In the Woods

10

Over the next few days, I spent practically every waking moment searching for the mystery tracksuit. Seven guys around Knocknaree matched the description, such as it was—tall, heavily built, thirties, bald or skinheaded. One of them had a minor record, left over from his wild youth: possession of hash, indecent exposure—my heart skipped a beat when I saw that, but all he had done was take a leak down a laneway just as an earnest young cop was passing. Two said they might have been going into the estate on their way home from work at about the time Damien had given us, but they weren't sure.

None of them would admit to having talked to Katy; all of them had alibis, more or less, for the night of her death; none of them had a dancing daughter with a broken leg, or anything like a motive, as far as I could discover. I got photos and did lineups for Damien and Jessica, but they both gave the array of photographs the same dazed, hunted look. Damien finally said he didn't think any of them was the man he had seen, while Jessica pointed tentatively to a different picture every time she was asked and finally turned catatonic on me again. I had a couple of floaters go door-to-door, asking everyone in the estate whether they had had a visitor matching the description: nothing.

A couple of the alibis were uncorroborated. One guy claimed he had been online till almost three in the morning, on a bikers' forum, discussing the maintenance of classic Kawasakis. Another said he had been on a date in town, missed the 12:30 night bus and waited for the 2:00 one in Supermac's. I stuck their photos up on the whiteboard and set about trying to break the alibis, but every time I looked at them I got the same feeling, a specific and unsettling feeling that I was starting to associate with this whole case: the sensation of another will meeting mine at every turn, something sly and obstinate, with reasons of its own.

Sam was the only one getting anywhere. He was out of the office a lot, interviewing people—county council members, he said, surveyors, farmers, members of Move the Motorway. At our dinners he was vague about where all this was taking him: "I'll show you in a few days," he said, "when it starts to make sense." I sneaked a glance at his notes once, when he went to the bathroom and left them on his desk: diagrams and shorthand and little sketches in the margins, meticulous and indecipherable.

Then on Tuesday—a muggy, petulant, drizzly morning, Cassie and I grimly going through the floaters' door-to-door reports again in case we had missed something—he came in with a big roll of paper, the heavy kind that children use to make valentines and Christmas decorations in school. "Right," he said, pulling tape out of his pocket and starting to stick the paper to the wall in our corner of the incident room. "Here's what I've been doing all this time."

It was a huge map of Knocknaree, beautifully detailed: houses, hills, the river, the wood, the keep, all sketched in fine pen and ink with the delicate, flowing precision of a children's-book illustrator. It must have taken him hours. Cassie whistled.

"Thank you, thankyouverymuch," Sam said in a deep Elvis voice, grinning. We both abandoned our stacks of reports and went over for a closer look. Much of the map had been divided into irregular blocks, shaded in colored pencil—green, blue, red, a few in yellow. Each block held a tiny, mysterious jumble of abbreviations: Sd J. Downey-GII 11/97; rz ag-ind 8/98. I cocked an interrogative eyebrow at Sam.

"I'll explain it now." He bit off another piece of tape and secured the last corner. Cassie and I sat on the edge of the table, where we were close enough to see the details.

"OK. See this?" Sam pointed to two parallel dashed lines curving across the map, cutting through the wood and the dig. "That's where the motorway's going to be. The government announced the plans in March of 2000 and bought the land off local farmers over the next year, under a compulsory purchase order. Nothing dodgy there."

"Well," Cassie said. "Depending on your point of view."

"Shhh," I told her. "Just look at the pretty picture."

"Ah, you know what I mean," Sam said. "Nothing you wouldn't expect. Where it gets interesting is the land around the motorway. That was all agricultural land, too, up until late 1995. Then, bit by bit, over the next four years, it started getting bought up and rezoned, from agricultural to industrial and residential."

"By clairvoyants who knew where the motorway was going to be, five years before it was announced," I said.

"That's not actually that dodgy either," Sam said. "There was talk about a motorway coming into Dublin from the southwest—I've found newspaper articles—starting in about 1994, when the economic boom kicked in. I talked to a couple of surveyors, and they said this was the most obvious route for a motorway, because of topography and settlement patterns and a load of other things. I didn't understand the whole of it, but that's what they said. There's no reason why property developers couldn't have done the same thing—got wind of the motorway and hired surveyors to tell them where it was likely to go."

Neither of us said anything. Sam glanced from me to Cassie and flushed slightly. "I'm not being naïve. Yeah, they might have been tipped off by someone in government—but, then again, they might not. Either way, it's not something we can prove, and I don't think it means anything to our case." I tried not to smile. Sam is one of the most efficient detectives on the squad, but it was very sweet, somehow, how earnest he was about it all.

"Who bought the land?" Cassie asked, relenting.

Sam looked relieved. "A bunch of different companies. Most of them don't exist, not really; they're just holding companies, owned by other companies that are owned by other companies. That's what's been taking all my time—trying to find out who actually owns the bloody land. So far I've traced each buy back to one of three companies: Global Irish Industries, Futura Property Consultants and Dynamo Development. The blue bits here are Global, see; the green ones are Futura, and the red are Dynamo. I'm having a hell of a time finding out who's behind them, though. Two of them are registered in the Czech Republic, and Futura's in Hungary."

"Now that does sound dodgy," Cassie said. "By any definition."

"Sure," Sam said, "but it's most likely tax evasion. We can pass all this on to the Revenue, but I don't see how it can have anything to do with our case."

"Unless Devlin had found out about it and was using it to put pressure on someone," I said.

Cassie looked skeptical. "Found out how? And he would've told us."

"You never know. He's weird."

"You think everyone's weird. First Mark—"

"I'm only getting to the interesting bit," said Sam. I made a face at Cassie and turned towards the map before she could make one back. "So by March of 2000, when the motorway is announced, these three companies own almost all the land around this section of it. But four farmers had held out—those are the yellow bits. I tracked them down; they're in Louth now. They'd seen what way things were going, and they knew these buyers were offering pretty good prices, above the going rate for agricultural land; that was why everyone else had taken the money. They talked it over—they're all mates, these four—and decided to hold on to their land and see if they could work out what was going on. When the motorway plans were announced, obviously, they copped why these fellas wanted their land so badly: for industrial estates and residential developments, now that the motorway was going to make Knocknaree accessible. So these lads figured they'd get the land rezoned themselves, double or triple its value overnight. They applied to the county council for rezoning—one of them applied four times—and got refused, every time."

