In the Woods (29 page)

A hot summer day, sun on the back of my neck and the taste of Fanta in my mouth. The girl called Sandra was lying on her back in the clearing in a patch of flattened grass, with Metallica half on top of her. Her shirt was coming off her shoulder so her bra strap showed black and lacy. Her hands were in Metallica’s hair and they were kissing with their mouths wide open. “Ewww, you could catch germs that way,” Jamie whispered, by my ear.

I pressed myself closer against the ground, feeling grass print crisscross patterns on my stomach where my T-shirt had twisted up. We breathed through our mouths, to be quieter.

Peter made a long kissing noise, just soft enough that they couldn’t hear him, and we clamped our hands over our mouths, shaking with giggles, elbowing to make each other be quiet. Shades and the tall girl with five earrings were on the other side of the clearing. Anthrax mostly stayed at the edge of the wood, kicking the wall and smoking and throwing stones at beer cans. Peter held up a pebble, grinning; he flicked it, and it rattled into the grass only inches from Sandra’s shoulder. Metallica, breathing hard, didn’t even look up, and we had to duck our faces down into the long grass till we could stop laughing.

Then Sandra turned her head and she was looking at me; straight at me, through the long grass stalks and the chicory. Metallica was kissing her neck and she didn’t move. Somewhere near my hand a grasshopper was ticking. I looked back at her and felt my heart banging slowly against the ground.

“Come on,” Peter whispered urgently, “Adam, come on,” and their hands pulled my ankles. I wriggled backwards, scratching my legs on brambles, back into the deep shadow of the trees. Sandra was still looking at me.

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. . .

There were other memories, ones I still find it difficult to think about. I remembered, for example, going down the stairs of our house without touching them. I can recall this in perfect detail: the ribbed texture of the wallpaper with its fading bouquets of roses, the way a shaft of light came through the bathroom door and down the stairwell, catching on dust-motes, to glow a deep auburn in the polish of the banister; the deft, accustomed flick of my hand with which I pushed off the rail to float serenely downstairs, my feet swimming slowly three or four inches above the carpet. I remembered, too, the three of us finding a secret garden, somewhere in the heart of the wood. Behind some hidden wall or doorway, it had been. Fruit trees run wild, apple, cherry, pear; broken marble fountains, trickles of water still bubbling along tracks green with moss and worn deep into the stone; great ivy-draped statues in every corner, feet wild with weeds, arms and heads cracked away and scattered among long grass and Queen Anne’s lace. Gray dawn light, the swish of our feet and dew on our bare legs. Jamie’s hand small and rosy on the stone folds of a robe, her face upturned to look into blind eyes. The infinite silence. I was very well aware that if this garden had existed it would have been found when the archaeologists did their initial survey, and the statues would have been in the National Museum by now, and Mark would have done his level best to describe them to us in detail, but this was the problem: I remembered it, all the same. The guys from Computer Crime rang me early Wednesday morning: they had finished trawling through our last Tracksuit Shadow suspect’s computer, and they confirmed that he had, in fact, been online when Katy died. With a certain amount of professional satisfaction, they added that, although the poor bastard shared the house and the computer with both his parents and his wife, e-mails and discussion-board posts showed that each of the occupants made characteristic spelling and punctuation errors. The posts made while Katy was dying matched our suspect’s pattern to a T.

“Buggery,” I said, hanging up and putting my face in my hands. We already had security footage of the night-bus guy in Supermac’s, dipping chips into barbecue sauce with the glacial concentration of the very drunk. Deep down, a part of me had been expecting this, but I was feeling pretty In the Woods 177

ropy—no sleep, not enough coffee, nagging headache—and it was way too early in the morning to find out that my one good lead had gone south.

“What?” Cassie asked, looking up from whatever she was doing.

“The Kawasaki Kid’s alibi checked out. If this guy Jessica saw is our man, he’s not from Knocknaree, and I don’t have the first clue where to look for him. I’m back to bloody square one.”

Cassie tossed down a handful of paper and rubbed her eyes. “Rob, our guy’s local. Everything’s pointing that way.”

“Then who the fuck is Tracksuit Boy? If he’s got an alibi for the murder and he just happened to talk to Katy one day, why hasn’t he said so?”

“Assuming,” Cassie said, glancing at me sideways, “he actually exists.”

A flare of disproportionate, almost uncontrollable fury shot through me.

