In the Woods (34 page)

I came off the stand shaking all over. My legs felt like jelly; for a second I thought I was going to have to grab at a railing to stay upright. You’re allowed to watch the trial after you’ve finished giving evidence, and Cassie would be surprised not to see me there, but I couldn’t do it. She didn’t need moral support: she would do just fine, and childish as it sounds this made me feel even worse. I knew the Devlin case was bothering her, and Sam, too, but both of them were managing to keep on top of things without even seeming to put much effort into it. I was the only one who was twitching and gibbering and spooking at shadows like a bit part in One Flew Over the In the Woods 207

Cuckoo’s Nest. I didn’t think I could bear to sit in the courtroom and watch Cassie matter-of-factly, unconsciously, clean up the mess I had made of several months’ work. It was still raining. I found an uncompromisingly dingy little pub down a side-street—three guys at a corner table pegged me as a cop with one glance and shifted seamlessly to a new topic of conversation—ordered a hot whiskey and sat down. The barman thumped my drink in front of me and went back to the racing pages without volunteering my change. I took a long swallow, burning the roof of my mouth, leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

The dodgy guys in the corner had moved on to someone’s ex-girlfriend.

“So I says to her, there’s nothing in the support order about dressing him like P. Fucking Diddy, if you want him to wear Nikes you can bleeding buy them yourself. . . .” They were eating toasted sandwiches; the salty, chemical smell made me feel sick. Outside the window the rain bucketed down a gutter.

Strange though it may seem, I had only just understood, up there on the stand with the flare of panic in MacSharry’s eyes, that I was falling apart. I had been aware that I was sleeping less than usual and drinking more, that I was snappy and distracted and possibly sort of seeing things, but no specific incident had seemed particularly ominous or alarming in itself. It was only now that the whole pattern rose up and swooped at me, violently, garishly clear, and it scared me to death.

All my instincts were shrieking at me to get off this horrible, treacherous case, get as far away from it as possible. I was owed quite a lot of holiday time, I could use some of my savings to rent a little apartment in Paris or Florence for a few weeks, walk on cobblestones and spend all day listening peacefully to a language I didn’t understand and not come back until the whole thing was over. But I knew, with dreary certainty, that this was impossible. It was too late to pull out of the investigation; I could hardly tell O’Kelly that it had suddenly dawned on me, weeks into the case, that I was actually Adam Ryan, and any other excuse would imply that I’d lost my nerve and would basically end my career. I knew I needed to do something, before people started noticing that I was going to pieces and the little men in white coats rolled up to take me away, but I could not for the life of me think of one single thing that would do the slightest bit of good. I finished my hot whiskey and ordered another. The barman turned on 208

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snooker on the TV; the commentator’s low, genteel murmur blended soothingly with the rain. The three guys left, slamming the door behind them, and I heard a burst of raucous laughter from outside. Eventually the barman cleared away my glass sort of pointedly, and I realized that he wanted me to leave.

I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. In the greenish, dirt-flecked mirror I looked like something out of a zombie film—mouth open, huge dark bags under my eyes, hair standing up in spiky tufts. This is ridiculous, I thought, with a horrible rush of dizzy, detached amazement. How did this happen? How the hell did I end up here?

I went back to the courthouse parking lot and sat in the car, eating Mentos and watching people hurry by with their heads down and their coats pulled tight. It was dark as evening, rain slanting through dipped headlights, streetlamps already on. Finally my phone beeped. Cassie: Whatsastory? Where are you? I texted back, In car, and reached over to flip on the taillights so she could find me. When she saw me in the passenger seat, she did a little double take and ran round to the other side.

“Sheesh,” she said, wriggling behind the wheel and shaking rain out of her hair. A drop had got caught in her eyelashes and a black mascara tear trickled to her cheekbone, making her look like a modish little Pierrette. “I’d forgotten what a pair of wankstains they are. They started snickering when I talked about them pissing on her bed; their lawyer was making faces at them to try and shut them up. What happened to you? Why am I driving?”

“I have a migraine,” I said. Cassie was flipping down the sun visor to check her makeup, but her hand stopped short and her eyes, round and apprehensive, met mine in the mirror. “I think I fucked up, Cass.”

She would have heard anyway. MacSharry would be on the phone to O’Kelly as soon as he got a chance, and by the end of the day it would be all round the squad. I was so tired I was almost dreaming; for a moment I allowed myself to wonder, wistfully, whether this might actually be some vodka-induced nightmare from which I would wake to my alarm and my appointment in court.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“I’m pretty sure I made an utter balls of it. I couldn’t even see straight, never mind think straight.” This was, after all, true. In the Woods 209

She slowly angled the mirror into place, licked her finger and rubbed away the Pierrette teardrop. “I meant the migraine. Do you need to go home?”

I thought longingly of my bed, hours of undisturbed sleep before Heather came home and wanted to know where her toilet bleach was, but the thought soured quickly: I would only end up lying there rigidly, hands clenched on the sheets, going over and over the courtroom in my head. “No. I took my tablets once I got out. It’s not one of the bad ones.”

“Should I find a pharmacy or have you got enough to last you?”

“I have plenty, but it’s better already. Let’s go.” I was tempted to go into more detail about the horrors of my imaginary migraine, but the whole art of lying is knowing when to stop, and I’ve always had sort of a flair for this. I had no idea, and still don’t, whether Cassie believed me. She reversed out of the parking space in a swift, dramatic curve, rain skidding off the windshield wipers, and nudged her way into the traffic.

“How did you get on?” I asked suddenly, as we inched down the quays.

“OK. I get the feeling their lawyer’s trying to claim the confessions were coerced, but the jury’ll never buy it.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s good.”

My phone leaped into hysterical life almost the instant we reached the incident room. O’Kelly, telling me to get into his office; MacSharry hadn’t wasted much time. I gave him the migraine story. The one joy of migraines is that they make a perfect excuse: they’re disabling, they’re not your fault, they can last as long as you need them to and nobody can prove you don’t have one. At least I really did look sick. O’Kelly made a few derisive comments about headaches being “womany shite,” but I regained a little of his respect by bravely insisting on staying in work.

I went back to the incident room. Sam was just getting in from somewhere, soaked through, his tweed overcoat smelling faintly of wet dog.

“How’d it go?” he asked. His tone was casual, but his eyes slid to me, over Cassie’s shoulder, and then quickly away again: the grapevine had already been doing its thing.

“Fine. Migraine,” Cassie said, tilting her head at me. By this stage I was starting to feel as if I really did have a migraine. I blinked, trying to focus.

“The old migraine’s a terrible man,” Sam said. “My mammy gets them. 210

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Sometimes she has to lie in a dark room for days, with ice on her head. Are you all right to be working?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

Sam glanced at Cassie. “He’s OK,” she said. “That trial would give anyone a headache. Where’ve you been?”

He peeled off his dripping coat, gave it a doubtful look and discarded it on a chair. “I went and had little chats with the Big Four.”

“O’Kelly’s going to love that,” I said. I sat down and pressed my temples between finger and thumb. “I should warn you, he’s not in the best of moods as it is.”

“No, it’s grand. I told them the protesters had been giving a few of the motorway brigade some hassle—I didn’t get specific, but I’ve a feeling they may think I meant vandalism—and I was just checking that they were all right.” Sam grinned, and I realized he was bursting with excitement about his day and was keeping it contained only because he knew about mine.

“They all got fierce jumpy about how I knew they were involved with Knocknaree, but I acted like it was no big deal—had a little chat, made sure none of them had been targeted by the protesters, told them to mind themselves and left. Not one of them even thanked me, do you believe that?

Right bunch of charmers, this lot.”

“So?” I inquired. “I think we all assumed that much.” I didn’t mean to be snotty, not really, but every time I closed my eyes I saw Philomena Kavanagh’s body, and every time I opened them I saw the crime scene shots of Katy all over the whiteboard behind Sam’s head, and I really wasn’t in the mood for him and his results and his tact.

“So,” Sam said, unfazed, “Ken McClintock—the boy behind Dynamo—

was in Singapore all through April; that’s where all the cool property developers are hanging out this year, don’t you know. That’s one down: he wasn’t making any anonymous calls from Dublin phones. And remember what Devlin said about your man’s voice?”

“Nothing particularly useful, as I recall,” I said.

“Not very deep,” said Cassie, “country accent, but nothing distinctive. Probably middle-aged.” She was reared back in her chair, knees crossed, arms folded negligently behind her; in her elegant court getup she looked almost deliberately incongruous in the incident room, like something out of some clever avant-garde fashion shoot.

“Spot on. Now Conor Roche from Global, he’s a Corkman, accent you In the Woods 211

could cut with a knife—Devlin would have spotted it straight off. And his partner, Jeff Barnes, he’s English, and he’s got a voice like a bear besides. That leaves us with”—Sam circled the name on the whiteboard, with a deft, happy flourish—“Terence Andrews of Futura, fifty-three, from Westmeath, squeaky little tenor voice on him. And guess where he lives?”

“Town,” Cassie said, starting to smile.

“Penthouse apartment on the quays. He drinks in the Gresham—I told him to mind himself walking back, you never know with these left-wing types—and all three pay phones are directly on his route home. I’ve got my boy, lads.”

I don’t remember what I did for the rest of the day; sat at my desk and played with paper, I suppose. Sam headed out on another of his mysterious errands and Cassie went off to follow up some unpromising lead, taking O’Gorman with her and leaving silent Sweeney to man the tip line, for which I was devoutly grateful. After the bustle of the previous few weeks, the near-empty incident room had an eerie, derelict feel to it, the vanished floaters’ desks still strewn with leftover paperwork and coffee mugs they had forgotten to take back to the canteen.

I sent Cassie a text saying I wasn’t feeling well enough for dinner at her place; I couldn’t bear the thought of all that solicitous tact. I left work just in time to get home before Heather—she “does her Pilates” on Monday evenings—wrote her a note saying I had a migraine and locked myself in my room. Heather tends her health with the kind of tenacious, minute dedication some women devote to flower beds or china collections, but the upside of this is that she accords other people’s ailments the same awed respect as her own: she would leave me alone for the evening and keep the sound on the television down.

On top of everything else, I couldn’t shake the feeling that had blown away my last chance in the courtroom: the steadily growing feeling that MacSharry’s photo of Philomena Kavanagh reminded me of something, though I had no idea what. This sounds like a minor problem, especially in light of the kind of day I had had, and no doubt for someone else it would have been. Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with. Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake 212

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triggering shifts and upheavals too far distant from the epicenter to be easily predictable. From that day on, any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential: this could be trivia, or it could be The Big One that blows your life and your mind wide open. Over the years, like someone living on a fault line, I had come to trust the equilibrium of the status quo, to believe that if The Big One hadn’t come by now then it wasn’t coming; but since we caught the Katy Devlin case little rumbles and tremors had been building ominously, and I was no longer anything like sure. The photo of Philomena Kavanagh spread-eagled and wide-mouthed could have been reminding me of some scene from a TV

show or of something terrible enough to wipe my mind blank for twenty years, and I had no way of knowing which it was.

In the event, it turned out to be neither. It hit me somewhere in the middle of the night, as I was drifting in and out of a fitful, twitchy doze; hit me so hard that it knocked me awake and upright, heart pounding. I grabbed for the switch on my bedside lamp, stared at the wall while little transparent squiggles swirled in front of my eyes.

Even before we were near the clearing we could tell something was different, something was wrong. The noises were tangled and jagged, too many layers of them, grunts and gasps and squeaks stifled to small, wild bursts more menacing than a roar. “Get down,” Peter hissed, and we flattened ourselves closer against the ground. Roots and fallen twigs scrabbled at our clothes and my feet were boiling in my runners. A hot day, hot and still, the sky blazing blue in and out of the branches. We slid through the undergrowth in slow motion: dust in my mouth, slashes of sun, a fly’s horrible persistent dance loud as a chainsaw against my ear. Bees at the wild blackberries a few yards away, and a trickle of sweat running down my back. Peter’s elbow in the corner of my vision, angling forward as carefully as a cat’s; Jamie’s quick eye-blink, close behind a grain-topped stalk of grass. There were too many people in the clearing. Metallica was holding Sandra’s arms down against the ground and Shades was holding her legs, and Anthrax was on top of her. Her skirt was twisted up around her waist and there were huge rips all down her tights. Her mouth past Anthrax’s moving shoulder was frozen wide and black, crisscrossed with slices of red-gold hair. She was making weird noises, like she was trying to scream and choking instead. Metallica hit her once, neatly, and she stopped. We ran, not caring that they could see us, not hearing the yells—“Jesus In the Woods 213