by Tana French
“Don’t you dare even suggest I hurt my daughter,” he said, a low, warning rumble. “Don’t you dare.”
“We’ve got three murdered children, Mr. Devlin, all murdered in the same place, all very probably murdered to cover up other crimes. And we’ve got one guy smack bang in the middle of each case: you. If you’ve got a good explanation for that, we need to hear it now.”
“This is unbefuckinglievable,” Jonathan said. His voice was rising dangerously. “Katy’s—someone’s after killing my daughter and you want me to give you an explanation? That’s your bloody job. You’re the ones should be giving me explanations, not accusing me of—”
I was on my feet almost before I knew it. I threw down my notebook with a flat smack and pitched myself forward on my hands, leaning across the table into his face. “A local guy, Jonathan, thirty-five or over, been living in Knocknaree more than twenty years. A guy with no solid alibi. A guy who knew Peter and Jamie, had daily access to Katy, and had a strong motive to kill all of them. Who the fuck does that sound like to you? You name me one other man who fits that description, and I swear to God you can walk out that door and we’ll never hassle you again. Come on, Jonathan. Name one. Just one.”
“Then arrest me!” he roared. He slammed out his fists at me, palms up, wrists pressed together. “Come on, if you’re so bloody sure, all your evidence— Arrest me! Come on!”
I cannot tell you, I wonder if you can imagine, how badly I wanted to do it. My whole life was shooting through my mind as a drowning man’s is said to—tear-sodden nights in a chilly dorm and bikes zigzagging look-Ma-nohands, pocket-warm butter-and-sugar sandwiches, the detectives’ voices yammering endlessly at my ears—and I knew we didn’t have enough, it would never stick, in twelve hours he would walk out that door free as a bird 260
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and guilty as sin. I had never been so sure of anything in my life. “Fuck this,” I said, shoving up my shirt cuffs. “No, Devlin. No. You’ve been sitting here bullshitting us all evening, and I’ve had enough.”
“Arrest me or—”
I lunged at him. He leaped backwards, sending the chair clattering, finding a corner and throwing up his fists in the same reflexive movement. Cassie was on me already, grabbing my raised arm with both hands. “Jesus, Ryan! Stop!”
We had done it so many times. It’s our last resort, when we know a suspect is guilty but we need a confession and he won’t talk. After the lunge and grab I slowly relax, shake off Cassie’s loosening hands, still glaring at the suspect; finally roll my shoulders and stretch out my neck and sprawl in my chair, drumming my fingers restlessly, while she goes back to questioning him with a watchful eye on me for any sign of renewed ferocity. A few minutes later she starts, checks her mobile, says, “Dammit, I have to take this. Ryan . . . just stay cool, OK? Remember what happened last time,” and leaves us alone together. It works; mostly I don’t even have to stand up again. Ten times we’d done it, twelve? We had it as smoothly choreographed as any screen stunt.
But this wasn’t the same, this was the real thing for which all the other times and all the other cases had been nothing but practice, and it infuriated me even more that Cassie didn’t realize this. I tried to jerk my arm away; she was stronger than I expected, wrists like steel, and I heard a seam rip somewhere in my sleeve. We swayed in a thick, clumsy struggle. “Get off me—”
“Rob, no—”
Her voice came to me thin and meaningless through the huge red roaring in my head. All I could see was Jonathan, brows down and chin braced like a boxer, cornered and waiting only a few feet away. I reefed my arm forward with all my strength and felt her stumble back as her grip slipped away, but the chair got under my feet and before I could kick it aside and reach him she had recovered, caught my other arm and twisted it up behind my back, one fast, clinical move. I gasped.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” she said straight into my ear, low and furious. “He doesn’t know anything.”
The words hit me like a slap of cold water in the face. I knew that even if she was wrong there was nothing in the world I could do about it, and it left me breathless, helpless. I felt as if I had been filleted. In the Woods 261
Cassie felt the fight drain out of me. She shoved me away and stepped back swiftly, her hands still tense and ready. We stared at each other across the room like enemies, both of us breathing hard.