“Sorry, Maddox, but what the hell are you talking about? Are you suggesting that Jessica made the whole thing up, just for laughs? You’ve barely seen those girls. Do you have any idea quite how devastated they are?”

“I’m saying,” Cassie said coolly, her eyebrows lifting, “that I can think of circumstances in which they might feel they had a very good reason to make up a story like that.”

In the fraction of a second before I lost my temper altogether, the penny dropped. “Shit,” I said. “The parents.”

“Hallelujah. Signs of intelligent life.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry for biting your head off, Cass. The parents . . . Shit. If Jessica thinks one of their parents did it, and she made up this whole thing—”

“Jessica? You think she could come up with something like this? She can hardly talk.”

“OK, then Rosalind. She comes up with Tracksuit Boy to take our attention off her parents, coaches Jessica—the whole Damien thing is just a coincidence. But if she bothered to do that, Cass . . . if she went to this much hassle, she must know something pretty bloody definitive. Either she or Jessica must have seen something, heard something.”

“On the Tuesday . . .” Cassie said, and checked herself; but the thought passed between us all the same, too horrible to be voiced. On that Tuesday, Katy’s body must have been somewhere.

“I need to talk to Rosalind,” I said, going for the phone.

“Rob, don’t chase her. She’ll only back off. Let her come to you.”

She was right. Kids can be beaten, raped, abused in any number of 178

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unthinkable ways, and still find it all but impossible to betray their parents by asking for help. If Rosalind was shielding Jonathan or Margaret or both, then her whole world would crumble when she told the truth, and she needed to come to that in her own time. If I tried to push her, I would lose her. I put the phone down.

But Rosalind didn’t ring me. After a day or two my self-restraint ran out and I called her mobile—for a variety of reasons, some more inchoate and troubling than others, I didn’t want to phone the land line. There was no answer. I left messages, but she never rang me back.

Cassie and I went down to Knocknaree on a gray, mean afternoon, to see if the Savages or Alicia Rowan had anything new to tell us. We were both pretty badly hungover—this was the day after Carl and his internet freak show—and we talked very little in the car. Cassie drove; I stared out the window at leaves whipping in a fast, untrustworthy wind, spurts of drizzle spattering the glass. Neither of us was at all sure I should be there. At the last minute, when we had turned onto my old road and Cassie was parking the car, I wimped out of going to Peter’s house. This was not because the road had overwhelmed me with a sudden flood of memories, or anything like that—quite the contrary: it reminded me strongly of every other road in the estate, but that was about it, and this left me feeling off balance and at a strong disadvantage, as if Knocknaree had got one up on me yet again. I had spent an awful lot of time at Peter’s house, and in some obscure way I felt his family was more likely to recognize me if I was unable to recognize them first.

I watched from the car as Cassie went up to Peter’s door and rang the bell, and as a shadowy figure ushered her inside. Then I got out of the car and walked down the road to my old home. The address—11 Knocknaree Way, Knocknaree, County Dublin—came back to me in the automatic rattle of something learned off by rote. It was smaller than I remembered; narrower; the lawn was a cramped little square rather than the vast, cool expanse of green I had been picturing. The paintwork had been redone not too long ago, gay butter-yellow with a white trim. Tall red and white rosebushes were dropping their last petals by the wall, and I wondered if my father had planted them. I looked up at my bedroom window and in that instant it clicked home: I had lived here. I had In the Woods 179

run out that door with my book bag on school mornings, leaned out of that window to yell down to Peter and Jamie, learned to walk in that garden. I had been riding my bike up and down this very road, until the moment when the three of us had climbed the wall at the end and run into the wood. There was a neat little silver Polo in the driveway, and a blond kid, maybe three or four, was pedaling a plastic fire truck around it and making siren noises. When I reached the gate he stopped and gave me a long, solemn look.

“Hello,” I said.

“Go away,” he told me, eventually and firmly.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this, but as it turned out I didn’t have to: the front door opened and the kid’s mother—thirties, also blond, pretty in a standardized kind of way—hurried down the drive and put a protective hand on his head. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Detective Robert Ryan,” I said, finding my ID. “We’re investigating the death of Katharine Devlin.”

She took the ID and scrutinized it carefully. “I’m not sure how I can help,” she said, handing it back to me. “We already talked to the other detectives. We didn’t see anything; we barely know the Devlins.”

