In the Woods

by Tana French

  “But Katy . . .” Cassie said, leaning forward.

  Simone looked at her for a long time. “Katy was . . . sérieuse.”

  That was what gave her voice some of its distinctive quality: somewhere, far back, there was a touch of French shaping the intonations. “Serious,” I said.

  “More than that,” said Cassie. Her mother was half French, and as a child she spent summers with her grandparents in Provence; she says she’s forgotten most of her spoken French at this point, but she still understands it. “A professional.”

  Simone inclined her head. “Yes. She loved even the hard work—not only for the results it brought, but for its own sake. A real talent for dance is not common; the temperament to make a career of it is much rarer. To find both at once . . .” She looked away again. “Sometimes, on evenings when only one studio was being used, she would ask if she could come in and practice in the other.”

  Outside, the light was beginning to dim towards evening; the skateboard kids’ calls floated up, faint and crystalline through the glass. I thought of In the Woods 63

  Katy Devlin alone in the studio, watching the mirror with detached absorption as she moved in slow spins and dips; the lift of a pointed foot; streetlamps throwing saffron rectangles across the floor, Satie’s Gnossiennes on the crackly record player. Simone seemed pretty sérieuse herself, and I wondered how on earth she had ended up here: above a shop in Stillorgan, with the smell of grease wafting up from the chip shop next door, teaching ballet to little girls whose mothers thought it would give them good posture or wanted framed pictures of them in tutus. I realized, suddenly, what Katy Devlin must have meant to her.

  “How did Mr. and Mrs. Devlin feel about Katy going to ballet school?”

  Cassie asked.

  “They were very supportive,” Simone said, without hesitation. “I was relieved, and also surprised; not every parent is willing to send a child that age away to school, and most, with good reason, are opposed to their children becoming professional dancers. Mr. Devlin, in particular, was very much in favor of Katy going. He was close to her, I think. I admired this, that he wanted what was best for her even if it meant letting her go away.”

  “And her mother?” Cassie said. “Was she close to her?”

  Simone gave a little one-shouldered shrug. “Less, I think. Mrs. Devlin is . . . rather vague. She always seemed bewildered by all of her daughters. I think perhaps she isn’t very intelligent.”

  “Have you noticed anyone strange hanging around in the past few months?” I asked. “Anyone who worried you?” Ballet schools and swimming clubs and scout troops are pedophile magnets. If someone had been looking for a victim, this was the obvious place where he might have spotted Katy.

  “I understand what you mean, but no. We look for this. About ten years ago a man used to sit on a wall up the hill and look into the studio through binoculars. We complained to the police, but they did nothing until he tried to convince one little girl to get into his car. Since then we’re very watchful.”

  “Did anyone take an interest in Katy to a level that you felt was unusual?”

  She thought, shook her head. “No one. Everyone admired her dancing, many people supported the fund-raiser we held to help with her fees, but no one person more than others.”

  “Was there any jealousy of her talent?”

  Simone laughed, a quick hard breath through her nose. “These are not stage parents we have here. They want their daughters to learn a little ballet, 64

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  enough to be pretty; they don’t want them to make a career of it. I’m sure a few of the other little girls were envious, yes. But enough to kill her? No.”

  She looked, suddenly, exhausted; her elegant pose hadn’t changed, but her eyes were glazed with fatigue. “Thank you for your time,” I said. “We’ll contact you if we need to ask you any more questions.”

  “Did she suffer?” Simone asked abruptly. She wasn’t looking at us. She was the first person to ask. I started to give the standard non-answer involving the post-mortem results, but Cassie said, “There’s no evidence of that. We can’t be sure of anything yet, but it seems to have been quick.”

  Simone turned her head with an effort and met Cassie’s eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

  She didn’t get up to see us out, and I realized it was because she wasn’t sure she could do it. As I closed the door I caught a last glimpse of her through the round window, still sitting straight-backed and motionless with her hands folded in her lap: a queen in a fairy tale, left alone in her tower to mourn her lost, witch-stolen princess.

  “ ‘I’m not going to get sick any more,’ ” Cassie said, in the car. “And she stopped getting sick.”