There was something dark and spreading on her lower lip, and after a moment I realized it was blood. For a hideous, free-falling second I thought I had hit her. (Later I found out that I hadn’t, in fact: when I pulled away, the recoil flung one of her wrists back to smack her in the mouth, cutting her lip on her front teeth; not that this makes much of a difference.) It brought me back to myself, a little. “Cassie—” I said. She ignored me. “Mr. Devlin,” she said coolly, as if nothing at all had happened; there was only the faintest hint of a tremor in her voice. Jonathan—I had forgotten he was there—moved slowly out of the corner, his eyes still on me. “We’ll be releasing you without charge for now. But I would strongly advise you to stay where we can find you and not to attempt to contact your rape victim in any way. Understood?”
“Yeah,” Devlin said, after a moment. “Fine.” He yanked the chair upright, pulled his tangled coat off the back and threw it on in quick, angry jabs. At the door he turned and gave me a hard look, and I thought for a moment he was going to say something, but he changed his mind and left, shaking his head disgustedly. Cassie followed him out and whipped the door shut behind her; it was too heavy for a proper slam, it closed with an unsatisfying thump. I sank into a chair and put my face in my hands. I had never done anything like this before, ever. I abhor physical violence, I always have; the very thought makes me flinch. Even when I was a prefect, with arguably more power and less accountability than any adult outside of small South American countries, I never once caned anyone. But a minute ago I had been tussling with Cassie like some drunk in a bar brawl, ready to dogfight Jonathan Devlin on the interview-room floor, swept away by the overwhelming desire to knee him in the guts and beat his face to bloody pulp. And I had hurt Cassie. I wondered, with detached, lucid interest, whether I was losing my mind. After a few minutes Cassie came back in, shut the door and leaned against it, hands shoved into her jeans pockets. Her lip had stopped bleeding.
“Cassie,” I said, rubbing my hands over my face. “I’m really sorry. Are you OK?”
“What the hell was that?” She had a hot, bright spot of color on each cheekbone.
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“I thought he knew something. I was sure.” My hands were shaking so hard it looked phony, like an inept actor simulating shock. I clasped them together to stop it.
Eventually she said, very quietly, “Rob, you can’t keep this up.” I didn’t answer. After a long time, I heard the door close behind her. 15
Igot drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I’d been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed sickeningly with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally I realized that, while the nausea showed no signs of getting better, it probably wasn’t going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on top of the covers without taking off my clothes. My dreams were uneasy ones, with a clogged, tainted quality to them. Something thrashing and yowling in a burlap bag, laughter and a lighter moving closer. Shattered glass on the kitchen floor, and someone’s mother was sobbing. I was a trainee again in some lonely border county, and Jonathan Devlin and Cathal Mills were hiding out in the hills with guns and a hunting dog, living wild and we had to catch them, me and two Murder detectives tall and cold as waxworks, our boots mired deep in treacly mud. I half woke fighting the bedclothes, sheets pulled away from t
he mattress into sweaty tangles, and was dragged down into sleep again even as I realized I had been dreaming.
But I woke up in the morning with one image brilliantly clear in my head, slapped across the front of my mind like a neon sign. Nothing to do with Peter or Jamie or Katy: Emmett, Tom Emmett, one of those two Murder detectives who had paid a flying visit to Ballygobackwards when I was a trainee. Emmett was tall and very thin, with subtly wonderful clothes (now that I think of it, this is probably where I got my first immutable impression of how Murder detectives are supposed to dress) and a face straight out of an old cowboy movie, scored and polished like ancient wood. He was still on the squad when I joined—he’s retired now—and he seemed like a pretty nice guy, but I never managed to get past that first awe of him; whenever he talked to me I would instantly congeal into an inarticulate, schoolboyish mess. 264
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I had been skulking in the Ballygobackwards car park one afternoon, smoking and trying not to be too obvious about eavesdropping on their conversation. The other detective had asked a question—what, I couldn’t hear—and Emmett had shaken his head briefly. “If he doesn’t, then we’ve made a bollocks of the whole thing,” he’d said, taking a last crisp drag on his cigarette and extinguishing it under one elegant shoe. “We’ll have to go back. Right back to the beginning, and see where we went wrong.” Then they’d turned and gone into the station, side by side, shoulders hunched and secretive in their discreet dark jackets.
