In the Woods (31 page)

“Yeah,” she said, after what felt like a very long time. “Yeah, I guess I was. A fox, maybe?”

Sam had found his journalist within a few hours: Michael Kiely, sixty-two and semi-retired after a moderately successful career—he had sort of peaked in the late eighties, when he discovered that a government minister had nine family members on his payroll as “consultants,” and had never quite recaptured those dizzy heights. In 2000, when the plans for the motorway were announced, Kiely had written a snide article suggesting that it had already achieved its primary goal: there were a lot of happy property developers in Ireland that morning. Apart from an oratorical two-column letter from the Minister for the Environment, explaining that this motorway would essentially make everything perfect forever, there had been no follow-up. It had taken Sam a few days to persuade Kiely to meet him, though—

the first time he mentioned Knocknaree, Kiely shouted, “Do you take me 188

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for a fool, boy?” and hung up—and even then, Kiely refused to be seen with him anywhere in town. He made him trek out to a spectacularly downmarket pub somewhere on the far side of the Phoenix Park: “Safer, my boy, so much safer.” He had a swooping nose and an artfully windswept mane of white hair—“sort of poetic-looking,” Sam said, dubiously, over dinner that evening. Sam had bought him a Bailey’s and brandy (“Good God,” I said—

I had been having a hard time eating anyway; “Ooo,” said Cassie, eyeing her booze shelf speculatively) and tried to bring up the motorway, but Kiely flinched and held up a hand, eyelids fluttering in exquisite pain: “Your voice, my boy, lower your voice . . . Oh, there’s something there, no doubt about it. But someone—naming no names—someone had me ordered off the story almost before it began. Legal reasons, they said, no proof of anything. . . . Absurd. Rubbish. It was purely, poisonously personal. This town, my boy: this dirty old town has a long memory.”

By the second round, though, he had loosened up a little and was in a reflective mood. “Some might say,” he told Sam, leaning forward in his chair and gesturing expansively, “some might say that place was bad news from the first. So much initial rhetoric, you know, about how it was going to be a new urban hub, and then—after all the houses in that lone estate had been sold—it simply fell through. They said the budget wouldn’t allow for any further development. Some might say, my boy, that the only purpose of the rhetoric was to ensure that the houses sold for much more than one might expect of an estate in the middle of nowhere. Not I, of course. I’ve no proof.”

He finished his drink and eyed the empty glass wistfully. “All I’ll say is that there’s been something just a little off kilter about that place all along. Do you know, the rate of injuries and fatalities during construction was almost three times the national average? Do you believe, my boy, that a place can have a will of its own—that it can rebel, so to speak, against human mismanagement?”

“Whatever one may say about Knocknaree,” I said, “it did not put a fucking plastic bag over Katy Devlin’s head.” I was glad Kiely was Sam’s problem and not mine. Normally I find this kind of absurdity entertaining, but the way I was feeling that week, I would probably have kicked the guy in the shin.

“What did you say?” Cassie asked Sam.

“I said yes, of course,” he said serenely, trying to wind fettuccine onto In the Woods 189

his fork. “I’d’ve said yes if he’d asked me did I believe little green men were running the country.”

Kiely had drunk his third round—Sam was going to have fun trying to get this one through expenses—in silence, chin sunk on his chest. Finally he had put on his coat, shaken Sam’s hand in a long, fervent grasp, murmured,

“Don’t look at it until you’re in a safe place,” and swept out of the pub, leaving a twist of paper in Sam’s palm.

“The poor bastard,” Sam said, rummaging in his wallet. “I think he was grateful to have someone listen to him for once. The way he is, he could shout a story from the rooftops and no one would believe a word of it.” He extracted something tiny and silver, holding it carefully between finger and thumb, and passed it to Cassie. I put down my fork and leaned in over her shoulder.

It was a piece of silver paper, the kind you pull out of a fresh cigarette packet, rolled into a tight, precise scroll. Cassie opened it out. On the back was written, in crabbed, smudged black felt-tip: “Dynamo—Kenneth McClintock. Futura—Terence Andrews. Global—Jeffrey Barnes & Conor Roche.”

“Are you sure he’s reliable?” I asked.

“Mad as a brush,” Sam said, “but he’s a good reporter, or he used to be. I’d say he wouldn’t have given me these unless he was sure of them.”

