In the Woods (33 page)

I had a fast, queasy flash of retrospective panic: if I had known that Alicia Rowan and my mother had been close, I would never have gone near that house. “I think she’s all right,” I said. “As much as one could expect. She still has Jamie’s room the way it was.”

My mother clicked her tongue unhappily. We washed up in silence for some time: clink of cutlery, Peter Falk cunningly interrogating someone in the next room. Outside the window, a pair of magpies landed on the grass and started picking over the tiny garden, discussing it raucously as they went.

“Shoo,” my mother said automatically, rapping the glass, and sighed. “I suppose I’ve never forgiven myself for losing touch with Alicia. She’d no one else. She was such a sweet girl, a real innocent—she was still hoping Jamie’s father would leave his wife, after all that time, and they’d be a family. . . . Did she ever marry?”

“No. But she doesn’t seem unhappy, really. She teaches yoga.” The suds in the basin had turned lukewarm and clammy; I reached for the kettle and added more hot water.

“That’s one reason we moved away, you know,” my mother said. She had her back to me, sorting cutlery into a drawer. “I couldn’t face them—Alicia and Angela and Joseph. I had my son back safe and sound, and they were going through hell. . . . I could hardly go out of the house, in case I’d meet them. I know it sounds mad, but I felt guilty. I thought they must hate me for having you safe. I don’t see how they could help it.”

This took me aback. I suppose all children are self-centered; it had never occurred to me, at any rate, that the move might have been for anyone’s In the Woods 201

benefit but my own. “I never really thought about that,” I said. “Selfish brat that I was.”

“You were a little darling,” my mother said, unexpectedly. “The most affectionate child that ever lived. When you came in from school or playing, you’d always give me a massive hug and a kiss—even when you were almost as big as me—and say, ‘Did you miss me, Mammy?’ Half the time you’d have something for me, a pretty stone or a flower. I still have most of them kept.”

“Me?” I was glad I hadn’t brought Cassie. I could practically see the wicked glint in her eye if she’d heard this.

“Yes, you. That’s why I was so worried when we couldn’t find you that day.” She gave my arm a sudden, almost violent little squeeze; even after all these years, I heard the strain in her voice. “I was panicking, you know. Everyone was saying, ‘Sure, they’ve only run away from home, children do that, we’ll have them found in no time. . . .’ But I said, ‘No. Not Adam.’

You were a sweet boy; kind. I knew you wouldn’t do that to us.”

Hearing the name cast in her voice sent something through me, something fast and primeval and dangerous. “I don’t remember myself as a particularly angelic child,” I said. My mother smiled, out the kitchen window; the abstracted look on her face, remembering things I didn’t, made me edgy. “Ah, not angelic. But thoughtful. You were growing up fast, that year. You made Peter and Jamie stop tormenting that poor wee boy, what was his name? The one with the glasses and the awful mammy who did the flowers for the church?”

“Willy Little?” I said. “That wasn’t me, that was Peter. I would have been perfectly happy to go on tormenting him till the cows came home.”

“No, that was you,” my mother said firmly. “The three of you did something or other that made him cry, and it upset you so badly, you decided you’d have to leave the poor boy alone. You were worried that Peter and Jamie wouldn’t understand. Do you not remember?”

“Not really,” I said. Actually, this bothered me more than anything in this whole uncomfortable conversation. You’d think I’d have preferred her version of the story to my own, but I didn’t. It was entirely possible, of course, that she had unconsciously recast me as the hero, or that I had done it myself, lied to her at the time; but over the past few weeks I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool’s 202

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gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed. “If there aren’t any more dishes, I should probably go in and talk to Dad for a while.”

“He’ll like that. Off you go—I can finish up here. Bring a couple of cans of Guinness with you; they’re in the fridge.”

“Thanks for the dinner,” I said. “It was delicious.”

“Adam,” my mother said suddenly, as I turned to leave; and that swift treacherous thing hit me under the breastbone again, and oh, God how I wanted to be that sweet child for one more moment, how I wanted to spin around and bury my face in her warm toast-smelling shoulder and tell her through great tearing sobs what these last weeks had been. I thought of what her face would look like if I actually did it, and bit my cheek hard to keep back an insane crack of laughter.

“I just wanted you to know,” she said timidly, twisting the dishcloth in her hands. “We did our best for you, after. Sometimes I worry that we did it all wrong. . . . But we were afraid that whoever had—you know—that whoever it was would come back and . . . We were just trying to do what would be best for you.”

