In the Woods (36 page)

liverpool rules, martina + conor 4ever, jonesy is gay—mostly done in what looked like colored marker; almost quaint, really, compared to what you get in your true hard-core areas. If for some reason I had had to leave my car there overnight, I wouldn’t have panicked.

Sandra answered the door. For a moment I wasn’t sure; she didn’t look the way I remembered her. She had been one of those girls who bloom early and fade, bewildered, into blowsiness within a few years. In my hazy mental image she was firm and voluptuous as a ripe peach, haloed in glossy, redgold eighties curls, but the woman at the door was overblown and sagging, 220

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with a weary, suspicious look and hair dyed to dull brassiness. A swift, tiny pang of loss went through me. I almost hoped it wasn’t her. Then she said, “Can I help you?” Her voice was deeper and rough around the edges, but I knew the sweet, breathy tone. (“Here, which of them’s your fella?” A sparkly fingernail moving from me to Peter, while Jamie shook her head and said, “Ewww!” Sandra had laughed, feet kicking up from against the wall: “You’ll change your mind soon enough!”)

“Ms. Sandra Scully?” I said. She nodded warily. I saw her peg us as cops, well before our IDs were out, and get ready to go on the defensive. Somewhere in the house a toddler was yelling and banging on something metallic. “I’m Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox. She’d like to speak with you for a few minutes.”

I felt Cassie shift almost imperceptibly beside me, clocking the signal. If I hadn’t been sure, I would have said “we,” and we would both have gone through the routine Katy Devlin questions with her until I made up my mind one way or the other. But I was sure, and Sandra was likely to be more comfortable talking about this without a guy in the room. Sandra’s jaw hardened. “Is this about Declan? Because you can tell that old bitch I took the stereo off him after the last time, so if she’s hearing anything it’s the voices in her head.”

“No, no, no,” Cassie said easily. “Nothing like that. We’re just working on an old case, and we thought you might remember some bits and pieces that could help us out. Can I come in?”

She stared at Cassie for a moment, then gave a defeated little shrug. “Do I have a choice?” She stepped back, opening the door a fraction wider; I smelled something frying.

“Thanks,” Cassie said. “I’ll try not to take too much of your time.” As she went into the house she glanced over her shoulder and gave me a tiny, reassuring wink. Then the door slammed behind her. She was gone a long time. I sat in the car and chain-smoked until I ran out of cigarettes; then I bit my cuticles and drummed Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on the steering wheel and picked dirt out of the dashboard with my car key. I wished crazily that I had thought of putting a wire on Cassie, or something, just in case there was a moment when it might help if I went in there. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her; but she hadn’t been there that day, and I In the Woods 221

had, and Sandra appeared to have turned into a pretty tough cookie somewhere along the way, and I couldn’t be positive that Cassie would know the right questions to ask. I had the windows rolled down and I could still hear the toddler yelling and banging; then Sandra’s voice, raised sharply, and a smack, and the toddler howling, more in outrage than in pain. I remembered her neat little white teeth when she laughed, the mysterious shadowy valley in the V of her top.

After what felt like hours I heard the door close, and Cassie came down the drive with a snap in her step. She got into the car and blew out her breath. “Well. You were bang on. It took her awhile to start talking, but once she did . . .”

My heart was pounding, whether with triumph or panic I couldn’t tell.

“What’d she say?”

Cassie already had her cigarettes out and was rummaging for a lighter.

“Drive around the corner or something. She didn’t like the car sitting outside; she says it looks like a cop car and the neighbors’ll talk.”

I got us out of the estate, parked on the shoulder opposite the dig, bummed one of Cassie’s girl smokes and found a light. “So?”

“Do you know what she said?” Cassie rolled down the window violently and blew smoke out of it, and I suddenly realized she was furious, furious and shaken. “She said, ‘It wasn’t rape or anything, they just made me do it.’

She said it like three times. Thank God the kids are too young to be anything to do with—”

“Cass,” I said, as calmly as I could. “From the beginning?”

