In the Woods

by Tana French

  She drew on her cigarette, hard and fast. She was looking at me, but not quite meeting my eyes; hers were too wide, dilated. I thought of Jessica Devlin’s dazed, narcotized stare. “The night I turned him down, he’d gone straight to these other girls’ flat, girls from our class. He arrived in tears. He told them that he and I had been secretly going out for a while, that he’d 244

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  decided it wasn’t working out, and that I had said if he broke up with me I’d tell everyone he’d raped me. He said I’d threatened to go to the police, the papers, to ruin his life.” She looked for an ashtray, flicked ash, missed. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder why she was telling me this story, why now. This may seem strange, but everything did that month, strange and precarious. The moment when Cassie had said, “We’ll have it,”

  had set in motion some unstoppable tectonic shift; familiar things were cracking open and twisting inside out before my eyes, the world turning beautiful and dangerous as a bright spinning blade. Cassie opening the door to one of her secret rooms seemed like a natural, inevitable part of this massive sea change. In a way, I suppose it was. It was only much later that I understood she had actually been telling me something very specific, if I had just been paying attention.

  “My God,” I said, after a while. “Just because you bruised his ego?”

  “Not just that,” Cassie said. She was wearing a soft cherry-colored sweater and I could see it vibrating, very fast, just above her breast, and I realized my heart was speeding, too. “Because he was bored. Because, by turning him down, I had made it clear that he’d got as much entertainment out of me as he was going to, so this was the only other use he had for me. Because, when you come right down to it, it was fun.”

  “Did you tell this Sarah-Jane what had happened?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cassie said levelly. “I told everyone who would still talk to me. Not one of them believed me. They all believed him—all our classmates, all our mutual acquaintances, which added up to just about everyone I knew. People who were supposed to be my friends.”

  “Oh, Cassie,” I said. I was aching to go over to her, put my arms around her, hold her close until that terrible rigidity melted out of her body and she came back from whatever remote place she had gone to. But the immobility of her, her braced shoulders: I couldn’t tell whether she would welcome it or whether it would be the worst thing I could do. Blame boarding school; blame, if you prefer, some deep-seated character flaw. The fact is that I didn’t know how. I doubt that, in the long run, it would have made any difference; but this only makes me wish even more intensely that, at least for that one moment, I had known what to do.

  “I stuck it out for another couple of weeks,” Cassie said. She lit another cigarette off the end of the old one, something I had never seen her do before.

  “He was always surrounded by this knot of people giving him protective In the Woods 245

  pats and glaring at me. People were coming up to me to tell me that I was the reason why genuine rapists got away with it. One girl said I deserved to be raped so I’d realize what a horrible thing I’d done.”

  She laughed, a small harsh sound. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? A hundred psychology students, and not one of us recognized a classic psychopath. You know the strange thing? I wished I had done everything he claimed I had. If I had, then it would all have made sense: I would have been getting what I deserved. But I hadn’t done any of it, and yet that made absolutely no difference to what happened. There was no such thing as cause and effect. I thought I was losing my mind.”

  I leaned over—slowly, the way you would reach out towards a terrified animal—and took her hand; that much, at least, I managed to do. She gave a quick breath of a laugh, squeezed my fingers, then let them go. “Anyway. Finally he came up to me one day, in the Buttery—all these girls were trying to stop him, but he sort of shook them off bravely and came over to me and said, loud, so they could hear him, ‘Please, stop ringing me in the middle of the night. What have I ever done to you?’ I was completely stunned, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. All I could think of to say was,

  ‘But I haven’t rung you.’ He smiled and shook his head, like, Yeah, right, and then he leaned in and said—just quietly, in this chirpy businesslike voice—

  ‘If I ever did break into your flat and rape you, I don’t think the charges would stick, do you?’ Then he smiled again and went back to his mates.”

