In the Woods

by Tana French

  “No,” she said sharply, with what sounded like disapproval in her voice.

  “I wanted to talk to you because . . .” She turned the cup in circles in her 150

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  lap. “I felt like you cared, Detective Ryan. About Katy. Your partner didn’t really seem to care, but you—you’re different.”

  “Of course we both care,” I said. I wanted to put a reassuring arm around her, or a hand on hers, or something, but I’ve never been good at that stuff.

  “Oh, I know, I know. But your partner . . .” She gave me a selfdeprecating little smile. “I guess I’m a bit scared of her. She’s so aggressive.”

  “My partner?” I said, startled. “Detective Maddox?” Cassie has always been the one with a reputation for being good with the families. I get stiff and tongue-tied, but she always seems to know the right thing to say and the gentlest way to say it. Some families still send her sad, valiant, grateful little cards at Christmas.

  Rosalind’s hands fluttered helplessly. “Oh, Detective Ryan, I don’t mean it in a bad way. Being aggressive is a good thing, isn’t it—especially in your job? And I’m probably much too sensitive. It was just how she went on at my parents—I know she had to ask all those questions, but it was the way she asked them, so coldly . . . Jessica was really upset. And she was smiling at me like it was all . . . Katy’s death wasn’t a joke, Detective Ryan.”

  “Very far from it,” I said. I was mentally skimming through that awful session in the Devlins’ sitting room, trying to work out what the hell Cassie had done to get this kid so upset. The only thing I could think of was that she had given Rosalind an encouraging smile, when she sat her down on the sofa. In retrospect, I supposed that could have been a little inappropriate, although hardly enough to warrant this kind of reaction. Shock and grief often do make people overreact in skewed, illogical ways; but still, this level of jumpiness strengthened my feeling that there was something up in that house. “I’m sorry if we gave the impression—”

  “No, oh no, not you—you were wonderful. And I know Detective Maddox can’t have meant to seem so—so harsh. Really, I do. Most aggressive people are just trying to be strong, aren’t they? They just don’t want to be insecure, or needy, or anything like that. They’re not actually cruel, underneath.”

  “No,” I said, “probably not.” I had a hard time thinking of Cassie as needy; but then, I had never thought of her as aggressive, either. I realized, with a sudden small shot of unease, that I had no way of knowing how Cassie came across to other people. It was like trying to tell whether your sister is pretty, or something: I could no more be objective about her than about myself.

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  “Have I offended you?” Rosalind looked up at me nervously, pulling at a ringlet. “I have. I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I’m always putting my foot in it. I open my silly mouth and everything just comes out, I never learn—”

  “No,” I said, “it’s fine. I’m not offended at all.”

  “You are. I can tell.” She threw her shawl more closely around her shoulders and flipped her hair out from under it, her face tight and withdrawn. I knew if I lost her now I might never have another chance. “Honestly,”

  I said, “I’m not. I was just thinking about what you said. It’s very insightful.”

  She played with the fringe of the shawl, not meeting my eyes. “But isn’t she your girlfriend?”

  “Detective Maddox? No no no,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

  “But I thought from the way she—” She clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Oh, there I go again! Stop, Rosalind!”

  I laughed; I couldn’t help it, we were both trying so hard. “Come on,”

  I said. “Take a deep breath and we’ll start over.”

  Slowly, she relaxed back onto the bench. “Thank you, Detective Ryan. But, please . . . just . . . what exactly happened to Katy? I keep imagining, you see . . . I can’t bear not knowing.”

  And so (because what could I say to that?) I told her. She didn’t faint or go into hysterics, or even burst into tears. She listened in silence, with her eyes—blue eyes, the color of faded denim—fixed on mine. When I had finished she put her fingers to her lips and stared out into the sunshine, at the neat patterns of hedges, the office workers with their plastic containers and gossip. I patted her shoulder awkwardly. The shawl was cheap stuff, once you touched it, prickly and synthetic, and the childish, pathetic gallantry of it went to my heart. I wanted to say something to her, something wise and profound about how few deaths can match the refined agony of being the one left behind, something that she could remember when she was alone and sleepless and uncomprehending in her room; but I couldn’t find the words.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “So she wasn’t raped?”

