In the Woods

by Tana French

  I shrugged. “Hard to tell. How’s Mark?”

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  “Raging. He says he’s spent half the year working his arse off for Move the Motorway, why would he risk scuppering the whole thing by killing the chairman’s kid? He thinks this is all political. . . .” Sam winced. “About Donnelly,” he said, looking not at me but at Cassie’s back. “If he’s our man. What would . . . does he have a motive?”

  “Not that we’ve found so far,” I said. I did not want to get into this.

  “If anything does come up . . .” Sam shoved his fists deeper into his trouser pockets. “Anything you think I might want to know. Could you call me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t eaten all day, but food was the last thing on my mind; all I wanted was to get back to Damien, and the pizza seemed to be taking hours. “Sure.”

  Damien took a can of 7-Up, but he refused the pizza; he wasn’t hungry, he said. “Sure?” Cassie asked, trying to catch strings of cheese with her finger.

  “God, when I was a student I’d never have turned down free pizza.”

  “You never turn down food, period,” I told her. “You’re a human Hoover.” Cassie, unable to answer through a huge mouthful, nodded cheerfully and gave us the thumbs-up. “Go on, Damien, have some. You should keep your strength up; we’re going to be here for a while.”

  His eyes widened. I waved a slice at him, but he shook his head, so I shrugged and kept it for myself. “OK,” I said, “let’s talk about Mark Hanly. What’s he like?”

  Damien blinked. “Mark? Um, he’s OK. He’s strict, I guess, but he sort of has to be. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Ever seen him get violent? Lose his temper?” I wiggled a hand at Cassie; she threw me a paper napkin.

  “Yeah—no . . . I mean, yeah, he gets mad sometimes, if someone’s messing, but I never saw him hit anyone, or anything like that.”

  “Do you think he would, if he was angry enough?” I wiped my hands and thumbed through my notebook, trying not to get grease on the pages.

  “You’re such a slob,” Cassie told me; I gave her the finger. Damien glanced between us, flustered and off balance.

  “What?” he asked at last, uncertainly.

  “Do you think Mark could get violent if he was provoked?”

  “I guess maybe. I don’t know.”

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  “What about you? Ever hit anyone?”

  “What . . . no!”

  “We should’ve got garlic bread,” Cassie said.

  “I’m not sharing an interview room with two people and garlic. What do you think it would take to make you hit someone, Damien?”

  His mouth opened.

  “You don’t seem like the violent type to me, but everyone’s got a breaking point. Would you hit someone if he insulted your mother, for example?”

  “I—”

  “Or for money? Or in self-defense? What would it take?”

  “I don’t . . .” Damien blinked fast. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never—

  but I guess everyone’s, like you said, everyone’s got a breaking point, I don’t know. . . .”

  I nodded and made a careful note of this. “Would you rather a different kind?” Cassie asked, inspecting the pizza. “I think ham-and-pineapple rules, personally, but they have some macho pepperoni-and-sausage thing next door.”

  “What? Um—no, thanks. Who’s . . . ?” We waited, chewing. “Who’s next door? Am I, like, allowed to ask?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s Mark. We sent Sean and Dr. Hunt home, awhile back, but we haven’t been able to let Mark go yet.”

  We watched Damien turn a shade paler as he processed this information and its implications. “Why not?” he asked faintly.

  “Can’t go into that,” Cassie said, reaching for more pizza. “Sorry.”

  Damien’s eyes ricocheted, disoriented, from her hand to her face to mine.

  “What I can tell you,” I said, pointing at him with a crust, “is that we’re taking this case very, very seriously. I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff in my career, Damien, but this. . . . There’s no crime in the world worse than murdering a child. Her whole life’s gone, the entire community’s terrified, her friends will never get over it, her family’s devastated—”

  “Emotional wrecks,” Cassie said indistinctly, through a mouthful. Damien swallowed, looked down at his 7-Up as if he had forgotten it and started fumbling with the tab.

  “Whoever did this . . .” I shook my head. “I don’t know how he can live with himself.”

