In the Woods (18 page)

Tana French

the windows tightly closed and not a single kid playing; they were all inside, confused and antsy and safe under their parents’ eyes, trying to eavesdrop on the adult whispers and find out what was going on. The Foleys were an unprepossessing bunch. The fifteen-year-old settled into an armchair and folded her arms, hitching up her bust like someone’s mammy, and gave us a pale, bored, supercilious stare; the ten-year-old looked like a cartoon pig and chewed gum with her mouth open, wriggling her rump on the sofa and occasionally flicking the gum out on her tongue and then back into her mouth again. Even the youngest was one of those deeply unnerving toddlers who look like bonsai adults: it had a prim, pudgy face with a beaky nose, and it stared at me from Vera’s lap, its lips pursing, and then retracted its chin disapprovingly into the folds of its neck. I had a nasty conviction that, if it said anything, its voice would be a deep, fortya-day rasp. The house smelled of cabbage. I could not fathom why on earth Rosalind and Jessica would choose to spend any time there, and the fact that they had bothered me.

With the exception of the toddler, though, they all told the same story. Rosalind and Jessica, and sometimes Katy, spent the night there every few weeks or so (“I’d love to have them more often, of course I would,” said Vera, pinching tensely at a corner of a slipcover, “but I simply can’t, not with my nerves, you know”); less often, Valerie and Sharon stayed with the Devlins. Nobody was sure whose idea this particular sleepover had been, although Vera thought vaguely that it might have been Margaret who suggested it. On Monday night Rosalind and Jessica had come over somewhere around half past eight, watched television and played with the baby (I couldn’t imagine how; the kid had barely moved all the time we were there, it must have been like playing with a large potato), and gone to bed around eleven, sharing a camp bed in Valerie and Sharon’s room. This, apparently, was where the trouble had started: unsurprisingly, they had all four been up talking and giggling most of the night. “Now they’re lovely girls, Officers, I’m not saying that, but sometimes the young people don’t realize how much of a strain they can put on us old folks, isn’t that right?” Vera tittered frantically and nudged the middle kid, who squirmed further away on the sofa. “I had to go in to them half a dozen times to tell them to be quiet—I can’t bear noise, you know. It must have been half past two in the morning, can you imagine, before they finally went off to sleep. And by that time, of course, my nerves were in such a state that I couldn’t In the Woods 107

settle at all, I had to get up and make myself a cup of tea. I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I was shattered the next morning. And then when Margaret rang, sure, we were all going frantic, weren’t we, girls? But I never imagined . . . sure, I thought she was only . . .” She pressed a thin, twitching hand over her mouth.

“Let’s go back to the night before,” Cassie said to the oldest kid. “What did you and your cousins talk about?”

The kid—Valerie, I think—rolled her eyes and pulled up her lip to show what a stupid question this was. “Stuff.”

“Did you talk about Katy at all?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Rosalind was saying how brilliant it was that she was going to ballet school. I don’t see what’s so great about it.”

“What about your aunt and uncle? Did you mention them?”

“Yeah. Rosalind was saying they’re horrible to her. They never let her do anything.”

Vera gave a breathless little hoot. “Oh, now, Valerie, don’t be saying that!

Sure, Officers, Margaret and Jonathan would do anything for those girls, they’ve themselves worn out—”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I guess that’s why Rosalind ran away, because they were too nice to her.”

Cassie and I both started to jump on this at once, but Vera got there first.

“Valerie! What did I tell you? We don’t talk about that. It was all a misunderstanding, only. Rosalind was a very bold girl to be worrying her poor parents like that, but it’s all forgiven and forgotten. . . .”

We waited for her to run down. “Why did Rosalind run away?” I asked Valerie.

She twitched one shoulder. “She was sick of her dad bossing her around. I think maybe he hit her or something.”

“Valerie! Now, Officers, I don’t know where she’s getting this. Jonathan would never lay a finger on those children, so he wouldn’t. Rosalind’s a sensitive girl; she had an argument with her daddy, and he didn’t realize how upset she was. . . .”

Valerie sat back and stared at me, a smug smile creeping through the professional boredom. The middle kid wiped her nose on her sleeve and examined the result with interest.

