In the Woods

by Tana French

  In the Woods 317

  “Yeah,” he said, through a huge mouthful. “Hey, it’s OK if I eat this, right? I’m starving, and Hitler will have a total cow if I eat during work.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Did you ever find your trowel?”

  Sean shook his head. “I had to buy a new one. Bastards.”

  “OK, think carefully,” I said. “When was the last time you saw it?”

  “Finds shed,” he said promptly. “When I found that coin. Are you going to, like, arrest someone for stealing it?”

  “Not exactly. What’s this about a coin?”

  “I found this coin,” he explained, helpfully. “Everyone was all excited and stuff, because it looked old and we’ve only found like ten coins on the whole dig. I took it to the finds shed to show Dr. Hunt—on my trowel, because if you touch old coins the oils in your hands could fuck them up or something—and he got all excited and started getting out all these books to try and ID it, and then it was half past five and we went home, and I forgot my trowel on the table in the finds shed. I went back to get it the next morning, but it wasn’t there.”

  “And that was the Thursday,” I said, my heart slowly sinking. “The day we came to talk to Mark.” It had been a long shot, anyway, and I was surprised at how badly let down I was. I felt idiotic and very, very tired; I wanted to go home and go to sleep.

  Sean shook his head and licked grains of sugar off his filthy fingers.

  “Nah, before that,” he said, and I felt my heart rate start to pick up again. “I sort of forgot about it for a while, because I didn’t need it—we were mattocking back that fucking drainage ditch—and I figured someone had, like, picked it up for me and forgot to give it back. That day you guys came for Mark, that was the first time I needed it, but everyone was going, ‘No, I haven’t seen it, uh-uh, wasn’t me.’ ”

  “It’s identifiable, then? Anyone who saw it would know it was yours?”

  “Totally. It’s got my initials on the handle.” He took another enormous bite of doughnut. “I burned them on ages ago,” he said, in muffled tones,

  “this one time when it was lashing rain and we had to stay inside for, like, hours. I have this Swiss Army knife, see, and I heated up the corkscrew with my lighter—”

  “At the time you accused Macker of taking it. Why?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, because he does dumb shit like that. Nobody was gonna steal it steal it, not with my initials on it, so I figured someone had just taken it to piss me off.”

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  “And do you still think it was him?”

  “Nah. I only realized after, Dr. Hunt locked the finds shed when we left, and Macker doesn’t have a key—” Suddenly his eyes lit up. “Hey, was it the murder weapon? Shit!”

  “No,” I said. “What day did you find the coin, can you remember?”

  Sean looked disappointed, but he thought about it, staring into space and swinging his legs. “The corpse showed up on a Wednesday, right?” he said eventually. He had finished his doughnut; he balled up the plastic wrap, tossed it in the air and swatted it into the undergrowth. “OK, so it wasn’t the day before that, because we were doing the fucking drainage ditch. The day before that. Monday.”

  I still think about this conversation with Sean. There is something oddly comforting in the memory, even though it carries its own inexorable undercurrent of grief. I suppose that day was, though it still comes hard to acknowledge this, the pinnacle of my career. I am not proud of a lot of the decisions I made in the course of Operation Vestal; but that morning, at least, in spite of everything that had come before and regardless of anything that came after, that morning I did everything right, as surely and easily as if I had never put a foot wrong in my life.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess. Ask Dr. Hunt; he logged it in the finds book. Am I, like, a witness? Am I gonna have to testify in court?”

  “Quite possibly,” I said. Adrenaline had burned off the fatigue and my mind was speeding, throwing out permutations and possibilities like a kaleidoscope. “I’ll let you know.”

  “All right,” Sean said happily. Apparently this made up for the murderweapon disappointment. “Do I get witness protection?”

  “No,” I said, “but I do need you to do something for me. I want you to go back to work and tell the others that we were talking about a stranger you saw hanging around a few days before the murder. I was asking you for a more detailed description. Can you pull that off?” No evidence and no backup: I didn’t want to spook anyone, not yet.

