In the Woods (7 page)

“We’d love to see them another day, Dr. Hunt,” I said. “Could you give us about ten minutes and then send Damien Donnelly in to us?”

“Damien,” said Hunt, and wandered off. Cassie shut the door behind him. I said, “How on earth does he run a whole excavation?” and started clearing away the drawings: fine, delicately shaded pencil sketches of an old coin, from various angles. The coin itself, sharply bent on one side and patchy with encrustations of earth, sat in the middle of the desk in a Ziploc bag. I found space for them on top of a filing cabinet.

“By hiring people like that Mark guy,” Cassie said. “I bet he’s plenty organized. What was with the hair clip?”

I squared off the edges of the drawings. “I think Jamie Rowan was wearing one that matched that description.”

“Ah,” she said. “I wondered. Is that in the file, do you know, or do you just remember it?”

“What difference does that make?” It came out sounding snottier than I’d intended.

In the Woods 37

“Well, if there’s a link, we can’t exactly keep it to ourselves,” Cassie said reasonably. “Just for example, we’re going to have to get Sophie to check that blood against the ’84 samples, and we’re going to have to tell her why. It would make things a whole lot simpler to explain if the link was right there in the file.”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” I said. The desk rocked; Cassie found a blank sheet of paper and folded it to wedge under the leg. “I’ll double-check tonight. Hold off on talking to Sophie till then, OK?”

“Sure,” said Cassie. “If it’s not there, we’ll find a way round it.” She tested the desk again: better. “Rob, are you OK with this case?”

I didn’t answer. Through the window I could see the morgue guys wrapping the body in plastic, Sophie pointing and gesturing. They barely had to brace themselves to lift the stretcher; it looked almost weightless as they carried it away towards the waiting van. The wind rattled the glass sharply in my face and I spun round. I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to shout, “Shut the hell up” or “Fuck this case, I quit” or something, something reckless and unreasonable and dramatic. But Cassie was just leaning against the desk and waiting, looking at me with steady brown eyes, and I have always had an excellent brake system, a gift for choosing the anticlimactic over the irrevocable every time.

“I’m fine with it,” I said. “Just kick me if I get too moody.”

“With pleasure,” Cassie said, and grinned at me. “God, though, look at all this stuff. . . . I hope we do get a chance to have a proper look. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was little, did I ever tell you?”

“Only about a million times,” I said.

“Lucky you’ve got a goldfish memory, then, isn’t it? I used to dig up the back garden, but all I ever found was a little china duck with the beak broken off.”

“It looks like I should have been the one digging out the back,” I said. Normally I would have made some remark about law enforcement’s loss being archaeology’s gain, but I was still feeling too nervy and dislocated for any decent level of back and forth; it would only have come out wrong. “I could have had the world’s biggest private collection of pottery bits.”

“Now there’s a pick-up line,” said Cassie, and dug out her notebook.

. . .

38

Tana French

Damien came in awkwardly, with a plastic chair bumping along from one hand and his mug of tea still clutched in the other. “I brought this . . .” he said, using the mug to gesture uncertainly at his chair and the two we were sitting on. “Dr. Hunt said you wanted to see me?”

“Yep,” said Cassie. “I would say, ‘Have a seat,’ but you already do.”

It took him a moment; then he laughed a little, checking our faces to see if that was OK. He sat down, started to put his mug on the table, changed his mind and kept it in his lap, looked up at us with big obedient blue eyes. This was definitely Cassie’s baby. He looked like the type who was accustomed to being taken care of by women; he was shaky already, and being interrogated by a guy would probably send him into a state where we would never get anything useful out of him. I got out a pen, unobtrusively.

“Listen,” Cassie said soothingly, “I know you’ve had a bad shock. Just take your time and walk us through it, OK? Start with what you were doing this morning, before you went up to the stone.”

Damien took a deep breath, licked his lips. “We were, um, we were working on the medieval drainage ditch. Mark wanted to see if we could follow the line a little further down the site. See, we’re, we’re sort of cleaning up loose ends now, ’cause it’s coming up to the end of the dig—”

“How long’s the dig been going on?” Cassie asked.