Her eyes were still wary. The kid was starting to get bored, making vrooming noises under his breath and wiggling his steering wheel, but she held him in place with a hand on his shoulder. Faint, sparkling music—Vivaldi, I think—was drifting through the open front door, and for a moment I came dizzyingly close to asking her: There are just a few things I’d like to confirm with you; would it be all right if I came in for a moment? I told myself Cassie would worry if she came out of the Savages’ house and found me gone. “We’re just double-checking everything,” I said. “Thank you for your time.”

The mother watched me leave. As I got back into the car, I saw her scooping up the fire truck under one arm and the kid under the other and taking them both inside.

I sat in the car for a long time, looking out at the road and feeling that I would be able to deal with this a lot better if only my hangover would go away. At last Peter’s door opened, and I heard voices: someone was walking Cassie down the drive. I whipped my head around and pretended to be staring in the opposite direction, deep in thought, until I heard the door close.

“Nothing new,” Cassie said, leaning in at the car window. “Peter didn’t 180

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mention being scared of anyone, or getting hassle from anyone. Smart kid, knew better than to go anywhere with a stranger; a little overconfident, though, which could have got him into trouble. They don’t have any suspicions of anybody, except they wondered if it could be the same person who killed Katy. They were sort of upset about that.”

“Aren’t we all,” I said.

“They seem like they’re doing OK.” I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask this, but I did want, rather badly, to know. “The father wasn’t happy about having to go over it all again, but the mother was lovely. Peter’s sister Tara still lives at home; she was asking after you.”

“Me?” I said, feeling an irrational little skip of panic in my stomach.

“She wanted to know if I had any idea how you were doing. I told her the cops had lost track of you, but as far as we knew you were fine.” Cassie gave me a sly grin. “I think she might have sort of fancied you, back then.”

Tara: a year or two younger than us, sharp elbows and sharp eyes, the kind of kid who was always ferreting out something to tell her mother. Thank God I hadn’t gone in there. “Maybe I should go talk to her after all,”

I said. “Is she good-looking?”

“Just your type: a fine strapping girl with good child-bearing hips. She’s a traffic warden.”

“Of course she is,” I said. I was starting to feel better. “I’ll get her to wear her uniform on our first date.”

“Way too much information. OK: Alicia Rowan.” Cassie straightened up and checked her notebook for the house number. “Want to come?”

It took me a moment to be sure. But we hadn’t spent much time at Jamie’s house, as far as I remembered. When we were indoors, it was mostly at Peter’s—his home was cheerfully noisy, full of brothers and sisters and pets, and his mother baked ginger biscuits, and his parents had bought a TV

on installments and we were allowed to watch cartoons. “Sure,” I said.

“Why not?”

Alicia Rowan answered the door. She was still beautiful, in a faded, nostalgic way—delicate bones, hollow cheeks, straggling blond hair and huge, haunted blue eyes—like some forgotten film star whose looks have only gained pathos over time. I saw the small, worn spark of hope and fear light in her eyes when Cassie introduced us, then fade at Katy Devlin’s name. In the Woods 181

“Yes,” she said, “yes, of course, that poor little girl. . . . Do they—do you think it had something to do . . . ? Please, come in.”

As soon as we got inside the house I knew this had been a bad idea. It was the smell of it—a wistful blend of sandalwood and camomile that went straight for my subconscious, setting memories flickering like fish in murky water. Weird bread with bits in it for tea; a painting of a naked woman, on the landing, that made us elbow and snicker. Hiding in a wardrobe, arms round my knees and flimsy cotton skirts drifting like smoke against my face,

“Forty-nine, fifty!” somewhere in the hall.

She brought us into the sitting room (handwoven throws over the sofa, a smiling Buddha in smoky jade on the coffee table: I wondered what 1980s Knocknaree had made of Alicia Rowan) and Cassie did the preliminary spiel. There was—of course; I don’t know how I had failed to expect this—a whacking great framed photo of Jamie on the mantelpiece, Jamie sitting on the estate wall squinting into sunlight and laughing, the wood rising all black and green behind her. On either side of it were little framed snapshots and one of them had three figures, elbows hooked around one another’s necks, heads tilted together in paper crowns, some Christmas or birthday. . . . I should have grown a beard or something, I thought wildly, looking away, Cassie should have given me time to—