In the Woods (53 page)

Cassie raised one eyebrow noncommittally. She finished her coffee: it was going to be a very long day, we had all been spiking ourselves up on caffeine.

“How do you want to do this?” I asked.

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“You head it up. He thinks of women as the source of sympathy and approval; I’ll pat him on the head now and then. He’s intimidated by men, so go easy: if you push him too hard, he’ll freeze up and want to leave. Just take your time, and guilt-trip him. I still think he was in two minds about the whole thing from the start, and I bet he feels terrible about it. If we play to his conscience, it’s only a matter of time before he goes to pieces.”

“Let’s do it,” I said, and we shook our clothes straight and smoothed down our hair and walked, shoulder to shoulder, down the corridor towards the interview room.

It was our last partnership. I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or the most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives know each other’s every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners in a pas de deux. I never knew and never will whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.

Damien was huddled in his chair, shoulders rigid, his cup of tea steaming away ignored on the table. When I cautioned him, he stared at me as if I were speaking Urdu.

The month since Katy’s death hadn’t been kind to him. He was wearing khaki combats and a baggy gray sweatshirt, but I could see that he had lost weight, and it made him seem gangly and somehow shorter than he actually was. The boy-band prettiness was looking a little ragged around the edges—

purplish bags under his eyes, a vertical crease starting to form between his eyebrows; the youthful bloom that should have lasted him another few years was fading fast. The change was subtle enough that I hadn’t noticed it back on the dig, but now it gave me pause.

We started with easy questions, things he could answer with no need to worry. He was from Rathfarnham, right? Studying at Trinity? Just finished second year? How had the exams gone? Damien answered in monosyllables and twisted the hem of his sweatshirt around his thumb, clearly dying to 330

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know why we were asking but afraid to find out. Cassie steered him onto archaeology and gradually he relaxed; he disentangled himself from the sweatshirt and started drinking his tea and speaking in full sentences, and they had a long, happy conversation about the various finds that had turned up on the dig. I left them to it for at least twenty minutes before intervening (tolerant smile: “Hate to say this, guys, but we should probably get back to business before we all three get in trouble”).

“Ah, come on, Ryan, two seconds,” Cassie begged. “I’ve never seen a ring brooch. What does it look like?”

“They said it’s probably going to be in the National Museum,” Damien told her, flushed with pride. “It’s kind of this big, and it’s bronze, and it’s got a pattern incised into it. . . .” He made vague squiggly motions, presumably intended to indicate an incised pattern, with one finger.

“Draw it for me?” Cassie asked, pushing her notebook and pen across the table to him. Damien drew obediently, brow furrowed in concentration.

“Sort of like this,” he said, giving Cassie back the notebook. “I can’t draw.”

“Wow,” Cassie said reverently. “And you found it? If I found something like that, I think I’d explode or have a heart attack or something.”

I looked over her shoulder: a broad circle with what appeared to be a pin across the back, decorated with fluid, balanced curves. “Pretty,” I said. Damien was indeed left-handed. His hands still looked a size too big for his body, like a puppy’s paws.

“Hunt’s out,” O’Kelly said, in the corridor. “Original statement says he was having his tea and watching telly with his wife all the Monday night, till he went to bed at eleven. Bloody documentaries, they watched, something about meerkats and one about Richard III—he told us every bloody detail, whether we wanted to know or not. The wife says the same, and the telly guide backs them up. And the neighbor has a dog, one of those little shites that barks all night; he says he heard Hunt shouting out the window at it around one in the morning. Why he wouldn’t tell the little fucker to shut up himself. . . . He’s sure of the date because it was the day they got the new decking in—says the workmen upset the dog. I’m sending Einstein home, before he has me driven mental. It’s a two-horse race, lads.”

“How’s Sam doing with Mark?” I asked.

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“Getting nowhere. Hanly’s being snotty as fuck and sticking to the shagfest story; the girlfriend’s backing him up. If they’re lying, they’re not going to crack any time soon. And he’s right-handed, for sure. How about your boy?”

