In the Woods Read online

  idea, everything was going great, I was dropping hints that maybe it would be simpler if I met the supplier myself instead of getting the stuff through him. Only then Dealer Boy started snorting a little too much of his own speed—this was in May, he had exams coming up. He got paranoid, decided I was trying to take over his business and stabbed me.” She took a sip of her drink. “Don’t tell Quigley, though. The operation’s still going on, so I’m not supposed to talk about it. Let the poor little fucker enjoy his illusions.”

  I was secretly terribly impressed, not only by the stabbing (after all, I told myself, it wasn’t as though she had done something outstandingly brave or intelligent; she had just failed to dodge fast enough), but by the dark, adrenaline-paced thought of undercover work and by the utter casualness with which she told the story. Having worked hard to perfect an air of easy indifference, I recognize the real thing when I see it.

  “Jesus,” I said again. “I bet he got a good going-over when they brought him in.” I’ve never hit a suspect—I find there’s no need to, as long as you make them think you might—but there are guys who do, and anyone who stabs a cop is likely to pick up a few bruises en route to the station. She cocked an eyebrow at me, amused. “They didn’t. That would’ve wrecked the whole operation. They need him to get to the supplier; they just started over with a new undercover.”

  “But don’t you want him taken down?” I said, frustrated by her calm and by my own creeping sense of naïveté. “He stabbed you.”

  Cassie shrugged. “After all, if you think about it, he had a point: I was only pretending to be his friend to screw him over. And he was a strung-out drug dealer. That’s what strung-out drug dealers do.”

  After that my memory grows hazy again. I know that, determined to impress her in my turn, and never having been stabbed or involved in a shootout or anything, I told her a long and rambling and mostly true story about talking down a guy who was threatening to jump off the roof of a block of flats with his baby, back when I was in Domestic Violence (really, I think I must have been a little drunk: another reason I’m so sure we had hot whiskey). I remember a passionate conversation about Dylan Thomas, I think, Cassie kneeling up on the sofa and gesturing, her cigarette burning away forgotten in the ashtray. Bantering, smart but tentative as shy circling children, both of us checking covertly after each riposte to make sure we hadn’t crossed any line or hurt any feelings. Firelight and the Cowboy Junkies, Cassie singing along in a sweet rough undertone. 16

  Tana French

  “The drugs you got from Dealer Boy,” I said, later. “Did you actually sell them to students?”

  Cassie got up to put on the kettle. “Occasionally,” she said.

  “Didn’t that bother you?”

  “Everything about undercover bothered me,” Cassie said. “Everything.”

  When we went into work the next morning we were friends. It really was as simple as that: we planted seeds without thinking, and woke up to our own private beanstalk. At break time I caught Cassie’s eye and mimed a cigarette, and we went outside to sit cross-legged at either end of a bench, like bookends. At the end of the shift she waited for me, bitching to the air about how long I took to get my things together (“It’s like hanging out with Sarah Jessica Parker. Don’t forget your lip liner, sweetie, we don’t want the chauffeur to have to go back for it again”), and said “Pint?” on the way down the stairs. I can’t explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency. As soon as she finished learning the ropes with Costello, we partnered up. O’Kelly put up a bit of a fight—he didn’t like the idea of two shiny new rookies working together, and it meant he would have to find something else to do with Quigley—but I had, by sheer luck rather than shrewd detection, found someone who had heard someone bragging about killing the homeless guy, so I was in O’Kelly’s good books, and I took full advantage of it. He warned us that he would give us only the simplest cases and the nohopers, “nothing that needs real detective work,” and we nodded meekly and thanked him again, aware that murderers aren’t considerate enough to ensure that the complex cases come up in strict rotation. Cassie moved her stuff to the desk beside mine, and Costello got stuck with Quigley and gave us sad reproachful looks for weeks, like a martyred Labrador. Over the next couple of years we developed, I think, a good reputation within the squad. We pulled in the suspect from the alley beating and interrogated him for six hours—although, if you deleted every recurrence of

