In the Woods

by Tana French

  “What did you say?” Cassie asked Sam.

  “I said yes, of course,” he said serenely, trying to wind fettuccine onto In the Woods 189

  his fork. “I’d’ve said yes if he’d asked me did I believe little green men were running the country.”

  Kiely had drunk his third round—Sam was going to have fun trying to get this one through expenses—in silence, chin sunk on his chest. Finally he had put on his coat, shaken Sam’s hand in a long, fervent grasp, murmured,

  “Don’t look at it until you’re in a safe place,” and swept out of the pub, leaving a twist of paper in Sam’s palm.

  “The poor bastard,” Sam said, rummaging in his wallet. “I think he was grateful to have someone listen to him for once. The way he is, he could shout a story from the rooftops and no one would believe a word of it.” He extracted something tiny and silver, holding it carefully between finger and thumb, and passed it to Cassie. I put down my fork and leaned in over her shoulder.

  It was a piece of silver paper, the kind you pull out of a fresh cigarette packet, rolled into a tight, precise scroll. Cassie opened it out. On the back was written, in crabbed, smudged black felt-tip: “Dynamo—Kenneth McClintock. Futura—Terence Andrews. Global—Jeffrey Barnes & Conor Roche.”

  “Are you sure he’s reliable?” I asked.

  “Mad as a brush,” Sam said, “but he’s a good reporter, or he used to be. I’d say he wouldn’t have given me these unless he was sure of them.”

  Cassie ran her fingertip over the scrap of paper. “If these check out,” she said, “this is the best lead we’ve got so far. Fair play, Sam.”

  “He got into a car, you know,” Sam said, sounding faintly worried. “I didn’t know whether to let him drive, after all that drink, but . . . I might need to talk to him again, sure; I need to keep him on side. I wonder should I ring and see did he get home OK?”

  The next day was Friday, two and a half weeks into the investigation, and early that evening O’Kelly called us into his office. Outside the day was crisp and biting, but sun was streaming through the big windows and the incident room was warm, so that from inside you could almost believe it was still summer. Sam was in his corner, scribbling between hushed phone calls; Cassie was running someone through the computer; I and a couple of floaters had just done a coffee run and were passing out mugs. The room had the intent, busy murmur of a classroom. O’Kelly put his head around 190

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  the door, stuck a finger-and-thumb circle into his mouth and whistled shrilly; when the murmur died away, he said, “Ryan, Maddox, O’Neill,”

  jerked his thumb over his shoulder and slammed the door behind him. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the floaters exchanging covert eyebrow-raises. We had been expecting this for a couple of days now, or at least I had. I had been rehearsing the scene in my head on the drives to work and in the shower and even in my sleep, waking myself up arguing. “Tie,” I said to Sam, motioning; his knot always edged its way towards one ear when he was concentrating.

  Cassie took a quick swig of her coffee and blew out a breath. “OK,” she said. “Let’s go.” The floaters went back to whatever they had been doing, but I could feel their eyes following us, all the way out of the room and down the corridor.

  “So,” O’Kelly said, as soon as we got into his office. He was already sitting behind his desk, fiddling with some awful chrome executive toy left over from the eighties. “How’s Operation What-d’you-call-it going?”

  None of us sat down. We gave him an elaborate exegesis of what we had done to find Katy Devlin’s killer, and why it hadn’t worked. We were talking too fast and too long, repeating ourselves, going into details he already knew: we could all feel what was coming, and none of us wanted to hear it.

  “Sounds like you’ve all the bases covered, all right,” O’Kelly said, when we finally ran down. He was still playing with his horrible little toy, click click click. . . . “Got a prime suspect?”

  “We’re leaning towards the parents,” I said. “One or the other of them.”

  “Which means you’ve nothing solid on either one.”

  “We’re still investigating, sir,” Cassie said.

  “And I’ve four main men for the threatening phone calls,” Sam said. O’Kelly glanced up. “I’ve read your reports. Watch where you step.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Grand,” O’Kelly said. He put down the chrome thing. “Keep at it. You don’t need thirty-five floaters for that.”

