In the Woods

by Tana French

  “Who’s got the camera?” Cassie said. “We’ll need to photograph this before we bag it.”

  “Sophie’s lot,” I said. “We’ll need them to go over this place, too.”

  “And look,” Sam said. He shone the torch over at the right-hand side of the shed, picked out a big plastic bag half full of gloves, those green rubber gardening gloves with woven backs. “If I needed gloves, I’d just take a pair out of there and throw them back in afterwards.”

  “Detectives!” Sophie yelled, somewhere outside. Her voice sounded tinny, compressed by the lowering sky. I jumped.

  Cassie started to spring up, glanced back at the trowel. “Someone should probably—”

  “I’ll stay,” Sam said. “You two go on ahead.”

  Sophie was on the steps of the finds shed, a black-light in her hand.

  “Yeah,” she said, “definitely your crime scene. He tried to clean up, but . . . Come see.”

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  The two baby techs were crammed into a corner, the guy holding two big black spray bottles, Helen with a video camera; her eyes were large and stunned over her mask. The finds shed was too small for five and the sinister, clinical incongruity the techs had brought with them turned it into some makeshift guerrilla torture chamber: paper covering the windows, bare lightbulb swinging overhead, masked and gloved figures waiting for their moment to step forward. “Stay back by the desk,” Sophie said, “away from the shelves.” She slammed the door—everyone flinched—and pressed tape back into place over the cracks.

  Luminol reacts with even the tiniest amount of blood, making it glow under ultraviolet light. You can paint over a splattered wall, scrub a carpet till it looks brand-new, keep yourself off the radar for years or decades; luminol will resurrect the crime in delicate, merciless detail. If only Kiernan and McCabe had had luminol, I thought, they could have commandeered a crop-spraying plane and misted the wood, and fought down a hysterical desire to laugh. Cassie and I pressed back against the desk, inches apart. Sophie motioned to the boy tech for the spray, flicked on her black-light and switched off the overhead bulb. In the sudden darkness I could hear all of us breathing, five sets of lungs fighting for the dusty air. Hiss of a spray bottle, the video camera’s tiny red eye moving in. Sophie squatted and held her black-light close to the floor, near the shelves. “There,”

  she said.

  I heard Cassie’s small, sharp intake of breath. The floor blazed bluewhite with frantic patterns like some grotesque abstract painting: spattered arcs where blood had burst outwards, blotchy circles where it had pooled and started to dry, great swipes and scrub-marks where someone panting and desperate had tried to clean it away. It glowed like something radioactive from cracks between the floorboards, etched the rough grain of the wood in high relief. Sophie moved the black-light upwards and sprayed again: tiny droplets fanning across the bottom of the metal shelves, a smudge like a wild grabbing handprint. The darkness stripped away the finds shed, the messy papers and bags of broken pottery, and left us suspended in black space with the murder: luminescent, howling, replaying itself again and again before our eyes.

  I said, “Jesus Christ.” Katy Devlin had died on this floor. We had sat in this shed and interviewed the killer, smack bang on the scene of the crime.

  “No chance that’s bleach or something,” said Cassie. Luminol gives false 326

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  positives for anything from household bleach through copper, but we both knew Sophie wouldn’t have called us in here until she was sure.

  “We’ve swabbed,” Sophie said briefly. I could hear the dirty look in her voice. “Blood.”

  Deep down, I think I had stopped believing in this moment. I had thought an awful lot about Kiernan, over the past few weeks: Kiernan, with his cozy seaside retirement and his haunted dreams. Only the luckiest of detectives makes it through a whole career without at least one of these cases, and some traitor part of me had insisted from the start that Operation Vestal—the last one in the world I would have chosen—was going to be mine. It took a strange, almost painful adjustment of focus to understand that our guy was no longer a faceless archetype, coalesced out of collective nightmare for one deed and then dissolved back into darkness; he was sitting in the canteen, just a few yards away, wearing muddy Docs and drinking tea under O’Gorman’s fishy eye.

