In the Woods

by Tana French

  All I could think was that “damage control” was two words. “Sir, I’m so sorry,” I said, which seemed like a better thing to say. I had no idea what suspension involved. I had a fleeting image of some TV cop slapping his badge and his gun on his boss’s desk, close-up fading to credits as his career went up in smoke.

  “That and two quid will get you a cup of coffee,” O’Kelly said flatly.

  “Sort the tips from the hotline and put them on file. Any of them mention the old case, you don’t even finish reading them, you pass them straight to Maddox or O’Neill.” He sat down at his desk, picked up the phone and started dialing. I stood there staring at him for a few seconds before I realized I was supposed to leave. I went slowly back to the incident room—I’m not sure why, I had no intention of doing anything with the hotline tips; I suppose I must have been on autopilot. Cassie was sitting in front of the VCR, her elbows on her knees, watching the tape of me interrogating Damien. There was an exhausted slump to her shoulders; the remote control dangled limply from one hand.

  Something deep inside me gave a horrible, sick lurch. It hadn’t even occurred to me, until that moment, to wonder how O’Kelly knew. It only hit me then, as I stood in the doorway of the incident room looking at her: there was only one way he could possibly have found out. I was perfectly aware that I had been pretty shitty to Cassie lately—

  although I would argue that the situation was a complex one, and that I had my reasons. But nothing I had done to her, nothing I could do in the world, warranted this. I had never imagined this kind of betrayal. Hell hath no fury. I thought my legs were going to give way.

  Maybe I made some involuntary sound or movement, I don’t know, but In the Woods 359

  Cassie turned sharply in her chair and stared at me. After a second she hit Stop and put down the remote. “What did O’Kelly say?”

  She knew; she already knew, and my final spark of doubt sank into something jagged and impossibly heavy dragging at my solar plexus. “As soon as the case is over, I’m suspended,” I said flatly. My voice sounded like someone else’s. Cassie’s eyes widened, horrified. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Oh, shit, Rob . . . But you’re not out? He didn’t—he didn’t fire you or anything?”

  “No, I’m not out,” I said. “No thanks to you.” The first shock was starting to wear off, and a cold, vicious anger was surging through me like electricity. I felt my whole body trembling with it.

  “That’s not fair,” Cassie said, and I heard a tiny shake in her voice. “I tried to warn you. I rang you last night, I don’t know how many times—”

  “It was a little late to be concerned about me by then, wasn’t it? You should have thought of that before.”

  Cassie was white to the lips, her eyes huge. I wanted to smash the stunned, uncomprehending look off her face. “Before what?” she demanded.

  “Before you poured out my private life to O’Kelly. Do you feel better now, Maddox? Has wrecking my career made up for the fact that I haven’t treated you like a little princess this week? Or have you got something else up your sleeve?”

  After a moment she said, very quietly, “You think I told him?”

  I almost laughed. “Yes, actually, I do. There were only five people in the world who knew about this, and I somehow doubt that my parents or a friend from fifteen years ago picked this moment to ring my boss and say, ‘Oh, by the way, did you know that Ryan’s name used to be Adam?’ How stupid do you think I am? I know you told him, Cassie.”

  She hadn’t taken her eyes off mine, but something in them had changed, and I realized she was every bit as furious as I was. In one fast movement she grabbed a videotape from the table and threw it at me, a hard overhand snap with her whole body behind it. I ducked reflexively; it crashed against the wall where my head had been, spun away and tumbled into a corner.

  “Watch that tape,” Cassie said.

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Watch that tape right now or, I swear to God, by tomorrow morning I’ll have your face plastered across every newspaper in the country.”

  It wasn’t the threat itself that got me; it was more the fact that she had 360

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  made it, had played what had to be her trump card. It sparked something in me: a harsh curiosity, mixed—or perhaps this is only hindsight, I don’t know—with some faint, dreadful premonition. I retrieved the tape from the corner, switched it into the VCR and hit Play. Cassie, her arms clasped tightly at her waist, watched me without moving. I swung a chair around and sat down in front of the screen, my back to her.

  It was the fuzzy black-and-white tape of Cassie’s session with Rosalind the night before. The time stamp showed 8:27; in the next room, I had been just about to give up on Damien. Rosalind was on her own in the main interview room, redoing her lipstick in a little compact mirror. There were sounds in the background, and it took me a moment to recognize that they were familiar: hoarse, helpless sobs, and my own voice saying over them, without much hope,

  “Damien, I need you to explain to me why you did this.” Cassie had switched on the intercom and set it to pick up my interview room. Rosalind’s head went up; she stared at the one-way glass, her face utterly expressionless. The door opened and Cassie came in, and Rosalind recapped her lipstick and tucked it into her purse. Damien was still sobbing. “Shit,” Cassie said, glancing up at the intercom. “Sorry about that.” She switched it off; Rosalind gave a tight, displeased little smile.

  “Detective Maddox interviewing Rosalind Frances Devlin,” Cassie said to the camera. “Have a seat.”

  Rosalind didn’t move. “I’m afraid I’d prefer not to talk to you,” she said, in an icy, dismissive voice I had never heard her use before. “I’d like to speak with Detective Ryan.”

  “Sorry, can’t be done,” Cassie said cheerfully, pulling out a chair for herself. “He’s in an interview—as I’m sure you heard,” she added, with a rueful little grin.

  “Then I’ll come back when he’s free.” Rosalind tucked her bag under her arm and headed for the door.

  “Just a moment, Miss Devlin,” Cassie said, and there was a new, hard edge in her voice. Rosalind sighed and turned, eyebrows raised contemptuously.

  “Is there any particular reason why you’re suddenly so reluctant to answer questions about your sister’s murder?”

  I saw Rosalind’s eyes flick up at the camera, just for a flash, but that tiny cold smile didn’t change. “I think you know, Detective, if you’re honest with yourself,” she said, “that I’m more than willing to help the investigation in any way I can. I simply don’t want to talk to you, and I’m sure you know why.”

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  “Let’s pretend I don’t.”

  “Oh, Detective, it’s been obvious from the start that you don’t care about my sister at all. You’re only interested in flirting with Detective Ryan. Isn’t it against the rules to sleep with your partner?”

  A fresh spurt of fury shot through me, so violent it took my breath away.

  “Jesus Christ! Is that what all this was about? Just because you thought I told her—” Rosalind had been shooting in the dark, I had never said a word about that to her or to anyone else; and for Cassie to think I would, to take this kind of revenge without even bothering to ask me—

  “Shut up,” she said coldly, behind me. I clenched my hands together and stared at the TV. I was almost too angry to see.

  On the screen, Cassie hadn’t even flinched; she was tilting her chair back on two legs and shaking her head, amused. “Sorry, Miss Devlin, but I don’t get distracted that easily. Detective Ryan and I feel exactly the same way about your sister’s death: we want to find her killer. So why is it, again, that you suddenly don’t want to talk about it?”

  Rosalind laughed. “Exactly the same way? Oh, I don’t think so, Detective. He has a very special connection to this case, doesn’t he?”

  Even in the blurry picture I could see Cassie’s fast blink, and the savage flash o
f triumph on Rosalind’s face as she realized she had got past her guard this time. “Oh,” she said, sweetly. “You mean you don’t know?”

  She only paused for a fraction of a second, just enough to heighten the effect, but to me it seemed to last forever; because I knew, with a hideous vortexing sense of inevitability, I knew what she was going to say. I suppose this must be what stuntmen feel when a fall goes horribly wrong, or jockeys coming off at full gallop: that oddly calm splinter of time, just before your body shatters against the ground, when your mind is wiped clean of everything except the one simple certainty: This is it, then. Here it comes.

  “He’s that boy whose friends disappeared in Knocknaree, ages ago,” Rosalind told Cassie. Her voice was high and musical and almost uninterested; except for a tiny, smug trace of pleasure, there was nothing in it, nothing at all. “Adam Ryan. It looks like he doesn’t tell you everything, after all, doesn’t it?” I had thought, only a few minutes before, that there was no way I could feel any worse and still survive.

  Cassie, on the screen, thumped the chair legs down and rubbed at one ear. She was biting her lip to hold back a smile, but I had nothing left in me with which to wonder what she was doing. “Did he tell you that?”

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  “Yes. We’ve got very close, really.”

  “Did he also tell you he had a brother who died when he was sixteen? That he grew up in a children’s home? That his father was an alcoholic?”

  Rosalind stared. The smile was gone from her face and her eyes were narrow, electric. “Why?” she asked.

  “Just checking. Sometimes he does those, too—it depends. Rosalind,” she said, somewhere between amused and embarrassed, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but sometimes, when detectives are trying to build up a relationship with a witness, they say things that aren’t exactly true. Things that they think will help the witness feel comfortable enough to share information. Do you understand?”

  Rosalind kept staring, unmoving.

  “Listen,” Cassie said gently, “I know for a fact that Detective Ryan has never had a brother, that his father is a very nice guy with no alcoholic tendencies, and that he grew up in Wiltshire—hence the accent—nowhere near Knocknaree. And not in a children’s home, either. But, whatever he told you, I know he only wanted to make it easier for you to help us find Katy’s killer. Don’t hold it against him. OK?”

  The door slammed open—Cassie jumped about a mile; Rosalind didn’t move, didn’t even take her eyes off Cassie’s face—and O’Kelly, foreshortened to a blob by the camera angle but instantly recognizable by his spidery comb-over, leaned into the room. “Maddox,” he said curtly. “A word.”

  O’Kelly, as I walked Damien out: in the observation room, rocking back and forth on his heels, staring impatiently through the glass. I couldn’t watch any more. I fumbled with the remote, hit Stop and stared blindly at the vibrating blue square.

  “Cassie,” I said, after a very long time.

  “He asked me if it was true,” she said, as evenly as if she were reading out a report. “I said that it wasn’t, and that if it were you would hardly have told her.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. It seemed important that she should know this. “I didn’t. I told her that two of my friends disappeared when we were little—so she’d realize I understood what she was going through. I never thought she’d know about Peter and Jamie and put two and two together. It never occurred to me.”

  Cassie waited for me to finish. “He accused me of covering for you,” she said, when I stopped talking, “and added that he should have split us up a In the Woods 363

  long time ago. He said he was going to check your prints against the ones from the old case—even if he had to drag a print tech out of bed to do it, even if it took all night. If the prints matched, he said, we would both be lucky to keep our jobs. He told me to send Rosalind home. I handed her over to Sweeney and started ringing you.”

  Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible. We sat there like that, not speaking, for a long time. The wind whipped spatters of rain against the window. Once I heard Cassie take a deep breath, and I thought she might be crying, but when I looked up there were no tears on her face; it was pale and quiet and very, very sad.

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  W e were still sitting there like that when Sam got in. “What’s the story?” he said, rubbing rain out of his hair and switching on the lights.

  Cassie stirred, lifted her head. “O’Kelly wants you and me to have another go at finding out Damien’s motive. Uniforms are bringing him over.”

  “Grand,” Sam said, “see if a new face shakes him up a bit,” but he had taken us both in with one quick glance and I wondered how much he was guessing; wondered, for the first time, how much he had known all along and simply left alone.

  He pulled over a chair and sat down next to Cassie, and they started discussing how to go at Damien. They had never interrogated anyone together before; their voices were tentative, earnest, deferring to each other and rising into open-ended little question marks: Do you think we should . . . ? What if we . . . ? Cassie switched the tapes in the VCR again, played Sam bits of last night’s interview. The fax machine made a series of demented, cartoonish noises and spat out Damien’s mobile-phone records, and they bent over the pages with a highlighter pen, murmuring.

  When they finally left—Sam nodding to me, briefly, over his shoulder—

  I waited in the empty incident room until I was sure they must have started the interrogation, and then I went looking for them. They were in the main interview room. I ducked into the observation chamber furtively, ears burning, like someone diving into an adult bookshop. I knew this was going to be the very last thing in the world I wanted to see, but I didn’t know how to stay away.

  They had made the room as cozy as humanly possible: coats and bags and scarves thrown on chairs, the table strewn with coffee and sugar packets and mobile phones and a carafe of water and a plate of sticky Danishes from the café outside the castle grounds. Damien, bedraggled in the same oversized sweatshirt and combats—they looked like he’d slept in them—hugged himself and stared round, wide-eyed; after the alien chaos of a jail cell, this must In the Woods 365

  have seemed a bright haven to him, safe and warm and almost homey. At certain angles you could see a fuzz of fair, pathetic stubble on his chin. Cassie and Sam were chattering, perching on the table and bitching about the weather and offering Damien milk. I heard footsteps in the corridor and tensed—if it was O’Kelly he would kick me out, back to the phone tips, this no longer had anything to do with me—but they went past without breaking stride. I leaned my forehead against the one-way glass and closed my eyes. They took him through safe little details first. Cassie’s voice, Sam’s, weaving together dexterously, soothing as lullabies: How did you get out of the house without waking up your mam? Yeah? I used to do that, too, when I was a teenager. . . . Had you done it before? God, this coffee’s horrible, do you want a Coke or something instead? They were good together, Cassie and Sam; they were good. Damien was relaxing. Once he even laughed, a pathetic little breath.

  “You’re a member of Move the Motorway, right?” Cassie said eventually, just as easily as before; nobody but me would have recognized the tiny lift in her voice that meant she was getting down to business. I opened my eyes and straightened up. “When did you get involved with them?”

  “This spring,” Damien said readily, “like March or something. There was a thing on the department notice-board in college, about a protest. I knew I was going to be working at Knocknaree for the summer, so I felt sort of . . . I don’t know, connected to it? So I went.”

  “Would that be the protest on the twentieth of March?” Sam asked, flipping through papers and rubbing the back of his head. He was doing solid country cop, friendly and not too quick.


  “Yeah, I think so. It was outside the government buildings, if that helps.”

  Damien seemed almost eerily at ease by this point, leaning forward across the table and playing with his coffee cup, chatty and eager as if this were a job interview. I’d seen this before, especially with first-time criminals: they’re not used to thinking of us as the enemy, and once the shock of being caught has worn off they turn light-headed and helpful with the sheer relief of the long tension breaking.

  “And that’s when you joined the campaign?”

  “Yeah. It’s a really important site, Knocknaree, it’s been inhabited ever since—”

  “Mark told us,” Cassie said, grinning. “As you can imagine. Was that when you met Rosalind Devlin, or did you know her before?”

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  A small, confused pause. “What?” Damien said.

  “She was on the sign-up table that day. Was that the first time you’d met her?”

  Another pause. “I don’t know who you mean,” Damien said finally.

  “Come on, Damien,” Cassie said, leaning forward to try to catch his eye; he was staring into his coffee cup. “You’ve been doing great all the way; don’t flake out on me now, OK?”

  “There are calls and texts to Rosalind all over your mobile-phone records,”

  Sam said, pulling out the sheaf of highlighted pages and putting them in front of Damien. He gazed at them blankly.

  “Why wouldn’t you want us knowing you guys were friends?” Cassie asked. “There’s no harm in that.”

  “I don’t want her dragged into this,” Damien said. His shoulders were starting to tense up.