  Even though I had been expecting it, it still hit me with a thud. The floaters had never really stopped making me edgy, but all the same: giving them up felt so horribly significant, such an irrevocable first step of retreat. Another few weeks, this meant, and O’Kelly would be putting us back into the rota, giving us new cases, Operation Vestal would become something we worked in scraps of free time; a few months more and Katy would be In the Woods 191

  relegated to the basement and the dust and the cardboard boxes, dragged out every year or two if we got a good new lead. Someone would do a cheesy documentary on her, with a breathy voiceover and creepy credit music to make it clear that the case remained unsolved. I wondered whether Kiernan and McCabe had listened to these same words in this room, probably from someone playing with the same pointless toy.

  O’Kelly felt the mutiny in our silence. “What,” he said. We gave it our best shot, our most earnest, most eloquent prepared speeches, but even as I was speaking I knew it was no good. I prefer not to remember most of what I said; I’m sure by the end I was babbling. “Sir, we always knew this wasn’t going to be a slam-dunk case,” I finished. “But we’re getting there, bit by bit. I really think it would be a mistake to drop it now.”

  “Drop it?” O’Kelly demanded, outraged. “When did you hear me say anything about dropping it? We’re dropping nothing. We’re scaling back, is all.”

  Nobody answered. He leaned forward and steepled his fingers on the desk. “Lads,” he said, more softly, “this is simple cost-benefit analysis. You’ve got the good out of the floaters. How many people have ye left to interview?”

  Silence.

  “And how many calls did the tip line get today?”

  “Five,” Cassie said, after a moment. “So far.”

  “Any of them any good?”

  “Probably not.”

  “There you go.” O’Kelly spread his hands. “Ryan, you said yourself this isn’t a slam-dunk case. That’s just what I’m telling you: there are quick cases and slow cases, and this one’ll take time. Meanwhile, though, we’ve had three new murders since, there’s some class of a drug war going on up the north side, and I’ve people ringing me left and right wanting to know what I’m doing with every floater in Dublin town. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  I did, all too well. Whatever else I may say about O’Kelly, I have to give him this: an awful lot of supers would have taken this one away from Cassie and me, right at the beginning. Ireland is still, basically, a small town; usually we have a fair idea whodunit almost from the start, and most of the time and effort goes not into identifying him but into building a case that will stick. Over the first few days, as it became clear that Operation Vestal 192

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  was going to be an exception and a high-profile one at that, O’Kelly must have been tempted to send us back to our taxi-rank brats and hand it over to Costello or one of the other thirty-year guys. I don’t generally think of myself as naïve, but when he hadn’t, I had put it down to some stubborn, grudging loyalty—not to us personally, but to us as members of his squad. I had liked the thought. Now I wondered if there might have been more to it than that: if some battle-scarred sixth sense of his had known, all along, that this one was doomed.

  “Keep one or two of them,” O’Kelly said, magnanimously. “For the tip line and legwork and that. Who do you want?”

  “Sweeney and O’Gorman,” I said. I had a fairly good handle on the names by this time, but at that mome
nt those were the only two I could remember.

  “Go home,” O’Kelly said. “Take the weekend off. Go for a few pints, get some sleep—Ryan, your eyes are like piss-holes in the snow. Spend some time with your girlfriends or whatever you’ve got. Come back on Monday and start fresh.”

  Out in the corridor, we didn’t look at one another. Nobody made any move to go back to the incident room. Cassie leaned against the wall and scuffed up the carpet pile with the toe of her shoe.

  “He’s right, in a way,” Sam said finally. “We’ll be grand on our own, so we will.”

  “Don’t, Sam,” I said. “Just don’t.”

  “What?” Sam asked, puzzled. “Don’t what?” I looked away.

  “It’s the idea of it,” Cassie said. “We shouldn’t be snookered on this case. We’ve the body, the weapon, the . . . We should have someone by now.”

  “Well,” I said, “I know what I’m going to do. I am going to find the nearest non-horrible pub and get absolutely legless. Anyone joining me?”

