In the Woods

by Tana French

  He passed directly beneath us, and we watched his back as he trudged towards the door. “Well,” I said. I mashed out my cigarette. “I think that’s our cue.”

  I got up and held out a hand to pull Cassie to her feet, but she didn’t move. Her eyes on mine were suddenly sober, intent, questioning.

  “What?” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be doing this interview.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t move, just stood there on the bridge with my hand held out to her. After a moment she shook her head wryly and the expression that had startled me disappeared, and she caught my hand and let me pull her up.

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  . . .

  We brought him into the interview room. When he saw the wall his eyes widened sharply, but he said nothing. “Detectives Maddox and Ryan interviewing Jonathan Michael Devlin,” Cassie said, riffling through one of the boxes and coming up with an overstuffed file. “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. OK?”

  “Am I under arrest?” Jonathan demanded. He hadn’t moved from the door. “For what?”

  “What?” I said, puzzled. “Oh, the caution . . . God, no. That’s routine. We just want to update you on the investigation’s progress, and see if you can help us move things forward another step.”

  “If you were under arrest,” Cassie said, dumping the file on the table,

  “you’d know all about it. What did you think you might be under arrest for?”

  Jonathan shrugged. She smiled at him and pulled out a chair, facing the scary wall. “Have a seat.” After a moment, he slowly took off his coat and sat down.

  I took him through the update. I was the one he had trusted with his story, and that trust was a small close-range weapon that I didn’t intend to detonate until the right moment. For now, I was his ally. I was, to a large extent, honest with him. I told him about the leads we had followed up, the tests the lab had run. I listed for him, one by one, the suspects we had identified and eliminated: the locals who thought he was stopping progress, the pedophiles and confession junkies and Tracksuit Shadows, the guy who thought Katy’s leotard was immodest; Sandra. I could feel the frail, mute army of photographs ranged behind me, waiting. Jonathan did well, he kept his eyes on mine almost all the time; but I could see the effort of will that went into it.

  “So what you’re telling me is that you’re getting nowhere,” he said eventually, heavily. He looked terribly tired.

  “God, no,” Cassie said. She had been sitting at the corner of the table, chin propped on one palm, watching in silence. “Not at all. What Detective Ryan is telling you is that we’ve come a long way, these last few weeks. We’ve done a lot of eliminating. And here’s what we’ve got left.” She inclined her head towards the wall; he didn’t take his eyes off her face. “We’ve got evidence that your daughter’s murderer is a local man with intimate knowledge of the Knocknaree area. We’ve got forensic evidence linking her In the Woods 253

  death to the 1984 disappearances of Peter Savage and Germaine Rowan, which indicates that the murderer is probably aged at least thirty-five and has had strong ties to the area for over twenty years. And a lot of the men fitting that description have alibis, so that narrows it down even further.”

  “We also have evidence,” I said, “to suggest that this isn’t some thrill killer. This man isn’t killing at random. He’s doing it because he feels he has no choice.”

  “So you think he’s insane,” Jonathan said. His mouth twisted. “Some lunatic—”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I’m just saying that sometimes situations get out of hand. Sometimes they end in tragedies that nobody really wanted to happen.”

  “So you see, Mr. Devlin, that narrows it down again: we’re looking for someone who knew all three children and had motive to want them dead,”

  Cassie said. She was tilting her chair back, hands behind her head, her eyes steady on his. “We’re going to get this guy. We’re getting closer every day. So if there’s anything you want to tell us—anything at all, about either case—this is the time to do it.”