  There was a flat, hollow note in her voice. “Drink your coffee,” I said, with some obscure notion about hot drinks being good for shock.

  “No, no . . .” She waved her hand distractedly. “Tell me. She wasn’t raped?”

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  “Not exactly, no. And she was already dead, you know. She didn’t feel a thing.”

  “She didn’t suffer much?”

  “Hardly at all. She was knocked out almost immediately.”

  Suddenly Rosalind bent her head over the coffee cup, and I saw her lips quivering. “I feel awful about it, Detective Ryan. I feel as if I should have protected her better.”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “But I should have known. I should have been there, not having fun with my cousins. I’m a terrible sister, aren’t I?”

  “You are not responsible for Katy’s death,” I said firmly. “It sounds to me as though you were a wonderful sister to her. There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “But—” She stopped, shook her head.

  “But what?”

  “Oh . . . I should have known. That’s all. Never mind.” She smiled tentatively up at me, through her hair. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “My turn,” I said. “Can I ask you a couple of things?”

  She looked apprehensive, but she took a deep breath and nodded.

  “Your father said Katy wasn’t into boys yet,” I said. “Is that true?”

  Her mouth opened, then closed again. “I don’t know,” she said, in a small voice.

  “Rosalind, I know this isn’t easy for you. But if she was, we need to know.”

  “Katy was my sister, Detective Ryan. I don’t want to . . . to say things about her.”

  “I know,” I said gently. “But the best thing you can do for her now is to tell me anything that might help me find her killer.”

  Finally she sighed, a tremulous little breath. “Yes,” she said. “She liked boys. I don’t know who, exactly, but I heard her and her friends teasing each other—about boyfriends, you know, and who they’d kissed. . . .”

  The thought of twelve-year-olds kissing startled me, but I remembered Katy’s friends, those knowing, disconcerting little girls. Maybe Peter and Jamie and I had just been backwards. “Are you positive? Your father seemed pretty sure.”

  “My father . . .” There was a tiny frown-line between Rosalind’s eyebrows. “My father worshipped Katy. And she . . . sometimes she took ad-In the Woods 153

  vantage of that. She didn’t always tell him the truth. That made me very sad.”

  “OK,” I said. “OK. I understand. You’ve done the right thing by telling me.” She nodded, just a slight inclination of the head. “I need to ask you one more thing. You ran away from home in May, right?”

  The frown deepened. “I didn’t exactly run away, Detective Ryan. I’m not a child. I spent a weekend with a friend.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Karen Daly. You can ask her, if you’d like. I’ll give you her number.”

  “There’s no need,” I said, ambiguously. We had already talked to Karen—a timid, pasty-faced girl, not at al
l what I would have expected a friend of Rosalind’s to be—and she had confirmed that Rosalind had been with her all weekend; but I have a fairly good nose for deception, and I was pretty sure there was something Karen wasn’t telling me. “Your cousin thought you might have spent the weekend with a boyfriend.”

  Rosalind’s mouth tightened into a displeased little line. “Valerie has a dirty mind. I know a lot of other girls do things like that, but I’m not other girls.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not. But your parents didn’t know where you were?”

  “No. They didn’t.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because I didn’t feel like telling them,” she said sharply. Then she glanced up at me and sighed, and her face softened. “Oh, Detective, don’t you ever feel that—that you just need to get away? From everything? That it’s all just too much?”

  “I do,” I said, “yes. So the weekend away wasn’t because anything bad had happened at home? We’ve been told you had a fight with your father. . . .”

  Rosalind’s face clouded over, and she looked away. I waited. After a moment, she shook her head. “No. I . . . nothing like that.”

  My alarm bells were going off again, but her voice had tightened and I didn’t want to push her, not yet. I wonder now, of course, whether I should have; but I can’t see that, in the long run, it would have made any difference to anything at all.