  “There you go,” Sophie said. She straightened up and switched on the overhead light. I blinked at the bland, innocent floor.

  “Look,” said Cassie. I followed the tilt of her chin: on one of the bottom shelves was a plastic bag stuffed with more plastic bags, the big, clear, heavy kind the archaeologists used for storing pottery. “If the trowel was a weapon of opportunity . . .”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sophie said. “We’re going to have to test every bag in this whole bloody place.”

  The windowpanes rattled and there was a sudden, wild thrumming on the roof of the shed: it had started to rain.

  20

  It rained hard all the rest of the day, the kind of thick, endless rain that can soak you to the skin as you run the few yards to your car. Every now and then lightning forked over the dark hills, and a distant rumble of thunder reached us. We left the Bureau gang to finish processing the scenes and took Hunt, Mark, Damien and, on the off-chance, a deeply aggrieved Sean (“I thought we were partners here!”) back to work with us. We found them an interview room each and started rechecking their alibis. Sean was easy to eliminate. He shared a flat in Rathmines with three other guys, all of whom remembered, to some extent, the night Katy had died: it had been one of the guys’ birthday and they had had a party, at which Sean had DJed till four in the morning, then thrown up on someone’s girlfriend’s boots and passed out on the sofa. At least thirty witnesses could vouch for both his whereabouts and his tastes in music. The other three were less straightforward. Hunt’s alibi was his wife, Mark’s was Mel; Damien lived in Rathfarnham with his widowed mother, who went to bed early but was positive he couldn’t have left the house without waking her. These are the kind of alibis detectives hate, the thin, mulish kind that can wreck a case. I could tell you about a dozen cases where we know exactly whodunit, how and where and when, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about it because the guy’s mammy swears he was tucked up on the sofa watching The Late Late Show.

  “Right,” O’Kelly said, in the incident room, after we had taken Sean’s statement and sent him home (he had forgiven me for my treachery and offered me a farewell high five; he wanted to know if he could sell his story to the papers, but I told him if he did I would personally raid his flat for drugs every night until he was thirty). “One down, two to go. Place your bets, lads: who do ye fancy?” He was in a much better mood with us, now that he knew we had a suspect in one of the interview rooms, even if we weren’t sure which one.

  “Damien,” Cassie said. “He fits the MO, bang on.”

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  “Mark’s admitted he was at the scene,” I said. “And he’s the only one with anything like a motive.”

  “As far as we know.” I knew what she meant, or thought I did, but I wasn’t going to bring up the hired-gun theory, not in front of either O’Kelly or Sam. “And I can’t see him doing it.”

  “I’m aware of that. I can.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes, which I actually found slightly comforting: a small savage part of me had expected her to flinch.

  “O’Neill?” O’Kelly asked.

  “Damien,” Sam said. “I brought them all a cup of tea. He’s the only one picked his up with his left hand.”

  After a startled second, Cassie and I started to laugh. The joke was on us—I, at any rate, had forgotten all about the left-handed thing—but we were both wound tight and giddy, and we couldn’t stop. Sam grinned and shrugged, pleased at the reaction. “I don’t know what ye two are laughing about,” O’Kelly said gruffly, but his mouth was twitching, too. “You should’ve spotted that yourselves.
All this jibber-jabber about MOs. . . .” I was laughing too hard, my face going red and my eyes watering. I bit down on my lip to stop myself.

  “Oh, God,” said Cassie, taking a deep breath. “Sam, what would we do without you?”

  “That’s enough fun and games,” O’Kelly said. “You two take Damien Donnelly. O’Neill, get Sweeney and have another go at Hanly, and I’ll find a few of the lads to talk to Hunt and the alibi witnesses. And, Ryan, Maddox, O’Neill—we need a confession. Don’t fuck this up. Ándele.” He scraped back his chair with an ear-splitting screech and left.

