In the Woods

9

In my memory, we spent a million nights in Cassie's flat, the three of us. The investigation only lasted a month or so, and I'm sure there must have been days when one or another of us was off doing something else; but over time those evenings have colored the whole season for me, like a brilliant dye flowering slowly through water. The weather dipped in and out of an early, bitter autumn; wind whined through the eaves, and raindrops seeped in the warped sash windows and trickled down the panes. Cassie would light a fire and we would all spread out our notes on the floor and bat theories back and forth, then take turns getting dinner—mainly pasta variations from Cassie, steak sandwiches from me, surprisingly exotic experiments from Sam: lavish tacos, some Thai thing with spicy peanut sauce. We would have wine with dinner, move on to whiskey in various forms afterwards; when we started to get tipsy, we would pack the case file away and kick off our shoes and put on music and talk.

Cassie, like me, is an only child, and we were both enthralled by Sam's stories about his childhood—four brothers and three sisters piled into an old white farmhouse in Galway, playing mile-wide games of Cowboys and Indians and sneaking out at night to explore the haunted mill, with a big quiet father and a mother dealing out oven-warm bread and raps with a wooden spoon and counting heads at mealtimes to make sure nobody had fallen into the stream. Cassie's parents died in a car crash when she was five, and she was brought up by a gentle, older aunt and uncle, in a ramshackle house in Wicklow, miles from anything. She talks about reading unsuitable books from their library—The Golden Bough, Ovid's Metamorphoses; Madame Bovary, which she hated but finished anyway—curled up in a window seat on the landing, eating apples from the garden, with soft rain going past the panes. Once, she says, she wriggled under an ancient and hideous wardrobe and found a china saucer, a George VI penny and two letters from a World War I soldier whose name nobody recognized, with bits blacked out by censors. I don't remember much from before I was twelve, and after that my memories are mainly arranged in rows—rows of gray-white dormitory beds, rows of echoing, bleach-smelling cold showers, rows of boys in archaic uniforms droning Protestant hymns about duty and constancy. To both of us, Sam's childhood was something out of a storybook; we pictured it in pencil drawings, apple-cheeked children with a laughing sheepdog jumping around them. "Tell us about when you were little," Cassie would say, snuggling into the futon and pulling her sleeves down over her hands to hold her hot whiskey.

In many ways, though, Sam was the odd man out in these conversations, and a part of me was pleased at this. Cassie and I had spent two years building our routine, our rhythm, our subtle private codes and indicators; Sam was, after all, there by our favor, and it seemed only fair that he should play a supporting role, present but not too present. It never seemed to bother him. He would stretch out on the sofa, tilting his whiskey glass to make the firelight throw spots of amber on his sweater, and watch and smile as Cassie and I argued over the nature of Time, or T. S. Eliot, or scientific explanations for ghosts. Adolescent conversations, no doubt, and made more so by the fact that Cassie and I brought out the brat in each other ("Bite me, Ryan," she would say, narrowing her eyes at me across the futon, and I would grab her arm and bite her wrist till she yelled for mercy), but I had never had them in my adolescence and I loved them, I loved every moment.

I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine. Don't let me deceive you: the evenings may have been roast chestnuts around a cozy turf fire, but the days were a grim, tense, frustrating slog. Officially we were on the nine-to-five shift, but we were in before eight every morning, seldom left before eight at night, took work home with us—questionnaires to correlate, statements to read, reports to write. Those dinners started at nine o'clock, ten; it was midnight before we stopped talking shop, two in the morning by the time we had unwound enough to go to bed. We developed an intense, unhealthy relationship with caffeine and forgot what it was like not to be exhausted. On the first Friday evening, a very new floater called Corry said, "See you Monday, lads," and got a round of sardonic laughter and slaps on the back, as well as a humorless "No, Whatsyourname, I'll see you at eight tomorrow morning and don't be late" from O'Kelly.

Rosalind Devlin hadn't come in to see me that first Friday, after all.

Around five o'clock, edgy from waiting and unaccountably worried that something might have happened to her, I rang her mobile. She didn't answer. She was with her family, I told myself, she was helping with the funeral arrangements or looking after Jessica or crying in her room; but that unease stayed with me, tiny and sharp as a pebble in my shoe.

On the Sunday we went to Katy's funeral, Cassie and Sam and I. The thing about murderers being irresistibly drawn to the graveside is mostly legend, but still, the off-chance was worth it, and anyway O'Kelly had told us to go on the grounds that it was good PR. The church had been built in the 1970s, when concrete was an artistic statement and when Knocknaree was supposed to become a major metropolis any day now; it was huge and chill and ugly, gauche semi-abstract Stations of the Cross, echoes creeping dismally up to the angled concrete ceiling. We stood at the back, in our best unobtrusive dark clothes, and watched as the church filled up: farmers holding flat caps, old women in headscarves, trendy teenagers trying to look blasé. The little white coffin, gold-trimmed and terrible, in front of the altar. Rosalind stumbling up the aisle, shoulders heaving, supported by Margaret on one side and Auntie Vera on the other; behind them Jonathan, glassy-eyed, guided Jessica towards the front pew.

Candles guttered in an unceasing draught; the air smelled of damp and incense and dying flowers. I was light-headed—I had forgotten to eat breakfast—and the whole scene had the glass-covered quality of memory. It took me awhile to realize that this was, in fact, for good reason: I had attended Mass here every Sunday for twelve years, had quite possibly sat through a memorial service for Peter and Jamie in one of the cheap wooden pews. Cassie blew into her hands, surreptitiously, to warm them.

The priest was very young and solemn, trying painfully hard to rise to the occasion with his frail seminary arsenal of clichés. A choir of pale little girls in school uniforms—Katy's schoolmates; I recognized some of the faces—huddled shoulder to shoulder, sharing hymn sheets. The hymns had been chosen to offer comfort, but the voices were thin and uncertain and a few girls kept breaking down. "Be not afraid, I go before you always; come, follow me…"

Simone Cameron caught my eye on her way back from Communion and gave me a tiny stiff nod; her golden eyes were bloodshot, monstrous. The family filed out of their pew one by one and laid mementoes on the coffin: a book from Margaret, a stuffed toy shaped like a ginger cat from Jessica, from Jonathan the pencil drawing that had hung above Katy's bed. Last of all Rosalind knelt down and placed a pair of small pink ballet shoes, bound together by their ribbons, on the lid. She stroked the shoes gently and then bent her head onto the coffin and sobbed, her warm brown ringlets tumbling over the white and gold. A faint, inhuman wail rose from somewhere in the front pew.

Outside, the sky was gray-white and wind was whipping leaves off the trees in the churchyard. Reporters were leaning over the railings, cameras firing in swift bursts. We found a discreet corner and scanned the area and the crowd, but unsurprisingly no one rang any alarm bells. "Some turnout," Sam said quietly. He was the only one of us who had gone up for Communion. "Let's get film off some of these lads tomorrow, check if anyone's here who shouldn't be."

"He's not here," Cassie said. She dug her hands into her jacket pockets. "Not unless he has to be. This guy won't even be reading the newspapers. He'll change the subject if anyone starts talking about the case."

Rosalind, moving slowly down the church steps with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, raised her head and saw us. She shook off the supporting arms and ran across the grass, long black dress fluttering in the wind. "Detective Ryan…" She caught my hand in both of hers and raised a tear-stained face to me. "I can't bear it. You have to catch the man who did this to my sister."

"Rosalind!" Jonathan called hoarsely, somewhere, but she didn't look away. Her hands were long-fingered and soft and very cold. "We'll do everything we can," I said. "Will you come in and talk to me tomorrow?"

