by Tana French
Sam laughed. “Nothing but the best for our boy.”
At 8:23 he had called his brother-in-law to arrange a round of golf for Sunday afternoon, with a few manly jokes thrown in. At 8:41 he had rung the restaurant again, to shout at the order-taker because his food hadn’t arrived. He was starting to sound tipsy. There followed a period of silence; apparently the Lasagna From Hell had, eventually, made it to its destination. At 12:08 a.m. he rang a London number: “His ex-wife,” Sam said. He was at the maudlin stage and wanted to talk about what had gone wrong. In the Woods 301
“The biggest mistake I ever made was letting you go, Dolores,” he told her, his voice thick with tears. “But, sure, maybe I did the right thing. You’re a fine woman, do you know that? You’re too good for me. A hundred times too good. Maybe even a thousand. Amn’t I right, Dolores? Don’t you think I did the right thing?”
“I wouldn’t know, Terry,” Dolores said wearily. “You tell me.” She was doing something else at the same time, clearing plates or maybe emptying a dishwasher; I could hear the chink of china in the background. Finally, when Andrews started to cry in earnest, she hung up. Two minutes later he rang her back, snarled, “You don’t hang up on me, you bitch, do you hear me? I hang up on you,” and slammed down the phone.
“A real ladies’ man,” I said.
“Bugger,” Sam said. He slumped in his chair, leaned his head back and put his hands over his face. “Ah, bugger. I’ve only a week left on this. What the hell do I do if it’s all sushi pizza and lonely hearts?”
The tape clicked again. “Hello,” said a deep male voice, furred with sleep.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“Unregistered mobile,” Sam said, through his hands. “Quarter to two.”
“You little fucking scut,” Andrews said, on the tape. He was very drunk. Sam sat up.
There was a brief pause. Then the deep voice said, “Didn’t I tell you not to ring me again?”
“Whoa,” I said.
Sam made a small inarticulate noise. His hand shot out as if to grab the tape recorder, but he caught himself and merely pulled it closer to us on the table. We bent our heads over it, listening. Sam was holding his breath.
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you told me.” Andrews’s voice was rising. “You’ve told me more than enough already. You told me it would all be back on track by now, do you remember that? Instead there’s fucking . . . injunctions everywhere—”
“I told you to calm the hell down and let me sort it, and I’m telling you the same again. I’ve everything under control.”
“You do in your hole. Don’t you dare talk to me like I’m your emp—your emp—your employee. You’re my fucking employee. I paid you. Fucking . . . thousands and thousands and . . . ‘Oh, we’ll need another five grand for this, Terry, a few grand for the new councilor, Terry. . . .’ I might as well have 302
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flushed it down the bog. If you were my employee you’d be fired. Out on your arse. Like that.”
“I got you everything you paid for. This is just a minor delay. It’ll be sorted. Nothing’s going to change. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sorted, my arse. You double-dealing little cunt, you. You took my money and ran. Now I’ve nothing but a pile of worthless land and the police crawling all over me. How do they . . . how the fuck do they even know that’s my land? I trusted you.”
There was a slight pause. Sam let his breath out in a small burst, held it again. Then the deep voice said sharply, “What phone are you calling from?”
“That’s none of your bloody business,” Andrews said sulkily.
“What were the police asking you about?”
“Some . . . just some kid.” Andrews stifled a belch. “That kid who got killed out there. Her father’s the fucker with the fucking injunction. . . . The thick bastards think I had something to do with it.”
“Get off the phone,” the deep voice said coldly. “Don’t talk to the cops without your lawyer. Don’t worry about the injunction. And don’t ever fucking ring me again.” There was a click as he hung up.
“Well,” I said, after a moment. “That certainly wasn’t sushi pizza and lonely hearts. Congratulations.” It wouldn’t be admissible in court, but it would be enough to put considerable pressure on Andrews. I was trying to be gracious, but a self-pitying part of me felt this was typical: while my investigation degenerated into an unparalleled collection of dead ends and disasters, Sam’s skipped gaily onwards and upwards, success after tidy little success. If I had been the one chasing Andrews, he would probably have made it through the two weeks without calling anyone more sinister than his aging mother. “That should get O’Kelly off your back.”
Sam didn’t answer. I turned to look at him. He was so white he was almost green.
“What?” I said, alarmed. “Are you all right?”
“I’m grand,” he said. “Yeah.” He leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder. His hand shook a little, and I saw a damp, unhealthy sheen on his face.
“Jesus,” I said. “No you’re not.” It struck me suddenly that the excitement of victory could have given him a heart attack or a stroke or something, he could have some weird undiagnosed weakness; there are stories In the Woods 303
like that in squad lore, detectives pursuing a suspect through epic obstacles only to drop dead as soon as the handcuffs click home. “Do you need a doctor or something?”
“No,” he said sharply. “No.”
“Then what the hell?”
Almost as I said it, the penny dropped. I’m amazed, actually, that I hadn’t already caught on. The timbre of the voice, the accent, the little quirks of inflection: I had heard them all before, every day, every evening; a little softened, lacking that abrasive edge, but the resemblance was there and unmistakable.