I had, I knew—there’s nothing like booze for triggering abject selfreproach—made a complete bollocks of just about everything, in just about every possible way. But that barely mattered, because the solution was suddenly so clear. I felt as if everything that had happened throughout this case—the Kavanagh nightmare, the awful interview with Jonathan, all the sleepless nights and little treacheries of the mind—had been sent by the hand of some wise kind god to bring me to this moment. Here I had been avoiding Knocknaree wood like the plague, I think I would have interviewed everyone in the country and racked my brain till it exploded before it occurred to me to take a step back in there, if I hadn’t been battered to the point where I had no defense left against the single blindingly obvious thing: I was the one person who beyond any doubt knew at least some of the answers, and if anything could give them back to me, it was (right back to the beginning) that wood.
It sounds facile, I’m sure. But I can’t begin to describe to you what it meant to me, this thousand-watt bulb clicking on above my head, this beacon to tell me that I wasn’t lost in a wilderness after all, that I knew exactly where to go. I almost burst out laughing, sitting there in bed with early-morning light streaming between the curtains. I should have had the mother of all hangovers, but I felt like I’d slept for a week; I was bubbling over with energy like a twenty-year-old. I showered and shaved and gave Heather such a cheerful “Good morning” that she looked taken aback and slightly suspicious, and then I drove into town singing along to terrible chart music on the car radio. I found a parking space on Stephen’s Green—it felt like a good omen; they’re unheard of at that hour of the morning—and did some quick shopping on my way to work. In a little bookshop off Grafton Street I found a beautiful old copy of Wuthering Heights—thick pages browning at the edges, rich red binding stamped in gold, “For Sara, Christmas 1922” in In the Woods 265
faded ink on the title page. Then I went to Brown Thomas and bought a sleek, complicated little machine that made cappuccino; Cassie has a thing for coffee with froth on top, I had meant to get her this for Christmas but had somehow never got around to it. I walked to work without bothering to move my car. It cost me a ridiculous amount of money in the meter, but it was the kind of sunny, buoyant day that encourages extravagance. Cassie was already at her desk with a pile of paperwork. Sam and the floaters, luckily for me, were nowhere to be seen. “Morning,” she said, giving me a cool warning look.
“Here,” I said, dumping the two bags in front of her.
“What’s this?” she demanded, eyeing them suspiciously.
“That,” I said, pointing at the coffee gadget, “is your belated Christmas present. And this one is an apology. I am so, so sorry, Cass—not just about yesterday, but about the way I’ve been all these last few weeks. I have been an utter pain in the arse and you have every right to be furious with me. But I absolutely promise that’s over. From now on I will be a normal, sane, nonhorrible human being.”
“That’d be a first,” Cassie said automatically, and my heart lifted. She opened the book—she loves Emily Brontë—and ran her fingers over the title page.
“Am I forgiven? I’ll go down on my knees if you like. Seriously.”
“I would love to make you do it,” Cassie said, “but somebody might see you, and the grapevine would blow a fuse on that one. Ryan, you little bastard. You ruined my perfectly good sulk.”
“You couldn’t have kept it up anyway,” I said, enormously relieved. “You would have cracked by lunchtime.”
“Don’t push it. Come here, you.” She held out an arm, and I bent and gave her a quick hug. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome,” I said. “And I really mean it: no more obnoxiousness.”
Cassie watched me as I took off my coat. “Look,” she said, “it’s not just that you’ve been a pain in the hole. I’ve been worried about you. If you don’t want to deal with this any more—no, listen—then you could swap with Sam, go after Andrews and let him take the family. He’s got far enough that any of us could take over; it’s not like we’re going to need help from his uncle or anything. Sam won’t ask questions, you know what he’s like. There’s no reason for you to drive yourself nuts over this.”