  “Ah, fuck, man” from the tape, I doubt it would run over forty minutes—

  In the Woods 17

  until he confessed. He was a junkie called Wayne (“Wayne,” I said to Cassie, while we were getting him a Sprite and watching him pick his acne in the one-way glass. “Why didn’t his parents just tattoo ‘Nobody in my family has ever finished secondary school’ on his forehead at birth?”) and he had beaten up the homeless guy, who was known as Beardy Eddie, for stealing his blanket. After he signed his statement, Wayne wanted to know if he could have his blanket back. We handed him over to the uniforms and told him they would look into it, and then we went back to Cassie’s with a bottle of champagne and stayed up talking till six in the morning, and came in to work late and sheepish and still a little giggly.

  We went through the predictable process where Quigley and a few of the others spent awhile asking me whether I was shagging her and whether, if so, she was any good; once it dawned on them that I genuinely wasn’t, they moved on to her probable dykehood (I have always considered Cassie to be very clearly feminine, but I could see how, to a certain kind of mind, the haircut and the lack of makeup and the boys’-department corduroys would add up to Sapphic tendencies). Cassie eventually got bored of this and tidied things up by appearing at the Christmas party with a strapless black velvet cocktail dress and a bullishly handsome rugby player named Gerry. He was actually her second cousin and happily married, but he was heartily protective of Cassie and had no objection to gazing adoringly at her for an evening if it would smooth her career path.

  After that, the rumors faded and people more or less left us to our own devices, which suited us both. Contrary to appearances, Cassie is not a particularly social person, any more than I am; she is vivacious and quick with banter and can talk to anyone, but given the choice, she preferred my company to that of a big group. I slept on her sofa a lot. Our solve rate was good and rising; O’Kelly stopped threatening to split us up every time we were late turning in paperwork. We were in the courtroom to see Wayne found guilty of manslaughter (“Ah, fuck, man”). Sam O’Neill drew a deft little caricature of the two of us as Mulder and Scully (I still have it, somewhere) and Cassie stuck it to the side of her computer, next to a bumper sticker that said bad cop! no doughnut!

  In retrospect, I think Cassie came along at just the right time for me. My dazzling, irresistible outsider’s vision of the Murder squad had not included things like Quigley, or gossip, or interminable circular interrogations of junkies with six-word vocabularies and dentist’s-drill accents. I had pictured 18

  Tana French

  a tensile, heightened mode of existence, everything small and petty bushfired away by a readiness so charged it snapped sparks, and the reality had left me bewildered and let down, like a child opening a glittering Christmas present and finding woolly socks inside. If it hadn’t been for Cassie, I think I might have ended up turning into that detective on Law & Order, the one who has ulcers and thinks everything is a government conspiracy. 2

  W e caught the Devlin case on a Wednesday morning in August. It was, according to my notes, 11:48, so everyone else was out getting coffee. Cassie and I were playing Worms on my computer.

  “Ha,” said Cassie, sending one of her worms bopping over to mine with a baseball bat and thwacking him off a cliff. My worm, Groundsweeper Willy, yelled, “Och, ye big mammy’s boy!” at me on his way down t
owards the ocean.

  “I let you do that,” I told her.

  “Course you did,” said Cassie. “No real man could actually be beaten by a little girl. Even the worm knows it: only a raisin-balled, testosterone-free cream puff could—”

  “Fortunately I’m secure enough in my masculinity that I don’t feel remotely threatened by—”

  “Shh,” said Cassie, turning my face back towards the monitor. “Nice boy. Shush, look pretty and play with your worm. God knows nobody else is going to.”

  “I think I’ll transfer somewhere nice and peaceful, like ERU,” I said.

  “ERU needs fast response times, sweetie,” Cassie said. “If it takes you half an hour to decide what to do with an imaginary worm, they’re not gonna want you in charge of hostages.”

