In the Woods

11

That weekend I went over to my parents' house for Sunday dinner. I do this every few weeks, although I'm not really sure why. We're not close; the best we can do is a mutual state of amicable and faintly puzzled politeness, like people who met on a package tour and can't figure out how to end the connection. Sometimes I bring Cassie with me. My parents love her—she teases my father about his gardening, and sometimes when she helps my mother in the kitchen I hear my mother laugh, full-throated and happy as a girl—and drop hopeful little hints about how close we are, which we cheerfully ignore.

"Where's Cassie today?" my mother asked after dinner. She had made macaroni and cheese—she has some idea that this is my favorite dish (which it may well have been, at some point in my life) and she cooks it, as a small timid expression of sympathy, whenever something in the papers indicates that a case of mine isn't going well. Even the smell of it makes me claustrophobic and itchy. She and I were in the kitchen; I was washing up and she was drying. My father was in the sitting room, watching a Columbo movie on TV. The kitchen was dim and we had the light on, though it was only midafternoon.

"I think she went to her aunt and uncle's," I said. Actually, Cassie was probably curled up on her sofa, reading and eating ice cream out of the carton—we hadn't had much time to ourselves, the last couple of weeks, and Cassie, like me, needs a certain amount of solitude—but I knew it would upset my mother, the thought of her spending a Sunday alone.

"That'll be nice for her: being looked after. The pair of you must be shattered."

"We're pretty tired," I said.

"All that back and forth to Knocknaree."

My parents and I don't talk about my work, except in the most general terms, and we never mention Knocknaree. I looked up sharply, but my mother was tilting a plate to the light to look for wet streaks.

"It's a long drive, all right," I said.

"I read in the paper," my mother said carefully, "that the police were talking to Peter and Jamie's families again. Was that yourself and Cassie?"

"Not the Savages. I talked to Ms. Rowan, though, yes. Does this look clean to you?"

"It's grand," my mother said, taking the baking dish out of my hand. "How's Alicia now?"

There was something in her voice that made me look up again, startled. She caught my gaze and flushed, wiping hair away from her cheek with the back of her wrist. "Ah, we used to be great friends. Alicia was…well, I suppose she was almost like a little sister to me. We got out of touch, after. I was just wondering how she was, is all."

I had a fast, queasy flash of retrospective panic: if I had known that Alicia Rowan and my mother had been close, I would never have gone near that house. "I think she's all right," I said. "As much as one could expect. She still has Jamie's room the way it was."

My mother clicked her tongue unhappily. We washed up in silence for some time: clink of cutlery, Peter Falk cunningly interrogating someone in the next room. Outside the window, a pair of magpies landed on the grass and started picking over the tiny garden, discussing it raucously as they went.

"Shoo," my mother said automatically, rapping the glass, and sighed. "I suppose I've never forgiven myself for losing touch with Alicia. She'd no one else. She was such a sweet girl, a real innocent—she was still hoping Jamie's father would leave his wife, after all that time, and they'd be a family… Did she ever marry?"

"No. But she doesn't seem unhappy, really. She teaches yoga." The suds in the basin had turned lukewarm and clammy; I reached for the kettle and added more hot water.

"That's one reason we moved away, you know," my mother said. She had her back to me, sorting cutlery into a drawer. "I couldn't face them—Alicia and Angela and Joseph. I had my son back safe and sound, and they were going through hell… I could hardly go out of the house, in case I'd meet them. I know it sounds mad, but I felt guilty. I thought they must hate me for having you safe. I don't see how they could help it."

This took me aback. I suppose all children are self-centered; it had never occurred to me, at any rate, that the move might have been for anyone's benefit but my own. "I never really thought about that," I said. "Selfish brat that I was."

"You were a little darling," my mother said, unexpectedly. "The most affectionate child that ever lived. When you came in from school or playing, you'd always give me a massive hug and a kiss—even when you were almost as big as me—and say, 'Did you miss me, Mammy?' Half the time you'd have something for me, a pretty stone or a flower. I still have most of them kept."

"Me?" I was glad I hadn't brought Cassie. I could practically see the wicked glint in her eye if she'd heard this.

"Yes, you. That's why I was so worried when we couldn't find you that day." She gave my arm a sudden, almost violent little squeeze; even after all these years, I heard the strain in her voice. "I was panicking, you know. Everyone was saying, 'Sure, they've only run away from home, children do that, we'll have them found in no time…' But I said, 'No. Not Adam.' You were a sweet boy; kind. I knew you wouldn't do that to us."