"I'll try. I'm sorry about Friday, but I couldn't…" She glanced quickly over her shoulder. "I couldn't get away. Please find him, Detective Ryan—please…"

I felt, more than heard, the spatter of the cameras. One of the photos—Rosalind's anguished, upturned profile, an unflattering shot of me with my mouth open—made it onto the front page of a tabloid the next morning, with PLEASE GIVE MY SISTER JUSTICE below it in letters an inch high, and Quigley gave me grief about it all week.

In the first two weeks of Operation Vestal we did everything you can think of, everything. Between us and the floaters and the local uniforms, we talked to everyone who lived within a four-mile radius of Knocknaree and anyone who had ever known Katy. There was one diagnosed schizophrenic on the estate, but he had never hurt anyone in his life, even when he was off his meds, which he hadn't been in three years. We checked out every Mass card the Devlins got and tracked down every person who'd contributed towards Katy's fees, and set up surveillance to see who brought flowers to lay on the altar stone.

We interviewed Katy's best friends—Christina Murphy, Elisabeth McGinnis, Marianne Casey: red-eyed, shaky, brave little girls, with no useful information to offer, but I found them disconcerting nevertheless. I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes), but all the same: Katy's friends had a poised, savvy awareness of the outside world that jarred with the happy animal oblivion I remembered enjoying at that age. "We wondered if Jessica had a learning disability, maybe," Christina said, sounding about thirty, "but we didn't want to ask. Did…I mean, was it a pedophile that killed Katy?"

The answer to this appeared to be no. In spite of Cassie's feeling that this hadn't really been a sex crime, we checked out every convicted sex offender in south Dublin, as well as plenty whom we've never been able to convict, and we spent hours with the guys who have the thankless job of tracking and trapping pedophiles online. The guy we mostly talked to was called Carl. He was young and skinny, with a lined white face, and he told us that after eight months on this job he was already thinking of quitting: he had two kids under seven, he said, and he couldn't look at them the same way any more, he felt too dirty to hug them good night after a day of doing what he did.

The network, as Carl called it, was buzzing with speculation and titillation about Katy Devlin—I'll spare you the details—and we read through hundreds of pages of chat transcripts, dispatches from a dark and alien world, but we came up empty. One guy seemed to empathize a little too strongly with Katy's killer ("I think he just LOVED HER TO MUCH she didn't understand so he got UPSET"), but when she died he had been online, discussing the relative physical merits of East Asian versus European little girls. Cassie and I both got very drunk that night.

Sophie's gang went over the Devlins' house with a fine-tooth comb—ostensibly collecting fibers and so on, for elimination purposes, but they reported back that they had found no bloodstains and nothing matching Cooper's description of the rape weapon. I pulled financial records: the Devlins lived modestly (one family holiday, to Crete, four years earlier on a credit-union loan; Katy's ballet lessons and Rosalind's violin; a '99 Toyota) and had almost no savings, but they weren't in any debt, their mortgage was almost paid off, they had never even fallen into arrears on their phone bill. There was no dodgy activity on their bank account and no insurance policy on Katy's life; there was nothing.

The tip line got a record number of calls, an incredible percentage of which were utterly useless: the people whose neighbors looked funny and refused to join the Residents' Association, the people who had seen sinister men hanging around halfway across the country, the usual assorted whackjobs who had had visions of the murder, the other set of whackjobs explaining at length how this was God's judgment on our sinful society. Cassie and I spent a full morning on one guy who rang up to tell us that God had punished Katy for her immodesty in exhibiting herself, dressed only in a leotard, to thousands of Irish Times readers. We had high hopes of him, actually—he refused to talk to Cassie, on the grounds that women shouldn't be working and that her jeans were also immodest (the objective standard for female modesty, he informed me vehemently, was Our Lady of Fatima). But his alibi was impeccable: he had spent the Monday night in the minuscule red-light district off Baggot Street, drunk as a skunk, shrieking fire and brimstone at the hookers and writing down their clients' plate numbers and getting forcibly removed by the pimps and starting all over again, until the cops had finally thrown him in a cell to sleep it off at around four in the morning. Apparently this happened every few weeks or so; everyone concerned knew the drill and was happy to confirm it, with the odd pungent remark about the guy's probable sexual proclivities.

Those were strange weeks, strange disjointed weeks. Even after all this time, I find it difficult to describe them to you. They were so full of little things, things that at the time seemed insignificant and disconnected as the jumble of objects in some bizarre parlor game: faces and phrases and sitting rooms and phone calls, all running together into a single strobe-light blur. It was only much later, in the stale cold light of hindsight, that the little things rose up and rearranged themselves and clicked neatly into place to form the pattern we should have seen all along.

And then, too, it was so excruciating, that first phase of Operation Vestal. The case was, though we refused to admit this even to ourselves, going nowhere. Every lead I found ran me into a dead end; O'Kelly kept giving us rousing, arm-waving speeches about how we couldn't afford to drop the ball on this one and when the going gets tough the tough get going; the papers were screaming for justice and printing photo enhancements of what Peter and Jamie would look like today if they had unfortunate haircuts. I was as tense as I have ever been in my life. But perhaps the real reason I find it so difficult to talk about those weeks is that—in spite of all that, and of the fact that I know this to be a self-indulgence I cannot afford—I miss them still.

Little things. We pulled Katy's medical records, of course, straight away. She and Jessica had been a couple of weeks premature, but Katy, at least, had rallied well, and until she was eight and a half she had had nothing but the normal childhood stuff. Then, out of nowhere, she had started getting sick. Stomach cramping, projectile vomiting, diarrhea for days on end; once she had ended up in the emergency room three times in one month. A year ago, after a particularly bad attack, the doctors had done an exploratory laparotomy—the surgery Cooper had spotted, the one that had kept her out of ballet school. They had diagnosed "idiopathic pseudo-obstructive bowel disease with atypical lack of distension." Reading between the lines, I got the sense that this meant they had ruled out everything else and had absolutely no idea what was wrong with this kid.

"Munchausen by proxy?" I asked Cassie, who was reading over my shoulder, arms folded on the back of my chair. She and I and Sam had staked out a corner of the incident room, as far as possible from the tip line, where we could have a modicum of privacy as long as we kept our voices down.

She shrugged, made a face. "It could be. But there's stuff that doesn't fit. Most Munchausen mothers have a background around the edges of medicine—nurse's aide, something like that." Margaret, according to the background check, had left school at fifteen and worked in Jacobs's biscuit factory until she got married. "And check out the admission records. Half the time Margaret's not even the one bringing Katy into the hospital: it's Jonathan, Rosalind, Vera, once it's a teacher… For Munchausen-by-proxy mothers, the whole point is the attention and sympathy they get from doctors and nurses. She wouldn't let someone else be at the center of all that."

"So we rule out Margaret?"

Cassie sighed. "She doesn't match the profile, but that's not definitive; she could be the exception. I just wish we could have a look at the other girls' records. These mothers don't usually target one kid and leave the others alone. They skip from kid to kid, to avoid suspicion, or else they start with the oldest and then move on to the next when the first one gets old enough to kick up a fuss. If it's Margaret, there'll be something weird in the other two's files—like maybe this spring, when Katy stopped getting sick, something went wrong with Jessica… Let's ask the parents if we can look at them."

"No," I said. All the floaters seemed to be talking at once and the noise was like a heavy fog coating my brain; I couldn't focus. "So far, the Devlins don't know they're suspects. I'd rather keep it that way, at least until we have something solid. If we go asking them for Rosalind and Jessica's medical records, it's bound to tip them off."

