In the Woods

by Tana French

  “Don’t be saying that outside this room,” O’Kelly said sharply and automatically. Cassie moved, something like a shrug, and went back to her drawing.

  A silence fell over the room. The story was a hideous one in itself, ancient as Cain and Abel but with all its own brand-new jagged edges, and it is impossible for me to describe the mixture of emotions with which I had heard Cassie tell it. I had been looking not at her but at our frail silhouettes in the window, but there was no way to avoid listening. She has a very beautiful speaking voice, Cassie, low and flexible and woodwind; but the words she 382

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  said seemed to crawl hissing up the walls, spin sticky dark trails of shadow across the lights, nest in tangled webs in the high corners.

  “Got any evidence?” O’Kelly demanded, finally. “Or are you just going on Donnelly’s word?”

  “No hard evidence, no,” Cassie said. “We can prove the connection between Damien and Rosalind—we’ve got calls between their mobiles—and they both gave us the same fake lead about some nonexistent guy in a tracksuit, which means she was an accessory after the fact, but there’s no proof that she even knew about the murder beforehand.”

  “Of course there isn’t,” he said flatly. “Why did I ask. Are you all three on board with this? Or is this just Maddox’s personal little crusade?”

  “I’m with Detective Maddox, sir,” Sam said firmly and promptly. “I’ve been interrogating Donnelly all day, and I think he’s telling the truth.”

  O’Kelly sighed, exasperated, and jerked his chin at me. Obviously he felt Cassie and Sam were being gratuitously difficult, he just wanted to finish Damien’s paperwork and declare this case closed; but in spite of his best efforts he is not a despot at heart, and he wouldn’t override his team’s unanimous opinion. I felt for him, really: I was presumably the last person he wanted to look to for support.

  Finally—somehow I couldn’t bear to say it out loud—I nodded. “Brilliant,” O’Kelly said wearily. “That’s just brilliant. All right. Donnelly’s story’s barely enough for us to charge her, never mind convict her. We need to get a confession. What age is she?”

  “Eighteen,” I said. I hadn’t spoken in so long that my voice came out as a startled croak; I cleared my throat. “Eighteen.”

  “Thank Christ for small mercies. At least we don’t have to have the parents there when we interrogate her. Right: O’Neill and Maddox, pull her in, go at her as hard as you can, scare the bejasus out of her till she cracks.”

  “Won’t work,” Cassie said, adding another branch to the tree. “Psychopaths have very low anxiety levels. You’d have to stick a gun to her head to scare her that badly.”

  “Psychopaths?” I said, after a startled instant.

  “Jesus, Maddox,” O’Kelly said, annoyed. “Less of the Hollywood. She didn’t eat the sister.”

  Cassie glanced up from her doodle, her eyebrows lifting into cool, delicate arcs. “I wasn’t talking about movie psychos. She fits the clinical definition. In the Woods 383

  No conscience, no empathy, pathological liar, manipulative, charming, intuitive, attention-seeking, easily bored, narcissistic, turns very nasty when she’s thwarted in any way . . . I’m sure I’m forgetting a few of the criteria, but does that sound about right?”

  “That’s enough to be going on with,” Sam said dryly. “Hang on; so even if we go to trial, she’ll get off on insanity?” O’Kelly mumbled something disgusted, no doubt to do with psychology in general and Cassie in particular.

  “She’s perfectly sane,” Cassie said crisply. “Any psychiatrist will say so. It’s not a mental illness.”

  “How long have you known this?” I asked.

  Her eyes flicked to me. “I started wondering the first time we met her. It didn’t seem relevant to the case: the killer clearly wasn’t a psychopath, and she had a perfect alibi. I considered telling you anyway, but do you really think you would have believed me?”

  You should have trusted me, I almost said. I saw Sam look back and forth between us, perplexed and unsettled.

  “Anyway,” Cassie said, going back to her sketching, “there’s no point in trying to scare a confession out of her. Psychopaths don’t really do fear; mainly just aggression, boredom or pleasure.”

