In the Woods Read online

  residents’ aesthetic sensibilities from the uncompromisingly archaeological view. One had a broken piece of blue plastic rope heavily knotted around a high branch, a couple of feet dangling. It was frayed and mildewed and implied sinister Gothic history—lynch mobs, midnight suicides—but I knew what it was. It was the remnant of a tire swing.

  Though I had come to think of Knocknaree as though it had happened to another and unknown person, some part of me had been here all along. While I doodled in Templemore or sprawled on Cassie’s futon, that relentless child had never stopped spinning in crazy circles on a tire swing, scrambling over a wall after Peter’s bright head, vanishing into the wood in a flash of brown legs and laughter.

  There was a time when I believed, with the police and the media and my stunned parents, that I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.

  3

  Idon’t tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don’t see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories or to sympathetic and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either. My parents know, obviously, and Cassie, and a boarding-school friend of mine called Charlie—he’s a merchant banker in London now; we still keep in touch, occasionally—and this girl Gemma whom I went out with for a while when I was about nineteen (we spent a lot of our time together getting much too drunk, plus she was the intense angsty type and I thought it would make me sound interesting); nobody else.

  When I went to boarding school I dropped the Adam and started using my middle name. I’m not sure whether this was my parents’ idea or mine, but I think it was a good one. There are five pages of Ryans in the Dublin phone book alone, but Adam is not a particularly common name, and the publicity was overwhelming (even in England: I used to scan furtively through the newspapers I was supposed to be using to light prefects’ fires, rip out anything relevant, memorize it later in a toilet cubicle before flushing it away). Sooner or later, someone would have made the connection. As it is, nobody is likely to link up Detective Rob and his English accent with little Adam Ryan from Knocknaree.

  I knew, of course, that I should tell O’Kelly, now that I was working on a case that looked like it might be connected to that one, but to be frank I never for a second considered doing it. It would have got me booted off the case—you are very definitely not allowed to work on anything where you might be emotionally involved—and probably questioned all over again about that day in the wood, and I failed to see how this would benefit either the case or the community in general. I still have vivid, disturbing memories of being questioned the first time round: male voices with a rough undertow of frustration yammering faintly at the edges of my hearing, while in my mind white clouds drifted endlessly across a vast blue sky and wind sighed In the Woods 33

  through some huge expanse of grass. That was all I could see or hear, the first couple of weeks afterwards. I don’t remember feeling anything about this at the time, but in retrospect the thought was a horrible one—my mind wiped clean, replaced by a test pattern—and every time the detectives came back and tried again it resurfaced, by some process of association, seeping in at the back of my head and frightening me into sullen, uncooperative edginess. And they did try—at first every few months, in the school holidays, then every year or so—but I never had anything to tell them, and around the time I left school they finally stopped coming. I felt that this had been an excellent decision, and I could not for the life of me see how reversing it at this stage would serve any useful purpose.

  And I suppose, if I’m being honest, it appealed both to my ego and to my sense of the picturesque, the idea of carrying this strange, charged secret through the case unsuspected. I suppose it felt, at the time, like the kind of thing that enigmatic Central Casting maverick would have done. I rang Missing Persons, and they came up with a possible ID almost immediately. Katharine Devlin, aged twelve, four foot nine, slim build, long dark hair, hazel eyes, reported missing from 29 Knocknaree Grove (I remembered that, suddenly: all the streets in the estate called Knocknaree Grove and Close and Place and Lane, everyone’s post constantly going astray) at 10:15 the previous morning, when her mother went to wake her and found her gone. Twelve and up is considered old enough to be a runaway, and she had apparently left the house of her own accord, so Missing Persons had been giving her a day to come home before sending in the troops. They already had the press release typed up, ready to send to the media in time for the evening news. I was disproportionately relieved to have an ID, even a tentative one. Obviously I had known that a little girl—especially a healthy well-groomed little girl, in a place as small as Ireland—can’t turn up dead without someone coming forward to claim her; but a number of things about this case were giving me the willies, and I think a superstitious part of me had believed that this child would remain as nameless as if she had dropped from thin air and that her DNA would turn out to match the blood from my shoes and a variety of other X-Files–type stuff. We got an ID shot from Sophie—a Polaroid, taken from the least disturbing angle, to show to the family—and headed back to the Portakabins.

  34

  Tana French

  Hunt popped out of one of them as we approached, like the little man in old Swiss clocks. “Did you . . . I mean, it is definitely murder, is it? The poor child. Awful.”

  “We’re treating it as suspicious,” I said. “What we’ll need to do now is have a quick word with your team. Then we’d like to speak to the person who found the body. The others can go back to work, as long as they stay outside the boundaries of the crime scene. We’ll speak with them later.”

  “How will . . . Is there something to show where it—where they shouldn’t be? Tape, and all that.”

