In the Woods (50 page)

His voice was rising. Heather’s bedroom backs onto the sitting room, and I was pretty sure she had one ear pressed against the wall. “He wants you to cover it up?” I asked, keeping my voice down and hoping Sam would take the hint.

“I’d say that’s what he was driving at, yeah,” he said, with heavy sarcasm. It didn’t come naturally to him, and rather than sounding tough and cynical it made him seem terribly young, like a miserable teenager. He slumped back in the armchair and raked his hair out of his face. “I never expected that, you know? Of all the things I worried about . . . I never even thought of it.”

I suppose, if I’m honest, I had never been able to take Sam’s whole line of investigation very seriously. International holding companies, rogue property developers and hush-hush land deals: it had always seemed impossibly remote and crude and almost laughable, some cheesy blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, not something that could ever affect anyone in any real way. The look on Sam’s face caught me off guard. He hadn’t been drinking, nothing like that; the double whammy—his uncle, O’Kelly—had hit him like a pair of buses. Being Sam, he had never even seen them coming. For a moment, in spite of everything, I wished I could find the right words to comfort him; to tell him that there comes a time when this happens to everyone and that he would survive it, as almost everyone does.

“What’ll I do?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, startled. Granted, Sam and I had been spending a lot of time together recently, but this hardly made us bosom buddies, and anyway I was in no position to give anyone sage advice. “I don’t mean to sound unfeeling, but why are you asking me?”

“Who else?” Sam said quietly. When he looked up at me I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. “I can’t go to any of my family with this, can I? It’d kill them. And my friends are great, but they’re not cops, and this is police business. And Cassie . . . I’d rather not bring her into this. Sure, she’s got 310

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enough on her plate already. She’s looking awful stressed these days. You already knew about it, and I just needed to talk to someone, before I decide.”

I was fairly confident that I had been looking pretty stressed myself, these past few weeks, though I was pleased by the implication that I had been hiding it better than I thought. “Decide?” I said. “It doesn’t really sound as if you have a lot of options here.”

“I’ve Michael Kiely,” Sam said. “I could give him the tape.”

“Jesus. You’d lose your job before the article hit the presses. It might even be illegal, I’m not sure.”

“I know.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Do you think that’s what I should do?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” I said. The whiskey, on a near-empty stomach, was making me feel slightly ill. I had used ice cubes from the back of the freezer, the only ones left, and they tasted stale and tainted.

“What would happen if I did, do you know?”

“Well, you’d be fired. Maybe prosecuted.” He said nothing. “They might have to have a tribunal, I suppose. If they decided your uncle had done something wrong, they’d tell him not to do it again, he’d be backbenched for a couple of years and then everything would go back to normal.”

“But the motorway.” Sam rubbed his hands over his face. “I can’t think straight. . . . If I say nothing, that motorway’ll go through, over all the archaeological stuff. For no good reason.”

“It’ll do that anyway. If you go to the papers, the government will just say, ‘Oops, sorry about that, too late to move it,’ and go on their merry way.”

“You think so?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Frankly.”

“And Katy,” he said. “That’s what we’re supposed to be about. What if Andrews hired someone to kill her? Do we just let him get away with it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wondered how long he was planning to stay there.

We sat in silence for a while. The people in the next apartment were having a dinner party or something: I could hear a jumble of happy voices, Kylie on the stereo, a girl calling coquettishly, “I did tell you, I so did!” Heather banged on the wall; there was a moment’s silence, then an outburst of halfmuffled laughter.

“Do you know what my first memory is?” Sam said. The lamplight shad-In the Woods 311

owed his eyes and I couldn’t tell what expression he wore. “The day Red got into the Dáil. I was only a little lad, maybe three or four, but we all came up to Dublin to walk him in, the whole family. It was a gorgeous day, sunny. I had a new little suit on me. I wasn’t sure what had happened exactly, but I knew it was important. Everyone looked so happy, and my dad . . . he was glowing, he was so proud. He put me up on his shoulders so I could see, and he shouted, ‘That’s your uncle, son!’ Red was up on the steps, waving and smiling, and I yelled, ‘That man’s my uncle!’ and everyone laughed, and he winked at me. . . . We’ve still got the photo, on the sitting-room wall.”