  “Course,” Sean assured me, offended. “Undercover work. Excellent.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get back to you later.” He slid down from the hood and bounced off towards the others, rubbing the back of his head through the woolly hat. He still had sugar around the corners of his mouth.

  In the Woods 319

  . . .

  I checked with Hunt, who went through his logbook and confirmed what Sean had said: he had found the coin on the Monday, a few hours before Katy died. “Wonderful find,” Hunt told me, “wonderful. Took us quite a long time to . . . um . . . identify it, you know. No coin specialist on site; I’m medieval, myself.”

  “Who has a key to the finds shed?” I asked.

  “Edward VI base penny, early 1550s,” he said. “Oh . . . the finds shed?

  But why?”

  “Yes, the finds shed. I’ve been told it’s locked at night. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, yes, every night. Mostly pottery, of course, but you never know.”

  “And who has a key?”

  “Well, I do, of course,” he said, pulling off his glasses and blinking fuzzily at me as he wiped them on his sweater. “And Mark and Damien—

  for the tours, you know. Just in case. People always like to see finds, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, I’m sure they do.”

  I went back out to the road and phoned Sam. One of the trees was dropping chestnuts, they were littered around my car, and I peeled the prickly casing off one of them and tossed it into the air while I waited for him to pick up: casual phone call, maybe setting up a date for the evening, if anyone was watching and worried; nothing important.

  “O’Neill,” Sam said.

  “Sam, it’s Rob,” I said, catching the chestnut overhand. “I’m in Knocknaree, at the dig. I need you and Maddox and a few floaters down here as fast as you can, with a team from the Bureau—get Sophie Miller if you can. Make sure they bring a metal detector and someone who knows how to work it. I’ll meet you at the entrance to the estate.”

  “Got it,” Sam said, and hung up.

  It would take him at least an hour to round everyone up and get out to Knocknaree. I moved my car up the hill, out of sight of the archaeologists, and sat on the hood to wait. The air smelled of dead grass and thunder. Knocknaree had closed in on itself, the far hills invisible under cloud, the wood a dark illusive smear down the hillside. Enough time had passed that 320

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  children were being allowed outside to play again, I heard faint high shrieks of glee or terror or both coming from inside the estate; that car alarm was still going, and somewhere a dog was barking mindlessly, frenetically, on and on and on.

  Every sound wound me a notch tighter; I could feel the blood trembling in every corner of my body. My mind was still going full tilt, whirring through correlations and shards of evidence, fitting together what I needed to say to the others when they arrived. And somewhere under the adrenaline was the inexorable realization that, if I was right, then Katy Devlin’s death almost certainly had nothing at all to do with what had happened to Peter and Jamie; not, at least, in any way you could enter into evidence. I was concentrating so hard that I almost forgot what I was waiting for. When the others started arriving, I saw them with the heightened, shocked gaze of a stranger: discreet dark cars and white van pulling in with a nearsilent rush
, doors sliding smoothly open; the black-suited men and the faceless techs with their glittering array of tools, cool and ready as surgeons to peel back the skin of this place inch by inch and reveal the darker, seething archaeology underneath. The slamming of car doors sounded small and deadly precise, muffled by the heavy air.

  “What’s the story?” Sam said. He had brought Sweeney and O’Gorman and a red-haired guy whom I recognized, vaguely, from the blur of action in the incident room a few weeks earlier. I slid off the Land Rover and they moved into place around me, Sophie and her team pulling on their gloves, Cassie’s thin still face over Sam’s shoulder.

  “The night Katy Devlin died,” I said, “a trowel disappeared from the locked finds shed on the dig. The trowels they use consist of a leaf-shaped metal blade attached to a wooden handle five or six inches long, tapering inwards towards the blade, with a rounded end. This particular trowel, which is still missing, had sc burned into the handle—the initials of the owner, Sean Callaghan, who claims he forgot it in the finds shed at five thirty on Monday evening. It matches Cooper’s description of the implement used to sexually assault Katy Devlin. Nobody knew it would be in the finds shed, which suggests that it was a weapon of opportunity and the shed may be our primary crime scene. Sophie, can you start there?”