“Left,” Cassie said.

“There’s our odds-on favorite, then. But that’s not going to be enough. I talked to Cooper. . . .” O’Kelly’s face pulled into a disgusted grimace.

“Position of the victim, position of the assailant, balance of probabilities—

more shite than a pigsty, but what it boils down to is he thinks our man’s left-handed but he’s not willing to say for definite. He’s like a bloody politician. How’s Donnelly doing?”

“Nervous,” I said.

O’Kelly slapped the door of the interview room. “Good. Keep him that way.”

We went back in and set about making Damien nervous. “OK, guys,” I said, pulling up my chair, “time to get down to business. Let’s talk about Katy Devlin.”

Damien nodded attentively, but I saw him brace himself. He took a sip of his tea, though it had to be cold by now.

“When did you first see her?”

“I guess when we were like three quarters of the way up the hill? Higher up than the cottage, anyway, and the Portakabins. See, because of the way the hill slopes—”

“No,” Cassie said, “not the day you found her body. Before that.”

“Before . . . ?” Damien blinked at her, took another sip of tea. “No—

um, I didn’t; I hadn’t. Met her before that, that day.”

“You’d never even seen her before?” Cassie’s tone hadn’t changed, but I felt the sudden bird-dog stillness in her. “Are you sure? Think hard, Damien.”

He shook his head vehemently. “No. I swear. I’d never seen her in my entire life.”

There was a moment of silence. I gave Damien what I hoped was a look of mild interest, but my head was whirling.

I had cast my vote for Mark not out of sheer contrariness, as you might think, nor because something about him annoyed me in ways I didn’t care to 332

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explore. I suppose when you come down to it, given the choices available, I simply wanted it to be him. I had never been able to take Damien seriously—

not as a man, not as a witness and certainly not as a suspect. He was such an abject little wimp, nothing to him but curls and stammers and vulnerability, you could have blown him away like a dandelion clock; the thought that all this past month might have stemmed from someone like him was outrageous. Mark, whatever we might think of each other, made an opponent and a goal worth having.

But this: it was such a pointless lie. The Devlin girls had hung around the dig often enough that summer, and they were hardly inconspicuous; all the other archaeologists had remembered them; Mel, who had stayed a safe distance from Katy’s body, had known her straight away. And Damien had given tours of the site; he was more likely than any of them to have spoken to Katy, spent time with her. He had bent over her body, supposedly to see if she was breathing (and even that much courage, I realized, was out of character). He had no reason in the world to deny having seen her before, unless he was clumsily dodging a trap we had never set; unless the thought of being linked to her in any way scared him so badly that he couldn’t think straight.

“OK,” Cassie said, “what about her father—Jonathan Devlin? Are you a member of Move the Motorway?” and Damien took a big gulp of cold tea and started nodding again, and we skated deftly away from the subject before he had a chance to realize what he had said.

Around three o’clock, Cassie and Sam and I went out for takeaway pizza—

Mark was starting to bitch about being hungry, and we wanted to keep him and Damien happy. Neither of them was under arrest; they could decide to walk out of the building at any moment, and there would be nothing we could do to stop them. We were trading, as we so often do, on the basic human desires to please authority and to be a good guy; and, while I was pretty sure these would keep Damien in the interview room indefinitely, I was far from convinced about Mark.

“How are you getting on with Donnelly?” Sam asked me, in the pizza place. Cassie was up at the counter, leaning over it and laughing with the guy who had taken our order.

I shrugged. “Hard to tell. How’s Mark?”

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“Raging. He says he’s spent half the year working his arse off for Move the Motorway, why would he risk scuppering the whole thing by killing the chairman’s kid? He thinks this is all political. . . .” Sam winced. “About Donnelly,” he said, looking not at me but at Cassie’s back. “If he’s our man. What would . . . does he have a motive?”

“Not that we’ve found so far,” I said. I did not want to get into this.

“If anything does come up . . .” Sam shoved his fists deeper into his trouser pockets. “Anything you think I might want to know. Could you call me?”