"Something solid," Cassie said. She looked down at the pages spread out on the table, the jumble of computerized headings and scribbled handwriting and photocopy-smudges; at the whiteboard, which had already blossomed into a multicolored tangle of names, phone numbers, arrows and question marks and underlining.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

The Devlin girls' school records had that same ambiguous, mocking quality. Katy was bright but not outstanding, solid Bs with the occasional C in Irish or A in PE; no behavioral problems bigger than a tendency to talk in class, no red flags except the stark patches of absence. Rosalind was more intelligent, but also more erratic: streams of straight As, broken up by clumps of Cs and Ds and frustrated teachers' comments about lacking effort and skipping class. Jessica's file, unsurprisingly, was the thickest. She had been in the "special" class since she and Katy were nine, but Jonathan had apparently hassled the health board and the school into running a battery of tests on her: her IQ was somewhere between 90 and 105, and there were no neurological problems. "Nonspecific learning disability with autistic features," the file claimed.

"What do you think?" I asked Cassie.

"I think this family just keeps getting weirder. Going by this, you'd swear that, if one of them's being abused, it's Jessica. Perfectly normal kid up until she's around seven; then all of a sudden, bam, her schoolwork and her social skills start going downhill. That's way too late for the onset of autism, but it's a textbook reaction to some kind of ongoing abuse. And Rosalind—all that upsy-downsy stuff could just be normal teenage mood swings, but it could also be a response to something weird going on at home. The only one who looks just fine—well, fine psychologically—is Katy."

Something dark loomed up in the corner of my vision and I whipped around, sending my pen skittering across the floor. "Whoa," Sam said, startled. "It's only me."

"Jesus," I said. My heart was racing. Cassie's eyes, across the table, gave away nothing. I retrieved my pen. "I didn't realize you were there. What've you got?"

"The Devlins' phone records," Sam said, waving a sheaf of paper in each hand. "Out and in." He put the two bundles on the table and squared off the edges carefully. He had color-coded the numbers; the pages were striped with neat lines of highlighter pen.

"For how long?" Cassie asked. She leaned across the table, looking at the pages upside down.

"Since March."

"That's it? For six months?"

That was the first thing I had noticed, too: how thin the piles were. A family of five, three adolescent girls; surely the line should have been busy nonstop, someone constantly yelling for someone else to get off the phone. I thought of the underwater hush in the house the day Katy was found, Auntie Vera hovering in the hall. "Yeah, I know," Sam said. "Maybe they use mobiles."

"Maybe," Cassie said. She didn't sound convinced. I wasn't either: almost without exception, when a family cuts itself off from the rest of the world it's because something is badly wrong. "But that's expensive. And there's two phones in that house, one in the downstairs coat closet and one on the upstairs landing, with a cord long enough that you could take it into any of the bedrooms. You wouldn't need to use a mobile for privacy."

We had gone through Katy's mobile records already. She had had an allowance, ten euros of credit every second Sunday. She had mostly used it on text messages to her friends, and we had reconstructed long, cryptically abbreviated conversations about homework, classroom gossip, American Idol; not one unidentified number, not one red flag.

"What's the highlighter?" I asked.

"I cross-referenced against the known associates, tried to split up the calls by family member. Looks like Katy's the one used the phone most: all those numbers in yellow are her mates." I flipped pages. The yellow highlighter took up at least half of each one. "The blue is Margaret's sisters—one in Kilkenny, Vera across the estate. The green's Jonathan's sister in Athlone, the nursing home where their mammy's living, and committee members of Move the Motorway. The purple's Rosalind's friend Karen Daly, the one she stayed with when she ran away. The calls between them start to dry up after that. I'd say Karen wasn't too pleased about being put in the middle of family hassle, except that she kept ringing Rosalind for a few weeks after; Rosalind just wasn't ringing her back."

"Maybe she wasn't allowed to," I said. It might have been just the start Sam had given me, but my heart was still going too fast and there was a sharp, animal taste of danger in my mouth.

Sam nodded. "The parents might've seen Karen as a bad influence. Anyway, that's all the calls accounted for, except a bunch from a phone company trying to get them to switch provider—and these three." He spread out the pages of incoming calls: three stripes of pink highlighter. "The dates, times and lengths match what Devlin gave us. They're all from pay phones."

"Dammit," Cassie said.

"Where?" I asked.

"City center. The first one's on the quays, down near the Financial Services Centre; second one's on O'Connell Street. Third one's halfway between, also on the quays."

"In other words," I said, "our caller's not one of the local boys who have their knickers in a twist over the value of their houses."

"I wouldn't say so. Going by the times, he's ringing on his way home from the pub. I suppose a Knocknaree fella could drink in town, but it doesn't sound likely, not as a regular thing. I'll have the lads check, to make sure, but for now I'm guessing this is someone whose interest in the motorway is business, not personal. And if I was a betting man, I'd put money on him living somewhere along the quays."

"Our killer's almost definitely local," Cassie said.

Sam nodded. "My boy could've hired a local to do the job, though. That's what I'd have done." Cassie caught my eye: the thought of Sam earnestly toddling off in search of a hit man was irresistible. "When I find out who owns that land, I'll see if any of them have been talking to anyone from Knocknaree."

"How are you getting on with that?" I asked.

"Ah, sure," Sam said cheerfully and vaguely. "I'm working on it."

"Hang on," Cassie said suddenly. "Who does Jessica phone?"

"No one," Sam said, "as far as I can tell," and he patted the papers gently into a stack and took them away.

All that was on the Monday, almost a week after Katy had died. In that week, neither Jonathan nor Margaret Devlin had phoned us to ask how the investigation was going. I wasn't complaining, exactly—some families ring four or five times a day, desperate for answers, and there are few things more excruciating than telling them we have none—but all the same: it was another small unsettling thing, in a case that was already much too full of them.

Rosalind finally came in on Tuesday, at lunchtime. No phone call, no arrangement, just Bernadette informing me with faint disapproval that there was a young woman to see me; but I knew it was her, and the fact that she had shown up out of the blue like that smacked of desperation somehow, of some clandestine urgency. I dropped what I was doing and went downstairs, ignoring the inquiring raised eyebrows from Cassie and Sam.

Rosalind was waiting in Reception. She had an emerald shawl wrapped tightly around her; her face, turned to look out the window, was wistful and faraway. She was too young to know it, but she made a lovely picture: the fall of chestnut curls and the splash of green, poised against the sunlit brick and stone of the courtyard. Block out the defiantly utilitarian lobby, and the scene could have come straight off a Pre-Raphaelite greeting card.

"Rosalind," I said.

She spun from the window, a hand going to her chest. "Oh, Detective Ryan! You startled me… Thank you so much for seeing me."

"Any time," I said. "Come upstairs and we'll talk."

"Are you sure? I don't want to be any trouble. If you're too busy, just tell me and I'll go."

"You're no trouble at all. Can I get you a cup of tea? Coffee?"

"Coffee would be lovely. But do we have to go in there? It's such a lovely day, and I'm a little claustrophobic—I don't like to tell people, but…Couldn't we go outside?"

It wasn't standard procedure; but then, I reasoned, she wasn't a suspect, or even necessarily a witness. "Sure," I said, "just give me a second," and ran upstairs for the coffee. I'd forgotten to ask her how she took it, so I added a little milk and put two sachets of sugar in my pocket, in case.

"Here you go," I said to Rosalind, downstairs. "Shall we find somewhere in the garden?"

