In the Woods (13 page)

Tana French

she would sulk and bang pans for days to register her displeasure at my lack of consideration, or I could say, “Are you OK?” in which case I would have to spend the next hour listening to a blow-by-blow account of the outrages perpetrated by her boss or her sinuses or whatever it was that was currently making her feel hard done by.

Fortunately I have an Option C, though it has to be saved for emergencies. “Are you sure?” I said. “There’s this awful flu going round at work, and I think I’m coming down with it. I hope you don’t get it, too.”

“Oh, my God,” said Heather, her voice going up another octave and her eyes getting even bigger. “Rob, pet, I so don’t mean to be rude, but I’d probably better stay away from you. You know I just get colds so easily.”

“I understand,” I said reassuringly, and Heather disappeared back into the kitchen, presumably to add horse-sized capsules of vitamin C and echinacea to her frenetically balanced diet. I went into my room and closed the door.

I poured myself a drink—I keep a bottle of vodka and one of tonic behind my books, to avoid cozy convivial “drinkies” with Heather—and spread out the old case file on my desk. My room is not conducive to concentration. The whole building has the cheap, mean-spirited feel of so many new Dublin developments—ceilings a foot too low, frontage flat and mudcolored and hideous in an utterly unoriginal way, bedrooms insultingly narrow as if designed to rub in the fact that you can’t afford to be picky—and the developer saw no need to waste insulation on us, so every footstep from above or musical selection from below echoes through our entire flat, and I know far more than I need to about the sexual tastes of the couple next door. Over four years I’ve more or less got used to it, but I still find all the basic premises of the place offensive.

The ink of the statement sheets was faded and spotty, almost illegible in places, and I tasted fine dust settling on my lips. The two detectives who had headed the case were both retired by this time, but I made a note of their names—Kiernan and McCabe—in case we, or rather Cassie, needed to talk to them at some stage.

One of the most startling things about the case, to modern eyes, is how slow our families were to become worried. Nowadays parents are on the phone to the police as soon as a child’s mobile goes unanswered; Missing Persons have become jaded from taking too many reports on children kept In the Woods 75

after school or lingering over video games. It seems ingenuous to say that the 1980s were a more innocent time, given all that we now know about industrial schools and revered priests and fathers in rocky, lonely corners of the country. But then these were only unthinkable rumors happening somewhere else, people held on to their innocence with a simple and passionate tenacity, and it was perhaps no less real for being chosen and for carrying its own culpability; and Peter’s mother called us from the edge of the wood, wiping her hands on her apron, and then left us to our absorbing game and went home to make the tea.

I found Jonathan Devlin in the margins of a minor witness statement, halfway through the pile. Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald of 27 Knocknaree Drive—

oldish, by the cramped, curlicued handwriting—had told the detectives that a group of rough-looking teenagers hung around the edge of the wood, drinking and smoking and courting and sometimes hurling terrible abuse at passersby, and that you weren’t safe walking your own road these times, and that what they needed was a good clatter round the ear. Kiernan or McCabe had scribbled names down the side of the page: Cathal Mills, Shane Waters, Jonathan Devlin.

I flipped through the sheets to see if any of them had been interviewed. Outside my door I could hear the rhythmic, invariable sounds of Heather going through her nightly routine: determinedly cleansing and toning and moisturizing, brushing her teeth for the dentist-prescribed three minutes, genteelly blowing her nose an inexplicable number of times. Bang on schedule at five to eleven, she tapped on my door and cooed, “Night-night, Rob,”

in a coy stage whisper. “Night,” I called back, adding a cough at the end. The three statements were brief and almost identical, except for margin notes that described Waters as “v. nervous” and Mills as “uncoperative” [sic]. Devlin hadn’t warranted any comment. On the afternoon of August 14, they had drawn their unemployment assistance and then gone by bus to the pictures in Stillorgan. They had got back to Knocknaree around seven—

when we were already late for tea—and gone drinking in a field near the wood till around midnight. Yes, they had seen the searchers, but they had simply moved behind a hedge to be out of sight. No, they hadn’t seen anything else unusual. No, they hadn’t seen anyone who could confirm their whereabouts that day, but Mills had offered (presumably in a spirit of sarcasm, but they took him up on it) to lead the detectives to the field and 76

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show them the empty cider cans, which did indeed prove to be located in the spot he identified. The young man who had been working the box office at the Stillorgan cinema appeared to be under the influence of controlled substances and wasn’t sure whether he remembered the three guys or not, even when the detectives searched his pockets and gave him a stern lecture about the evils of drugs.

