by Tana French
Rocketing through the house to the kitchen, my mother hoovering somewhere upstairs—“Mam! Jamie’s staying, can I take stuff for a picnic?” as I grabbed three packets of crisps and a half-package of custard creams and shoved them up my T-shirt—then out the door again, waving to my mother’s startled face on the landing, and one-handed over the wall. Coke cans fizzing and foaming over, and us on our feet on top of the castle wall to clank them together. “We won!” Peter shouted up into the branches and the glittering bands of light, head thrown back and fist punching the air. “We did it!”
Jamie screamed, “I’m gonna stay here forever!” and danced on the wall like a thing made of air, “Forever and ever and ever!” And I just yelled, wild wordless whoops, and the wood caught our voices and tossed them outwards in great expanding ripples, wove them into the whirlpool of leaves and the jink and bubble of the river and the rustling calling web of rabbits and beetles and robins and all the other denizens of our domain, into one long high paean.
This memory, alone of all my hoard, did not dissolve into smoke and slide away through my fingers. It remained—still remains—sharp-edged and warm and mine, a single bright coin left in my hand. I suppose that, if the wood was going to leave me only one moment, that was a kind one to choose. In one of those merciless little codicils that such cases sometimes have, Simone Cameron rang me not long after I got back to work. My mobile number was on the card I had given her, and she had no way of knowing that I was cross-checking joyriders’ statements in Harcourt Street and no longer had anything to do with the Katy Devlin case. “Detective Ryan,” she said,
“we’ve found something I think you must see.”
It was Katy’s diary, the one Rosalind had told us she’d got bored with and thrown away. The Cameron Academy’s cleaning lady, in an unaccustomed fit of thoroughness, had found it taped to the back of a framed poster of Anna Pavlova that hung on the studio wall. She had rung Simone, 422
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agog with excitement, when she read the name on the cover. I should have given Simone Sam’s number and hung up, but instead I left the joyriders’
statements unchecked and drove down to Stillorgan.
It was eleven in the morning and Simone was the only person at the Academy. The studio was flooded with sunlight and the photos of Katy had been taken off the notice-board, but one breath of that specific professional smell—resin, hard clean sweat, floor polish—brought it all back: skateboarders calling on the dark street below, rush of padded feet and chatter in the corridor, Cassie’s voice beside me, the high singing urgency we had brought with us into the room.
The poster lay facedown on the floor. Dusty sheets of paper had been taped to the back of the frame to form a makeshift pouch, and on top of them was the diary. It was just a copybook, the kind kids use in school, lined pages and the cover that grubby recycled orange. “Paula, who found this, had to go on to her next job,” Simone said, “but I have her phone number if you like.”
I picked it up. “Have you read it?” I asked.
Simone nodded. “Some. Enough.” She was wearing narrow black trousers and a soft black pullover, and they somehow made her look more exotic, not less, than the full skirt and leotard had. Her extraordinary eyes had the same immobilized look they had held when we told her about Katy. I sat down on one of the plastic chairs. “Katy Devlin VERY PRIVATE
KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU!!!” the cover said, but I opened it anyway. It was about three-quarters full. The handwriting was rounded and careful, just beginning to develop touches of individuality: strong flourishes on y’s and g’s, a tall curled capital S. Simone sat opposite me and watched, one hand laid over the other in her lap, while I read. The diary covered almost eight months. The entries were regular at first, maybe half a page a day, but after a few months they became intermittent, two a week, one. Much of it was about ballet. “Simone says my arabesque is better but I still have to think about it coming from the whole body not just the leg specially on the left the line has to go straigt through.” “Were learning a new piece for the end of year show it has music from Giselle + I have fouettés. Simone says remember this is Giselles way to tell her boyfriend how he broke her heart + how much shell miss him this is her only chance so that has to be the reason for everything I do. Some of it goes like this” and then a few lines of labored, mysterious notation, like In the Woods 423
some coded musical score. The day she got her acceptance from the Royal Ballet School was a wild, overexcited burst of capital letters and exclamation marks and stickers shaped like stars: “IM GOING IM GOING IM
REALLY REALLY GOING!!!!!!”
