In the Forest (25 page)

‘They’re after finding the girl in a furrow between the trees with twigs and brush over her,’ he says, his voice hasty and breathless.

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ Brophy says in a choked cry, recalling his brother telling him about delivering her stones from a quarry and her getting upset because of the way the ground swallowed them up.

‘Who found her? One of our lads?’

‘No, a forester ... he went up a few hundred yards and jumped the security wire ... by himself.’

‘And the child?’

‘No sign . . . they’re intensifying the search,’ Pakie says.

‘Take me to my mother’s grave,’ O’Kane shouts.

‘You sonofabitch . . . you thought you’d get away with it ... you thought a couple of months and animals and insects would have eaten her . . . missing for ever.’

‘Let me out ... let me out ... I want to go to my mother . .. she knows I’m innocent.’

‘Cuff him,’ Morgan says, sharp.

‘We can’t cuff him unless we get him on the ground . . . and if we open that door he’s gone . . . he’s back in them woods, period,’ Lahiffe tells him.

‘Put your foot down, Joe,’ Morgan says to Solon and as the car is turned, Cleary, a second guard, has arrived at the other window, his face streaming and red - ‘They just found the child, it was under the woman when they lifted her back.’

‘A fucking animal,’ Solon says.

‘You’re looking into the personification of Evil.’

‘Get him out of the area fast . . . there’s people up there baying for him . . . people that knew him . . . that fed him,’ Cleary says.

‘I’d like to throw him to them ... to the gladiators . . . it’s what should be done,’ Pakie says.

‘Now, lads ... we keep the cool ... we play this by the book . . . otherwise it could affect the trial,’ Morgan reminds them.

‘You realise what he’s done ... a woman, a child,’ Lahiffe says.

‘I do and I shrink from him . . . “Touch not the murderer lest thou too be touched”,’ Morgan says solemnly.

‘Unreal . . . unreal,’ Brophy keeps saying.

‘Fecking not unreal . . . real,’ Cleary says, mangling the handles of the motorcycle, shouting to include the warm day, the soft countryside, young buds, hawthorn blossom and a few hundred yards away, a scene so gruesome that he vomited.

‘You saw her,’ Solon says helplessly.

‘I saw her.’

‘What state are they in?’ Morgan asks.

‘They smell. They smell.’

‘Picture it ... and picture him ... he killed the girl, he reloaded the chamber and he shot the child . . .an animal . . .’

‘No animal would do such a thing ... an animal kills for survival . . . this is bloodlust . . .’

‘I want my mother,’ O’Kane says, throwing himself across Lahiffe.

‘You sonofabitch . . . your mother won’t help you now or never . . . you’re zeroed.’

‘Take a back road Joe . . . the word will be out,’ Morgan says and thanks the two messengers with a grim nod.

It is a narrow road, rutted and grassy from disuse, the drive so frantic it is like hallucination - dust spattering up, the fleeing countryside, the occasional cottage garden, horses, a television mast, O’Kane immersed in himself, in some bottomless cavity, like a grieving animal. Soon now they would enter bedlam but they did not know it and perhaps he did not know it either because he was sitting with his head down, sobs reaching up out of his gut when suddenly the car starts to veer from one side of the road to the other, Solon not yet realising what it is and then feeling that he is being choked as O’Kane has caught his tie and is jerking it violently. The car comes to a skidding halt and lurches up onto a bank where there are geese and goslings, grazing. The cramped car filled now with shouts, urgent, harried, afraid, the two detectives in the back locked in a clinch with him, like wrestlers in a pit, his strength prodigal, their fists not even denting him as if they are hitting leather.

‘Lie on him.’

‘Restrain him.’

‘Get him to the floor.’

‘Cuff him.’

‘We can’t cuff him.’

‘Get him off me . . . he’s biting my ear,’ Brophy roars. ‘Jesus, as if one madman isn’t enough,’ Morgan says, hoists himself over the front seat, grips O’Kane by the hair, pulling it with a long practised traction until the mouth and teeth are loosed from the bloodied ear and O’Kane’s face getting whiter and whiter - ‘You’re breaking my fucking neck.’

