In the Woods Read online

  “You’re doing great,” Cassie said gently. “What did you do then?”

  “Mel said, ‘Oh, my God,’ or something, and we ran back and told Dr. Hunt. He told us all to go into the canteen.”

  “OK, Damien, I need you to think carefully,” Cassie said. “Did you see anything that seemed weird today, or over the last few days? Anyone unusual hanging around, anything out of place?”

  He gazed into space, lips slightly parted; took another sip of his tea.

  “This probably isn’t the kind of thing you mean. . . .”

  “Anything could help us,” Cassie told him. “Even the tiniest thing.”

  “OK.” Damien nodded earnestly. “OK, on Monday I was waiting for the bus home, out by the gate? And I saw this guy come down the road and go into the estate. I don’t know why I even noticed him, I just— He sort of looked around before he went into the estate, like he was checking if anyone was watching him or something.”

  “What time was this?” Cassie asked.

  “We finish at half past five, so maybe twenty to six? That was the other weird thing. I mean, there’s nothing round here that you can get to without a car, except the shop and the pub, and the shop closes at five. So I wondered where he was coming from.”

  “What did he look like?”

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  “Sort of tall, like six foot. In his thirties, I guess? Heavy. I think he was bald. He had on a dark blue tracksuit.”

  “Would you be able to work with a sketch artist to come up with a drawing of him?”

  Damien blinked fast, looking alarmed. “Um . . . I didn’t see him all that well. I mean, he was coming from up the road, on the other side of the estate entrance. I wasn’t really looking—I don’t think I’d remember . . .”

  “That’s all right,” Cassie said. “Don’t worry about it, Damien. If you feel like you might be able to give us some more details, let me know, OK?

  Meanwhile, just take care of yourself.”

  We got Damien’s address and phone number, gave him a card (I wanted to give him a lollipop, too, for being such a brave boy, but they’re not standard department issue) and shooed him back to the others, with orders to send in Melanie Jackson.

  “Sweet kid,” I said noncommittally, testing.

  “Yeah,” said Cassie dryly. “If I ever want a pet, I’ll keep him in mind.”

  Mel was a lot more useful than Damien. She was tall and skinny and Scottish, with muscled brown arms and sandy hair in a messy ponytail, and she sat like a boy, feet planted firmly apart.

  “Maybe you know this already, but she’s from the estate,” she said straightaway. “Or from somewhere round here, anyway.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “The local kids come around the site sometimes. There’s not much else for them to do during the summer. They mostly want to know if we’ve found buried treasure, or skeletons. I’ve seen her a few times.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Maybe two, three weeks ago.”

  “Was she with anyone?”

  Mel shrugged. “Nobody that I remember. Just a bunch of other kids, I think.”

  I liked Mel. She was shaken but refusing to show it; she was fidgeting with an elastic band, cat’s-cradling it into shapes between her callused fingers. She told basically the same story as Damien, but with a lot less coaxing and petting.

  “At the end of the tea break, Mark told me to go mattock back around In the Woods 41

  the ceremonial stone so we could see the base. Damien said he’d go, too—

  we don’t usually work on our own, it’s boring. Partway up the slope we saw something blue and white on the stone. Damien said, ‘What’s that?’ and I said, ‘Somebody’s jacket, maybe.’ When we got a bit closer I realized it was a kid. Damien shook her arm and checked whether she was breathing, but you could tell she was dead. I never saw a dead body before, but—” She bit the inside of her cheek, shook her head. “It’s bullshit, isn’t it, when they say,

  ‘Oh, he looked like he was just sleeping?’ You could tell.”

  We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be. . . . Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. The body had shocked Mel Jackson far more deeply than it would have the most sheltered Victorian virgin.

  “Could you have missed the body if it had been on the stone yesterday?”

  I asked.

  Mel glanced up, wide eyed. “Ah, shit—you mean it was there all the time we were . . . ?” Then she shook her head. “No. Mark and Dr. Hunt went round the whole site yesterday afternoon, to make a list of what needs doing. They’d have seen it—her. We only missed it this morning because we were all down the bottom of the site, at the end of the drainage ditch. The way the hill slopes, we couldn’t see the top of the stone.”

  She hadn’t seen anyone or anything unusual, including Damien’s weirdo: “But I wouldn’t have anyway. I don’t take the bus. Most of us who aren’t from Dublin live in this house they rented for us, a couple of miles down the road. Mark and Dr. Hunt have cars, so they drive us back. We don’t go past the estate.”

  The “anyway” interested me: it suggested that Mel, like me, had her doubts about the sinister tracksuit. Damien struck me as the type who would say just about anything if he thought it would make you happy. I wished I had thought of asking him whether the guy had been wearing stilettos. 42

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  . . .

  Sophie and her baby techs had finished up with the ceremonial stone and were working their way outwards in a circle. I told her that Damien Donnelly had touched the body and leaned over it; we’d need his prints and hair, for elimination. “What an idiot,” Sophie said. “I suppose we should be thankful he didn’t decide to cover her up with his coat.” She was sweating in her coveralls. The boy tech covertly ripped a page out of his sketchbook, behind her back, and started over.