  “Tomato check,” Cassie told me, dabbing a finger at the corner of her mouth. “Can’t take you anywhere.”

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  . . .

  We finished off most of the pizza. I didn’t want it—even the smell, greasy and pervasive, was too much for me—but the whole thing was getting Damien more and more flustered. He accepted a slice, in the end, and sat wretchedly picking off the pineapple and nibbling on it, his head whipping from Cassie to me and back as if he were trying to follow a tennis match from too close by. I spared a thought for Sam: Mark was unlikely to be sent into a tailspin by pepperoni and extra cheese.

  My mobile vibrated in my pocket. I checked the screen: Sophie. I took it out into the corridor; Cassie, behind me, said, “Detective Ryan leaving the interview room.”

  “Hi, Sophie,” I said.

  “Hey. Here’s the update: no signs that either lock was forced or picked. And the trowel’s your rape weapon, all right. It looks like it’s been washed, but we’ve got traces of blood in the cracks on the handle. We’ve also got a fair amount of blood on one of those tarps. We’re still checking gloves and plastic bags—we’ll still be checking gloves and plastic bags when we’re eighty. We found a torch under the tarps, too. There are prints all over it, but they’re all small and the torch has Hello Kitty on it, so I’m betting it’s your victim’s and so are the prints. How’re you guys doing?”

  “Still working on Hanly and Donnelly. Callaghan and Hunt are out.”

  “Now you tell me? For Christ’s sake, Rob. Thanks a bunch. We’ve gone over Hunt’s fucking car. Nothing—well, obviously. No blood in Hanly’s car, either. About a million hairs and fibers and blah blah blah; if he had her in there, he wasn’t worried enough to clean up after himself, so we might get a match. Matter of fact, I doubt he’s ever cleaned that thing. If he ever runs out of archaeological sites, he can start work under his front seat.”

  I slammed the door behind me, told the camera, “Detective Ryan entering the interview room,” and started clearing away the pizza things. “That was the Technical Bureau,” I said to Cassie. “They’ve confirmed our evidence is exactly what we thought it was. Damien, are you finished with that?” I threw the pineappleless slice of pizza back into the box before he could answer.

  “That’s what we like to hear,” Cassie said, grabbing a napkin and giving 336

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  the table a quick wipe. “Damien, do you need anything before we get to work?”

  Damien stared, trying to catch up; shook his head.

  “Great,” I said, shoving the pizza box into a corner and pulling up a chair. “Then let’s start by updating you on some of what we’ve found out today. Why do you think we brought the four of you in here?”

  “About that girl,” he said, faintly. “Katy Devlin.”

  “Well, yeah, sure. But why do you think we only wanted the four of you?

  Why not the rest of the team?”

  “You said . . .” Damien motioned to Cassie with the 7-Up can; he was clutching it in both hands, as if afraid I might take that away, too. “You asked about the keys. Who had keys to the sheds.”

  “Bingo,” Cassie said, nodding approvingly. “Well spotted.”

  “Did you, um . . . ?” He swallowed. “Did you, like, find something in one of the sheds?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Actually, we found something in two of the sheds, bu
t close enough. We can’t go into details, obviously, but here’s the gist of it: we’ve got evidence that Katy was killed in the finds shed on the Monday night and stashed in the tools shed through the Tuesday. There was no forced entry. What do you think that means?”

  “I dunno,” Damien said, at last.

  “It means we’re looking for someone who had the key. That’s Mark, Dr. Hunt or you. And Hunt’s got an alibi.”

  Damien actually half-raised his hand, as if he were in school. “Um, me, too. I mean, an alibi.”

  He looked at us hopefully, but we were both shaking our heads. “Sorry,”

  Cassie said. “Your mother was asleep during the time we’re looking at; she can’t vouch for you. And anyway, mothers . . .” She shrugged, smiling. “I mean, I’m sure your mammy’s honest and everything, but as a rule, they’ll say whatever it takes to keep their kids out of trouble. God love them for it, but it means we can’t really take their word on something this important.”