There was another silence. It occurred to me that Sam’s father might just possibly be less shocked by his brother’s exploits than Sam expected, but I decided this would provide dubious comfort at best.

Sam pushed back his hair again. “And there’s my house,” he said. “You know I own my house, right?”

I nodded. I had a feeling I knew where this was going.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a nice house—four bedrooms and all. I was only looking for an apartment, like. But Red said . . . you know, for when I’ve a family. I didn’t think I could afford anything decent, but he . . . yeah.” He cleared his throat again, a sharp unsettling sound. “He introduced me to the fella building the estate. He said they were old friends, the guy would give me a good deal.”

“Well,” I said, “he did. There’s not much you can do about it now.”

“I could sell the house, for the price I got it. To some young couple who’ll never get a place any other way.”

“Why?” I said. This conversation was starting to frustrate me. He was like a big earnest bewildered Saint Bernard, gamely struggling to do his duty in the midst of a blizzard that made every laborious step completely useless.

“Self-immolation’s a nice gesture, but it doesn’t usually achieve very much.”

“Don’t know the word,” Sam said wearily, reaching for his glass. “But I get the idea. You’re saying I should leave it.”

“I don’t know what you should do,” I said. A wave of fatigue and nausea enveloped me. God, I thought, what a week. “I’m probably the last person to ask. I just don’t see the point of making a martyr of yourself and ditching your home and your career when it won’t do anyone any good. You didn’t do anything wrong. Right?”

Sam looked up at me. “Right,” he said softly, bitterly. “I did nothing wrong.”

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. . .

Cassie wasn’t the only one who was losing weight. It had been well over a week since I had eaten an actual meal, with food groups and everything, and I had been vaguely aware that when I was shaving I had to maneuver the razor into new little hollows around my jawline; but it wasn’t until I was taking off my suit that night that I realized it was hanging off my hipbones and sagging away from my shoulders. Most detectives either lose or gain some weight during a big investigation—Sam and O’Gorman were both starting to look a little bulky around the middle from too much snatched junk food—and I’m tall enough that this is seldom noticeable, but if this case went on for much longer, I was going to have to buy new suits or go around looking like Charlie Chaplin.

This is what not even Cassie knows: the year I was twelve, I was a big kid. Not one of those featureless spherical children you see waddling down the street on preachy news segments about the moral inferiority of modern youth; in photos I just look sturdy, a little chunky maybe, tall for my age and horribly uncomfortable, but I felt monstrous and lost: my own body had betrayed me. I had shot up and out until it was unrecognizable to me, some hideous practical joke I had to carry around every moment of every day. It didn’t help that Peter and Jamie looked exactly like they always had: longer in the leg, all their baby teeth gone, but still slight and light and invincible as ever. It didn’t last long, my chunky stage: the food at boarding school was, in keeping with literary tradition, so awful that even a kid who wasn’t shaken and homesick and growing fast would have had a hard time eating enough of it to gain weight. And I hardly ate anything at all, that first year. At first the housemaster made me stay at the table on my own, for hours sometimes, until I forced down a few bites and his point, whatever it was, had been made; after a while I grew expert at slipping food into a plastic bag in my pocket, to be flushed away later. Fasting is, I think, a profoundly instinctive form of appeal. I’m sure I believed, in some inarticulate way, that if I ate little enough for long enough Peter and Jamie would be given back and everything would return to normal. By the beginning of my second year I was tall and thin with too many elbows, the way thirteen-year-olds are supposed to be.

I’m not sure why this, out of all the possibilities, should be my most In the Woods 313

closely guarded secret. I think the truth is this: I have always wondered whether this was the reason I was left behind, that day in the wood. Because I was fat; because I couldn’t run fast enough; because, newly heavy and awkward, my balance shattered, I was afraid to jump off the castle wall. Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected. Sometimes I think of the ancient gods who demanded that their sacrifices be fearless and without blemish, and I wonder whether, whoever or whatever took Peter and Jamie away, it decided I wasn’t good enough.

