In the Woods

by Tana French

  Rosalind glanced around the room and sighed. “I’d like you to ring my parents now,” she told Sam. “Tell them to get me a lawyer and then come down here.” She pulled a dainty little pen and diary out of her blazer pocket, wrote something on a page, then ripped it out and handed it to Sam, as if he were a concierge. “That’s their number. Thank you so much.”

  “You can see your parents once we’ve finished talking,” Sam said. “If you want a lawyer—”

  “I think I’ll see them sooner than that, actually.” Rosalind smoothed her skirt over her backside and sat down, with a little moue of distaste at the plastic chair. “Don’t minors have the right to have a parent or guardian present during an interview?”

  There was a moment when everyone froze, except Rosalind, who crossed her knees demurely and smiled up at Sam, savoring the effect.

  “Interview suspended,” Sam said curtly. He whipped the file off the table and headed for the door.

  “Jesus Christ on a bike,” said O’Kelly. “Ryan, are you telling me—”

  “She could be lying,” Cassie said. She was staring intently through the glass; her hand had closed into a fist around the tissue. My heart, which had stopped beating, resumed at double speed. “Of course she is. Look at her, there’s no way she’s under—”

  “Aye, right. Do you know how many men have landed in jail for saying that?”

  Sam banged the observation-room door open so hard it bounced off the wall. “What age is that girl?” he demanded, of me.

  “Eighteen,” I said. My head was spinning; I knew I was sure, but I couldn’t remember how. “She told me—”

  “Sweet Jesus! And you took her word for it?” I had never seen Sam lose his temper before, and it was more impressive than I would have expected. 406

  Tana French

  “If you asked that girl the time at half past two, she’d tell you it was three o’clock just to fuck with your head. You didn’t even check?”

  “Look who’s talking,” O’Kelly snapped. “Any one of ye could have checked, any time in the past God knows how long, but no—”

  Sam didn’t even hear him. His eyes were locked on mine, blazing. “We took your word because you’re supposed to be a bloody detective. You sent your own partner in there to get crucified, without even bothering—”

  “I did check!” I shouted. “I checked the file!” But even as the words left my mouth I knew, with a horrible sick thud. A sunny afternoon, a long time ago; I had been fumbling through the file, with the phone jammed between my jaw and my shoulder and O’Gorman yammering in my other ear, trying to talk to Rosalind and make sure she was an appropriate adult to supervise my conversation with Jessica, all at the same time (And I must have known, I thought, I must have known even then that she couldn’t be trusted, or why would I have bothered to check such a small thing?). I had found the page of family stats and skimmed down to Rosalind’s DOB, subtracted the years—

  Sam had swung away from me and was rooting urgently through the file, and I saw the moment when his shoulders sagged. “November,” he said, very quietly. “Her birthday’s the second of November. She’ll be eighteen.”

  “Congratulations,” O’Kelly said heavily, after a silence. “The three of ye. Well done.”

  Cassie let out her breath. “Inadmissible,” she said. “Every fucking word.”

  She slid down the wall to a sitting position, as if her knees had suddenly given way, and closed her eyes.

  A faint, high, insistent sound came from the speakers. In the interview room, Rosalind had got bored and started humming.

  25

  That evening we started clearing out the incident room, Sam and Cassie and I. We worked methodically and in silence, taking down photographs, erasing the multicolored tangle from the whiteboard, sorting files and reports and packing them away in blue-stamped cardboard boxes. Someone had set fire to a flat off Parnell Street the previous night, killing a Nigerian asylum-seeker and her six-month-old baby; Costello and his partner needed the room.