  We left the car at the site and walked round to the estate by the road (I still remembered, somewhere in my muscles, going over the wall: where the foothold was, the scrape of the concrete on my kneecap, the jar of landing). Cassie demanded to go to the shop on the way; it was well past two o’clock and we might not have another chance at lunch for a while. Cassie eats like a teenage boy and hates missing meals, which normally I enjoy—women who live on weighed portions of salad annoy me—but I wanted to get today over with as quickly as possible.

  I waited outside the shop, smoking, but Cassie came out with two sandwiches in plastic cartons and handed one to me. “Here.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Eat the damn sandwich, Ryan. I’m not carrying you home if you faint.”

  I have in fact never fainted in my life, but I do tend to forget to eat until I start getting irritable or spacy.

  “I said I’m not hungry,” I said, hearing the whine in my voice, but I opened the sandwich anyway: Cassie had a point, it was likely to be a very long day. We sat on the curb, and she pulled a bottle of lemon Coke out of her satchel. The sandwich was officially chicken and stuffing, but it tasted mainly of plastic wrapper, and the Coke was warm and too sweet. I felt slightly sick.

  I don’t want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past, smiling sadly at the world from behind a bittersweet veil of cigarette smoke and memories. Kno
cknaree didn’t leave me with night terrors or impotence or a pathological fear of trees or any of the other good stuff that, in a made-for-TV movie, would have led me to a therapist and redemption and a more communicative relationship with my supportive but frustrated wife. To be honest, I could go for months on end In the Woods 43

  without ever thinking about it. Occasionally some newspaper or other would run a feature on missing people and there they would be, Peter and Jamie, smiling from the cover of a Sunday supplement in grainy photographs made premonitory by hindsight and overuse, between vanished tourists and runaway housewives and all the mythic, murmuring ranks of Ireland’s lost. I’d see the article and notice, detachedly, that my hands were shaking and it was hard to breathe, but this was purely a physical reflex and only lasted a few minutes anyway.

  I suppose the whole thing must have had its effects on me, but it would be impossible—and, to my mind, pointless—to figure out exactly what they were. I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are; and a few weeks later I went to boarding school, which shaped and scarred me in far more dramatic, obvious ways. It would feel naïve and basically cheesy to unweave my personality, hold up a strand and squeal: Golly, look, this one’s from Knocknaree! But here it was again, all of a sudden, resurfacing smugly and immovably in the middle of my life, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

  “That poor kid,” Cassie said suddenly, out of nowhere. “That poor, poor little kid.”

  The Devlins’ house was a flat-fronted semi-d with a patch of grass in front, exactly like all the others on the estate. All of the neighbors had made frantic little declarations of individuality via ferociously trimmed shrubs or geraniums or something, but the Devlins just mowed their lawn and left it at that, which in itself argued a certain level of originality. They lived halfway up the estate, five or six streets from the site; far enough that they had missed the uniforms, the techs, the morgue van, all the terrible, efficient bustle that in one glance would have told them everything they needed to know.

  When Cassie rang the bell, a man about forty answered. He was a few inches shorter than me, starting to thicken around the middle, with neatly clipped dark hair and big bags under his eyes. He was wearing a cardigan and khaki trousers and holding a bowl of cornflakes, and I wanted to tell him that this was all right, because I already knew what he would learn over the next few months: this is the kind of thing people remember in agony all 44

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  their lives, that they were eating cornflakes when the police came to tell them their daughter was dead. I once saw a woman break down on the witness stand, sobbing so hard they had to call a recess and give her a sedative shot, because when her boyfriend was stabbed she was at a yoga class.

  “Mr. Devlin?” Cassie said. “I’m Detective Maddox, and this is Detective Ryan.”

  His eyes widened. “From Missing Persons?” There was mud on his shoes, and the hems of his trousers were wet. He must have been out looking for his daughter, somewhere in the wrong fields, come in to get something to eat before he tried again and again.

  “Not exactly,” Cassie said gently. I mostly leave these conversations to her, not just out of cowardice but because we both know she is much better at it. “May we come in?”

  He stared at the bowl, put it down clumsily on the hall table. A little milk slopped onto sets of keys and a child’s pink cap. “What do you mean?”

  he demanded; fear put an aggressive edge on his voice. “Have you found Katy?”

  I heard a tiny sound and looked over his shoulder. A girl was standing at the foot of the stairs, holding on to the banister with both hands. The interior of the house was dim even in the sunny afternoon, but I saw her face, and it transfixed me with a bright shard of something like terror. For an unimaginable, swirling moment I knew I was seeing a ghost. It was our victim; it was the dead little girl on the stone table. I heard a roaring noise in my ears. A split second later, of course, the world righted itself, the roaring subsided and I realized what I was seeing. We wouldn’t be needing the ID shot. Cassie had seen her as well. “We’re not sure yet,” she said. “Mr. Devlin, is this Katy’s sister?”