19

T hat Tuesday, first thing in the morning, I finally took the bus out to Knocknaree to pick up my car. Given the choice, I would have preferred never to think about Knocknaree again in my life, but I was sick of getting to and from work on jam-packed, sweat-smelling DARTs, and I needed to do a serious supermarket run soon, before Heather’s head imploded.

My car was still on the shoulder, in pretty much the same condition as I’d left it, although all the rain had covered it with a layer of grime and someone had written also available in white with a finger on the passenger door. I headed between the Portakabins (apparently deserted, except for Hunt in the office, blowing his nose loudly) onto the site, to retrieve my sleeping bag and my thermos.

The mood of the dig had changed: this time there were no water fights and no cheery shouting. The team was working in grim silence, hunched like a chain gang, keeping a hard, punishingly fast rhythm. I went through the dates in my mind: this was their last week, the motorway people were due to start work on Monday if the injunction was lifted. I saw Mel stop mattocking and straighten up, grimacing, one hand to her spine; she was panting, and her head fell back as if she didn’t have the strength left to hold it up, but after a moment she rolled her shoulders, took a breath and heaved up her mattock again. The sky hung gray and heavy, uncomfortably close. Somewhere far away, on the estate, a car alarm’s hysterical shrieking went ignored.

The wood was dark and sullen, giving away nothing. I looked at it and realized that I very badly did not want to go in there. My sleeping bag would be sodden by now, and probably colonized by mold or ants or something, and I never used it anyway; it wasn’t worth the immensity of that first step into the rich, mossy silence. Maybe one of the archaeologists or the local kids would find it and annex it before it rotted away. I was already late for work, but even the thought of going in made me In the Woods 315

tired, and a few more minutes wouldn’t make much difference at this stage. I found a semicomfortable position on a tumbledown wall, one foot up to brace myself, and lit a cigarette. A stocky guy with scrubby dark hair—

George McSomething, I remembered him vaguely from the interviews—

raised his head and saw me. Apparently this gave him an idea: he stuck his trowel into the ground, sat back on his haunches and pulled a flattened smoke packet out of his jeans.

Mark was kneeling on top of a thigh-high bank, scraping at a patch of earth with coiled, frantic energy, but almost before the dark guy fished out a cigarette he had spotted him and was leaping down off the bank, hair flying, and bounding over. “Here, Macker! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Macker jumped up guiltily—“Jesus!”—dropped the packet and fumbled for it in the dirt. “I’m having a smoke. What’s your problem?”

“You have it on your tea break. Like I told you.”

“What’s the big deal? I can smoke and trowel at the same time, it takes five seconds to light a fag—”

Mark lost it. “We don’t have five seconds to waste. We don’t have one second. Do you think you’re still in school, you fucking half-wit? Do you think this is all some kind of game, yeah?”

His fists were clenched and he was halfway to a street fighter’s crouch. The other archaeologists had stopped working and were watching, openmouthed and unsure, tools suspended in midair. I wondered if it was going to turn into a brawl, but then Macker forced a laugh and stepped back, raising his hands mockingly. “Relax, man,” he said. He held up the cigarette between thumb and finger and reinserted it into the packet with elaborate precision.

Mark kept staring until Macker, taking his time, had knelt down and picked up his trowel and started scraping again. Then he spun around and headed back towards the bank, his shoulders hunched and rigid. Macker scrambled stealthily to his feet and followed, mimicking Mark’s springy lope, turning it into a chimpanzee’s gallop. He got an edgy snicker from one or two of the others; pleased with himself, he held out his trowel in front of his crotch and thrust his pelvis at Mark’s backside. His silhouette against the lowering sky was distorted, grotesque, a creature from some obscene and darkly symbolic Greek frieze. The air hummed with electricity like a power line and his clowning set my teeth on edge. I realized I was digging my nails 316

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into the wall. I wanted to handcuff him, smack him in the mouth, anything to make him stop.

The other archaeologists got bored and stopped paying attention, and Macker gave Mark’s back the finger and swaggered back to his patch as if all eyes were still on him. I was suddenly, fiercely glad that I would never in my life have to be a teenager again. I ground out my cigarette on a stone and was buttoning my coat and turning to go back to my car when the realization slammed home in the pit of my stomach (sucker punch, wicked drop through black ice): the trowel.