In the Woods (12 page)

I shoved the file under my jacket, in case I ran into O’Kelly (there was no reason why I shouldn’t have it, especially now that the link to the Devlin case was definite, but for some reason I felt guilty, furtive, as if I were absconding with some taboo artifact), and went back up to the squad room. Cassie was at her computer; she had left the lights off so O’Kelly wouldn’t spot them.

“Mark’s clean,” she said. “So’s Margaret Devlin. Jonathan has one conviction, just this February.”

“Kiddie porn?”

“Jesus, Ryan. You have a melodramatic mind. No, disturbing the peace: he was protesting about the motorway and crossed a police line. Judge gave him a hundred-quid fine and twenty hours of community service, then 68

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upped it to forty when Devlin said that as far as he was concerned he had just been arrested for performing a community service.”

That wasn’t where I’d seen Devlin’s name, then: as I’ve said, I had had only the vaguest idea that the motorway controversy even existed. But it did explain why he hadn’t reported the threatening phone calls. We would not have seemed like allies to him, especially not on anything related to the motorway. “The hair clip’s in the file,” I said.

“Nice one,” said Cassie, with a shade of a question in her voice. She was shutting down the computer and turned to look at me. “Are you pleased?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. It was, obviously, nice to know that I wasn’t losing my mind and imagining things; but now I was wondering whether I had actually remembered it at all or only seen it in the file, and which of those possibilities I liked less, and wishing I had just kept my mouth shut about the damn thing.

Cassie waited; in the evening light through the window her eyes looked huge, opaque and watchful. I knew she was giving me a chance to say, Fuck the hair clip, let’s forget we ever found it. Even now the temptation, tired and profitless though it may be, is to wonder what would have happened if I had.

But it was late, I had had a long day, I wanted to go home, and being handled with kid gloves—even by Cassie—has always made me itch; cutting short this whole line of inquiry seemed like so much more effort than simply leaving it to run its course. “Will you ring Sophie about the blood?”

I asked. In that dim room, it seemed all right to admit this much weakness at least.

“Sure,” said Cassie. “Later, though, OK? Let’s go talk to O’Kelly before he has an aneurysm. He texted me while you were in the basement; I didn’t think he even knew how to do that, did you?”

I rang O’Kelly’s extension and told him we were back, to which he said,

“About fucking time. What did you do, stop for a quickie?” and then told us to get into his office pronto.

The office has only one chair apart from O’Kelly’s own, one of those faux-leather ergonomic things. The implication is that you shouldn’t take up too much of his space or time. I sat in the chair, and Cassie perched on a table behind me. O’Kelly gave her an irritated look. In the Woods 69

“Make it fast,” he said. “I’ve to be somewhere at eight.” His wife had left him the year before; since then the grapevine had picked up a series of awkward attempts at relationships, including one spectacularly unsuccessful blind date where the woman turned out to be an ex-hooker he had arrested regularly in his Vice days.

“Katharine Devlin, aged twelve,” I said.

“The ID’s definite, so?”

“Ninety-nine percent,” I said. “We’ll have one of the parents view the body when the morgue’s patched her up, but Katy Devlin was an identical twin, and the surviving twin looks exactly like our victim.”

“Leads, suspects?” he snapped. He had a sort of nice tie on, ready for his date, and he was wearing too much cologne; I couldn’t place it, but it smelled expensive. “I’m going to have to give a fucking press conference tomorrow. Tell me you’ve got something.”

“She was hit over the head and asphyxiated, probably raped,” Cassie said. The fluorescent lighting smudged gray under her eyes. She looked too tired and too young to be saying the words so calmly. “We won’t know anything definite till the post-mortem tomorrow morning.”

“Fucking tomorrow?” O’Kelly said, outraged. “Tell that shite Cooper to give this priority.”

“Already did, sir,” said Cassie. “He had to be in court this afternoon. He said first thing tomorrow is the best he can do.” (Cooper and O’Kelly hate each other; what Cooper had actually said was, “Kindly explain to Mr. O’Kelly that his cases aren’t the only ones in the world.”) “We’ve identified four primary lines of inquiry, and—”

“Good, that’s good,” said O’Kelly, grabbing drawers open and rummaging for a pen.

“First, there’s the family,” said Cassie. “You know the stats, sir: most murdered kids are killed by their parents.”

“And there’s something odd about that family, sir,” I said. This was my line; we had to get the point across, in case we ever needed a little leeway in investigating the Devlins, but if Cassie had said it O’Kelly would have gone off into a long snide boring routine about women’s intuition. We were good at O’Kelly by this time. Our counterpoint has been polished to the seamlessness of a Beach Boys harmony—we can sense exactly when to swap the roles of front man and backup, good cop and bad cop, when my cool detachment needs to strike a balancing note of gravitas against Cassie’s bright 70

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ease—and it is for use even against our own. “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something up in that house.”

“Never ignore a hunch,” said O’Kelly. “Dangerous.” Cassie’s foot, swinging casually, nudged my back.

“Second,” she said, “we’re going to have to at least check out the possibility of some kind of cult.”

“Oh, God, Maddox. What, did Cosmo run an article on Satanism this month?” O’Kelly’s disregard for cliché is so sweeping that it almost has its own panache. I find this entertaining or irritating or mildly comforting, depending on my mood, but at least it makes it very easy to prepare your script in advance.

“I think it’s a load of rubbish, too, sir,” I said, “but we’ve got a murdered little girl on a sacrificial altar. The reporters were asking about it already. We’ll have to eliminate it.” It is, obviously, difficult to prove that something does not exist, and saying it without solid proof just brings out the conspiracy theorists, so we take a different tack. We would spend several hours finding ways in which Katy Devlin’s death didn’t match the putative MO of a hypothetical group (no bloodletting, no sacrificial garment, no occult symbols, yada yada yada), and then O’Kelly, who luckily has absolutely no sense of the absurd, would explain all this to the cameras.

“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