In the Woods Read online

  “You got your degree at Trinity, right?” Sam said.

  Cassie gave a quick shake of her head, reached for more cherries. “I dropped out in fourth year.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  She spat a cherry stone into her palm and gave Sam a smile I knew, an exceptionally sweet smile that scrunched up her face till you couldn’t see her eyes. “Because what would you people do without me?”

  I could have told him she wouldn’t answer. I had asked her that question several times, over the years, and got answers ranging from “There was In the Woods 127

  nobody of your caliber to annoy” to “The food in the Buttery sucked.”

  There has always been something enigmatic about Cassie. This is one of the things I like in her, and I like it all the more for being, paradoxically, a quality that isn’t readily apparent, elusiveness brought to so high a level it becomes almost invisible. She gives the impression of being startlingly, almost childishly open—which is true, as far as it goes: what you see is in fact what you get. But what you don’t get, what you barely glimpse: this is the side of Cassie that fascinated me always. Even after all this time I knew there were rooms inside her that she had never let me guess at, let alone enter. There were questions she wouldn’t answer, topics she would discuss only in the abstract; try to pin her down and she would skim away laughing, as nimbly as a figure skater.

  “You’re good,” Sam said. “Degree or no degree.”

  Cassie raised one eyebrow. “Wait and see if I’m right before you say that.”

  “Why did he keep her for a day?” I asked. This had been bothering me all along—because of the obvious hideous possibilities, and because of the nagging suspicion that, if he hadn’t needed to get rid of her for some reason, he might have kept her for longer, kept her forever; she might have vanished as silently and finally as Peter and Jamie had.

  “If I’m right about all the other stuff, the distancing himself from the crime, then it wasn’t because he wanted to. He would’ve wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible. He kept her because he didn’t have a choice.”

  “He lives with someone and had to wait till they were out of the way?”

  “Yeah, could be. But I was wondering if maybe the dig wasn’t a random choice. Maybe he had to dump her there—either because it’s part of whatever grand plan he’s following, or because he doesn’t have a car and the dig was the only place handy. That would fit in with what Mark said about not seeing a car go past—and it would mean the kill site’s somewhere very nearby, probably in one of the houses at that end of the estate. Maybe he tried to dump her on Monday night, but Mark was there in the woods, with his fire. The killer could have seen him and been scared off; he had to hide Katy and try again the next night.”

  “Or the killer could have been him,” I said.

  “Alibi for Tuesday night.”

  “From a girl who’s mad about him.”

  “Mel’s not the ditzy stand-by-your-man type. She’s got a mind of her 128

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  own, and she’s plenty smart enough to realize how important this is. If Mark had jumped out of bed halfway through the action to take a nice long walk, she’d have told us.”

  “He could have an accomplice. Either Mel or someone else.”

  “And what, they hid the body on the grassy knoll?”

  “What’s your boy’s motive?” Sam inquired. He had been eating cherries and watching us with interest.

  “His motive is he’s several hundred yards out of his tree,” I told him. “You didn’t hear him. He’s perfectly normal on most things—normal enough to reassure a kid, Cass—but get him talking about the site and he starts going on about sacrilege and worship. . . . The site’s under threat from this motorway: maybe he thought a nice human sacrifice to the gods, just like old times, would get them to step in and save it. When it comes to this site, he’s batty.”

  “If this turns out to be a pagan sacrifice,” Sam said, “dibs I not be the one to tell O’Kelly.”

  “I vote we get him to tell O’Kelly himself. And we sell tickets.”

  “Mark is not batty,” Cassie said firmly.

  “Oh, he is, too.”

  “He is not. His work is the center of his life. That’s not batty.”

  “You should have seen them,” I told Sam. “Honestly, it was more like a date than an interrogation. Maddox nodding away, fluttering her eyelashes, telling him she knew exactly how he feels—”

  “Which I do, actually,” Cassie said. She abandoned Cooper’s notes and pulled herself backward onto the futon. “And I did not either flutter my eyelashes. When I do, you won’t miss it.”

  “You know how he feels? What, you pray to the Heritage God?”

  “No, you big eejit. Shut up and listen. I have a theory about Mark.” She kicked off her shoes, tucked her feet up under her.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Sam, I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

  “I always have time for a good theory,” Sam said. “Can I have a drink to go with it, if we’ve finished working?”

  “Wise move,” I told him.

  Cassie shoved me with her foot. “Find whiskey or something.” I slapped her foot away and got up. “OK,” she said, “we all need to believe in something, right?”

