In the Woods

by Tana French

  “We’re not trying to drag anyone into anything,” Cassie said gently. “We just want to figure out what happened.”

  “I already told you.”

  “I know, I know. Bear with us, OK? We just have to clear up the details. Is that when you first met Rosalind, at that protest?”

  Damien reached out and touched the mobile records with one finger.

  “Yeah,” he said. “When I signed up. We got talking.”

  “You got on well, so you stayed in touch?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  They backed off then. When did you start work at Knocknaree? Why’d you pick that dig? Yeah, it sounded fascinating to me, too. . . . Gradually Damien relaxed again. It was still raining, thick curtains of water sliding down the windows. Cassie went for more coffee, came back with a look of guilty mischief and a packet of custard creams swiped from the canteen. There was no hurry, now that Damien had confessed. The only thing he could do was demand a lawyer, and a lawyer would advise him to tell them exactly what they were trying to find out; an accomplice meant shared blame, confusion, all a defense attorney’s favorite things. Cassie and Sam had all day, all week, as long as it took.

  “How soon did you and Rosalind start going out?” Cassie asked, after a while.

  Damien had been folding the corner of a phone-record page into little In the Woods 367

  pleats, but at this he glanced up, startled and wary. “What? . . . We didn’t—

  um, we aren’t. We’re just friends.”

  “Damien,” Sam said reproachfully, tapping the pages. “Look at this. You’re ringing her three, four times a day, texting her half a dozen times, talking for hours in the middle of the night—”

  “God, I’ve done that,” Cassie said reminiscently. “The amount of phone credit you go through when you’re in love . . .”

  “You don’t ring any of your other friends a quarter as much. She’s ninetyfive percent of your phone bill, man. And there’s nothing wrong with that. She’s a lovely girl, you’re a nice young fella; why shouldn’t you go out together?”

  “Hang on,” Cassie said suddenly, sitting up. “Was Rosalind involved in this? Is that why you don’t want to talk about her?”

  “No!” Damien almost shouted. “Leave her alone!”

  Cassie and Sam stared, eyebrows raised.

  “Sorry,” he muttered after a moment, slumping in his chair. He was bright red. “I just . . . I mean, she didn’t have anything to do with it. Can’t you leave her out of it?”

  “Then why the big secret, Damien?” Sam asked. “If she wasn’t involved?”

  He shrugged. “Because. We didn’t tell anyone we were going out.”

  “Why not?”

  “We just didn’t. Rosalind’s dad would’ve been mad.”

  “He didn’t like you?” Cassie asked, with just enough surprise to be flattering.

  “No, it wasn’t that. She’s not allowed to have boyfriends.” Damien glanced nervously between them. “Could you—you know . . . could you not tell him?

  Please?”

  “How mad would he have been,” Cassie said softly, “exactly?”

  Damien picked pieces off his Styrofoam cup. “I just didn’t want to get her into trouble.” But the flush hadn’t died away and he was breathing fast; there was something there.

  “We’ve a witness,” Sam said, “who told us Jonathan Devlin may recently have hit Rosalind at least once. Do you know if that’s true?”

  A fast blink, a shrug. “How would I know?”

  Cassie shot Sam a quick look and backed off again. “So how did you guys manage to meet up without her dad finding out?” she asked confidentially. 368

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  “At first we just met in town on weekends and went for coffee and stuff. Rosalind told them she was meeting her friend Karen, from school? So they were OK with that. Later, um . . . later we sometimes met at night. Out on the dig. I’d go out there and wait till her parents were asleep and she could sneak out of the house. We’d sit on the altar stone, or sometimes in the finds shed if it was raining, and just talk.”

  It was easy to imagine, easy and seductively sweet: a blanket around their shoulders and a country sky packed with stars, and moonlight making the rough landscape of the dig into a delicate, haunted thing. No doubt the secrecy and the complications had only added to the romance of it all. It carried the primal, irresistible power of myth: the cruel father, the fair maiden imprisoned in her tower, hedged in by thorns and calling for rescue. They had made their own nocturnal, stolen world, and to Damien it must have been a very beautiful one.