  We went to Doyle’s, in the end: overamplified eighties music and too few tables, suits and students shouldering at the bar. None of us had any desire to go to a police pub where, inevitably, everyone we met would want to know how Operation Vestal was going. On about the third round, as I was coming back from the men’s room, I bumped elbows with a girl and her drink In the Woods 193

  splashed over, splattering us both. It was her fault—she had reared back laughing at something one of her friends had said, and knocked straight into me—but she was extremely pretty, the tiny ethereal type I always go for, and she gave me a soft appreciative look while we were both apologizing and comparing damage, so I bought her another drink and struck up a conversation. Her name was Anna and she was doing a Master’s in art history; she had a cascade of fair hair that made me think of warm beaches, and one of those floaty white cotton skirts, and a waist I could have got my hands around. I told her I was a professor of literature, over from a university in England to do research on Bram Stoker. She sucked on the rim of her glass and laughed at my jokes, showing little white teeth with an engaging overbite. Behind her, Sam grinned and raised an eyebrow and Cassie did a panting, puppy-eyed impression of me, but I didn’t care. It had been a ridiculously long time since I had slept with anyone and I badly wanted to go home with this girl, sneak giggling into some student flat with art posters on the walls, wind that extravagant hair round my fingers and let my mind shimmer into blankness, lie in her sweet safe bed all night and most of tomorrow and not once think about either of these fucking cases. I put a hand on Anna’s shoulder to guide her out of the way of a guy precariously maneuvering four pints, and gave Cassie and Sam the finger behind her back.

  The tide of people threw us closer and closer. We had got off the subject of our respective studies—I wished I knew more about Bram Stoker—and were on to the Aran Islands (Anna and a bunch of friends, the previous summer; the beauties of nature; the joy of escaping urban life in all its superficiality), and she had started touching my wrist to emphasize her points, when one of her friends detached himself from the howling group and came over to stand behind her.

  “You all right, Anna?” he demanded ominously, putting an arm around her waist and giving me a bullocky stare.

  Out of his line of vision, Anna rolled her eyes at me, with a conspiratorial little smile. “Everything’s fine, Cillian,” she said. I didn’t think he was her boyfriend—she hadn’t been acting taken, at any rate—but if he wasn’t then he clearly wanted to be. He was a big guy, handsome in a heavy-set way; he had obviously been drinking for some time and was itching for an excuse to invite me to take it outside.

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  For a moment I actually considered it. You heard the lady, pal, go back to your little buddies. . . . I glanced over at Sam and Cassie: they had given up on me and were deep in an intent conversation, heads bent close to hear through the noise, Sam illustrating something with a finger on the table. I was suddenly, viciously sick of myself and my professorial alter ego, and, by association, of Anna and whatever game she was playing with me and this Cillian guy. “I should get back to my girlfriend,” I said, “sorry again for spilling your drink,” and turned away from the startled pink O of her mouth and the confused, reflexive flare of belligerence in Cillian’s eyes. I slipped my arm around Cassie’s shoulders for a moment as I sat down, and she gave me a suspicious look. “Get shot down?” Sam asked.

  “Nah,” said Cassie. “I’m betting he changed his mind and told her he had a girlfriend. Hence the touchy-feely stuff. Next time you pull that one, Ryan, I’m gonna snog the face off Sam and let your lady friend’s mates beat you up for messing with her head.”

  “Deadly,” Sam said happily. “I like this game.”

  At closing time, Cassie and I went back to her flat. Sam had gone home, it was a Friday and we didn’t have to get up the next morning; there seemed no reason to do anything but lie on the sofa, drinking and occasionally changing the music and letting the fire burn down to a whispering glow.

  “You know,” said Cassie idly, fishing a piece of ice out of her glass to chew on, “what we’ve been forgetting is that kids think differently.”

  “What are you on about?” We had been talking about Shakespeare, something to do with the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and my mind was still there. I half-thought she was going to come up with some late-night analogy between the way children think and the way people thought in the sixteenth century, and I was already preparing a rebuttal.