She took a sip of coffee and tried to hide a quick little moue of distaste. "I know, it's foul," I said.

"No, no, that's fine—it's just that…well, I don't take milk, usually, but—"

"Oops," I said. "Sorry about that. Want me to get you another one?"

"Oh, no! It's all right, Detective Ryan, honestly—I didn't really need coffee. You have this one. I don't want to put you to any trouble; it's wonderful of you to see me, you mustn't go out of your way…" She was talking too fast, too high and chatty, hands flying, and she held my eyes for too long without blinking, as if she had been hypnotized. She was badly nervous, and trying hard to cover up.

"It's no problem at all," I said gently. "I'll tell you what: let's find somewhere nice to sit, and then I'll get you another cup of coffee. It'll still be foul, but at least it'll be black. How does that sound?" Rosalind smiled up at me gratefully, and for a moment I had a startled sense that this small act of consideration had moved her almost to tears.

We found a bench in the gardens, in the sun; birds were twittering and rustling in the hedges, darting out to wrestle with discarded sandwich crusts. I left Rosalind there and went back up for the coffee. I took my time, to give her a chance to settle down, but when I got back she was still sitting on the edge of the bench, biting her lip and picking the petals off a daisy.

"Thank you," she said, taking the coffee and trying to smile. I sat down beside her. "Detective Ryan, have you…have you found out who killed my sister?"

"Not yet," I said. "But it's early days. I promise you, we're doing absolutely everything we can."

"I know you'll catch him, Detective Ryan. I knew the minute I saw you. I can tell an awful lot about people from first impressions—sometimes it actually scares me, how often I'm right—and I knew right away that you were the person we needed."

She was looking up at me with pure, unblemished faith in her eyes. I was flattered, of course I was, but at the same time, this level of trust made me very uncomfortable. She was so sure, and so desperately vulnerable; and, although you try not to think this way, I knew there was a chance this case would never be solved, and I knew exactly what that would do to her.

"I had a dream about you," Rosalind said, then glanced down, embarrassed. "The night after Katy's funeral. I hadn't slept more than an hour a night since she vanished, you know. I was—oh, I was frantic. But seeing you that day…it reminded me not to give up. That night I dreamed you knocked on our door and told me you'd caught the man who did this. You had him in the police car behind you, and you said he'd never hurt anyone again."

"Rosalind," I said. I couldn't take this. "We're doing our best, and we won't give up. But you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that it might take a very long time."

She shook her head. "You'll find him," she said simply.

I let it go. "You said there was something you wanted to ask me?"

"Yes." She took a deep breath. "What happened to my sister, Detective Ryan? Exactly?"

Her eyes were wide and intent, and I wasn't sure how to handle this: if I told her, would she break down, collapse, scream? The gardens were full of chattery office workers on their lunch break. "I should really let your parents tell you about it," I said.

"I'm eighteen, you know. You don't need their permission to talk to me."

"Still."

Rosalind bit her bottom lip. "I asked them. He…they…they told me to shut up."

Something zipped through me—anger, alarm bells, compassion, I'm not sure. "Rosalind," I said, very gently, "is everything all right at home?"

Her head flew up, mouth open in a little O. "Yes," she said, in a small, uncertain voice. "Of course."

"Are you sure?"

"You're very kind," she said shakily. "You're so good to me. It's…everything's fine."

"Would you be more comfortable talking to my partner?"

"No," she said sharply, with what sounded like disapproval in her voice. "I wanted to talk to you because…" She turned the cup in circles in her lap. "I felt like you cared, Detective Ryan. About Katy. Your partner didn't really seem to care, but you—you're different."

"Of course we both care," I said. I wanted to put a reassuring arm around her, or a hand on hers, or something, but I've never been good at that stuff.

"Oh, I know, I know. But your partner…" She gave me a self-deprecating little smile. "I guess I'm a bit scared of her. She's so aggressive."

"My partner?" I said, startled. "Detective Maddox?" Cassie has always been the one with a reputation for being good with the families. I get stiff and tongue-tied, but she always seems to know the right thing to say and the gentlest way to say it. Some families still send her sad, valiant, grateful little cards at Christmas.

Rosalind's hands fluttered helplessly. "Oh, Detective Ryan, I don't mean it in a bad way. Being aggressive is a good thing, isn't it—especially in your job? And I'm probably much too sensitive. It was just how she went on at my parents—I know she had to ask all those questions, but it was the way she asked them, so coldly…Jessica was really upset. And she was smiling at me like it was all…Katy's death wasn't a joke, Detective Ryan."

"Very far from it," I said. I was mentally skimming through that awful session in the Devlins' sitting room, trying to work out what the hell Cassie had done to get this kid so upset. The only thing I could think of was that she had given Rosalind an encouraging smile, when she sat her down on the sofa. In retrospect, I supposed that could have been a little inappropriate, although hardly enough to warrant this kind of reaction. Shock and grief often do make people overreact in skewed, illogical ways; but still, this level of jumpiness strengthened my feeling that there was something up in that house. "I'm sorry if we gave the impression—"

"No, oh no, not you—you were wonderful. And I know Detective Maddox can't have meant to seem so—so harsh. Really, I do. Most aggressive people are just trying to be strong, aren't they? They just don't want to be insecure, or needy, or anything like that. They're not actually cruel, underneath."

"No," I said, "probably not." I had a hard time thinking of Cassie as needy; but then, I had never thought of her as aggressive, either. I realized, with a sudden small shot of unease, that I had no way of knowing how Cassie came across to other people. It was like trying to tell whether your sister is pretty, or something: I could no more be objective about her than about myself.

"Have I offended you?" Rosalind looked up at me nervously, pulling at a ringlet. "I have. I'm sorry, I'm sorry—I'm always putting my foot in it. I open my silly mouth and everything just comes out, I never learn—"

"No," I said, "it's fine. I'm not offended at all."

"You are. I can tell." She threw her shawl more closely around her shoulders and flipped her hair out from under it, her face tight and withdrawn.

I knew if I lost her now I might never have another chance. "Honestly," I said, "I'm not. I was just thinking about what you said. It's very insightful."

She played with the fringe of the shawl, not meeting my eyes. "But isn't she your girlfriend?"

"Detective Maddox? No no no," I said. "Nothing like that."

"But I thought from the way she—" She clapped a hand over her mouth. "Oh, there I go again! Stop, Rosalind!"

I laughed; I couldn't help it, we were both trying so hard. "Come on," I said. "Take a deep breath and we'll start over."

Slowly, she relaxed back onto the bench. "Thank you, Detective Ryan. But, please…just…what exactly happened to Katy? I keep imagining, you see…I can't bear not knowing."

And so (because what could I say to that?) I told her. She didn't faint or go into hysterics, or even burst into tears. She listened in silence, with her eyes—blue eyes, the color of faded denim—fixed on mine. When I had finished she put her fingers to her lips and stared out into the sunshine, at the neat patterns of hedges, the office workers with their plastic containers and gossip. I patted her shoulder awkwardly. The shawl was cheap stuff, once you touched it, prickly and synthetic, and the childish, pathetic gallantry of it went to my heart. I wanted to say something to her, something wise and profound about how few deaths can match the refined agony of being the one left behind, something that she could remember when she was alone and sleepless and uncomprehending in her room; but I couldn't find the words.

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"So she wasn't raped?"

There was a flat, hollow note in her voice. "Drink your coffee," I said, with some obscure notion about hot drinks being good for shock.

"No, no…" She waved her hand distractedly. "Tell me. She wasn't raped?"

"Not exactly, no. And she was already dead, you know. She didn't feel a thing."