  Jonathan didn’t answer immediately. The room was very quiet, only the soft drone of the fluorescent bars overhead and the slow, monotonous creak of Cassie rocking her chair on its back legs. Jonathan’s eyes fell away from hers and moved past her, across the photographs: Katy suspended in that impossible arabesque, Katy laughing on a blurry green lawn with her hair blown sideways and a sandwich in her hands, Katy with one eye a slit open and blood crusted dark on her lip. The bare, simple pain on his face was almost indecent. I had to force myself not to look away. The silence stretched tighter. Almost imperceptibly, something I recognized was happening to Jonathan. There’s a specific crumbling in the mouth and spine, a sagging as though the underlying musculature is dissolving to water, that every detective knows: it belongs to the instant before a suspect confesses, as he finally and almost with relief lets his defenses fall away. Cassie had stopped rocking her chair. My pulse was running high in my throat, and I felt the photographs behind me catch tiny swift breaths and hold them, poised to swoop off the paper and down the corridor and out into the dark evening, freed, if only he gave the word. Jonathan wiped a hand hard across his mouth and folded his arms and looked back at Cassie. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing.”

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  Cassie and I let out our breath in unison. I had known, really, that it was too much to hope for, so soon, and—after that first sinking second—I hardly cared; because now, at last, I was sure that Jonathan knew something. He had as good as told us so. This actually came as something of a shock. The whole case had been so crowded with possibilities and hypotheticals (“OK. So say just for a second that Mark did do it, right, and the illness and the old case aren’t related after all, and say Mel’s telling the truth: who could he have got to dump the body?”) that certainty had started to seem unimaginable, some remote childhood dream. I felt as if I had been moving among empty dresses hung in some dim attic and had suddenly bumped smack into a human body, warm and solid and alive.

  Cassie eased the front legs of her chair to the floor. “OK,” she said, “OK. Let’s go back to the beginning. The rape of Sandra Scully. When did that happen, exactly?”

  Jonathan’s head turned sharply towards me. “You’re all right,” I told him, in an undertone. “Statute of limitations.” In fact, we still hadn’t bothered to check this, but it was moot: there was no chance we would ever be able to charge him, anyway.

  He gave me a long, wary look. “Summer of ’84,” he said, finally. “I wouldn’t know the date.”

  “We’ve got statements putting it in the first two weeks of August,”

  Cassie said, opening the file. “Does that sound right to you?”

  “Could well have been.”

  “We also have statements saying that there were witnesses.”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Actually, Jonathan,” Cassie said, “we’ve been told that you chased them into the woods and came back saying, ‘Bloody kids.’ Sounds to me like you knew they were there.”

  “Maybe I did. I don’t remember.”

  “How did you feel about the fact that there were kids out there who knew what you’d done?”

  Another shrug. “Like I said. I don’t remember that.”

  “Cathal says . . .” She flipped pages. “Cathal Mills says you were terrified they’d go to the cops. He says you were, quote, so scared you were practically shitting your pants, unquote.”

  No response. He settled deeper into the chair, arms folded, solid as a wall. In the Woods 255

  “What’d you do to stop them turning you in?”

  “Nothing.”

  Cassie laughed. “Ah, come on, Jonathan. We know who those witnesses were.”

  “You’ve one up on me, then.” His face was still braced
into hard angles, giving away nothing, but a red flush was building across his cheeks: he was getting angry.

  “And only a few days after the rape,” Cassie said, “two of them disappeared.” She got up—unhurriedly, stretching—and crossed the room to the wall of photos.

  “Peter Savage,” she said, laying a finger on his school picture. “I’d like you to look at the photograph, please, Mr. Devlin.” She waited until Jonathan’s head came up and he stared, defiantly, at the picture. “People say he was a born leader. He might have been heading up the Move the Motorway campaign with you, if he’d lived. His parents can’t move house, do you know that? Joseph Savage got offered his dream job, a few years back, but it would’ve involved moving to Galway, and they couldn’t bear the thought that Peter might come home someday and find them gone.”

  Jonathan began to say something, but she didn’t give him time. “Germaine Rowan”—her hand moved to the next picture—“a.k.a. Jamie. She wanted to be a vet when she grew up. Her mother hasn’t moved a thing in her room. She dusts it every Saturday. When the phone numbers went to seven digits, back in the nineties—remember that?—Alicia Rowan went into Telecom Éireann’s head office and begged them, in tears, to let her keep the old six-digit one, in case someday Jamie tried to ring home.”