  “Ándele?” said Cassie. She looked perilously near to another bout of the giggles.

  “Well done, lads,” Sam said. He held out a hand to each of us; his grip was strong and warm and solid. “Good luck.”

  “If Andrews hired one of them,” I said, when Sam had gone to find Sweeney, and Cassie and I were alone in the incident room, “this is going to be the mess of the century.”

  Cassie raised one eyebrow noncommittally. She finished her coffee: it was going to be a very long day, we had all been spiking ourselves up on caffeine.

  “How do you want to do this?” I asked.

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  “You head it up. He thinks of women as the source of sympathy and approval; I’ll pat him on the head now and then. He’s intimidated by men, so go easy: if you push him too hard, he’ll freeze up and want to leave. Just take your time, and guilt-trip him. I still think he was in two minds about the whole thing from the start, and I bet he feels terrible about it. If we play to his conscience, it’s only a matter of time before he goes to pieces.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said, and we shook our clothes straight and smoothed down our hair and walked, shoulder to shoulder, down the corridor towards the interview room.

  It was our last partnership. I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or the most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives know each other’s every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners in a pas de deux. I never knew and never will whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.

  Damien was huddled in his chair, shoulders rigid, his cup of tea steaming away ignored on the table. When I cautioned him, he stared at me as if I were speaking Urdu.

  The month since Katy’s death hadn’t been kind to him. He was wearing khaki combats and a baggy gray sweatshirt, but I could see that he had lost weight, and it made him seem gangly and somehow shorter than he actually was. The boy-band prettiness was looking a little ragged around the edges—

  purplish bags under his eyes, a vertical crease starting to form between his eyebrows; the youthful bloom that should have lasted him another few years was fading fast. The change was subtle enough that I hadn’t noticed it back on the dig, but now it gave me pause.

  We started with easy questions, things he could answer with no need to worry. He was from Rathfarnham, right? Studying at Trinity? Just finished second year? How had the exams gone? Damien answered in monosyllables and twisted the hem of his sweatshirt around his thumb, clearly dying to 330

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  know why we were asking but afraid to find out. Cassie steered him onto archaeology and gradually he relaxed; he disentangled himself from the sweatshirt and started drinking his tea and speaking in full sentences, and they had a long, happy conversation about the various finds that had turned up on the dig. I left them to it for at least twenty minutes before intervening (tolerant smile: “Hate to say this, guys, but we should probably get back to business before we all three get in trouble”).

  “Ah, come on, Ryan, two seconds,” Cassie begged. “I’ve never seen a ring brooch. What does it look like?”

  “They said it’s probably going to be in the National Museum,” Damien told her, flushed with pride. “It’s kind of this big, and it’s bronze, and it’s got a pattern incised into it. . . .” He made vague squiggly motions, presumably intended to indicate an incised pattern, with one finger.

  “Draw it for me?” Cassie asked, pushing her notebook and pen across the table to him. Damien drew obediently, brow furrowed in concentration.

  “Sort of like this,” he said, giving Cassie back the notebook. “I can’t draw.”

  “Wow,” Cassie said reverently. “And you found it? If I found something like that, I think I’d explode or have a heart attack or something.”

  I looked over her shoulder: a broad circle with what appeared to be a pin across the back, decorated with fluid, balanced curves. “Pretty,” I said. Damien was indeed left-handed. His hands still looked a size too big for his body, like a puppy’s paws.

  “Hunt’s out,” O’Kelly said, in the corridor. “Original statement says he was having his tea and watching telly with his wife all the Monday night, till he went to bed at eleven. Bloody documentaries, they watched, something about meerkats and one about Richard III—he told us every bloody detail, whether we wanted to know or not. The wife says the same, and the telly guide backs them up. And the neighbor has a dog, one of those little shites that barks all night; he says he heard Hunt shouting out the window at it around one in the morning. Why he wouldn’t tell the little fucker to shut up himself. . . . He’s sure of the date because it was the day they got the new decking in—says the workmen upset the dog. I’m sending Einstein home, before he has me driven mental. It’s a two-horse race, lads.”