"She didn't suffer much?"

"Hardly at all. She was knocked out almost immediately."

Suddenly Rosalind bent her head over the coffee cup, and I saw her lips quivering. "I feel awful about it, Detective Ryan. I feel as if I should have protected her better."

"You didn't know."

"But I should have known. I should have been there, not having fun with my cousins. I'm a terrible sister, aren't I?"

"You are not responsible for Katy's death," I said firmly. "It sounds to me as though you were a wonderful sister to her. There's nothing you could have done."

"But—" She stopped, shook her head.

"But what?"

"Oh…I should have known. That's all. Never mind." She smiled tentatively up at me, through her hair. "Thank you for telling me."

"My turn," I said. "Can I ask you a couple of things?"

She looked apprehensive, but she took a deep breath and nodded.

"Your father said Katy wasn't into boys yet," I said. "Is that true?"

Her mouth opened, then closed again. "I don't know," she said, in a small voice.

"Rosalind, I know this isn't easy for you. But if she was, we need to know."

"Katy was my sister, Detective Ryan. I don't want to…to say things about her."

"I know," I said gently. "But the best thing you can do for her now is to tell me anything that might help me find her killer."

Finally she sighed, a tremulous little breath. "Yes," she said. "She liked boys. I don't know who, exactly, but I heard her and her friends teasing each other—about boyfriends, you know, and who they'd kissed…"

The thought of twelve-year-olds kissing startled me, but I remembered Katy's friends, those knowing, disconcerting little girls. Maybe Peter and Jamie and I had just been backwards. "Are you positive? Your father seemed pretty sure."

"My father…" There was a tiny frown-line between Rosalind's eyebrows. "My father worshipped Katy. And she…sometimes she took advantage of that. She didn't always tell him the truth. That made me very sad."

"OK," I said. "OK. I understand. You've done the right thing by telling me." She nodded, just a slight inclination of the head. "I need to ask you one more thing. You ran away from home in May, right?"

The frown deepened. "I didn't exactly run away, Detective Ryan. I'm not a child. I spent a weekend with a friend."

"Who was that?"

"Karen Daly. You can ask her, if you'd like. I'll give you her number."

"There's no need," I said, ambiguously. We had already talked to Karen—a timid, pasty-faced girl, not at all what I would have expected a friend of Rosalind's to be—and she had confirmed that Rosalind had been with her all weekend; but I have a fairly good nose for deception, and I was pretty sure there was something Karen wasn't telling me. "Your cousin thought you might have spent the weekend with a boyfriend."

Rosalind's mouth tightened into a displeased little line. "Valerie has a dirty mind. I know a lot of other girls do things like that, but I'm not other girls."

"No," I said. "You're not. But your parents didn't know where you were?"

"No. They didn't."

"Why was that?"

"Because I didn't feel like telling them," she said sharply. Then she glanced up at me and sighed, and her face softened. "Oh, Detective, don't you ever feel that—that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all just too much?"

"I do," I said, "yes. So the weekend away wasn't because anything bad had happened at home? We've been told you had a fight with your father…"

Rosalind's face clouded over, and she looked away. I waited. After a moment, she shook her head. "No. I…nothing like that."

My alarm bells were going off again, but her voice had tightened and I didn't want to push her, not yet. I wonder now, of course, whether I should have; but I can't see that, in the long run, it would have made any difference to anything at all.

"I know you're having a very hard time right now," I said, "but don't run away again, OK? If things are getting on top of you, or if you just want to talk, give Victim Support a ring, or call me—you have my mobile number, right? I'll do whatever I can to help."

Rosalind nodded. "Thank you, Detective Ryan. I'll remember that." But her face was withdrawn, subdued, and I had the sense that, in some obscure but critical way, I had let her down.

Cassie was in the squad room, photocopying statements. "Who was that?"

"Rosalind Devlin."

"Huh," Cassie said. "What did she say?"

For some reason, I didn't feel like telling her the details. "Nothing much. Just that, no matter what Jonathan thought, Katy was into boys. Rosalind didn't know any names; we'll need to talk to Katy's mates again and see if they can give us more. She also said Katy told lies, but then, most kids do."

"Anything else?"

"Not really."

Cassie turned from the photocopier, a page in her hand, and gave me a long look I couldn't read. Then she said, "At least she's talking to you. You should stay in touch with her; she might open up more as you go."

"I did ask her whether there was anything wrong at home," I said, a little guiltily. "She said no, but I didn't believe her."

"Hmm," Cassie said, and went back to photocopying.

But when we talked to Christina and Marianne and Beth again, the next day, they were all adamant: Katy had had no boyfriends and no particular crushes. "We used to tease her about guys sometimes," Beth said, "but not really, you know? Just messing." She was a redheaded, cheerful-looking kid, already sprouting boisterous curves, and when her eyes filled with tears she seemed bewildered by them, as if crying was still an unfamiliar thing. She fished in the sleeve of her sweater and pulled out a tattered tissue.

"She might not have told us, though," said Marianne. She was the quietest of the bunch, a pale fairy of a girl vanishing into her funky teenage clothes. "Katy's—Katy was very private about stuff. Like the first time she auditioned for ballet school, we didn't even know about it till she got accepted, remember?"

"Um, hel-lo, not the same thing," Christina said, but she had been crying, too and the stuffed nose took most of the authority off her voice. "We couldn't exactly have missed a boyfriend."

The floaters would re-interview every boy on the estate and in Katy's class, of course, just in case; but I realized that, at some level, this was exactly what I had been expecting. This case was like an endless, infuriating streetcorner shell game: I knew the prize was in there somewhere, right under my eye, but the game was rigged and the dealer much too fast for me, and every sure-thing shell I turned over came up empty.

Sophie rang me as we were leaving Knocknaree, to say that the lab results were back. She was walking somewhere; I could hear the mobile jolting and the fast, decisive taps of her shoes.

"I've got your results on the Devlin kid," she said. "The lab's got a six-week backlog, and you know what they're like, but I got them to jump this one up the queue. I practically had to sleep with the head geek before he'd do it."

My heart rate picked up. "Bless you, Sophie," I said. "We owe you another one." Cassie, driving, glanced across at me; I mouthed, "Results."

"Tox screen was negative: she wasn't drugged, drunk or on any medication. She was covered in trace, mostly outdoor stuff—dirt, pollen, the usual. It's all consistent with the soil composition around Knocknaree, even—this is the good part—even the stuff that was inside her clothes and stuck to the blood. So stuff she didn't just pick up at the dump site. Lab says there's some super-rare plant in that wood that doesn't grow anywhere else nearby—it got the plant geek very turned on, apparently—and the pollen wouldn't blow more than a mile or so. The odds are she was in Knocknaree the whole time."

"That fits with what we have," I said. "Get to the good stuff."

Sophie snorted. "That was the good stuff. The footprints are a dead end: half of them match the archaeologists, and the ones that don't are too blurry to be any use. Practically all the fibers are consistent with stuff we pulled from the home; a handful of unidentified ones, but nothing distinctive. One hair on the T-shirt matching the idiot who found her, two that match the mother—one on the combats, one on a sock, and she probably does the washing, so no big deal there."

"Any DNA? Or fingerprints or anything?"

"Ha," Sophie said. She was eating something crunchy, probably crisps—Sophie lives mainly on junk food. "A few bloody partials, but they came off a rubber glove—surprise, surprise. So no epithelials, either. And no semen and no saliva, and no blood that doesn't match the kid."

