In the Woods Read online

  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.

  “This is the place where, just yesterday morning, little Katy Devlin’s body was found. In spite of her youth, Katy was a well-known figure in the small, close-knit community of Knocknaree. She had just been awarded a place at the prestigious Royal Ballet School, where she was due to begin her studies in only a few weeks. Today, local residents were devastated at the tragic death of the little girl who was all of their pride and joy.”

  A shaky handheld camera on an old woman with a flowery headscarf, outside Lowry’s shop. “Ah, it’s awful.” A long pause while she looked down and shook her head, her mouth working; a guy on a bike went past behind her, gawking at the camera. “It’s only terrible. We’re all saying prayers for the family. How could anyone want to harm that gorgeous wee girl?” There was a low, angry murmur from the old men at the bar.

  Back to the blonde. “But this may not be the first violent death Knocknaree has seen. Thousands of years ago, this stone”—she swept her arm out, like an estate agent displaying a fitted kitchen—“was a ceremonial altar where archaeologists say the Druids may have practiced human sacrifice. This afternoon, however, detectives said there was no evidence that Katy’s death was the work of a religious cult.”

  Cut to O’Kelly, in front of an imposing piece of cardboard with a police seal stamped on it. He was wearing a vile checked jacket that, on camera, seemed to ripple and heave of its own accord. He cleared his throat and went through our list, nonexistent dead livestock and all. Cassie held out a hand, not taking her eyes off the screen, and I found a fiver. The orange presenter again. “And Knocknaree holds yet another mystery. In 1984, two local children . . .” The screen filled up with those overused school pictures: Peter grinning wickedly from under his hair, Jamie—she hated photos—giving the photographer a dubious, humoring-the-adults half-smile.

  “Here we go,” I said, trying to make it sound light and wry. Cassie took a sip of her coffee. “Are you going to tell O’Kelly?” she asked.

  I had been waiting for this, and I knew all the reasons why she had to In the Woods 113

  ask, but still it hit me with a jolt. I glanced at the guys at the bar; they were intent on the screen. “No,” I said. “No. I’d be off the case. I want to work this one, Cass.”

  She nodded, slowly. “I know. If he finds out, though.”

  If he found out, there was a pretty good chance that both of us would be reverted back to uniform, or at the very least thrown off the squad. I had been trying not to think about this. “He won’t,” I said. “How could he? And if he does, we’ll both say you had no idea.”

  “He wouldn’t believe that for a second. And anyway that’s not the point.”

  Fuzzy old footage of a cop with a hyperactive German shepherd, plunging into the wood. A diver pulling himself out of the river, shaking his head. “Cassie,” I said. “I know what I’m asking. But please; I need to do this. I won’t fuck it up.”

  I saw her lashes flicker and realized that my tone had come out more desperate than I intended. “We don’t even know for sure that there’s a link,” I said, more quietly. “And if there is, I could end up remembering something that’s useful to the investigation. Please, Cass. Back me up on this one.”

  She was silent for a moment, drinking her coffee and gazing thoughtfully at the TV. “Is there any chance that a really determined reporter could . . . ?”

  “No,” I said briskly. I had, as you would expect, thought about this a lot. Even the file didn’t mention my new name or my new school, and when we moved my father gave the police my grandmother’s address; she died when I was about twenty, and the family sold her house. “My parents are unlisted, and my number’s listed under Heather Quinn—”

  “—And these days your name’s Rob. We should be fine.”

  The “we,” and the practical, considering tone—as if this were just another routine complication, in the same category as a reluctant witness or a suspect gone on the run—warmed me. “If it all goes horribly wrong, I’ll let you fend off the paparazzi,” I said.

  “Cool. I’ll learn karate.”

  On the screen the old footage was over, and the blonde was working up to a big finish. “. . . But, for now, all the people of Knocknaree can do is wait . . . and hope.” They panned to the altar stone for a long moment, poignantly, and then cut back to the studio, and the orange presenter started giving the latest update on some endless depressing tribunal. 114

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  . . .