  “Mark’s got the same kind of problem,” I said. “Mel says she was with him, but she’s his girlfriend, and they’re not much more reliable than mothers. A little, but not much. So here we all are.”

  “And if you’ve got anything to tell us, Damien,” Cassie said softly,

  “now’s the time.”

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  Silence. He took a sip of his 7-Up and then looked up at us, all transparent blue eyes and bewilderment, and shook his head.

  “OK,” I said. “Fair enough. There’s something I want you to look at, Damien.” I went through the file, making kind of a big deal of it—Damien’s eyes followed my hand, apprehensively—and finally pulled out a bunch of photos. I laid them out in front of him, one by one, taking a good look at each before I put it down; letting him wait.

  “Katy and her sisters, last Christmas,” I said. Plastic tree, garish with red and green lights; Rosalind in the middle, wearing blue velvet and giving the camera an impish little smile, her arms around the twins; Katy straightbacked and laughing, waving a white fake-sheepskin jacket, and Jessica smiling uncertainly down at a beige one, like a reflection in some uncanny mirror. Unconsciously, Damien smiled back.

  “Katy at a family picnic, two months ago.” The snapshot with the green lawn and the sandwich.

  “She looks happy, doesn’t she?” Cassie said, aside to me. “She was about to go off to ballet school, everything was just beginning. . . . It’s good to know she was happy, before . . .”

  One of the crime scene Polaroids: a full-length shot of her curled on the altar stone. “Katy just after you found her. Remember that?” Damien shifted in his chair, caught himself and sat still.

  Another crime-scene shot, this one a close-up: dried blood on her nose and mouth, that one eye a slit open. “Same again: Katy where her killer dumped her.”

  One of the post-mortem shots: “Katy the next day.” The breath went out of Damien. We had chosen the nastiest picture we had: her face folded down on itself to reveal the skull, a gloved hand holding up a steel ruler to the fracture above her ear, clotted hair and splinters of bone.

  “Hard to look at, isn’t it?” Cassie said, almost to herself. Her fingers hovered over the photos, moved to the crime-scene close-up, stroked the line of Katy’s cheek. She glanced up, at Damien.

  “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “See, to me,” I said, leaning back in my chair and tapping the postmortem shot, “that looks like something that only a raving psycho would do to a little girl. Some animal with no conscience, who gets his kicks out of hurting the most vulnerable people he can find. But I’m just a detective. 338

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  Now Detective Maddox here, she’s studied psychology. Do you know what a profiler is, Damien?”

  A tiny shake of the head. His eyes were still riveted to the photographs, but I didn’t think he was seeing them.

  “Someone who studies what kind of person commits what kind of crime, tells the police what type of guy to look for. Detective Maddox, she’s our resident profiler, and she’s got her own theory about the guy who did this.”

  “Damien,” Cassie said, “let me tell you something. I’ve said all along, right from day one, that this was done by someone who didn’t want to do it. Someone who wasn’t violent, wasn’t a killer, didn’t enjoy causing pain; someone who did this because he had to. He didn’t have any choice. That’s what I’ve been saying since the day we got this case.”

  “It’s true, she has,” I said. “The rest of us said she was off her head, but she stuck to her guns: this wasn’t a psycho, or a serial killer, or a child-rapist.”

  Damien flinched, a quick jerk of the chin. “What do you think, Damien?

  Do you think it takes a sick bastard to do something like this, or do you think this could just happen to a normal guy who never wanted to hurt anyone?”

  He tried to shrug, but his shoulders were too tense and it came out as a grotesque twitch. I got up and wandered around the table, taking my time, to lean against the wall behind him. “Well, we’ll never know for sure one way or the other, unless he tells us. But let’s just say for a moment that Detective Maddox is right. I mean, she’s the one with the psychology training; I’m willing to admit she could have a point. Let’s say this guy isn’t the violent type; he was never meant to be a murderer. It just happened.”

  Damien had been holding his breath. He let it out, caught it again with a little gasp.

