In the Woods Page 22

  She laughed a little, embarrassed; glanced up at me under her lashes.

  “Your friends,” she said timidly. “The ones who disappeared. What happened?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. I had painted myself into this one, and I had no idea how to get out of it. Rosalind’s eyes were starting to turn suspicious, and, while there was not a chance in hell that I was going to go into the whole Knocknaree thing, the last thing I wanted was to lose her trust after all this.

  Jessica, of all people, saved me: she shifted a little in the armchair, stretched out a finger to Rosalind’s arm.

  Rosalind didn’t seem to notice. “Jessica?” I said.

  “Oh—what is it, sweetheart?” Rosalind bent towards her. “Are you ready to tell Detective Ryan about the man?”

  Jessica nodded stiffly. “I saw a man,” she said, her eyes not on me but on Rosalind. “He talked to Katy.”

  My heart rate started to pick up. If I had been religious, I would have been lighting candles to every saint in the calendar for this: just one solid lead. “That’s great, Jessica. Where was this?”

  “On the road. When we were coming back from the shop.”

  “Just you and Katy?”

  “Yes. We’re allowed.”

  “I’m sure you are. What did he say?”

  “He said”—Jessica took a deep breath—“he said, ‘You’re a very good 166

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  dancer,’ and Katy said, ‘Thank you.’ She likes when people say she’s a good dancer.”

  She looked anxiously up at Rosalind. “You’re doing wonderfully, pet,”

  Rosalind said, stroking her hair. “Keep going.”

  Jessica nodded. Rosalind touched her glass, and Jessica took an obedient sip of her 7-Up. “Then,” she said, “then he said, ‘And you’re a very pretty girl,’ and Katy said, ‘Thank you.’ She likes that, too. And then he said . . . he said . . . ‘My little girl likes dancing, too, but she broke her leg. Do you want to come see her? It would make her very happy.’ And Katy said, ‘Not now. We have to go home.’ So then we went home.”

  You’re a pretty girl. . . . These days, there are very few men who would say something like that to a twelve-year-old. “Do you know who the man was?”

  I asked. “Had you ever seen him before?”

  She shook her head.

  “What did he look like?”

  Silence; a breath. “Big.”

  “Big like me? Tall?”

  “Yeah . . . um . . . yeah. But big like this, too.” She stretched out her arms; the glass wobbled precariously.

  “A fat man?”

  Jessica giggled, a sharp, nervous sound. “Yeah.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “A, a tracksuit. A dark-blue one.” She glanced at Rosalind, who nodded encouragingly.

  Shit, I thought. My heart was speeding. “What was his hair like?”

  “No. He didn’t have hair.”

  I made a quick, fervent mental apology to Damien: apparently he hadn’t, after all, just been telling us what we wanted to hear. “Was he old? Young?”

  “Like you.”

  “When did this happen?”

  Jessica’s lips parted, moved soundlessly. “Huh?”

  “When did you and Katy meet the man? Was it just a few days before Katy went away? Or a few weeks? Or a long time ago?”

  I was trying to be sensitive, but she flinched. “Katy didn’t go away,” she said. “Katy got killed.” Her eyes were starting to lose focus. Rosalind shot me a reproachful look.

  “Yes,” I said, as gently as I could, “she did. So it’s very important for you In the Woods 167

  to try and remember when you saw this man, so we can find out if he’s the one who killed her. Can you do that?”

  Jessica’s mouth fell a little open. Her eyes were unreachable, gone.

  “She told me,” Rosalind said softly, over her head, “that this happened a week or two before . . .” She swallowed. “She’s not sure of the exact date.”

  I nodded. “Thank you so much, Jessica,” I said. “You’ve been very brave. Do you think you would know this man if you saw him again?”

  Nothing; not a flicker. The sugar packet hung loosely in her curled fingers. “I think we should go,” Rosalind said, looking worriedly from Jessica to her watch.