  “I know you’re having a very hard time right now,” I said, “but don’t run away again, OK? If things are getting on top of you, or if you just want to 154

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  talk, give Victim Support a ring, or call me—you have my mobile number, right? I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  Rosalind nodded. “Thank you, Detective Ryan. I’ll remember that.” But her face was withdrawn, subdued, and I had the sense that, in some obscure but critical way, I had let her down.

  Cassie was in the squad room, photocopying statements. “Who was that?”

  “Rosalind Devlin.”

  “Huh,” Cassie said. “What did she say?”

  For some reason, I didn’t feel like telling her the details. “Nothing much. Just that, no matter what Jonathan thought, Katy was into boys. Rosalind didn’t know any names; we’ll need to talk to Katy’s mates again and see if they can give us more. She also said Katy told lies, but then, most kids do.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  Cassie turned from the photocopier, a page in her hand, and gave me a long look I couldn’t read. Then she said, “At least she’s talking to you. You should stay in touch with her; she might open up more as you go.”

  “I did ask her whether there was anything wrong at home,” I said, a little guiltily. “She said no, but I didn’t believe her.”

  “Hmm,” Cassie said, and went back to photocopying.

  But when we talked to Christina and Marianne and Beth again, the next day, they were all adamant: Katy had had no boyfriends and no particular crushes. “We used to tease her about guys sometimes,” Beth said, “but not really, you know? Just messing.” She was a redheaded, cheerful-looking kid, already sprouting boisterous curves, and when her eyes filled with tears she seemed bewildered by them, as if crying was still an unfamiliar thing. She fished in the sleeve of her sweater and pulled out a tattered tissue.

  “She might not have told us, though,” said Marianne. She was the quietest of the bunch, a pale fairy of a girl vanishing into her funky teenage clothes. “Katy’s—Katy was very private about stuff. Like the first time she auditioned for ballet school, we didn’t even know about it till she got accepted, remember?”

  “Um, hel-lo, not the same thing,” Christina said, but she had been cry-In the Woods 155

  ing, too and the stuffed nose took most of the authority off her voice. “We couldn’t exactly have missed a boyfriend.”

  The floaters would re-interview every boy on the estate and in Katy’s class, of course, just in case; but I realized that, at some level, this was exactly what I had been expecting. This case was like an endless, infuriating streetcorner shell game: I knew the prize was in there somewhere, right under my eye, but the game was rigged and the dealer much too fast for me, and every sure-thing shell I turned over came up empty. Sophie rang me as we were leaving Knocknaree, to say that the lab results were back. She was walking somewhere; I could hear the mobile jolting and the fast, decisive taps of her shoes.

  “I’ve got your results on the Devlin kid,” she said. “The lab’s got a sixweek backlog, and you know what they’re like, but I got them to jump this one up the queue. I practically had to sleep with the head geek before he’d do it.”

  My heart rate picked up. “Bless you, Sophie,” I said. “We owe you another one.” Cassie, driving, glanced across at me; I mouthed, “Results.”

  “Tox screen was negative: she wasn’t drugged, drunk or on any medication. She was covered in trace, mostly outdoor stuff—dirt, pollen, the usual. It’s all consistent with the soil composition around Knocknaree, even—this is the good part—even the stuff that was inside her clothes and stuck to the blood. So stuff she didn’t just pick up at the dump site. Lab says there’s some super-rare plant in that wood that doesn’t grow anywhere else nearby—it got the plant geek very turned on, apparently—and the pollen wouldn’t blow more than a mile or so. The odds are she was in Knocknaree the whole time.”

  “That fits with what we have,” I said. “Get to the good stuff.”

  Sophie snorted. “That was the good stuff. The footprints are a dead end: half of them match the archaeologists, and the ones that don’t are too blurry to be any use. Practically all the fibers are consistent with stuff we pulled from the home; a handful of unidentified ones, but nothing distinctive. One hair on the T-shirt matching the idiot who found her, two that match the mother—one on the combats, one on a sock, and she probably does the washing, so no big deal there.”

  “Any DNA? Or fingerprints or anything?”

