“Waste of time,” O’Kelly said. “But yeah, yeah, do it. Talk to Sex Crime, talk to the parish priest, whoever, just get it out of the way. What’s third?”
“Third,” Cassie said, “is a straight-up sex crime—a pedophile who killed her either to stop her talking or because killing is part of his thing. And if things point that way, we’re going to have to look at the two kids who disappeared at Knocknaree in 1984. Same age, same location, and right beside our victim’s body we found a drop of old blood—lab’s working on matching it to the ’84 samples—and a hair clip that fits the description of one the missing girl was wearing. We can’t rule out a connection.” This was definitely Cassie’s line. I am, as I’ve said, a pretty good liar, but just hearing her say it made my heart rate go up annoyingly, and in many ways O’Kelly is more perceptive than he pretends to be.
“What, a serial sex killer? After twenty years? And how do you know about this hair clip anyway?”
“You told us to familiarize ourselves with cold cases, sir,” said Cassie virtuously. It was true, he had—I think he heard it in a seminar, or maybe on CSI—but he told us a lot of things, and anyway none of us ever had time. In the Woods 71
“And the guy could have been out of the country, or in prison, or he only kills when he’s under a lot of stress—”
“We’re all under a lot of stress,” said O’Kelly. “Serial killer. That’s all we need. What’s next?”
“Fourth is the one that could get dodgy, sir,” said Cassie. “Jonathan Devlin, the father, runs the Move the Motorway campaign in Knocknaree. Apparently that’s pissed off a few people. He says he’s had three anonymous phone calls in the last couple of months, threatening his family if he doesn’t back off. We’re going to have to find out who has a serious stake in that motorway going through Knocknaree.”
“Which means fucking about with property developers and county councils,” said O’Kelly. “Jesus.”
“We’ll need as many floaters as we can get, sir,” I said, “and I think we’ll need someone else from Murder.”
“Too bloody right, you will. Take Costello. Leave him a note; he’s always in early.”
“Actually, sir,” I said, “I’d like to have O’Neill.” I have nothing against Costello, but I definitely did not want him on this one. Apart from the fact that he was basically dreary and this case was depressing enough without him, he was the dogged type who would go through the old case file with a fine-tooth comb and start trying to trace Adam Ryan.
“I’m not putting three rookies on a high-profile case. You two are only on this because you spend your breaks surfing for porn, or whatever you were doing, instead of getting some fresh air like everyone else.”
“O’Neill’s hardly a rookie, sir. He’s been in Murder for seven years.”
“And we all know why,” said O’Kelly, nastily. Sam made the squad at twenty-seven; his uncle is a mid-level politician, Redmond O’Neill, who is usually junior Minister for Justice or the Environment or something. Sam deals with it well: whether by nature or by strategy, he is placid, reliable, everyone’s favorite backup, and this deflects most of the potential for snide commentary. He still gets the odd bitchy remark, but these are usually reflexive, like O’Kelly’s had been, rather than actively malicious.
“That’s exactly why we need him, sir,” I said. “If we’re going to poke our noses into county council business and all the rest of it without making too many waves, we need someone who’s got contacts in that circle.”
O’Kelly glanced at the clock, moved to smooth his comb-over and then thought better of it. It was twenty to eight. Cassie recrossed her legs, settled 72
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more comfortably on the table. “I guess there could be pros and cons,” she said. “Maybe we should discuss—”
“Ah, whatever, have O’Neill,” said O’Kelly irritably. “Just get the job done and don’t let him piss anyone off. I want reports on my desk every morning.” He stood up and started patting papers into rough piles: we were dismissed.
Out of absolutely nowhere I felt a sudden sweet shot of joy, piercing and distilled as the jolt I imagine heroin users get when the fix hits the vein. It was my partner bracing herself on her hands as she slid fluidly off the desk, it was the neat practiced movement of flipping my notebook shut onehanded, it was my superintendent wriggling into his suit jacket and covertly checking his shoulders for dandruff, it was the garishly lit office with a stack of marker-labeled case files sagging in the corner and evening rubbing up against the window. It was the realization, all over again, that this was real and it was my life. Maybe Katy Devlin, if she had made it that far, would have felt this way about the blisters on her toes, the pungent smell of sweat and floor wax in the dance studios, the early-morning breakfast bells raced down echoing corridors. Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.
I remember that moment because, if I am honest, I have them so seldom. I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.
5
N either of us felt like a pint. Cassie rang Sophie’s mobile and gave her the story about recognizing the hair clip from her encyclopedic knowledge of cold cases—I got the sense Sophie didn’t really buy it, but didn’t much care either way. Then she went home to type up a report for O’Kelly, and I went home with the old file. I share an apartment in Monkstown with an unspeakable woman named Heather, a civil servant with a little-girl voice that always sounds as though she is about to burst into tears. At first I found it appealing; now it just makes me nervous. I moved in because I liked the idea of living near the sea, the rent was affordable, and I fancied her (five foot nothing, tiny build, big blue eyes, hair down to her arse) and harbored Hollywood-style fantasies of a beautiful relationship blossoming to our mutual amazement. I stay because of inertia and because by the time I discovered her array of neuroses I had started saving for an apartment of my own, and her flat was—even after we both worked out that Harry and Sally were never going to materialize, and she raised my rent—the only one in the greater Dublin area that would allow me to do that.