  I watched from the window as they walked away down the street: Rosalind’s decisive little steps and the delicate sway of her hips, Jessica dragging along behind her by the hand. I looked at the back of Jessica’s silky bent head and thought of those old stories where one twin is hurt and the other, miles away, feels the pain. I wondered if there had been a moment, during that giggly girls’ night at Auntie Vera’s, when she had made some small, unnoticed sound; if all the answers we wanted were locked away behind the strange dark gateways of her mind.

  You’re the perfect person for this case, Rosalind had said to me, and the words were still ringing in my head as I watched her go. Even now, I wonder whether subsequent events proved her completely right or utterly and horribly wrong, and what criteria one could possibly use to tell the difference. 10

  Over the next few days, I spent practically every waking moment searching for the mystery tracksuit. Seven guys around Knocknaree matched the description, such as it was—tall, heavily built, thirties, bald or skinheaded. One of them had a minor record, left over from his wild youth: possession of hash, indecent exposure—my heart skipped a beat when I saw that, but all he had done was take a leak down a laneway just as an earnest young cop was passing. Two said they might have been going into the estate on their way home from work at about the time Damien had given us, but they weren’t sure.

  None of them would admit to having talked to Katy; all of them had alibis, more or less, for the night of her death; none of them had a dancing daughter with a broken leg, or anything like a motive, as far as I could discover. I got photos and did lineups for Damien and Jessica, but they both gave the array of photographs the same dazed, hunted look. Damien finally said he didn’t think any of them was the man he had seen, while Jessica pointed tentatively to a different picture every time she was asked and finally turned catatonic on me again. I had a couple of floaters go door-to-door, asking everyone in the estate whether they had had a visitor matching the description: nothing.

  A couple of the alibis were uncorroborated. One guy claimed he had been online till almost three in the morning, on a bikers’ forum, discussing the maintenance of classic Kawasakis. Another said he had been on a date in town, missed the 12:30 night bus and waited for the 2:00 one in Supermac’s. I stuck their photos up on the whiteboard and set about trying to break the alibis, but every time I looked at them I got the same feeling, a specific and unsettling feeling that I was starting to associate with this whole case: the sensation of another will meeting mine at every turn, something sly and obstinate, with reasons of its own.

  . . .

  In the Woods 169

  Sam was the only one getting anywhere. He was out of the office a lot, interviewing people—county council members, he said, surveyors, farmers, members of Move the Motorway. At our dinners he was vague about where all this was taking him: “I’ll show you in a few days,” he said, “when it starts to make sense.” I sneaked a glance at his notes once, when he went to the bathroom and left them on his desk: diagrams and shorthand and little sketches in the margins, meticulous and indecipherable. Then on Tuesday—a muggy, petulant, drizzly morning, Cassie and I grimly going through the floaters’ door-to-door reports again in case we had missed something—he came in with a big roll of paper, the heavy kind that children use to make valentines and Christmas decorations in school.

  “Right,” he said, pulling tape out of his pocket and starting to stick the paper to the wall in our corner of the incident room. “Here’s what I’ve been doing all this time.”

  It was a huge map of Knocknaree, beautifully detailed: houses, hills, the river, the wood, the keep, all sketched in fine pe
n and ink with the delicate, flowing precision of a children’s-book illustrator. It must have taken him hours. Cassie whistled.

  “Thank you, thankyouverymuch,” Sam said in a deep Elvis voice, grinning. We both abandoned our stacks of reports and went over for a closer look. Much of the map had been divided into irregular blocks, shaded in colored pencil—green, blue, red, a few in yellow. Each block held a tiny, mysterious jumble of abbreviations: Sd J. Downey–GII 11/97; rz ag–ind 8/98. I cocked an interrogative eyebrow at Sam.

  “I’ll explain it now.” He bit off another piece of tape and secured the last corner. Cassie and I sat on the edge of the table, where we were close enough to see the details.