  O’Kelly and Sweeney were interviewing Rosalind, down the hall, with Jonathan in the background to protect her. I think I had expected Jonathan to come in with all guns blazing and possibly try to hit someone, but as it transpired he hadn’t been the problem. When O’Kelly told the Devlins, outside the interview room, what Rosalind had confessed to, Margaret whirled on him, mouth gaping open; then she drew in a huge gulp of breath and screamed, “No!” hoarse and wild, her voice slamming off the walls of the corridor. “No. No. No. She was with her cousins. How can you do this to her? How can you . . . how . . . Ah, God, she warned me—she warned me you would do this! You”—she stabbed a thick, trembling finger at me, and I flinched before I could stop myself—“you, calling her a dozen times a day asking her out, and her only a child, you should be ashamed. . . . And her”—Cassie—“she hated Rosalind from the start, Rosalind always said she would try to blame her for . . . What are you trying to do to her? Are you trying to kill her? Then will you be happy? Oh, God, my poor baby . . . Why do people tell these lies about her? Why?” Her hands clawed at her hair and she broke down into ugly, wrenching sobs.

  Jonathan had stood still at the top of the stairs, holding on to the railing, while O’Kelly tried to calm Margaret down and shot us filthy looks over her shoulder. He was dressed for work, in a suit and tie. For some reason I remember it very clearly, that suit. It was dark blue and spotlessly clean, with a slight sheen where it had been ironed too many times, and somehow I found it almost inexpressibly sad.

  408

  Tana French

  Rosalind was under arrest for murder and for assaulting an officer. She had opened her mouth only once since her parents arrived, to claim—lip trembling—that Cassie had punched her in the stomach and that she had only been defending herself. We would send a file to the prosecutor’s office on both charges, but we all knew the evidence for murder was slim at best. We no longer had even the Tracksuit Shadow link to show that Rosalind had been an accessory: my session with Jessica had not in fact been supervised by an appropriate adult, and I had no way of proving that it had ever happened. We had Damien’s word and a bunch of mobile-phone records, and that was all.

  It was getting late, maybe eight o’clock, and the building was very quiet, just our movements and a soft fitful rain pattering at the windows of the incident room. I took down the post-mortem photos and the Devlins’ family snapshots, the scowling Tracksuit Shadow suspects and the grainy blowups of Peter and Jamie, picked the Blu-Tack off the backs and filed them away. Cassie checked each box, fitted a lid onto it and labeled it in squeaky black marker. Sam went around the room with a rubbish bag, collecting Styrofoam cups and emptying wastepaper baskets, brushing crumbs off the tables. There were smears of dried blood down the front of his shirt. His map of Knocknaree was starting to curl at the edges, and one corner ripped away as I took it down. Someone had got spatters of water on it and the ink had run in spots, making Cassie’s property-developer caricature look unpleasantly as if he had had a stroke. “Should we keep this on file,” I asked Sam, “or . . . ?”

  I held it out to him and we looked at it: tiny gnarled tree trunks and smoke curling from the chimneys of the houses, fragile and wistful as a fairy tale.

  “Probably better not,” Sam said, after a moment. He took the map from me, rolled it into a tube and maneuvered it into the rubbish bag.

  “I’m missing a lid,” Cassie said. Dark, shocking scabs had formed over the cuts on her cheek. “Any more over there?”

  “There was one under the table,” Sam said. “Here—” He threw Cassie the last lid, and she fitted it into place and straightened up. We stood under the fluorescent lights and looked at one another, across the bare tables and the litter of boxes. My turn to make dinner. . . . For a moment I almost said it, and I felt the same thought cross both Sam’s and Cassie’s minds, stupid and impossible and no less piercing for any of that.

  “Well,” Cassie said quietly, on a long breath. She
glanced around the In the Woods 409

  empty room, wiping her hands on the sides of her jeans. “Well, I guess that’s it, then.”

  I am intensely aware, by the way, that this story does not show me in a particularly flattering light. I am aware that, within an impressively short time of meeting me, Rosalind had me coming to heel like a well-trained dog: running up and down stairs to bring her coffee, nodding along while she bitched about my partner, imagining like some starstruck teenager that she was a kindred soul. But before you decide to despise me too thoroughly, consider this: she fooled you, too. You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie.