Hearing the name cast in her voice sent something through me, something fast and primeval and dangerous. "I don't remember myself as a particularly angelic child," I said.

My mother smiled, out the kitchen window; the abstracted look on her face, remembering things I didn't, made me edgy. "Ah, not angelic. But thoughtful. You were growing up fast, that year. You made Peter and Jamie stop tormenting that poor wee boy, what was his name? The one with the glasses and the awful mammy who did the flowers for the church?"

"Willy Little?" I said. "That wasn't me, that was Peter. I would have been perfectly happy to go on tormenting him till the cows came home."

"No, that was you," my mother said firmly. "The three of you did something or other that made him cry, and it upset you so badly, you decided you'd have to leave the poor boy alone. You were worried that Peter and Jamie wouldn't understand. Do you not remember?"

"Not really," I said. Actually, this bothered me more than anything in this whole uncomfortable conversation. You'd think I'd have preferred her version of the story to my own, but I didn't. It was entirely possible, of course, that she had unconsciously recast me as the hero, or that I had done it myself, lied to her at the time; but over the past few weeks I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool's gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed. "If there aren't any more dishes, I should probably go in and talk to Dad for a while."

"He'll like that. Off you go—I can finish up here. Bring a couple of cans of Guinness with you; they're in the fridge."

"Thanks for the dinner," I said. "It was delicious."

"Adam," my mother said suddenly, as I turned to leave; and that swift treacherous thing hit me under the breastbone again, and oh, God how I wanted to be that sweet child for one more moment, how I wanted to spin around and bury my face in her warm toast-smelling shoulder and tell her through great tearing sobs what these last weeks had been. I thought of what her face would look like if I actually did it, and bit my cheek hard to keep back an insane crack of laughter.

"I just wanted you to know," she said timidly, twisting the dishcloth in her hands. "We did our best for you, after. Sometimes I worry that we did it all wrong… But we were afraid that whoever had—you know—that whoever it was would come back and…We were just trying to do what would be best for you."

"I know, Mum," I said. "It's fine," and, with the sensation of some huge and narrow escape, I went out to the sitting room to watch Columbo with my father.

"How's work treating you?" my father said, during an ad break. He rummaged down the side of a cushion for the remote control and lowered the sound on the TV.

"Fine," I said. On the screen, a small child sitting on a toilet was conversing vehemently with a green, fanged cartoon creature surrounded by vapor trails.

"You're a good lad," my father said, staring at the TV as if mesmerized by this. He took a swig from his can of Guinness. "You've always been a good lad."

"Thanks," I said. Clearly he and my mother had had some kind of conversation about me, in preparation for this afternoon, although for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it might have entailed.

"And work's all right for you."

"Yes. Fine."

"That's grand, then," my father said, and turned the volume up again.

I got back to the apartment around eight. I went into the kitchen and started making myself a sandwich, ham and Heather's low-fat cheese—I'd forgotten to go shopping. The Guinness had left me bloated and uncomfortable—I'm not a beer drinker, but my father gets worried if I ask for anything else; he considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality—and I had some hazy paradoxical idea that eating something would soak up the beer and make me feel better. Heather was in the sitting room. Her Sunday evenings are devoted to something she calls "Me Time," a process involving Sex and the City DVDs, a wide variety of mystifying implements and a lot of bustling between the bathroom and the sitting room with a look of grim, righteous determination.

My phone beeped. Cassie: Give me a lift 2 court 2moro? Grown-up clothes + golf cart + weather =very bad look.

"Oh, shit," I said aloud. The Kavanagh case, an old woman beaten to death in Limerick during a break-in, sometime the year before: Cassie and I were giving evidence first thing in the morning. The prosecutor had been in to prep us, and we'd reminded each other on Friday and everything, but I'd promptly managed to forget all about it.

"What's wrong?" Heather piped eagerly, hurrying out of the sitting room at the prospect of an opening for conversation. I threw the cheese back into the fridge and slammed the door on it, not that that would do much good: Heather knows to a millimeter how much of everything she has left, and once sulked till I bought her a new bar of fancy organic soap because I'd come in drunk and washed my hands with hers. "Are you all right?" She was in her dressing gown, with what looked like Saran Wrap around her head, and she smelled of a headache-inducing array of flowery, chemical things.