  “Hon,” I said finally, carefully, “maybe you should put in an alarm on this place. I don’t want to scare you, but—”

  Cassie shook her head. “And what, never leave the flat again? I can’t afford to start getting paranoid. I’ve got good locks, and I keep my gun beside my bed.” I had noticed that, of course, but there are plenty of detectives who don’t feel right unless they have their guns within reach. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure he’d never actually do it. I know the way he works—

  unfortunately. It’s a lot more fun for him to think that I’m always wondering than to just do it and get it over with.”

  She took a last pull on her cigarette, leaned forward to stub it out. Her spine was so rigid that the movement looked painful. “At the time, though, the whole thing freaked me out enough that I dropped out of college. I went over to France—I’ve got cousins in Lyons, I stayed with them for a year and worked as a waitress in this café. It was nice. That’s where I got the Vespa. Then I came back and applied to Templemore.”

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  “Because of him?”

  She shrugged. “I guess. Probably. So maybe one good thing came out of it. Two: I’ve got good psychopath sensors now. It’s like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you’re supersensitized.” She finished her drink in a long swallow. “I ran into Sarah-Jane last year, in a pub in town. I said hi. She told me he was doing fine, ‘in spite of your best efforts,’ and then walked off.”

  “Is that what your nightmares are about?” I said gently, after a moment. I had woken her from these dreams—flailing at me, gasping incomprehensible spates of words—twice before, when we had worked rape-murders, but she would never tell me the details.

  “Yeah. I dream he’s the guy we’re after, but we can’t prove it, and when he finds out I’m on the case, he . . . Well. He does his thing.”

  I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.

  “What was his name?” I asked. I was desperate to do something, fix this somehow, and running a background check on this guy, trying to find something to arrest him for, was the only thing I could think of to do. And I suppose a small part of me, whether through cruelty or detached curiosity or whatever, had noticed that Cassie refused to say it, and wanted to see what would happen if she did.

  Cassie’s eyes finally focused on mine, and I was shaken by the concentrated, diamond-hard hatred. “Legion,” she said. 14

  W e pulled Jonathan in the next day: I rang him up and asked him, in my best professional voice, if he would mind coming in after work, just to help us out with a few things. Sam had Terence Andrews in the main interview room, the big one with an observation chamber for lineups (“Jesus, Mary and the Seven Dwarves,” O’Kelly said, “all of a sudden we’ve suspects coming out of the woodwork. I should’ve taken away your floaters sooner, got ye three off your lazy arses”), but this was fine with us: we wanted a small room, the smaller the better. We decorated it as carefully as a stage set. Photos of Katy, alive and dead, spanning half a wall; Peter and Jamie and the scary runners and the grazes on my knees across the other half (we had a shot of my broken fingernails, but it made me far more uncomfortable than it could possibly have made Jonathan—my thumbs have a very distinctive turn to them, and already at twelve my hands were almost man-sized�
��and Cassie said nothing when I slid it back into the file); maps and charts and every bit of esoteric-looking paperwork we could find, the blood work, timelines, files and cryptically labeled boxes stacked in corners.

  “That ought to do it,” I said, surveying the final result. It was actually quite impressive, in a nightmarish way.

  “Mmm.” A corner of one of the post-mortem shots was peeling away from the wall, and Cassie absently pressed it back into place. Her hand lingered there for a second, fingertips lying lightly across Katy’s bare gray arm. I knew what she was thinking—if Devlin was innocent, then this was wanton cruelty—but I had no room to worry about this. More often than we like to admit, cruelty comes with the job.

  We had half an hour or so before Devlin got off work, and we were far too antsy to start on anything else. We left our interview room—which was beginning to freak me out a little, all those round watching eyes; I told myself this was a good sign—and went into the observation chamber to see how Sam was getting on.

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  He had been doing his research; Terence Andrews now had a nice big section of whiteboard all to himself. He had studied commerce at UCD, and though his marks had been unimpressive he had apparently gained a firm grasp of the essentials: at twenty-three he had married Dolores Lehane, a Dublin debutante, and her property-developer daddy had set him up in the business. Dolores had left him four years ago and was living in London. The marriage had been childless but hardly unproductive: Andrews had a bustling little empire, concentrated in the greater Dublin area but with outposts in Budapest and Prague, and rumor had it that Dolores’s lawyers and the Revenue knew about less than half of it.

