In the Woods (38 page)

‘Now! . . .’ ”

I waited for a long time. “Did all three of you rape her?” I asked quietly, in the end.

“Shane, only. Not that that makes it any better. I helped hold her. . . .”

He took a fast breath between his teeth. “I’ve never known anything like it. I think maybe we went a little out of our minds. It didn’t feel real, you know? It was like a nightmare, or a bad trip. It went on forever. It was blazing hot, I was sweating like a pig, light-headed. I looked round at the trees and they were closing in on us, shooting out brand-new branches, I thought they were about to wrap round us and swallow us up; and all the colors looked wrong, off, like in one of those colorized old films. The sky had gone almost white, and there were things shooting across it, little black things. I looked back—I felt like I should warn the others that something was happening, something was wrong—and I was holding . . . holding her, but I couldn’t feel my hands, they didn’t look like mine. I couldn’t work out whose hands those were. I was terrified. Cathal was there across from me and his breathing sounded like the loudest thing in the world, but I didn’t recognize him; I couldn’t remember who the hell he was or what we were doing. Sandra was fighting and there were these noises and—Jesus. For a In the Woods 233

second I swear I thought we were hunters and this was a, an animal we’d brought down, and Shane was killing it. . . .”

I was starting to dislike the tone of this. “If I understand you correctly,”

I said coldly, “you were under the influence both of alcohol and of illegal drugs at the time, you may quite possibly have been suffering from heatstroke, and you were presumably in a state of considerable excitement. Don’t you think these factors might have had something to do with this experience?”

Jonathan’s eyes went to me for a moment; then he shrugged, a defeated little twitch. “Yeah, sure,” he said quietly. “Probably. Again, I’m not saying any of this is an excuse. I’m only telling you. You asked.”

It was an absurd story, of course, melodramatic and self-serving and utterly predictable: every criminal I have ever interrogated had a long convoluted story proving conclusively that it wasn’t actually his fault or at least that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and most of them were a whole lot better than this one. What bothered me was that some tiny part of me believed it. I wasn’t at all convinced about Cathal’s idealistic motives, but Jonathan: he had been lost somewhere in the wild borderlands of nineteen, half in love with his friends with a love passing the love of women, desperate for some mystical rite that would reverse time and put their disintegrating private world back together. It would not have been difficult for him to see this as an act of love, however dark and twisted and untranslatable to the harsh outside world. Not that this made any difference: I wondered what else he would have done for his cause.

“And you’re no longer in any contact with Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?” I asked, a little cruelly, I know.

“No,” he said quietly. He looked away, out the window, and laughed, a mirthless little breath. “After all that, eh? Cathal and I send Christmas cards; the wife signs his name to theirs. I haven’t heard from Shane in years. I wrote him the odd letter, but he never wrote back. I stopped trying.”

“You started drifting apart not long after the rape.”

“It was a slow thing, took years. But yeah, when you come down to it, I suppose it started with that day in the woods. It was awkward, after—

Cathal wanted to talk about it over and over, it made Shane nervous as a cat on hot bricks; I felt guilty as hell, didn’t even want to think about it. . . . Ironic, isn’t it? Here we thought it was going to be the thing that brought us together forever.” He shook his head quickly, like a horse twitching off a fly. 234

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“But I’d say we might have gone our separate ways anyway, sure. It happens. Cathal moved away, I got married . . .”

“And Shane?”

“I’m betting you know Shane’s in jail,” he said dryly. “Shane . . . Listen, if that poor thick bastard had been born ten years later, he’d have been grand. I’m not saying he’d be some great success story, but he’d have a decent job and maybe a family. He was a casualty of the eighties. There’s a whole generation out there that fell through the cracks. By the time the economy picked up it was too late for most of us, we were too old to start over. Cathal and I were just lucky. I was shite at everything else but good at maths, A’s all through school, so I finally managed to get a job in the bank. And Cathal went out with some rich young one who had a computer and taught him how to use it, for the laugh; a few years later, when everyone was crying out for people who knew computers, he was one of the few in the country who could do more than turn the bloody things on. He always did land on his feet, Cathal. But Shane . . . He’d no job, no education, no prospects, no family. What did he have to lose by robbing?”