  “Or some days she’d come to the dig, maybe bring Jessica, and I’d give them the tour. We couldn’t really talk much, in case someone saw, but—

  just to see each other. . . . And this one time, back in May”—he smiled a little, down at his hands, a shy, private smile—“see, I had a part-time job, making sandwiches in this deli? So I saved up enough that we could go away for a whole weekend. We took the train up to Donegal and stayed in this little B&B, we signed in like—like we were married. Rosalind told her parents she was spending the weekend with Karen, to study for her exams.”

  “And then what went wrong?” Cassie asked, and I caught that tautening in her voice again. “Did Katy find out about you two?”

  Damien glanced up, startled. “What? No. Jesus, no. We were really careful.”

  “What, then? She was bothering Rosalind? Little sisters can be pretty annoying.”

  “No—”

  “Rosalind was jealous of all the attention Katy was getting? What?”

  “No! Rosalind’s not like that—she was happy for Katy! And I wouldn’t kill someone just for . . . I’m not—I’m not crazy!”

  “And you’re not violent, either,” Sam said, slapping another heap of paper in front of Damien. “These are interviews about you. Your teachers remember you staying far away from fights, not starting them. Would you say that’s accurate?”

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  “I guess—”

  “Did you just do it for the buzz, after all?” Cassie cut in. “Did you want to see what it felt like to kill someone?”

  “No! What are you—”

  Sam moved round the table, surprisingly fast, and leaned in beside Damien. “The lads from the dig say George McMahon gave you hassle, just like he did everyone else, but you’re one of the few who never lost your temper with him. So what got you angry enough to kill a little girl who never did you any harm?”

  Damien huddled wretchedly into his sweatshirt, his chin tucked into his neck, and shook his head. They had closed in too soon, too hard; they were losing him.

  “Hey. Look at me.” Sam snapped his fingers in Damien’s face. “Do I look anything like your mammy?”

  “What? No—” But the unexpectedness of it had caught him; his eyes, wild and miserable, had flicked back up.

  “Well spotted. That’s because I’m not your mammy and this isn’t some little thing you can get out of by sulking. This is as serious as it gets. You lured an innocent little girl out of her house in the middle of the night, you hit her on the head, you suffocated her and watched while she died, you shoved a trowel up inside her”—Damien flinched violently—“and now you’re telling us you did it for no reason at all. Is that what you’re going to tell the judge?

  What kind of sentence do you think he’s going to give you?”

  “You don’t get it!” Damien cried. His voice cracked like a thirteen-yearold’s.

  “I know, I know we don’t, but I want to. Help me get it, Damien.”

  Cassie was leaning forward, holding both his hands in hers, forcing him to look at her.

  “You don’t understand! An innocent little girl? Everyone thinks she was, Katy was like some saint, they always thought she was so perfect—it wasn’t like that! Just because she was a kid, that doesn’t mean she was— You wouldn’t believe me if I told you some of the stuff she did, you wouldn’t even believe me.”r />
  “I will,” Cassie said, low and urgent. “Whatever you’re going to tell me, Damien, I’ve seen worse on this job. I’ll believe you. Try me.”

  Damien’s face was red, suffused, and his hands were shaking in Cassie’s. 370

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  “She used to get her dad mad at Rosalind and Jessica. Like all the time, they were always scared. She just made stuff up and told him—like Rosalind had been mean to her or Jessica had touched her stuff or something—it wasn’t even true, she just made it up, and he always just believed her. Rosalind tried to tell him this one time that it wasn’t true, she was trying to protect Jessica, but he just, he just . . .”

  “What did he do?”

  “He hit them!” Damien howled. His head shot up and his eyes, redrimmed and blazing, locked on to Cassie’s. “He beat them up! He broke Rosalind’s skull with a poker, he threw Jessica into a wall and she broke her arm, he, Jesus, he did it to them, and Katy, she was watching and she laughed !” He ripped his hands out of Cassie’s and swiped tears away furiously with the back of his wrist. He was gasping for breath.

  “Do you mean Jonathan Devlin was having sexual intercourse with his daughters?” Cassie said calmly. Her eyes were huge.