  “Why?” I demanded. I found this both intriguing and mildly disconcerting; I am not religious, and as far as I knew Cassie wasn’t either. In the Woods 129

  “Oh, because we do. Every single society in the world, ever, has had some form of belief system. But now . . . How many people do you know who’re Christian—not just going to church, but actually Christian, like trying to do things the way Jesus would’ve? And it’s not like people can have faith in political ideologies. Our government doesn’t even have an ideology, as far as anyone can tell—”

  “ ‘A Little Something for the Boys,’ ” I said, over my shoulder. “That’s an ideology, of sorts.”

  “Hey,” said Sam mildly.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anyone specific.” He nodded.

  “Neither did I, Sam,” said Cassie. “I just meant there isn’t one overall philosophy. So people have to make their own faith.”

  I had found whiskey, Coke, ice and three glasses; I juggled them all back to the coffee table in one go. “What, you mean Religion Lite? All those New Age yuppies having tantric sex and feng shui-ing their SUVs?”

  “Them, too, but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money—actually, that’s the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I’m not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it’s not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It’s actually irresponsible: you’re not a good member of society, you’re being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car.”

  “But if anyone asks for a raise,” I said, whapping the ice tray, “they’re being very very naughty to threaten their employer’s profit margin, after everything he’s done for the economy.”

  “Exactly. If you’re not rich, you’re a lesser being who shouldn’t have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.”

  “Ah, now,” Sam said. “I don’t think things are that bad.”

  There was a small, polite silence. I collected stray ice cubes from the coffee table. Sam by nature has a Pollyanna streak, but he also has the kind of family that owns houses in Ballsbridge. His views on socioeconomic matters, though sweet, could hardly be considered objective.

  “The other big religion these days,” Cassie said, “is bodies. All those patronizing ads and news reports about smoking and drinking and fitness—”

  I was pouring, looking at Sam for a signal to stop; he lifted a hand, smiled at me as I passed him the glass. “Those always make me want to see how many cigarettes I can fit in my mouth at once,” I said. Cassie had 130

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  stretched her legs across the futon; I moved them out of th
e way so I could sit down, put them back across my lap and started making her drink, lots of ice and lots of Coke.

  “Me, too. But those reports and stuff aren’t just saying things are unhealthy—they’re saying they’re morally wrong. Like you’re somehow a better person, spiritually, if you have the right body-fat percentage and exercise for an hour a day—and there’s that awful condescending set of ads where smoking isn’t just a stupid thing to do, it’s literally the devil. People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.”

  “Drink your drink,” I said. She was lit up and gesturing, leaning forward, her glass forgotten in her hand. “What does this have to do with batty Mark again?”

  Cassie made a face at me and took a sip of her drink. “Look: Mark believes in archaeology—in his heritage. That’s his faith. It’s not some abstract set of principles, and it’s not about his body or his bank account; it’s a concrete part of his whole life, every day, whether it pays off or not. He lives in it. That’s not batty, that’s healthy, and there’s something seriously wrong with a society where people think it’s weird.”

  “The guy poured a fucking libation to some Bronze Age god,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with me for considering that a little odd. Back me up here, Sam.”

  “Me?” Sam had settled back into the sofa, listening to the conversation and reaching out to finger the tumble of shells and rocks on the windowsill.

  “Ah, I’d say he’s just young. He should get himself a wife and a few kids. That’d settle him.”

  Cassie and I looked at each other and started to laugh. “What?” Sam demanded.

  “Nothing,” I said, “honestly.”

  “I’d love to get you and Mark together over a couple of pints,” Cassie said.

  “I’d soon sort him out,” Sam said serenely, sending Cassie and me into a fresh fit of giggles. I leaned back into the futon and took a sip of my drink. I was enjoying this conversation. It was a good evening, a happy evening; In the Woods 131

  soft rain was pittering at the windows and Billie Holiday was playing in the background and I was glad, after all, that Cassie had invited Sam. I was starting to like him a lot more actively. Everyone, I decided, should have a Sam around.

  “Do you seriously think we can eliminate Mark?” I asked Cassie. She sipped her drink, balanced the glass on her stomach. “Actually, I honestly do,” she said. “Regardless of the battiness question. Like I said, I get this very strong sense that whoever did this was in two minds about it. I can’t imagine Mark being in two minds about anything—at least, not anything important.”

  “Lucky Mark,” Sam said, smiling at her across the coffee table.

  “So,” Sam asked, later, “how did you and Cassie meet?” He leaned back on the sofa and reached for his glass.