I was finding it hard to feel any particular sympathy towards Shane Waters.

“In the minutes immediately after the rape,” I said, almost against my will,

“did you hear anything out of the ordinary—possibly a sound like a large bird flapping its wings?” I left out the part about it being a voiced sound. Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear. Jonathan gave me a funny look. “The wood was full of birds, foxes, what have you. I wouldn’t have noticed one more or less—especially not just then. I don’t know if I’ve given you any idea of the state we were all in. It wasn’t just me, you know. It was like we were coming down off acid. I was shaking all over, couldn’t see straight, everything kept sliding sideways. Sandra was—Sandra was gasping, like she couldn’t breathe. Shane was lying on the grass just staring up at the trees and twitching. Cathal started laughing, he was staggering around the clearing howling, I told him I’d punch the face off him if he didn’t—” He stopped.

“What is it?” I asked, after a moment.

“I’d forgotten,” he said slowly. “I don’t—sure, I don’t like to think about the thing anyway. I’d forgotten . . . If it was anything, mind you. The way our heads were, it could easily have been just imagination.”

I waited. Finally he sighed, made an uneasy movement like a shrug.

“Well. The way I remember it, I grabbed Cathal and told him to shut up or In the Woods 235

I’d hit him, and he stopped laughing and caught me by my T-shirt—he looked half crazy, for a second there I thought it was going to turn into a fight. But there was still someone laughing—not one of us; away in the trees. Sandra and Shane both started screaming—maybe I did, too, I don’t know—

but it just got louder and louder, this huge voice laughing. . . . Cathal let go of me and shouted something about those kids, but it didn’t sound—”

“Kids?” I said coolly. I was fighting a violent impulse to get the hell out of there. There was no reason why Jonathan should recognize me—I had just been some little kid hanging around, my hair had been a lot fairer then, I had a different accent and a different name—but I felt suddenly horribly naked and exposed.

“Ah, there were these kids from the estate—little kids, ten, twelve—who used to play in the wood. Sometimes they’d spy on us; throw things and then run, you know the way. But it didn’t sound like any kid to me. It sounded like a man—a young fella, maybe, around our age. Not a child.”

For a split second I almost took the opening he had offered. The flash of wariness had dissolved and the quick little whispers in the corners had risen to a silent shout, so close, close as breath. It was on the tip of my tongue: Those kids, weren’t they spying on you that day? Weren’t you worried they would tell? What did you do to stop them? But the detective in me held me back. I knew I would only get one chance, and I needed to come to it on my own territory and with all the ammunition I could bring.

“Did any of you go to see what it was?” I asked, instead. Jonathan thought for a moment, his eyes hooded and intent. “No. Like I said, we were all in some kind of shock anyway, and this was more than we could handle. I was frozen, couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. It kept getting louder, till I thought the whole estate would be out to see what was going on, and we were still yelling. . . . Finally it stopped—moved off into the woods, maybe, I don’t know. Shane kept screaming, till Cathal smacked him across the back of the head and told him to shut up. We got out of there as fast as we could. I went home, nicked some of my da’s booze and got drunk as a lord. I don’t know what the others did.”

So much for Cassie’s mysterious wild animal, then. But there had quite possibly been someone in the woods that day, someone who, if he had seen the rape, had in all probability seen us, too; someone who might have been there again, a week or two later. “Do you have any suspicion as to who the person laughing might have been?” I asked.

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“No. I think Cathal asked us about that, later. He said we needed to know who it was, how much they had seen. I’ve no idea.”

I stood up. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Devlin,” I said. “I may need to ask you a few more questions about this at some stage, but that’s all for now.”

“Wait,” he said suddenly. “Do you think Sandra killed Katy?”

He looked very short and pathetic, standing there at the window with his hands balled in his cardigan pockets, but he still had a kind of forlorn dignity about him. “No,” I said. “I don’t. But we have to investigate every possibility thoroughly.”