  “OK,” Sam said. “Fair enough. Then what about the other sister—Jessica, is it? Would she know anything?”

  “Quite possibly,” I said. “They’re close.” One corner of Cassie’s mouth went up wryly at the word I had chosen.

  “Ah, Jesus,” O’Kelly said. “She’s twelve, am I right? That means the parents.”

  “Actually,” Cassie said, not looking up, “I doubt talking to Jessica would be any use either. She’s completely under Rosalind’s control. Whatever Rosalind’s done to her, she’s so punch-drunk that she can hardly think for herself. If we find a way to charge Rosalind, yeah, we might get something out of Jessica sooner or later; but as long as Rosalind’s in that house, she’ll be too terrified of saying something wrong to say anything at all.”

  O’Kelly lost patience. He hates being baffled, and the charged, crisscrossing tensions in the room must have been setting his teeth on edge just as badly as the case itself. “That’s great, Maddox. Thanks for that. So what the hell do you suggest? Come on; let’s hear you come up with something useful, instead of sitting there shooting down everyone else’s ideas.”

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  Cassie stopped drawing and carefully balanced her pen across one finger. “OK,” she said. “Psychopaths get their kicks by having power over other people—manipulating them, inflicting pain. I think we should try playing to that. Give her all the power she can eat, and see if she gets carried away.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Last night,” Cassie said slowly, “Rosalind accused me of sleeping with Detective Ryan.”

  Sam’s head turned sharply towards me. I kept my eyes on O’Kelly. “Oh, I hadn’t forgotten, believe me,” he said heavily. “And it bloody well better not be true. You two are both in deep enough shite already.”

  “No,” Cassie said, a trifle wearily, “it’s not true. She was just trying to distract me and hoping she would hit a nerve. She didn’t, but she doesn’t know that for sure; I could just have been covering very well.”

  “So?” O’Kelly demanded.

  “So,” Cassie said, “I could go talk to her, admit that Detective Ryan and I have a longstanding affair, and beg her not to turn us in—maybe tell her we suspect she was involved in Katy’s death and offer to tell her how much we know in exchange for her silence, something like that.”

  O’Kelly snorted. “And what, you think she’ll just spill her guts?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Yeah, most people hate to admit they’ve done something terrible, even if they won’t get in trouble for it; but that’s because they feel bad about it, and because they don’t want other people to think less of them. To this girl, other people aren’t real, any more than characters in a video game, and right and wrong are just words. It’s not like she feels any guilt or remorse or anything about having Damien kill Katy. In fact, I’m willing to bet she’s over the moon with herself. This is her greatest achievement yet, and she hasn’t been able to brag to anyone about it. If she’s sure she has the upper hand, and she’s sure I’m not wearing a wire—and would I wear a wire to admit to sleeping with my partner?—I think she’ll jump at the chance. The thought of telling a detective exactly what she did, knowing there’s not a thing I can do about it, knowing it must be killing me. . . . It’ll be one of the most delicious buzzes of her life. She won’t be able to resist.”

  “She can say whatever she bloody well likes,” O’Kelly said. “Without a caution, none of it will be admissible.”

  “So I’ll caution her.”

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  “And you think she’ll keep talking? I thought you said the girl’s not crazy.”

  “I don’t kn
ow,” Cassie said. She sounded, just for a second, exhausted and openly pissed off, and it made her seem very young, like a teenager unable to conceal her frustration with the idiotic adult world. “I just think it’s our best shot. If we go for a formal interview, she’ll be on her guard, she’ll sit there and deny everything, and we’ll have blown our shot: she’ll go home knowing there’s no way we can pin anything on her. This way, at least there’s a chance she’ll figure I can’t prove anything and take the risk of talking.”

  O’Kelly was grating a thumbnail, monotonously and infuriatingly, over the fake-wood grain of the table; he was obviously thinking about it. “If we do it, you wear a wire. I’m not risking this on your word against hers.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Cassie said coolly.