“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t eaten all day, but food was the last thing on my mind; all I wanted was to get back to Damien, and the pizza seemed to be taking hours. “Sure.”

Damien took a can of 7-Up, but he refused the pizza; he wasn’t hungry, he said. “Sure?” Cassie asked, trying to catch strings of cheese with her finger.

“God, when I was a student I’d never have turned down free pizza.”

“You never turn down food, period,” I told her. “You’re a human Hoover.” Cassie, unable to answer through a huge mouthful, nodded cheerfully and gave us the thumbs-up. “Go on, Damien, have some. You should keep your strength up; we’re going to be here for a while.”

His eyes widened. I waved a slice at him, but he shook his head, so I shrugged and kept it for myself. “OK,” I said, “let’s talk about Mark Hanly. What’s he like?”

Damien blinked. “Mark? Um, he’s OK. He’s strict, I guess, but he sort of has to be. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Ever seen him get violent? Lose his temper?” I wiggled a hand at Cassie; she threw me a paper napkin.

“Yeah—no . . . I mean, yeah, he gets mad sometimes, if someone’s messing, but I never saw him hit anyone, or anything like that.”

“Do you think he would, if he was angry enough?” I wiped my hands and thumbed through my notebook, trying not to get grease on the pages.

“You’re such a slob,” Cassie told me; I gave her the finger. Damien glanced between us, flustered and off balance.

“What?” he asked at last, uncertainly.

“Do you think Mark could get violent if he was provoked?”

“I guess maybe. I don’t know.”

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“What about you? Ever hit anyone?”

“What . . . no!”

“We should’ve got garlic bread,” Cassie said.

“I’m not sharing an interview room with two people and garlic. What do you think it would take to make you hit someone, Damien?”

His mouth opened.

“You don’t seem like the violent type to me, but everyone’s got a breaking point. Would you hit someone if he insulted your mother, for example?”

“I—”

“Or for money? Or in self-defense? What would it take?”

“I don’t . . .” Damien blinked fast. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never—

but I guess everyone’s, like you said, everyone’s got a breaking point, I don’t know. . . .”

I nodded and made a careful note of this. “Would you rather a different kind?” Cassie asked, inspecting the pizza. “I think ham-and-pineapple rules, personally, but they have some macho pepperoni-and-sausage thing next door.”

“What? Um—no, thanks. Who’s . . . ?” We waited, chewing. “Who’s next door? Am I, like, allowed to ask?”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s Mark. We sent Sean and Dr. Hunt home, awhile back, but we haven’t been able to let Mark go yet.”

We watched Damien turn a shade paler as he processed this information and its implications. “Why not?” he asked faintly.

“Can’t go into that,” Cassie said, reaching for more pizza. “Sorry.”

Damien’s eyes ricocheted, disoriented, from her hand to her face to mine.

“What I can tell you,” I said, pointing at him with a crust, “is that we’re taking this case very, very seriously. I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff in my career, Damien, but this. . . . There’s no crime in the world worse than murdering a child. Her whole life’s gone, the entire community’s terrified, her friends will never get over it, her family’s devastated—”

“Emotional wrecks,” Cassie said indistinctly, through a mouthful. Damien swallowed, looked down at his 7-Up as if he had forgotten it and started fumbling with the tab.

“Whoever did this . . .” I shook my head. “I don’t know how he can live with himself.”

“Tomato check,” Cassie told me, dabbing a finger at the corner of her mouth. “Can’t take you anywhere.”

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. . .

We finished off most of the pizza. I didn’t want it—even the smell, greasy and pervasive, was too much for me—but the whole thing was getting Damien more and more flustered. He accepted a slice, in the end, and sat wretchedly picking off the pineapple and nibbling on it, his head whipping from Cassie to me and back as if he were trying to follow a tennis match from too close by. I spared a thought for Sam: Mark was unlikely to be sent into a tailspin by pepperoni and extra cheese.

My mobile vibrated in my pocket. I checked the screen: Sophie. I took it out into the corridor; Cassie, behind me, said, “Detective Ryan leaving the interview room.”