  According to Sam, though, he had got a little overenthusiastic. The flashy executive pad and the pimpmobile (customized silver Porsche, tinted windows, chrome, the whole enchilada) and the golf-club memberships were all bravado: Andrews had barely more actual cash than I did, his bank manager was starting to get restive, and over the past six months he had been selling off bits of his land, still undeveloped, to pay the mortgages on the rest. “If that motorway doesn’t go through Knocknaree, and fast,” Sam said succinctly, “the boy’s banjaxed.”

  I had disliked Andrews well before I knew his name, and I saw nothing that changed my opinion. He was on the short side, balding badly, with beefy, florid features. He had a massive paunch and a squint in one eye, but where most men would have tried to conceal these infirmities he used them as blunt weapons: he wore the belly thrown out in front of him like a status symbol—No cheap Guinness in here, sunshine, this was built by restaurants you couldn’t afford in a million years—and every time Sam got distracted and glanced over his shoulder to see what Andrews was looking at, Andrews’s mouth twitched into a triumphant little smirk.

  He had brought his lawyer with him, of course, and was answering about one question out of ten. Sam had managed, working his way doggedly through a dizzying pile of paperwork, to prove that Andrews owned large amounts of land in Knocknaree; upon which Andrews had quit denying that he’d ever heard of the place. He wouldn’t touch questions about his financial situation, though—he clapped Sam on the shoulder and said genially, “If I were on a cop’s salary, Sam, boy, I’d be more worried about my own finances than anyone else’s,” while the lawyer murmured colorlessly, in the background, “My client cannot disclose any information on that subject”—and both of them were profoundly, smoothly shocked at the mention of the In the Woods 249

  threatening phone calls. I fidgeted and checked my watch every thirty seconds; Cassie leaned against the glass, eating an apple and abstractedly offering me a bite now and then.

  Andrews did, however, have an alibi for the night of Katy’s death, and after a certain amount of aggrieved rhetoric he agreed to provide it. He had been at a poker night in Killiney with a few of “the lads,” and when the game wound up around midnight he had decided not to drive home—“Cops aren’t as understanding as they used to be,” he said, with a wink at Sam—

  and had stayed in the host’s spare room. He gave the names and phone numbers of The Lads, so Sam could confirm this.

  “That’s grand,” Sam said at last. “We’ll just need to do a voice lineup, so we can eliminate you as the source of the phone calls.”

  A wounded expression spread across Andrews’s pudgy features. “I’m sure you realize it’s hard for me to go out of my way for you, Sam,” he said, “after the way I’ve been treated.” Cassie started to giggle.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Andrews,” Sam said gravely. “Could you tell me what aspects of your treatment have been the problem, exactly?”

  “You’ve dragged me in here for most of a business day, Sam, and treated me like a suspect,” Andrews said, his voice swelling and quavering with the injustice of it all. I started to laugh as well. “Now, I know you’re used to dealing with little scumbags with nothing better to do, but you have to realize what this means to a man in my position. I’m missing out on some wonderful opportunities because I’m here helping you out, I may have lost thousands today already, and now you want me to hang around doing some voice what-d’you-call-it for a man I’ve never even heard of?” Sam had been right: he did have a squeaky little tenor voice on him.

  “Sure, we can fix that,” Sam said. “We don’t need to do the voice lineup now. If it suits you better to come back and do it this evening or tomorrow morning, outside business hours, I’ll set it up then. How’s that?”

  Andrews pouted. The lawyer—he was the naturally peripheral type, I don’t even remember what he looked like—raised a tentative finger and requested a moment to confer with his client. Sam turned off the camera and joined us in the observation room, loosening his tie.

  “Hi,” he said. “Exciting watching, yeah?”