  “Cassie,” Sam said very gently, leaning forward across the table, “are you sure you’re able for this?” I felt a sudden flare of anger, no less painful for being utterly unjustifiable: it should have been my place, not his, to ask the question.

  “I’ll be fine,” Cassie told him, with a little one-sided smile. “Hey, I did undercover for months and never got spotted once. Oscar material, me.”

  I didn’t think this was what Sam had been asking. Just telling me about that guy in college had left her practically catatonic, and I could see that same distant, dilated look starting in her eyes again, hear the too-detached note in her voice. I thought of that first evening, across the stalled Vespa: how I had wanted to sweep her under my coat, protect her even from the rain.

  “I could do it,” I said, too loudly. “Rosalind likes me.”

  “No,” O’Kelly snapped, “you couldn’t.”

  Cassie rubbed her eyes with finger and thumb, pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache starting. “No offense,” she said flatly,

  “but Rosalind Devlin doesn’t like you any more than she likes me. She’s not capable of that emotion. She finds you useful. She knows she has you wrapped around her little finger—or had you; whichever—and she’s sure you’re the one cop who, if it comes to it, will believe she’s been wrongfully accused and fight her corner. Believe me, there’s not a chance in hell she’s going to throw that away by confessing to you. Me, I’m no use to her anyway; she has nothing to lose by talking to me. She knows I dislike her, but that just means she’ll get an extra thrill out of having me at her mercy.”

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  “All right,” O’Kelly said, shoving his stuff into a pile and pushing back his chair. “Let’s do it. Maddox, I hope to God you know what you’re talking about. First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll get you wired up and you can go have a girly chat with Rosalind Devlin. I’ll make sure they give you something voice-activated, so you can’t forget to hit Record.”

  “No,” Cassie said. “No recorder. I want a transmitter, feeding to a backup van less than two hundred yards away.”

  “To interview an eighteen-year-old kid?” O’Kelly said contemptuously.

  “Have some balls, Maddox. This isn’t Al-Qaeda here.”

  “To go one-on-one with a psychopath who just murdered her little sister.”

  “She’s got no history of violence herself,” I said. I didn’t intend it to sound bitchy, but Cassie’s eyes passed briefly over me, with no expression in them at all, as if I didn’t exist.

  “Transmitter and backup,” she repeated.

  I didn’t go home that night until three in the morning, when I could be sure that Heather would be asleep. Instead I drove out to Bray, to the seafront, and sat there in the car. It had finally stopped raining and the night was dense with mist; the tide was in, I could hear the slap and rush of the water, but I caught only the odd glimpse of the waves between the swirls of erasing gray. The gay little pavilion drifted in and out of existence like something from Brigadoon. Somewhere a foghorn sounded one melancholy note over and over, and people walking home along the seafront materialized gradually out of nothingness, silhouettes floating in midair like dark messengers. I thought about a lot of things, that night. I thought of Cassie in Lyons, just a girl in an apron, serving coffee at sunny outdoor tables and bantering in French with the customers. I thought of my parents getting ready to go out dancing: the careful lines my father’s comb left in his Brylcreemed hair, the rousing scent of my mother’s perfume and her flower-patterned dress whisking out the door. I thought of Jonathan and Cathal and Shane, longlimbed and rash and laughing fiercely over their lighter games; of Sam at a big wooden table amid seven noisy brothers and sisters, and of Damien in some hushed college library filling out an application for a job at Knocknaree. I thought of Mark’s reckless eyes—The only things I believe in are out on that there dig—and then of revolutionaries waving ragged, gallant banners, In the Woods 387

  of refugees swimming swift nighttime currents; of all those who hold life so light, or the stakes so dear, that they can walk steady and open-eyed to meet the thing that will take or transform their lives and whose high cold criteria are far beyond our understanding. I tried, for a long time, to remember bringing my mother wildflowers.

