in Reception. She had an emerald shawl wrapped tightly around her; her face, turned to look out the window, was wistful and faraway. She was too young to know it, but she made a lovely picture: the fall of chestnut curls and the splash of green, poised against the sunlit brick and stone of the courtyard. Block out the defiantly utilitarian lobby, and the scene could have come straight off a Pre-Raphaelite greeting card.
“Rosalind,” I said.
She spun from the window, a hand going to her chest. “Oh, Detective Ryan! You startled me. . . . Thank you so much for seeing me.”
“Any time,” I said. “Come upstairs and we’ll talk.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to be any trouble. If you’re too busy, just tell me and I’ll go.”
“You’re no trouble at all. Can I get you a cup of tea? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be lovely. But do we have to go in there? It’s such a lovely day, and I’m a little claustrophobic—I don’t like to tell people, but . . . Couldn’t we go outside?”
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It wasn’t standard procedure; but then, I reasoned, she wasn’t a suspect, or even necessarily a witness. “Sure,” I said, “just give me a second,” and ran upstairs for the coffee. I’d forgotten to ask her how she took it, so I added a little milk and put two sachets of sugar in my pocket, in case.
“Here you go,” I said to Rosalind, downstairs. “Shall we find somewhere in the garden?”
She took a sip of coffee and tried to hide a quick little moue of distaste.
“I know, it’s foul,” I said.
“No, no, that’s fine—it’s just that . . . well, I don’t take milk, usually, but—”
“Oops,” I said. “Sorry about that. Want me to get you another one?”
“Oh, no! It’s all right, Detective Ryan, honestly—I didn’t really need coffee. You have this one. I don’t want to put you to any trouble; it’s wonderful of you to see me, you mustn’t go out of your way. . . .” She was talking too fast, too high and chatty, hands flying, and she held my eyes for too long without blinking, as if she had been hypnotized. She was badly nervous, and trying hard to cover up.
“It’s no problem at all,” I said gently. “I’ll tell you what: let’s find somewhere nice to sit, and then I’ll get you another cup of coffee. It’ll still be foul, but at least it’ll be black. How does that sound?” Rosalind smiled up at me gratefully, and for a moment I had a startled sense that this small act of consideration had moved her almost to tears.
We found a bench in the gardens, in the sun; birds were twittering and rustling in the hedges, darting out to wrestle with discarded sandwich crusts. I left Rosalind there and went back up for the coffee. I took my time, to give her a chance to settle down, but when I got back she was still sitting on the edge of the bench, biting her lip and picking the petals off a daisy.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the coffee and trying to smile. I sat down beside her. “Detective Ryan, have you . . . have you found out who killed my sister?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But it’s early days. I promise you, we’re doing absolutely everything we can.”
“I know you’ll catch him, Detective Ryan. I knew the minute I saw you. I can tell an awful lot about people from first impressions—sometimes it actually scares me, how often I’m right—and I knew right away that you were the person we needed.”
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She was looking up at me with pure, unblemished faith in her eyes. I was flattered, of course I was, but at the same time, this level of trust made me very uncomfortable. She was so sure, and so desperately vulnerable; and, although you try not to think this way, I knew there was a chance this case would never be solved, and I knew exactly what that would do to her.
“I had a dream about you,” Rosalind said, then glanced down, embarrassed. “The night after Katy’s funeral. I hadn’t slept more than an hour a night since she vanished, you know. I was—oh, I was frantic. But seeing you that day . . . it reminded me not to give up. That night I dreamed you knocked on our door and told me you’d caught the man who did this. You had him in the police car behind you, and you said he’d never hurt anyone again.”
“Rosalind,” I said. I couldn’t take this. “We’re doing our best, and we won’t give up. But you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that it might take a very long time.”
She shook her head. “You’ll find him,” she said simply. I let it go. “You said there was something you wanted to ask me?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “What happened to my sister, Detective Ryan? Exactly?”
Her eyes were wide and intent, and I wasn’t sure how to handle this: if I told her, would she break down, collapse, scream? The gardens were full of chattery office workers on their lunch break. “I should really let your parents tell you about it,” I said.
“I’m eighteen, you know. You don’t need their permission to talk to me.”
“Still.”
Rosalind bit her bottom lip. “I asked them. He . . . they . . . they told me to shut up.”
Something zipped through me—anger, alarm
bells, compassion, I’m not sure. “Rosalind,” I said, very gently, “is everything all right at home?”
Her head flew up, mouth open in a little O. “Yes,” she said, in a small, uncertain voice. “Of course.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’re very kind,” she said shakily. “You’re so good to me. It’s . . . everything’s fine.”
“Would you be more comfortable talking to my partner?”