He tapped one of the yellow blocks, half full of tiny calligraphic notes. Cassie and I leaned forward to read them: M. Cleary, app rz ag-nd: 5/2000 ref, 11/2000 ref, 6/2001 ref, 1/2002 ref; sd M. Cleary-FPC 8/2002; rz ag-ind 10/2002.

Cassie took it in with a brief nod and leaned back on her hands, her eyes still on the map. "So they sold up," she said quietly.

"Yeah. For around the same price as the others got—good for agricultural land, but a long way under the going rate for industrial or residential. Maurice Cleary wanted to stay put, out of sheer bloody-mindedness as much as anything else—said he wasn't going to be forced off his land by any eejit in a suit—but he got a visit from some fella from one of the holding companies, who explained to him that they'd be building a pharmaceutical plant backing onto his farm and they couldn't guarantee that chemical waste wouldn't seep into the water and poison his cattle. He took it as a threat—I don't know whether he was right or not, but he sold up anyway. As soon as the Big Three bought the land—under various other names, but it all traces back to them—they applied for rezoning, and got it."

Cassie laughed, a small angry breath.

"Your Big Three had the county council in their pockets all the way," I said.

"Looks like."

"You've talked to the county councilors?"

"Ah, yeah. For all the good it did me. They were very polite and all, but they talked in circles. They could keep going for hours without giving me a single straight answer." I slid my eyes sideways and caught Cassie's covert, amused glance: Sam, living with a politician, should have been used to this by now. "They said the rezoning decisions were—hang on…" He flipped pages in his notebook. "'Our decisions were on all occasions intended to further the best interests of the community as a whole, as determined based upon the information made available to us at the relevant points in time, and were not impacted by any form of favoritism.' This wasn't part of a letter or anything; your man actually said that to me. In conversation, like." Cassie mimed sticking a finger down her throat.

"How much does it take to buy a county council?" I asked.

Sam shrugged. "For that many decisions, over that amount of time, it must have added up to a decent old figure. The Big Three had a lot of money sunk in that land, one way or another. They wouldn't have been best pleased at the idea of the motorway moving."

"How much damage would it actually do them?"

He pointed to two dotted lines, just cutting across the northwest corner of the map. "According to my surveyors, that's the nearest logical alternative route. That's the one Move the Motorway wants. It's a good two miles away, four or five in some places. The land to the north of the original route would still be accessible enough, but these lads all have plenty on the south side as well, and its value would go right down. I talked to a couple of estate agents, pretended I was interested in buying; they all said industrial land right on the motorway was worth up to twice as much as industrial land three miles off it. I haven't done the exact maths, but it could add up to millions in the difference."

"That'd be worth a few threatening phone calls," Cassie said softly.

"There are people," I said, "to whom that would be worth a few extra grand for a hit man."

Nobody said anything for a few moments. Outside, the drizzle was starting to clear; a watery shaft of sun fell across the map like a helicopter's searchlight, picked out a stretch of the river, rippling with delicate pen-strokes and shaded over with a dull red haze. Across the room, the floater manning the tip line was trying to get rid of someone too voluble to let him finish his sentences. Finally Cassie said, "But why Katy? Why not go after Jonathan?"

"Too obvious, maybe," I said. "If Jonathan had been murdered, we'd have gone straight after any enemies he might have made through the campaign. With Katy, it can be set up to look like a sex crime, so our attention is diverted away from the motorway angle, but Jonathan still gets the message."

"Unless I can find out who's behind these three companies, though," Sam said, "I've hit a dead end. The farmers don't know any names, the county council claims they don't either. I've seen a couple of deeds of sale and applications and that, but they were signed by lawyers—and the lawyers say they can't release their clients' names to me without permission from the clients."

"Jesus."

"What about journalists?" Cassie said suddenly.

Sam shook his head. "What about them?"

"You said there were articles about the motorway as far back as 1994. There must be journalists who followed the story, and they'd have a pretty good idea who bought up the land, even if they're not allowed to print it. This is Ireland; there's no such thing as a secret."

"Cassie," Sam said, his face lighting up, "you're a gem. I'm buying you a pint for that."

"Want to read my door-to-door reports for me instead? O'Gorman structures sentences like George Bush; most of the time I haven't a clue what he's on about."

"Listen, Sam," I said, "if this pans out, we'll both be buying you pints for a very long time." Sam bounded over to his end of the table, giving Cassie a clumsy, happy pat on the shoulder on his way, and started rooting through a file of newspaper clippings like a dog with a brand-new scent, and Cassie and I went back to our reports.

We left the map taped to the wall, where it got on my nerves for reasons I couldn't quite define. It was the perfection of it, I think, the fragile, enchanting detail: tiny leaves curling in the wood, knobbly little stones in the wall of the keep. I suppose I had some kind of subconscious idea that one day I'd happen to glance up at it and catch two minute, laughing faces ducking out of sight among the pen-and-ink trees. Cassie drew a property developer, with a suit and horns and little dripping fangs, in one of the yellow patches; she draws like an eight-year-old, but I still jumped about a foot every time I caught the bloody thing leering at me in the corner of my eye.

I had started trying—for the first time, really—to remember what had happened in that wood. I prodded tentatively around the edges of it, barely acknowledging even to myself what I was doing, like a kid picking at a scab but afraid to look. I went for long walks—mostly in the early hours of the morning, on nights when I wasn't staying at Cassie's and couldn't sleep-wandering through the city for hours in something like a trance, listening for delicate little noises in the corners of my mind. I would come to, dazed and blinking, to find myself staring up at the tacky neon sign of an unfamiliar shopping center, or the elegant gables of some Georgian home in the swankier part of Dun Laoghaire, with no idea how I had got there.

To some extent, at least, it worked. Unleashed, my mind threw out great streams of images like a slide show running on fast forward, and gradually I learned the knack of reaching out to catch one as they flew past, holding it lightly and watching as it unfurled in my hands. Our parents bringing us into town to shop for First Communion clothes; Peter and I, natty in our dark suits, doubled over howling with unfeeling laughter when Jamie—after a long, whispered battle with her mother—came out of the girls' dressing room wearing a meringue and a look of horrified loathing. Mad Mick, the local nutter, who wore overcoats and fingerless gloves all year round and whispered to himself in an endless stream of small, bitter curses—Peter said Mick was crazy because when he was young he had done rude things with a girl and she was going to have a baby, so she hanged herself in the wood and her face went black. One day Mick started screaming, outside Lowry's shop. The cops took him away in a police car, and we never saw him again. My desk in school, old deep-grained wood with an obsolete hole in the top for an inkwell, worn shiny and inlaid with years of doodles: a hurley stick, a heart with the initials inside scribbled over, DES PEARSE WAS HERE 12/10/67. Nothing special, I know, nothing that helped with the case; barely worth mentioning. But remember, I was used to taking it for granted that the first twelve years of my life were more or less gone for good. To me every salvaged scrap seemed tremendously potent and magical, a fragment of Rosetta stone carved with just one tantalizing character.

