In the Woods

by Tana French

  “Don’t worry about that right now, OK?” Cassie said soothingly. This sounded like a pretty ludicrous suggestion to me, in the circumstances, but it seemed to calm Damien down a little; he even nodded. “Just keep helping us, and we’ll do our best to help you.”

  “I didn’t—like you said, I never wanted to hurt anyone, I swear to God.”

  His eyes were locked on Cassie’s as if his very life depended on her believing him. “Can you tell them that, can you tell the judge? I’m not, I’m not some, like, psycho or serial killer or . . . I’m not like that. I didn’t want to hurt her, I swear on, on, on . . .”

  “Shhh. I know.” She had her hand on his again, her thumb rubbing the back of his wrist in a soothing rhythm. “Shhh, Damien. It’s going to be OK. The worst part’s over. Now all you need to do is tell us what happened, in your own words. Can you do that for me?”

  After a few deep breaths, he nodded, bravely. “Well done,” said Cassie. She stopped short of patting him on the head and giving him a biscuit.

  “We’ll need the whole story, Damien,” I said, pulling my chair closer,

  “step by step. Where did it start?”

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  “Huh?” he said, after a moment. He looked stunned. “I . . . what?”

  “You said you never wanted to hurt her. So how did this end up happening?”

  “I don’t . . . I mean, I’m not sure. I don’t remember. Can’t I just tell you about, like, that night?”

  Cassie and I exchanged glances. “OK,” I said. “Sure. Start when you left work on the Monday evening. What did you do?” There was something there, obviously there was, his memory hadn’t conveniently deserted him; but if we pushed him now, he might clam up altogether or change his mind about that lawyer.

  “OK . . .” Damien took another deep breath and sat up straighter, hands clasped tightly between his knees, like a schoolboy at an oral exam. “I took the bus home. I had dinner with my mother, and then we played Scrabble for a while; she likes Scrabble. My mother—she’s sort of sick, she has this heart condition?—she went to bed at ten, she always does. I, um, I went to my room and I just hung out there till she was asleep—she snores, so I could . . . I tried to read and stuff, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t concentrate, I was so . . .” His teeth were chattering again.

  “Shhh,” Cassie said gently. “It’s over now. You’re doing the right thing.”

  He caught a jagged little breath, nodded. “What time did you leave the house?” I asked.

  “Um, eleven. I walked back to the dig—see, it’s only really like a few miles from my house, it just takes ages on the bus ’cause you have to go all the way into town and then out again. I went round by the back lanes, so I wouldn’t have to go past the estate. I had to go past the cottage instead, but the dog knows me, so when he got up I said, ‘Good dog, Laddie,’ and he shut up. It was dark, but I had a torch. I went in the tools shed and got a pair of, of gloves, and I put them on, and I picked up a . . .” He swallowed hard.

  “I picked up a big rock. From the ground, at the edge of the dig. Then I went into the finds shed.”

  “What time was this?” I said.

  “Like midnight.”

  “And when did Katy get there?”

  “It was supposed to be . . .” A blink, a duck of the head. “It was supposed to be one o’clock, but she was early, maybe quarter to one? When she knocked on the door I almost had a heart attack.”

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  He had been frightened of her. I wanted to punch him. “So you let her in.”

  “Yeah. She had these chocolate biscuits in her hand, I guess she took them on her way out of the house; she gave me one, but I couldn’t—I mean, I couldn’t eat. I just put it in my pocket. She ate hers and she told me about that ballet school and stuff for a couple of minutes. And then I said . . . I said, ‘Look on that shelf,’ and she turned round. And I, um, I hit her. With the rock, on the back of her head. I hit her.”

  There was a high note of pure disbelief in his voice. His pupils were dilated so widely that his eyes looked black.

  “How many times?” I asked.

  “I don’t—I—God . . . Do I have to do this? I mean, I told you I did it, can’t you just . . . just . . .” He was gripping the edge of the table, nails digging in.

  “Damien,” Cassie said, softly but very firmly, “we need to know the details.”

