In the Woods (27 page)

“Rosalind,” I said. “Jessica.”

Jessica flinched, eyes widening sharply, and the illusion was gone. She was holding something, a packet of sugar from the bowl in the middle of the table; she shoved the corner into her mouth and started to suck on it.

Rosalind’s face lit up at the sight of me. “Detective Ryan! It’s so good to see you. I know it was short notice, but— Oh, sit down, sit down. . . .” I pulled up another armchair. “Jessica saw something I think you should know about. Didn’t you, pet?”

Jessica shrugged, an awkward wriggle.

“Hi, Jessica,” I said, softly and as calmly as I could. My mind was shooting in a dozen directions at once: if this had anything to do with the parents then I would have to find somewhere for the girls to go, and Jessica was going to be terrible on the stand— “I’m glad you decided to tell me. What did you see?”

Her lips parted; she swayed a little in her chair. Then she shook her head.

“Oh, dear . . . I thought this might happen.” Rosalind sighed. “Well. She told me that she saw Katy—”

“Thanks, Rosalind,” I said, “but I really need to hear this from Jessica. Otherwise it’s hearsay, and that’s not admissible in court.”

Rosalind stared blankly, taken aback. Finally she nodded. “Well,” she said, “of course, if that’s what you need, then . . . I just hope . . .” She bent In the Woods 163

over Jessica and tried to catch her eye, smiling; hooked her hair back behind her ear. “Jessica? Darling? You really need to tell Detective Ryan what we talked about, sweetheart. It’s important.”

Jessica ducked her head away. “Don’t remember,” she whispered. Rosalind’s smile tightened. “Come on, Jessica. You remembered just fine earlier on, before we came all the way out here and dragged Detective Ryan away from work. Didn’t you?”

Jessica shook her head again and bit down on the sugar packet. Her lip was trembling.

“It’s all right,” I said. I wanted to shake her. “She’s just a little nervous. She’s been having a hard time. Right, Jessica?”

“We’ve both been having a hard time,” Rosalind said sharply, “but one of us has to act like an adult instead of like a stupid little girl.” Jessica shrank deeper into her oversized sweater.

“I know,” I said, in what I hoped was a soothing tone, “I know. I understand how hard this is—”

“No, actually, Detective Ryan, you don’t.” Rosalind’s crossed knee was jiggling angrily. “Nobody can possibly understand what this is like. I don’t know why we came in. Jessica can’t be bothered to tell you what she saw, and you obviously don’t think that matters. We might as well go.”

I couldn’t lose them. “Rosalind,” I said urgently, leaning forward across the table, “I’m taking this very seriously. And I do understand. Honestly, I do.”

Rosalind laughed bitterly, fumbling under the table for her purse. “Oh, I’m sure. Put that thing down, Jessica. We’re going home.”

“Rosalind, I do. When I was about Jessica’s age, two of my best friends disappeared. I know what you’re going through.”

Her head came up and she stared at me.

“I know it’s not the same as losing a sister—”

“It isn’t.”

“—but I do know how hard it is to be the one left behind. I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure you get some answers. OK?”

Rosalind kept staring for another long moment. Then she dropped her purse and laughed, a breathless burst of relief. “Oh—oh, Detective Ryan!”

Before she thought, she had reached across the table and caught my hand.

“I knew there was a reason why you’re the perfect person for this case!”

164

Tana French

I hadn’t looked at it this way before, and the thought was warming. “I hope you’re right,” I said.

I gave her hand a squeeze; it was intended to be reassuring, but she suddenly realized what she had done and pulled away, in an embarrassed flutter.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to—”

“Tell you what,” I said, “you and I can talk for a while, until Jessica feels ready to explain what she saw. How’s that?”

“Jessica? Pet?” Rosalind touched Jessica’s arm; she jumped, eyes wide.

“Do you want to stay here for a bit?”

Jessica thought about this, gazing up into Rosalind’s face. Rosalind smiled down at her. Finally she nodded.

I bought coffee for Rosalind and me and a 7-Up for Jessica. Jessica held her glass in both hands and stared, as if hypnotized, at the bubbles floating upwards, while Rosalind and I talked.