There were passages about things she did with her friends: “We had a sleep over at Christinas house her mum gave us weird pizza with olives +
we played truth or dare Beth fancies Matthew. I dont fancy anyone dancers mostly dont get married till after their career so maybe when Im thirty five or forty. We put on make up Marianne looked really pretty but Christina put too much eye shadow she looked like her mum!!” The first time she and her friends were allowed into town on their own: “We took the bus + went shopping to Miss Selfrige Marianne + I got the same top but hers is pink with purple writing mine is light blue with red. Jess couldnt come so I got her a flower clip for in her hair. Then we went to Mac Donalds Christina stuck her finger in my barbcue sauce so I put some on her icecream we laughed so much the gaurd said hed put us out if we didnt stop. Beth asked him do you want some barbcue icecream?”
She tried on Louise’s pointe shoes, hated cabbage and got kicked out of Irish class for texting Beth across the aisle. A happy child, you would say, giggly and determined and running too fast for punctuation; nothing special about her except dancing, and contented that way. But in between: terror rose off the pages like petrol fumes, acrid and dizzying. “Jess is sad that Im going to ballet school she cried. Rosalind said if I go Jess will kill her self
+ it will be my fault I shouldnt be so selfish all the time. I dont know what to do if I ask Mum and Dad they might not let me go. I dont want Jess to die.”
“Simone said I cant get sick any more so tonight I said to Rosalind I dont want to drink it. Rosalind says I have to or I wont be good at dancing any more. I was really scared because she got so mad but I was mad too and I said no I dont beleive her I think it just makes me sick. She says Ill be sorry + Jess isnt allowed to talk to me.”
“Christina is mad at me on Tuesday she came over + Rosalind told her I said she wont be good enough for me once I go to ballet school + Christina wont beleive me I didnt. Now Christina and Beth wont talk to me Marianne still does though. I hate Rosalind I HATE HER I HATE HER.”
“Yesterday this diary was under my bed like always then I couldnt find it. I didnt say anything but then Mum took Rosalind + Jess to Auntie Veras I 424
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stayed home + looked all over in Rosalinds room it was inside her shoe box in her wardrobe. I was scared to take it because now shell know and shell be really mad but I dont care. Im going to keep it here at Simones I can write in it when I practice by myself.”
The last entry in the diary was dated three days before Katy died.
“Rosalind is sorry she was so horrible about me going away she was only worried about Jess + upset about me being so far away shell miss me too. To make up for it shes going to get me a lucky charm to bring me luck dancing.”
Her voice rang small and bright through the rounded Biro letters, swirled in the sunlight with the dust-motes. Katy, a year dead; bones in the gray geometric churchyard at Knocknaree. I had thought of her very little since the trial ended. Even during the investigation, to be frank, she had occupied a less prominent place in my mind than you might expect. The victim is the one person you never know; she had been only a cluster of translucent, conflicting images refracted through other people’s words, crucial not in herself but for her death and the urgent firework trail of consequences it left behind. One moment on the Knocknaree dig had eclipsed ev
erything else she had ever been. I thought of her lying on her stomach on this blond wooden floor, the frail wings of her shoulder blades moving as she wrote, music spiraling around her.
“Would it have made some difference if we’d found this earlier?” Simone asked. Her voice made me start and set my heart pounding; I had almost forgotten she was there.
“Probably not,” I said. I had no idea whether this was true, but she needed to hear it. “There’s nothing here that ties Rosalind directly to any crime. There’s the mention of her making Katy drink something, but she would have explained that away—claimed it was a vitamin drink, maybe; Lucozade. The same for the lucky charm: it doesn’t prove anything.”
