In the Woods

by Tana French

  “Nobody’s accused you of—”

  “You’ve been dancing around it since the first day you came here, and I don’t like insinuations. I love my daughters. I hug them good night. That’s it. I’ve never once touched any of them in any way that anyone could call wrong. Is that clear?”

  “Crystal,” I said, trying not to let it sound sarcastic.

  “Good.” He nodded, one sharp, controlled jerk. “Now, about this other thing: I’m not stupid, Detective Ryan. Just assuming that I did something that might land me in jail, why the hell would I tell you about it?”

  “Listen,” I said earnestly, “we’re considering the possibility”—Bless you, Cassie—“that the victim might have had something to do with Katy’s death, as revenge for this rape.” His eyes widened. “It’s only an outside chance and we have absolutely no solid evidence, so I don’t want you to put too much weight on this. In particular, I don’t want you to contact her in any way. If we do turn out to have a case, that could ruin the whole thing.”

  “I wouldn’t contact her. Like I said, I’m not stupid.”

  “Good. I’m glad that’s understood. But I do need to hear your version of what happened.”

  “And then what? You charge me with it?”

  “I can’t guarantee you anything,” I said. “I’m certainly not going to arrest you. It’s not up to me to decide whether to file charges—that’s down to the prosecutor’s office and the victim—but I doubt she’ll be willing to come forward. And I haven’t cautioned you, so anything you say wouldn’t be admissible in court anyway. I just need to know how it happened. It’s up to you, Mr. Devlin. How badly do you want me to find Katy’s killer?”

  Jonathan took his time. He stayed where he was, leaning forward, hands clasped, and gave me a long, suspicious glare. I tried to look trustworthy and not blink.

  230

  Tana French

  “If I could make you understand,” he said finally, almost to himself. He pulled himself restlessly up from the chair and went to the window, leaned back against the glass; every time I blinked his silhouette rose up in front of my eyelids, bright-edged and looming against the barred panes. “Have you any friends you’ve known since you were a little young fella?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Nobody knows you like people you grew up with. I could run into Cathal or Shane tomorrow, after all this time, and they’d still know more about me than Margaret does. We were closer than most brothers. None of us had what you’d call a happy family: Shane never knew his da, Cathal’s was a waster who never did a decent day’s work in his life, my parents were both drunks. I’m not saying any of this as an excuse, mind you; I’m only trying to tell you what we were like. When we were ten we did the bloodbrothers thing—did you ever do that? cut your wrists, press them together?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I wondered, fleetingly, whether we had. It felt like the kind of thing we would have done.

  “Shane was scared to cut himself, but Cathal talked him into it. He could sell holy water to the pope, Cathal.” He was smiling, a little; I could hear it in his voice. “When we saw The Three Musketeers on the telly, Cathal decided that would be our motto: all for one and one for all. We had to have each other’s back, he said, there was nobody else on our side. He was right, too.” His head turned towards me, a brief, measuring look. “What are you—thirty, thirty-five?”

  I nodded.

  “You missed the worst of it. When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn’t go into Daddy’s business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college—and we didn’t—that just put it off for a few years. We’d nothing to do only hang around, nothing to look forward to, nothing to aim for; nothing at all, except each other. I don’t know if you understand what a powerful thing that is. Dangerous.”

  I wasn’t sure what I thought of the direction in which this appeared to be going, but I felt a sudden, unwelcome dart of something like envy. In school I had dreamed of friendships like this: the steel-tempered closeness of soldiers in battle or prisoners of war, the mystery attained only by men in extremis.

  Jonathan took a breath. “Anyway. Then Cathal started going out with In the Woods 231

  this girl—Sandra. It felt strange, at first: we’d all been out with girls here and there, but none of us had ever had a serious girlfriend before. But she was lovely, Sandra was; lovely. Always laughing, and this innocence about her—

  I think probably she was my first love, as well. . . . When Cathal said she fancied me, too, wanted to be with me, I couldn’t believe my luck.”

  “This didn’t strike you as—well, slightly odd, to say the least?”