  “OK. See this?” Sam pointed to two parallel dashed lines curving across the map, cutting through the wood and the dig. “That’s where the motorway’s going to be. The government announced the plans in March of 2000

  and bought the land off local farmers over the next year, under a compulsory purchase order. Nothing dodgy there.”

  “Well,” Cassie said. “Depending on your point of view.”

  “Shhh,” I told her. “Just look at the pretty picture.”

  “Ah, you know what I mean,” Sam said. “Nothing you wouldn’t expect. Where it gets interesting is the land around the motorway. That was all agricultural land, too, up until late 1995. Then, bit by bit, over the next four 170

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  years, it started getting bought up and rezoned, from agricultural to industrial and residential.”

  “By clairvoyants who knew where the motorway was going to be, five years before it was announced,” I said.

  “That’s not actually that dodgy either,” Sam said. “There was talk about a motorway coming into Dublin from the southwest—I’ve found newspaper articles—starting in about 1994, when the economic boom kicked in. I talked to a couple of surveyors, and they said this was the most obvious route for a motorway, because of topography and settlement patterns and a load of other things. I didn’t understand the whole of it, but that’s what they said. There’s no reason why property developers couldn’t have done the same thing—got wind of the motorway and hired surveyors to tell them where it was likely to go.”

  Neither of us said anything. Sam glanced from me to Cassie and flushed slightly. “I’m not being naïve. Yeah, they might have been tipped off by someone in government—but, then again, they might not. Either way, it’s not something we can prove, and I don’t think it means anything to our case.” I tried not to smile. Sam is one of the most efficient detectives on the squad, but it was very sweet, somehow, how earnest he was about it all.

  “Who bought the land?” Cassie asked, relenting.

  Sam looked relieved. “A bunch of different companies. Most of them don’t exist, not really; they’re just holding companies, owned by other companies that are owned by other companies. That’s what’s been taking all my time—trying to find out who actually owns the bloody land. So far I’ve traced each buy back to one of three companies: Global Irish Industries, Futura Property Consultants and Dynamo Development. The blue bits here are Global, see; the green ones are Futura, and the red are Dynamo. I’m having a hell of a time finding out who’s behind them, though. Two of them are registered in the Czech Republic, and Futura’s in Hungary.”

  “Now that does sound dodgy,” Cassie said. “By any definition.”

  “Sure,” Sam said, “but it’s most likely tax evasion. We can pass all this on to the Revenue, but I don’t see how it can have anything to do with our case.”

  “Unless Devlin had found out about it and was using it to put pressure on someone,” I said.

  Cassie looked skeptical. “Found out how? And he would’ve told us.”

  “You never know. He’s weird.”

  In the Woods 171

  “You think everyone’s weird. First Mark—”

  “I’m only getting to the interesting bit,” said Sam. I made a face at Cassie and turned towards the map before she could make one back. “So by March of 2000, when the motorway is announced, these three companies own almost all the land around this section of it. But four farmers had held out—

  those are the yellow bits. I tracked them down; they’re in Louth now. They’d seen what way things were going, and they knew these buyers were offering pretty good prices, above the going rate for agricultural land; that was why everyone else had taken the money. They talked it over—they’re all mates, these four—and decided to hold on to their land and see if they could work out what was going on. When the motorway plans were announced, obviously, they copped why these fellas wanted their land so badly: for industrial estates and residential developments, now that the motorway was going to make Knocknaree accessible. So these lads figured they’d get the land rezoned themselves, double or triple its value overnight. They applied to the county council for rezoning—one of them applied four times—and got refused, every time.”

