In the Woods (26 page)

Cassie, by unspoken agreement, was following up on the old case while I concentrated on the Devlins. McCabe had died several years before, a heart attack, but she went to see Kiernan. He was retired and living in Laytown, a little commuter village up along the coast. He was well into his seventies, with a ruddy, good-humored face and the comfortably sloppy build of a rugby player gone to seed, but he brought Cassie for a long walk on the wide empty beach, seagulls and curlews screaming, while he told her what he remembered about the Knocknaree case. He seemed happy, Cassie said that evening, as she lit the fire and I spread mustard on ciabatta rolls and Sam poured the wine. He had taken up woodworking, there was sawdust on his soft worn trousers; his wife had wrapped a scarf around his neck and kissed his cheek as he went out.

He remembered the case, though, every detail. In all Ireland’s brief disorganized history as a nation, fewer than half a dozen children have gone missing and stayed that way, and Kiernan had never been able to forget that two of these had been given into his hands and he had failed them. The search, he told Cassie (a little defensively, she said, as though this was a conversation he had had many times in his mind), had been massive: dogs, In the Woods 157

helicopters, divers; policemen and volunteers had combed miles of wood and hill and field in every direction, starting at dawn every morning for weeks and going on into the late summer twilights; they had followed leads to Belfast and Kerry and even Birmingham; and all the time a nagging whisper had insisted, in Kiernan’s ear, that they were looking in the wrong directions, that the answer was right in front of them all along.

“What’s his theory?” Sam asked.

I flipped the last steak onto its roll and handed round the plates. “Later,”

Cassie said, to Sam. “Enjoy your sandwich first. How often does Ryan do something that’s worth appreciating?”

“You are speaking to two talented men here,” I told her. “We can eat and listen, at the same time.” It would have been nice to hear this story in private first, obviously, but by the time Cassie had got back from Laytown it had been too late for that. The thought had already killed my appetite; the thing itself wasn’t going to make much difference. Besides, we always talked about the case over dinner, and today was not going to be any different if I could help it. Sam appears blithely unaware of subtext and emotional cross-currents, but I sometimes wonder if anyone can be quite as oblivious as all that.

“I’m impressed,” Cassie said. “OK”—her eyes went to me for a second; I looked away—“Kiernan’s theory was that the kids never left Knocknaree. I don’t know if you guys remember this, but there was a third kid. . . .” She leaned sideways to check her notebook, open on the arm of the sofa. “Adam Ryan. He was with the other two that afternoon, and they found him in the wood, a couple of hours into the search. No injuries, but there was blood in his shoes and he was pretty shaken up; he couldn’t remember anything. So Kiernan figured that, whatever happened, it must have been either in the wood or very nearby, otherwise how had Adam got back there? He thought someone—someone local—had been watching them for a while. The guy approached them in the wood, maybe lured them back to his house, and attacked them. Probably he hadn’t planned to kill them; maybe he tried to molest them and something went wrong. At some point during the attack, Adam escaped and ran back into the wood—which probably means they were either in the wood itself, in one of the estate houses that back onto it, or in one of the farmhouses nearby; otherwise he’d have gone home, right?

Kiernan thinks the guy panicked and killed the other two children, possibly stashed the bodies in his house until he saw his chance, and then either 158

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dumped them in the river or buried them, in his garden or, more likely—

there were no reports of unexplained digging in the area over the next few weeks—in the wood.”

I took a bite of my sandwich. The taste, pungent and bloody, almost made me retch. I forced it down, unchewed, with a swallow of wine.

“Where’s young Adam these days?” Sam inquired.

Cassie shrugged. “I doubt he’d be able to tell us anything. Kiernan and McCabe kept going back to him for years, but he never remembered any more. In the end they gave up, figured the memory was gone for good. The family moved out of the area; Knocknaree gossip says they emigrated to Canada.” All of which was true, as far as it went. This was both more difficult and more ridiculous than I had expected. We were like spies, communicating over Sam’s head in careful, stilted code.

“They must have been going mental,” Sam said. “An eyewitness right there. . . .” He shook his head and took a big bite of sandwich.