  At that point O’Kelly banged into the squad room and demanded,

  “Where is everyone?” Cassie hit Alt-Tab fast; one of her worms was named O’Smelly and she had been purposefully sending him into hopeless situations, to watch him get blown up by exploding sheep.

  “Break,” I said.

  “Bunch of archaeologists found a body. Who’s up?”

  “We’ll have it,” said Cassie, shoving her foot off my chair so that hers shot back to her own desk.

  “Why us?” I said. “Can’t the pathologist deal with it?”

  20

  Tana French

  Archaeologists are required by law to call the police if they find human remains at a depth of less than nine feet below ground level. This is in case some genius gets the idea of concealing a murder by burying the corpse in a fourteenth-century graveyard and hoping it gets marked down as medieval. I suppose they figure that anyone who has the enterprise to dig down more than nine feet without getting spotted deserves a little leeway for sheer dedication. Uniforms and pathologists get called out fairly regularly, when subsidence and erosion have brought a skeleton close to the surface, but usually this is only a formality; it’s relatively simple to distinguish between modern and ancient remains. Detectives are called only in exceptional circumstances, usually when a peat bog has preserved flesh and bone so perfectly that the body has all the clamoring immediacy of a fresh corpse.

  “Not this time,” said O’Kelly. “It’s modern. Young female, looks like murder. Uniforms asked for us. They’re only in Knocknaree, so you won’t need to stay out there.”

  Something strange happened to my breath. Cassie stopped shoving things into her satchel and I felt her eyes flick to me for a split second. “Sir, I’m sorry, we really can’t take on another full murder investigation right now. We’re bang in the middle of the McLoughlin case and—”

  “That didn’t bother you when you thought this was just an afternoon off, Maddox,” said O’Kelly. He dislikes Cassie for a series of mind-numbingly predictable reasons—her sex, her clothes, her age, her semiheroic record—

  and the predictability bothers her far more than the dislike. “If you had time for a day out down the country, you have time for a serious murder investigation. The Tech Bureau are already on their way.” And he left.

  “Oh, shit,” said Cassie. “Oh, shit, the little wanker. Ryan, I’m so sorry. I just didn’t think—”

  “It’s fine, Cass,” I said. One of the best things about Cassie is that she knows when to shut up and leave you alone. It was her turn to drive, but she picked out my favorite unmarked—a ’98 Saab that handles like a dream—

  and threw me the keys. In the car, she dug her CD holder out of her satchel and passed it to me; driver chooses the music, but I tend to forget to bring any. I picked the first thing that looked as if it had a hard pounding bass, and turned it up loud.

  I hadn’t been to Knocknaree since that summer. I went to boarding school a few weeks after Jamie should have gone—not the same school; one in Wiltshire, as far away as my parents could afford—and when I came back In the Woods 21

  at Christmas we lived in Leixlip, out on the other side of Dublin. Once we hit the highway, Cassie had to dig out the map and find the exit, then navigate us down potholed side roads edged with long grass, hedges grown wild and scraping at the windows.

  Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I’m deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it—not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved, who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who’s just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs.

  The Knocknaree site was a huge field set on a shallow slope, down the side of a hill. It was stripped to bare earth, churned up by purposeful, indecipherable archaeological scribblings—trenches, giant anthills of soil, Portakabins, scattered fragments of rough stone wall like outlines for some lunatic maze—

  that made it surreal, postnuclear. It was bordered on one side by a thick stand of trees, on another by a wall, tidy gables peeking over it, that ran from the trees to the road. Towards the top of the slope, near the wall, techs were clustered around something cordoned off by blue-and-white crime-scene tape. I probably knew every one of them, but the context translated them—white coveralls, busy gloved hands, nameless delicate instruments—into something alien and sinister and possibly CIA-related. The one or two identifiable objects looked picture-book solid and comforting: a low whitewashed cottage just off the road, with a black-and-white sheepdog stretched in front of it, paws twitching; a stone tower covered in ivy that rippled like water in the breeze. Light fluttered off the dark slice of a river cutting across one corner of the field.

  runner heels dug into the earth of the bank, leaf-shadows dappling a red T-shirt, fishing-rods of branches and string, slapping at midges: Shut up! You’ll scare the fish!—

  22

  Tana French

  This field was where the wood had been, twenty years ago. The strip of trees was what was left of it. I had lived in one of the houses beyond the wall.