And on occasion I did manage to remember something that, if not useful, could at least be called relevant. Metallica and Sandra, sitting in a tree… We, I realized gradually and with an odd sense of insult, had not been the only people who claimed the wood as our territory and brought our private business there. There was a clearing deep in the wood, not far from the old castle—first bluebells in spring, sword fights with whippy branches that left long red weals on your arms, a tangled clump of bushes that by the end of summer was heavy with blackberries—and sometimes, when we had nothing more interesting to do, we used to spy on the bikers there. I remembered only one specific incident, but it had the taste of habit: we had done this before.

A hot summer day, sun on the back of my neck and the taste of Fanta in my mouth. The girl called Sandra was lying on her back in the clearing in a patch of flattened grass, with Metallica half on top of her. Her shirt was coming off her shoulder so her bra strap showed black and lacy. Her hands were in Metallica's hair and they were kissing with their mouths wide open. "Ewww, you could catch germs that way," Jamie whispered, by my ear.

I pressed myself closer against the ground, feeling grass print crisscross patterns on my stomach where my T-shirt had twisted up. We breathed through our mouths, to be quieter.

Peter made a long kissing noise, just soft enough that they couldn't hear him, and we clamped our hands over our mouths, shaking with giggles, elbowing to make each other be quiet. Shades and the tall girl with five earrings were on the other side of the clearing. Anthrax mostly stayed at the edge of the wood, kicking the wall and smoking and throwing stones at beer cans. Peter held up a pebble, grinning; he flicked it, and it rattled into the grass only inches from Sandra's shoulder. Metallica, breathing hard, didn't even look up, and we had to duck our faces down into the long grass till we could stop laughing.

Then Sandra turned her head and she was looking at me; straight at me, through the long grass stalks and the chicory. Metallica was kissing her neck and she didn't move. Somewhere near my hand a grasshopper was ticking. I looked back at her and felt my heart banging slowly against the ground.

"Come on," Peter whispered urgently, "Adam, come on," and their hands pulled my ankles. I wriggled backwards, scratching my legs on brambles, back into the deep shadow of the trees. Sandra was still looking at me.

There were other memories, ones I still find it difficult to think about. I remembered, for example, going down the stairs of our house without touching them. I can recall this in perfect detail: the ribbed texture of the wallpaper with its fading bouquets of roses, the way a shaft of light came through the bathroom door and down the stairwell, catching on dust-motes, to glow a deep auburn in the polish of the banister; the deft, accustomed flick of my hand with which I pushed off the rail to float serenely downstairs, my feet swimming slowly three or four inches above the carpet.

I remembered, too, the three of us finding a secret garden, somewhere in the heart of the wood. Behind some hidden wall or doorway, it had been. Fruit trees run wild, apple, cherry, pear; broken marble fountains, trickles of water still bubbling along tracks green with moss and worn deep into the stone; great ivy-draped statues in every corner, feet wild with weeds, arms and heads cracked away and scattered among long grass and Queen Anne's lace. Gray dawn light, the swish of our feet and dew on our bare legs. Jamie's hand small and rosy on the stone folds of a robe, her face upturned to look into blind eyes. The infinite silence. I was very well aware that if this garden had existed it would have been found when the archaeologists did their initial survey, and the statues would have been in the National Museum by now, and Mark would have done his level best to describe them to us in detail, but this was the problem: I remembered it, all the same.

The guys from Computer Crime rang me early Wednesday morning: they had finished trawling through our last Tracksuit Shadow suspect's computer, and they confirmed that he had, in fact, been online when Katy died. With a certain amount of professional satisfaction, they added that, although the poor bastard shared the house and the computer with both his parents and his wife, e-mails and discussion-board posts showed that each of the occupants made characteristic spelling and punctuation errors. The posts made while Katy was dying matched our suspect's pattern to a T.

"Buggery," I said, hanging up and putting my face in my hands. We already had security footage of the night-bus guy in Supermac's, dipping chips into barbecue sauce with the glacial concentration of the very drunk. Deep down, a part of me had been expecting this, but I was feeling pretty ropy—no sleep, not enough coffee, nagging headache—and it was way too early in the morning to find out that my one good lead had gone south.

"What?" Cassie asked, looking up from whatever she was doing.

"The Kawasaki Kid's alibi checked out. If this guy Jessica saw is our man, he's not from Knocknaree, and I don't have the first clue where to look for him. I'm back to bloody square one."

Cassie tossed down a handful of paper and rubbed her eyes. "Rob, our guy's local. Everything's pointing that way."

"Then who the fuck is Tracksuit Boy? If he's got an alibi for the murder and he just happened to talk to Katy one day, why hasn't he said so?"

"Assuming," Cassie said, glancing at me sideways, "he actually exists."

A flare of disproportionate, almost uncontrollable fury shot through me. "Sorry, Maddox, but what the hell are you talking about? Are you suggesting that Jessica made the whole thing up, just for laughs? You've barely seen those girls. Do you have any idea quite how devastated they are?"

"I'm saying," Cassie said coolly, her eyebrows lifting, "that I can think of circumstances in which they might feel they had a very good reason to make up a story like that."

In the fraction of a second before I lost my temper altogether, the penny dropped. "Shit," I said. "The parents."

"Hallelujah. Signs of intelligent life."

"Sorry," I said. "Sorry for biting your head off, Cass. The parents…Shit. If Jessica thinks one of their parents did it, and she made up this whole thing—"

"Jessica? You think she could come up with something like this? She can hardly talk."

"OK, then Rosalind. She comes up with Tracksuit Boy to take our attention off her parents, coaches Jessica—the whole Damien thing is just a coincidence. But if she bothered to do that, Cass…if she went to this much hassle, she must know something pretty bloody definitive. Either she or Jessica must have seen something, heard something."

"On the Tuesday…" Cassie said, and checked herself; but the thought passed between us all the same, too horrible to be voiced. On that Tuesday, Katy's body must have been somewhere.

"I need to talk to Rosalind," I said, going for the phone.

"Rob, don't chase her. She'll only back off. Let her come to you."