"Yeah, fine," I said. I hit Reply and started texting Cassie back: As opposed to what? See you at 8:30ish. "I just forgot I'm in court tomorrow."

"Uh-oh," said Heather, widening her eyes. Her nails were a tasteful pale pink; she waved them around to dry them. "I could help you get ready. Go over your notes with you or something."

"No, thanks." Actually, I didn't even have my notes. They were somewhere at work. I wondered whether I should drive in and get them, but I told myself I was probably still over the limit.

"Oh…OK. That's all right." Heather blew on her nails and peered at my sandwich. "Oh, did you go shopping? It's actually your turn to buy toilet bleach, you know."

"I'm going tomorrow," I said, gathering up my phone and my sandwich and heading for my room.

"Oh. Well, I suppose it can wait till then. Is that my cheese?"

I extricated myself from Heather—not without difficulty—and ate my sandwich, which unsurprisingly didn't undo the effects of the Guinness. Then I poured myself a vodka and tonic, following the same general logic, and lay on my back on the bed to run through the Kavanagh case in my mind.

I couldn't focus. All the peripheral details bounced into my head promptly, vividly and uselessly—the flickering red light of the Sacred Heart statue in the victim's dark sitting room, the two teenage killers' stringy little bangs, the awful clotted hole in the victim's head, the damp-stained flowery wallpaper in the B amp;B where Cassie and I had stayed—but I couldn't remember a single important fact: how we had tracked down the suspects or whether they had confessed or what they had stolen, or even their names. I got up and walked around my room, stuck my head out of the window for some cold air, but the harder I tried to concentrate, the less I remembered. After a while I couldn't even be positive whether the victim's name was Philomena or Fionnuala, although a couple of hours earlier I had known it without having to think (Philomena Mary Bridget).

I was stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I think I can say, without flattering myself, that I've always had an ironically good memory, the parroty kind that can absorb and regurgitate large amounts of information without much effort or understanding. This is how I managed to pass my A-levels, and also why I hadn't freaked out too badly at the realization that I didn't have my notes—I'd forgotten to go over them before, once or twice, and never been caught out.

And it wasn't as if I were trying to do anything particularly out of the ordinary, after all. In Murder you get used to juggling three or four investigations at once. If you pull a child-murder or a dead cop or something high-priority like that, you can hand off your open cases, the way we'd handed off the taxi-rank thing to Quigley and McCann, but you still have to deal with all the aftermath of the closed ones: paperwork, meetings with prosecutors, court dates. You develop a knack for filing away all the salient facts at the back of your mind, ready to whip out at any moment if you should need them. The basics of the Kavanagh case should have been there, and the fact that they weren't sent me into a silent, animal panic.

About two o'clock I became convinced that, if I could just get a good night's sleep, everything would fall into place in the morning. I had another shot of vodka and turned off the light, but every time I closed my eyes the images zipped around my head in a frenetic, unstoppable procession—Sacred Heart, greasy perpetrators, head wound, creepy B amp;B… Around four, I suddenly realized what a cretin I had been not to go pick up my notes. I switched on the light and fumbled blindly for my clothes, but as I was tying my shoes I noticed my hands wobbling and remembered the vodka—I was definitely not in the right form for smooth-talking my way out of a breathalyzer—and then slowly became aware that I was way too fuzzy to make any sense of my notes even if I had them.

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling some more. Heather and the guy in the next flat snored in syncopation; every now and then a car went past the gates of the complex, sending gray-white searchlights arcing across my walls. After a while I remembered my migraine tablets and took two of them, on the grounds that they always knock me out—I tried not to consider the possibility that this might be a side effect of the migraines themselves. I finally fell asleep around seven, just in time for my alarm.

When I beeped my horn outside Cassie's, she ran down wearing her one respectable outfit—a chic little Chanel trouser suit, black with rose-pink lining, and her grandmother's pearl earrings—and bounced into the car with what I considered an unnecessary amount of energy, although she was probably just in a hurry to get out of the drizzle. "Hi, you," she said. She was wearing makeup; it made her look older and sophisticated, unfamiliar. "No sleep?"

"Not much. Do you have your notes?"