  “Jessica,” he said hoarsely. The little girl edged forward; without taking his eyes from Cassie’s face, Devlin reached back, caught her shoulder and pulled her into the doorway. “They’re twins,” he said. “Identical. Is this—

  Have you—Did you find a girl who looks like this?” Jessica stared somewhere between me and Cassie. Her arms hung limply by her sides, hands invisible under an oversized gray sweater.

  “Please, Mr. Devlin,” Cassie said. “We need to come in and speak with you and your wife in private.” She flicked a glance at Jessica. Devlin looked down, saw his hand on her shoulder and moved it away, startled. It stayed frozen in midair, as if he had forgotten what to do with it. In the Woods 45

  He knew, by that point; of course he knew. If she had been found alive, we would have said so. But he moved back from the door automatically and made a vague gesture to one side, and we went into the sitting room. I heard Devlin say, “Go back upstairs to your Auntie Vera.” Then he followed us in and closed the door.

  The terrible thing about the sitting room was how normal it was, how straight out of some satire on suburbia. Lace curtains, a flowery four-piece suite with those little covers on the arms and headrests, a collection of ornate teapots on top of a sideboard, everything polished and dusted to an immaculate shine: it seemed—victims’ homes and even crime scenes almost always do—far too banal for this level of tragedy. The woman sitting in an armchair matched the room: heavy in a solid shapeless way, with a helmet of permed hair and big, drooping blue eyes. There were deep lines from her nose to her mouth.

  “Margaret,” Devlin said. “They’re detectives.” His voice was taut as a guitar string, but he didn’t go to her; he stayed by the sofa, fists clenched in the pockets of his cardigan. “What is it?” he demanded.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Devlin,” Cassie said, “there’s no easy way to say this. The body of a little girl has been found on the archaeological site beside this estate. I’m afraid we think she’s your daughter Katharine. I’m so sorry.”

  Margaret Devlin let out her breath as if she’d been hit in the stomach. Tears began to fall down her cheeks, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Are you sure?” Devlin snapped. His eyes were huge. “How can you be sure?”

  “Mr. Devlin,” Cassie said gently, “I’ve seen the little girl. She looks exactly like your daughter Jessica. We’ll be asking you to come see the body tomorrow, to confirm her identity, but there’s no doubt in my mind. I’m sorry.”

  Devlin swung towards the window, away again, pressed a wrist against his mouth, lost and wild-eyed. “Oh, God,” said Margaret. “Oh, God, Jonathan—”

  “What happened to her?” Devlin cut in harshly. “How did she—how—”

  “I’m afraid it looks as if she was murdered,” Cassie said. Margaret was heaving herself up out of the chair, in slow, underwater movements. “Where is she?” The tears were still pouring down her face, but her voice was eerily calm, almost brisk.

  “She’s with our doctors,” Cassie said gently. If Katy had died differently, we might have taken them to her. But as it was, her skull smashed open, her 46

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  face covered in blood . . . At the post-mortem, the morgue guys would wash off at least that gratuitous layer of horror.

  Margaret looked around, dazed, patting mechanically at the pockets of her skirt. “Jonathan. I can’t find my keys.”

  “Mrs. Devlin,” Cassie said, putting a hand on her arm. “I’m afraid we can’t take you to Katy yet. The doctors need to examine her. We’ll let you know as soon as you can see her.”

  Margaret twitched away from her and moved in slow motion towards the door, dragging a clumsy hand across her face to smear the tears away. “Katy. Where is she?”
Cassie shot a glance of appeal over her shoulder at Jonathan, but he was leaning both palms against the windowpane and staring out, unseeing, breathing too fast and too hard.

  “Please, Mrs. Devlin,” I said urgently, trying to unobtrusively get between her and the door. “I promise we’ll take you to Katy as soon as we can, but at the moment you can’t see her. It’s simply not possible.”

  She stared at me, red-eyed, her mouth hanging open. “My baby,” she gasped. Then her shoulders slumped and she started to weep, in deep, hoarse, unrestrained sobs. Her head fell back and she let Cassie take her gently by the shoulders and ease her back into her chair.

  “How did she die?” Jonathan demanded, still staring fixedly out the window. The words were blurred, as if his lips were numb. “What way?”

  “We won’t know that until the doctors have finished examining her,” I said. “We’ll keep you informed of every development.”

  I heard light footsteps running down the stairs; the door flew open, and a girl stood in the doorway. Behind her Jessica was still in the hall, sucking a lock of hair and staring in at us.

  “What is it?” said the girl breathlessly. “Oh, God . . . is it Katy?”

  Nobody answered. Margaret pressed a fist to her mouth, turning her sobs into terrible choking sounds. The girl looked from face to face, her lips parted. She was tall and slim, with chestnut curls tumbling down her back, and it was hard to tell how old she was—eighteen or twenty, maybe, but she was made up far more expertly than any teenager I’d ever known, and she was wearing tailored black trousers and high-heeled shoes and a white shirt that looked expensive, with a purple silk scarf flung round her neck. She had a kind of vital, electric presence that filled the room. In that house, she was utterly, startlingly incongruous.

  “Please,” she said, appealing to me. Her voice was high and clear and In the Woods 47