"Great," I said, my heart slowly sinking. I had fallen for the con all over again, I had got my hopes up, and I felt suckered and stupid.

"Except for that old spot Helen found. They got a blood type off it: it's A positive. Your victim's O neg."

She paused for another mouthful of crisps, while my stomach did something complicated. "What?" she demanded, when I said nothing. "That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it? Same as the blood from the old case. OK, so it's tentative, but at least it's a link."

"Yeah," I said. I could feel Cassie listening; I turned my shoulder to her. "That's great. Thanks, Sophie."

"We've sent the swabs and those shoes off for DNA testing," Sophie said, "but I wouldn't hold your breath if I were you. I bet it's all degraded to fuck. Who stores blood evidence in a basement?"

Cassie, by unspoken agreement, was following up on the old case while I concentrated on the Devlins. McCabe had died several years before, a heart attack, but she went to see Kiernan. He was retired and living in Laytown, a little commuter village up along the coast. He was well into his seventies, with a ruddy, good-humored face and the comfortably sloppy build of a rugby player gone to seed, but he brought Cassie for a long walk on the wide empty beach, seagulls and curlews screaming, while he told her what he remembered about the Knocknaree case. He seemed happy, Cassie said that evening, as she lit the fire and I spread mustard on ciabatta rolls and Sam poured the wine. He had taken up woodworking, there was sawdust on his soft worn trousers; his wife had wrapped a scarf around his neck and kissed his cheek as he went out.

He remembered the case, though, every detail. In all Ireland's brief disorganized history as a nation, fewer than half a dozen children have gone missing and stayed that way, and Kiernan had never been able to forget that two of these had been given into his hands and he had failed them. The search, he told Cassie (a little defensively, she said, as though this was a conversation he had had many times in his mind), had been massive: dogs, helicopters, divers; policemen and volunteers had combed miles of wood and hill and field in every direction, starting at dawn every morning for weeks and going on into the late summer twilights; they had followed leads to Belfast and Kerry and even Birmingham; and all the time a nagging whisper had insisted, in Kiernan's ear, that they were looking in the wrong directions, that the answer was right in front of them all along.

"What's his theory?" Sam asked.

I flipped the last steak onto its roll and handed round the plates. "Later," Cassie said, to Sam. "Enjoy your sandwich first. How often does Ryan do something that's worth appreciating?"

"You are speaking to two talented men here," I told her. "We can eat and listen, at the same time." It would have been nice to hear this story in private first, obviously, but by the time Cassie had got back from Laytown it had been too late for that. The thought had already killed my appetite; the thing itself wasn't going to make much difference. Besides, we always talked about the case over dinner, and today was not going to be any different if I could help it. Sam appears blithely unaware of subtext and emotional cross-currents, but I sometimes wonder if anyone can be quite as oblivious as all that.

"I'm impressed," Cassie said. "OK"—her eyes went to me for a second; I looked away—"Kiernan's theory was that the kids never left Knocknaree. I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was a third kid…" She leaned sideways to check her notebook, open on the arm of the sofa. "Adam Ryan. He was with the other two that afternoon, and they found him in the wood, a couple of hours into the search. No injuries, but there was blood in his shoes and he was pretty shaken up; he couldn't remember anything. So Kiernan figured that, whatever happened, it must have been either in the wood or very nearby, otherwise how had Adam got back there? He thought someone—someone local—had been watching them for a while. The guy approached them in the wood, maybe lured them back to his house, and attacked them. Probably he hadn't planned to kill them; maybe he tried to molest them and something went wrong. At some point during the attack, Adam escaped and ran back into the wood—which probably means they were either in the wood itself, in one of the estate houses that back onto it, or in one of the farmhouses nearby; otherwise he'd have gone home, right? Kiernan thinks the guy panicked and killed the other two children, possibly stashed the bodies in his house until he saw his chance, and then either dumped them in the river or buried them, in his garden or, more likely—there were no reports of unexplained digging in the area over the next few weeks—in the wood."

I took a bite of my sandwich. The taste, pungent and bloody, almost made me retch. I forced it down, unchewed, with a swallow of wine.

"Where's young Adam these days?" Sam inquired.

Cassie shrugged. "I doubt he'd be able to tell us anything. Kiernan and McCabe kept going back to him for years, but he never remembered any more. In the end they gave up, figured the memory was gone for good. The family moved out of the area; Knocknaree gossip says they emigrated to Canada." All of which was true, as far as it went. This was both more difficult and more ridiculous than I had expected. We were like spies, communicating over Sam's head in careful, stilted code.

"They must have been going mental," Sam said. "An eyewitness right there…" He shook his head and took a big bite of sandwich.

"Yeah, Kiernan said it was frustrating, all right," Cassie said, "but the kid was doing his best. He even participated in a reconstruction, with two local kids. They were hoping it would help him remember what he and his mates had done that afternoon, but he froze up as soon as he got into the wood." My stomach flipped. I had no memory of this at all. I put down my sandwich; suddenly and intensely, I wanted a cigarette.

"Poor little bastard," Sam said peacefully.

"Was this what McCabe thought, too?" I asked.

"No." Cassie licked mustard off her thumb. "McCabe thought it was a tourist killer—some guy who was only here for a few days, probably over from England, maybe for work. See, they couldn't find a single good suspect. They did almost a thousand questionnaires, hundreds of interviews, ruled out all the known perverts and weirdos in south Dublin, accounted for every local man's movements down to the minute… You know what it's like: you almost always come up with a suspect, even if you don't have enough to charge him. They had nobody. Every time they got a lead, they ran bang into a dead end."

"That sounds familiar," I said grimly.

"Kiernan thinks it was because someone gave the guy a fake alibi so he never really made it onto their radar, but McCabe figured it was because he wasn't there to find. His theory was that the kids were playing by the river and followed it to where it comes out on the other side of the wood—it's a long walk, but they'd done it before. There's a little back road that goes right past that stretch of the river. McCabe thought someone was driving by, saw the kids and tried to drag them or lure them into his car. Adam fought, got away and ran back into the wood, and the guy drove off with the other two. McCabe talked to Interpol and the British police, but they didn't come up with anything useful."

"Kiernan and McCabe," I said, "both thought the children were murdered, then."

"McCabe wasn't sure, apparently. He thought there was a chance someone had abducted them—maybe someone mentally ill and desperate to have kids, or maybe…Well. At first they thought they might have just run away, but two twelve-year-olds with no money? They'd have been found within days."

"Well, Katy was no random tourist killing," Sam said. "He had to set up the meeting, keep her somewhere for the day…"

"Actually," I said, impressed by the pleasant, everyday tone of my voice, "I can't really see the old case as a car snatch, either. As far as I remember, the shoes were only put back on the kid after the blood in them had started to congeal. In other words, the abductor spent some time with all three of them, in the area, before one got away. To me, that says local."

"Knocknaree's a small place," Sam said. "What are the odds of two different child-murderers living there?"

Cassie balanced her plate on her crossed legs, linked her hands behind her neck and arched stiffness out of it. There were dark shadows under her eyes; I realized suddenly that her afternoon with Kiernan had hit her hard, and that her reluctance to tell the story might not have been just for my sake. There is a specific tiny compression to the corners of her mouth when she is holding something back, and I wondered what Kiernan had told her that she wasn't saying.