“Was that,” I said, “was that by any chance your uncle?”
Sam’s eyes snapped to me and then to the door, but there was no one there. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “It was.” His breathing was fast and shallow.
“Are you sure?”
“I know his voice. I’m sure.”
Regrettable though this may be, my main reaction was an intense desire to laugh. He had been so bloody earnest (Straight as a die, lads), so solemn, like a GI making a speech about the flag in some terrible American war movie. At the time I had found it endearing—that kind of absolute faith is one of those things that, like virginity, can only be lost once, and I had never met anyone who had retained it into his thirties before—but now it seemed to me that Sam had spent much of his life trundling happily along on sheer dumb luck, and I had a hard time working up much sympathy for the fact that he had finally stepped on a banana skin and gone flying.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
His head moved blindly from side to side, under the fluorescent lights. He must have thought of it, surely: we were the only two there, one favor and one push of the Record button and the phone call could have been about that Sunday round of golf, anything.
“Can you give me the weekend?” he said. “I’ll take this to O’Kelly on Monday. I just . . . not right now. I can’t think straight. I need the weekend.”
“Sure,” I said. “Are you going to talk to your uncle?”
Sam glanced up at me. “If I do, he’ll start covering his tracks, won’t he?
Getting rid of the evidence before the investigation starts.”
“I assume he would, yes.”
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“If I don’t tell him—if he finds out that I could have given him the heads-up, and I didn’t . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wondered, fleetingly, where the hell Cassie was.
“Do you know the mad thing?” Sam said, after a while. “If you’d asked me this morning who I’d go to, if something like this happened and I didn’t know what to do, I’d have said Red.”
I could think of nothing
to say to this. I looked at his blunt, pleasant features and suddenly felt oddly disengaged from him, from the entire scene; it was a vertiginous sensation, as if I were watching these events unfold in a lighted box hundreds of feet below me. We sat there for a long time, until O’Gorman banged in and started shouting about something to do with rugby, and Sam quietly put the tape in his pocket and gathered up his things and left.
That afternoon, when I went for a smoke break, Cassie followed me outside.
“Have you got a light?” she asked.
She had lost weight, her cheekbones had sharpened, and I wondered whether this had happened unnoticed over the whole course of Operation Vestal or—the thought gave me a prickle of unease—just over the past few days. I fished out my lighter and handed it to her.
It was a cold, cloudy afternoon, dead leaves starting to build up against the walls; Cassie turned her back to the wind to light her cigarette. She was wearing makeup—mascara, a smudge of something pink on each cheek—
but her face, bent over her cupped hand, still looked too pale, almost gray.
“What’s going on, Rob?” she asked, as she straightened up. My stomach plummeted. We’ve all had this excruciating conversation, but I don’t know of a single man who thinks it serves any useful purpose, nor of a single occasion when it has had a positive result, and I had been hoping against hope that Cassie would turn out to be one of the rare women who can leave it alone. “Nothing’s going on,” I said.
“Why are you being weird at me?”
I shrugged. “I’m wrecked, the case is a mess, these last few weeks have done my head in. It’s not personal.”
“Come on, Rob. It is too. You’ve been acting like I have leprosy ever since . . .” I felt my whole body tighten. Cassie’s voice trailed off.
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “I just need some space right now. OK?”
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“I don’t even know what that means. All I know is you’re freaking out on me, and I can’t do anything about it when I don’t understand why.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the determined set to her chin, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to dodge this one. “I’m not freaking out,” I said, hideously uncomfortable. “I just don’t want to make things any more complicated than they already are. I am very definitely not capable of starting a relationship right now, and I don’t want to give the impression—”
“Relationship?” Cassie’s eyebrows shot up; she almost laughed. “Jesus, is that what all this is about? No, Ryan, I don’t expect you to marry me and have my little babies. What the hell made you think I wanted a relationship?
I just want things to go back to normal, because this is ridiculous.”
I didn’t believe her. It was a convincing performance—the quizzical look, the easy slouch of her shoulder against the wall; anyone else in the world would have been able to breathe a sigh of relief, give her an awkward hug and start back towards some variation of normal, arm in arm. But I knew Cassie’s every tell and every quirk, as well as I knew my own hands. The quickening in her breath, that gymnast’s brace of the shoulders, the infinitesimal tentative note in her voice: she was terrified, and this terrified me in turn.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fair enough.”
“You know that. Right, Rob?” That tiny shake again.
“In this situation,” I said, “I’m not sure going back to normal is a possibility. Saturday night was a big mistake, and I wish it had never happened, but it did. And we’re stuck with it.”
Cassie flicked ash onto the cobbles, but I had seen the flash of hurt on her face, stark and shocked as if I had slapped her. After a moment she said,
“Well. I’m not sure it needs to be a mistake.”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” I said. My back was pressed against the wall so hard that I could feel its protrusions digging into me, straight through my suit. “It would never have happened if I hadn’t been such a mess about other things. I’m sorry, but that’s the reality of it.”