“The beginning is she started going out with Cathal Mills when she was sixteen and he was nineteen. He was, God knows why, considered extremely cool, and Sandra was mad about him. Jonathan Devlin and Shane Waters were his best mates. Neither of them had a girlfriend, Jonathan was into Sandra, Sandra liked him, and one fine day about six months into the relationship Cathal tells her that Jonathan wants to, and I quote, ‘do her’ and that he thinks this would be a lovely idea. Like he’s giving his mate a sip of his beer or something. Jesus, this was the eighties, they didn’t even have condoms—”

“Cass—”

She threw the lighter out of the window at a tree. Cassie has a pretty good arm; it cracked off the trunk and flew into the undergrowth. I had seen her in a temper before—I tell her it’s her French grandfather’s fault, 222

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Mediterranean lack of self-control—and I knew she’d settle down now that she’d taken it out on the tree. I made myself wait. She thumped back against her seat, drew on her cigarette and, after a moment, gave me a sheepish sideways grin.

“You owe me a lighter, prima donna,” I told her. “Now what’s the story?”

“And you still owe me last year’s Christmas present. Anyway. Sandra actually didn’t have much of a problem with the idea of shagging Jonathan. It happened once or twice, everyone was a little embarrassed afterwards, they got over it, everything was fine—”

“When was this?”

“The beginning of that summer: June of ’84. Apparently Jonathan went out with some girl for a while soon after—must be Claire Gallagher—and Sandra thinks he returned the favor. She had a big row with Cathal about that, but the whole thing had her so confused that eventually she just decided to forget it.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Apparently I was living in the middle of The Jerry Springer Show. ‘Teenage Wife-Swappers Speak Out.’ ” Only a few yards and a few years away, Jamie and Peter and I had been giving each other dead arms and aiming lawn darts at the Carmichaels’ horrible yappy Jack Russell. All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space. I thought of the dark strata of archaeology underfoot; of the fox outside my window, calling out to a city that barely overlapped with mine.

“Then, though,” Cassie said, “Shane found out and wanted to play, too. Cathal was of course fine with this, but Sandra wasn’t. She didn’t like Shane—‘that spotty little wanker,’ she called him. I get the feeling he was a bit of a reject, but the other two hung around with him out of habit, because they’d all been mates since they were tiny kids. Cathal kept trying to convince her—I can’t wait to find out what Cathal’s internet history looks like, can you?—she kept saying she’d think about it, and finally they jumped her in the wood, Cathal and our boy Jonathan held her down and Shane raped her. She’s not sure of the exact date, but she knows she had bruises on her wrists and she was worried about whether they’d be gone by the time school started back, so it has to have been sometime in August.”

“Did she see us?” I asked, keeping my voice level. The fact that this story was starting to dovetail with my own was disorienting but also, horribly, tremendously exciting.

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Cassie looked at me; her face gave away nothing, but I knew she was checking whether I was OK with all this. I tried to look casual. “Not properly. She was . . . well, you know the state she was in. But she remembers hearing someone in the undergrowth, and then the guys yelling. Jonathan ran after you, and when he came back he said something like, ‘Bloody kids.’ ”

She tapped ash out of the window. I could tell by the set of her shoulders that she hadn’t finished. Across the road on the dig, Mark and Mel and a couple of the others were doing something with rods and yellow measuring tapes, yelling back and forth. Mel laughed, hearty and clear, and called,

“You wish!”

“And?” I said, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. I was trembling like a gun dog holding a point. As I say, I don’t hit suspects, but my mind was racing with Sipowicz-style images of slamming Devlin up against a wall, screaming into his face, punching answers out of him.

“You know something?” Cassie said. “She didn’t even break up with Cathal Mills. She went out with him for another few months, till he dumped her.”

I almost said, Is that all? “I think the statute of limitations is different if she was a minor,” I said instead. My mind was going a hundred miles an hour, flying through interrogation strategies. “We might still have time. He sounds like the kind of guy I’d love to arrest in the middle of a board meeting.”

Cassie shook her head. “There’s not a chance she’ll press charges. She thinks it was basically all her own fault for sleeping with him in the first place.”

“Let’s go talk to Devlin,” I said, starting the car.