  “Willpower, like Simone said?”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “Or she could have been making herself sick,” I said. “Vomiting and diarrhea are both pretty easy to induce. Maybe she was looking for attention, and once she got into ballet school she didn’t need to any more. She was getting plenty of attention without being sick—newspaper articles, fund-raisers, the lot. . . . I need a cigarette.”

  “Junior Munchausen syndrome?” Cassie reached into the back, dug around in my jacket pockets and found my smokes. I smoke Marlboro Reds; Cassie has no particular brand loyalty but generally buys Lucky Strike Lights, which I consider to be girl cigarettes. She lit two and passed one to me. “Can we pull medical records on the two sisters as well?”

  “Dodgy,” I said. “They’re alive, so there’s confidentiality. If we got the parents’ consent . . .” She shook her head. “Why, what are you thinking?”

  She opened her window a few inches, and the wind blew her hair sideways. “I don’t know. . . . The twin, Jessica—the bunny-in-headlights thing In the Woods 65

  could just be stress from Katy being missing, but she’s way too thin. Even through that big huge woolly thing you could tell she’s half the size of Katy, and Katy was no heifer. And then the other sister . . . There’s something off about her, too.”

  “Rosalind?” I said.

  There must have been something funny in my tone. Cassie shot me an oblique glance. “You liked her.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did,” I said, defensive and not sure why. “She seemed like a nice girl. She’s very protective of Jessica. What, you didn’t?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Cassie said coolly and, I felt, a little unfairly. “Regardless of who likes her, she dresses funny, she wears too much makeup—”

  “She’s well groomed, so there’s something wrong with her?”

  “Please, Ryan, do us both a favor and grow up; you know exactly what I mean. She smiles at inappropriate times, and, as you spotted, she wasn’t wearing a bra.” I had noticed that, but I hadn’t realized that Cassie had as well, and the dig irritated me. “She may well be a very nice girl, but there’s something off there.”

  I didn’t say anything. Cassie threw the rest of her cigarette out the window and dug her hands into her pockets, slumped in her seat like a sulky teenager. I turned on dipped headlights and sped up. I was annoyed with her and I knew she was annoyed with me, too, and I wasn’t sure quite how this had happened.

  Cassie’s mobile rang. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, looking at the screen. “Hello, sir. . . . Hello? . . . Sir? . . . Bloody phones.” She hung up.

  “Reception?” I said coldly.

  “The fucking reception is fine,” she said. “He just wanted to know when we’d be back and what was taking us so long, and I didn’t feel like talking to him.”

  I can usually hold a sulk for much longer than Cassie, but I couldn’t help it, I laughed. After a moment Cassie did, too.

  “Listen,” she said, “I wasn’t being bitchy about Rosalind. More like worried.”

  “Are you thinking sexual abuse?” I realized that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had been wondering about the same thing, but I disliked the thought so much that I had been avoiding
it. One sister oversexual, one 66

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  badly underweight, and one, after various unexplained illnesses, murdered. I thought of Rosalind’s head bent over Jessica’s and felt a sudden, unaccustomed surge of protectiveness. “The father’s abusing them. Katy’s coping strategy is making herself sick, either out of self-hatred or to lessen the chances of abuse. When she gets into ballet school, she decides she needs to be healthy and the cycle has to stop; maybe she confronts the father, threatens to tell. So he kills her.”

  “It plays,” said Cassie. She was watching the trees flash past on the roadside; I could only see the back of her head. “But so does, for example, the mother—if it turns out Cooper was wrong about the rape, obviously. Munchausen by proxy. She seemed way at home in the victim role, did you notice?”

  I had. In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask, but in others it pares people to the essentials (and this is, of course, the real and icy reason why we try to tell families about their losses ourselves, rather than leaving it to the uniforms: not to show how much we care, but to see how they react), and we had borne bad news often enough to know the usual variations. Most people are shocked senseless, struggling for their footing, with no idea how to do this; tragedy is new territory that comes with no guide, and they have to work out, step by dazed step, how to negotiate it. Margaret Devlin had been unsurprised, almost resigned, as though grief was her familiar default state.