  He tapped one of the yellow blocks, half full of tiny calligraphic notes. Cassie and I leaned forward to read them: M. Cleary, app rz ag–nd: 5/2000

  ref, 11/2000 ref, 6/2001 ref, 1/2002 ref; sd M. Cleary–FPC 8/2002; rz ag–ind 10/2002. Cassie took it in with a brief nod and leaned back on her hands, her eyes still on the map. “So they sold up,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah. For around the same price as the others got—good for agricultural land, but a long way under the going rate for industrial or residential. Maurice Cleary wanted to stay put, out of sheer bloody-mindedness as much as anything else—said he wasn’t going to be forced off his land by any eejit in a suit—but he got a visit from some fella from one of the holding companies, who explained to him that they’d be building a pharmaceutical plant backing onto his farm and they couldn’t guarantee that chemical waste wouldn’t seep into the water and poison his cattle. He took it as a threat—I don’t know whether he was right or not, but he sold up anyway. As soon as the Big Three bought the land—under various other names, but it all traces back to them—they applied for rezoning, and got it.”

  Cassie laughed, a small angry breath.

  “Your Big Three had the county council in their pockets all the way,” I said.

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  “Looks like.”

  “You’ve talked to the county councilors?”

  “Ah, yeah. For all the good it did me. They were very polite and all, but they talked in circles. They could keep going for hours without giving me a single straight answer.” I slid my eyes sideways and caught Cassie’s covert, amused glance: Sam, living with a politician, should have been used to this by now. “They said the rezoning decisions were—hang on . . .” He flipped pages in his notebook. “ ‘Our decisions were on all occasions intended to further the best interests of the community as a whole, as determined based upon the information made available to us at the relevant points in time, and were not impacted by any form of favoritism.’ This wasn’t part of a letter or anything; your man actually said that to me. In conversation, like.”

  Cassie mimed sticking a finger down her throat.

  “How much does it take to buy a county council?” I asked. Sam shrugged. “For that many decisions, over that amount of time, it must have added up to a decent old figure. The Big Three had a lot of money sunk in that land, one way or another. They wouldn’t have been best pleased at the idea of the motorway moving.”

  “How much damage would it actually do them?”

  He pointed to two dotted lines, just cutting across the northwest corner of the map. “According to my surveyors, that’s the nearest logical alternative route. That’s the one Move the Motorway wants. It’s a good two miles away, four or five in some places. The land to the north of the original route would still be accessible enough, but these lads all have plenty on the south side as well, and its value would go right down. I talked to a couple of estate agents, pretended I was interested in buying; they all said industrial land right on the motorway was worth up to twice as
much as industrial land three miles off it. I haven’t done the exact maths, but it could add up to millions in the difference.”

  “That’d be worth a few threatening phone calls,” Cassie said softly.

  “There are people,” I said, “to whom that would be worth a few extra grand for a hit man.”

  Nobody said anything for a few moments. Outside, the drizzle was starting to clear; a watery shaft of sun fell across the map like a helicopter’s searchlight, picked out a stretch of the river, rippling with delicate penstrokes and shaded over with a dull red haze. Across the room, the floater manning the tip line was trying to get rid of someone too voluble to let him In the Woods 173

  finish his sentences. Finally Cassie said, “But why Katy? Why not go after Jonathan?”

  “Too obvious, maybe,” I said. “If Jonathan had been murdered, we’d have gone straight after any enemies he might have made through the campaign. With Katy, it can be set up to look like a sex crime, so our attention is diverted away from the motorway angle, but Jonathan still gets the message.”

  “Unless I can find out who’s behind these three companies, though,”

  Sam said, “I’ve hit a dead end. The farmers don’t know any names, the county council claims they don’t either. I’ve seen a couple of deeds of sale and applications and that, but they were signed by lawyers—and the lawyers say they can’t release their clients’ names to me without permission from the clients.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What about journalists?” Cassie said suddenly.

  Sam shook his head. “What about them?”

  “You said there were articles about the motorway as far back as 1994. There must be journalists who followed the story, and they’d have a pretty good idea who bought up the land, even if they’re not allowed to print it. This is Ireland; there’s no such thing as a secret.”

  “Cassie,” Sam said, his face lighting up, “you’re a gem. I’m buying you a pint for that.”

  “Want to read my door-to-door reports for me instead? O’Gorman structures sentences like George Bush; most of the time I haven’t a clue what he’s on about.”