  24

  O’Kelly has always been something of a mystery to me. He disliked Cassie, despised her theory and basically thought she was being an irredeemable pain in the arse; but The Squad has a deep, almost totemistic significance to him, and once he has resigned himself to backing one of its members he backs him, or even her, all the way. He gave Cassie her transmitter and her backup van, even though he considered it a complete waste of time and resources. When I got in the next morning—very early; we wanted to catch Rosalind before she left for school—Cassie was in the incident room, being fitted with the wire.

  “And take off the top, please,” the surveillance tech said quietly. He was small and blank-faced, with deft, professional hands. Cassie pulled her sweater over her head obediently, like a child at the doctor’s office. Underneath she was wearing what looked like a boy’s undershirt. She had left off the defiant makeup she had been using for the past few days, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. I wondered whether she’d slept at all; I thought of her sitting on her windowsill with her T-shirt pulled around her knees, the tiny red glow of a cigarette blooming and fading as she drew on it, watching dawn lighten the gardens below. Sam was at the window, his back to us; O’Kelly was fussing with the whiteboard, erasing lines and redrawing them. “And run the wire up under the T-shirt for me, please,” said the tech.

  “You’ve phone tips waiting for you,” O’Kelly told me.

  “I want to go with you,” I said. Sam’s shoulders shifted; Cassie, head bent over the microphone, didn’t look up.

  “When hell freezes over and the camels come skating home,” O’Kelly said.

  I was so tired that I was seeing everything through a fine, seething white mist. “I want to go,” I repeated. This time everyone ignored me. The tech clipped the battery pack to Cassie’s jeans, made a tiny incision in the neck hem of her undershirt and slid the mike inside. He had her put In the Woods 389

  her sweater back on—Sam and O’Kelly turned around—and then told her to talk. When she looked at him blankly, O’Kelly said impatiently, “Just say whatever comes into your head, Maddox, tell us your plans for the weekend if you want,” but instead she recited a poem. It was an old-fashioned little poem, the kind of thing one might learn off by heart in school. Long afterwards, flicking through pages in a dusty bookshop, I came across these lines: About your easy heads my prayers

  I said with syllables of clay.

  What gift, I asked, shall I bring now

  Before I weep and walk away?

  Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.

  Take our fortune of tears and live

  Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask

  Is the one gift you cannot give.

  Her voice was low and even, expressionless. The speakers hollowed it out, underlaid it with a whispery echo, and in the background there was a rushing sound like some faraway high wind
. I thought of those ghost stories where the voices of the dead come to their loved ones from crackly radios or down telephone lines, borne on some lost wavelength across the laws of nature and the wild spaces of the universe. The tech fiddled delicately with mysterious little dials and sliders.

  “Thank you for that, Maddox, that was very moving,” O’Kelly said, when the tech was satisfied. “Right: here’s the estate.” He slapped Sam’s map with the back of his hand. “We’ll be in the van, parked in Knocknaree Crescent, first left inside the front entrance. Maddox, you’ll go in on that motorbike whatsit, park in front of the Devlins’ and get the girl to come out for a walk. You’ll go out the back gate of the estate and turn right, away from the dig, then right again along the side wall, to come out on the main road, and right again towards the front entrance. If you deviate from this route at any point, say so for the mike. Give your location as often as you can. When—Jesus, if—you’ve cautioned her and got enough for an arrest, arrest her. If you think she’s sussed you or you’re not going to get anywhere, wind it up and get out. If you need backup at any point, say so and we’ll come in. If she has a weapon, identify it for the mike—‘Put the knife down,’

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  whatever. You don’t have eyewitnesses, so don’t pull your weapon unless you’ve no choice.”

  “I’m not taking my gun,” Cassie said. She unbuckled her holster, handed it to Sam and held out her arms. “Check me.”

  “For what?” Sam said, puzzled, looking down at the gun in his hands.

  “Weapons.” Her eyes slid away, unfocused, over his shoulder. “If she says anything, she’s going to claim I had her at gunpoint. Check my scooter, too, before I get on it.”