  “So basically the same pattern,” I said. “She’s making one or all of the girls sick, when Katy gets into ballet school she tries to put her foot down, and the mother kills her.”

  “It could explain why Rosalind dresses like a forty-year-old, too,” Cassie said. “Trying to be a grown-up to get away from her mother.”

  My mobile rang. “Ah, fuck, man,” we both said, in unison. I did the bad-reception routine, and we spent the rest of the drive making a list of possible lines of inquiry. O’Kelly likes lists; a good one might distract him from the fact that we hadn’t rung him back.

  We work out of the grounds of Dublin Castle, and in spite of all the colonial connotations this is one of my favorite perks of the job. Inside, the rooms have been lovingly refurbished to be exactly like every corporate office in the country—cubicles, fluorescent lighting, staticky carpet and In the Woods 67

  institution-colored walls—but the outsides of the buildings are protected and still intact: old, ornate red brick and marble, with battlements and turrets and worn carvings of saints in unexpected places. In winter, on foggy evenings, crossing the cobblestones is like walking through Dickens—hazy gold streetlamps throwing odd-angled shadows, bells pealing in the cathedrals nearby, every footstep ricocheting into darkness; Cassie says you can pretend you’re Inspector Abberline working on the Ripper murders. Once, on a ringingly clear full-moon night in December, she turned cartwheels straight across the main courtyard.

  There was a light in O’Kelly’s window, but the rest of the building was dark: it was past seven, everyone else had gone home. We sneaked in as quietly as we could. Cassie tiptoed up to the squad room to run Mark and the Devlins through the computer, and I went down to the basement, where we keep the old case files. It used to be a wine cellar, and the crack Corporate Design Squad hasn’t got around to it yet, so it’s still all flagstones and columns and low-arched bays. Cassie and I have a pact to take a couple of candles down there someday, in spite of the electric lighting and in defiance of safety regulations, and spend an evening looking for secret passageways. The cardboard box (Rowan G., Savage P., 33791/84) was exactly as I had left it more than two years before; I doubt anyone had touched it since. I pulled out the file and flipped to the statement Missing Persons had taken from Jamie’s mother and, thank God, there it was: blond hair, hazel eyes, red T-shirt, cut-off denim shorts, white runners, red hair clips decorated with strawberries.

  I shoved the file under my jacket, in case I ran into O’Kelly (there was no reason why I shouldn’t have it, especially now that the link to the Devlin case was definite, but for some reason I felt guilty, furtive, as if I were absconding with some taboo artifact), and went back up to the squad room. Cassie was at her computer; she had left the lights off so O’Kelly wouldn’t spot them.

  “Mark’s clean,” she said. “So’s Margaret Devlin. Jonathan has one conviction, just this February.”

  “Kiddie porn?”

  “Jesus, Ryan. You have a melodramatic mind. No, disturbing the peace: he was protesting about the motorway and crossed a police line. Judge gave him a hundred-quid fine and twenty hours of community service, then 68

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  upped it to forty when Devlin said that as far as he was concerned he had just been arrested for performing a community service.”

  That wasn’t where I’d seen Devlin’s name, then: as I’ve said, I had had only the vaguest idea that the motorway controversy even existed. But it did explain why he hadn’t reported the threatening phone calls. We would not have seemed like allies to him, especially not on anything related to the motorway. “The hair clip’s in the file,” I said.

  “Nice one,” said Cassie, with a shade of a question in her voice. She was shutting down the computer and turned to look at me. “Are you pleased?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. It was, obviously, nice to know that I wasn’t losing my mind and imagining things; but now I was wondering whether I had actually remembered it at all or only seen it in the file, and which of those possibilities I liked less, and wishing I had just kept my mouth shut about the damn thing.

  Cassie waited; in the evening light through the window her eyes looked huge, opaque and watchful. I knew she was giving me a chance to say, Fuck the hair clip, let’s forget we ever found it. Even now the temptation, tired and profitless though it may be, is to wonder what would have happened if I had.

  But it was late, I had had a long day, I wanted to go home, and being handled with kid gloves—even by Cassie—has always made me itch; cutting short this whole line of inquiry seemed like so much more effort than simply leaving it to run its course. “Will you ring Sophie about the blood?”