“Yeah, Kiernan said it was frustrating, all right,” Cassie said, “but the kid was doing his best. He even participated in a reconstruction, with two local kids. They were hoping it would help him remember what he and his mates had done that afternoon, but he froze up as soon as he got into the wood.”

My stomach flipped. I had no memory of this at all. I put down my sandwich; suddenly and intensely, I wanted a cigarette.

“Poor little bastard,” Sam said peacefully.

“Was this what McCabe thought, too?” I asked.

“No.” Cassie licked mustard off her thumb. “McCabe thought it was a tourist killer—some guy who was only here for a few days, probably over from England, maybe for work. See, they couldn’t find a single good suspect. They did almost a thousand questionnaires, hundreds of interviews, ruled out all the known perverts and weirdos in south Dublin, accounted for every local man’s movements down to the minute. . . . You know what it’s like: you almost always come up with a suspect, even if you don’t have enough to charge him. They had nobody. Every time they got a lead, they ran bang into a dead end.”

“That sounds familiar,” I said grimly.

“Kiernan thinks it was because someone gave the guy a fake alibi so he never really made it onto their radar, but McCabe figured it was because he wasn’t there to find. His theory was that the kids were playing by the river and followed it to where it comes out on the other side of the wood—it’s a In the Woods 159

long walk, but they’d done it before. There’s a little back road that goes right past that stretch of the river. McCabe thought someone was driving by, saw the kids and tried to drag them or lure them into his car. Adam fought, got away and ran back into the wood, and the guy drove off with the other two. McCabe talked to Interpol and the British police, but they didn’t come up with anything useful.”

“Kiernan and McCabe,” I said, “both thought the children were murdered, then.”

“McCabe wasn’t sure, apparently. He thought there was a chance someone had abducted them—maybe someone mentally ill and desperate to have kids, or maybe . . . Well. At first they thought they might have just run away, but two twelve-year-olds with no money? They’d have been found within days.”

“Well, Katy was no random tourist killing,” Sam said. “He had to set up the meeting, keep her somewhere for the day . . .”

“Actually,” I said, impressed by the pleasant, everyday tone of my voice,

“I can’t really see the old case as a car snatch, either. As far as I remember, the shoes were only put back on the kid after the blood in them had started to congeal. In other words, the abductor spent some time with all three of them, in the area, before one got away. To me, that says local.”

“Knocknaree’s a small place,” Sam said. “What are the odds of two different child-murderers living there?”

Cassie balanced her plate on her crossed legs, linked her hands behind her neck and arched stiffness out of it. There were dark shadows under her eyes; I realized suddenly that her afternoon with Kiernan had hit her hard, and that her reluctance to tell the story might not have been just for my sake. There is a specific tiny compression to the corners of her mouth when she is holding something back, and I wondered what Kiernan had told her that she wasn’t saying.

“They even searched the trees, you know that?” she said. “After a few weeks, some smart floater remembered an old case where a kid climbed a hollow tree and fell into a hole in the trunk; he wasn’t found till forty years later. Kiernan and McCabe had people checking every tree, shining torches into hollows . . .”

Her voice drifted off and we fell silent. Sam munched his sandwich with even, unhurried appreciation, put down the plate and sighed contentedly. Finally Cassie stirred, held out a hand; I put her smoke packet into it. “Kiernan still dreams about it, you know,” she said quietly, fishing out a cigarette. 160

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“Not as much as he used to, he said; only every few months, since he retired. He dreams that he’s searching for the two kids in the wood at night, calling them, and someone leaps out of the bushes and rushes at him. He knows it’s the person who took them, he can see his face—‘Clear as I see you,’ he said—but when he wakes up, he can’t remember it.”