“Like two years, but I’ve only been on it since June. I’m in college.”

“I used to want to be an archaeologist,” Cassie told him. I nudged her foot, under the table; she stood on mine. “How’s the dig going?”

Damien’s face lit up; he looked almost dazzled with delight, unless dazzled was just his normal expression. “It’s been amazing. I’m so glad I did it.”

“I’m so jealous,” Cassie said. “Do they let people volunteer for just, like, a week?”

“Maddox,” I said stuffily, “can you discuss your career change later?”

“Sor-ry,” said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours—he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence—but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it’s the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy. “OK,” she said, “so then you went up to the stone . . . ?”

“We needed to take back all the grass and soil around it,” Damien said. In the Woods 39

“The rest of that bit got bulldozed last week, but they left a patch round the stone, because we didn’t want to risk the bulldozer hitting it. So after the tea break Mark told me and Mel to go up there and mattock it back while the others did the drainage ditch.”

“What time was that?”

“Tea break ends at quarter past eleven.”

“And then . . . ?”

He swallowed, took a sip from his mug. Cassie leaned forward encouragingly and waited.

“We, um . . . There was something on the stone. I thought it was a jacket or something, like somebody had forgotten their jacket there? I said, um, I said, ‘What’s that?’ so we went closer and . . .” He looked down into his mug. His hands were shaking again. “It was a person. I thought she might be, you know, unconscious or something, so I shook her, her arm, and um . . . she felt weird. Cold and, and stiff. And I put my head down to see if she was breathing, but she wasn’t. There was blood on her, I saw blood. On her face. So I knew she was dead.” He swallowed again.

“You’re doing great,” Cassie said gently. “What did you do then?”

“Mel said, ‘Oh, my God,’ or something, and we ran back and told Dr. Hunt. He told us all to go into the canteen.”

“OK, Damien, I need you to think carefully,” Cassie said. “Did you see anything that seemed weird today, or over the last few days? Anyone unusual hanging around, anything out of place?”

He gazed into space, lips slightly parted; took another sip of his tea.

“This probably isn’t the kind of thing you mean. . . .”

“Anything could help us,” Cassie told him. “Even the tiniest thing.”

“OK.” Damien nodded earnestly. “OK, on Monday I was waiting for the bus home, out by the gate? And I saw this guy come down the road and go into the estate. I don’t know why I even noticed him, I just— He sort of looked around before he went into the estate, like he was checking if anyone was watching him or something.”

“What time was this?” Cassie asked.

“We finish at half past five, so maybe twenty to six? That was the other weird thing. I mean, there’s nothing round here that you can get to without a car, except the shop and the pub, and the shop closes at five. So I wondered where he was coming from.”

“What did he look like?”

40

Tana French

“Sort of tall, like six foot. In his thirties, I guess? Heavy. I think he was bald. He had on a dark blue tracksuit.”

“Would you be able to work with a sketch artist to come up with a drawing of him?”

Damien blinked fast, looking alarmed. “Um . . . I didn’t see him all that well. I mean, he was coming from up the road, on the other side of the estate entrance. I wasn’t really looking—I don’t think I’d remember . . .”

“That’s all right,” Cassie said. “Don’t worry about it, Damien. If you feel like you might be able to give us some more details, let me know, OK?

Meanwhile, just take care of yourself.”

We got Damien’s address and phone number, gave him a card (I wanted to give him a lollipop, too, for being such a brave boy, but they’re not standard department issue) and shooed him back to the others, with orders to send in Melanie Jackson.

“Sweet kid,” I said noncommittally, testing.

“Yeah,” said Cassie dryly. “If I ever want a pet, I’ll keep him in mind.”

Mel was a lot more useful than Damien. She was tall and skinny and Scottish, with muscled brown arms and sandy hair in a messy ponytail, and she sat like a boy, feet planted firmly apart.