“I know, Mum,” I said. “It’s fine,” and, with the sensation of some huge and narrow escape, I went out to the sitting room to watch Columbo with my father.

“How’s work treating you?” my father said, during an ad break. He rummaged down the side of a cushion for the remote control and lowered the sound on the TV.

“Fine,” I said. On the screen, a small child sitting on a toilet was conversing vehemently with a green, fanged cartoon creature surrounded by vapor trails.

“You’re a good lad,” my father said, staring at the TV as if mesmerized by this. He took a swig from his can of Guinness. “You’ve always been a good lad.”

“Thanks,” I said. Clearly he and my mother had had some kind of conversation about me, in preparation for this afternoon, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it might have entailed.

“And work’s all right for you.”

“Yes. Fine.”

“That’s grand, then,” my father said, and turned the volume up again. In the Woods 203

. . .

I got back to the apartment around eight. I went into the kitchen and started making myself a sandwich, ham and Heather’s low-fat cheese—I’d forgotten to go shopping. The Guinness had left me bloated and uncomfortable—I’m not a beer drinker, but my father gets worried if I ask for anything else; he considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality—and I had some hazy paradoxical idea that eating something would soak up the beer and make me feel better. Heather was in the sitting room. Her Sunday evenings are devoted to something she calls

“Me Time,” a process involving Sex and the City DVDs, a wide variety of mystifying implements and a lot of bustling between the bathroom and the sitting room with a look of grim, righteous determination. My phone beeped. Cassie: Give me a lift 2 court 2moro? Grown-up clothes + golf cart + weather =very bad look.

“Oh, shit,” I said aloud. The Kavanagh case, an old woman beaten to death in Limerick during a break-in, sometime the year before: Cassie and I were giving evidence first thing in the morning. The prosecutor had been in to prep us, and we’d reminded each other on Friday and everything, but I’d promptly managed to forget all about it.

“What’s wrong?” Heather piped eagerly, hurrying out of the sitting room at the prospect of an opening for conversation. I threw the cheese back into the fridge and slammed the door on it, not that that would do much good: Heather knows to a millimeter how much of everything she has left, and once sulked till I bought her a new bar of fancy organic soap because I’d come in drunk and washed my hands with hers. “Are you all right?” She was in her dressing gown, with what looked like Saran Wrap around her head, and she smelled of a headache-inducing array of flowery, chemical things.

“Yeah, fine,” I said. I hit Reply and started texting Cassie back: As opposed to what? See you at 8:30ish. “I just forgot I’m in court tomorrow.”

“Uh-oh,” said Heather, widening her eyes. Her nails were a tasteful pale pink; she waved them around to dry them. “I could help you get ready. Go over your notes with you or something.”

“No, thanks.” Actually, I didn’t even have my notes. They were somewhere at work. I wondered whether I should drive in and get them, but I told myself I was probably still over the limit.

“Oh . . . OK. That’s all right.” Heather blew on her nails and peered at 204

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my sandwich. “Oh, did you go shopping? It’s actually your turn to buy toilet bleach, you know.”

“I’m going tomorrow,” I said, gathering up my phone and my sandwich and heading for my room.

“Oh. Well, I suppose it can wait till then. Is that my cheese?”

I extricated myself from Heather—not without difficulty—and ate my sandwich, which unsurprisingly didn’t undo the effects of the Guinness. Then I poured myself a vodka and tonic, following the same general logic, and lay on my back on the bed to run through the Kavanagh case in my mind.

I couldn’t focus. All the peripheral details bounced into my head promptly, vividly and uselessly—the flickering red light of the Sacred Heart statue in the victim’s dark sitting room, the two teenage killers’ stringy little bangs, the awful clotted hole in the victim’s head, the damp-stained flowery wallpaper in the B&B where Cassie and I had stayed—but I couldn’t remember a single important fact: how we had tracked down the suspects or whether they had confessed or what they had stolen, or even their names. I got up and walked around my room, stuck my head out of the window for some cold air, but the harder I tried to concentrate, the less I remembered. After a while I couldn’t even be positive whether the victim’s name was Philomena or Fionnuala, although a couple of hours earlier I had known it without having to think (Philomena Mary Bridget).