  I had not expected this. I don’t watch Irish news; it always morphs into a migraine blur of identical sociopath-eyed politicians mouthing meaningless white noise, like the gibber you get when you play a 33-rpm record at 45. I stick to foreign news, where distance gives enough simplification for the comforting illusion that there is some difference between the various players. I had known, by vague osmosis, that there was an archaeological site somewhere around Knocknaree and that there was some controversy about it, but I hadn’t picked up the details, or the exact location. I had not been expecting this.

  I parked on the shoulder across the road from the Portakabin cluster, between the bureau van and a big black Merc—Cooper, the forensic pathologist. We got out of the car and I stopped to check my gun: clean, loaded, safety on. I wear a shoulder holster; anywhere more obvious feels gauche, a legal equivalent of flashing. Cassie says fuck gauche, when you are five foot five and young and female a little blatant authority isn’t a bad thing, and wears a belt. Often the discrepancy works for us: people don’t know who to worry about, the little girl with the gun or the big guy apparently without, and the distraction of deciding keeps them off balance. Cassie leaned against the car and dug her smokes out of her satchel.

  “Want one?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. I went over my harness, tightened the straps, made sure none of them were twisted. My fingers seemed thick and clumsy, detached from my body. I did not want Cassie to point out that, whoever this girl was and whenever she had been killed, it was unlikely that the murderer was skulking behind a Portakabin needing to be taken at gunpoint. She tipped her head back and blew smoke up into
the branches overhead. It was your basic Irish summer day, irritatingly coy, all sun and skidding clouds and jackknifing breeze, ready at any second to make an effortless leap into bucketing rain or blazing sun or both.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get into character.” Cassie put out her smoke on the sole of her shoe and tucked the butt back into the packet, and we headed across the road.

  A middle-aged guy in an unraveling sweater was hovering between the Portakabins, looking lost. He perked up when he saw us. In the Woods 23

  “Detectives,” he said. “You must be the detectives, yes? Dr. Hunt . . . I mean, Ian Hunt. Site director. Where would you like to—well, the office or the body or . . . ? I’m not sure, you know. Protocol and things like that.” He was one of those people whom your mind instantly starts turning into a cartoon: scribbled wings and beak and ta-da, Road Runner.

  “Detective Maddox, and this is Detective Ryan,” Cassie said. “If it’s all right, Dr. Hunt, maybe one of your colleagues could give Detective Ryan an overview of the whole site, while you show me the remains?”

  Little bitch, I thought. I felt jittery and dazed at the same time, as if I had a massive stone-over and had tried to clear it with way too much caffeine; the light jinking off fragments of mica in the rutted ground looked too bright, tricky and fevered. I was in no mood to be protected. But one of Cassie’s and my unspoken rules is that, in public at least, we do not contradict each other. Sometimes one of us takes advantage of it.

  “Um . . . yes,” said Hunt, blinking at us through his glasses. He somehow gave the impression of constantly dropping things—lined yellow pages, chewed-looking tissues, half-wrapped throat lozenges—even though he wasn’t holding anything. “Yes, of course. They’re all . . . Well, Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but you see Damien’s . . . Mark!” He aimed it in the general direction of the open door of a Portakabin, and I had a fleeting glimpse of a bunch of people crowded around a bare table: army jackets, sandwiches and steaming mugs, clods of earth on the floor. One of the guys tossed down a hand of cards and started disentangling himself from the plastic chairs.