  “Yes. Yes. He did it to all of them. Katy . . .” Damien’s face contorted.

  “Katy liked it. How sick is that? How can anyone . . . ? That was why she was his favorite. He hated Rosalind because she . . . didn’t want to. . . .” He bit the back of his hand and cried.

  I realized I had been holding my breath for so long I was light-headed; realized, too, that there was a chance I might throw up. I leaned against the cool glass and concentrated on breathing slowly and evenly. Sam found a tissue and passed it to Damien. Unless I was even stupider than I had already proven myself to be, Damien believed every word he was saying. Why not? We see worse in the papers every other week, raped toddlers, children starving in basements, babies’ limbs ripped off. As their private mythology grew to fill more and more of his mind, why not the evil sister keeping Cinderella in the dust?

  And, though this is by no means an easy thing to admit, I wanted to believe it, too. For a moment I almost could. It made such perfect sense; it explained and excused so much, almost everything. But, unlike Damien, I had seen the medical records, the post-mortem report. Jessica had broken that arm falling off a jungle gym in full view of fifty witnesses, Rosalind had never had a fractured skull; Katy had died a virgin. Something like a cold sweat crawled across my shoulders, light and spreading. Damien blew his nose. “It can’t have been easy for Rosalind to tell you In the Woods 371

  this,” Cassie said gently. “That was pretty brave of her. Had she tried to tell anyone else?”

  He shook his head. “He always said if she told he’d kill her. I was the first person she ever trusted enough to tell.” There was something like wonder in his voice, wonder and pride, and under the tears and snot and redness his face lit up with a faint, awed radiance. He looked, for a second, like some young knight setting off in search of the Holy Grail.

  “And when did she tell you?” Sam asked.

  “Sort of in pieces. Like you said, it was hard for her. She didn’t say anything till like May. . . .” Damien flushed an even deeper red. “When we stayed in that B&B. We were, um, we were kissing? And I tried to touch her . . . her chest. Rosalind got sort of mad and pushed me away and said she wasn’t like that, and I was I guess kind of surprised—I hadn’t expected it to be that big of a deal, you know? We’d been going out for like a month—

  I mean, I know that didn’t give me any right to . . . but . . . Anyway I was just startled, but Rosalind got all worried that I was mad at her. So she . . . she told me what her dad had been doing to her. To explain why she’d got so freaked out.”

  “And what did you say?” Cassie asked.

  “I said she should move out! I wanted us to get a flat together, we could’ve got the money—I had this dig coming up and Rosalind could’ve got modeling jobs, this guy from a really big model agency had spotted her and he kept saying she could be a supermodel, only her father wouldn’t let her. . . . I didn’t want her to ever go back to that house. But Rosalind wouldn’t. She said she wouldn’t leave Jessica. Can you imagine what kind of person it takes to do that? She went back to that just to protect her sister. I’ve never known anyone that brave.”

  If he had been just a couple of years older, the story would have sent him lunging for the phone to ring the police, Childline, anyone. But he was only nineteen; adults were still bossy aliens who didn’t understand, to be told nothing because they would charge in and ruin everything. It had probably never even occurred to him to ask for help.

  “She even said . . .” Damien looked away. He was tearing up again. I thought, vindictively, that he was going to be in big trouble in jail if he kept bawling at the drop of a hat. “She told me she might never be able to, to make love with me. Because of the bad associations. She didn’t know if she 372

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  could ever trust anyone that much. So she said, if I wanted to break up with her and find a normal girlfriend—she actually said that, normal—then she’d understand. The only thing she asked for was, if I was going to go, I should go right away, before she started to care too much about me. . . .”

  “But you didn’t want to do that,” Cassie said softly.

  “Course not,” Damien said simply. “I love her.” There was something in his face, some reckless and consuming purity that, believe it or not, I envied. Sam gave him another tissue. “There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” he said, an easy, soothing rumble. “You wanted to protect Rosalind—

  that’s fair enough, sure, any man would have felt the same. But why get rid of Katy? Why not Jonathan? I’d have been going after him, myself.”

  “I said that, too,” Damien said, and then stopped, his mouth open, as if he had said something incriminating. Cassie and Sam looked blandly back at him and waited.