I was stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I think I can say, without flattering myself, that I’ve always had an ironically good memory, the parroty kind that can absorb and regurgitate large amounts of information without much effort or understanding. This is how I managed to pass my A-levels, and also why I hadn’t freaked out too badly at the realization that I didn’t have my notes—I’d forgotten to go over them before, once or twice, and never been caught out.

And it wasn’t as if I were trying to do anything particularly out of the ordinary, after all. In Murder you get used to juggling three or four investigations at once. If you pull a child-murder or a dead cop or something highpriority like that, you can hand off your open cases, the way we’d handed off the taxi-rank thing to Quigley and McCann, but you still have to deal with all the aftermath of the closed ones: paperwork, meetings with prose-In the Woods 205

cutors, court dates. You develop a knack for filing away all the salient facts at the back of your mind, ready to whip out at any moment if you should need them. The basics of the Kavanagh case should have been there, and the fact that they weren’t sent me into a silent, animal panic. About two o’clock I became convinced that, if I could just get a good night’s sleep, everything would fall into place in the morning. I had another shot of vodka and turned off the light, but every time I closed my eyes the images zipped around my head in a frenetic, unstoppable procession—

Sacred Heart, greasy perpetrators, head wound, creepy B&B. . . . Around four, I suddenly realized what a cretin I had been not to go pick up my notes. I switched on the light and fumbled blindly for my clothes, but as I was tying my shoes I noticed my hands wobbling and remembered the vodka—I was definitely not in the right form for smooth-talking my way out of a breathalyzer—and then slowly became aware that I was way too fuzzy to make any sense of my notes even if I had them. I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling some more. Heather and the guy in the next flat snored in syncopation; every now and then a car went past the gates of the complex, sending gray-white searchlights arcing across my walls. After a while I remembered my migraine tablets and took two of them, on the grounds that they always knock me out—I tried not to consider the possibility that this might be a side effect of the migraines themselves. I finally fell asleep around seven, just in time for my alarm. When I beeped my horn outside Cassie’s, she ran down wearing her one respectable outfit—a chic little Chanel trouser suit, black with rose-pink lining, and her grandmother’s pearl earrings—and bounced into the car with what I considered an unnecessary amount of energy, although she was probably just in a hurry to get out of the drizzle. “Hi, you,” she said. She was wearing makeup; it made her look older and sophisticated, unfamiliar. “No sleep?”

“Not much. Do you have your notes?”

“Yeah. You can have a look at them while I’m in— who’s up first, actually, me or you?”

“I can’t remember. Will you drive? I need to go over this.”

“I’m not insured on this thing,” she said, eyeing the Land Rover with disdain.

“So don’t hit anyone.” I clambered woozily out of the car and went round to the other side, rain splattering off my head, while Cassie shrugged and slid into the driver’s seat. She has nice handwriting—faintly foreign-206

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looking somehow, but firm and clear—and I am very used to it, but I was so tired and hungover that her notes didn’t even look like words. All I could see was random, indecipherable squiggles arranging and rearranging themselves on the page as I watched, like some kind of bizarre Rorschach test. In the end I fell asleep, my head juddering gently off the cool windowpane. I was, of course, first on the stand. I really don’t have the heart to go into the dozen ways in which I made a fool of myself: stammering, mixing up names, screwing up timelines and having to go back and painstakingly correct myself from the beginning. The prosecutor, MacSharry, looked confused at first (we’d known each other awhile, and normally I am pretty good on the stand), then alarmed and finally furious, under the urbane veneer. He had this huge blown-up photo of Philomena Kavanagh’s body—it’s a standard trick, try to horrify the jury into needing to punish someone, and I was vaguely surprised that the judge had allowed it in—and I was supposed to point out each injury and match it to what the suspects had said in their confessions (apparently they had, in fact, confessed). But for some reason it was the final straw. It vaporized what little composure I had left: every time I looked up I saw her, heavy and battered, skirt rucked up around her waist, mouth open in a powerless howl of reproach at me for letting her down. The courtroom was like a sauna, steam from drying coats fogging the windows; my scalp prickled with heat and I could feel droplets of sweat sliding down my ribs. By the time the defense attorney finished crossexamining me he had a look of incredulous, almost indecent glee, like a teenager who’s managed to get into a girl’s knickers when the most he hoped for was a kiss. Even the jury—shifting, shooting one another covert sideways looks—seemed embarrassed for me.