Cassie ran her fingertip over the scrap of paper. “If these check out,” she said, “this is the best lead we’ve got so far. Fair play, Sam.”

“He got into a car, you know,” Sam said, sounding faintly worried. “I didn’t know whether to let him drive, after all that drink, but . . . I might need to talk to him again, sure; I need to keep him on side. I wonder should I ring and see did he get home OK?”

The next day was Friday, two and a half weeks into the investigation, and early that evening O’Kelly called us into his office. Outside the day was crisp and biting, but sun was streaming through the big windows and the incident room was warm, so that from inside you could almost believe it was still summer. Sam was in his corner, scribbling between hushed phone calls; Cassie was running someone through the computer; I and a couple of floaters had just done a coffee run and were passing out mugs. The room had the intent, busy murmur of a classroom. O’Kelly put his head around 190

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the door, stuck a finger-and-thumb circle into his mouth and whistled shrilly; when the murmur died away, he said, “Ryan, Maddox, O’Neill,”

jerked his thumb over his shoulder and slammed the door behind him. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the floaters exchanging covert eyebrow-raises. We had been expecting this for a couple of days now, or at least I had. I had been rehearsing the scene in my head on the drives to work and in the shower and even in my sleep, waking myself up arguing. “Tie,” I said to Sam, motioning; his knot always edged its way towards one ear when he was concentrating.

Cassie took a quick swig of her coffee and blew out a breath. “OK,” she said. “Let’s go.” The floaters went back to whatever they had been doing, but I could feel their eyes following us, all the way out of the room and down the corridor.

“So,” O’Kelly said, as soon as we got into his office. He was already sitting behind his desk, fiddling with some awful chrome executive toy left over from the eighties. “How’s Operation What-d’you-call-it going?”

None of us sat down. We gave him an elaborate exegesis of what we had done to find Katy Devlin’s killer, and why it hadn’t worked. We were talking too fast and too long, repeating ourselves, going into details he already knew: we could all feel what was coming, and none of us wanted to hear it.

“Sounds like you’ve all the bases covered, all right,” O’Kelly said, when we finally ran down. He was still playing with his horrible little toy, click click click. . . . “Got a prime suspect?”

“We’re leaning towards the parents,” I said. “One or the other of them.”

“Which means you’ve nothing solid on either one.”

“We’re still investigating, sir,” Cassie said.

“And I’ve four main men for the threatening phone calls,” Sam said. O’Kelly glanced up. “I’ve read your reports. Watch where you step.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Grand,” O’Kelly said. He put down the chrome thing. “Keep at it. You don’t need thirty-five floaters for that.”

Even though I had been expecting it, it still hit me with a thud. The floaters had never really stopped making me edgy, but all the same: giving them up felt so horribly significant, such an irrevocable first step of retreat. Another few weeks, this meant, and O’Kelly would be putting us back into the rota, giving us new cases, Operation Vestal would become something we worked in scraps of free time; a few months more and Katy would be In the Woods 191

relegated to the basement and the dust and the cardboard boxes, dragged out every year or two if we got a good new lead. Someone would do a cheesy documentary on her, with a breathy voiceover and creepy credit music to make it clear that the case remained unsolved. I wondered whether Kiernan and McCabe had listened to these same words in this room, probably from someone playing with the same pointless toy.

O’Kelly felt the mutiny in our silence. “What,” he said. We gave it our best shot, our most earnest, most eloquent prepared speeches, but even as I was speaking I knew it was no good. I prefer not to remember most of what I said; I’m sure by the end I was babbling. “Sir, we always knew this wasn’t going to be a slam-dunk case,” I finished. “But we’re getting there, bit by bit. I really think it would be a mistake to drop it now.”

“Drop it?” O’Kelly demanded, outraged. “When did you hear me say anything about dropping it? We’re dropping nothing. We’re scaling back, is all.”

Nobody answered. He leaned forward and steepled his fingers on the desk. “Lads,” he said, more softly, “this is simple cost-benefit analysis. You’ve got the good out of the floaters. How many people have ye left to interview?”

Silence.

“And how many calls did the tip line get today?”

“Five,” Cassie said, after a moment. “So far.”

“Any of them any good?”

“Probably not.”