‘No one cares if we break every bone in your body,’ Morgan tells him as Lahiffe pulls his arms behind his back and handcuffs him, still butting, still vowing that he will bring them down.

The car rocks from side to side with Solon struggling to get a grip on the wheels as they slurp on the mossy bank and beyond the geese in a wild consternation because their young have been slaughtered, bits of yellow, lifeless, furry rag, slung there.

O’Kane sits between them, a lethal presence, the only weapon left to him is his fingers, his thumb tearing the opposite thumb, dragging the flesh away and then each finger picking the flesh of its opposite finger, the shredded flesh, the drawn blood and the chafing of the cuffs as if they are about to spring open of their own accord.

As they near the town the two detectives in the back look from one to the other, comparing their slashed jackets, their bruises, their cut lips.

‘Longest eighteen miles I’ve ever driven.’

‘How’s the ear?’

‘Deadly ... I can’t tell my wife he bit me.’

‘Cover him up lads . . . they’ll be looking for his horns here,’ Morgan says and they throw a blanket over him to hide him from the throng.

They have gathered outside the station, milled, grave, appalled, but when he is bundled out, the voices break into an instantaneous wail of repugnance and revenge, the same words again and again - ‘Murderer . . . Child murderer . . . Butcher.’

The likeness of the dead woman stares back at him from raised posters, stares from several points, her face with an unwonted calmness, the eyes soft as cloud, a long rope of hair under the upturned brim of a straw hat, gazing, at them, at him, at the summer day. He is not seeing it, not hearing their heckles, he has gone back into himself, into a hulking frozenness.

A legion of guards converge around him and he is pushed forward, a bunched and damned silhouette passing into the gloom of the hallway. Then in some monstrous and antic aftermath he turns, head-butts the blanket off and begins to laugh, a mad, mocking laugh and they draw back, a shaft of terror passing through them, witnesses to some medieval grotesquerie, his grinning face, his loathsome eyes with dead yet murderous glare.

They are afraid of him now, the Kinderschreck, one of their own sons, come out of their own soil, their own flesh and blood, gone amok.

It was like I dreamed it. It was like I’ll dream it all my life. I seemed to have known where I was going, my
steps led me there in an orderly, unfussy motion. I
didn’t salute any of the mob around the crossroads, they were as invisible to me as I to them. I was a phantom in search of a phantom and I would find it. To call it weird is to belittle it. I even think I envisaged how the woman would be. I’d seen her once playing pool in Boyce’s bar and sensing this glow around her, arnberish, possibly because of the red gold hair. She played like a pro and the men riled her. I had known it before I wakened. To my wife I said, ‘Leave the dinner till
evening time’ and she didn’t question me. She never
does which possibly accounts for our being together. I am described as a loner. My favourite place is a mobile home thirty miles away by the seaside. I walk and I walk and I need no one. I’ve never been one to believe in signs or portents or dreaming. I am a rationalist. Having passed the two barriers and little knots of guards stationed here and there it seemed to me that everyone was running in different directions, somewhat clueless. Strangers to the wood. It was a warm day and in the breeze there was the smell of spring itself, a tender smell. The wood was fairly dark and I had to crawl along under the low branches and under the trees that had fallen athwart. Strands of dead moss dipped from their branches. I sensed something in the instant before I saw it. Then that rapid contraction in the chest, that onrush of adrenaline. The exposed calf of one leg was the whitest white, the coat was black and she had thick purplish socks. She was in a furrow, face down, and the pine needles had fallen on her like decoration, fine, thin needles; rust colour. I knew she was dead, the smell alone told me that. She looked so remarkably lifelike that a person might be forgiven for thinking she could be brought back to life with a touch. There were flies on her hair, moving in and out of it and lodging on the crusts of dried blood. They were merciless. Nothing else moved. Not her. Not I. It was her repose that I found the most unbearable, the wisdom of it, as if in those last moments she saw what was coming and somehow she met death. The picture just kept going in and in, a gruesome canvas inside my head, forever.