She was right. Kids can be beaten, raped, abused in any number of unthinkable ways, and still find it all but impossible to betray their parents by asking for help. If Rosalind was shielding Jonathan or Margaret or both, then her whole world would crumble when she told the truth, and she needed to come to that in her own time. If I tried to push her, I would lose her. I put the phone down.

But Rosalind didn't ring me. After a day or two my self-restraint ran out and I called her mobile—for a variety of reasons, some more inchoate and troubling than others, I didn't want to phone the land line. There was no answer. I left messages, but she never rang me back.

Cassie and I went down to Knocknaree on a gray, mean afternoon, to see if the Savages or Alicia Rowan had anything new to tell us. We were both pretty badly hungover—this was the day after Carl and his internet freak show—and we talked very little in the car. Cassie drove; I stared out the window at leaves whipping in a fast, untrustworthy wind, spurts of drizzle spattering the glass. Neither of us was at all sure I should be there.

At the last minute, when we had turned onto my old road and Cassie was parking the car, I wimped out of going to Peter's house. This was not because the road had overwhelmed me with a sudden flood of memories, or anything like that—quite the contrary: it reminded me strongly of every other road in the estate, but that was about it, and this left me feeling off balance and at a strong disadvantage, as if Knocknaree had got one up on me yet again. I had spent an awful lot of time at Peter's house, and in some obscure way I felt his family was more likely to recognize me if I was unable to recognize them first.

I watched from the car as Cassie went up to Peter's door and rang the bell, and as a shadowy figure ushered her inside. Then I got out of the car and walked down the road to my old home. The address—11 Knocknaree Way, Knocknaree, County Dublin—came back to me in the automatic rattle of something learned off by rote.

It was smaller than I remembered; narrower; the lawn was a cramped little square rather than the vast, cool expanse of green I had been picturing. The paintwork had been redone not too long ago, gay butter-yellow with a white trim. Tall red and white rosebushes were dropping their last petals by the wall, and I wondered if my father had planted them. I looked up at my bedroom window and in that instant it clicked home: I had lived here. I had run out that door with my book bag on school mornings, leaned out of that window to yell down to Peter and Jamie, learned to walk in that garden. I had been riding my bike up and down this very road, until the moment when the three of us had climbed the wall at the end and run into the wood.

There was a neat little silver Polo in the driveway, and a blond kid, maybe three or four, was pedaling a plastic fire truck around it and making siren noises. When I reached the gate he stopped and gave me a long, solemn look.

"Hello," I said.

"Go away," he told me, eventually and firmly.

I wasn't sure how to respond to this, but as it turned out I didn't have to: the front door opened and the kid's mother—thirties, also blond, pretty in a standardized kind of way—hurried down the drive and put a protective hand on his head. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"Detective Robert Ryan," I said, finding my ID. "We're investigating the death of Katharine Devlin."

She took the ID and scrutinized it carefully. "I'm not sure how I can help," she said, handing it back to me. "We already talked to the other detectives. We didn't see anything; we barely know the Devlins."

Her eyes were still wary. The kid was starting to get bored, making vrooming noises under his breath and wiggling his steering wheel, but she held him in place with a hand on his shoulder. Faint, sparkling music—Vivaldi, I think—was drifting through the open front door, and for a moment I came dizzyingly close to asking her: There are just a few things I'd like to confirm with you; would it be all right if I came in for a moment? I told myself Cassie would worry if she came out of the Savages' house and found me gone. "We're just double-checking everything," I said. "Thank you for your time."

The mother watched me leave. As I got back into the car, I saw her scooping up the fire truck under one arm and the kid under the other and taking them both inside.

I sat in the car for a long time, looking out at the road and feeling that I would be able to deal with this a lot better if only my hangover would go away. At last Peter's door opened, and I heard voices: someone was walking Cassie down the drive. I whipped my head around and pretended to be staring in the opposite direction, deep in thought, until I heard the door close.

"Nothing new," Cassie said, leaning in at the car window. "Peter didn't mention being scared of anyone, or getting hassle from anyone. Smart kid, knew better than to go anywhere with a stranger; a little overconfident, though, which could have got him into trouble. They don't have any suspicions of anybody, except they wondered if it could be the same person who killed Katy. They were sort of upset about that."

"Aren't we all," I said.

"They seem like they're doing OK." I hadn't been able to bring myself to ask this, but I did want, rather badly, to know. "The father wasn't happy about having to go over it all again, but the mother was lovely. Peter's sister Tara still lives at home; she was asking after you."

"Me?" I said, feeling an irrational little skip of panic in my stomach.

"She wanted to know if I had any idea how you were doing. I told her the cops had lost track of you, but as far as we knew you were fine." Cassie gave me a sly grin. "I think she might have sort of fancied you, back then."

Tara: a year or two younger than us, sharp elbows and sharp eyes, the kind of kid who was always ferreting out something to tell her mother. Thank God I hadn't gone in there. "Maybe I should go talk to her after all," I said. "Is she good-looking?"

"Just your type: a fine strapping girl with good child-bearing hips. She's a traffic warden."

"Of course she is," I said. I was starting to feel better. "I'll get her to wear her uniform on our first date."

"Way too much information. OK: Alicia Rowan." Cassie straightened up and checked her notebook for the house number. "Want to come?"

It took me a moment to be sure. But we hadn't spent much time at Jamie's house, as far as I remembered. When we were indoors, it was mostly at Peter's—his home was cheerfully noisy, full of brothers and sisters and pets, and his mother baked ginger biscuits, and his parents had bought a TV on installments and we were allowed to watch cartoons. "Sure," I said. "Why not?"

Alicia Rowan answered the door. She was still beautiful, in a faded, nostalgic way—delicate bones, hollow cheeks, straggling blond hair and huge, haunted blue eyes—like some forgotten film star whose looks have only gained pathos over time. I saw the small, worn spark of hope and fear light in her eyes when Cassie introduced us, then fade at Katy Devlin's name.

"Yes," she said, "yes, of course, that poor little girl… Do they—do you think it had something to do…? Please, come in."

As soon as we got inside the house I knew this had been a bad idea. It was the smell of it—a wistful blend of sandalwood and camomile that went straight for my subconscious, setting memories flickering like fish in murky water. Weird bread with bits in it for tea; a painting of a naked woman, on the landing, that made us elbow and snicker. Hiding in a wardrobe, arms round my knees and flimsy cotton skirts drifting like smoke against my face, "Forty-nine, fifty!" somewhere in the hall.