  “Not as odd as you’d think. It sounds mad now, yeah; but we’d always shared everything. It was a rule with us. This just felt like more of the same. I was going out with a girl for a while around the same time, sure, and she went with Cathal, not a bother on her—I think she only went out with me in the first place because he was taken. He was a lot better looking than I was.”

  “Shane,” I said, “appears to have fallen out of the loop.”

  “Yeah. That was where it all went wrong. Shane found out, and he went mental. He was always mad about Sandra, too, I think; but more than that, he felt like we’d betrayed him. He was devastated. We had huge rows about it practically every day, for weeks and weeks. Half the time he wouldn’t even talk to us. I was miserable, felt like everything was falling apart—you know how it is when you’re that age, any little thing is the end of the world. . . .”

  He stopped. “What happened then?” I said.

  “Then Cathal got it into his head that, since it was Sandra had come between us, it would have to be Sandra brought us together again. He was obsessed, wouldn’t stop talking about it. If we were all with the same girl, he said, it’d be the final seal on our friendship—like the blood-brothers thing, only stronger. I don’t know, any more, if he really believed that, or if he just . . . I don’t know. He had an odd streak in him, Cathal, especially when it came to things like . . . Well. I had my doubts, but he kept on and on about it, and of course Shane was behind him all the way. . . .”

  “It didn’t occur to any of you to ask Sandra’s opinion about this?”

  Jonathan let his head fall back against the glass, with a soft bump. “We should have,” he said quietly, after a moment. “God knows we should have. But we lived in a world of our own, the three of us. Nobody else seemed real—I was wild about Sandra, but it was the same way I was wild about Princess Leia or whoever else we fancied that week, not the way you love a real woman. Not an excuse—there’s no excuse for what we did, none. But a reason.”

  232

  Tana French

  “What happened?”

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “We were in the wood,” he said. “The four of us—I wasn’t with Claire any more. In this clearing where we used to go sometimes. I don’t know would you remember, but we had a beauty of a summer that year—hot as Greece or somewhere, never a cloud in the sky, bright till after ten at night. We spent every day outside, in the wood or hanging around at the edge of it. We were all burned black—I looked like an Italian student only for these mad white patches round my eyes from my sunglasses. . . .

  “It was late one afternoon. We’d all been in the clearing all day, drinking and having a few joints. I think we were pretty much off our faces; not just the cider and the gear, but the sun, and the giddy way you get when you’re that age. . . . I’d been arm-wrestling with Shane—he was in a half-decent mood for once—and I’d let him win, and we were messing, pushing each other and fighting on the grass, you know the way young fellas do. Cathal and Sandra were yelling, cheering us on, and then Cathal started tickling Sandra—she was laughing and screaming. They rolled under our feet then; we went over in a heap on top of them. And all of a sudden Cathal yelled,

  ‘Now! . . .�
� ”

  I waited for a long time. “Did all three of you rape her?” I asked quietly, in the end.

  “Shane, only. Not that that makes it any better. I helped hold her. . . .”

  He took a fast breath between his teeth. “I’ve never known anything like it. I think maybe we went a little out of our minds. It didn’t feel real, you know? It was like a nightmare, or a bad trip. It went on forever. It was blazing hot, I was sweating like a pig, light-headed. I looked round at the trees and they were closing in on us, shooting out brand-new branches, I thought they were about to wrap round us and swallow us up; and all the colors looked wrong, off, like in one of those colorized old films. The sky had gone almost white, and there were things shooting across it, little black things. I looked back—I felt like I should warn the others that something was happening, something was wrong—and I was holding . . . holding her, but I couldn’t feel my hands, they didn’t look like mine. I couldn’t work out whose hands those were. I was terrified. Cathal was there across from me and his breathing sounded like the loudest thing in the world, but I didn’t recognize him; I couldn’t remember who the hell he was or what we were doing. Sandra was fighting and there were these noises and—Jesus. For a In the Woods 233

  second I swear I thought we were hunters and this was a, an animal we’d brought down, and Shane was killing it. . . .”