  I asked. In that dim room, it seemed all right to admit this much weakness at least.

  “Sure,” said Cassie. “Later, though, OK? Let’s go talk to O’Kelly before he has an aneurysm. He texted me while you were in the basement; I didn’t think he even knew how to do that, did you?”

  I rang O’Kelly’s extension and told him we were back, to which he said,

  “About fucking time. What did you do, stop for a quickie?” and then told us to get into his office pronto.

  The office has only one chair apart from O’Kelly’s own, one of those faux-leather ergonomic things. The implication is that you shouldn’t take up too much of his space or time. I sat in the chair, and Cassie perched on a table behind me. O’Kelly gave her an irritated look. In the Woods 69

  “Make it fast,” he said. “I’ve to be somewhere at eight.” His wife had left him the year before; since then the grapevine had picked up a series of awkward attempts at relationships, including one spectacularly unsuccessful blind date where the woman turned out to be an ex-hooker he had arrested regularly in his Vice days.

  “Katharine Devlin, aged twelve,” I said.

  “The ID’s definite, so?”

  “Ninety-nine percent,” I said. “We’ll have one of the parents view the body when the morgue’s patched her up, but Katy Devlin was an identical twin, and the surviving twin looks exactly like our victim.”

  “Leads, suspects?” he snapped. He had a sort of nice tie on, ready for his date, and he was wearing too much cologne; I couldn’t place it, but it smelled expensive. “I’m going to have to give a fucking press conference tomorrow. Tell me you’ve got something.”

  “She was hit over the head and asphyxiated, probably raped,” Cassie said. The fluorescent lighting smudged gray under her eyes. She looked too tired and too young to be saying the words so calmly. �
�We won’t know anything definite till the post-mortem tomorrow morning.”

  “Fucking tomorrow?” O’Kelly said, outraged. “Tell that shite Cooper to give this priority.”

  “Already did, sir,” said Cassie. “He had to be in court this afternoon. He said first thing tomorrow is the best he can do.” (Cooper and O’Kelly hate each other; what Cooper had actually said was, “Kindly explain to Mr. O’Kelly that his cases aren’t the only ones in the world.”) “We’ve identified four primary lines of inquiry, and—”

  “Good, that’s good,” said O’Kelly, grabbing drawers open and rummaging for a pen.

  “First, there’s the family,” said Cassie. “You know the stats, sir: most murdered kids are killed by their parents.”

  “And there’s something odd about that family, sir,” I said. This was my line; we had to get the point across, in case we ever needed a little leeway in investigating the Devlins, but if Cassie had said it O’Kelly would have gone off into a long snide boring routine about women’s intuition. We were good at O’Kelly by this time. Our counterpoint has been polished to the seamlessness of a Beach Boys harmony—we can sense exactly when to swap the roles of front man and backup, good cop and bad cop, when my cool detachment needs to strike a balancing note of gravitas against Cassie’s bright 70

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  ease—and it is for use even against our own. “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something up in that house.”

  “Never ignore a hunch,” said O’Kelly. “Dangerous.” Cassie’s foot, swinging casually, nudged my back.

  “Second,” she said, “we’re going to have to at least check out the possibility of some kind of cult.”

  “Oh, God, Maddox. What, did Cosmo run an article on Satanism this month?” O’Kelly’s disregard for cliché is so sweeping that it almost has its own panache. I find this entertaining or irritating or mildly comforting, depending on my mood, but at least it makes it very easy to prepare your script in advance.

  “I think it’s a load of rubbish, too, sir,” I said, “but we’ve got a murdered little girl on a sacrificial altar. The reporters were asking about it already. We’ll have to eliminate it.” It is, obviously, difficult to prove that something does not exist, and saying it without solid proof just brings out the conspiracy theorists, so we take a different tack. We would spend several hours finding ways in which Katy Devlin’s death didn’t match the putative MO of a hypothetical group (no bloodletting, no sacrificial garment, no occult symbols, yada yada yada), and then O’Kelly, who luckily has absolutely no sense of the absurd, would explain all this to the cameras.