I unlocked the door, shouted, “Hi,” and made a dive for my room. Heather beat me to it: she appeared in the kitchen doorway with incredible speed and quavered, “Hi, Rob, how was your day?” Sometimes I have this mental picture of her sitting in the kitchen hour after hour, folding the hem of the tablecloth into perfect little pleats, poised to leap out of her chair and fasten on to me as soon as she hears my key in the lock.
“Fine,” I said, keeping my body language pointed towards my room and unlocking my door (I installed the lock a few months after I moved in, ostensibly to prevent hypothetical burglars from making off with confidential police files). “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” Heather said, pulling her pink fleece dressing gown more closely around herself. The martyred tone meant I had two options: I could say, “Great,” and go into my room and close the door, in which case 74
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she would sulk and bang pans for days to register her displeasure at my lack of consideration, or I could say, “Are you OK?” in which case I would have to spend the next hour listening to a blow-by-blow account of the outrages perpetrated by her boss or her sinuses or whatever it was that was currently making her feel hard done by.
Fortunately I have an Option C, though it has to be saved for emergencies. “Are you sure?” I said. “There’s this awful
flu going round at work, and I think I’m coming down with it. I hope you don’t get it, too.”
“Oh, my God,” said Heather, her voice going up another octave and her eyes getting even bigger. “Rob, pet, I so don’t mean to be rude, but I’d probably better stay away from you. You know I just get colds so easily.”
“I understand,” I said reassuringly, and Heather disappeared back into the kitchen, presumably to add horse-sized capsules of vitamin C and echinacea to her frenetically balanced diet. I went into my room and closed the door.
I poured myself a drink—I keep a bottle of vodka and one of tonic behind my books, to avoid cozy convivial “drinkies” with Heather—and spread out the old case file on my desk. My room is not conducive to concentration. The whole building has the cheap, mean-spirited feel of so many new Dublin developments—ceilings a foot too low, frontage flat and mudcolored and hideous in an utterly unoriginal way, bedrooms insultingly narrow as if designed to rub in the fact that you can’t afford to be picky—and the developer saw no need to waste insulation on us, so every footstep from above or musical selection from below echoes through our entire flat, and I know far more than I need to about the sexual tastes of the couple next door. Over four years I’ve more or less got used to it, but I still find all the basic premises of the place offensive.
The ink of the statement sheets was faded and spotty, almost illegible in places, and I tasted fine dust settling on my lips. The two detectives who had headed the case were both retired by this time, but I made a note of their names—Kiernan and McCabe—in case we, or rather Cassie, needed to talk to them at some stage.
One of the most startling things about the case, to modern eyes, is how slow our families were to become worried. Nowadays parents are on the phone to the police as soon as a child’s mobile goes unanswered; Missing Persons have become jaded from taking too many reports on children kept In the Woods 75
after school or lingering over video games. It seems ingenuous to say that the 1980s were a more innocent time, given all that we now know about industrial schools and revered priests and fathers in rocky, lonely corners of the country. But then these were only unthinkable rumors happening somewhere else, people held on to their innocence with a simple and passionate tenacity, and it was perhaps no less real for being chosen and for carrying its own culpability; and Peter’s mother called us from the edge of the wood, wiping her hands on her apron, and then left us to our absorbing game and went home to make the tea.
I found Jonathan Devlin in the margins of a minor witness statement, halfway through the pile. Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald of 27 Knocknaree Drive—
oldish, by the cramped, curlicued handwriting—had told the detectives that a group of rough-looking teenagers hung around the edge of the wood, drinking and smoking and courting and sometimes hurling terrible abuse at passersby, and that you weren’t safe walking your own road these times, and that what they needed was a good clatter round the ear. Kiernan or McCabe had scribbled names down the side of the page: Cathal Mills, Shane Waters, Jonathan Devlin.
I flipped through the sheets to see if any of them had been interviewed. Outside my door I could hear the rhythmic, invariable sounds of Heather going through her nightly routine: determinedly cleansing and toning and moisturizing, brushing her teeth for the dentist-prescribed three minutes, genteelly blowing her nose an inexplicable number of times. Bang on schedule at five to eleven, she tapped on my door and cooed, “Night-night, Rob,”
in a coy stage whisper. “Night,” I called back, adding a cough at the end. The three statements were brief and almost identical, except for margin notes that described Waters as “v. nervous” and Mills as “uncoperative” [sic]. Devlin hadn’t warranted any comment. On the afternoon of August 14, they had drawn their unemployment assistance and then gone by bus to the pictures in Stillorgan. They had got back to Knocknaree around seven—
when we were already late for tea—and gone drinking in a field near the wood till around midnight. Yes, they had seen the searchers, but they had simply moved behind a hedge to be out of sight. No, they hadn’t seen anything else unusual. No, they hadn’t seen anyone who could confirm their whereabouts that day, but Mills had offered (presumably in a spirit of sarcasm, but they took him up on it) to lead the detectives to the field and 76
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show them the empty cider cans, which did indeed prove to be located in the spot he identified. The young man who had been working the box office at the Stillorgan cinema appeared to be under the influence of controlled substances and wasn’t sure whether he remembered the three guys or not, even when the detectives searched his pockets and gave him a stern lecture about the evils of drugs.