‘Up here ... up here.’ I went out shouting it. I shouted like a madman but Cornelius said that when he came towards me, my face and my beard had the pallor of a ghost.

‘Why didn’t he overpower the bastard? Why didn’t he take the gun off him? Why didn’t he run into the woods? Why did he die like a lamb to the slaughter?’ It is Jack, a second woodsman, asking the detective who has just been winched down. Asking it relentlessly as he has asked it from the moment at dusk when, after the searches were called off until the morrow, he came on him alone, Father John, with his head placed over a limestone slab, his hands folded for prayer, his priest’s collar unstained.

‘Why, just tell me why, he didn’t fight back?’

‘No use in whys . . . because the creatures are all gone,’ the detective replies and then genuflects for a moment in lieu of a prayer and then it is the cold grim task of identifying the body and noting every detail for his report.

The same woods, that filtered green, the constant leafy murmur and yet not the same, no longer the harmless place it once was, marked now as a human can be marked by its violation, its wood memory, the habitation of their frightful pilgrimage, their hapless cries; three bodies soon to be wrapped in plastic and brought down to the waiting hearses.

The small country chapel has the smell and leafiness of field and woodland. Garlands of fern and ivy, bluebells in jugs, their bells a clouded violet blue, so close together as if they might just accidentally tinkle; carpets of flowers along the aisle and by the altar steps where the two coffins are placed on either side, the larger brown coffin for Eily and the smaller white one for Maddie. The chapel is filled to overflowing, the sermons, eulogies and songs drift out along with the smell of bluebells and woodbine, out to the grounds and the adjoining fields where hundreds of mourners stand, stunned and teary.

Cassandra spoke for her entire family when she said that their spirits should now be allowed to go free and looked at the coffins as if she was talking to the bodies beneath, bodies that had been cut and sawn and scalped and weighed and swabbed and pieced together again, dressed now in garments of eternal glory.

‘Free them,’ she said and cupped her hands and as she raised them, people looked up to the rafters believing they were witnessing the transmigration of the two souls.

An estranged father stood apart. That was his child inside the small white coffin, his feelings locked inside his own brusque and taciturn nature. Herself and the child were one, indivisible, and O’Kane, the outcast, had seen that and had wanted it and had had to destroy it in his hunger to belong. The ultimate loser. An estranged father who wanted to cry but did not cry, then. There were tears to be shed but they would be shed elsewhere, him imagining them forever in the woods, their true resting place. He thought
What can I do to prove to myself that I am that bit bigger than I was, before this struck. I can’t bring them back. I can think of those last mad minutes until thinking is empty of thought, but I can’t bring them back, ever.

What he did then was to search out O’Kane’s father and shake his hand and the man looked at him, perplexed, uncomprehending, his sunken eyes like holes in his face, two fathers, outside that boundary of mother and child, their hands briefly touching, touching on things that could never be said.

‘Tell me that you didn’t rape her, Mich ... just tell me that.’ It is Aileen, teary and unslept and waiting since dawn to be allowed in, travelling almost a hundred miles since he has been moved to a prison half way between home and the city. She has brought him clean clothes, a bar of soap and bananas that he asked for. The guard outside has explained to her that he has refused to give blood and asked her to tell him, as they have told him, that it can be taken forcibly. He looks at her as if he might kill her.

‘Tell me,’ she says, beseeching.

‘They set you up ... they want to blacken me with every crime in the book.’

‘Then tell me that you did not rape the woman, simple, simple, Mich.’

‘Fucking voices . . . won’t shut the fuck up ... get me a radio . . . get me anything . . . get me a gun . . . get me out of here.’

‘Mich . . . Michen.’

‘She loved me . . . she was my girlfriend . . . she sucked my cock in the woods ... we had a tent up there . . . mad for me.’