  “OK. OK.” He rubbed a hand clumsily across his mouth. “I hit her, just one time, but I guess I must’ve not done it hard enough, ’cause she sort of tripped forwards and fell down, but she was still like—she turned round and she opened her mouth like she was gonna scream, so I—I grabbed her. I mean, I was scared, I was really scared, if she screamed . . .” He was practically gibbering. “I got my hand over her mouth and I tried to hit her again, but she got her hands in the way and she was scratching me and kicking and everything—we were on the floor, see, and I couldn’t even see what was going on ’cause there was just my torch on the table, I hadn’t turned on the light—I tried to hold her down but she was trying to get to the door, she kept twisting, and she was strong—I hadn’t expected her to be strong, when she was . . .”

  His voice trailed off and he stared down at the table. He was breathing through his nose, fast and shallow and hard.

  “When she was so little,” I said, tonelessly.

  Damien’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He had turned a nasty greenish-white, freckles standing out in high relief.

  “We can take a break if you need one,” Cassie said. “But sooner or later you’re going to have to tell us the rest of the story.”

  He shook his head violently. “No. No break. I just want to . . . I’m OK.”

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  “Good,” I said. “Then let’s keep going. You had a hand over her mouth, and she was fighting.” Cassie moved, a tiny half-suppressed twitch.

  “Yeah. OK.” Damien hugged himself, hands dug deep into the sleeves of his sweatshirt. “Then she twisted over onto her stomach and she was kind of crawling towards the door, and I—I hit her again. With the rock, on the side of her head. I guess I did it harder this time—adrenaline or something—’cause she collapsed. She was unconscious. But she was still breathing, really loud, sort of moaning, so I knew I had to . . . I couldn’t hit her again, I just couldn’t. I didn’t . . .” He was close to hyperventilating.

  “I didn’t . . . want to . . . hurt her. . . .”

  “So what did you do?”

  “There’s these, these plastic bags on the shelf. For finds. So I got one of them, and I . . . I put it over her head and kept it twisted till . . .”

  “Till what?” I said.

  “Till she stopped breathing,” Damien said at last, very softly. There was a long silence, just the wind whistling eerily through the air vent and the sound of the rain.

  “And then?”

  “Then.” Damien’s head wobbled a little; his eyes looked blind. “I picked her up. I couldn’t leave her in the finds shed or you guys would know, so I was going to take her out to the site. She was . . . there was blood all over the place, I guess from her head. I left the plastic bag on her so the blood wouldn’t go everywhere. But when I got out to the site there was—in the wood, I saw this light, like a campfire or something. Somebody was there. I got scared, I was so scared I could hardly stand up, I thought I was going to drop her. . . . I mean, what if they saw me?” His palms turned up to us in appeal; his voice cracked. “I didn’t know what to do with her.”

  He had skipped the trowel. “So what did you do?” I asked.

  “I took her back to the sheds. In the tools shed, there’s these tarps, we’re supposed to use them to cover up delicate bits of the site when it rains? But we almost never need them. I wrapped her up in a tarp so that—I mean, I didn’t want . . . you know, bugs . . .” He swallowed. “And I put her under the rest of them. I guess I could’ve just left her in one of t
he fields, but that felt— There’s foxes and—and rats and stuff, round there, and it might’ve been days before anyone found her, and I didn’t want to, just to throw her away. . . . I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought maybe by tomorrow night I’d, I’d know what to do. . . .”

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  “And then you went home?”

  “No, I—first I cleaned up the finds shed. The blood. It was all on the floor, and on the steps, and it kept getting on my gloves and my feet and . . . I got a bucket of water from the hose and I tried to wash it off. It was—you could smell it . . . I kept having to stop ’cause I thought I was going to throw up.”

  He looked, I swear, as if he expected sympathy. “It must have been awful,” Cassie said, sympathetically.