“Just a sec,” Cassie said. “There’s something else. It might be nothing, but . . . After they finished, Cathal—honestly, I think we should investigate him anyway, we’re bound to find something we can charge him with—

Cathal said, ‘That’s my girl,’ and gave her a kiss. She was sitting there shaking and trying to pull her clothes straight and get her head together. And they heard something in the trees, just a few yards away. Sandra says she’s never heard anything like it. Like an enormous bird flapping its wings, she said, only she’s positive it was a voiced sound, a call. They all jumped and yelled, and then Cathal shouted something like, ‘Those fucking kids messing about again,’ and threw a stone into the trees, but it kept going. It was in the shadows, they couldn’t see anything. They were paralyzed, totally freaked out, they all just sat there screaming. Finally it stopped and they 224

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heard it moving away into the woods—it sounded big, she said, at least the size of a person. They legged it home. And there was a smell, Sandra says, a strong animal smell—like goats or something, or what you get at the zoo.”

“What the hell ?” I said. I was utterly taken aback.

“It wasn’t you guys messing, then.”

“Not that I recall,” I said. I remembered running hard, my own breathing rasping in my ears, unsure what was happening but knowing that something was horribly wrong; remembered the three of us staring at one another, panting, at the edge of the wood. I seriously doubted that we would have decided to go back to the clearing and make weird flapping noises and a smell of goat. “She probably imagined it.”

Cassie shrugged. “Sure, she might have. But I sort of wondered if there could’ve actually been some kind of wild animal in the wood.”

Ireland’s most ferocious form of wildlife is probably badgers, but there are regular flurries of atavistic rumor, usually somewhere in the Midlands: dead sheep found with their throats torn out, late-night travelers crossing paths with huge slouching shadows or glowing eyes. Mostly the animal in question turns out to be a rogue sheepdog or a pet kitty seen in tricky lighting, but some go unexplained. I thought, unwillingly, of the rips across the back of my T-shirt. Cassie, without exactly believing in the mysterious wild animal, has always been fascinated by it—because its lineage goes back to the Black Dog that stalked medieval wayfarers, and because she loves the idea that not every inch of the country is mapped and regulated and monitored by CCTV, that there are still secret corners of Ireland where some untamed thing the size of a puma might be going about its hidden business. I like the thought, too, normally, but I had no time for it just then. All through this case, since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly, relentlessly thinning; it had grown so fine that I could hear the small furtive movements on the other side, beating wings and tiny scrabbling feet like a moth battering against your cupped hands. I had no room for left-field theories about escaped exotic pets or leftover elk or the Loch Ness monster or whatever the hell Cassie had in mind.

“No,” I said. “No, Cass. We practically lived in that wood; if there was anything bigger than a fox in there, we would have known. And the searchers would have found some sign of it. Either some voyeur with bad BO was watching them, or Sandra imagined the whole thing.”

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“Fair enough,” Cassie said, neutrally. I started the car again. “Hang on; how are we going to do this?”

“I am not fucking sitting in the car for this one,” I told her, hearing my voice rise dangerously.

She raised her eyebrows a fraction. “I was thinking I should, actually—

well, not sit in the car, but drop you off and go talk to the cousins some more or something, and you can text me when you want me to pick you up. You and Devlin can have a guy chat. He’s not going to talk about a rape if I’m there.”

“Oh,” I said, a little awkwardly. “OK. Thanks, Cass. That sounds good.”

She got out of the car and I started sliding over to the passenger side, thinking she wanted to drive; but she went over to the trees and kicked around in the undergrowth until she spotted my lighter. “Here,” she said, getting back into the car and giving me a little one-sided smile. “Now I want my Christmas present.”

13

A s I pulled up in front of the Devlins’ house, Cassie said, “Rob, maybe you’ve already thought of it, but this could point in a whole other direction.”

“How so?” I said absently.

“You know what I was saying about the token feel to Katy’s rape—how it didn’t seem like a sexual thing? You’ve given us someone who has a nonsexual motive for wanting Devlin’s daughter to be raped, and who’d have to use an implement.”

“Sandra? Suddenly, after twenty years?”