  We dumped our stuff at Cassie’s and went for a walk on the beach. I love Sandymount strand. It’s
pretty enough on the rare summery afternoons, brochure-blue sky and all the girls in camisoles and red shoulders, but for some reason I love it most of all on your bog-standard Irish days, when wind blows rain-spatter in your face and everything blurs into elusive, Puritan half-tones: gray-white clouds, gray-green sea off on the horizon, great sweep of bleached-fawn sand edged with a scatter of broken shells, wide abstract curves of dull silver where the tide is coming in unevenly. Cassie was wearing sage-green cords and her big russet duffel coat, and the wind was turning her nose red. A large earnest girl in shorts and a baseball cap—probably an American student—was jogging on the sand in front of us; up on the promenade, an underage mother in a tracksuit heaved along a twin stroller.

  “So what are you thinking?” I asked.

  I meant about the case, obviously, but Cassie was in a giddy mood—she generates more energy than most people, and she’d been sitting indoors most of the day. “Will you listen to him? A woman asking a guy what he’s thinking is the ultimate crime, she’s clingy and needy and he runs a mile, but when it’s the other—”

  “Behave yourself,” I said, pulling her hood over her face.

  “Help! I’m being oppressed!” she yelled through it. “Call the Equality Commission.” The stroller girl gave us a sour look.

  “You’re overexcited,” I told Cassie. “Calm down or I’ll take you home with no ice cream.”

  She shook back the hood and took off down the strand in a long chain of cartwheels and flips, her coat tumbling around her shoulders. My initial impression of Cassie was satisfyingly spot-on: she did gymnastics for eight years as a kid and was apparently quite good. She quit because competitions and routines bored her; it was the moves themselves she loved, their taut, sprung, risky geometry, and fifteen years later her body still remembers almost all of them. When I caught up with her she was breathless and dusting sand off her hands.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Much. You were saying?”

  “The case. Work. Dead person.”

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  “Ah. That,” she said, instantly serious. She pulled her coat straight and we wandered on down the strand, scuffing at half-buried shells.

  “I was wondering,” Cassie said, “what Peter Savage and Jamie Rowan were like.”

  She was watching a ferry, small and neat as a toy, chug determinedly across the horizon line; her face, tipped up to the soft rain, was unreadable.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I’m not sure. Just wondering.”

  I thought about the question for a long time. My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind: Jamie scrambling intent and surefooted up to a high branch, Peter’s laugh arcing out of the trompe-l’oeil dazzle of green ahead. Through some slow sea change they had become children out of a haunting storybook, bright myths from a lost civilization; it was hard to believe they had once been real and my friends.

  “In what sense?” I said eventually and inanely. “Personality, or looks, or what?”

  Cassie shrugged. “Whichever.”

  “They were both about the same height as me,” I said. “Average height, I suppose, whatever that is. They both had a slim build. Jamie had whiteblond hair, cut in a bob, and a snub nose. Peter had light brown hair, that floppy cut that little boys have when their mothers cut it for them, and green eyes. I think he would probably have been very handsome.”

  “And their personalities?” Cassie glanced up at me; the wind flattened her hair sleek as a seal’s against her head. Occasionally when we go for walks she links a hand through my arm, but I knew she wouldn’t do it now.

  In my first year of boarding school I thought about them all the time. I was wildly, devastatingly homesick; I know every child is, in that situation, but I think my wretchedness went well beyond the norm. It was a constant agony, consuming and debilitating as a toothache. At the start of every term I had to be extracted howling and struggling from the car and dragged inside while my parents drove away. You’d think this kind of thing would have made me a perfect target for bullies, but actually they left me severely alone, recognizing, I suppose, that nothing they could do would make me feel any worse. It wasn’t that the school was hell on earth or anything, in fact I think it was probably pretty OK as these places go—a smallish school 116

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  in the countryside, with an elaborate house system and an obsession with sports and various other clichés—but I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything in my life, to go home.