“There you go.” O’Kelly spread his hands. “Ryan, you said yourself this isn’t a slam-dunk case. That’s just what I’m telling you: there are quick cases and slow cases, and this one’ll take time. Meanwhile, though, we’ve had three new murders since, there’s some class of a drug war going on up the north side, and I’ve people ringing me left and right wanting to know what I’m doing with every floater in Dublin town. Do you see what I’m saying?”

I did, all too well. Whatever else I may say about O’Kelly, I have to give him this: an awful lot of supers would have taken this one away from Cassie and me, right at the beginning. Ireland is still, basically, a small town; usually we have a fair idea whodunit almost from the start, and most of the time and effort goes not into identifying him but into building a case that will stick. Over the first few days, as it became clear that Operation Vestal 192

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was going to be an exception and a high-profile one at that, O’Kelly must have been tempted to send us back to our taxi-rank brats and hand it over to Costello or one of the other thirty-year guys. I don’t generally think of myself as naïve, but when he hadn’t, I had put it down to some stubborn, grudging loyalty—not to us personally, but to us as members of his squad. I had liked the thought. Now I wondered if there might have been more to it than that: if some battle-scarred sixth sense of his had known, all along, that this one was doomed.

“Keep one or two of them,” O’Kelly said, magnanimously. “For the tip line and legwork and that. Who do you want?”

“Sweeney and O’Gorman,” I said. I had a fairly good handle on the names by this time, but at that moment those were the only two I could remember.

“Go home,” O’Kelly said. “Take the weekend off. Go for a few pints, get some sleep—Ryan, your eyes are like piss-holes in the snow. Spend some time with your girlfriends or whatever you’ve got. Come back on Monday and start fresh.”

Out in the corridor, we didn’t look at one another. Nobody made any move to go back to the incident room. Cassie leaned against the wall and scuffed up the carpet pile with the toe of her shoe.

“He’s right, in a way,” Sam said finally. “We’ll be grand on our own, so we will.”

“Don’t, Sam,” I said. “Just don’t.”

“What?” Sam asked, puzzled. “Don’t what?” I looked away.

“It’s the idea of it,” Cassie said. “We shouldn’t be snookered on this case. We’ve the body, the weapon, the . . . We should have someone by now.”

“Well,” I said, “I know what I’m going to do. I am going to find the nearest non-horrible pub and get absolutely legless. Anyone joining me?”

We went to Doyle’s, in the end: overamplified eighties music and too few tables, suits and students shouldering at the bar. None of us had any desire to go to a police pub where, inevitably, everyone we met would want to know how Operation Vestal was going. On about the third round, as I was coming back from the men’s room, I bumped elbows with a girl and her drink In the Woods 193

splashed over, splattering us both. It was her fault—she had reared back laughing at something one of her friends had said, and knocked straight into me—but she was extremely pretty, the tiny ethereal type I always go for, and she gave me a soft appreciative look while we were both apologizing and comparing damage, so I bought her another drink and struck up a conversation. Her name was Anna and she was doing a Master’s in art history; she had a cascade of fair hair that made me think of warm beaches, and one of those floaty white cotton skirts, and a waist I could have got my hands around. I told her I was a professor of literature, over from a university in England to do research on Bram Stoker. She sucked on the rim of her glass and laughed at my jokes, showing little white teeth with an engaging overbite. Behind her, Sam grinned and raised an eyebrow and Cassie did a panting, puppy-eyed impression of me, but I didn’t care. It had been a ridiculously long time since I had slept with anyone and I badly wanted to go home with this girl, sneak giggling into some student flat with art posters on the walls, wind that extravagant hair round my fingers and let my mind shimmer into blankness, lie in her sweet safe bed all night and most of tomorrow and not once think about either of these fucking cases. I put a hand on Anna’s shoulder to guide her out of the way of a guy precariously maneuvering four pints, and gave Cassie and Sam the finger behind her back.

The tide of people threw us closer and closer. We had got off the subject of our respective studies—I wished I knew more about Bram Stoker—and were on to the Aran Islands (Anna and a bunch of friends, the previous summer; the beauties of nature; the joy of escaping urban life in all its superficiality), and she had started touching my wrist to emphasize her points, when one of her friends detached himself from the howling group and came over to stand behind her.