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  “Ha,” Sophie said. She was eating something crunchy, probably crisps—

  Sophie lives mainly on junk food. “A few bloody partials, but they came off a rubber glove—surprise, surprise. So no epithelials, either. And no semen and no saliva, and no blood that doesn’t match the kid.”

  “Great,” I said, my heart slowly sinking. I had fallen for the con all over again, I had got my hopes up, and I felt suckered and stupid.

  “Except for that old spot Helen found. They got a blood type off it: it’s A positive. Your victim’s O neg.”

  She paused for another mouthful of crisps, while my stomach did something complicated. “What?” she demanded, when I said nothing. “That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? Same as the blood from the old case. OK, so it’s tentative, but at least it’s a link.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I could feel Cassie listening; I turned my shoulder to her.

  “That’s great. Thanks, Sophie.”

  “We’ve sent the swabs and those shoes off for DNA testing,” Sophie said, “but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you. I bet it’s all degraded to fuck. Who stores blood evidence in a basement?”

  Cassie, by unspoken agreement, was following up on the old case while I concentrated on the Devlins. McCabe had died several years before, a heart attack, but she went to see Kiernan. He was retired and living in Laytown, a little commuter village up along the coast. He was well into his seventies, with a ruddy, good-humored face and the comfortably sloppy build of a rugby player gone to seed, but he brought Cassie for a long walk on the wide empty beach, seagulls and curlews screaming, while he told her what he remembered about the Knocknaree case. He seemed happy, Cassie said that evening, as she lit the fire and I spread mustard on ciabatta rolls and Sam poured the wine. He had taken up woodworking, there was sawdust on his soft worn trousers; his wife had wrapped a scarf around his neck and kissed his cheek as he went out.

  He remembered the case, t
hough, every detail. In all Ireland’s brief disorganized history as a nation, fewer than half a dozen children have gone missing and stayed that way, and Kiernan had never been able to forget that two of these had been given into his hands and he had failed them. The search, he told Cassie (a little defensively, she said, as though this was a conversation he had had many times in his mind), had been massive: dogs, In the Woods 157

  helicopters, divers; policemen and volunteers had combed miles of wood and hill and field in every direction, starting at dawn every morning for weeks and going on into the late summer twilights; they had followed leads to Belfast and Kerry and even Birmingham; and all the time a nagging whisper had insisted, in Kiernan’s ear, that they were looking in the wrong directions, that the answer was right in front of them all along.

  “What’s his theory?” Sam asked.

  I flipped the last steak onto its roll and handed round the plates. “Later,”

  Cassie said, to Sam. “Enjoy your sandwich first. How often does Ryan do something that’s worth appreciating?”

  “You are speaking to two talented men here,” I told her. “We can eat and listen, at the same time.” It would have been nice to hear this story in private first, obviously, but by the time Cassie had got back from Laytown it had been too late for that. The thought had already killed my appetite; the thing itself wasn’t going to make much difference. Besides, we always talked about the case over dinner, and today was not going to be any different if I could help it. Sam appears blithely unaware of subtext and emotional cross-currents, but I sometimes wonder if anyone can be quite as oblivious as all that.

  “I’m impressed,” Cassie said. “OK”—her eyes went to me for a second; I looked away—“Kiernan’s theory was that the kids never left Knocknaree. I don’t know if you guys remember this, but there was a third kid. . . .” She leaned sideways to check her notebook, open on the arm of the sofa. “Adam Ryan. He was with the other two that afternoon, and they found him in the wood, a couple of hours into the search. No injuries, but there was blood in his shoes and he was pretty shaken up; he couldn’t remember anything. So Kiernan figured that, whatever happened, it must have been either in the wood or very nearby, otherwise how had Adam got back there? He thought someone—someone local—had been watching them for a while. The guy approached them in the wood, maybe lured them back to his house, and attacked them. Probably he hadn’t planned to kill them; maybe he tried to molest them and something went wrong. At some point during the attack, Adam escaped and ran back into the wood—which probably means they were either in the wood itself, in one of the estate houses that back onto it, or in one of the farmhouses nearby; otherwise he’d have gone home, right?