  It is difficult for me to describe the degree of horror and self-loathing inspired by the realization that Rosalind had suckered me. I’m sure Cassie would have said that my gullibility was only natural, that all the other liars and criminals I’d encountered had been mere amateurs while Rosalind was the real, the natural-born thing, and that she herself had been immune purely because she had fallen for the same technique once before; but Cassie wasn’t there. A few days after we closed the case, O’Kelly told me that until the verdicts came in I would be working out of the main detective unit in Harcourt Street—“away from anything you can fuck up,” as he put it, and I found it difficult to counter this. I was still officially on the Murder squad, so nobody knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing in the general unit. They gave me a desk and occasionally O’Kelly sent over a pile of bureaucracy, but for the most part I was free to wander the corridors as I chose, eavesdropping on fragments of conversation and evading curious stares, immaterial and unwanted as a ghost. I spent sleepless nights conjuring up gory, detailed, improbable fates for Rosalind. I wanted her not just dead but obliterated from the face of the earth—crushed to unidentifiable pulp, pulverized in a shredder, burned to a handful of toxic ash. I had never suspected myself of this capacity for sadism, and it horrified me further to realize that I would joyfully have carried out any of these sentences myself. Every conversation I had had with her spooled over and over through my head, and I saw with merciless clarity how skillfully she had played me: how unerringly she had put her finger on 410

  Tana French

  everything from my vanities through my griefs through my deepest hidden fears, and drawn them out of me to work her will.

  This was, in the end, the most hideous realization of all: Rosalind had not, after all, implanted a microchip behind my ear or drugged me into submission. I had broken every vow myself and steered every boat to shipwreck with my own hand. She had simply, like any good craftswoman, used what came her way. Almost with a glance she had assessed me and Cassie to the bone and discarded Cassie as unusable; but in me she had seen something, some subtle but fundamental quality, that made me worth keeping. I didn’t testify at Damien’s trial. Too risky, the prosecutor said: there was too much of a chance that Rosalind had told Damien about my “personal history,” as he put it. He was a guy named Mathews who wears flashy ties and gets called “dynamic” a lot, and he always makes me tired. Rosalind hadn’t brought up the subject again—apparently Cassie had been convincing enough to make her drop it and move on to other, more promising weapons—and I doubted that she would have told Damien anything useful at all, but I didn’t bother to argue.

  I went to see Cassie testify, though. I sat at the back of the courtroom, which was, unusually, packed; the trial had been filling front pages and talk radio since before it even began. Cassie was wearing a neat little dove-gray suit and her curls were slicked down smoothly against her head. I hadn’t seen her in a few months. She looked thinner, more subdued; the quicksilver mobility I associate with her was gone, and her new stillness brought her face home to me—the delicate, marked arches above her eyelids, the wide clean curves of her mouth—as if I had never seen it before. She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones. I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.

  She was good; Cassie has always been good in the courtroom. Juries trust her and she holds their attention, which is harder than it sounds, especially in a long trial. She answered Mathews’s questions in a quiet, clear voice, her In the Woods 411

  hands folded in her lap. On cross-examination she did what she could for Damien: yes, he had appeared agitated and confused; yes, he had seemed genuinely to believe that the murder had been necessary to protect Rosalind and Jessica Devlin; yes, in her opinion he had been under Rosalind’s influence and had committed the crime at her urging. Damien huddled in his seat and stared at her like a little boy watching a horror movie, his eyes dazed and huge and uncomprehending. He had tried to commit suicide, using the time-honored prison bedsheet, when he heard that Rosalind was going to testify against him.

  “When Damien confessed to this crime,” the defense barrister asked,

  “did he tell you why he had committed it?”

  Cassie shook her head. “Not that day, no. My partner and I asked him about his motive a number of times, but he either refused to answer or said that he wasn’t sure.”

  “Even though he had already confessed, and telling you his motive couldn’t possibly have done him any harm. Why do you think that was?”