I didn’t get the impression that the “youths”—I hate that word—had been serious suspects. They weren’t exactly hardened criminals (the local uniforms cautioned them for public intoxication on a semiregular basis, and Shane Waters had been given six months’ probation for shoplifting when he was fourteen, but that was it), and why would they want to make a couple of twelve-year-olds disappear? They had simply been there, and vaguely unsavory, so Kiernan and McCabe had checked them out. The bikers, we had called them, although I’m unsure whether any of them actually had motorbikes; probably they just dressed as though they did. Black leather jackets, unzipped at the wrists and trimmed with metal studs; stubble and long hair, and one of them had the inevitable mullet. High Doc boots. T-shirts with logos on the fronts: metallica, anthrax. I thought those were their names, till Peter told me they were bands. I had no idea which one had become Jonathan Devlin; I couldn’t connect the sad-eyed man with the little paunch and the desk slump to any of the lean, sun-blurred, looming teenagers in my memory. I had forgotten all about them. I don’t think the bikers had entered my mind once in twenty years, and I intensely disliked the thought that they had been there all along in spite of this, just waiting for their cue to pop up neatly as jacks-in-thebox, bobbing and grinning, and make me jump. One of them wore shades all year round, even in the rain. Sometimes he offered us Juicy Fruit gum, which we took, at arm’s length, even though we knew they had stolen it from Lowry’s shop. “Don’t go near them,” my mother said, “don’t answer if they talk to you,” and wouldn’t tell me why. Peter asked Metallica if we could have a drag of his cigarette, and he showed us how to hold it and laughed when we coughed. We stood in the sun, just out of reach, stretching to see the insides of their magazines; Jamie said one of them had a girl all nude. Metallica and Shades flicked plastic lighters, had competitions to see who could hold his finger over the flame longest. When they left, in the evening, we went over and smelled the squashed cans left behind in the dusty grass: sour, stale, grown-up.

In the Woods 77

. . .

I woke up because someone was screaming below my window. I sat up hard, my heart banging against my ribs. I had been dreaming, something tangled and feverish where Cassie and I were in a crowded bar and a guy in a tweed cap was yelling at her, and for a moment I thought it was her voice I had heard. I was disoriented, it was dark, heavy late-night silence; and someone, a girl or a child, was screaming again and again outside. I went to the window and cautiously hooked the curtain open an inch. The complex where I live is made up of four identical apartment buildings around a little square of grass with a couple of iron benches, the kind of thing estate agents call a “communal recreation area,” although nobody ever uses it (the couple in the ground-floor flat had lazy evening cocktails al fresco a couple of times, but people complained about the noise, and the management company put up a narky sign in the foyer). The white security lights gave the garden an eerie nightscope glow. It was empty; the slants of shadow in the corners were too low to hide anyone. The scream came again, high and chilling and very close, and an atavistic prickle went up my spine. I waited, shivering a little in the cold air striking off the glass. After a few minutes something moved in the shadows, blacker against the black, then detached itself and stepped out onto the grass: it was a big dog-fox, alert and scrawny in his sparse summer coat. He raised his head and screamed again, and for a moment I imagined I caught his wild, alien scent. Then he trotted across the grass and disappeared through the front gate, pouring between the bars as sinuously as a cat. I heard his shrieks moving away into the darkness. I was dazed and half asleep and keyed up with leftover adrenaline, and my mouth tasted foul; I needed something cold and sweet. I went out to the kitchen to look for juice. Heather, like me, sometimes has trouble sleeping, and I found myself almost hoping she would be awake and still wanting to complain about whatever it was, but there was no light under her door. I poured myself a glass of her orange juice and stood in front of the open fridge for a long time, holding the glass to my temple and swaying slightly in the flickering white light.

In the morning it was pouring rain. I texted Cassie to say I’d pick her up—

the Golf Cart tends to go catatonic in wet weather. When I beeped my horn 78

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outside her flat, she ran down wearing a Paddington Bear duffle coat and carrying a thermos of coffee.

“Thank God it didn’t do this yesterday,” she said. “Bye-bye evidence.”

“Look at this,” I said, giving her the Jonathan Devlin stuff. She sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and read, occasionally passing me the thermos. “Do you remember these guys?” she said, when she’d finished.

“Vaguely. Not well, but it was a small neighborhood and they were hard to miss. They were the nearest thing we had to juvenile delinquents.”

“Did they strike you as dangerous?”

I thought about this for a while, as we crawled down Northumberland Road. “Depends what you mean,” I said. “We were wary of them, but I think that was mainly because of their image, not because they ever did anything to us. I remember them being fairly tolerant of us, actually. I can’t see them having made Peter and Jamie disappear.”

“Who were the girls? Were they interviewed?”

“What girls?”

Cassie flicked back to Mrs. Fitzgerald’s statement. “She said ‘courting.’

I’d say it’s a safe bet that involved girls.”

She was right, of course. I wasn’t too clear on the exact definition of

“courting,” but I was pretty sure it would have excited a fair amount of comment if Jonathan Devlin and his mates had been doing it with each other. “They’re not in the file,” I said.

“What about you, do you remember them?”

We were still on Northumberland Road. The rain was sheeting down the windows so heavily it looked like we were underwater. Dublin was built for pedestrians and carriages, not for cars; it’s full of tiny winding medieval streets, rush hour lasts from seven in the morning till eight at night, and at the first hint of bad weather the whole city goes into prompt, thorough gridlock. I wished we had left a note for Sam.

“I think so,” I said eventually. It was nearer to a sensation than to a memory: powdery lemon bonbons, dimples, flowery perfume. Metallica and Sandra, sitting in a tree . . . “One of them might have been called Sandra.”

Something inside me flinched at the name—acrid taste like fear or shame at the back of my tongue—but I couldn’t find why.

Sandra: round-faced and buxom, giggles and pencil skirts that rode up when she perched on the wall. She seemed very grown up and sophisticated to us; she must have been all of seventeen or eighteen. She gave us sweets In the Woods 79

out of a paper bag. Sometimes there was another girl there, tall, with big teeth and lots of earrings—Claire, maybe? Ciara? Sandra showed Jamie how to put on mascara, in a little heart-shaped mirror. Afterwards Jamie kept blinking, as though her eyes felt strange, heavy. “You look pretty,” Peter said. Later Jamie decided she hated it. She washed it off in the river, scrubbing away the panda rings with the hem of her T-shirt.

“Green light,” Cassie said quietly. I inched forward another few feet. We stopped at a newsagent’s and Cassie ran in and got the papers, so we could see what we were dealing with. Katy Devlin was front-page news in every one of them, and they all seemed to be focusing on the motorway link—knocknaree protest leader’s daughter murdered, that kind of thing. The large tabloid reporter (whose story was headlined dig bigwig’s daughter slaughter, a hyphen away from libel) had thrown in a few coy references to Druidic ceremonies but stayed clear of full-scale Satanism hysteria; she was obviously waiting to see which way the wind blew. I hoped O’Kelly would do his stuff well. Nobody, thank Christ, had mentioned Peter and Jamie, but I knew it was only a matter of time. We palmed off the McLoughlin case (the one we had been working till we got this call: two God-awful little rich boys who had kicked another to death when he jumped the queue for a late-night taxi) on Quigley and his brand-new partner McCann, and went to find ourselves an incident room. The incident rooms are too small and always in demand, but we had no trouble getting one: children take priority. By that time Sam had got in—he had been held up in traffic as well; he has a house somewhere in Westmeath, a couple of hours out of town, which is as near as our generation can afford to buy—so we grabbed him and briefed him, with full harmonies and the official hair-clip story, while we set up the incident room.

“Ah, Jesus,” he said, when we finished. “Tell me it wasn’t the parents.”

Every detective has a certain kind of case that he or she finds almost unbearable, against which the usual shield of practiced professional detachment turns brittle and untrustworthy. Cassie, though nobody else knows this, has nightmares when she works rape-murders; I, displaying a singular lack of originality, have serious trouble with murdered children; and, apparently, family killings gave Sam the heebie-jeebies. This case could turn out to be perfect for all three of us.