  “Luminol kit,” Sophie said to one of her mini-mes, and he broke away from the group and clicked open the back of the van.

  “Three people had keys to the finds shed,” I said. “Ian Hunt, Mark In the Woods 321

  Hanly and Damien Donnelly. We can’t rule out Sean Callaghan, either: he could have made up the whole story about leaving the trowel there. Hunt and Hanly have cars, which means if it’s one of them he might have hidden or transported the body in the trunk. Callaghan and Donnelly don’t, as far as I know, so either of them would have had to hide the body fairly nearby, probably on the site. We’ll have to go over the whole place with a fine-tooth comb and pray there’s some evidence left. We’re looking for the trowel, for a bloodstained plastic bag and for our primary and secondary crime scenes.”

  “Do they have keys to the other sheds, too?” Cassie asked.

  “Find out,” I said.

  The tech was back, with the luminol kit in one hand and a roll of brown paper in the other. We looked at one another and nodded and fell into step, a swift, primed phalanx moving down the hill towards the dig. A case breaking is like a dam breaking. Everything around you gathers itself up and moves effortlessly, unstoppably into top gear; every drop of energy you’ve poured into the investigation comes back to you, unleashed and gaining momentum by the second, subsuming you in its building roar. I forgot that I had never liked O’Gorman, forgot that Knocknaree wrecked my head and that I had almost blown this whole case a dozen times, almost forgot everything that had happened between me and Cassie. This, I think, is one of the things I always craved from the job: the way that, at certain moments, you can surrender everything else, lose yourself in the driving techno pulse of it and become nothing but one part of a perfectly calibrated, vital machine. We fanned out, just in case, as we crossed the site towards the archaeologists. They gave us quick, apprehensive glances, but nobody bolted; no one even stopped working.

  “Mark,” I said. He was still kneeling on top of his bank; he leaped up in one fast, dangerous movement and stared at me. “I’m going to have to ask you to bring all your team into the canteen.”

  Mark exploded. “Jesus fuck! Have you not done enough? What are you afraid of? Even if we find the fucking Holy Grail today, your lot will still level this place on Monday morning. Could you not leave us our last few days in peace?”

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  Sam and O’Gorman moving in at my shoulders. “Settle down, boy,”

  O’Gorman said threateningly.

  “Don’t you ‘boy’ me. We have till half past five on Friday and anything you want from us can wait till then, because we’re going nowhere.”

  “Mark,” Cassie said sharply, beside me. “This has nothing to do with the motorway. Here’s how we’re going to work this: we need you and Damien Donnelly and Sean Callaghan to come with us right now. Non-negotiable. If you quit giving us hassle, the rest of your team can keep working, under Detective Johnston’s supervision. Fair enough?”

  Mark glared at her for another second, but then he spat into the dust and jerked his chin at Mel, who was already moving towards him. The rest of the archaeologists stared, wide-eyed and sweating. Mark snapped instructions at Mel in an undertone, stabbing a finger at various parts of the site; then he gave her shoulder a light, unexpected squeeze and strode off towards the Portakabins, fists shoved deep in his jacket pockets. O’Gorman went after him.

  “Sean,” I called. “Damien.” Sean bounded over eagerly and held up his hand for a high five, gave me a knowing look when I ignored it. Damien came more slowly, hitching up his combats. He looked dazed almost to the point of concussion, but coming from him this didn’t exactly set my alarm bells ringing.

  “We need to talk to you,” I said. “We’d like you to wait in the canteen for a while, until we’re ready to take you back to headquarters.”

  Both their mouths opened. I turned and left before they could ask. We put them in the canteen, along with a flustered Dr. Hunt—still clutching handfuls of paperwork—and left O’Gorman to keep an eye on them. Hunt gave us permission to search the site, with an alacrity that moved him further down the suspect list (Mark demanded to see our warrant, but backed off fast when I told him I’d be happy to get one if he didn’t mind waiting around for a few hours), and Sophie and her team headed for the finds shed and started taping brown paper over the windows. Johnston, out on the dig, moved among the archaeologists with his notebook out, checking trowels and pulling people aside for brief tête-à-têtes.