She brought us into the sitting room (handwoven throws over the sofa, a smiling Buddha in smoky jade on the coffee table: I wondered what 1980s Knocknaree had made of Alicia Rowan) and Cassie did the preliminary spiel. There was—of course; I don't know how I had failed to expect this—a whacking great framed photo of Jamie on the mantelpiece, Jamie sitting on the estate wall squinting into sunlight and laughing, the wood rising all black and green behind her. On either side of it were little framed snapshots and one of them had three figures, elbows hooked around one another's necks, heads tilted together in paper crowns, some Christmas or birthday… I should have grown a beard or something, I thought wildly, looking away, Cassie should have given me time to—

"In our file," Cassie said, "the initial report says you called the police saying that your daughter and her friends had run away. Is there any particular reason why you assumed they'd run away, rather than, say, getting lost or having an accident?"

"Well, yes. You see…Oh, God." Alicia Rowan ran her hands through her hair—long, boneless-looking hands. "I was going to send Jamie to boarding school, and she didn't want to go. It makes me sound so horribly selfish… I suppose I was. But I truly did have my reasons."

"Ms. Rowan," Cassie said gently, "we're not here to judge you."

"Oh, no, I know, I know you're not. But one judges oneself, doesn't one? And you'd really…oh, you'd have to know the whole story to understand."

"We'd be glad to hear the whole story. Anything you can tell us might help."

Alicia nodded, without much hope; she must have heard those words so many times, over the years. "Yes. Yes, I see that."

She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, eyes closed, over a count of ten. "Well…" she said. "I was only seventeen when I had Jamie, you see. Her father was a friend of my parents', and very much married, but I was desperately in love with him. And it all felt very sophisticated and daring, having an affair—hotel rooms, you know, and cover stories—and I didn't believe in marriage anyway. I thought it was an outdated form of oppression."

Her father. He was in the file—George O'Donovan, a Dublin solicitor—but thirty-odd years later Alicia was still shielding him. "But then you discovered you were pregnant," Cassie said.

"Yes. He was horrified, and my parents found out the whole story and they were horrified. They all said I must give the baby up for adoption, but I wouldn't. I put my foot down. I said I would keep the baby and raise her all by myself. I thought of it as a bit of a blow for women's rights, I think: a rebellion against the patriarchy. I was very young."

She had been lucky. In Ireland in 1972, women were given life sentences in asylums or convents for far less. "That was a brave thing to do," Cassie said.

"Oh, thank you, Detective. Do you know, I think I was quite a brave person, back then. But I wonder if it was the right decision. I used to think—if I had given Jamie up for adoption, you see…" Her voice trailed off.

"Did they come round in the end?" Cassie asked. "Your family and Jamie's father?"

Alicia sighed. "Well, no. Not really. In the end they said I could keep the baby, as long as we both stayed well out of all their lives. I had disgraced the family, you see; and, of course, Jamie's father didn't want his wife to find out." There was no anger in her voice, nothing but a simple, sad puzzlement. "My parents bought me this house—nice and far away; I'm from Dublin originally, from Howth—and gave me a bit of money now and then. I sent Jamie's father letters to tell him how she was getting on, and photographs. I was positive that sooner or later he would come round and want to start seeing her. Maybe he would have. I don't know."

"And when did you decide she should go to boarding school?"

Alicia wrapped her fingers in her hair. "I…oh, dear. I don't like thinking about this."

We waited.

"I had just turned thirty, you see," she said eventually. "And I realized I didn't like what I had become. I was waiting tables in a café in town while Jamie was at school, but it really wasn't worth it, with the bus fares, and I had no education so I couldn't get any other job… I realized I didn't want to spend the rest of my life like that. I wanted something better, for me and for Jamie. I…oh, in many ways I was still a child myself. I'd never had a chance to grow up. And I wanted to."

"And for that," Cassie said, "you needed a little time to yourself?"

"Yes. Oh, exactly. You understand." She squeezed Cassie's arm gratefully. "I wanted a proper career, so I wouldn't have to rely on my parents, but I didn't know what career. I needed a chance to figure it out. And once I did, I knew I would probably have to do some kind of course, and I couldn't simply leave Jamie on her own all the time…It would have been different if I'd had a husband, or family. I had a few friends, but I couldn't expect them to—"

She was twisting her hair tighter and tighter around her fingers. "Makes sense," Cassie said matter-of-factly. "So you had just told Jamie your decision…"

"Well, I told her first in May, when I decided. But she took it very badly. I tried to explain, and I brought her up to Dublin to show her around the school, but that only made things worse. She hated it. She said the girls there were all stupid and didn't talk about anything except boys and clothes. Jamie was a bit of a tomboy, you see, she loved being outdoors in the wood all the time; she hated the thought of being cooped up in a city school and having to do exactly what everyone else did. And she didn't want to leave her best friends. She was very close to Adam and Peter—the little boy who vanished with her, you know." I fought down the impulse to hide my face behind my notebook.

"So you argued."

"Heavens, yes. Well, really it was more like a siege than a battle. Jamie and Peter and Adam absolutely mutinied. They shut out the entire adult world for weeks—wouldn't speak to us parents, wouldn't even look at us, wouldn't speak in class—every bit of homework Jamie did had 'Don't send me away' written across the top…"

She was right: it had been a mutiny. LET JAMIE STAY, red block letters across squared paper. My mother trying helplessly to reason with me while I sat cross-legged and unresponsive on the sofa, picking at the skin around my fingernails, my stomach squirming with excitement and terror at my own daring. But we won, I thought in confusion, surely we won: whoops and high fives on the castle wall, Coke cans raised high in a triumphant toast—"But you stuck by your decision," Cassie said.

"Well, not exactly. They did wear me down. It was terribly difficult, you know—all the estate talking about it, and Jamie making it sound as though she were being sent off to the orphanage from Annie or somewhere—and I didn't know what to do… In the end I said, 'Well, I'll think about it.' I told them not to worry, we would sort something out, and they called off their protest. I truly did think about waiting another year, but my parents had offered to pay Jamie's school fees, and I couldn't be sure they'd still feel the same way in a year's time. I know this makes me sound like a terrible mother, but I really did think—"

"Not at all," Cassie said. I shook my head automatically. "So, when you told Jamie she would be going after all…"

"Oh, dear, she just…" Alicia twisted her hands together. "She was devastated. She said I had lied to her. Which I hadn't, you know, really I hadn't… And then she stormed out to find the others, and I thought, 'Oh, Lord, now they'll stop speaking again, but at least it's only for a week or two'—I had waited until the last minute to tell her, you see, so she could enjoy her summer. And then, when she didn't come home, I assumed…"

"You assumed she'd run away," Cassie said gently. Alicia nodded. "Do you still feel that's a possibility?"

