In the Woods

by Tana French

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Quite possibly exactly what you did.”

  He kept staring at me, breathing fast, his nostrils flaring slightly. I turned away and drew on my cigarette; after a while I heard him take a deep breath and lean back against the wall again.

  “Now I’ve something to ask you,” he said. “Did Rosalind have it right about you being that boy whose friends disappeared?”

  The question didn’t surprise me. He had the right to see or hear footage of all interviews with Rosalind, and at some level I think I had always expected him to ask, sooner or later. I knew I should deny it—the official story was that I had, legally if a little callously, made up the whole disappearance thing to gain Rosalind’s trust—but I didn’t have the energy, and I couldn’t see the point. “Yeah,” I said. “Adam Ryan.”

  Jonathan turned his head and looked at me for a long time, and I wondered what hazy memories he was trying to match to my face.

  “We had nothing to do with that,” he said, and the undertone in his voice—gentle, almost pitying—startled me. “I want you to know that. Nothing at all.”

  “I know,” I said, eventually. “I’m sorry I went for you.”

  He nodded a few times, slowly. “I’d probably have done the same thing, in your place. And it’s not as if I was some holy innocent. You saw what we did to Sandra, didn’t you? You were there.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She’s not going to press charges.”

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  He moved his head as if the thought disturbed him. The river was dark and thick-looking, with an oily, unhealthy sheen. There was something in the water, a dead fish maybe, or a rubbish spill; the seagulls were screaming over it in a whirling frenzy.

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked, inanely.

  Jonathan shook his head, staring up at the lowering sky. He looked exhausted—not the kind of exhaustion that can be healed by a good night’s sleep or a holiday; something bone-deep and indelible, settled in puffy grooves around his eyes and mouth. “Move house. We’ve had bricks through the windows, and someone spray-painted pedaphile on the car—

  he couldn’t spell, whoever he was, but the message came across clear enough. I can stick it out till the motorway thing is settled, one way or the other, but after that. . . .”

  Allegations of child abuse, no matter how baseless they may seem, have to be checked out. The investigation into Damien’s accusations against Jonathan had found no evidence to substantiate them and a considerable amount to contradict them, and Sex Crime had been as discreet as was humanly possible; but the neighbors always know, by some mysterious system of jungle drums, and there are always plenty of people who believe there is no smoke without fire.

  “I’m sending Rosalind to counseling, like the judge said. I’ve done some reading and all the books say it makes no difference to people like her, they’re made that way and there’s no cure, but I have to try. And I’ll keep her at home as long as I can, where I can see what she’s at and try to stop her pulling her tricks on anyone else. She’s off to college in October, music at Trinity, but I’ve told her I won’t pay her rent on a flat—she’ll stay at home, if it’s that or get a job. Margaret still believes she did nothing and you lot set her up, but she’s glad enough to keep her at home awhile longer. She says Rosalind’s sensitive.” He cleared his throat with a harsh sound, as if the word tasted bad. “I’m sending Jess to live with my sister in Athlone as soon as the scars on her wrists go down; get her out of harm’s way.”

  His mouth twisted in that bitter half-smile. “Harm. Her own sister.” For an instant I thought of what that house must have been like for the past eighteen years, what it must be like now. It made a slow, sick horror heave in my stomach.

  “Do you know something?” Jonathan said abruptly and painfully. “Margaret and I were only going out a couple of months when she found out she In the Woods 415

  was pregnant. We were both terrified. I managed to bring it up once, that maybe she should think about . . . taking the boat to England. But . . . sure, she’s very religious. She felt bad enough about getting pregnant to start with, never mind . . . She’s a good woman, I don’t regret marrying her. But if I’d known what was—what it—what Rosalind was going to be, God forgive me, I’d have dragged her on that boat myself.”

  I wish to God you had, I wanted to say, but it would have been cruelty.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, uselessly.

  He glanced at me for a moment; then he took a breath and shrugged his coat closer around his shoulders. “I’d better head in, see if Rosalind’s finished up.”

  “I think she’ll be awhile.”

  “She probably will,” he said tonelessly, and plodded up the steps into the courthouse, his overcoat flapping behind him, hunching a little against the wind.

  The jury found Damien guilty. Given the evidence presented, they could hardly have done otherwise. There had been various complicated, multilateral legal fights about admissibility; psychiatrists had had jargon-heavy debates about the workings of Damien’s mind. (All this I heard third-hand, in passing snatches of conversation or in interminable phone calls from Quigley, who had apparently made it his mission in life to find out why I had been relegated to paperwork in Harcourt Street.) His barrister went for a double-barreled defense—he was temporarily insane, and even if he wasn’t, he believed he was protecting Rosalind from grievous bodily harm—

  which often generates enough confusion to be mistaken for reasonable doubt; but we had a full confession, and, perhaps more importantly, we had autopsy photos of a dead child. Damien was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life, which in practice usually works out at somewhere between ten and fifteen years.

  I doubt that he appreciated the multiple ironies of this, but that trowel quite possibly saved his life, and certainly spared him various unsavory prison experiences. Because of the sexual assault on Katy, he was considered a sex offender and sentenced to be held in the high-risk unit, with the pedophiles and rapists and other prisoners who would not fare well in general population. This was presumably something of a mixed blessing, but it did at least 416

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  increase his chances of getting out of jail alive and without any communicable diseases. There was a minor lynch mob, maybe a few dozen people, waiting for him outside the courthouse after the sentencing. I watched the news in a dingy little pub near the quays, and a low, dangerous rumble of approval rose from the regulars as, on screen, impassive uniforms guided Damien stumbling through the crowd and the van pulled away under a hail of fists and hoarse shouts and the odd half-brick. “Bring in the bloody death penalty,” someone muttered in a corner. I was aware that I should feel sorry for Damien, that he had been fucked from the moment he walked over to that sign-up table and that I of all people ought to be able to muster up some compassion for this, but I couldn’t; I couldn’t.

  I really don’t have the heart to go into detail about what “suspended pending investigation” turned out to mean: the tense, endless hearings, the various stern authorities in sharply pressed suits and uniforms, the clumsy humiliating explanations and self-justifications, the sick through-the-looking-glass sensation of being trapped on the wrong side of the interrogation process. To my surprise, O’Kelly turned out to be my most vehement defender, going into long impassioned speeches about my solve rate and my interview technique and all kinds of things he had never mentioned before. Although I knew this was probably due not to some unsuspected vein of affection but to self-protection—my misbehavior reflected badly on him, he needed to justify the fact that he had harbored a renegade like me on his squad for so long—I was pathetically, almost tearfully grateful: he seemed my one remaining ally in the world. I even tried to thank him once, in the corridor after one of these sessions, but I only got out a few words before he gave me a look of such profound disgust that I started stammering and backed away. Eventually the various authorities decided
not to fire me, or even—which would have been far worse—to revert me back to uniform. Again, I don’t put this down to any particular feeling on their part that I deserved a second chance; more likely it was simply because firing me could have caught the eye of some journalist and led to all kinds of inconvenient questions and consequences. They kicked me off the squad, of course. Even in my wildest moments of optimism, I had hardly dared to hope they wouldn’t. They sent In the Woods 417

  me back to the floater pool, with a hint (beautifully delivered, really, in delicate, steely subtext) that I shouldn’t expect to get out of it again for a long time, if at all. Sometimes Quigley, with a more refined sense of cruelty than I gave him credit for, requests me for tip lines or door-to-door. The whole process was, of course, nowhere near as simple as I’m making it out to be. It took months, months during which I sat around the apartment in a wretched nightmarish daze, with my savings draining away and my mother timidly bringing over macaroni and cheese to make sure I ate, and Heather buttonholing me to explain the underlying character flaw at the root of all my problems (apparently I needed to learn to be more considerate of other people’s feelings, hers in particular) and give me her therapist’s phone number. By the time I got back to work, Cassie was gone. I heard, from various sources, that she had been offered a promotion to Detective Sergeant if she would stay; that, conversely, she had quit the force because she was about to be booted off the squad; that someone had seen her in a pub in town, holding hands with Sam; that she had gone back to college and was studying archaeology. The moral of most of the stories, by implication, was that women never really had belonged on the Murder squad.

  Cassie had not, as it turned out, left the force at all. She had transferred to Domestic Violence and negotiated time out to finish her psychology degree—hence the college story, I suppose. No wonder there were rumors: Domestic Violence is possibly the single most excruciating job in the force, combining as it does all the worst elements of Murder and Sex Crime with none of the kudos, and the thought of leaving one of the elite squads for that was inconceivable to most people. Her nerve must have gone, the grapevine said.

  Personally, I don’t believe Cassie’s transfer had anything to do with losing her nerve; and, though I’m sure this sounds facile and self-serving, I really doubt that it had anything to do with me, or at least not in the way you might think. If the only problem had been the fact that we couldn’t bear to be in the same room, she would have found a new partner and dug in her heels, shown up for work a little thinner and more defiant every day, until we came up with a new way to be around each other or until I put in for a transfer. She was always the stubborn one, of us two. I think she transferred because she had lied to O’Kelly and she had lied to Rosalind Devlin, and 418

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  both of them had believed her; and because, when she told me the truth, I had called her a liar.

  In some ways, I was disappointed that the archaeology story had turned out to be untrue. It was an easy picture to imagine, and one I liked to think about: Cassie on some green hill, with a mattock and combats, her hair blown off her face, brown and muddy and laughing.

  I kept a vague eye on the papers for a while, but no scandal concerning the Knocknaree motorway ever surfaced. Uncle Redmond’s name showed up, well down the list, in some tabloid’s chart of how much taxpayers were spending on various politicians’ makeup, but that was all. The fact that Sam was still on the Murder squad tended to make me think that he had done as O’Kelly told him, in the end—although it’s possible, of course, that he did in fact take his tape to Michael Kiely, and no newspaper would touch it. I don’t know.