  “Yeah. God. It was.” Damien turned to her in gratitude. “I felt like I’d been there forever, I kept thinking it was almost morning and the guys would be there any minute and I had to hurry, and then I thought this was a nightmare and I needed to wake up, and then I got dizzy. . . . I couldn’t even see what I was doing, I had the torch but half the time I was too scared to turn it on—I thought whoever was in the wood would see it and come look—so it was all dark, and blood everywhere, and every time there was a sound I thought I was gonna die, like actually die. . . . There kept being these, these noises outside, like something was scratching at the walls of the shed. Once I thought I heard it, like, sniffing round the edge of the door—

  for a second I thought it could be Laddie, but he’s chained up at night, and I almost—Jesus, it was . . .” He shook his head, dazed.

  “But you got it cleaned up in the end,” I said.

  “I guess, yeah. As much as I could. I just—I couldn’t keep going any more, you know? I put the rock behind the tarps, and she had this little torch so I put it in there, too. For one second—see, when I lifted up the tarps the shadows did something weird and it looked like, like she was moving—God. . . .”

  He was starting to look green again. “So you left the rock and her torch in the tools shed,” I said. He had skipped the trowel this time, too. This didn’t bother me as much as you might think: at this stage, anything he shied away from became a weapon for us to use in our own time.

  “Yeah. And I washed off the gloves and put them back in the bag. And then I locked up the sheds, and I just—I just walked home.”

  Quietly and without restraint, as if it was something he had been waiting to do for a long time, Damien began to cry.

  He cried for a long time and much too hard to answer questions. Cassie sat next to him, patting his arm and murmuring soothing things and passing 346

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  him tissues. After a while of this, I caught her eye, over the top of his head; she nodded. I left them to it and went to find O’Kelly.

  “That little mammy’s boy?” he said, eyebrows shooting up. “Well, fuck me sideways. I didn’t think he’d the bollocks for it. My money was on Hanly. He’s after leaving, just now; told O’Neill to shove his questions up his hole and stormed out. Good thing Donnelly didn’t do the same. I’ll start on the file for the prosecutors.”

  “We’ll need his phone records and financials,” I said, “and background interviews with the other archaeologists, college classmates, school friends, anyone close to him. He’s being coy about the motive.”

  “Who gives a fuck about the motive?” O’Kelly demanded, but the irritation didn’t carry conviction: he was delighted. I knew I should be delighted myself, but somehow I wasn’t. When I had dreamed of solving this case, my mental picture had never been anything like this. The scene in the interview room, which should have been the greatest triumph of my career, simply felt like too little too late.

  “In this case,” I said, “I do.” O’Kelly was right, technically—as long as you can prove that your boy committed the crime, you have absolutely no obligation to explain why—but juries, trained by TV, want a motive; and, this time, so did I. “A brutal crime like this, from a sweet kid with absolutely no history; the defense is bound to try for mental illness. If we find a motive, then that’s out.”

  O’Kelly snorted. “Fair enough. I’ll put the lads onto the interviews. Get back in there and get me a cast-iron case. And, Ryan”—grudgingly, as I turned to leave—“well done. The pair of ye.”

  Cassie had got Damien calmed down; he was still a little shaky and he kept blowing his nose, but he was no longer sobbing. “Are you all right to keep going?” she asked, squeezing his hand. “We’re nearly there, OK? You’re doing great.” For a second, a pathetic shadow of a smile slipped across Damien’s face.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about . . . sorry. I’m fine.”

  “Fair play. You just let me know if you need another break.”

  “OK,” I said, “we’d got to the point where you went home. Let’s talk about the next day.”

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  “Oh—yeah. The next day.” Damien caught a long, resigned, shuddering breath. “The whole day was a total nightmare. I was so tired I couldn’t even see, and every time anyone went into the tools shed I thought I was gonna faint or something—and having to act all normal, you know, laughing at people’s jokes and acting like nothing had happened, and I kept thinking about—about her. . . . And then I had to do the whole same thing that night, wait till my mother went to sleep and sneak out and walk back to the dig. If that light had been there in the wood again, I don’t know what I’d’ve done. But it wasn’t.”

  “So you went back to the tools shed,” I said.