  “How’s Sam doing with Mark?” I asked.

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  “Getting nowhere. Hanly’s being snotty as fuck and sticking to the shagfest story; the girlfriend’s backing him up. If they’re lying, they’re not going to crack any time soon. And he’s right-handed, for sure. How about your boy?”

  “Left,” Cassie said.

  “There’s our odds-on favorite, then. But that’s not going to be enough. I talked to Cooper. . . .” O’Kelly’s face pulled into a disgusted grimace.

  “Position of the victim, position of the assailant, balance of probabilities—

  more shite than a pigsty, but what it boils down to is he thinks our man’s left-handed but he’s not willing to say for definite. He’s like a bloody politician. How’s Donnelly doing?”

  “Nervous,” I said.

  O’Kelly slapped the door of the interview room. “Good. Keep him that way.”

  We went back in and set about making Damien nervous. “OK, guys,” I said, pulling up my chair, “time to get down to business. Let’s talk about Katy Devlin.”

  Damien nodded attentively, but I saw him brace himself. He took a sip of his tea, though it had to be cold by now.

  “When did you first see her?”

  “I guess when we were like three quarters of the way up the hill? Higher up than the cottage, anyway, and the Portakabins. See, because of the way the hill slopes—”

  “No,” Cassie said, “not the day you found her body. Before that.”

  “Before . . . ?” Damien blinked at her, took another sip of tea. “No—

  um, I didn’t; I hadn’t. Met her before that, that day.”

  “You’d never even seen her before?” Cassie’s tone hadn’t changed, but I felt the sudden bird-dog stillness in her. “Are you sure? Think hard, Damien.”

  He shook his head vehemently. “No. I swear. I’d never seen her in my entire life.”

  There was a moment of silence. I gave Damien what I hoped was a look of mild interest, but my head was whirling.

  I had cast my vote for Mark not out of sheer contrariness, as you might think, nor because something about him annoyed me in ways I didn’t care to 332

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  explore. I suppose when you come down to it, given the choices available, I simply wanted it to be him. I had never been able to take Damien seriously—

  not as a man, not as a witness and certainly not as a suspect. He was such an abject little wimp, nothing to him but curls and stammers and vulnerability, you could have blown him away like a dandelion clock; the thought that all this past month might have stemmed from someone like him was outrageous. Mark, whatever we might think of each other, made an opponent and a goal worth having.

  But this: it was such a pointless lie. The Devlin girls had hung around the dig often enough that summer, and they were hardly inconspicuous; all the other archaeologists had remembered them; Mel, who had stayed a safe distance from Katy’s body, had known her straight away. And Damien had given tours of the site; he was more likely than any of them to have spoken to Katy, spent time with her. He had bent over her body, supposedly to see if she was breathing (and even that much courage, I realized, was out of character). He had no reason in the world to deny having seen her before, unless he was clumsily dodging a trap we had never set; unless the thought of being linked to her in any way scared him so badly that he couldn’t think straight.

  “OK,” Cassie said, “what about her father—Jonathan Devlin? Are you a member of Move the Motorway?” and Damien took a big gulp of cold tea and started nodding again, and we skated deftly away from the subject before he had a chance to realize what he had said.

  Around three o’clock, Cassie and Sam and I went out for takeaway pizza—

  Mark was starting to bitch about being hungry, and we wanted to keep him and Damien happy. Neither of them was under arrest; they could decide to walk out of the building at any moment, and there would be nothing we could do to stop them. We were trading, as we so often do, on the basic human desires to please authority and to be a good guy; and, while I was pretty sure these would keep Damien in the interview room indefinitely, I was far from convinced about Mark.

  “How are you getting on with Donnelly?” Sam asked me, in the pizza place. Cassie was up at the counter, leaning over it and laughing with the guy who had taken our order.