"No. I don't know. Oh, Detective, one day I think one thing, and the next…But there was her piggy bank, you see—she would have taken that, wouldn't she? And Adam was still in the wood. And if they'd run away, surely by now she would have…would have…"

She turned away sharply, a hand going up to shield her face. "When it occurred to you that she might not have run away," Cassie said, "what was your first thought?"

Alicia did the cleansing-breath thing again, folded her hands tightly in her lap. "I thought her father might just possibly have…I hoped he had taken her. He and his wife couldn't have children, you know, so I thought maybe…But the detectives looked into it, and they said no."

"In other words," Cassie said, "there was nothing that made you think anyone might have harmed her. She hadn't been scared of anyone, or upset about anything else, in the previous weeks."

"Not really, no. There had been one day—oh, a couple of weeks earlier—when she ran in from playing early, looking a bit shaken up, and she was awfully quiet all evening. I asked her if anything had happened, if something was bothering her, but she said no."

Something dark leaped in my mind—home early, No, Mammy, nothing's wrong—but it was far too deep to catch. "I did tell the detectives," Alicia said, "but that didn't give them very much to go on, did it? And it might have been nothing, after all. She might just have had a little spat with the boys. Perhaps I should have been able to tell whether it was something serious or not… But Jamie was quite a reserved child, quite private. It was hard to tell, with her."

Cassie nodded. "Twelve's a complicated age."

"Yes, it is; it really is, isn't it? That was the thing, you see: I don't think I'd realized that she was old enough to—well, to feel so strongly about things. But she and Peter and Adam…they'd done everything together since they were babies. I don't think they could imagine life without one another."

The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind. I bent my head over my notebook so that Alicia Rowan and Cassie wouldn't see my face.

"I still keep her bedroom the way she left it," Alicia said. "In case—I know it's silly, of course I do, but if she did come home, I wouldn't want her to think… Would you like to see it? There might be—the other detectives might have missed something…"

A flash of the bedroom slapped me straight across the face-white walls with posters of horses, yellow curtains blowing, a dream-catcher hanging above the bed—and I knew I had had enough. "I'll wait in the car," I said. Cassie gave me a quick glance. "Thank you for your time, Ms. Rowan."

I made it out to the car and put my head down on the steering wheel until the haze cleared from my eyes. When I looked up I saw a flutter of yellow, and adrenaline spiked through me as a white-blond head moved between the curtains; but it was only Alicia Rowan, turning the little vase of flowers on the windowsill to catch the last of the gray afternoon light.

"The bedroom's eerie," Cassie said, when we were out of the estate and negotiating the twisting little back roads. "Pajamas on the bed and an old paperback open on the floor. Nothing that gave me any ideas, though. Was that you, in the photo on the mantelpiece?"

"Presumably," I said. I was still feeling like hell; the last thing I wanted to do was analyze Alicia Rowan's decor.

"What she said about Jamie coming in upset one day. Do you remember what that was about?"

"Cassie," I said, "we've been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining fuck-all. As far as I'm concerned, my life began when I was twelve and a half and on a ferry to England. OK?"

"Jesus, Ryan. I was just asking."

"And now you know the answer," I said, putting the car up a gear. Cassie threw up her hands, switched the radio on to something loud and left me to it.

A couple of miles later I took a hand off the wheel and rumpled Cassie's hair.

"Fuck off, dickface," she said, without rancor.

I grinned, relieved, and pulled one of her curls. She smacked my hand away. "Listen, Cass," I said, "I need to ask you something."

She gave me a suspicious look.

"Do you think the two cases are linked, or not? If you had to make a guess."

Cassie thought about this for a long time, looking out the window at the hedges and the gray sky, clouds chasing fast. "I don't know, Rob," she said at last. "There are things that don't match up. Katy was left where she'd be found right away, while…That's a big difference, psychologically. But maybe the guy was haunted by the first time, figured he might feel less guilty if he made sure the family got the body back this time round. And Sam's right: what are the odds of two different child-killers in the same place? If I had to put money on it…I honestly don't know."

I hit the brakes, hard. I think both Cassie and I yelled. Something had darted across the road in front of the car—something dark and low to the ground, with the sinuous gait of a weasel or a stoat, but much too big for either—and disappeared into the overgrown hedge on the other side.

We slammed forward in our seats—I had been going much too fast for a one-lane back road—but Cassie is fanatical about seat belts, which might have saved her parents' lives, and we were both wearing ours. The car came to a stop skewed at a wild angle across the road, one wheel inches from a ditch. Cassie and I sat still, stunned. On the radio some girl band ululated with insane cheer, on and on.

"Rob?" Cassie said breathlessly, after a minute. "Are you OK?"

I couldn't make my hands release their grip on the steering wheel. "What the hell was that?"

"What?" Her eyes were wide and frightened.

"The animal," I said. "What was it?"

Cassie was looking at me with something new in her eyes, something that scared me almost as badly as the creature had. "I didn't see an animal."

"It went straight across the road. You must have missed it. You were looking out the side."

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

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

It had taken Sam a few days to persuade Kiely to meet him, though—the first time he mentioned Knocknaree, Kiely shouted, "Do you take me for a fool, boy?" and hung up—and even then, Kiely refused to be seen with him anywhere in town. He made him trek out to a spectacularly down-market pub somewhere on the far side of the Phoenix Park: "Safer, my boy, so much safer." He had a swooping nose and an artfully windswept mane of white hair—"sort of poetic-looking," Sam said, dubiously, over dinner that evening. Sam had bought him a Bailey's and brandy ("Good God," I said—I had been having a hard time eating anyway; "Ooo," said Cassie, eyeing her booze shelf speculatively) and tried to bring up the motorway, but Kiely flinched and held up a hand, eyelids fluttering in exquisite pain: "Your voice, my boy, lower your voice…Oh, there's something there, no doubt about it. But someone—naming no names—someone had me ordered off the story almost before it began. Legal reasons, they said, no proof of anything… Absurd. Rubbish. It was purely, poisonously personal. This town, my boy: this dirty old town has a long memory."

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

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

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

"What did you say?" Cassie asked Sam.

"I said yes, of course," he said serenely, trying to wind fettuccine onto his fork. "I'd've said yes if he'd asked me did I believe little green men were running the country."