  “I’ve seen guys like that before. Do you know what happens to them, afterwards? They go to fucking pieces, Damien. They can’t live with themselves. We’ve seen it, over and over.”

  “It’s not pretty,” Cassie said softly. “We know what happened, the guy knows we know, but he’s scared to confess. He thinks going to jail is the worst thing that could happen to him. God, is he ever wrong. Every day, for the rest of his life, he wakes up in the morning and it hits him all over again, like it was yesterday. Every night he’s scared to go to sleep because of the nightmares. He keeps thinking it has to get better, but it never does.”

  “And sooner or later,” I said, from the shadows behind him, “he has a In the Woods 339

  nervous breakdown, and he ends up spending the next few years in a padded cell, wearing pajamas and drugged up to the eyeballs. Or he ties a rope to the banisters one evening and hangs himself. More often than you’d think, Damien, they just can’t face another day.”

  This was bullshit, by the way; of course it was. Of those dozen uncharged murderers I could name for you, only one killed himself, and he had a history of untreated mental problems to start with. The rest are living more or less exactly as they always did, holding down jobs and going to the pub and taking their kids to the zoo, and if they occasionally get the heebiejeebies they keep it to themselves. Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened. But Katy had only been dead a month, and Damien hadn’t had time to learn this. He was rigid in his chair, staring down at his 7-Up and breathing as if it hurt.

  “You know which ones survive, Damien?” Cassie asked. She leaned across the table and laid her fingertips on his arm. “The ones who confess. The ones who do their time. Seven years later, or whatever, it’s over; they get out of jail and they can start again. They don’t have to see their victims’ faces every time they close their eyes. They don’t have to spend every second of every day terrified that this is the day they’re going to be caught. They don’t have to jump a mile every time they see a cop or there’s a knock at the door. Believe me: in the long run, those are the ones who get away.”

  He was squeezing the can so hard that it buckled, with a sharp little crack. We all jumped.

  “Damien,” I asked, very quietly, “does any of this sound familiar?”

  And, at long last, there it was: that tiny dissolution in the back of his neck, the sway of his head as his spine crumpled. Almost impercept
ibly, after what seemed like an age, he nodded.

  “Do you want to live like this for the rest of your life?”

  His head moved, unevenly, from side to side.

  Cassie gave his arm one last little pat and took her hand away: nothing that could look like coercion. “You didn’t want to kill Katy, did you?” she said; gently, so gently, her voice falling soft as snow over the room. “It just happened.”

  “Yeah.” He whispered it, barely a breath, but I heard. I was listening so hard I could almost hear his heart beating. “It just happened.”

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  For a moment the room seemed to fold in on itself, as if some explosion too enormous to be heard had sucked all the air away. None of us could move. Damien’s hands had gone limp around the can; it dropped to the table with a clunk, rocked crazily, came to a stop. The overhead light streaked his curls with hazy bronze. Then the room breathed in again, a slow, replete sigh.

  “Damien James Donnelly,” I said. I didn’t go back around the table to face him; I wasn’t sure my legs would carry me. “I arrest you on suspicion that, on or around the seventeenth of August of this year, at Knocknaree in County Dublin, you did murder Katharine Bridget Devlin, contrary to common law.”

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  Damien couldn’t stop shaking. We took the photos away and brought him a fresh cup of tea, offered to find him an extra sweater or to heat up the leftover pizza for him, but he shook his head without looking at us. To me the whole scene felt wildly unreal. I couldn’t take my eyes off Damien. I had razed half my mind in search of memories, I had gone into Knocknaree wood, I had risked my career and I was losing my partner; because of this boy.

  Cassie went through the rights sheet with him—slowly and tenderly, as if he had been in a bad accident—and I held my breath in the background, but he didn’t want a lawyer: “What’s the point? I did it, you guys knew anyway, everyone’s gonna know, there’s nothing a lawyer can . . . I’m going to jail, right? Am I going to jail?” His teeth were chattering; he needed something a lot stronger than tea.