I didn’t get the impression that the “youths”—I hate that word—had been serious suspects. They weren’t exactly hardened criminals (the local uniforms cautioned them for public intoxication on a semiregular basis, and Shane Waters had been given six months’ probation for shoplifting when he was fourteen, but that was it), and why would they want to make a couple of twelve-year-olds disappear? They had simply been there, and vaguely unsavory, so Kiernan and McCabe had checked them out. The bikers, we had called them, although I’m unsure whether any of them actually had motorbikes; probably they just dressed as though they did. Black leather jackets, unzipped at the wrists and trimmed with metal studs; stubble and long hair, and one of them had the inevitable mullet. High Doc boots. T-shirts with logos on the fronts: metallica, anthrax. I thought those were their names, till Peter told me they were bands. I had no idea which one had become Jonathan Devlin; I couldn’t connect the sad-eyed man with the little paunch and the desk slump to any of the lean, sun-blurred, looming teenagers in my memory. I had forgotten all about them. I don’t think the bikers had entered my mind once in twenty years, and I intensely disliked the thought that they had been there all along in spite of this, just waiting for their cue to pop up neatly as jacks-in-thebox, bobbing and grinning, and make me jump. One of them wore shades all year round, even in the rain. Sometimes he offered us Juicy Fruit gum, which we took, at arm’s length, even though we knew they had stolen it from Lowry’s shop. “Don’t go near them,” my mother said, “don’t answer if they talk to you,” and wouldn’t tell me why. Peter asked Metallica if we could have a drag of his cigarette, and he showed us how to hold it and laughed when we coughed. We stood in the sun, just out of reach, stretching to see the insides of their magazines; Jamie said one of them had a girl all nude. Metallica and Shades flicked plastic lighters, had competitions to see who could hold his finger over the flame longest. When they left, in the evening, we went over and smelled the squashed cans left behind in the dusty grass: sour, stale, grown-up.
In the Woods 77
. . .
I woke up because someone was screaming below my window. I sat up hard, my heart banging against my ribs. I had been dreaming, something tangled and feverish where Cassie and I were in a crowded bar and a guy in a tweed cap was yelling at her, and for a moment I thought it was her voice I had heard. I was disoriented, it was dark, heavy late-night silence; and someone, a girl or a child, was screaming again and again outside. I went to the window and cautiously hooked the curtain open an inch. The complex where I live is made up of four identical apartment buildings around a little square of grass with a couple of iron benches, the kind of thing estate agents call a “communal recreation area,” although nobody ever uses it (the couple in the ground-floor flat had lazy evening cocktails al fresco a couple of times, but people complained about the noise, and the management company put up a narky sign in the foyer). The white security lights gave the garden an eerie nightscope glow. It was empty; the slants of shadow in the corners were too low to hide anyone. The scream came again, high and chilling and very close, and an atavistic prickle went up my spine. I waited, shivering a little in the cold air striking off the glass. After a few minutes something moved in the shadows, blacker against the black, then detached itself and stepped out onto the grass
: it was a big dog-fox, alert and scrawny in his sparse summer coat. He raised his head and screamed again, and for a moment I imagined I caught his wild, alien scent. Then he trotted across the grass and disappeared through the front gate, pouring between the bars as sinuously as a cat. I heard his shrieks moving away into the darkness. I was dazed and half asleep and keyed up with leftover adrenaline, and my mouth tasted foul; I needed something cold and sweet. I went out to the kitchen to look for juice. Heather, like me, sometimes has trouble sleeping, and I found myself almost hoping she would be awake and still wanting to complain about whatever it was, but there was no light under her door. I poured myself a glass of her orange juice and stood in front of the open fridge for a long time, holding the glass to my temple and swaying slightly in the flickering white light.
In the morning it was pouring rain. I texted Cassie to say I’d pick her up—
the Golf Cart tends to go catatonic in wet weather. When I beeped my horn 78
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outside her flat, she ran down wearing a Paddington Bear duffle coat and carrying a thermos of coffee.
“Thank God it didn’t do this yesterday,” she said. “Bye-bye evidence.”
“Look at this,” I said, giving her the Jonathan Devlin stuff. She sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and read, occasionally passing me the thermos. “Do you remember these guys?” she said, when she’d finished.
“Vaguely. Not well, but it was a small neighborhood and they were hard to miss. They were the nearest thing we had to juvenile delinquents.”