“When was this?” Cassie asked.

“Ah, I wouldn’t remember. A long time ago—last year, I think it was—”

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“May,” said Valerie. “This May.”

“How long was she gone?”

“Like three days. The police came and everything.”

“And where had she been, do you know?”

“She went off somewhere with a fella,” Valerie said, smirking.

“She did not,” Vera snapped shrilly. “She was only saying that to frighten her poor mother, God forgive her. She was staying with that friend of hers from school—what’s her name, Karen. She came home after the weekend and no harm done.”

“Whatever,” Valerie said, doing the one-shouldered shrug again.

“Want my tea,” the toddler stated firmly. I had been right: it had a voice like a bassoon.

This, in all probability, explained something I had been meaning to check out: why Missing Persons had been so quick to assume that Katy was a runaway. Twelve is borderline, and normally they would have given her the benefit of the doubt, started the search and the media fireworks immediately rather than waiting the twenty-four hours. But running away tends to spread through families, the younger children getting the idea from the older. When Missing Persons ran the Devlins’ address through their system, they would have come up with Rosalind’s escapade and assumed that Katy had done the same thing, had a spat with her parents and stormed off to a friend’s house; that she, like Rosalind, would be back as soon as she calmed down, and no harm done.

I was, callously, very glad that Vera had been up all Monday night. Though it was almost too horrible to admit, I had had moments of worry about both Jessica and Rosalind. Jessica didn’t look very strong, but she definitely did look unbalanced, and the cliché about insanity lending strength has some basis in fact, and she could hardly have failed to be jealous of all the adulation Katy was getting. Rosalind was highly strung and fiercely protective of Jessica, and if Katy’s success had been sending Jessica further and further into her daze . . . I knew Cassie had been thinking the same things, but she hadn’t mentioned them either, and for some reason this had been getting on my nerves.

“I want to know why Rosalind ran away from home,” I said, as we In the Woods 109

headed back down the Foleys’ drive. The middle kid had her nose squashed up against the living-room window and was making faces at us.

“And where she went,” said Cassie. “Can you talk to her? I think you’ll get more out of her than I would.”

“Actually,” I said, a little awkwardly, “that was her on the phone, earlier. She’s coming in to see me tomorrow afternoon. She says there’s something she wants to talk about.”

Cassie turned from stuffing her notebook into her satchel and gave me a long look I couldn’t read. For a moment I wondered if she was miffed that Rosalind had asked for me instead of her. We were both used to Cassie being the families’ favorite, and I felt a juvenile, shameful spark of triumph: Someone likes me best, so there. My relationship with Cassie has a brotherand-sister tinge that works well for us, but occasionally it does lead to sibling rivalry. But then she said, “Perfect. You can bring up the running-away thing without it seeming like a big deal.”

She swung her satchel onto her back and we headed off down the road. She was looking out over the fields with her hands in her pockets, and I couldn’t tell whether she was annoyed with me for not telling her about Rosalind Devlin’s phone call earlier—which, in all fairness, I should have done. I gave her a little nudge with my elbow, testing. A few steps later she flipped up a foot behind her and kicked me in the arse.

We spent the rest of the afternoon going door-to-door through the estate. Door-to-door is boring, thankless work, and the floaters already had it covered, but we wanted to get a feel for what the neighbors thought of the Devlins. The general consensus was that they were a decent family but kept themselves firmly to themselves, which hadn’t gone down very well: in a place the size and social class of Knocknaree, any kind of reserve is considered a general insult, half a step from the unforgivable sin of snobbery. But Katy herself was different: the Royal Ballet School place had made her Knocknaree’s pride, their own personal cause. Even the obviously poor households had sent someone to the fund-raiser, everyone needed to describe her dancing to us; a few people cried. A lot of people were part of Jonathan’s Move the Motorway campaign and gave us edgy, resentful looks when we asked about him. A few went into outraged speeches about how he 110