  “The same key fits all the Portakabins,” Cassie said, coming out of the canteen. “Hunt, Mark and Damien have one each—not Sean. No spares. They all say they’ve never lost, lent or missed their keys.”

  “So let’s start with the sheds,” I said, “and then we can work our way out-In the Woods 323

  wards if we need to. Sam, will you and Cassie take the tools shed? Sweeney and I will do the office.”

  The office was tiny and crammed—shelves sagging with books and houseplants, desk piled with papers and mugs and bits of pottery and an elephantine, obsolete computer. Sweeney and I worked fast and methodically, pulling out drawers, taking down books and checking behind them and stacking them back roughly in place. I didn’t actually expect to find anything. There was nowhere here to stash a body, and I was fairly sure the trowel and the plastic bag had been either dumped in the river or buried somewhere on the dig, where we would need the metal detector and huge amounts of luck and time to find them. All my hopes were pinned on Sophie and her team and whatever arcane rites they were performing in the finds shed. My hands moved automatically along the shelves; I was listening, so hard it nearly paralyzed me, for some sound from outside, footsteps, Sophie’s voice calling. When Sweeney dropped a drawer and cursed softly, I almost screamed at him to shut up.

  It was gradually dawning on me just how high I had staked on this. I could have simply rung Sophie and got her to come down and check out the finds shed, no need to mention it to anyone if it didn’t pan out. Instead, I had taken over the entire site and pulled in just about every person who had anything to do with the investigation, and if this turned out to be a wildgoose chase I didn’t even want to think about what O’Kelly would say. After what felt like an hour I heard, outside, “Rob!” I leaped up from the floor, scattering papers everywhere, but it was Cassie’s voice: clear, boyish, excited. She bounded up the steps, caught the door handle and swung round it into the office. “Rob, we’ve got it. The trowel. In the tools shed, under all these tarps—” She was flushed and breathless, and she had obviously completely forgotten that we were barely on speaking terms. I forgot it
myself, for a moment; her voice sent the old, bright dart of warmth straight to my heart.

  “Stay here,” I said to Sweeney, “keep searching,” and followed her. She was already running back to the tools shed, feet flashing as she jumped the ruts and puddles.

  The tools shed was a mess: wheelbarrows at various wild angles, picks and shovels and mattocks tangled against the walls, great teetering stacks of dented metal buckets and foam kneeling mats and neon-yellow visibility vests (someone had written insert foot here, with an arrow pointing downwards, on the back of the top one), everything crusted in ragged layers 324

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  of dried mud. A few people kept their bikes there. Cassie and Sam had been working from left to right; the left-hand side had that unmistakable postsearch look, discreetly tidy and invaded. Sam was kneeling at the back of the shed between a broken wheelbarrow and a heap of green tarpaulins, holding up the corner of the tarps with one gloved hand. We picked our way through the tools and squeezed in beside him.

  The trowel had been jammed down behind the pile of tarps, between them and the wall; jammed hard enough that the point, when it caught halfway down, had gouged a rip into the tough material. There was no lightbulb and the shed was dim even with the big doors open, but Sam shone his torch on the handle: sc, big uneven letters with Gothic serifs, charred deep into the varnished wood.

  There was a long silence; only the dog and the car alarm, on and on in the distance, with identical mechanical determination.

  “I’d say the tarps aren’t used very often,” Sam said quietly. “They were behind everything else, under broken tools and all. And didn’t Cooper say she was probably wrapped in something, the day before she was found?”

  I stood up and dusted bits of muck off my knees. “Right here,” I said.

  “Her family was going crazy looking for her, and she was right here all the time.” I had got up too fast, and for a moment the shed rocked around me and receded; there was a high white buzz in my ears.