  “Riveting,” I said. “It must be even more fun from inside.”

  “I’m telling you. A laugh a minute, this boy. God, did you see that bloody eye? It took me ages to cop on, I thought at first he’d just no attention span—”

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  “Your suspect’s more fun than our suspect,” Cassie said. “Ours doesn’t even have a twitch or anything.”

  “Speaking of whom,” I said, “don’t schedule the lineup for tonight. Devlin’s got a prior appointment, and afterwards, with any luck, he’ll be in no mood for anything else.” If we were really lucky, I knew, the case—both cases—could be over that evening, with no need for Andrews to do anything at all, but I didn’t mention this. Even the thought made my throat tighten irritatingly.

  “God, that’s right,” Sam said. “I forgot. Sorry. We’re getting somewhere, though, aren’t we? Two good suspects in one day.”

  “Damn, we’re good,” Cassie said. “Andrews high five!” She crossed her eyes, swiped at Sam’s hand and missed. We were all very keyed up.

  “If someone hits you on the back of the head you’ll be stuck that way,”

  Sam said. “That’s what happened to Andrews.”

  “Hit him again and see if you can unstick him.”

  “My God, you’re politically incorrect,” I told her. “I’m going to report you to the National Commission for Squinty Bastards’ Rights.”

  “He’s giving me bugger-all,” Sam said. “But that’s grand; I didn’t expect to get much out of him today. All I want is to rattle him a bit, and get him to agree to the voice lineup. Once we have an ID, I can put the pressure on.”

  “Hang on. Is he langered ?” Cassie asked. She leaned forward, breath misting the glass, to watch Andrews as he gestured and muttered furiously in his lawyer’s ear.

  Sam grinned. “Well spotted. I don’t think he’s actually drunk—not drunk enough to get chatty, anyway, unfortunately—but there’s a smell of booze off him, all right, when you get up close. If just the thought of coming in here got him shook enough that he needed a drink, he’s got something to hide. Maybe it’s just the phone calls, but . . .”

  Andr
ews’s lawyer stood up, rubbing his hands on the sides of his trousers, and waved nervously at the glass. “Round two,” Sam said, trying to work his tie back into place. “See ye later, lads. Good luck.”

  Cassie aimed her apple core at the bin in the corner and missed. “Andrews jump shot,” Sam said, and headed out, grinning. We left him to it and went outside for a cigarette—it might be awhile before we got another chance. There is a little overhead bridge crossing one of the In the Woods 251

  pathways into the formal garden, and we sat there, our backs against the railings. The castle grounds were golden and nostalgic in the slanting lateafternoon light. Tourists in shorts and backpacks wandered past, gawking up at the crenellations; one of them, for no reason that I could fathom, took a photo of us. A couple of little kids were whirling around the maze of brick trails in the garden, arms out superhero style.

  Cassie’s mood had shifted abruptly; the burst of ebullience had dissipated and she was shut away in a private circle of thought, arms on her knees, wayward wisps of smoke trailing from the cigarette burning forgotten between her fingers. She has these moods occasionally, and I was glad of this one. I didn’t want to talk. All I could think was that we were about to hit Jonathan Devlin hard, with everything we had, and if he was ever going to crack then it would be today; and I had absolutely no idea what I would do, what would happen, if he did.

  Suddenly Cassie’s head went up; her gaze moved past me, over my shoulder. “Look,” she said.

  I turned. Jonathan Devlin was coming across the courtyard, his shoulders set forward and his hands deep in the pockets of his big brown overcoat. The high, arrogant lines of the surrounding buildings should have dwarfed him, but instead they seemed to me to align themselves around him, swooping into strange geometries with him at their crux, imbuing him with some impenetrable significance. He hadn’t seen us. His head was down and the sun, low over the gardens, was in his face; to him we would have been only hazy silhouettes, suspended in a bright nimbus like the carved saints and gargoyles. Behind him his shadow fluttered long and black across the cobblestones.