  “Objection: calls for speculation. . . .”

  My partner. I knew from Cassie’s blink on the word, from the tiny shift in the angle of her shoulders, that she had seen me tucked away there at the back; but she never looked my way, not even when the lawyers finally finished with her and she stepped down from the stand and walked out of the courtroom. I thought of Kiernan then; of what it must have been to him when, after thirty years of partnership, McCabe had that heart attack and died. More than I have ever envied anything in the world, I envied Kiernan that, that unique and unattainable grief.

  Rosalind was the next witness. She tiptoed up to the stand, through the sudden flurry of whispers and journalistic scribbling, and gave Mathews a timid little rosebud smile from under her mascara. I left. I read it in the newspapers the next day: how she had sobbed when she talked about Katy, trembled as she recounted how Damien had threatened to kill her sisters if she broke up with him; how, when his barrister started digging, she had cried, “How dare you! I loved my sister!” and then fainted, forcing the judge to adjourn the court for the afternoon.

  She hadn’t had a trial—her parents’ decision, I’m sure, rather than hers; left to herself, I can’t imagine she would have passed up that amount of attention. Mathews had plea-bargained her case. Conspiracy charges are notoriously difficult to prove; there was no hard evidence against Rosalind, her 412

  Tana French

  confession was inadmissible and she had of course recanted it anyway (Cassie, she explained, had terrified it out of her by making throat-slitting motions); and, besides, as a juvenile she wouldn’t get much of a sentence even if by some chance she were found guilty. She was also claiming, off and on, that she and I had slept together, which left O’Kelly apoplectic and me even more so and brought the general confusion to a level nothing short of paralyzing. Mathews had played the odds and concentrated on Damien. In exchange for her testimony, he had offered Rosalind a three-year suspended sentence for reckless endangerment and resisting arrest. I’d heard, through the grapevine, that she’d already received half a dozen proposals of marriage, and that newspapers and publishers were having a bidding war over her story. On my way out of the courthouse I saw Jonathan Devlin, leaning against the wall and smoking. He was holding the cigarette close against his chest, tilting his head back to watch the
gulls wheeling over the river. I got my smokes out of my coat and joined him.

  He glanced at me, then away again.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  He shrugged heavily. “Much as you’d expect. Jessica tried to kill herself. Went to bed and cut her wrists with my razor.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Is she all right?”

  One corner of his mouth twitched in a humorless smile. “Yeah. Luckily she made a balls of it: cut across instead of down, or some such.”

  I lit my cigarette, cupping my hand around the flame—it was a windy day, purplish clouds starting to gather. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Strictly off the record?”

  He looked at me: a dark, hopeless look tinged with something like contempt. “Why not.”

  “You knew, didn’t you?” I said. “You knew all along.”

  He said nothing for a long time, so long that I wondered if he was going to ignore the question. Eventually he sighed and said, “Not knew. She couldn’t have done it herself, she was with her cousins, and I didn’t know anything about this lad Damien. But I wondered. I’ve known Rosalind all her life. I wondered.”

  “And you didn’t do anything.” I had meant my voice to be expressionless, In the Woods 413

  but a note of accusation must have slipped in. He could have told us on the first day what Rosalind was; he could have told someone years earlier, when Katy first started getting sick. Although I knew that quite possibly this would have made no difference to anything at all, in the long run, I couldn’t help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.

  Jonathan tossed away his cigarette butt and turned to face me, hands shoved into the pockets of his overcoat. “What do you think I should have done?” he demanded in a low, hard voice. “She’s my daughter, too. I’d already lost one. Margaret won’t hear a word against her; years ago I wanted to send Rosalind to a psychologist, about the amount of lies she told, and Margaret got hysterical and threatened to leave me, take the girls with her. And I didn’t know anything. I would have had fuck-all to tell you. I kept an eye on her and prayed it was some property developer. What would you have done?”