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“Cass, I’m genuinely, honest-to-God fine,” I said. “Yesterday was a huge wake-up call. I swear on anything you can think of, I’ve worked out how to deal with this case.”
“Rob, remember how you said to kick you if you got too weird about this one? This is me kicking you. Metaphorically, for now.”
“Look, give me one more week. If by the end of next week you think I’m still not handling this, I’ll swap with Sam. OK?”
“OK,” Cassie said finally, though she still looked unconvinced. I was in such a good mood that this unexpected protective streak, which normally would have given me the fidgets, seemed very touching; probably because I knew it was no longer necessary. I gave her shoulder a clumsy little squeeze on the way to my desk.
“Actually,” she said, as I sat down, “this whole Sandra Scully thing has one major silver lining. You know how we’ve been wanting to get our hands on Rosalind and Jessica’s medical records? Well, we’ve got Katy showing physical signs of abuse, Jessica showing psychological signs and now Jonathan admitting to rape. I think there’s a good chance we’ve got enough circumstantial stuff to pull the records.”
“Maddox,” I said, “you’re a star.” This was the one thing that had been nagging at me, the fact that I had made a fool of myself by sending us off on a wild-goose chase. Apparently it hadn’t been that pointless after all.
“But I thought you thought Devlin wasn’t our guy.”
Cassie shrugged. “Not exactly. He’s hiding something, but it could be just abuse—well, not just, you know what I mean—or he could be covering for Margaret, or . . . I’m not as sure as you are that he’s guilty, but I’d like to see what’s in those records, that’s all.”
“I’m not sure either.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You seemed pretty sure yesterday.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, a little awkwardly, “do you have any idea whether he’s filed a complaint on me? I don’t have the bollocks to check.”
“Because you apologized so nicely,” Cassie told me, “I’m going to overlook that wonderful setup line. He didn’t say anything about it to me, and anyway you’d know if he had: you’d be able to hear O’Kelly all the way to Knocknaree. That’s why I’m assuming Cathal Mills ha
sn’t filed anything on me for saying he had a teeny weenie, either.”
“He won’t. Can you seriously see him sitting down with some desk sergeant and explaining that you suggested he might have a limp mini-dick?
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Devlin’s a different story, though. He’s half off his trolley right now anyway—”
“Don’t be bitching about Jonathan Devlin,” Sam said, bouncing into the incident room. He was flushed and overexcited, his collar twisted and a forelock of fair hair tumbling into his eyes. “Devlin is The Man. Honestly, if I didn’t think he might take me up wrong, I’d snog the face off him.”
“You’ll make a lovely couple,” I said, putting down my pen. “What’s he done?” Cassie spun her chair around, a smile of anticipation starting on her face.
Sam pulled out his chair with a flourish, dropped into it and swung his feet up onto the table like a private eye in an old movie; if he had had a hat, he would have sent it spinning across the room. “He’s only after picking Andrews out of the voice lineup. Andrews and his lawyer nearly had a conniption about it, and Devlin wasn’t best pleased to hear from me either—
what the hell did ye say to him?—but they all did it in the end. I rang Devlin up—I figured that was the best way; you know how everyone always sounds different down the phone?—and I got Andrews and a bunch of the lads to say a few sentences from the phone calls: ‘Nice little girl you’ve got there,’ ‘You have no idea what you’re messing with . . . ’ ”
He shoved the lock of hair away with his wrist; his face, laughing and open, was triumphant as a little boy’s. “Andrews was mumbling and drawling and all sorts, trying to make his voice sound different, but my main man Jonathan picked him out in five seconds flat, not a bother on him. He was yelling at me down the phone, wanting to know who it was, and Andrews and his lawyer—I had your man Devlin on speakerphone so they could hear it themselves, I didn’t want any arguments later—they were sitting there with faces on them like a pair of slapped arses. It was brilliant.”