  I was starting to dislike the tone of this. “If I understand you correctly,”

  I said coldly, “you were under the influence both of alcohol and of illegal drugs at the time, you may quite possibly have been suffering from heatstroke, and you were presumably in a state of considerable excitement. Don’t you think these factors might have had something to do with this experience?”

  Jonathan’s eyes went to me for a moment; then he shrugged, a defeated little twitch. “Yeah, sure,” he said quietly. “Probably. Again, I’m not saying any of this is an excuse. I’m only telling you. You asked.”

  It was an absurd story, of course, melodramatic and self-serving and utterly predictable: every criminal I have ever interrogated had a long convoluted story proving conclusively that it wasn’t actually his fault or at least that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and most of them were a whole lot better than this one. What bothered me was that some tiny part of me believed it. I wasn’t at all convinced about Cathal’s idealistic motives, but Jonathan: he had been lost somewhere in the wild borderlands of nineteen, half in love with his friends with a love passing the love of women, desperate for some mystical rite that would reverse time and put their disintegrating private world back together. It would not have been difficult for him to see this as an act of love, however dark and twisted and untranslatable to the harsh outside world. Not that this made any difference: I wondered what else he would have done for his cause.

  “And you’re no longer in any contact with Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?” I asked, a little cruelly, I know.

  “No,” he said quietly. He looked away, out the window, and laughed, a mirthless little breath. “After all that, eh? Cathal and I send Christmas cards; the wife signs his name to theirs. I haven’t heard from Shane in years. I wrote him the odd letter, but he never wrote back. I stopped trying.”

  “You started drifting apart not long after the rape.”

  “It was a slow thing, took years. But yeah, when you come down to it, I suppose it started with that day in the woods. It was awkward, after—

  Cathal wanted to talk about it over and over, it made Shane nervous as a cat on hot bricks; I felt guilty as hell, didn’t even want to think about it. . . . Ironic, isn’t it? Here we thought it was going to be the thing that brought us together forever.” He shook his head quickly, like a horse twitching off a fly. 234

  Tana French

  “But I’d say we might have gone our separate ways anyway, sure. It happens. Cathal moved away, I got married . . .”

  “And Shane?”

  “I’m betting you know Shane’s in jail,” he said dryly. “Shane . . . Listen, if that poor thick bastard had been born ten years later, he’d have been grand. I’m not saying he’d be some great success story, but he’d have a decent job and maybe a family. He was a casualty of the eighties. There’s a whole generation out there that fell through the cracks. By the time the economy picked up it was too late for most of us, we were too old to start over. Cathal and I were just lucky. I was shite at everything else but good at maths, A’s all through school, so I finally managed to get a job in the bank. And Cathal went out with some rich young one who had a computer and taught him how to use it, for the laugh; a few years later, when everyone was crying out for people who knew computers, he was one of the few in the country who could do more than turn the bloody things on. He always did land on his feet, Cathal. But Shane . . . He’d no job, no education, no prospects, no family. What did he have to lose by robbing?”

  I was finding it hard to feel any particular sympathy towards Shane Waters.

  “In the minutes immediately after the rape,” I said, almost against my will,

  “did you hear anything out of the ordinary—possibly a sound like a large bird flapping its wings?” I left out the part about it being a voiced sound. Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear. Jonathan gave me a funny look. “The wood was full of birds, foxes, what have you. I wouldn’t have noticed one more or less—especially not just then. I don’t know if I’ve given you any idea of the state we were all in. It wasn’t just me, you know. It was like we were coming down off acid. I was shaking all over, couldn’t see straight, everything kept sliding sideways. Sandra was—Sandra was gasping, like she couldn’t breathe. Shane was lying on the grass just staring up at the trees and twitching. Cathal started laughing, he was staggering around the clearing howling, I told him I’d punch the face off him if he didn’t—” He stopped.

  “What is it?” I asked, after a moment.

  “I’d forgotten,” he said slowly. “I don’t—sure, I don’t like to think about the thing anyway. I’d forgotten . . . If it was anything, mind you. The way our heads were, it could easily have been just imagination.”