Jonathan nodded. “I suppose that means you’ve no real suspect,” he said.

“No, I know, I know, you can’t tell me. . . . If you’re talking to Sandra, tell her I’m sorry. We did a terrible thing. I know it’s a bit late to be saying that, I should’ve thought of it twenty years ago, but . . . tell her, all the same.”

That evening I went out to Mountjoy to see Shane Waters. I’m sure Cassie would have come with me if I’d told her I was going, but I wanted to do this, as much as possible, on my own. Shane was rat-faced and nervy, with a repulsive little mustache, and he still had acne. He reminded me of Wayne the junkie. I tried every tactic I knew and promised him everything I could think of—immunity, early release on the armed robbery—banking on the fact that he wasn’t smart enough to know what I could and couldn’t deliver, but (always one of my blind spots) I’d underestimated the power of stupidity: with the infuriating mulishness of someone who has long ago given up trying to analyze possibilities and ramifications, Shane stuck to the one option he understood. “I don’t know nothing,” he told me, over and over, with a kind of anemic self-satisfaction that made me want to scream. “And you can’t prove I do.” Sandra, the rape, Peter and Jamie, even Jonathan Devlin:

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, man.” I finally gave up when I realized I was in serious danger of throwing something. On my way home I swallowed my pride and phoned Cassie, who didn’t even try to pretend she hadn’t guessed where I’d gone. She had spent her evening eliminating Sandra Scully from the inquiry. On the night in question, Sandra had been working in a call center in town. Her supervisor and everyone else on the shift confirmed that she had been there until just before two in the morning, when she had clocked out and caught a night bus In the Woods 237

home. This was good news—it tidied things up, and I hadn’t liked thinking of Sandra as a possible murderess—but it gave me a complicated little pang, the thought of her in an airless fluorescent cubicle, surrounded by parttiming students and actors waiting for the next gig. I won’t go into details, but we put a considerable amount of effort and ingenuity, most of it more or less legal, into identifying the worst possible time to go talk to Cathal Mills. He had some high position with a gibberish title, in a company that provided something called “corporate e-learning software localization solutions” (I was impressed: I hadn’t thought it was possible for me to dislike him any more than I already did), so we walked in on him halfway through a crucial meeting with a big potential client. Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist’s rat mazes. Cassie shot me a wide-eyed, horrified look as we followed some droid through the fifth set of swipe-card swing doors. Cathal was in the boardroom, and he was easy to identify: he was the one with the PowerPoint presentation. He was still a handsome guy—tall and broad-shouldered, with bright blue eyes and hard, dangerous bones—

but fat was starting to blur his waist and hang under his jaw; in a few more years he would have coarsened into piggishness. The new client was four identical, humorless Americans in inscrutable dark suits.

“Sorry, fellas,” Cathal said, giving us an easy, warning smile, “the boardroom’s being used.”

“It is indeed,” Cassie told him. She had dressed for the occasion, in ripped jeans and an old turquoise camisole that said yuppies taste like chicken in red across the front. “I’m Detective Maddox—”

“And I’m Detective Ryan,” I said, flipping out my ID. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The smile didn’t budge, but a savage flash shot across his eyes. “This isn’t a good time.”

“No?” Cassie inquired sociably, lounging against the table so that the PowerPoint image vanished into a blob on her camisole.

“No.” He cut his eyes sideways at the new client, who stared disapprovingly into space and shuffled papers.

“This looks like a good place to talk,” she said, surveying the boardroom appreciatively, “but we could go back to headquarters if you’d prefer.”

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“What’s this about?” Cathal demanded. It was a mistake, and he knew it as soon as the words were out. If we had said anything off our own bat, in front of the clones, it would have been an invitation to a harassment claim, and he looked like the type who would sue; but hey, he had asked.

“We’re investigating a child-murder,” Cassie said sweetly. “There’s a possibility it’s linked to the alleged rape of a young girl, and we have reason to believe you might be able to help us with our inquiries.”