Kiely had drunk his third round—Sam was going to have fun trying to get this one through expenses—in silence, chin sunk on his chest. Finally he had put on his coat, shaken Sam's hand in a long, fervent grasp, murmured, "Don't look at it until you're in a safe place," and swept out of the pub, leaving a twist of paper in Sam's palm.

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

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

"Are you sure he's reliable?" I asked.

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

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

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

The next day was Friday, two and a half weeks into the investigation, and early that evening O'Kelly called us into his office. Outside the day was crisp and biting, but sun was streaming through the big windows and the incident room was warm, so that from inside you could almost believe it was still summer. Sam was in his corner, scribbling between hushed phone calls; Cassie was running someone through the computer; I and a couple of floaters had just done a coffee run and were passing out mugs. The room had the intent, busy murmur of a classroom. O'Kelly put his head around the door, stuck a finger-and-thumb circle into his mouth and whistled shrilly; when the murmur died away, he said, "Ryan, Maddox, O'Neill," jerked his thumb over his shoulder and slammed the door behind him.

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

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

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

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

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

"We're leaning towards the parents," I said. "One or the other of them."

"Which means you've nothing solid on either one."

"We're still investigating, sir," Cassie said.

"And I've four main men for the threatening phone calls," Sam said.

O'Kelly glanced up. "I've read your reports. Watch where you step."

"Yes, sir."

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

Even though I had been expecting it, it still hit me with a thud. The floaters had never really stopped making me edgy, but all the same: giving them up felt so horribly significant, such an irrevocable first step of retreat. Another few weeks, this meant, and O'Kelly would be putting us back into the rota, giving us new cases, Operation Vestal would become something we worked in scraps of free time; a few months more and Katy would be relegated to the basement and the dust and the cardboard boxes, dragged out every year or two if we got a good new lead. Someone would do a cheesy documentary on her, with a breathy voiceover and creepy credit music to make it clear that the case remained unsolved. I wondered whether Kiernan and McCabe had listened to these same words in this room, probably from someone playing with the same pointless toy.

O'Kelly felt the mutiny in our silence. "What," he said.

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

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

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

Silence.

"And how many calls did the tip line get today?"

"Five," Cassie said, after a moment. "So far."

"Any of them any good?"

"Probably not."

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

I did, all too well. Whatever else I may say about O'Kelly, I have to give him this: an awful lot of supers would have taken this one away from Cassie and me, right at the beginning. Ireland is still, basically, a small town; usually we have a fair idea whodunit almost from the start, and most of the time and effort goes not into identifying him but into building a case that will stick. Over the first few days, as it became clear that Operation Vestal was going to be an exception and a high-profile one at that, O'Kelly must have been tempted to send us back to our taxi-rank brats and hand it over to Costello or one of the other thirty-year guys. I don't generally think of myself as naïve, but when he hadn't, I had put it down to some stubborn, grudging loyalty—not to us personally, but to us as members of his squad. I had liked the thought. Now I wondered if there might have been more to it than that: if some battle-scarred sixth sense of his had known, all along, that this one was doomed.

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't, Sam," I said. "Just don't."

"What?" Sam asked, puzzled. "Don't what?" I looked away.

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

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

We went to Doyle's, in the end: overamplified eighties music and too few tables, suits and students shouldering at the bar. None of us had any desire to go to a police pub where, inevitably, everyone we met would want to know how Operation Vestal was going. On about the third round, as I was coming back from the men's room, I bumped elbows with a girl and her drink splashed over, splattering us both. It was her fault—she had reared back laughing at something one of her friends had said, and knocked straight into me—but she was extremely pretty, the tiny ethereal type I always go for, and she gave me a soft appreciative look while we were both apologizing and comparing damage, so I bought her another drink and struck up a conversation.

Her name was Anna and she was doing a Master's in art history; she had a cascade of fair hair that made me think of warm beaches, and one of those floaty white cotton skirts, and a waist I could have got my hands around. I told her I was a professor of literature, over from a university in England to do research on Bram Stoker. She sucked on the rim of her glass and laughed at my jokes, showing little white teeth with an engaging overbite.

Behind her, Sam grinned and raised an eyebrow and Cassie did a panting, puppy-eyed impression of me, but I didn't care. It had been a ridiculously long time since I had slept with anyone and I badly wanted to go home with this girl, sneak giggling into some student flat with art posters on the walls, wind that extravagant hair round my fingers and let my mind shimmer into blankness, lie in her sweet safe bed all night and most of tomorrow and not once think about either of these fucking cases. I put a hand on Anna's shoulder to guide her out of the way of a guy precariously maneuvering four pints, and gave Cassie and Sam the finger behind her back.

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

"You all right, Anna?" he demanded ominously, putting an arm around her waist and giving me a bullocky stare.

Out of his line of vision, Anna rolled her eyes at me, with a conspiratorial little smile. "Everything's fine, Cillian," she said. I didn't think he was her boyfriend—she hadn't been acting taken, at any rate—but if he wasn't then he clearly wanted to be. He was a big guy, handsome in a heavy-set way; he had obviously been drinking for some time and was itching for an excuse to invite me to take it outside.

For a moment I actually considered it. You heard the lady, pal, go back to your little buddies.…I glanced over at Sam and Cassie: they had given upon me and were deep in an intent conversation, heads bent close to hear through the noise, Sam illustrating something with a finger on the table. I was suddenly, viciously sick of myself and my professorial alter ego, and, by association, of Anna and whatever game she was playing with me and this Cillian guy. "I should get back to my girlfriend," I said, "sorry again for spilling your drink," and turned away from the startled pink O of her mouth and the confused, reflexive flare of belligerence in Cillian's eyes.

I slipped my arm around Cassie's shoulders for a moment as I sat down, and she gave me a suspicious look. "Get shot down?" Sam asked.

"Nah," said Cassie. "I'm betting he changed his mind and told her he had a girlfriend. Hence the touchy-feely stuff. Next time you pull that one, Ryan, I'm gonna snog the face off Sam and let your lady friend's mates beat you up for messing with her head."

"Deadly," Sam said happily. "I like this game."

At closing time, Cassie and I went back to her flat. Sam had gone home, it was a Friday and we didn't have to get up the next morning; there seemed no reason to do anything but lie on the sofa, drinking and occasionally changing the music and letting the fire burn down to a whispering glow.

"You know," said Cassie idly, fishing a piece of ice out of her glass to chew on, "what we've been forgetting is that kids think differently."

"What are you on about?" We had been talking about Shakespeare, something to do with the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and my mind was still there. I half-thought she was going to come up with some late-night analogy between the way children think and the way people thought in the sixteenth century, and I was already preparing a rebuttal.