"Yeah. You can have a look at them while I'm in—who's up first, actually, me or you?"

"I can't remember. Will you drive? I need to go over this."

"I'm not insured on this thing," she said, eyeing the Land Rover with disdain.

"So don't hit anyone." I clambered woozily out of the car and went round to the other side, rain splattering off my head, while Cassie shrugged and slid into the driver's seat. She has nice handwriting—faintly foreign-looking somehow, but firm and clear—and I am very used to it, but I was so tired and hungover that her notes didn't even look like words. All I could see was random, indecipherable squiggles arranging and rearranging themselves on the page as I watched, like some kind of bizarre Rorschach test. In the end I fell asleep, my head juddering gently off the cool windowpane.

I was, of course, first on the stand. I really don't have the heart to go into the dozen ways in which I made a fool of myself: stammering, mixing up names, screwing up timelines and having to go back and painstakingly correct myself from the beginning. The prosecutor, MacSharry, looked confused at first (we'd known each other awhile, and normally I am pretty good on the stand), then alarmed and finally furious, under the urbane veneer. He had this huge blown-up photo of Philomena Kavanagh's body—it's a standard trick, try to horrify the jury into needing to punish someone, and I was vaguely surprised that the judge had allowed it in—and I was supposed to point out each injury and match it to what the suspects had said in their confessions (apparently they had, in fact, confessed). But for some reason it was the final straw. It vaporized what little composure I had left: every time I looked up I saw her, heavy and battered, skirt rucked up around her waist, mouth open in a powerless howl of reproach at me for letting her down.

The courtroom was like a sauna, steam from drying coats fogging the windows; my scalp prickled with heat and I could feel droplets of sweat sliding down my ribs. By the time the defense attorney finished cross-examining me he had a look of incredulous, almost indecent glee, like a teenager who's managed to get into a girl's knickers when the most he hoped for was a kiss. Even the jury—shifting, shooting one another covert sideways looks—seemed embarrassed for me.

I came off the stand shaking all over. My legs felt like jelly; for a second I thought I was going to have to grab at a railing to stay upright. You're allowed to watch the trial after you've finished giving evidence, and Cassie would be surprised not to see me there, but I couldn't do it. She didn't need moral support: she would do just fine, and childish as it sounds this made me feel even worse. I knew the Devlin case was bothering her, and Sam, too, but both of them were managing to keep on top of things without even seeming to put much effort into it. I was the only one who was twitching and gibbering and spooking at shadows like a bit part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I didn't think I could bear to sit in the courtroom and watch Cassie matter-of-factly, unconsciously, clean up the mess I had made of several months' work.

It was still raining. I found an uncompromisingly dingy little pub down a side-street—three guys at a corner table pegged me as a cop with one glance and shifted seamlessly to a new topic of conversation—ordered a hot whiskey and sat down. The barman thumped my drink in front of me and went back to the racing pages without volunteering my change. I took a long swallow, burning the roof of my mouth, leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

The dodgy guys in the corner had moved on to someone's ex-girlfriend. "So I says to her, there's nothing in the support order about dressing him like P. Fucking Diddy, if you want him to wear Nikes you can bleeding buy them yourself…" They were eating toasted sandwiches; the salty, chemical smell made me feel sick. Outside the window the rain bucketed down a gutter.

Strange though it may seem, I had only just understood, up there on the stand with the flare of panic in MacSharry's eyes, that I was falling apart. I had been aware that I was sleeping less than usual and drinking more, that I was snappy and distracted and possibly sort of seeing things, but no specific incident had seemed particularly ominous or alarming in itself. It was only now that the whole pattern rose up and swooped at me, violently, garishly clear, and it scared me to death.

All my instincts were shrieking at me to get off this horrible, treacherous case, get as far away from it as possible. I was owed quite a lot of holiday time, I could use some of my savings to rent a little apartment in Paris or Florence for a few weeks, walk on cobblestones and spend all day listening peacefully to a language I didn't understand and not come back until the whole thing was over. But I knew, with dreary certainty, that this was impossible. It was too late to pull out of the investigation; I could hardly tell O'Kelly that it had suddenly dawned on me, weeks into the case, that I was actually Adam Ryan, and any other excuse would imply that I'd lost my nerve and would basically end my career. I knew I needed to do something, before people started noticing that I was going to pieces and the little men in white coats rolled up to take me away, but I could not for the life of me think of one single thing that would do the slightest bit of good.