  Sam didn’t sell his house, either. Instead, I heard, he rented it out at a nominal rate to a young widow whose husband had died of a brain aneurysm, leaving her with a toddler, a difficult pregnancy and no life insurance. As she was a freelance cellist, she couldn’t even collect unemployment benefit; she had fallen behind on her rent, her landlord had evicted her, and she and the children had been living in a B&B provided by a charity organization. I have no idea how Sam found this woman—I’d have thought you would need to go to Victorian London for that level of picturesque, deserving pathos; he had presumably put in a characteristic amount of research. He had moved to a rental flat in Blanchardstown, I think, or some equivalent suburban hell. The main theories were that he was about to leave the force for the priesthood, and that he had a terminal disease. Sophie and I went out once or twice—I did, after all, owe her dinner and cocktails several times over. I thought we had a good time, and she didn’t ask any difficult questions, which I took as a good sign. After a few dates, though, and before the relationship had really progressed enough to merit the name, she dumped me. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. In the Woods 419

  “You should go for younger women,” she advised me. “They can’t always tell.”

  Inevitably, sometime during those interminable months in my apartment (hand after hand of late-night solitaire poker, near-lethal quantities of Radiohead and Leonard Cohen), my thoughts turned back to Knocknaree. I had, of course, sworn never to let the place cross my mind again; but human beings can’t help being curious, I suppose, as long as the knowledge doesn’t come at too high a price.

  Imagine my surprise, then, when I realized that there was nothing there. Everything before my first day of boarding school had apparently been excised from my mind, with surgical precision and this time for good. Peter, Jamie, the bikers and Sandra, the wood, every scrap of memory I had retrieved with such laborious care over the course of Operation Vestal: gone. I could remember what it had been like to remember these scenes, once upon a time, but now they had the remote, secondhand quality of old films I had watched or stories I had been told, I saw them as if from a vast distance—

  three brown-skinned kids in battered shorts, spitting on Willy Little’s head from the branches and scrambling away, giggling—and I knew with cold certainty that over time even these deracinated images would shrivel up to nothing and blow away. They no longer seemed to belong to me, and I couldn’t shake the dark, implacable sense that this was because I had forfeited my right to them, once and for all. Only one image remained. A summer afternoon, Peter and me sprawled on the grass in his front garden. We had been trying, in a halfhearted kind of way, to make a periscope from instructions in an old comic book, but we were supposed to have a cardboard tube out of a roll of paper towel, and we couldn’t ask our mothers for one because we weren’t talking to them. We had used rolled-up newspaper instead, but it kept buckling, so all we could see through the periscope was the sports page, backwards. We were both in a really bad mood. It was the first week of the holidays and it was sunny, so it should have been a brilliant day, we should have been fixing the tree house or freezing our mickeys off swimming in the river or something; but on our way home from the last day of school on Friday, Jamie had said, to her shoes, “Three months and I go to boarding school.”

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  “Shut up,” Peter had said, shoving her, not hard. “No you won’t. She’ll give in.” But it had taken all the shine off the holidays, like a huge black smoke-cloud hanging over everything in sight. We couldn’t go inside because our parents were all mad at us for not talking, and we couldn’t go into the wood or do anything good because everything we thought of felt stupid, and we couldn’t even go find Jamie and get her to come out because she would just shake her head and say “What’s the point?” and make everything even worse. So we were lying in the garden, bored and itchy and annoyed with each other and with the periscope for not working and with the entire world for being a pain in the hole. Peter was pulling up blades of grass, biting the ends off and spitting them up into the air, in a restless automatic rhythm. I was lying on my stomach, one eye open to stare down at the ants bustling back and forth, and the sun was making my hair sweat. This summer doesn’t even count, I th
ought. This summer sucks.

  Jamie’s door slammed open and she shot out like she had been fired from a cannon, her mother calling after her with a rueful smile in her voice and the door ricocheting shut with a bang and the Carmichaels’ horrible Jack Russell exploding into high-pitched inbred hysteria. Peter and I sat up. Jamie skidded to a halt at her gate, head whipping round to look for us, and when we shouted to her she raced down the path, leaped over Peter’s garden wall and tumbled flat on the grass with an arm hooked round each of our necks, bringing us down with her. We were all yelling at the same time and it took a few seconds before I figured out what Jamie was shouting: “I’m staying! I’m staying! I don’t have to go!”

  The summer came to life. It burst from gray to fierce blue and gold in the blink of an eye; the air pealed with grasshoppers and lawnmowers, swirled with branches and bees and dandelion seeds, it was soft and sweet as whipped cream, and over the wall the wood was calling us in the loudest of silent voices, it was shaking out all its best treasures to welcome us home. Summer tossed out a fountain of ivy tendrils, caught us straight under the breastbones and tugged; summer, redeemed and unfurling in front of us, a million years long.

  We disentangled ourselves and sat up panting, barely able to believe it.

  “Seriously?” I said. “For definite?”

  “Yeah. She said, ‘We’ll see, I’ll have another think about it and we’ll sort something out,’ but that always means it’s OK but she just doesn’t want to say so yet. I’m going nowhere!”

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  Jamie ran out of words, so she pushed me over. I grabbed her arm, got on top of her and gave her a Chinese burn. There was a huge grin straight across my face, and I was so happy that I thought it would never come off again. Peter was on his feet. “We have to celebrate. Picnic in the castle. Go home and get stuff and meet there.”