“But if we had found it before she died,” Simone said quietly, “then,”
and of course there was nothing I could say to that, nothing at all. I put the diary and the little paper pouch into an evidence bag and sent them over to Sam, at Dublin Castle. They would go into a box in the basement, somewhere near my old clothes; the case was closed, there was nothing he could do with them unless, or until, Rosalind did the same thing to someone else. I would have liked to send the diary to Cassie, as some kind of wordless and useless apology, but it wasn’t her case any more In the Woods 425
either, and anyway I could no longer be sure she would understand how I meant it.
A few weeks later I heard that Cassie and Sam were engaged; Bernadette sent round an e-mail, looking for contributions towards a present. That evening I told Heather someone’s kid had scarlet fever, locked myself in my room and drank vodka, slowly but purposefully, until four in the morning. Then I rang Cassie’s mobile.
On the third ring she said blurrily, “Maddox.”
“Cassie,” I said. “Cassie, you’re not actually going to marry that boring little yokel. Are you?”
I heard her catch her breath, ready to say something. After a while she let it out again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For everything. I’m so, so sorry. I love you, Cass. Please.”
I waited again. After a long time I heard a clunk. Then Sam, somewhere in the background, said, “Who was that?”
“Wrong number,” Cassie said, farther away now. “Some drunk guy.”
“What were you on so long for, then?” There was a grin in his voice: teasing. A rustle of sheets.
“He told me he loved me, so I wanted to see who it was,” said Cassie.
“But he turned out to be looking for Britney.”
“Aren’t we all,” said Sam; then, “Ow!” and Cassie giggled. “You bit my nose.”
“Serves you right,” said Cassie. More low laughter, a rustle, a kiss; a long contented sigh. Sam said, soft and happy, “Baby.” Then nothing but their breathing, easing into tandem and slowing gradually back into sleep. I sat there for a very long time, watching the sky lighten outside my window and realizing that my name hadn’t come up on Cassie’s mobile. I could feel the vodka working its way out of my blood; the headache was starting to kick in. Sam snored, very gently. I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.
. . .
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The motorway went ahead on the route originally planned, of course. Move the Motorway stalled it for an impressive amount of time—injunctions, constitutional challenges, I think they might have taken it all the way to the European High Court—and a grungy bunch of unisex protesters calling themselves Knocknafree (and including, I would be willing to bet, Mark) set up camp on the site to stop the bulldozers going through, which held things up for another few weeks while the government got a court order against them. They never had a chance in hell. I wish I could have asked Jonathan Devlin whether he actually believed, in the teeth of all the historical evidence, that this one time public opinion would make a difference, or whether he knew, all along, and needed to try anyway. I envied him, either way.
I went down there, the day I saw in the paper that construction had begun. I was supposed to be going door-to-door in Terenure, trying to find someone who’d seen a stolen car that had been used in a robbery, but nobody would miss me for an hour or so. I’m not sure why I went. It wasn’t a dramatic final bid for closure or anything like that; I just had some belated impulse to see the place, one more time.
It was a mess. I had expected this, but I hadn’t foreseen the scale of it. I could hear the mindless roar of machinery long before I reached the top of the hill. The whole site was unrecognizable, men in neon protective gear swarming like ants and shouting hoarse unintelligible commands over the noise, huge grimy bulldozers tossing aside great clumps of earth and nosing with slow, obscene delicacy at the excavated remnants of walls. I parked at the side of the road and got out of the car. There was a disconsolate little huddle of protesters on the shoulder (it was still untouched, so far; the chestnuts were starting to fall again), waving hand-lettered signs—
Save Our Heritage, History Is Not For Sale—in case the media showed up again. The raw, churning earth seemed to go on and on into the distance, it seemed huger than the dig had ever been, and it took me a few moments to realize why this was: that last strip of wood was almost gone. Pale, splintered trunks; roots exposed, thrusting crazily at the gray sky. Chainsaws were gibbering at the handful of trees that were left. The memory smacked me in the solar plexus so hard it took my breath away: scrambling up the castle wall, crisp packets crackling in my T-shirt and the sound of the river chuckling somewhere far below; Peter’s runner In the Woods 427
searching for a foothold just above me, Jamie’s blond flag flying high among the swaying leaves. My whole body remembered it, the familiar scrape of stone against my palm, the brace of my thigh muscle as I pushed myself upwards, into the whirl of green and exploding light. I had become so used to thinking of the wood as the invincible and stalking enemy, the shadow over every secret corner of my mind; I had completely forgotten that, for much of my life, it had been our easy playground and our best-loved refuge. It hadn’t really occurred to me, until I saw them cutting it down, that it had been beautiful.