  “We had nothing—” Jonathan started, but she cut him off again, her voice rising, bearing down on his.

  “And Adam Ryan.” The photo of my scraped knees. “His parents moved away, because of the publicity and because they were afraid that whoever did this would come back for him. They’ve dropped off the radar. But wherever he is, he’s been living with the fallout every day of his life. You love Knocknaree, right, Jonathan? You love being part of a community where you’ve lived since you were a tiny kid? Adam might have felt the same way, if he’d got the chance. But now he’s out there somewhere, could be anywhere in the world, and he can’t ever come home.”

  The words tolled through me like the lost bells of some underwater city. She was good, Cassie: just for a split second, I was filled with such a wild 256

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  and utter desolation that I could have thrown back my head and howled like a dog.

  “Do you know how the Savages and Alicia Rowan feel about you, Jonathan?” Cassie demanded. “They envy you. You had to bury your daughter, but the only thing worse than that is never having the chance to do it. Remember how you felt the day Katy was missing? They’ve felt that way for twenty years.”

  “All these people deserve to know what happened, Mr. Devlin,” I said quietly. “And it’s not just for their sakes, either. We’ve been working on the assumption that the two cases are connected. If we’re wrong, then we need to know that, or Katy’s killer could slip straight through our fingers.”

  Something shot across Jonathan’s eyes—something, I thought, like a strange, sick mixture of horror and hope, but it was gone too quickly for me to be sure.

  “What happened that day?” Cassie asked. “The fourteenth of August, 1984. The day Peter and Jamie vanished.”

  Jonathan settled deeper into the chair and shook his head. “I’ve told you all I know.”

  “Mr. Devlin,” I said, leaning forward to him, “it’s easy to understand how this happened. You were utterly terrified about the whole thing with Sandra.”

  “You knew she was no threat,” Cassie said. “She was mad about Cathal, she wouldn’t say anything to get him into trouble—and if she did, it would be her word against all of yours. Juries have a tendency to doubt rape victims, especially rape victims who’ve had consensual sex with two of their assailants. You could call her a slut and be home free. But those kids . . . one word from them could land you in jail at any minute. You could never feel safe, as long as they were around.”

  She left the wall, pulled a chair close beside him and sat down. “You didn’t go into Stillorgan at all that day,” she said softly, “did you?”

  Jonathan shifted, a tiny squaring of the shoulders. “Yeah,” he said, heavily. “I did. Myself and Cathal and Shane. To the pictures.”

  “What’d you see?”

  “Whatever I told the cops at the time. It’s been twenty years.”

  Cassie shook her head. “No,” she said, a slight, cool syllable that dropped like a depth charge. “Maybe one of you—I’d bet on Shane; he’s the one I’d leave out, myself—went to the pictures, so he could tell the other two the In the Woods 257

  plot of the film, in case anyone asked. Maybe, if you were smart, you all three went into the cinema and then slipped out the fire exit as soon as the lights went down, so you’d have an alibi. But before six o’clock, two of you, at least, were back in Knocknaree, in the wood.”

  “What,” said Jonathan. His face was pulled into a disgusted grimace.

  “The kids always went home for tea at half past six, and you knew it could take you awhile to find them; the wood was pretty big, back then. But you found them, all right. They were playing, not hiding; probably they were making plenty of noise. You sneaked up on them, just like they’d snuck up on you, and you grabbed them.”

  We had talked all this over beforehand, of course we had: gone through it again and again, found a theory that fit with everything we had, tested every detail. But some tiny slippery unease was stirring in me, twitching and elbowing—Not like that, it wasn’t like that—and it was too late: there was no way left to stop.