  I waited. Finally he sighed, made an uneasy movement like a shrug.

  “Well. The way I remember it, I grabbed Cathal and told him to shut up or In the Woods 235

  I’d hit him, and he stopped laughing and caught me by my T-shirt—he looked half crazy, for a second there I thought it was going to turn into a fight. But there was still someone laughing—not one of us; away in the trees. Sandra and Shane both started screaming—maybe I did, too, I don’t know—

  but it just got louder and louder, this huge voice laughing. . . . Cathal let go of me and shouted something about those kids, but it didn’t sound—”

  “Kids?” I said coolly. I was fighting a violent impulse to get the hell out of there. There was no reason why Jonathan should recognize me—I had just been some little kid hanging around, my hair had been a lot fairer then, I had a different accent and a different name—but I felt suddenly horribly naked and exposed.

  “Ah, there were these kids from the estate—little kids, ten, twelve—who used to play in the wood. Sometimes they’d spy on us; throw things and then run, you know the way. But it didn’t sound like any kid to me. It sounded like a man—a young fella, maybe, around our age. Not a child.”

  For a split second I almost took the opening he had offered. The flash of wariness had dissolved and the quick little whispers in the corners had risen to a silent shout, so close, close as breath. It was on the tip of my tongue: Those kids, weren’t they spying on you that day? Weren’t you worried they would tell? What did you do to stop them? But the detective in me held me back. I knew I would only get one chance, and I needed to come to it on my own territory and with all the ammunition I could bring.

  “Did any of you go to see what it was?” I asked, instead. Jonathan thought for a moment, his eyes hooded and intent. “No. Like I said, we were all in some kind of shock anywa
y, and this was more than we could handle. I was frozen, couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. It kept getting louder, till I thought the whole estate would be out to see what was going on, and we were still yelling. . . . Finally it stopped—moved off into the woods, maybe, I don’t know. Shane kept screaming, till Cathal smacked him across the back of the head and told him to shut up. We got out of there as fast as we could. I went home, nicked some of my da’s booze and got drunk as a lord. I don’t know what the others did.”

  So much for Cassie’s mysterious wild animal, then. But there had quite possibly been someone in the woods that day, someone who, if he had seen the rape, had in all probability seen us, too; someone who might have been there again, a week or two later. “Do you have any suspicion as to who the person laughing might have been?” I asked.

  236

  Tana French

  “No. I think Cathal asked us about that, later. He said we needed to know who it was, how much they had seen. I’ve no idea.”

  I stood up. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Devlin,” I said. “I may need to ask you a few more questions about this at some stage, but that’s all for now.”

  “Wait,” he said suddenly. “Do you think Sandra killed Katy?”

  He looked very short and pathetic, standing there at the window with his hands balled in his cardigan pockets, but he still had a kind of forlorn dignity about him. “No,” I said. “I don’t. But we have to investigate every possibility thoroughly.”

  Jonathan nodded. “I suppose that means you’ve no real suspect,” he said.

  “No, I know, I know, you can’t tell me. . . . If you’re talking to Sandra, tell her I’m sorry. We did a terrible thing. I know it’s a bit late to be saying that, I should’ve thought of it twenty years ago, but . . . tell her, all the same.”

  That evening I went out to Mountjoy to see Shane Waters. I’m sure Cassie would have come with me if I’d told her I was going, but I wanted to do this, as much as possible, on my own. Shane was rat-faced and nervy, with a repulsive little mustache, and he still had acne. He reminded me of Wayne the junkie. I tried every tactic I knew and promised him everything I could think of—immunity, early release on the armed robbery—banking on the fact that he wasn’t smart enough to know what I could and couldn’t deliver, but (always one of my blind spots) I’d underestimated the power of stupidity: with the infuriating mulishness of someone who has long ago given up trying to analyze possibilities and ramifications, Shane stuck to the one option he understood. “I don’t know nothing,” he told me, over and over, with a kind of anemic self-satisfaction that made me want to scream. “And you can’t prove I do.” Sandra, the rape, Peter and Jamie, even Jonathan Devlin: