In the Woods (9 page)

Auntie Vera, I assumed—tiptoed down the stairs and hovered uncertainly in the hallway for a few minutes, wringing her hands, then slowly retreated to the kitchen. Rosalind rubbed Jessica’s limp fingers.

Katy, they said, had been a good child, bright but not outstanding in school, passionate about ballet. She had a temper, they said, but she hadn’t had any arguments with family or friends recently; they gave us the names of her best friends, so we could check. She had never run away from home, nothing like that. She had been happy lately, excited about going away to In the Woods 49

ballet school. She wasn’t into boys yet, Jonathan said, she was only twelve, for God’s sake; but I saw Rosalind dart a sudden glance at him and then at me, and I made a mental note to talk to her without her parents.

“Mr. Devlin,” I said, “what was your relationship with Katy like?”

Jonathan stared. “What the fuck are you accusing me of?” he said heavily. Jessica let out a high, hysterical yelp of laughter, and I jumped. Rosalind pursed her lips and shook her head at her, frowning, then gave her a pat and a tiny reassuring smile. Jessica bowed her head and put her hair back in her mouth.

“Nobody’s accusing you of anything,” Cassie said firmly, “but we have to be able to say we’ve explored and eliminated every possibility. If we leave anything out, then when we catch this person—and we will—the defense can make that into reasonable doubt. I know answering these questions will be painful, but I promise you, Mr. Devlin, it would be even more painful to see this person acquitted because we didn’t ask them.”

Jonathan took a breath through his nose, relaxed a fraction. “My relationship with Katy was great,” he said. “She talked to me. We were close. I . . . maybe I made a pet of her.” A twitch from Jessica, a swift up-glance from Rosalind. “We argued, the way any father and daughter do, but she was a wonderful daughter and a wonderful girl, and I loved her.” For the first time his voice cracked; he jerked his head up angrily.

“And you, Mrs. Devlin?” Cassie said.

Margaret was shredding a tissue in her lap; she looked up, obedient as a child. “Sure, they’re all great,” she said. Her voice was thick and wobbly.

“Katy was . . . a little angel. She was always an easy child. I don’t know what we’ll do without her.” Her mouth convulsed.

Neither of us asked Rosalind or Jessica. Kids are unlikely to be frank about their siblings when their parents are around, and once a kid lies, especially a kid as young and as confused as Jessica, the lie becomes fixed in his mind and the truth recedes into the background. Later, we would try to get the Devlins’ permission to speak to Jessica—and, if she was under eighteen, Rosalind—on her own. I didn’t get the sense this would be easy.

“Can any of you think of anyone who might want to harm Katy for any reason?” I asked.

For a moment nobody said anything. Then Jonathan shoved his chair back and stood up. “Jesus,” he said. His head swung back and forth, like a baited bull’s. “Those phone calls.”

50

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“Phone calls?” I said.

“Christ. I’ll kill him. You said she was found on the dig?”

“Mr. Devlin!” Cassie said. “You need to sit down and tell us about the phone calls.”

Slowly he focused on her. He sat down, but I could still see an abstracted quality in his eyes, and I would have been willing to bet he was privately considering the best way to hunt down whoever had made these calls. “You know about the motorway going over the archaeological site, right?” he said.

“Most people around here are against it. A few are more interested in how much the value of their houses would go up, with it going right past the estate, but most of us . . . That should be a Heritage Site. It’s unique and it’s ours, the government has no right to destroy it without even asking us. There’s a campaign here in Knocknaree, Move the Motorway. I’m the chairman; I set it up. We picket government buildings, write letters to politicians—for all the good it does.”

“Not much response?” I said. Talking about his cause was steadying him. And it intrigued me: he had seemed at first like a downtrodden little man, not the type to lead a crusade, but there was clearly more to him than met the eye.

“I thought it was just bureaucracy, they never want to make changes. But the phone calls made me wonder. . . . The first one was late at night; the guy said something like, ‘You thick bastard, you have no idea what you’re messing with.’ I thought he had a wrong number, I hung up on him and went back to bed. It was only after the second one that I remembered and connected it up.”

“When was this first call?” I said. Cassie was writing. Jonathan looked at Margaret; she shook her head, dabbing her eyes.

“Sometime in April—late April, maybe. The second one was on the third of June, around half past one in the morning—I wrote it down. Katy—there’s no phone in our bedroom, it’s in the hall, and she’s a light sleeper—she got there first. She says when she answered he said, ‘Are you Devlin’s daughter?’

and she said, ‘I’m Katy,’ and he said, ‘Katy, tell your father to back off the bloody motorway, because I know where you live.’ Then I took the phone off her, and he said something like, ‘Nice little girl you’ve got there, Devlin.’

I told him never to ring my house again, and hung up.”

“Can you remember anything about his voice?” I asked. “Accent, age, anything? Did it sound familiar at all?”

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Jonathan swallowed. He was concentrating ferociously, clinging to the subject like a lifeline. “It didn’t ring any bells. Not young. On the high side. A country accent, but not one I could pin down—not Cork or the North, nothing distinctive like that. He sounded . . . I thought maybe he was drunk.”

“Were there any other calls?”

“One more, a few weeks ago. The thirteenth of July, two in the morning. I took it. The same guy said, ‘Don’t you—’ ” He glanced at Jessica. Rosalind had an arm round her, rocking her soothingly and murmuring in her ear.

“ ‘Don’t you effing well listen, Devlin? I warned you to leave the effing motorway alone. You’ll regret this. I know where your family lives.’ ”

“Did you report this to the police?” I asked.

“No,” he said brusquely. I waited for a reason, but he didn’t offer one.

“You weren’t worried?”

“To be honest,” he said, glancing up with a terrible mixture of misery and defiance, “I was delighted. I thought it meant we were getting somewhere. Whoever he was, he wouldn’t have bothered ringing me if the campaign hadn’t been a real threat. But now . . .” Suddenly he hunched towards me, staring me in the eye, fists pressed together. I had to fight not to lean back. “If you find out who made those calls, tell me. You tell me. I want your word.”

“Mr. Devlin,” I said, “I promise you we’ll do everything in our power to find out who it was and whether he had anything to do with Katy’s death, but I can’t—”

“He scared Katy,” Jessica said, in a small hoarse voice. I think we all jumped. I was as startled as if one of the armchairs had contributed to the conversation; I had been beginning to wonder if she was autistic or handicapped or something.

“Did he?” Cassie said quietly. “What did she say?”

Jessica gazed at her as if the question was incomprehensible. Her eyes started to slide away again; she was retreating back into her private daze. Cassie leaned forward. “Jessica,” she said, very gently, “is there anyone else Katy was scared of?”

Jessica’s head swayed a little, and her mouth moved. A thin hand reached out and caught a pinch of Cassie’s sleeve.

“Is this real?” she whispered.

“Yes, Jessica,” Rosalind said softly. She detached Jessica’s hand and gathered the child close against her, stroking her hair. “Yes, Jessica, it’s real.” Jessica stared out under her arm, her eyes wide and unfocused. 52

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. . .

They had no internet access, which eliminated the deeply depressing possibility of some chat-room wacko from halfway around the world. They also had no alarm system, but I doubted that would turn out to be relevant: Katy hadn’t been snatched from her bed by some intruder. We had found her fully and carefully dressed—yes, she always coordinated, Margaret said; she’d picked that up from her ballet teacher, whom she worshipped—in outdoor clothes. She had switched off her light and waited till her parents were asleep, and then, sometime in the night or the early morning, she had got up and got dressed and gone somewhere. Her house key had been in her pocket: she had been expecting to come back.

We searched her room anyway, partly for any clues to where she might have gone, and partly because of the brutal, obvious possibility that Jonathan or Margaret had killed her and then staged it to look as if she had left the house alive. She had shared a room with Jessica. The window was too small and the lightbulb too dim, which added to the creepy feeling the house was giving me. The wall on Jessica’s side, a little eerily, was covered in sunshiny, idyllic art prints: Impressionist picnics, Rackham fairies, landscapes from the cheerier parts of Tolkien (“I gave her all those,” said Rosalind, from the doorway. “Didn’t I, pet?” Jessica nodded, at her shoes). Katy’s wall, less surprisingly, had a strict ballet theme: photos of Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn that looked like they’d been cut from TV

guides, a newsprint picture of Pavlova, her acceptance letter from the Royal Ballet School; a pretty nice pencil drawing of a young dancer, with to katy, 21/03/03. happy birthday! love, daddy scribbled on the corner of the pasteboard mount.

The white pajamas Katy had worn on Monday night were tangled on her bed. We bagged them just in case, along with the sheets and her mobile phone, which was on her bedside table, switched off. She hadn’t kept a diary—“She started one awhile ago, but after a couple of months she got bored and ‘lost’ it,” Rosalind said, putting the word in quotation marks and giving me a small, sad, knowing smile, “and she never bothered to start another”—but we took school copybooks, an old homework diary, anything whose scribbles might give us some hint. Each of the girls had a tiny faux wood desk, and on Katy’s there was a little round tin holding a jumble of hair elastics; I recognized, with a small sudden pang, two silk cornflowers. In the Woods 53

. . .

“Phew,” said Cassie, when we got out of the estate onto the road. She rubbed her hands through her hair, messing up her curls.

“I’ve seen that name somewhere, not too long ago,” I said. “Jonathan Devlin. As soon as we get back, let’s run him through the computer and see if he’s got a record.”

“God, I almost hope it turns out to be that simple,” Cassie said. “There is something deeply, deeply fucked up in that house.”

I was glad—relieved, actually—that she had said it. I’d found a number of things about the Devlins disturbing—Jonathan and Margaret hadn’t touched once, had barely looked at each other; where you would expect a bustle of curious, comforting neighbors, there had been nobody but shadowy Auntie Vera; each member of the household appeared to come from a completely different planet—but I was so edgy that I wasn’t sure I could trust my own judgment, so it was good to know Cassie had felt something off kilter, too. It wasn’t that I was having a breakdown or losing my mind or anything, I knew I would be fine once I got a chance to go home and sit down by myself and take all this in; but that first glimpse of Jessica had practically given me a heart attack, and the realization that she was Katy’s twin hadn’t been as reassuring as you might think. This case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels, and I couldn’t shake the uneasy sense that they were somehow deliberate. Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code. When I first went to boarding school I told my dormmates I had a twin brother. My father was a good amateur photographer, and one Saturday that summer when he’d seen us trying out a new stunt on Peter’s bike—

speeding along their knee-high garden wall and sailing off the end—he made us do it again and again, half the afternoon while he crouched on the grass changing lenses, until he’d used up a whole roll of black-and-white film and got the shot he wanted. We’re in midair; I am driving and Peter is on the handlebars with his arms spread wide, and both of us have our eyes screwed tight shut and our mouths open (high, rough-edged boy-yells) and our hair is streaming out in fiery haloes, and I’m pretty sure that just after the photo was taken we went tumbling and skidding across the lawn and my mother gave out to my father for encouraging us. He angled the shot so that 54

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the ground is out of the picture and we look like we’re flying, gravity-free against the sky.

I glued the photo to a piece of cardboard and propped it on my bedside table, where we were allowed two family pictures, and told the other boys detailed stories—some true, some imagined and I’m sure utterly implausible—about the adventures my twin and I had during the holidays. He was at a different school, I said, one in Ireland; our parents had read that it was healthier for twins to be separated. He was learning to ride horses. By the time I came back for second year I had realized that it was only a matter of time before the twin story got me into excruciatingly embarrassing trouble (some classmate meeting my parents on Sports Day, asking chirpily why Peter hadn’t come, too), so I left the photo at home—tucked into a slit in my mattress, like some dirty secret—and stopped mentioning my brother, in the hope that everyone would forget I had had one. When this kid called Hull—he was the type to pull the limbs off small furry animals in his spare time—sensed my discomfort and latched on to the subject, I finally told him my twin had been thrown off a horse over the summer and died of concussion. I spent much of that year in terror that the rumor about Ryan’s dead brother would reach the teachers and, through them, my parents. In hindsight, of course, I’m fairly sure that it did, and that the teachers, already briefed on the Knocknaree saga, decided to be sensitive and understanding—I still cringe when I think about it—and let the rumor die out in its own time. I think I had a narrow escape: a couple of years further into the eighties and I would probably have been sent to kiddie counseling and forced to share my feelings with hand puppets. Still, I regretted having to get rid of my twin. I’d found it comforting, the knowledge that Peter was alive and riding horseback, somewhere in a couple of dozen minds. If Jamie had been in the photo, I would probably have made us triplets and had a much harder time working my way out of that one. By the time we got back to the site, the reporters had arrived. I gave them the standard preliminary spiel (I do this part, on the basis that I look more like a responsible adult than Cassie does): body of a young girl, name not being released till all the relatives are informed, treating it as a suspicious death, anyone who may have any information please contact us, no comment no comment no comment. In the Woods 55