  “There’s crime-scene tape in place,” I said. “If they stay outside it, they’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll need to ask you for the lend of somewhere we can use as an onsite office,” Cassie said, “for the rest of the day and possibly a bit longer. Where would be best?”

  “Better use the finds shed,” said Mark, materializing from wherever.

  “We’ll need the office, and everywhere else is soupy.” I hadn’t heard the term before, but the view through the Portakabin doors—layers of mud crazed with boot prints, low sagging benches, teetering heaps of farming implements and bicycles and luminous yellow vests that reminded me uncomfortably of my time in uniform—provided a fair explanation.

  “As long as it has a table and a few chairs, that’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Finds shed,” said Mark, and jerked his head towards a Portakabin.

  “What’s up with Damien?” Cassie asked Hunt.

  He blinked helplessly, mouth open in a caricature of surprise. “What . . . Damien who?”

  “Damien on your team. Earlier you said that Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but Damien wouldn’t be able to show Detective Ryan around. Why’s that?”

  “Damien’s one of the ones who found the body,” said Mark, while Hunt was catching up. “Gave them a shock.”

  “Damien what?” said Cassie, writing.

  “Donnelly,” Hunt said happily, on sure ground at last. “Damien Donnelly.”

  “And he was with someone when he found the body?”

  “Mel Jackson,” Mark said. “Melanie.”

  “Let’s go talk to them,” I said.

  The archaeologists were still sitting around the table in their makeshift In the Woods 35

  canteen. There were fifteen or twenty of them; their faces turned towards the door, intent and synchronized as baby birds’, when we came in. They were all young, early twenties, and they were made younger by their grungystudent clothes and by a windblown, outdoorsy innocence that, although I was pretty sure it was illusory, made me think of kibbutzniks and Waltons. The girls wore no makeup and the
ir hair was in plaits or ponytails, tightened to be practical rather than cutesy; the guys had stubble and peeling sunburns. One of them, with a guileless teacher’s-nightmare face and a woolly cap, had got bored and started melting stuff onto a broken CD with a lighter flame. The result (bent teaspoon, coins, smoke-packet cellophane, a couple of crisps) was surprisingly pleasing, like one of the less humorless manifestations of modern urban art. There was a food-stained microwave in one corner, and a small inappropriate part of me wanted to suggest that he put the CD in it, to see what would happen.

  Cassie and I started to speak at the same time, but I kept going. Officially she was the primary detective, because she was the one who’d said,

  “We’ll have it”; but we have never worked that way, and the rest of the squad had grown used to seeing m & r scribbled under “Primary” on the case board, and I had a sudden, stubborn urge to make it clear that I was just as capable of leading this investigation as she was.

  “Good morning,” I said. Most of them muttered something. Sculptor Boy said loudly and cheerfully, “Good afternoon!”—which, technically, it was—and I wondered which of the girls he was trying to impress. “I’m Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox. As you know, the body of a young girl was found on this site earlier today.”

  One of the guys let his breath out in a little burst and caught it again. He was in a corner, sandwiched protectively between two of the girls, clutching a big steaming mug in both hands; he had short brown curls and a sweet, frank, freckled boy-band face. I was pretty sure this was Damien Donnelly. The others seemed subdued (except for Sculptor Boy) but not traumatized, but he was white under the freckles and holding the mug way too hard.

  “We’ll need to talk to each of you,” I said. “Please don’t leave the site until we have. We may not have a chance to get to all of you for a while, so please bear with us if we need you to stay a bit late.”

  “Are we, like, suspects?” said Sculptor Boy.

  “No,” I said, “but we need to find out if you have any relevant information.”

  36

  Tana French

  “Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, and slumped back in his chair. He started to melt a square of chocolate onto the CD, caught Cassie’s eye and put the lighter away. I envied him: I have often wanted to be one of those people who can take anything, the more horrific the better, as a deeply cool adventure.

  “One other thing,” I said. “Reporters will probably start arriving at any minute. Do not talk to them. Seriously. Telling them anything, even something that seems insignificant, could damage our whole case. We’ll leave you our cards, in case at any point you think of anything we should know. Any questions?”

  “What if they offer us, like, millions?” Sculptor Boy wanted to know. The finds shed was less impressive than I’d expected. In spite of what Mark had said about taking away the valuable stuff, I think my mental image had included gold cups and skeletons and pieces of eight. Instead there were two chairs, a wide desk spread with sheets of drawing paper, and an incredible quantity of what appeared to be broken pottery, stuffed into plastic bags and crammed onto those perforated DIY metal shelves.

  “Finds,” said Hunt, flapping a hand at the shelves. “I suppose . . . Well, no, maybe some other time. Some very nice jettons and clothing hooks.”

  “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—”<
br />
  “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.