I finished my hot whiskey and ordered another. The barman turned on snooker on the TV; the commentator's low, genteel murmur blended soothingly with the rain. The three guys left, slamming the door behind them, and I heard a burst of raucous laughter from outside. Eventually the barman cleared away my glass sort of pointedly, and I realized that he wanted me to leave.

I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. In the greenish, dirt-flecked mirror I looked like something out of a zombie film—mouth open, huge dark bags under my eyes, hair standing up in spiky tufts. This is ridiculous, I thought, with a horrible rush of dizzy, detached amazement. How did this happen? How the hell did I end up here?

I went back to the courthouse parking lot and sat in the car, eating Mentos and watching people hurry by with their heads down and their coats pulled tight. It was dark as evening, rain slanting through dipped headlights, streetlamps already on. Finally my phone beeped. Cassie: Whatsastory? Where are you? I texted back, In car, and reached over to flip on the taillights so she could find me. When she saw me in the passenger seat, she did a little double take and ran round to the other side.

"Sheesh," she said, wriggling behind the wheel and shaking rain out of her hair. A drop had got caught in her eyelashes and a black mascara tear trickled to her cheekbone, making her look like a modish little Pierrette. "I'd forgotten what a pair of wankstains they are. They started snickering when I talked about them pissing on her bed; their lawyer was making faces at them to try and shut them up. What happened to you? Why am I driving?"

"I have a migraine," I said. Cassie was flipping down the sun visor to check her makeup, but her hand stopped short and her eyes, round and apprehensive, met mine in the mirror. "I think I fucked up, Cass."

She would have heard anyway. MacSharry would be on the phone to O'Kelly as soon as he got a chance, and by the end of the day it would be all round the squad. I was so tired I was almost dreaming; for a moment I allowed myself to wonder, wistfully, whether this might actually be some vodka-induced nightmare from which I would wake to my alarm and my appointment in court.

"How bad is it?" she asked.

"I'm pretty sure I made an utter balls of it. I couldn't even see straight, never mind think straight." This was, after all, true.

She slowly angled the mirror into place, licked her finger and rubbed away the Pierrette teardrop. "I meant the migraine. Do you need to go home?"

I thought longingly of my bed, hours of undisturbed sleep before Heather came home and wanted to know where her toilet bleach was, but the thought soured quickly: I would only end up lying there rigidly, hands clenched on the sheets, going over and over the courtroom in my head. "No. I took my tablets once I got out. It's not one of the bad ones."

"Should I find a pharmacy or have you got enough to last you?"

"I have plenty, but it's better already. Let's go." I was tempted to go into more detail about the horrors of my imaginary migraine, but the whole art of lying is knowing when to stop, and I've always had sort of a flair for this. I had no idea, and still don't, whether Cassie believed me. She reversed out of the parking space in a swift, dramatic curve, rain skidding off the windshield wipers, and nudged her way into the traffic.

"How did you get on?" I asked suddenly, as we inched down the quays.

"OK. I get the feeling their lawyer's trying to claim the confessions were coerced, but the jury'll never buy it."

"Good," I said. "That's good."

My phone leaped into hysterical life almost the instant we reached the incident room. O'Kelly, telling me to get into his office; MacSharry hadn't wasted much time. I gave him the migraine story. The one joy of migraines is that they make a perfect excuse: they're disabling, they're not your fault, they can last as long as you need them to and nobody can prove you don't have one. At least I really did look sick. O'Kelly made a few derisive comments about headaches being "womany shite," but I regained a little of his respect by bravely insisting on staying in work.

I went back to the incident room. Sam was just getting in from somewhere, soaked through, his tweed overcoat smelling faintly of wet dog. "How'd it go?" he asked. His tone was casual, but his eyes slid to me, over Cassie's shoulder, and then quickly away again: the grapevine had already been doing its thing.

"Fine. Migraine," Cassie said, tilting her head at me. By this stage I was starting to feel as if I really did have a migraine. I blinked, trying to focus.

"The old migraine's a terrible man," Sam said. "My mammy gets them. Sometimes she has to lie in a dark room for days, with ice on her head. Are you all right to be working?"

"I'm fine," I said. "What have you been up to?"

Sam glanced at Cassie. "He's OK," she said. "That trial would give anyone a headache. Where've you been?"