"We've been wondering how he got her to the kill site—no, knock it off and listen." I was shoving at her leg with my foot and whining, "Shut up, I'm off duty, I can't hear you, la la la…" I was hazy with vodka and lateness and I had decided I was sick of this frustrating, tangled, intractable case. I wanted to talk about Shakespeare some more, or maybe play cards. "When I was eleven a guy tried to molest me," Cassie said.

I stopped kicking and lifted my head to look at her. "What?" I asked, a little too carefully. This, I thought, this, finally, was Cassie's secret locked room, and I was at last going to be invited in.

She glanced over at me, amused. "No, he didn't actually do anything to me. It was no big deal."

"Oh," I said, feeling silly and, obscurely, a little miffed. "What happened, then?"

"Our school was going through this craze for marbles—everyone played marbles all the time, all through lunch, after school. You carried them around in a plastic bag and it was a big thing, how many you had. So this one day I'd been kept after school—"

"You? I'm astounded," I said. I rolled over and found my glass. I wasn't sure where this story was going.

"Fuck off; just because you were Prefect Perfect. Anyway I was leaving, and one of the staff—not a teacher; a groundskeeper or a cleaning guy or something—came out of this little shed and said, 'Do you want marbles? Come on in here and I'll give you marbles.' He was an old guy, maybe sixty, with white hair and a big mustache. So I sort of edged around the door of the shed for a while, and then I went in."

"God, Cass. You silly, silly thing," I said. I took another sip, put down my glass and pulled her feet into my lap to rub them.

"No, I told you, nothing happened. He went behind me and put his hands through under my arms, like he was going to lift me up, only then he started messing with the buttons on my shirt. I said, 'What are you doing?' and he said, 'I keep my marbles up on that shelf. I'm going to pick you up so you can get them.' I knew something was very badly wrong, even though I had no idea what, so I twisted away and said, 'I don't want any marbles,' and legged it home."

"You were lucky," I said. She had slim, high-arched feet; even through the soft thick socks she wore at home, I could feel the tendons, the small bones moving under my thumbs. I pictured her at eleven, all knees and bitten nails and solemn brown eyes.

"Yeah, I was. God knows what could've happened."

"Did you tell anyone?" I still wanted more from the story; I wanted to extract some rending revelation, some terrible, shameful secret.

"No. I felt too icky about the whole thing, and anyway I didn't even know what to tell. That's the point: it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with sex. I knew about sex, my friends and I talked about it all the time, I knew something was wrong, I knew he was trying to undo my shirt, but I never put it together. Years later, when I was like eighteen, something reminded me of it—I saw some kids playing marbles, or something—and it suddenly hit me: Oh, my God, that guy was trying to molest me!"

"And this has what to do with Katy Devlin?" I asked.

"Kids don't connect things in the same ways grown-ups do," said Cassie. "Give me your feet and I'll do them."

"I wouldn't. Can't you see the smell-waves off my socks?"

"God, you're disgusting. Don't you ever change them?"

"When they stick to the wall. In accordance with bachelor tradition."

"That's not tradition. That's reverse evolution."

"Go on, then," I said, unfolding my feet and shoving them at her.

"No. Get a girlfriend."

"What are you wittering about now?"

"Girlfriends aren't allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are." All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. "Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action."

"Look who's talking," I said, realizing as I spoke that I had no idea how much action Cassie got. There had been a semi-serious boyfriend before I knew her, a barrister called Aidan, but he had somehow faded from the scene around the time she joined Drugs; relationships seldom survive undercover work. Obviously I would have known if she'd had a boyfriend since, and I like to think I would have known if she'd even been dating someone, whatever that means, but beyond that I had no idea. I had always assumed that was because there was nothing to know, but suddenly I wasn't sure. I glanced encouragingly at Cassie, but she was kneading my heel and giving me her best enigmatic smile.

"The other thing," she said, "is why I went in there in the first place." Cassie has a mind like a cloverleaf flyover: it can spin off in wildly divergent directions and then, by some Escherian defiance of dimension, swoop dizzily back to the crux. "It wasn't just for the marbles. He had this very thick country accent—Midlands, I think—and it sounded like he might have said, 'Do you want marvels?' I mean, I knew he hadn't, I knew he'd said 'marbles,' but a part of me thought just maybe he was one of those mysterious old men out of stories, and inside the shed would be shelves and shelves of scrying glasses and potions and ancient parchments and tiny dragons in cages. I knew it was only a shed and he was only a groundskeeper, but at the same time I thought this might just be my chance to be one of the children who go through the wardrobe into the other world, and I couldn't stand the thought of spending the rest of my life knowing I'd missed it."

How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it's against all the odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge—humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny's cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work. I told Quigley that she thought Croke Park Stadium should be turned into a shopping center, and watched her try to decipher his outraged splutter. She cut up the packaging of her new mouse mat and stuck the part that said TOUCH ME—FEEL THE DIFFERENCE to the back of my shirt, and I wore it half the day before I noticed. We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.

No. These are stories I like to think about, small bright currency and not without value; but above all that, and underlying everything we did, she was my partner. I don't know how to tell you what that word, even now, does to me; what it means. I could tell you about going room by room, guns two-handed at arm's length, through silent houses where a suspect could be armed and waiting behind any door; or about long nights on surveillance, sitting in a dark car drinking black coffee from a thermos and trying to play gin rummy by the light of a streetlamp. Once we chased two hit-and-run joyriders through their own territory—graffiti and rubbish-dump wastelands whipping past the windows, sixty miles per hour, seventy, I floored it and stopped looking at the speedometer—until they spun into a wall, and then we held the sobbing fifteen-year-old driver between us, promising him that his mother and the ambulance would be there soon, while he died in our arms. In a notorious tower block that would redraw the outlines of your image of humanity, a junkie pulled a syringe on me—we weren't even interested in him, it was his brother we were after, and the conversation had seemed to be proceeding along normal lines until his hand moved too fast and suddenly there was a needle against my throat. While I stood frozen and sweating and wildly praying that neither of us would sneeze, Cassie sat down cross-legged on the reeking carpet, offered the guy a cigarette and talked to him for an hour and twenty minutes (in the course of which he demanded, variously, our wallets, a car, a fix, a Sprite and to be left alone); talked to him so matter-of-factly and with such frank interest that finally he dropped the syringe and slid down the wall to sit across from her, and he was starting to tell her his life story when I got my hands under control enough to slap the cuffs on him.

The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands.