In the Woods

by Tana French

  “Was this the work of a satanic cult?” asked a large woman in unflattering ski pants, whom we’d met before. She was from one of those tabloids with a penchant for punny headlines using alternative spellings.

  “There’s absolutely no evidence to indicate that,” I said snottily. There never is. Homicidal satanic cults are the detective’s version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.

  “But she was found on an altar that the Druids used for human sacrifice, wasn’t she?” the woman demanded.

  “No comment,” I said automatically. I had just realized what the stone table reminded me of, that deep groove round the edge: the autopsy tables in the morgue, grooved to drain away blood. I had been so busy wondering whether I recognized it from 1984, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I recognized it from a few months ago. Jesus. Eventually the reporters gave up and started drifting off. Cassie had been sitting on the steps of the finds shed, blending into the scenery and keeping an eye on things. When she saw the large journalist homing in on Mark, who had come out of the canteen heading for the Portaloo, she got up and wandered towards them, making sure Mark could see her. I saw him catch her eye, over the reporter’s shoulder; after a minute Cassie shook her head, amused, and left them to it.

  “What was that all about?” I asked, fishing out the key to the finds shed.

  “He’s giving her a lecture about the site,” said Cassie, dusting off the seat of her jeans and grinning. “Every time she tries to ask anything about the body, he says, ‘Hang on,’ and goes into a rant about how the government is about to destroy the most important discovery since Stonehenge, or starts explaining Viking settlements. I’d love to stay and watch; I think she may finally have met her match.”

  The rest of the archaeologists had very little to add, except that Sculptor Boy, whose name was Sean, felt we should consider the possibility of vampire involvement. He sobered up a lot when we showed him the ID shot, but although he, like the others, had seen Katy or possibly Jessica around the site a few times—sometimes with other kids her age, sometimes with an older girl matching Rosalind’s description—none of them had seen anyone 56

  Tana French

  odd watching her or anything like that. None of them had seen anything sinister at all, in fact, although Mark added, “Except for the politicians who show up to have their photos taken in front of their heritage before they pimp it out. Do you want descriptions?” Nobody remembered the Tracksuit Shadow, either, which reinforced my suspicion that he had been either some perfectly normal guy from the estate out for a walk, or else Damien’s imaginary friend. You get people like this in every investigation, people who end up wasting huge amounts of your time with their compulsion to say whatever they think you want to hear. The archaeologists from Dublin—Damien, Sean and a handful of others—had all been at home on Monday and Tuesday nights; the rest had been in their rented house, a couple of miles from the dig. Hunt, who of course turned out to be pretty lucid on anything archaeological, had been home in Lucan with his wife. He confirmed the large reporter’s theory that the stone where Katy had been dumped was a Bronze Age sacrificial altar.

  “We can’t be sure whether the sacrifices were human or animal, naturally, although the . . . um . . . the shape certainly suggests they may have been human. The right dimensions, you know. Very rare artifact. It implies that this hill was a site of immense religious importance in the Bronze Age, yes?

  Such a terrible shame . . . this road.”

  “Have you found anything else to suggest this?” I asked. If he had, it would be months before we could disentangle our case from the mediaversus-New-Age frenzy. Hunt gave me a wounded look. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.

  He was the last interview. As we were putting our stuff away, the boy tech knocked on the door of the Portakabin and stuck his head in. “Um,”

  he said. “Hi. Sophie says to tell you we’re finishing up for today and there’s one more thing you might want to see.”

  They’d packed up the markers and left the altar stone alone in its field again, and at first the whole site looked deserted; the reporters had long since moved on, and all the archaeologists had gone home except Hunt, who was clambering into a muddy red Ford Fiesta. Then we came out from among the Portakabins, and I saw a flash of white between the trees. The familiar, uneventful routine of the interviews had settled my mood considerably (Cassie calls these preliminary background interviews the nuthin’ stage of a case: nobody saw nuthin’, nobody heard nuthin’, nobody In the Woods 57

  did nuthin’), but still I felt something zip down my spine as we stepped into the wood. Not fear: more like the sudden shot of alertness when someone wakes you by calling your name, or when a bat shrills past just too high to be heard. The undergrowth was thick and soft, years of fallen leaves sinking under my feet, and the trees grew heavily enough to filter the light into a restless green glow.

  Sophie and Helen were waiting for us in a tiny clearing, maybe a hundred yards in. “I left it for you to take a look at,” Sophie said, “but I want to bag all this shit before the light starts going. I’m not setting up the lighting rig.”

  Someone had been using the place as a campsite. A sleeping-bag-sized patch had been cleared of sharp branches, and the layers of leaves were pressed flat; a few yards away were the remains of a campfire, in a wide circle of bare earth. Cassie whistled.

  “Is this our kill site?” I asked, without much hope: for that, Sophie would have interrupted the interviews.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “We’ve done a fingertip search: no signs of a struggle and not a drop of blood—there’s a big spill of something near the fire, but it tests negative, and from the smell I’m pretty sure it’s red wine.”

  “That’s one up-market camper,” I said, raising my eyebrows. I had been picturing some bucolic homeless guy, but market forces mean that “wino,”

  in Ireland, is a metaphorical term: your average down-and-out alcoholic goes for hard cider or cheap vodka. I wondered briefly about a couple, with an adventurous streak or nowhere else to go, but the flattened patch was barely wide enough for one person. “Find anything else?”

  “We’ll go through the ash in case someone was burning bloody clothes or something, but it looks like straight wood. We’ve got boot prints, five cigarette butts and this.” Sophie handed me a Ziploc bag labeled in felt-tip. I held it up to the shifting light, and Cassie tiptoed to look over my shoulder: a single long, fair, wavy hair. “Found it near the fire,” Sophie said, and jerked her thumb at a plastic evidence marker.

  “Any idea how recently this place was used?” Cassie asked.

  “The ash hasn’t been rained on. I’ll check rainfall for this area, but I know where I live it rained early Monday morning, and I’m only about two miles away. It looks like someone stayed here either last night or the night before.”

  “Can I see those cigarette butts?” I asked.

  58

  Tana French

  “Be my guest,” said Sophie. I found a mask and tweezers in my case and squatted by one of the markers near the fire. The butt was from a rollie, made thin and smoked down low; someone was being careful with tobacco.

  “Mark Hanly smokes rollies,” I said, straightening up. “And has long fair hair.”

  Cassie and I looked at each other. It was past six o’clock, O’Kelly would be on the phone demanding a briefing any minute, and the conversation we needed to have with Mark was likely to take awhile, even assuming we could disentangle the side roads and find the archaeologists’ house.

  “Forget it, let’s talk to him tomorrow,” Cassie said. “I want to go see the ballet teacher on the way in. And I’m starving.”

  “It’s like having a puppy,” I told Sophie. Helen looked shocked.

  “Yes, but a p
edigree one,” Cassie said cheerfully.

  As we headed back across the site towards the car (my shoes were a mess, just like Mark had said they would be—there was red-brown muck grained into every seam—and they had been fairly nice shoes; I comforted myself with the thought that the killer’s footwear would be in the same unmistakable condition), I looked back at the wood and saw that flutter of white again: Sophie and Helen and the boy tech, moving back and forth among the trees as silently and intently as ghosts.

  4

  The Cameron Dance Academy was above a video shop in Stillorgan. On the street outside, three kids in baggy trousers were flipping skateboards on and off a low wall and yelling. The assistant teacher—an extremely pretty young woman called Louise, in a black leotard and black pointe shoes and a full, calf-length black skirt; Cassie gave me an amused look as we followed her up the stairs—let us in and told us Simone Cameron was just finishing up a class, so we waited on the landing. Cassie drifted over to a cork notice-board on the wall, and I looked around. There were two dance studios, with little round windows in the doors: in one, Louise was showing a bunch of toddlers how to be butterflies or birds or something; in the other, a dozen little girls in white leotards and pink tights were crossing the floor in pairs, in a series of jumps and twirls, to the “Valse des Fleurs” on an old scratchy record player. As far as I could tell there was, to put it mildly, a wide range of ability. The woman teaching them had white hair pulled back in a tight bun, but her body was as spare and straight as a young athlete’s; she was wearing the same black outfit as Louise and holding a pointer, tapping at the girls’ ankles and shoulders and calling instructions.

  “Look at this,” Cassie said quietly.

  The poster showed Katy Devlin, though it took me a second to recognize her. She was wearing a gauzy white smock and had one leg raised behind her in an effortless, impossible arc. Below her it said, in a large font, “Send Katy to the Royal Ballet School! Help Her Make Us Proud!” and gave the details of the fund-raiser: St. Alban’s Parish Hall, 20 June, 7:00 p.m., An Evening of Dance with the Pupils of the Cameron Dance Academy. Tickets a10/a 7. All Proceeds will Go to Pay Katy’s Fees. I wondered what would happen to the money now.

  Under the poster was a newspaper clipping, with an arty soft-focus shot of Katy at the barre; her eyes, in the mirror, gazed out at the photographer with an ageless, intent gravity. dublin’s tiny dancer takes wing, The Irish 60

  Tana French

  Times, 23 June: “ ‘I guess I’ll miss my family, but I still can’t wait,’ Katy says. ‘I’ve wanted to be a dancer ever since I was six. I can’t believe I’m really going. Sometimes when I wake up I think maybe I dreamed it.’ ” No doubt the article had brought in donations towards Katy’s fees—another thing we’d have to check up on—but it had done us no favors at all: pedophiles read morning papers, too, and it was an eye-catching photo, and the field of potential suspects had just widened to include most of the country. I glanced at the other notices: tutu for sale, size 7–8; would anyone living in the Blackrock area be interested in setting up a carpool to and from the intermediate class?

  The studio door opened and a flood of matching little girls streamed past us, all chattering and shoving and shrieking at once. “Can I help you?”

  Simone Cameron asked, in the doorway.

  She had a beautiful voice, deep as a man’s without being in the least mannish, and she was older than I had thought: her face was bony and deeply, intricately lined. I realized that she probably took us for parents coming to ask about dance classes for our daughter, and for a moment I had a wild impulse to play along with it, ask about fees and schedules and go away, leave her her illusion and her star pupil a little longer.

  “Ms. Cameron?”

  “Simone, please,” she said. She had extraordinary eyes, almost golden, huge and heavy-lidded.

  “I’m Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox,” I said for the thousandth time that day. “Could we speak to you for a few minutes?”

  She brought us into the studio and set out three chairs in a corner. A mirror took up the whole of one long wall, three barres running along it at different heights, and I kept catching my own movements out of the corner of my eye. I angled my chair so I couldn’t see it.

  I told Simone about Katy—it was definitely my turn to do this part. I had expected her to cry, I think, but she didn’t: her head went back a little and the lines in her face seemed to get even deeper, but that was all.

  “You saw Katy in class on Monday evening, didn’t you?” I said. “How did she seem?”

  Very few people can hold a silence, but Simone Cameron was unusual: she waited, not moving, one arm thrown over the back of her chair, until she was ready to speak. After a long time she said, “Very much as usual. Slightly overexcited—it was a few minutes before she could settle and concentrate—

  In the Woods 61

  but this was natural: she was to leave for the Royal Ballet School in a few weeks. She’d been growing more and more excited about it all summer.” She turned her head away, very slightly. “She missed her class yesterday evening, but I simply assumed she was ill again. If I had rung her parents . . .”

  “By yesterday evening she was dead,” Cassie said gently. “There was nothing you could have done.”

  “Ill again?” I asked. “Had she been ill recently?”

  Simone shook her head. “Not recently, no. But she isn’t a strong child.”

  Her eyelids dropped for a moment, hooding her eyes: “Wasn’t.” Then she looked up at me again. “I’ve taught Katy for six years now. For several of those years, beginning when she was perhaps nine, she was ill very often. So was her sister Jessica, but her illnesses were colds, coughs—she, I think, is simply delicate. Katy suffered from periods of vomiting, diarrhea. Sometimes it was serious enough to need hospitalization. The doctors thought it was some form of chronic gastritis. She should have gone to the Royal Ballet School last year, you know, but she had an acute attack at the end of the summer, and they operated on her to find out more; by the time she recovered, it was too far into the term for her to catch up. She had to reaudition this spring.”

  “But recently these attacks had disappeared?” I asked. We would need Katy’s medical records, fast.

  Simone smiled, remembering; it was a small, wrenching thing, and her eyes flicked away from us. “I was worried about whether she would be healthy enough for the training—dancers can’t afford to miss many classes through illness. When Katy was accepted again this year, I kept her after class one day and warned her that she would have to keep seeing a doctor, to find out what was wrong. Katy listened, and then she shook her head and said—very solemnly, like a vow—‘I’m not going to get sick any more.’ I tried to impress upon her that this wasn’t something she could ignore, that her career might depend on this, but that was all she would say. And, in fact, she hasn’t been ill since. I thought perhaps she had simply outgrown whatever it was; but the will can be a powerful thing, and Katy is—was—strong-willed.”

  The other class was letting out; I heard parents’ voices on the landing, another rush of small feet and chatter. “You taught Jessica as well?” Cassie said. “Did she audition for the Royal Ballet School?”

  In the early stages of an investigation, unless you have an obvious suspect, all you can do is find out as much about the victim’s life as possible 62

  Tana French

  and hope something sets off alarm bells; and I was pretty sure Cassie was right, we needed to know more about the Devlin family. And Simone Cameron wanted to talk. We see this a lot, people desperate to keep talking because when they stop we will leave and they will be left alone with what has happened. We listen and nod and sympathize, and file away everything they say.

  “I taught all three of the sisters, at one time or another,” Simone said.

  “Jessica seemed quite competent when she was younger, and she worked hard, but as she grew she became cripplingly self-conscious, to
the point where any individual exercises seemed to be a painful ordeal for her. I told her parents I thought it would be better if she didn’t have to go through this any more.”

  “And Rosalind?” Cassie asked.

  “Rosalind had some talent, but she lacked application and wanted instant results. After a few months she switched to, I believe, violin lessons. She said it was by her parents’ choice, but I thought it was because she was bored. We see this quite often with young children: when they aren’t immediately proficient, and when they realize how much hard work is involved, they become frustrated and leave. Frankly, neither of them would ever have been Royal Ballet School material in any case.”