He peeled off his dripping coat, gave it a doubtful look and discarded it on a chair. "I went and had little chats with the Big Four."

"O'Kelly's going to love that," I said. I sat down and pressed my temples between finger and thumb. "I should warn you, he's not in the best of moods as it is."

"No, it's grand. I told them the protesters had been giving a few of the motorway brigade some hassle—I didn't get specific, but I've a feeling they may think I meant vandalism—and I was just checking that they were all right." Sam grinned, and I realized he was bursting with excitement about his day and was keeping it contained only because he knew about mine. "They all got fierce jumpy about how I knew they were involved with Knocknaree, but I acted like it was no big deal—had a little chat, made sure none of them had been targeted by the protesters, told them to mind themselves and left. Not one of them even thanked me, do you believe that? Right bunch of charmers, this lot."

"So?" I inquired. "I think we all assumed that much." I didn't mean to be snotty, not really, but every time I closed my eyes I saw Philomena Kavanagh's body, and every time I opened them I saw the crime scene shots of Katy all over the whiteboard behind Sam's head, and I really wasn't in the mood for him and his results and his tact.

"So," Sam said, unfazed, "Ken McClintock—the boy behind Dynamo—was in Singapore all through April; that's where all the cool property developers are hanging out this year, don't you know. That's one down: he wasn't making any anonymous calls from Dublin phones. And remember what Devlin said about your man's voice?"

"Nothing particularly useful, as I recall," I said.

"Not very deep," said Cassie, "country accent, but nothing distinctive. Probably middle-aged." She was reared back in her chair, knees crossed, arms folded negligently behind her; in her elegant court getup she looked almost deliberately incongruous in the incident room, like something out of some clever avant-garde fashion shoot.

"Spot on. Now Conor Roche from Global, he's a Corkman, accent you could cut with a knife—Devlin would have spotted it straight off. And his partner, Jeff Barnes, he's English, and he's got a voice like a bear besides. That leaves us with"—Sam circled the name on the whiteboard, with a deft, happy flourish—"Terence Andrews of Futura, fifty-three, from Westmeath, squeaky little tenor voice on him. And guess where he lives?"

"Town," Cassie said, starting to smile.

"Penthouse apartment on the quays. He drinks in the Gresham—I told him to mind himself walking back, you never know with these left-wing types—and all three pay phones are directly on his route home. I've got my boy, lads."

I don't remember what I did for the rest of the day; sat at my desk and played with paper, I suppose. Sam headed out on another of his mysterious errands and Cassie went off to follow up some unpromising lead, taking O'Gorman with her and leaving silent Sweeney to man the tip line, for which I was devoutly grateful. After the bustle of the previous few weeks, the near-empty incident room had an eerie, derelict feel to it, the vanished floaters' desks still strewn with leftover paperwork and coffee mugs they had forgotten to take back to the canteen.

I sent Cassie a text saying I wasn't feeling well enough for dinner at her place; I couldn't bear the thought of all that solicitous tact. I left work just in time to get home before Heather—she "does her Pilates" on Monday evenings—wrote her a note saying I had a migraine and locked myself in my room. Heather tends her health with the kind of tenacious, minute dedication some women devote to flower beds or china collections, but the upside of this is that she accords other people's ailments the same awed respect as her own: she would leave me alone for the evening and keep the sound on the television down.

On top of everything else, I couldn't shake the feeling that had blown away my last chance in the courtroom: the steadily growing feeling that MacSharry's photo of Philomena Kavanagh reminded me of something, though I had no idea what. This sounds like a minor problem, especially in light of the kind of day I had had, and no doubt for someone else it would have been. Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.

Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals too far distant from the epicenter to be easily predictable. From that day on, any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential: this could be trivia, or it could be The Big One that blows your life and your mind wide open. Over the years, like someone living on a fault line, I had come to trust the equilibrium of the status quo, to believe that if The Big One hadn't come by now then it wasn't coming; but since we caught the Katy Devlin case little rumbles and tremors had been building ominously, and I was no longer anything like sure. The photo of Philomena Kavanagh spread-eagled and wide-mouthed could have been reminding me of some scene from a TV show or of something terrible enough to wipe my mind blank for twenty years, and I had no way of knowing which it was.