“OK,” she said, very carefully, “OK. But it doesn’t have to be a huge big deal. We’re friends, we’re close, that’s why this happened, it should just bring us a little closer; end of story.”
What she said was eminently reasonable and sensible; I knew I was the one who sounded juvenile, melodramatic, and this just wound me even tighter. But her eyes: I had seen them look like that before, across a junkie’s 306
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needle in a flat where no human being should live, and she had sounded very plausibly calm then, too. “Yeah,” I said, looking away. “Maybe. I just need some time to sort out my head. What with everything else that’s been going on.”
Cassie spread her hands. “Rob,” she said: this small clear puzzled voice, I’ll never be able to forget it. “Rob, it’s just me.”
I couldn’t hear her. I could barely see her; her face looked like a stranger’s, unreadable and risky. I wanted to be almost anywhere else in the world. “I should get back inside,” I said, throwing my cigarette away. “Can I have my lighter?”
I can’t explain why I gave so little consideration to the possibility that Cassie might have told the simple, exact truth about what she wanted from me. After all, I had never known her to lie, to me or to anyone else, and I’m not sure why I assumed with such certainty that she had suddenly started doing it now. It never once occurred to me that her wretchedness might actually be the result not of unrequited passion but of losing her closest friend—which I think I can, without deceiving myself, say that I was. It sounds like arrogance, fancying myself some irresistible Casanova, but I truly don’t think it was that simple. You have to remember that I’d never seen Cassie like this before. I’d never seen her cry, I could count on the fingers of one hand the times I’d seen her afraid; now her eyes were puffy and bruised-looking under the clumsy defiant makeup, and there was that flinch of fear and desperate appeal in them every time she looked at me. What was I supposed to think? Rosalind’s words—thirty, biological clock, can’t afford to wait—rubbed at me like a broken tooth, and everything I’d read on the subject (tattered magazines in waiting rooms, Heather’s Cosmo skimmed blearily over breakfast) backed them up: ten ways for “thirty-something”
women to make the most of their last chance, Awful Warnings on leaving child-bearing too late, and, for good measure, the odd article on how you should never sleep with your friends because it inevitably led to “feelings”
on the woman’s part, fear of commitment on the man’s, tedious and unnecessary hassle all round. I had always thought of Cassie as a million miles from these chick-lit clichés, but then (Sometimes, when you’re close to someone, you miss things), I had also thought we were the exception to every rule, and look how that had In the Woods 307
turned out. And I didn’t intend to be a cliché myself; but remember that Cassie wasn’t the only one whose life had gone haywire, I was lost and confused and shaken to the core, and I held on to the only guidelines I could find.
And then, too, I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.
Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie’s full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw. She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god’s most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.
Sam showed up at my apartment on Monday evening, late, around ten. I had just got up and made myself toast for dinner and I was already half asleep again, and when the buzzer went I had an irrational, craven flash of fear that it might be Cassie, maybe a little drunk, demanding that we sort things out once and for all. I let Heather answer. When she banged irritably on my door and said, “It’s for you, some guy called Sam,” I was so relieved that it took a
moment for the surprise to kick in. Sam had never been to my place before; I hadn’t even realized he knew where it was. I went to the door, tucking my shirt in, and listened to him clumping up the stairs. “Hi,” I said, when he reached the landing.
“Hello,” he said. I hadn’t seen him since Friday morning. He was wearing his big tweed overcoat; he needed a shave and his hair was dirty, falling in long dank streaks across his forehead.
I waited, but he didn’t offer any explanation of his presence, so I brought him into the sitting room. Heather followed us in and started talking—Hi I’m Heather, and it’s lovely to meet you, and where has Rob been hiding you all this time, he never brings his friends home, isn’t that very bold of him, and I was just watching The Simple Life, do you ever follow it, God it’s mad this year, and on and on and on. Finally our monosyllabic replies got through to her: she said, in injured tones, “Well. I suppose you boys want some privacy,” and when neither of us denied it she flounced off, giving Sam a warm smile and me a slightly chillier one.
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“Sorry for bursting in on you like this,” Sam said. He looked around the room (aggressive designer sofa cushions, shelves of long-lashed porcelain animals) as if it baffled him.
“That’s all right,” I said. “Would you like a drink?” I had no idea what he was doing there. I didn’t even want to think about the intolerable possibility that it had something to do with Cassie: she wouldn’t have, I thought, surely to God she wouldn’t have asked him to have a word with me?
“Whiskey would be great.”
I found half a bottle of Jameson’s in my kitchen cupboard. When I carried the glasses back into the sitting room Sam was in an armchair, still wearing his coat, his head down and his elbows on his knees. Heather had left the TV on, with the volume off, and two identical women in orange makeup were arguing with silent hysteria about something or other; the light skittered wildly across his face, giving him a ghostly, damned look. I switched off the TV and handed him a glass. He looked at it with something like surprise, then threw half of it back with one clumsy jerk of his wrist. It occurred to me that he might be a little drunk already. He wasn’t unsteady or slurring or anything like that, but both his movements and his voice seemed different, rough-edged and heavy.