The fire cracked and spat sharply. I caught it out of the corner of my eye and whipped round; I was sure I had seen something shoot out of the fireplace into the room, some small, black, clawed thing—baby bird, maybe, fallen down the chimney?—but there was nothing there. When I turned back Sam’s eyes were on me, gray and calm and somehow sympathetic, but he only smiled and leaned across the table to refill my glass. I was having trouble sleeping, even when I got the opportunity. I often do, as I’ve said, but this was different: in those weeks I kept finding myself trapped in some twilight zone between sleep and waking, unable to force my way into either. “Look out!” voices said suddenly and loudly in my ear; or,

“I can’t hear you. What? What?” I half-dreamed dark intruders moving stealthily around the room, riffling through my work notes and fingering the shirts in my wardrobe; I knew they couldn’t be real, but it took me a panicky eternity to drag myself awake to either confront or dispel them. Once I woke to find myself slumped against the wall by my bedroom door, pawing crazily at the light switch, my legs barely able to hold me up. My head was swimming and there was a muffled moaning sound coming from somewhere, and it was a long time before I realized that it was my voice. I turned on the light, and my desk lamp, and crawled back into bed, where I lay, too shaken to go back to sleep, until my alarm went off. In this limbo I kept hearing children’s voices, too. Not Peter’s and Jamie’s, or anything: this was a group of children a long way off, chanting playground rhymes that I didn’t remember ever having known. Their voices were gay and uncaring and too pure to be human, and underneath them were the brisk expert rhythms of complicated hand-clapping. Say say my playmate, come out and play with me, climb up my apple tree . . . Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-o, one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so. . . . Sometimes their faint chorus stayed in my head all day, a high inescapable underscore to whatever I was doing. I lived in mortal dread that O’Kelly would catch me humming one of the rhymes. In the Woods 161

. . .

Rosalind phoned my mobile that Saturday. I was in the incident room; Cassie had gone off to talk to Missing Persons; behind me, O’Gorman was bellowing about some guy who had failed to give him proper respect during the door-to-door. I had to press the phone to my ear to hear her. “Detective Ryan, it’s Rosalind. . . . I’m so sorry to bother you, but do you think you might have the time to come talk to Jessica?”

City noises in the background: cars, loud conversation, the frenetic beeping of a pedestrian signal. “Of course,” I said. “Where are you?”

“We’re in town. Could we meet you in the Central Hotel bar in, say, ten minutes? Jessica has something to tell you.”

I dug out the main file and started flipping through it for Rosalind’s date of birth: if I was going to talk to Jessica, I needed an “appropriate adult”

present. “Are your parents with you?”

“No, I . . . no. I think Jessica might be more comfortable talking without them, if that’s all right.”

My antennae prickled. I had found the page of family stats: Rosalind was eighteen, and appropriate as far as I was concerned. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll see you there.”

“Thank you, Detective Ryan, I knew I could come to you—I’m sorry to rush you, but we really should get home before—” A beep, and she was gone: either her battery or her credit had run out. I wrote Cassie a “Back soon” note and left.

Rosalind had good taste. The Central bar has a stubbornly old-fashioned feel—ceiling moldings, huge comfortable armchairs taking up inefficient quantities of space, shelves of weird old books in elegant bindings—that contrasts satisfyingly with the manic overdrive of the streets below. Sometimes I used to go there on Saturdays, have a glass of brandy and a cigar—

this was before the smoking ban—and spend the afternoon reading the 1938 Farmer’s Almanac or third-rate Victorian poems.

Rosalind and Jessica were at a table by the window. Rosalind’s curls were caught up loosely and she was wearing a white outfit, long skirt and gauzy ruffled blouse, that blended perfectly with the surroundings; she looked as if she had just stepped in from some Edwardian garden party. She was leaning 162

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over to whisper in Jessica’s ear, one hand stroking her hair in a slow, soothing rhythm. Jessica was in an armchair, her legs curled under her, and the sight of her hit me all over again, almost as hard as it had that first time. The sun streaming through the high window held her in a column of light that transformed her into a radiant vision of someone else, someone vivid and eager and lost. The fine crooked Vs of her eyebrows, the tilt of her nose, the full, childish curve of her lip: the last time I had looked into that face, it had been empty and blood-smeared on Cooper’s steel table. She was like a reprieve; like Eurydice, gifted back to Orpheus from the darkness for a brief miraculous moment. I wanted, so intensely it took my breath away, to reach out and lay a hand on her soft dark head, to pull her tightly against me and feel her slight and warm and breathing, as if by protecting her hard enough I could somehow undo time and protect Katy, too.