“Maybe you know this already, but she’s from the estate,” she said straightaway. “Or from somewhere round here, anyway.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“The local kids come around the site sometimes. There’s not much else for them to do during the summer. They mostly want to know if we’ve found buried treasure, or skeletons. I’ve seen her a few times.”

“When was the last time?”

“Maybe two, three weeks ago.”

“Was she with anyone?”

Mel shrugged. “Nobody that I remember. Just a bunch of other kids, I think.”

I liked Mel. She was shaken but refusing to show it; she was fidgeting with an elastic band, cat’s-cradling it into shapes between her callused fingers. She told basically the same story as Damien, but with a lot less coaxing and petting.

“At the end of the tea break, Mark told me to go mattock back around In the Woods 41

the ceremonial stone so we could see the base. Damien said he’d go, too—

we don’t usually work on our own, it’s boring. Partway up the slope we saw something blue and white on the stone. Damien said, ‘What’s that?’ and I said, ‘Somebody’s jacket, maybe.’ When we got a bit closer I realized it was a kid. Damien shook her arm and checked whether she was breathing, but you could tell she was dead. I never saw a dead body before, but—” She bit the inside of her cheek, shook her head. “It’s bullshit, isn’t it, when they say,

‘Oh, he looked like he was just sleeping?’ You could tell.”

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be. . . . Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. The body had shocked Mel Jackson far more deeply than it would have the most sheltered Victorian virgin.

“Could you have missed the body if it had been on the stone yesterday?”

I asked.

Mel glanced up, wide eyed. “Ah, shit—you mean it was there all the time we were . . . ?” Then she shook her head. “No. Mark and Dr. Hunt went round the whole site yesterday afternoon, to make a list of what needs doing. They’d have seen it—her. We only missed it this morning because we were all down the bottom of the site, at the end of the drainage ditch. The way the hill slopes, we couldn’t see the top of the stone.”

She hadn’t seen anyone or anything unusual, including Damien’s weirdo: “But I wouldn’t have anyway. I don’t take the bus. Most of us who aren’t from Dublin live in this house they rented for us, a couple of miles down the road. Mark and Dr. Hunt have cars, so they drive us back. We don’t go past the estate.”

The “anyway” interested me: it suggested that Mel, like me, had her doubts about the sinister tracksuit. Damien struck me as the type who would say just about anything if he thought it would make you happy. I wished I had thought of asking him whether the guy had been wearing stilettos. 42

Tana French

. . .

Sophie and her baby techs had finished up with the ceremonial stone and were working their way outwards in a circle. I told her that Damien Donnelly had touched the body and leaned over it; we’d need his prints and hair, for elimination. “What an idiot,” Sophie said. “I suppose we should be thankful he didn’t decide to cover her up with his coat.” She was sweating in her coveralls. The boy tech covertly ripped a page out of his sketchbook, behind her back, and started over.

We left the car at the site and walked round to the estate by the road (I still remembered, somewhere in my muscles, going over the wall: where the foothold was, the scrape of the concrete on my kneecap, the jar of landing). Cassie demanded to go to the shop on the way; it was well past two o’clock and we might not have another chance at lunch for a while. Cassie eats like a teenage boy and hates missing meals, which normally I enjoy—women who live on weighed portions of salad annoy me—but I wanted to get today over with as quickly as possible.

I waited outside the shop, smoking, but Cassie came out with two sandwiches in plastic cartons and handed one to me. “Here.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Eat the damn sandwich, Ryan. I’m not carrying you home if you faint.”

I have in fact never fainted in my life, but I do tend to forget to eat until I start getting irritable or spacy.

“I said I’m not hungry,” I said, hearing the whine in my voice, but I opened the sandwich anyway: Cassie had a point, it was likely to be a very long day. We sat on the curb, and she pulled a bottle of lemon Coke out of her satchel. The sandwich was officially chicken and stuffing, but it tasted mainly of plastic wrapper, and the Coke was warm and too sweet. I felt slightly sick.