  I coped, in the grand tradition of children everywhere, by retreating into my imagination. I sat on wobbly chairs through droning assemblies and pictured Jamie fidgeting beside me, conjured up every detail of her, the shape of her kneecaps, the tilt of her head. At night I lay awake for hours, boys snoring and muttering all around me, and concentrated with every cell in my body until I knew, beyond any doubt, that when I opened my eyes Peter would be in the next bed. I used to float messages in cream-soda bottles down the stream that ran through the school grounds: “To Peter and Jamie. Please come back please. Love Adam.” I knew, you see, that I had been sent away because they had disappeared; and I knew that if they were to run back out of the wood some evening, grubby and nettle-stung and demanding their tea, I would be allowed to come home.

  “Jamie was a tomboy,” I said. “Very shy of strangers, especially adults, but physically absolutely fearless. You two would have liked each other.”

  Cassie gave me a sideways half-grin. “In 1984 I was only ten, remember?

  You guys wouldn’t have talked to me.”

  I had come to think of 1984 as a separate, private world; it came as something of a shock to realize that Cassie had been there, too, only a few miles away. At the moment when Peter and Jamie disappeared she had been playing with her own friends or riding a bike or eating her tea, oblivious to what was happening and to the long, complicated paths that would lead her to me and to Knocknaree. “Of course we would have,” I said. “We would have said, ‘Give us your lunch money, you little twit.’ ”

  “You do that anyway. Go on about Jamie.”

  “Her mother was sort of a hippie—long floaty skirts and long hair, and she used to give Jamie yogurt with wheat germ in it for her break at school.”

  “Ewww,” Cassie said. “I didn’t even know you could get wheat germ in the eighties. Supposing you wanted to.”

  “I think she may have been illegitimate—Jamie, not her mother. Her father wasn’t in the picture. A few kids used to pick on her about it, till she beat one of them up. I asked my mother where Jamie’s dad was, after that, and she told me not to be nosy.” I had asked Jamie, too. She had shrugged and said, “Who cares?”

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  “And Peter?”

  “Peter was the leader,” I said. “Always, even when we were tiny kids. He could talk to anyone, he was always talking us out of trouble—not that he was a smart arse, I don’t think he was, but he was confident and he liked people. And he was kind.”

  There was a kid on our road, Willy Little. The name would have caused him enough trouble all by itself—I wonder what on earth his parents were thinking—but on top of that he had Coke-bottle glasses, and he had to wear thick hand-knit sweaters with bunnies across the front all year round because there was something wrong with his chest, and he started most of his sentences with “My mother says . . .” We had cheerfully tortured him all our lives—drawing the obvious pictures on his school copybooks, spitting on his head out of trees, saving up droppings from Jamie’s rabbit and telling him they were chocolate raisins, that kind of thing—

  but the summer we were twelve Peter made us stop. “It’s not fair,” he said.

  “He can’t help it.”

  Jamie and I sort of saw his point, although we did argue that Willy could perfectly well have called himself Bill and quit telling people what his mother thought about things. I felt guilty enough to offer
him half a Mars bar the next time I saw him, but understandably he gave me a suspicious look and scuttled away. I wondered, absently, what Willy was doing these days. In the movies he would have been a Nobel-prize-winning genius with a supermodel wife; this being real life, he was probably making a living as a medical-research guinea pig and still wearing bunny sweaters.

  “That’s rare,” Cassie said. “Most kids that age are vicious. I’m sure I was.”

  “I think Peter was an unusual kid,” I said.

  She stopped to pick up a bright orange cockleshell and examine it.

  “There’s still a chance they could be alive, isn’t there?” She dusted sand off the shell against her sleeve, blew on it. “Somewhere.”

  “I suppose there is,” I said. Peter and Jamie, out there somewhere, specks of faces blurring into some vast moving throng. When I was twelve this was in some ways the worst possibility of all: that they had simply kept running that day, left me behind and never once looked back. I still have a reflexive habit of scanning for them in crowds—airports, gigs, train stations; it’s faded a lot now, but when I was younger it would build to something like 118