  “We never even went into the bloody wood that day. We—”

  “You pulled the kids’ shoes off, to make it harder for them to run away. Then you killed Jamie. We won’t be sure how till we find the bodies, but I’m betting on a blade. You either stabbed her or cut her throat. Somehow or other, her blood went into Adam’s shoes; maybe you deliberately used them to catch the blood, trying not to leave too much evidence. Maybe you were planning to throw the shoes into the river, along with the bodies. But then, Jonathan, while you were dealing with Peter, you took your eye off Adam. He grabbed his shoes and he ran like fuck. There were slash marks in his T-shirt: I think one of you was stabbing at him as he ran, just missed him. . . . But you lost him. He knew that wood even better than you did, and he hid till the searchers found him. How did that make you feel, Jonathan? Knowing that you’d done all that for nothing, and there was still a witness out there?”

  Jonathan stared into space, his jaw set. My hands were shaking; I slid them under the edge of the table.

  “See, Jonathan,” Cassie said, “this is why I think there were only two of you there. Three big guys against three little kids, it would’ve been no contest: you wouldn’t have needed to take their shoes off to stop them running, you could have just held down one kid each, and Adam would never have made it home. But if there were only two of you, trying to subdue the three of them . . .”

  “Mr. Devlin,” I said. My voice sounded strange, echoing. “If you’re the 258

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  one who wasn’t actually there—if you’re the one who went to the cinema to provide an alibi—then you need to tell us. There’s a big, big difference between being a murderer and being an accessory.”

  Jonathan shot me a vicious et-tu-Brute look. “You’re out of your bloody minds,” he said. He was breathing hard through his nose. “You—fuck this. We never touched those kids.”

  “I know you weren’t the ringleader, Mr. Devlin,” I said. “That was Cathal Mills. He’s told us so. He said, and I quote, ‘Jonner would never in a million years have had the balls to think of it.’ If you were only an accessory, or only a witness, do yourself a favor and tell us now.”

  “That’s a load of shite. Cathal didn’t confess to any murders, because we didn’t commit any murders. I haven’t a clue what happened to those kids and I don’t give a damn. I’ve nothing to say about them. I just want to know who did this to Katy.”

  “Katy,” Cassie said, her eyebrows lifting. “OK, fair enough: we’ll come back to Peter and Jamie. Let’s talk about Katy.” She shoved her chair back with a scre
ech—Jonathan’s shoulders leaped—and crossed, fast, to the wall.

  “These are Katy’s medical records. Four years of unexplained gastric illness, ending this spring when she told her ballet teacher it was going to stop and, hey presto, it stopped. Our medical examiner says there was no sign of anything wrong with her. Do you know what that says to us? It says someone was poisoning Katy. It’s easily done: a little toilet bleach here, a dose of oven cleaner there, even salt water’ll do it. It happens all the time.”

  I was watching Jonathan. The angry flush had drained out of his cheeks; he was white, bone-white. That tiny convulsive unease inside me evaporated like mist and it hit me, all over again: he knew.

  “And that wasn’t some stranger, Jonathan, that wasn’t someone with a stake in the motorway and a grudge against you. That was someone who had daily access to Katy, someone she trusted. But by this spring, when she got a second chance at ballet school, that trust was starting to wear a little thin. She refused to keep taking the stuff. Probably she threatened to tell. And just a few months later”—a sharp slap to one of the piteous postmortem shots—“Katy’s dead.”

  “Were you covering for your wife, Mr. Devlin?” I asked gently. I could hardly breathe. “When a child’s poisoned, it’s usually the mother. If you were just trying to keep your family together, we can help you with that. We can get Mrs. Devlin the help she needs.”

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  “Margaret loves our girls,” Jonathan said. His voice was taut, overtightened. “She would never—”

  “Never what?” inquired Cassie. “She’d never make Katy sick, or she’d never kill her?”

  “Never do anything to hurt her. Ever.”

  “Then who does that leave?” Cassie asked. She was leaning against the wall, fingering the post-mortem photo and watching him, cool as a girl in a painting. “Rosalind and Jessica both have a rock-solid alibi for the night Katy died. Who’s left?”