Frankly, I hadn’t expected to take much pleasure in a teenager’s conversation, but Rosalind was an unusual kid. The initial shock of Katy’s death had worn off and for the first time I got a chance to see what she was really like: outgoing, bubbly, all sparkle and dash, ridiculously bright and articulate. I wondered where the girls like this had been when I was eighteen. She was naïve, but she knew it; she told jokes on herself with such zest and mischief that—in spite of the context, and my creeping worry that this level of innocence would get her into trouble one day, and Jessica sitting there watching invisible booglies like a cat—my laughter was real.

“What are you going to do when you leave school?” I asked. I was genuinely curious. I couldn’t picture this girl in some nine-to-five office. Rosalind smiled, but a sad little shadow passed across her face. “I’d love to study music. I’ve been playing the violin since I was nine, and I do a little bit of composing; my teacher says I’m . . . well, he says I shouldn’t have any trouble getting into a good course. But . . .” She sighed. “It’s expensive, and my—my parents don’t really approve. They want me to do a secretarial course.”

But they had been behind Katy’s Royal Ballet School ambitions, all the way. In Domestic Violence I had seen cases like this, where parents choose a favorite or a scapegoat (I made a bit of a pet of her, Jonathan had said, that first day) and siblings grow up in utterly different families. Few of them end well.

“You’ll find a way,” I said. The idea of her as a secretary was ludicrous; In the Woods 165

what the hell was Devlin thinking? “A scholarship or something. It sounds like you’re good.”

She ducked her head modestly. “Well. Last year the National Youth Orchestra performed a sonata I wrote.”

I didn’t believe her, of course. The lie was transparent—something that size, someone would have mentioned it during the door-to-door—and it went straight to my heart as no sonata ever could have; because I recognized it. That’s my twin brother, his name’s Peter, he’s seven minutes older than me. . . . Children—and Rosalind was little more—don’t tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.

For a moment I almost said as much. Rosalind, I know something’s wrong at home; tell me, let me help. . . . But it was too soon; she would just have thrown all her defenses up again, it would have undone everything I had managed to do. “Well done,” I said. “That’s pretty impressive.”

She laughed a little, embarrassed; glanced up at me under her lashes.

“Your friends,” she said timidly. “The ones who disappeared. What happened?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. I had painted myself into this one, and I had no idea how to get out of it. Rosalind’s eyes were starting to turn suspicious, and, while there was not a chance in hell that I was going to go into the whole Knocknaree thing, the last thing I wanted was to lose her trust after all this.

Jessica, of all people, saved me: she shifted a little in the armchair, stretched out a finger to Rosalind’s arm.

Rosalind didn’t seem to notice. “Jessica?” I said.

“Oh—what is it, sweetheart?” Rosalind bent towards her. “Are you ready to tell Detective Ryan about the man?”

Jessica nodded stiffly. “I saw a man,” she said, her eyes not on me but on Rosalind. “He talked to Katy.”

My heart rate started to pick up. If I had been religious, I would have been lighting candles to every saint in the calendar for this: just one solid lead. “That’s great, Jessica. Where was this?”

“On the road. When we were coming back from the shop.”

“Just you and Katy?”

“Yes. We’re allowed.”

“I’m sure you are. What did he say?”

“He said”—Jessica took a deep breath—“he said, ‘You’re a very good 166

Tana French

dancer,’ and Katy said, ‘Thank you.’ She likes when people say she’s a good dancer.”

She looked anxiously up at Rosalind. “You’re doing wonderfully, pet,”

Rosalind said, stroking her hair. “Keep going.”

Jessica nodded. Rosalind touched her glass, and Jessica took an obedient sip of her 7-Up. “Then,” she said, “then he said, ‘And you’re a very pretty girl,’ and Katy said, ‘Thank you.’ She likes that, too. And then he said . . . he said . . . ‘My little girl likes dancing, too, but she broke her leg. Do you want to come see her? It would make her very happy.’ And Katy said, ‘Not now. We have to go home.’ So then we went home.”

You’re a pretty girl. . . . These days, there are very few men who would say something like that to a twelve-year-old. “Do you know who the man was?”

I asked. “Had you ever seen him before?”

She shook her head.

“What did he look like?”

Silence; a breath. “Big.”

“Big like me? Tall?”

“Yeah . . . um . . . yeah. But big like this, too.” She stretched out her arms; the glass wobbled precariously.

“A fat man?”