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was trying to stop progress and undermine the economy, and got special little stars beside their names in my notebook. Most people were of the opinion that Jessica wasn’t the full shilling. When we asked if they had seen anything suspicious, they offered us the usual set of local weirdos—an old guy who yelled at bins, two fourteen-year-olds with a reputation for drowning cats in the river—and irrelevant ongoing feuds and nonspecific things that went bump in the night. A number of people, none of them with any useful information, mentioned the old case; until the dig and the motorway and Katy came along, it had been Knocknaree’s one claim to fame. I thought I half-recognized a few names, a couple of faces. I gave them my best professional blank look. After an hour or so of this we got to 27 Knocknaree Drive and found Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald—still, incredibly, very much alive and kicking. Mrs. Fitzgerald was great. She was eighty-eight, skinny and half blind and bent almost double; she offered us tea, ignored our refusals and shouted to us from the kitchen while she prepared a loaded, trembling tray, and then demanded to know whether we had found her purse that some young one had robbed off her in town three months ago, and why not. It was a bizarre sensation, after reading her faded handwriting in the old file, to watch her complain about her swollen ankles (“I’m a martyr to them, so I am”) and indignantly refuse to let me take the tray. It was as if Tutankhamen or Miss Havisham had wandered into the pub one night and started bitching about the head on the pints.

She was from Dublin, she told us—“a Liberties girl, born and bred and buttered”—but she had moved to Knocknaree twenty-seven years ago, when her husband (“God rest him”) retired from his job as a train driver. The estate had been her microcosm ever since, and I was pretty sure she could recite every coming and going and scandal in its history. She knew the Devlins, of course, and approved of them: “Ah, they’re a lovely family altogether. She was always a great girl, Margaret Kelly, never a bit of worry to her mammy, only for”—she leaned sideways to Cassie and lowered her voice conspiratorially—“only for coming up pregnant that time. And do you know, love, the government and the Church do always be going on about what a shocking thing this teenage pregnancy is, but what I say is, every now and then it’s no harm. That Devlin lad used to be a bit of a bowsie, so he did, but the moment he got that young one in the family way—sure, he wasn’t the same fella at all. He got a job for himself, and a house, and they’d In the Woods 111

a lovely wedding. It was the making of him. It’s only terrible what’s after happening to that poor child, may she rest in peace.”

She crossed herself and patted my arm. “And you’re after coming all the way from England to find out who done it? Aren’t you great? God bless you, young fella.”

“The old heretic,” I said, when we got outside. Mrs. Fitzgerald had cheered up my day immensely. “I hope I have that much zip when I’m eighty-eight.”

We knocked off just before six and went to the local pub—Mooney’s, next to the shop—to watch the news. We had only covered a small part of the estate, but we had a handle on the general atmosphere, and it had been a long day; the meeting with Cooper seemed to have happened at least forty-eight hours before. I had a dizzy urge to keep going until we got to my old road—

see if Jamie’s mother answered their door, what Peter’s brothers and sisters looked like now, who was living in my old room—but I knew this would not be a good idea.

We had timed it well: as I carried our coffee over to the table, the barman turned up the volume on the TV and the news came on with a sweep of synthetic music. Katy was the lead story; the studio presenters looked suitably grave, their voices vibrating heartrendingly at the end of each sentence to indicate tragedy. The arty Irish Times shot flashed up in a corner of the screen.

“The young girl found dead yesterday on the controversial archaeological site at Knocknaree has been identified as Katharine Devlin, aged twelve,” intoned the male presenter. Either the color on the TV set was off or he had used too much fake tan; his face was orange, the whites of his eyes spookily bright. The old guys at the bar stirred, tilting their faces slowly up to the screen, their glasses clicking down. “Katharine had been missing from her nearby home since early Tuesday morning. Police have confirmed that the death is suspicious, and have appealed to anyone with information to come forward.” The tip-line number came up across the bottom of the screen, white lettering on a blue banner. “Orla Manahan is live at the scene.”

Cut to a blonde with frozen hair and an overhanging nose, standing in front of the altar stone, which didn’t appear to be doing anything that 112

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demanded live coverage. People had already started leaving tributes propped against it: flowers wrapped in colored cellophane, a pink teddy bear. In the background a stray piece of crime-scene tape, overlooked by Sophie’s team, fluttered forlornly from a tree.