  “What?” I said. It was sort of a weird question, out of the blue like that, and to be honest I had half-forgotten he was there. Cassie buys good booze, silky Connemara whiskey that tastes like turf smoke, and we were all a little tipsy. The conversation was starting, comfortably, to ebb. Sam had been stretching to read the titles of the battered paperbacks on the bookshelf; I had been lying back on the futon, thinking about nothing more taxing than the music. Cassie was in the bathroom. “Oh. When she joined the squad. Her bike broke down one evening and I gave her a lift.”

  “Ah. Right,” Sam said. He looked slightly flustered, which wasn’t like him. “That’s what I thought at first, sure: that you hadn’t met before. But then it seemed like you’d known each other for ages, so I just wondered were you old friends or . . . you know.”

  “We get that a lot,” I said. People tended to assume we were cousins or had grown up next door to each other or something along those lines, and it always filled me with a private, unreasonable happiness. “We just hit it off well, I suppose.”

  Sam nodded. “You and Cassie,” he said, and cleared his throat.

  “What’d I do?” Cassie demanded suspiciously, shoving my feet out of the way and sliding back into her seat.

  “God only knows,” I said.

  “I was only asking Rob whether the two of ye knew each other before you joined Murder,” Sam explained. “From college or something.”

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  “I didn’t go to college,” I said. I had a feeling that I knew what he had been going to ask me. Most people do ask, sooner or later, but I hadn’t had Sam down as the inquisitive type, and I wondered why, exactly, he wanted to know.

  “Seriously?” Sam said, startled and trying not to show it. This is what I mean about the accent. “I thought Trinity, maybe, and you had classes together, or . . .”

  “Didn’t know him from Adam,” Cassie said blandly, which after a frozen instant sent her and me into helpless, snorting, juvenile giggles. Sam shook his head, smiling.

  “One as mad as the other,” he said, and got up to empty the ashtray. I had told Sam the truth: I never went to college. I came out of my A-levels, miraculously, with a B and two Ds—enough to have got me into some course somewhere, probably, except that I hadn’t even filled in an application form. I told people I was taking a gap year, but the truth was that I wanted to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for as long as possible, maybe for the rest of my life.

  Charlie was going up to London to study economics, so I went with him: there was nowhere else I particularly needed or wanted to be. His father was paying his share of the rent on a sparkly apartment with hardwood floors and a doorman, and there was no way I could afford my half, so I got a dingy little bedsit in a semi-dangerous area and Charlie got a flatmate, a Dutch exchange student who would be going home at Christmas. The plan was that by then I would have a job and be able to join him, but long before Christmas it became clear that I wouldn’t be moving anywhere—not just because of money, but because I had, unexpectedly, fallen in love with my bedsit and my private, free-floating, wayward life.

  After boarding school, the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the building like In the Woods 133

  a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

  I lived there for almost two years. Most of the time I was on the dole; occasionally, when they started hassling me or when I wanted money to impress a girl, I spent a few weeks working in furniture removals or construction. Charlie and I had, inevitably, drifted apart—starting, I think, with his look of polite, horrified fascination when he first saw the bedsit. We met for pints every couple of weeks, and sometimes I went to parties with him and his new friends (this is where I met most of the girls, including angsty Gemma with the drink problem). They were nice guys, his friends from uni, but they spoke a language I neither knew nor regretted, full of inside jokes and abbreviations and backslapping, and I found it hard to make myself pay attention.

  I’m not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room. I
read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better—

  Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos—so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms. I watched a lot of TV, too. In my second year there I became fascinated with late-night true-crime documentaries, mostly on the Discovery Channel: not with the crimes themselves, but with the intricate structures of their unraveling. I loved the taut, steady absorption with which these men—

  sharp FBI Bostonians, potbellied Texas sheriffs—carefully disentangled threads and joined jigsaw pieces, until at last everything fell into place and the answer rose at their command to hang in the air before them, shining and unassailable. They were like magicians, throwing a handful of scraps into a top hat and tapping it and whipping out—flourish of trumpets—a perfect, silken banner; only this was a thousand times better, because the answers were real and vital and there were (I thought) no illusions. 134

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  I knew it wasn’t like that in real life, at least not all the time, but it struck me as a breathtaking thing to have a job where even that possibility existed. When, all in the same month, Charlie got engaged and the dole informed me they were cracking down on people like me and this guy with a thing for bad rap music moved in downstairs, it seemed like the obvious response to go back to Ireland, apply to Templemore Training College and start becoming a detective. I didn’t miss the bedsit—I think I had been starting to get bored anyway—but I still remember those marvelous, self-indulgent two years among the happiest times of my life.