"They even searched the trees, you know that?" she said. "After a few weeks, some smart floater remembered an old case where a kid climbed a hollow tree and fell into a hole in the trunk; he wasn't found till forty years later. Kiernan and McCabe had people checking every tree, shining torches into hollows…"

Her voice drifted off and we fell silent. Sam munched his sandwich with even, unhurried appreciation, put down the plate and sighed contentedly. Finally Cassie stirred, held out a hand; I put her smoke packet into it. "Kiernan still dreams about it, you know," she said quietly, fishing out a cigarette. "Not as much as he used to, he said; only every few months, since he retired. He dreams that he's searching for the two kids in the wood at night, calling them, and someone leaps out of the bushes and rushes at him. He knows it's the person who took them, he can see his face—'Clear as I see you,' he said—but when he wakes up, he can't remember it."

The fire cracked and spat sharply. I caught it out of the corner of my eye and whipped round; I was sure I had seen something shoot out of the fireplace into the room, some small, black, clawed thing—baby bird, maybe, fallen down the chimney?—but there was nothing there. When I turned back Sam's eyes were on me, gray and calm and somehow sympathetic, but he only smiled and leaned across the table to refill my glass.

I was having trouble sleeping, even when I got the opportunity. I often do, as I've said, but this was different: in those weeks I kept finding myself trapped in some twilight zone between sleep and waking, unable to force my way into either. "Look out!" voices said suddenly and loudly in my ear; or, "I can't hear you. What? What?" I half-dreamed dark intruders moving stealthily around the room, riffling through my work notes and fingering the shirts in my wardrobe; I knew they couldn't be real, but it took me a panicky eternity to drag myself awake to either confront or dispel them. Once I woke to find myself slumped against the wall by my bedroom door, pawing crazily at the light switch, my legs barely able to hold me up. My head was swimming and there was a muffled moaning sound coming from somewhere, and it was a long time before I realized that it was my voice. I turned on the light, and my desk lamp, and crawled back into bed, where I lay, too shaken to go back to sleep, until my alarm went off.

In this limbo I kept hearing children's voices, too. Not Peter's and Jamie's, or anything: this was a group of children a long way off, chanting playground rhymes that I didn't remember ever having known. Their voices were gay and uncaring and too pure to be human, and underneath them were the brisk expert rhythms of complicated hand-clapping. Say say my playmate, come out and play with me, climb up my apple tree…Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-o, one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so… Sometimes their faint chorus stayed in my head all day, a high inescapable underscore to whatever I was doing. I lived in mortal dread that O'Kelly would catch me humming one of the rhymes.

Rosalind phoned my mobile that Saturday. I was in the incident room; Cassie had gone off to talk to Missing Persons; behind me, O'Gorman was bellowing about some guy who had failed to give him proper respect during the door-to-door. I had to press the phone to my ear to hear her. "Detective Ryan, it's Rosalind… I'm so sorry to bother you, but do you think you might have the time to come talk to Jessica?"

City noises in the background: cars, loud conversation, the frenetic beeping of a pedestrian signal. "Of course," I said. "Where are you?"

"We're in town. Could we meet you in the Central Hotel bar in, say, ten minutes? Jessica has something to tell you."

I dug out the main file and started flipping through it for Rosalind's date of birth: if I was going to talk to Jessica, I needed an "appropriate adult" present. "Are your parents with you?"

"No, I…no. I think Jessica might be more comfortable talking without them, if that's all right."

My antennae prickled. I had found the page of family stats: Rosalind was eighteen, and appropriate as far as I was concerned. "No problem," I said. "I'll see you there."

"Thank you, Detective Ryan, I knew I could come to you—I'm sorry to rush you, but we really should get home before—" A beep, and she was gone: either her battery or her credit had run out. I wrote Cassie a "Back soon" note and left.

Rosalind had good taste. The Central bar has a stubbornly old-fashioned feel—ceiling moldings, huge comfortable armchairs taking up inefficient quantities of space, shelves of weird old books in elegant bindings—that contrasts satisfyingly with the manic overdrive of the streets below. Sometimes I used to go there on Saturdays, have a glass of brandy and a cigar—this was before the smoking ban—and spend the afternoon reading the 1938 Farmer's Almanac or third-rate Victorian poems.

Rosalind and Jessica were at a table by the window. Rosalind's curls were caught up loosely and she was wearing a white outfit, long skirt and gauzy ruffled blouse, that blended perfectly with the surroundings; she looked as if she had just stepped in from some Edwardian garden party. She was leaning over to whisper in Jessica's ear, one hand stroking her hair in a slow, soothing rhythm.

Jessica was in an armchair, her legs curled under her, and the sight of her hit me all over again, almost as hard as it had that first time. The sun streaming through the high window held her in a column of light that transformed her into a radiant vision of someone else, someone vivid and eager and lost. The fine crooked Vs of her eyebrows, the tilt of her nose, the full, childish curve of her lip: the last time I had looked into that face, it had been empty and blood-smeared on Cooper's steel table. She was like a reprieve; like Eurydice, gifted back to Orpheus from the darkness for a brief miraculous moment. I wanted, so intensely it took my breath away, to reach out and lay a hand on her soft dark head, to pull her tightly against me and feel her slight and warm and breathing, as if by protecting her hard enough I could somehow undo time and protect Katy, too.

"Rosalind," I said. "Jessica."

Jessica flinched, eyes widening sharply, and the illusion was gone. She was holding something, a packet of sugar from the bowl in the middle of the table; she shoved the corner into her mouth and started to suck on it.

Rosalind's face lit up at the sight of me. "Detective Ryan! It's so good to see you. I know it was short notice, but—Oh, sit down, sit down…" I pulled up another armchair. "Jessica saw something I think you should know about. Didn't you, pet?"

Jessica shrugged, an awkward wriggle.

"Hi, Jessica," I said, softly and as calmly as I could. My mind was shooting in a dozen directions at once: if this had anything to do with the parents then I would have to find somewhere for the girls to go, and Jessica was going to be terrible on the stand—"I'm glad you decided to tell me. What did you see?"

Her lips parted; she swayed a little in her chair. Then she shook her head.

"Oh, dear…I thought this might happen." Rosalind sighed. "Well. She told me that she saw Katy—"

"Thanks, Rosalind," I said, "but I really need to hear this from Jessica. Otherwise it's hearsay, and that's not admissible in court."

Rosalind stared blankly, taken aback. Finally she nodded. "Well," she said, "of course, if that's what you need, then…I just hope…" She bent over Jessica and tried to catch her eye, smiling; hooked her hair back behind her ear. "Jessica? Darling? You really need to tell Detective Ryan what we talked about, sweetheart. It's important."

Jessica ducked her head away. "Don't remember," she whispered.

Rosalind's smile tightened. "Come on, Jessica. You remembered just fine earlier on, before we came all the way out here and dragged Detective Ryan away from work. Didn't you?"

Jessica shook her head again and bit down on the sugar packet. Her lip was trembling.

"It's all right," I said. I wanted to shake her. "She's just a little nervous. She's been having a hard time. Right, Jessica?"

"We've both been having a hard time," Rosalind said sharply, "but one of us has to act like an adult instead of like a stupid little girl." Jessica shrank deeper into her oversized sweater.

"I know," I said, in what I hoped was a soothing tone, "I know. I understand how hard this is—"

"No, actually, Detective Ryan, you don't." Rosalind's crossed knee was jiggling angrily. "Nobody can possibly understand what this is like. I don't know why we came in. Jessica can't be bothered to tell you what she saw, and you obviously don't think that matters. We might as well go."

I couldn't lose them. "Rosalind," I said urgently, leaning forward across the table, "I'm taking this very seriously. And I do understand. Honestly, I do."

Rosalind laughed bitterly, fumbling under the table for her purse. "Oh, I'm sure. Put that thing down, Jessica. We're going home."