  “Yeah. I put on gloves again and I got her—I got her out. She was . . . I thought she’d be stiff, I thought dead bodies were stiff, but she . . .” He bit down on his lip. “She wasn’t, not really. But she was cold. It was—I didn’t want to touch her. . . .” He shuddered.

  “But you had to.”

  Damien nodded and blew his nose again. “I took her out to the site and I put her on the altar stone. Where she’d be, be safe, from rats and stuff. Where someone would find her before she . . . I tried to make her look like she was sleeping, or something. I don’t know why. I threw the rock away, and I rinsed off the plastic bag and put it back where it was, but I couldn’t find her torch, it was somewhere down behind the tarps, and I—I just wanted to go home. . . .”

  “Why didn’t you bury her?” I asked. “On the site, or in the wood?” It would have been the intelligent thing to do; not that this had anything to do with anything.

  Damien looked at me, his mouth hanging a little open. “I never thought of that,” he said. “I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. And, anyway—I mean, just bury her? Like rubbish?”

  And it had taken us a full month to catch up with this gem. “The day after that,” I said, “you made sure you were one of the people who discovered the body. Why?”

  “Oh. Yeah. That.” He made a convulsive little movement, something like a shrug. “I heard—see, I had the gloves on, so no fingerprints, but I heard somewhere that if I’d got one of my hairs on her, or fluff from my clothes or something, you guys could figure out it was from me. So I knew I had to find her—I didn’t want to, Jesus, I didn’t want to see her, but . . . All 348

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  day I kept trying to figure out an excuse to go up there, but I was scared it would look suspicious. I was . . . I couldn’t think. I just wanted it to be over. But then Mark told Mel to go work on the altar stone.”

  He sighed, a tired little sound. “And after that . . . it was actually easier, you know? At least I didn’t have to pretend everything was fine.”

  No wonder he had been spacey during that first interview. Not spacey enough to ring our alarm bells, though. For a novice, he had done pretty well. “And when we talked to you,” I said, and then I stopped. Cassie and I didn’t look at each other, didn’t move a muscle, but the realization shot between us like a jolt from an electric fence. One reason we had taken Jessica’s Tracksuit Shadow story quite so seriously was that Damien had
put the very same guy practically at the scene of the crime.

  “When we talked to you,” I said, after only a fractional pause, “you invented a big guy in a tracksuit, to throw us off.”

  “Yeah.” Damien looked anxiously from one of us to the other. “Sorry about that. I just thought . . .”

  “Interview suspended,” Cassie said, and left. I followed her, with a sinking sensation in my stomach and Damien’s faint apprehensive “Wait—

  what . . . ?” drifting after us.

  By some shared instinct, we didn’t stay in the corridor or go back to the incident room. We went next door, into the interview room where Sam had been questioning Mark. There was still debris strewn on the table: crumpled napkins, Styrofoam cups, a splatter of dark liquid where someone had banged down a fist or shoved back a chair.

  “All right!” Cassie said, on something between a gasp and a laugh. “We did it, Rob!” She tossed her notebook onto the table and threw an arm around my shoulders. The gesture was quick and glad and unthinking, but it set my teeth on edge. We had been working together with all the old perfect understanding, slagging each other as if nothing had ever been wrong, but this had been purely for Damien’s benefit and because the case demanded it; and I did not think I should be required to explain this to Cassie.

  “Apparently, yeah,” I said.

  “When he finally said it . . . God, I think my jaw practically hit the floor. In the Woods 349

  Champagne tonight, whenever we’re finished, and lots of it.” She let out a deep breath, leaned back against the table and ran her hands through her hair. “You should probably go get Rosalind.”

  I felt my shoulders tighten. “Why?” I asked coolly.

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that. Why should anyone go get her?”

  Cassie stopped in midstretch and stared at me. “Rob, she and Damien gave us the same exact fake lead. There has to be some connection there.”

  “Actually,” I said, “Jessica and Damien gave us the same fake lead.”

  “You think Damien and Jessica are in on this together? Come on.”