In the Woods (32 page)

“You all right, Anna?” he demanded ominously, putting an arm around her waist and giving me a bullocky stare.

Out of his line of vision, Anna rolled her eyes at me, with a conspiratorial little smile. “Everything’s fine, Cillian,” she said. I didn’t think he was her boyfriend—she hadn’t been acting taken, at any rate—but if he wasn’t then he clearly wanted to be. He was a big guy, handsome in a heavy-set way; he had obviously been drinking for some time and was itching for an excuse to invite me to take it outside.

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For a moment I actually considered it. You heard the lady, pal, go back to your little buddies. . . . I glanced over at Sam and Cassie: they had given up on me and were deep in an intent conversation, heads bent close to hear through the noise, Sam illustrating something with a finger on the table. I was suddenly, viciously sick of myself and my professorial alter ego, and, by association, of Anna and whatever game she was playing with me and this Cillian guy. “I should get back to my girlfriend,” I said, “sorry again for spilling your drink,” and turned away from the startled pink O of her mouth and the confused, reflexive flare of belligerence in Cillian’s eyes. I slipped my arm around Cassie’s shoulders for a moment as I sat down, and she gave me a suspicious look. “Get shot down?” Sam asked.

“Nah,” said Cassie. “I’m betting he changed his mind and told her he had a girlfriend. Hence the touchy-feely stuff. Next time you pull that one, Ryan, I’m gonna snog the face off Sam and let your lady friend’s mates beat you up for messing with her head.”

“Deadly,” Sam said happily. “I like this game.”

At closing time, Cassie and I went back to her flat. Sam had gone home, it was a Friday and we didn’t have to get up the next morning; there seemed no reason to do anything but lie on the sofa, drinking and occasionally changing the music and letting the fire burn down to a whispering glow.

“You know,” said Cassie idly, fishing a piece of ice out of her glass to chew on, “what we’ve been forgetting is that kids think differently.”

“What are you on about?” We had been talking about Shakespeare, something to do with the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and my mind was still there. I half-thought she was going to come up with some late-night analogy between the way children think and the way people thought in the sixteenth century, and I was already preparing a rebuttal.

“We’ve been wondering how he got her to the kill site—no, knock it off and listen.” I was shoving at her leg with my foot and whining, “Shut up, I’m off duty, I can’t hear you, la la la. . . .” I was hazy with vodka and lateness and I had decided I was sick of this frustrating, tangled, intractable case. I wanted to talk about Shakespeare some more, or maybe play cards.

“When I was eleven a guy tried to molest me,” Cassie said. I stopped kicking and lifted my head to look at her. “What?” I asked, a In the Woods 195

little too carefully. This, I thought, this, finally, was Cassie’s secret locked room, and I was at last going to be invited in.

She glanced over at me, amused. “No, he didn’t actually do anything to me. It was no big deal.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling silly and, obscurely, a little miffed. “What happened, then?”

“Our school was going through this craze for marbles—everyone played marbles all the time, all through lunch, after school. You carried them around in a plastic bag and it was a big thing, how many you had. So this one day I’d been kept after school—”

“You? I’m astounded,” I said. I rolled over and found my glass. I wasn’t sure where this story was going.

“Fuck off; just because you were Prefect Perfect. Anyway I was leaving, and one of the staff—not a teacher; a groundskeeper or a cleaning guy or something—came out of this little shed and said, ‘Do you want marbles?

Come on in here and I’ll give you marbles.’ He was an old guy, maybe sixty, with white hair and a big mustache. So I sort of edged around the door of the shed for a while, and then I went in.”

“God, Cass. You silly, silly thing,” I said. I took another sip, put down my glass and pulled her feet into my lap to rub them.

“No, I told you, nothing happened. He went behind me and put his hands through under my arms, like he was going to lift me up, only then he started messing with the buttons on my shirt. I said, ‘What are you doing?’

and he said, ‘I keep my marbles up on that shelf. I’m going to pick you up so you can get them.’ I knew something was very badly wrong, even though I had no idea what, so I twisted away and said, ‘I don’t want any marbles,’

and legged it home.”

“You were lucky,” I said. She had slim, high-arched feet; even through the soft thick socks she wore at home, I could feel the tendons, the small bones moving under my thumbs. I pictured her at eleven, all knees and bitten nails and solemn brown eyes.

“Yeah, I was. God knows what could’ve happened.”

“Did you tell anyone?” I still wanted more from the story; I wanted to extract some rending revelation, some terrible, shameful secret.

“No. I felt too icky about the whole thing, and anyway I didn’t even know what to tell. That’s the point: it never occurred to me that it had anything to 196

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do with sex. I knew about sex, my friends and I talked about it all the time, I knew something was wrong, I knew he was trying to undo my shirt, but I never put it together. Years later, when I was like eighteen, something reminded me of it—I saw some kids playing marbles, or something—and it suddenly hit me: Oh, my God, that guy was trying to molest me!”

“And this has what to do with Katy Devlin?” I asked.

“Kids don’t connect things in the same ways grown-ups do,” said Cassie.

“Give me your feet and I’ll do them.”

“I wouldn’t. Can’t you see the smell-waves off my socks?”

“God, you’re disgusting. Don’t you ever change them?”

“When they stick to the wall. In accordance with bachelor tradition.”

“That’s not tradition. That’s reverse evolution.”

“Go on, then,” I said, unfolding my feet and shoving them at her.

“No. Get a girlfriend.”

“What are you wittering about now?”

“Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.”

All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said, realizing as I spoke that I had no idea how much action Cassie got. There had been a semi-serious boyfriend before I knew her, a barrister called Aidan, but he had somehow faded from the scene around the time she joined Drugs; relationships seldom survive undercover work. Obviously I would have known if she’d had a boyfriend since, and I like to think I would have known if she’d even been dating someone, whatever that means, but beyond that I had no idea. I had always assumed that was because there was nothing to know, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. I glanced encouragingly at Cassie, but she was kneading my heel and giving me her best enigmatic smile.

“The other thing,” she said, “is why I went in there in the first place.”

Cassie has a mind like a cloverleaf flyover: it can spin off in wildly divergent directions and then, by some Escherian defiance of dimension, swoop dizzily back to the crux. “It wasn’t just for the marbles. He had this very thick country accent—Midlands, I think—and it sounded like he might have said, ‘Do you want marvels?’ I mean, I knew he hadn’t, I knew he’d said ‘marbles,’ but a part of me thought just maybe he was one of those mysterious old men out of stories, and inside the shed would be shelves and In the Woods 197

shelves of scrying glasses and potions and ancient parchments and tiny dragons in cages. I knew it was only a shed and he was only a groundskeeper, but at the same time I thought this might just be my chance to be one of the children who go through the wardrobe into the other world, and I couldn’t stand the thought of spending the rest of my life knowing I’d missed it.”

How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against all the odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work. I told Quigley that she thought Croke Park Stadium should be turned into a shopping center, and watched her try to decipher his outraged splutter. She cut up the packaging of her new mouse mat and stuck the part that said touch me—feel the difference to the back of my shirt, and I wore it half the day before I noticed. We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.

No. These are stories I like to think about, small bright currency and not without value; but above all that, and underlying everything we did, she was my partner. I don’t know how to tell you what that word, even now, does to me; what it means. I could tell you about going room by room, guns twohanded at arm’s length, through silent houses where a suspect could be armed and waiting behind any door; or about long nights on surveillance, sitting in a dark car drinking black coffee from a thermos and trying to play gin rummy by the light of a streetlamp. Once we chased two hit-and-run joyriders through their own territory—graffiti and rubbish-dump wastelands whipping past the windows, sixty miles per hour, seventy, I floored it and stopped looking at the speedometer—until they spun into a wall, and then we held the sobbing fifteen-year-old driver between us, promising him that his mother and the ambulance would be there soon, while he died in 198

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our arms. In a notorious tower block that would redraw the outlines of your image of humanity, a junkie pulled a syringe on me—we weren’t even interested in him, it was his brother we were after, and the conversation had seemed to be proceeding along normal lines until his hand moved too fast and suddenly there was a needle against my throat. While I stood frozen and sweating and wildly praying that neither of us would sneeze, Cassie sat down cross-legged on the reeking carpet, offered the guy a cigarette and talked to him for an hour and twenty minutes (in the course of which he demanded, variously, our wallets, a car, a fix, a Sprite and to be left alone); talked to him so matter-of-factly and with such frank interest that finally he dropped the syringe and slid down the wall to sit across from her, and he was starting to tell her his life story when I got my hands under control enough to slap the cuffs on him.

The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands. 11

T hat weekend I went over to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner. I do this every few weeks, although I’m not really sure why. We’re not close; the best we can do is a mutual state of amicable and faintly puzzled politeness, like people who met on a package tour and can’t figure out how to end the connection. Sometimes I bring Cassie with me. My parents love her—she teases my father about his gardening, and sometimes when she helps my mother in the kitchen I hear my mother laugh, full-throated and happy as a girl—and drop hopeful little hints about how close we are, which we cheerfully ignore.

“Where’s Cassie today?” my mother asked after dinner. She had made macaroni and cheese—she has some idea that this is my favorite dish (which it may well have been, at some point in my life) and she cooks it, as a small timid expression of sympathy, whenever something in the papers indicates that a case of mine isn’t going well. Even the smell of it makes me claustrophobic and itchy. She and I were in the kitchen; I was washing up and she was drying. My father was in the sitting room, watching a Columbo movie on TV. The kitchen was dim and we had the light on, though it was only midafternoon.

“I think she went to her aunt and uncle’s,” I said. Actually, Cassie was probably curled up on her sofa, reading and eating ice cream out of the carton—we hadn’t had much time to ourselves, the last couple of weeks, and Cassie, like me, needs a certain amount of solitude—but I knew it would upset my mother, the thought of her spending a Sunday alone.

“That’ll be nice for her: being looked after. The pair of you must be shattered.”

“We’re pretty tired,” I said.

“All that back and forth to Knocknaree.”

My parents and I don’t talk about my work, except in the most general terms, and we never mention Knocknaree. I looked up sharply, but my mother was tilting a plate to the light to look for wet streaks. 200

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“It’s a long drive, all right,” I said.

“I read in the paper,” my mother said carefully, “that the police were talking to Peter and Jamie’s families again. Was that yourself and Cassie?”

“Not the Savages. I talked to Ms. Rowan, though, yes. Does this look clean to you?”

“It’s grand,” my mother said, taking the baking dish out of my hand.

“How’s Alicia now?”

There was something in her voice that made me look up again, startled. She caught my gaze and flushed, wiping hair away from her cheek with the back of her wrist. “Ah, we used to be great friends. Alicia was . . . well, I suppose she was almost like a little sister to me. We got out of touch, after. I was just wondering how she was, is all.”