"Rosalind, I do. When I was about Jessica's age, two of my best friends disappeared. I know what you're going through."

Her head came up and she stared at me.

"I know it's not the same as losing a sister—"

"It isn't."

"—but I do know how hard it is to be the one left behind. I'm going to do whatever it takes to make sure you get some answers. OK?"

Rosalind kept staring for another long moment. Then she dropped her purse and laughed, a breathless burst of relief. "Oh-oh, Detective Ryan!" Before she thought, she had reached across the table and caught my hand. "I knew there was a reason why you're the perfect person for this case!"

I hadn't looked at it this way before, and the thought was warming. "I hope you're right," I said.

I gave her hand a squeeze; it was intended to be reassuring, but she suddenly realized what she had done and pulled away, in an embarrassed flutter. "Oh, I didn't mean to—"

"Tell you what," I said, "you and I can talk for a while, until Jessica feels ready to explain what she saw. How's that?"

"Jessica? Pet?" Rosalind touched Jessica's arm; she jumped, eyes wide. "Do you want to stay here for a bit?"

Jessica thought about this, gazing up into Rosalind's face. Rosalind smiled down at her. Finally she nodded.

I bought coffee for Rosalind and me and a 7-Up for Jessica. Jessica held her glass in both hands and stared, as if hypnotized, at the bubbles floating upwards, while Rosalind and I talked.

Frankly, I hadn't expected to take much pleasure in a teenager's conversation, but Rosalind was an unusual kid. The initial shock of Katy's death had worn off and for the first time I got a chance to see what she was really like: outgoing, bubbly, all sparkle and dash, ridiculously bright and articulate. I wondered where the girls like this had been when I was eighteen. She was naïve, but she knew it; she told jokes on herself with such zest and mischief that—in spite of the context, and my creeping worry that this level of innocence would get her into trouble one day, and Jessica sitting there watching invisible booglies like a cat—my laughter was real.

"What are you going to do when you leave school?" I asked. I was genuinely curious. I couldn't picture this girl in some nine-to-five office.

Rosalind smiled, but a sad little shadow passed across her face. "I'd love to study music. I've been playing the violin since I was nine, and I do a little bit of composing; my teacher says I'm…well, he says I shouldn't have any trouble getting into a good course. But…" She sighed. "It's expensive, and my—my parents don't really approve. They want me to do a secretarial course."

But they had been behind Katy's Royal Ballet School ambitions, all the way. In Domestic Violence I had seen cases like this, where parents choose a favorite or a scapegoat (I made a bit of a pet of her, Jonathan had said, that first day) and siblings grow up in utterly different families. Few of them end well.

"You'll find a way," I said. The idea of her as a secretary was ludicrous; what the hell was Devlin thinking? "A scholarship or something. It sounds like you're good."

She ducked her head modestly. "Well. Last year the National Youth Orchestra performed a sonata I wrote."

I didn't believe her, of course. The lie was transparent—something that size, someone would have mentioned it during the door-to-door—and it went straight to my heart as no sonata ever could have; because I recognized it. That's my twin brother, his name's Peter, he's seven minutes older than me… Children—and Rosalind was little more—don't tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.

For a moment I almost said as much. Rosalind, I know something's wrong at home; tell me, let me help… But it was too soon; she would just have thrown all her defenses up again, it would have undone everything I had managed to do. "Well done," I said. "That's pretty impressive."

She laughed a little, embarrassed; glanced up at me under her lashes.

"Your friends," she said timidly. "The ones who disappeared. What happened?"

"It's a long story," I said. I had painted myself into this one, and I had no idea how to get out of it. Rosalind's eyes were starting to turn suspicious, and, while there was not a chance in hell that I was going to go into the whole Knocknaree thing, the last thing I wanted was to lose her trust after all this.

Jessica, of all people, saved me: she shifted a little in the armchair, stretched out a finger to Rosalind's arm.

Rosalind didn't seem to notice. "Jessica?" I said.

"Oh—what is it, sweetheart?" Rosalind bent towards her. "Are you ready to tell Detective Ryan about the man?"

Jessica nodded stiffly. "I saw a man," she said, her eyes not on me but on Rosalind. "He talked to Katy."

My heart rate started to pick up. If I had been religious, I would have been lighting candles to every saint in the calendar for this: just one solid lead. "That's great, Jessica. Where was this?"

"On the road. When we were coming back from the shop."

"Just you and Katy?"

"Yes. We're allowed."

"I'm sure you are. What did he say?"

"He said"—Jessica took a deep breath—"he said, 'You're a very good dancer,' and Katy said, 'Thank you.' She likes when people say she's a good dancer."

She looked anxiously up at Rosalind. "You're doing wonderfully, pet," Rosalind said, stroking her hair. "Keep going."

Jessica nodded. Rosalind touched her glass, and Jessica took an obedient sip of her 7-Up. "Then," she said, "then he said, 'And you're a very pretty girl,' and Katy said, 'Thank you.' She likes that, too. And then he said…he said…'My little girl likes dancing, too, but she broke her leg. Do you want to come see her? It would make her very happy.' And Katy said, 'Not now. We have to go home.' So then we went home."

You're a pretty girl… These days, there are very few men who would say something like that to a twelve-year-old. "Do you know who the man was?" I asked. "Had you ever seen him before?"

She shook her head.

"What did he look like?"

Silence; a breath. "Big."

"Big like me? Tall?"

"Yeah…um…yeah. But big like this, too." She stretched out her arms; the glass wobbled precariously.

"A fat man?"

Jessica giggled, a sharp, nervous sound. "Yeah."

"What was he wearing?"

"A, a tracksuit. A dark-blue one." She glanced at Rosalind, who nodded encouragingly.

Shit, I thought. My heart was speeding. "What was his hair like?"

"No. He didn't have hair."

I made a quick, fervent mental apology to Damien: apparently he hadn't, after all, just been telling us what we wanted to hear. "Was he old? Young?"

"Like you."

"When did this happen?"

Jessica's lips parted, moved soundlessly. "Huh?"

"When did you and Katy meet the man? Was it just a few days before Katy went away? Or a few weeks? Or a long time ago?"

I was trying to be sensitive, but she flinched. "Katy didn't go away," she said. "Katy got killed." Her eyes were starting to lose focus. Rosalind shot me a reproachful look.

"Yes," I said, as gently as I could, "she did. So it's very important for you to try and remember when you saw this man, so we can find out if he's the one who killed her. Can you do that?"

Jessica's mouth fell a little open. Her eyes were unreachable, gone.

"She told me," Rosalind said softly, over her head, "that this happened a week or two before…" She swallowed. "She's not sure of the exact date."

I nodded. "Thank you so much, Jessica," I said. "You've been very brave. Do you think you would know this man if you saw him again?"

Nothing; not a flicker. The sugar packet hung loosely in her curled fingers. "I think we should go," Rosalind said, looking worriedly from Jessica to her watch.

I watched from the window as they walked away down the street: Rosalind's decisive little steps and the delicate sway of her hips, Jessica dragging along behind her by the hand. I looked at the back of Jessica's silky bent head and thought of those old stories where one twin is hurt and the other, miles away, feels the pain. I wondered if there had been a moment, during that giggly girls' night at Auntie Vera's, when she had made some small, unnoticed sound; if all the answers we wanted were locked away behind the strange dark gateways of her mind.

You're the perfect person for this case, Rosalind had said to me, and the words were still ringing in my head as I watched her go. Even now, I wonder whether subsequent events proved her completely right or utterly and horribly wrong, and what criteria one could possibly use to tell the difference.