In the event, it turned out to be neither. It hit me somewhere in the middle of the night, as I was drifting in and out of a fitful, twitchy doze; hit me so hard that it knocked me awake and upright, heart pounding. I grabbed for the switch on my bedside lamp, stared at the wall while little transparent squiggles swirled in front of my eyes.

Even before we were near the clearing we could tell something was different, something was wrong. The noises were tangled and jagged, too many layers of them, grunts and gasps and squeaks stifled to small, wild bursts more menacing than a roar. "Get down," Peter hissed, and we flattened ourselves closer against the ground. Roots and fallen twigs scrabbled at our clothes and my feet were boiling in my runners. A hot day, hot and still, the sky blazing blue in and out of the branches. We slid through the undergrowth in slow motion: dust in my mouth, slashes of sun, a fly's horrible persistent dance loud as a chainsaw against my ear. Bees at the wild blackberries a few yards away, and a trickle of sweat running down my back. Peter's elbow in the corner of my vision, angling forward as carefully as a cat's; Jamie's quick eye-blink, close behind a grain-topped stalk of grass.

There were too many people in the clearing. Metallica was holding Sandra's arms down against the ground and Shades was holding her legs, and Anthrax was on top of her. Her skirt was twisted up around her waist and there were huge rips all down her tights. Her mouth past Anthrax's moving shoulder was frozen wide and black, crisscrossed with slices of red-gold hair. She was making weird noises, like she was trying to scream and choking instead. Metallica hit her once, neatly, and she stopped.

We ran, not caring that they could see us, not hearing the yells—"Jesus Christ!" "Get the fuck out!"—until afterwards. Jamie and I saw Sandra the next day, down at the shop. She was wearing a big sweatshirt and had dark smudges under her eyes. We knew she had seen us, but none of us looked at each other.

It was some ungodly hour of the night, but I rang Cassie's mobile anyway.

"Are you all right?" she said, sounding tousled and sleepy.

"I'm fine. I've got something, Cass."

She yawned. "Jesus. This better be good, dickface. What time is it?"

"I don't know. Listen. Sometime that summer, Peter and Jamie and I saw Jonathan Devlin and his friends raping a girl."

There was a pause. Then Cassie said, sounding a lot more awake, "Are you sure? You could have misinterpreted—"

"No. I'm positive. She tried to scream and one of them hit her. They were holding her down."

"Did they see you guys?"

"Yes. Yes. We ran, and they yelled after us."

"Fucking hell," she said. I could feel her slowly realizing: a raped little girl, a rapist in the family, two witnesses vanished. We were only a few steps away from an arrest warrant. "Fucking hell…Well done, Ryan. Do you know the girl's name?"

"Sandra something."

"The one you mentioned before? We'll start tracking her down tomorrow."

"Cassie," I said, "if this pans out, how the hell do we explain how we knew?"

"Listen, Rob, don't worry about that yet, OK? If we find Sandra, she'll be all the witness we need. Otherwise we go at Devlin hard, hit him with all the details, freak him out till he confesses… We'll find a way."

It almost undid me, her unquestioning assumption that the details would be correct. I had to swallow hard to keep my voice from cracking. "What's the statute of limitations on rape? Can we get him for that even if we don't have enough evidence on the other stuff?"

"Can't remember. We'll figure all that out in the morning. Are you going to be able to sleep, or are you too hyper?"

"Too hyper," I said. I was almost hysterically jittery; I felt as though someone had injected sherbet into my bloodstream. "Talk for a while?"

"Sure," Cassie said. I heard her curl up more comfortably in bed, sheets rustling; I found my vodka bottle and tucked the phone under my ear while I poured a shot.

She told me about a time when she was nine and convinced all the other local kids that a magic wolf lived in the hills near the village. "I said I'd found a letter under my floorboards telling me that he'd been there for four hundred years, and there was a map tied around his neck that would show us where to find treasure. I organized all the kids into a posse—God, I was a bossy little bitch—and every weekend we all went off up into the hills looking for this wolf. We were running away screaming every time we saw a sheepdog and falling into streams and having a brilliant time…"

I stretched out in bed and sipped my drink. The adrenaline was draining away and the low rhythms of Cassie's voice were soothing; I felt warm and comfortably exhausted, like a kid after a long day. "And it wasn't a German shepherd or anything, either," I'm sure I heard her say, "it was way too big and it looked completely different, wild," but I was already asleep.