  “We’ve been wondering how he got her to the kill site—no, knock it off and listen.” I was shoving at her leg with my foot and whining, “Shut up, I’m off duty, I can’t hear you, la la la. . . .” I was hazy with vodka and lateness and I had decided I was sick of this frustrating, tangled, intractable case. I wanted to talk about Shakespeare some more, or maybe play cards.

  “When I was eleven a guy tried to molest me,” Cassie said. I stopped kicking and lifted my head to look at her. “What?” I asked, a In the Woods 195

  little too carefully. This, I thought, this, finally, was Cassie’s secret locked room, and I was at last going to be invited in.

  She glanced over at me, amused. “No, he didn’t actually do anything to me. It was no big deal.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling silly and, obscurely, a little miffed. “What happened, then?”

  “Our school was going through this craze for marbles—everyone played marbles all the time, all through lunch, after school. You carried them around in a plastic bag and it was a big thing, how many you had. So this one day I’d been kept after school—”

  “You? I’m astounded,” I said. I rolled over and found my glass. I wasn’t sure where this story was going.

  “Fuck off; just because you were Prefect Perfect. Anyway I was leaving, and one of the staff—not a teacher; a groundskeeper or a cleaning guy or something—came out of this little shed and said, ‘Do you want marbles?

  Come on in here and I’ll give you marbles.’ He was an old guy, maybe sixty, with white hair and a big mustache. So I sort of edged around the door of the shed for a while, and then I went in.”

  “God, Cass. You silly, silly thing,” I said. I took another sip, put down my glass and pulled her feet into my lap to rub them.

  “No, I told you, nothing happened. He went behind me and put his hands through under my arms, like he was going to lift me up, only then he started messing with the buttons on my shirt. I said, ‘What are you doing?’

  and he said, ‘I keep my marbles up on that shelf. I’m going to pick you up so you can get them.’ I knew something was very badly wrong, even though I had no idea what, so I twisted away and said, ‘I don’t want any marbles,’

  and legged it home.”

  “You were lucky,” I said. She had slim, high-arched feet; even through the soft thick socks she wore at home, I could feel the tendons, the small bones moving under my thumbs. I pictured her at eleven,
all knees and bitten nails and solemn brown eyes.

  “Yeah, I was. God knows what could’ve happened.”

  “Did you tell anyone?” I still wanted more from the story; I wanted to extract some rending revelation, some terrible, shameful secret.

  “No. I felt too icky about the whole thing, and anyway I didn’t even know what to tell. That’s the point: it never occurred to me that it had anything to 196

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  do with sex. I knew about sex, my friends and I talked about it all the time, I knew something was wrong, I knew he was trying to undo my shirt, but I never put it together. Years later, when I was like eighteen, something reminded me of it—I saw some kids playing marbles, or something—and it suddenly hit me: Oh, my God, that guy was trying to molest me!”

  “And this has what to do with Katy Devlin?” I asked.

  “Kids don’t connect things in the same ways grown-ups do,” said Cassie.

  “Give me your feet and I’ll do them.”

  “I wouldn’t. Can’t you see the smell-waves off my socks?”

  “God, you’re disgusting. Don’t you ever change them?”

  “When they stick to the wall. In accordance with bachelor tradition.”

  “That’s not tradition. That’s reverse evolution.”

  “Go on, then,” I said, unfolding my feet and shoving them at her.

  “No. Get a girlfriend.”

  “What are you wittering about now?”

  “Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.”

  All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.”

  “Look who’s talking,” I said, realizing as I spoke that I had no idea how much action Cassie got. There had been a semi-serious boyfriend before I knew her, a barrister called Aidan, but he had somehow faded from the scene around the time she joined Drugs; relationships seldom survive undercover work. Obviously I would have known if she’d had a boyfriend since, and I like to think I would have known if she’d even been dating someone, whatever that means, but beyond that I had no idea. I had always assumed that was because there was nothing to know, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. I glanced encouragingly at Cassie, but she was kneading my heel and giving me her best enigmatic smile.