  “Um,” he said, after a moment. “See, this one night Rosalind’s stomach was hurting and finally I got it out of her—she didn’t want to tell me, but he’d . . . he’d punched her in the stomach. Like four times. Just because Katy told him Rosalind wouldn’t let her change the channel to watch some ballet thing on TV—and it wasn’t even true, she would’ve changed it if Katy had asked. . . . I just—I couldn’t stand it any more. I was thinking about it every night, what she was going through, I couldn’t sleep—I couldn’t just let it keep happening!”

  He took a breath, got his voice back under control. Cassie and Sam nodded understandingly.

  “I said, um, I said, ‘I’m gonna kill him.’ Rosalind . . . she couldn’t believe I would really do that for her. And yeah, I guess I was sort of—not joking, but like not totally serious about actually doing it. I’d never even thought about doing anything like that in my whole life. But when I saw how much it meant to her that I would even say it—nobody had ever tried to protect her before. . . . She was almost crying, and she’s not the kind of girl who cries, she’s a really strong person.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Cassie said. “So why didn’t you go after Jonathan Devlin, once you’d got your head round the idea?”

  “See, if he died”—Damien leaned forward, hands gesturing anxiously—

  “their mother wouldn’t be able to look after them, because of money and because I think she’s kind of spacey or something? They’d be sent to homes In the Woods 373

  and they’d be split up, Rosalind wouldn’t be there to take care of Jessica any more—and Jessica needs her, she’s so messed up she can’t do anything, Rosalind has to do her homework for her and stuff. And Katy—I mean, Katy would have gone and done the exact same thing to somebody else. If only Katy wasn’t there, they’d all be fine! Their dad only, he only did stuff to them when Katy got him to. Rosalind said, and she felt so guilty about this—Jesus, she felt guilty!—sometimes she wished Katy had never been born. . . .”

  “A
nd that gave you an idea,” Cassie said evenly. I could tell by the set of her mouth that she was so angry she could hardly speak. “You suggested killing Katy instead.”

  “It was my idea,” Damien said quickly. “Rosalind had nothing to do with it. She didn’t even— At first she said no. She didn’t want me taking a risk like that for her. She’d survived it for years, she said, she could survive for six more, till Jessica was old enough to move out. But I couldn’t let her just stay!

  That time he fractured her skull, she was in the hospital for two months. She could have died.”

  Suddenly I was furious, too, but not with Rosalind: with Damien, for being such a fucking cretin, such a perfect sucker, like some goofy cartoon character blundering obediently into the right place for the Acme anvil to drop on his head. I am of course fully aware of both the irony and the tedious psychological explanations of this reaction, but at the time all I could think of was slamming into the interview room and shoving Damien’s face into the medical reports: Do you see this, moron? Do you see a skull fracture anywhere here? Didn’t it even occur to you to ask to see the scar before you slaughtered a child for it?

  “So you insisted,” Cassie said, “and, in the end, Rosalind somehow came round.”

  This time Damien caught the biting edge. “That was because of Jessica!

  Rosalind didn’t mind what happened to her, but Jessica—Rosalind was worried she was going to have a nervous breakdown or something. She didn’t think Jessica could take six more years!”

  “But Katy wouldn’t have been there for most of that time anyway,” Sam said. “She was about to go to ballet school, in London. By now she would have been gone. Didn’t you know that?”

  Damien almost howled, “No! I said that, I asked—you don’t understand. . . . She didn’t care about being a dancer. She just liked everyone 374

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  making a fuss of her. In that school, where she wouldn’t have been anything special—she’d have dropped out by Christmas and come back home!”

  Of all the things they had done to her, between them, this was the one that shocked me most profoundly. It was the diabolical expertise of it, the icy precision with which it targeted, annexed and defiled the one thing that had lain at Katy Devlin’s heart. I thought of Simone’s deep quiet voice in the echoing dance studio: Sérieuse. In all my career I had never felt the presence of evil as I felt it then: strong and rancid-sweet in the air, curling invisible tendrils up the table legs, nosing with obscene delicacy at sleeves and throats. The hairs rose on the back of my neck.