Jessica giggled, a sharp, nervous sound. “Yeah.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A, a tracksuit. A dark-blue one.” She glanced at Rosalind, who nodded encouragingly.

Shit, I thought. My heart was speeding. “What was his hair like?”

“No. He didn’t have hair.”

I made a quick, fervent mental apology to Damien: apparently he hadn’t, after all, just been telling us what we wanted to hear. “Was he old? Young?”

“Like you.”

“When did this happen?”

Jessica’s lips parted, moved soundlessly. “Huh?”

“When did you and Katy meet the man? Was it just a few days before Katy went away? Or a few weeks? Or a long time ago?”

I was trying to be sensitive, but she flinched. “Katy didn’t go away,” she said. “Katy got killed.” Her eyes were starting to lose focus. Rosalind shot me a reproachful look.

“Yes,” I said, as gently as I could, “she did. So it’s very important for you In the Woods 167

to try and remember when you saw this man, so we can find out if he’s the one who killed her. Can you do that?”

Jessica’s mouth fell a little open. Her eyes were unreachable, gone.

“She told me,” Rosalind said softly, over her head, “that this happened a week or two before . . .” She swallowed. “She’s not sure of the exact date.”

I nodded. “Thank you so much, Jessica,” I said. “You’ve been very brave. Do you think you would know this man if you saw him again?”

Nothing; not a flicker. The sugar packet hung loosely in her curled fingers. “I think we should go,” Rosalind said, looking worriedly from Jessica to her watch.

I watched from the window as they walked away down the street: Rosalind’s decisive little steps and the delicate sway of her hips, Jessica dragging along behind her by the hand. I looked at the back of Jessica’s silky bent head and thought of those old stories where one twin is hurt and the other, miles away, feels the pain. I wondered if there had been a moment, during that giggly girls’ night at Auntie Vera’s, when she had made some small, unnoticed sound; if all the answers we wanted were locked away behind the strange dark gateways of her mind.

You’re the perfect person for this case, Rosalind had said to me, and the words were still ringing in my head as I watched her go. Even now, I wonder whether subsequent events proved her completely right or utterly and horribly wrong, and what criteria one could possibly use to tell the difference. 10

Over the next few days, I spent practically every waking moment searching for the mystery tracksuit. Seven guys around Knocknaree matched the description, such as it was—tall, heavily built, thirties, bald or skinheaded. One of them had a minor record, left over from his wild youth: possession of hash, indecent exposure—my heart skipped a beat when I saw that, but all he had done was take a leak down a laneway just as an earnest young cop was passing. Two said they might have been going into the estate on their way home from work at about the time Damien had given us, but they weren’t sure.

None of them would admit to having talked to Katy; all of them had alibis, more or less, for the night of her death; none of them had a dancing daughter with a broken leg, or anything like a motive, as far as I could discover. I got photos and did lineups for Damien and Jessica, but they both gave the array of photographs the same dazed, hunted look. Damien finally said he didn’t think any of them was the man he had seen, while Jessica pointed tentatively to a different picture every time she was asked and finally turned catatonic on me again. I had a couple of floaters go door-to-door, asking everyone in the estate whether they had had a visitor matching the description: nothing.

A couple of the alibis were uncorroborated. One guy claimed he had been online till almost three in the morning, on a bikers’ forum, discussing the maintenance of classic Kawasakis. Another said he had been on a date in town, missed the 12:30 night bus and waited for the 2:00 one in Supermac’s. I stuck their photos up on the whiteboard and set about trying to break the alibis, but every time I looked at them I got the same feeling, a specific and unsettling feeling that I was starting to associate with this whole case: the sensation of another will meeting mine at every turn, something sly and obstinate, with reasons of its own.

. . .

In the Woods 169

Sam was the only one getting anywhere. He was out of the office a lot, interviewing people—county council members, he said, surveyors, farmers, members of Move the Motorway. At our dinners he was vague about where all this was taking him: “I’ll show you in a few days,” he said, “when it starts to make sense.” I sneaked a glance at his notes once, when he went to the bathroom and left them on his desk: diagrams and shorthand and little sketches in the margins, meticulous and indecipherable. Then on Tuesday—a muggy, petulant, drizzly morning, Cassie and I grimly going through the floaters’ door-to-door reports again in case we had missed something—he came in with a big roll of paper, the heavy kind that children use to make valentines and Christmas decorations in school.