At the edge of the site, near the road, one of the workmen had pulled a squashed packet of cigarettes from under his orange vest and was methodically patting down his pockets for a lighter. I found mine and went over to him.
“Ta, son,” he said through the cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. He was somewhere in his fifties, small and wiry, with a face like a terrier: friendly, noncommittal, with bushy eyebrows and a thick handlebar mustache.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
He shrugged, inhaled and handed the lighter back to me. “Ah, sure. I’ve seen worse. Bleeding great rocks everywhere, that’s the only thing.”
“From the castle, maybe. This used to be an archaeological site.”
“You’re telling me,” he said, nodding towards the protesters. I smiled. “Found anything interesting?”
His eyes returned sharply to my face, and I could see him giving me a quick, concise appraisal: protester, archaeologist, government spy? “Like what?”
“I don’t know; archaeological bits and pieces, maybe. Animal bones. Human bones.”
His eyebrows twitched together. “You a cop?”
“No,” I said. The air smelled wet and heavy, rich with turned earth and latent rain. “Two of my friends went missing here, back in the eighties.”
He nodded thoughtfully, unsurprised. “I remember that, all right,” he said. “Two young kids. Are you the little fella was with them?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me.”
He took a deep, leisurely drag on his cigarette and squinted up at me with mild interest. “Sorry for your trouble.”
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“It’s a long time ago,” I said.
He nodded. “We’ve found no bones that I know of. Rabbits and foxes might’ve turned up, maybe; no
thing bigger. We’d have called the cops if we had.”
“I know,” I said. “I was just checking.”
He thought about this for a while, gazing back over the site. “One of the lads found this, earlier,” he said. He went through his pockets, working from the bottom up, and pulled something out from under the vest. “What d’you make of that, now?”
He dropped the thing into my palm. It was leaf-shaped, flat and narrow and about as long as my thumb, made of some smooth metal coated matt black with age. One end was jagged; it had snapped off something, a long time ago. He had tried to clean it up, but it was still patched with small, hard encrustations of earth. “I don’t know,” I said. “An arrowhead, maybe, or part of a pendant.”
“Found it in the muck on his boot, at the tea break,” the man said. “He gave it to me to bring home to my daughter’s young fella; mad into the old archaeology, he is.”
The thing was cool in my palm, heavier than you would expect. Narrow grooves, half worn away, formed a pattern on one side. I tilted it to the light: a man, no more than a stick-figure, with the wide, pronged antlers of a stag.
“You can hang on to that if you like,” the man said. “The young fella won’t miss what he’s never had.”
I closed my hand over the object. The edges bit into my palm; I could feel my pulse beating against it. It should probably have been in a museum. Mark would have gone nuts over it. “No,” I said. “Thank you. I think your grandson should have it.”
He shrugged, eyebrows jumping. I tipped the object into his hand.
“Thank you for showing it to me,” I said.
“No bother,” the man said, tucking it back into his pocket. “Good luck.”
“You, too,” I said. It was starting to rain, a fine, misty drizzle. He threw his cigarette butt into a tire track and headed back to work, turning up his collar as he went.
I lit a cigarette of my own and watched them working. The metal object had left slender red marks across my palm. Two little kids, maybe eight or nine, were balancing on their stomachs across the estate wall; the In the Woods 429
