In the Woods

12

In the morning we started trying to trace a Sandra or Alexandra Something who had lived in or near Knocknaree in 1984. It was one of the more frustrating mornings of my life. I rang the census bureau and got a nasal, uninterested woman who said she couldn't release any information to me without a court order. When I started getting passionate about the fact that a murdered child was involved, and she realized I wasn't going to go away, she told me I needed to speak to someone else, put me on hold (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, apparently played with one finger on a vintage Casio) and finally transferred me to an identical uninterested woman who went through the identical process.

Opposite me, Cassie was trying to get hold of the Dublin South-West electoral register for 1988—by which time I was pretty sure Sandra would have been old enough to vote, but probably not old enough to have moved away from home—with much the same results; I could hear a saccharine quacking sound telling her, at intervals, that her call was important to them and would be answered in rotation. She was bored and restless, changing position every thirty seconds: sitting cross-legged, perching on the table, swiveling her chair around and around until she got tangled up in the phone cord. I was blurry-eyed from lack of sleep, and sticky with sweat—the central heating was up to full, although it wasn't even a cold day—and just about ready to scream.

"Well, fuck this," I said finally, slamming down the phone. I knew Eine Kleine Nachtmusik would be playing in my head for weeks. "This is bloody pointless."

"Your irritation is important to us," Cassie droned, looking at me upside down with her head tipped backwards over her headrest, "and will be exacerbated in rotation. Thank you for holding."

"Even if these morons ever give us anything, it won't be on disk or in a database. It'll be five million shoeboxes full of paper and we'll have to go through every single fucking name. It'll take weeks."

"And she's probably moved and got married and emigrated and died anyway, but have you got a better idea?"

Suddenly I had a brainwave. "Actually, I do," I said, grabbing my coat. "Come on."

"Hello? Where are we going?"

I spun Cassie's chair around to face the door as I went past. "We are going to talk to Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald. Who's your favorite genius?"

"Leonard Bernstein, actually," Cassie said, happily banging down her phone and bouncing out of her chair, "but you'll do for today."

We stopped at Lowry's and bought Mrs. Fitzgerald a tin of shortbread, to make up for the fact that we still hadn't found her purse. Big mistake: that generation is compulsively competitive about generosity, and the biscuits meant she had to get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam into a battered little dish, while I sat on the edge of her slippery sofa manically jiggling one knee until Cassie gave me a hairy look and I forced myself to stop. I knew I had to eat the damn things, too, or the "Ah, go on" phase could last for hours.

Mrs. Fitzgerald watched sharply, screwing up her eyes to peer at us, until we had each swallowed a sip of tea—it was so strong I could feel my mouth shriveling—and a bite of scone. Then she sighed with satisfaction and settled back into her armchair. "I love a nice white scone," she said. "Them fruit ones get stuck in my falsies."

"Mrs. Fitzgerald," Cassie said, "do you remember the two children who disappeared in the wood, about twenty years ago?" I resented, suddenly and fiercely, the fact that I needed her to say this, but I didn't have the nerve to do it myself. I was superstitiously certain that some shake in my voice would give me away, make Mrs. Fitzgerald suspicious enough to look harder at me and remember that third child. Then we really would have been there all day.

"I do, of course," she said indignantly. "Terrible, that was. They never found hide nor hair of them. No proper funeral nor nothing."

"What do you think happened to them?" Cassie asked suddenly.

I wanted to kick her for wasting time, but I did, grudgingly, understand why she had asked. Mrs. Fitzgerald was like a sly old woman from a fairy tale, peering out of some dilapidated cottage in the woods, mischievous and watchful; you couldn't help half-believing she would give you the answer to your riddle, even though it might be in a form too cryptic to unravel.

She inspected her scone thoughtfully, took a bite and dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin. She was making us wait, enjoying the suspense. "Some mentaler threw them in the river," she said at last. "God rest them. Some unfortunate fella who should never have been let out."

I noticed that my body was having the old, infuriating automatic reaction to this conversation: shaking hands, racing pulse. I put down my cup. "You believe they were murdered, then," I said, deepening my voice to make sure it stayed under control.

"Sure, what else, young fella? My mammy, may she rest in peace—she was still alive then; she died three year after, of the influenza—she always said it was the pooka took them. But she was fierce old-fashioned, God love her." This one took me by surprise. The pooka is an ancient child-scarer out of legend, a wild mischief-making descendant of Pan and ancestor of Puck. He had not been on Kiernan and McCabe's list of persons of interest. "No, they went into the river, or otherwise your lot would've found the bodies. There's people say they still haunt the wood, poor wee things. Theresa King from the Lane saw them only last year, when she was bringing in her washing."

I hadn't been expecting this one, either, though I probably should have been. Two children vanished forever in the local wood; how could they have failed to become part of Knocknaree folklore? I don't believe in ghosts, but the thought—small flitting shapes at dusk, wordless calls—still sent a bright icy chill through me, along with a strange twinge of outrage: how dared some woman from the Lane see them, instead of me?

"At the time," I said, aiming the conversation back on track, "you told the police that three rough young men used to hang around the edge of the wood."

"Little gurriers," Mrs. Fitzgerald said with relish. "Spitting on the ground and all. My father always said that was a sure sign of bad rearing, spitting. Ah, but two of them turned out all right in the end, so they did. Concepta Mills's young fella does the computers now. He's after moving into town—Blackrock, if you don't mind. Knocknaree wasn't good enough for him. The Devlin lad, sure, we were talking about him already. He's the father of that poor wee girl Katy, God rest her soul. A lovely man."

"What about the third boy?" I asked. "Shane Waters?"

She pursed her lips and took a prim sip of tea. "I wouldn't know about the likes of him."

"Ah…turned out badly, did he?" Cassie said confidentially. "Could I take another scone, Mrs. Fitzgerald? These are the nicest ones I've had in ages." They were the only ones she'd had in ages. She dislikes scones on the grounds that they "don't taste like food."

"Go on, love; sure, you could do with a bit of meat on you. There's plenty more where those came from. Now that my daughter's after buying me the microwave, I do make six dozen at once and put them away in the freezer till I need them."

Cassie made a flatteringly big deal of choosing her scone, took a huge bite and said, "Mmm." If she ate enough of them that Mrs. Fitzgerald felt the need to go heat up more, I was going to brain her. She swallowed her mouthful and said, "Does Shane Waters still live in Knocknaree?"

"Mountjoy Jail," said Mrs. Fitzgerald, giving the words their full sinister weight. "That's where he's living. Himself and another fella robbed a petrol station with a knife; terrified the life out of the poor young fella working there. His mammy always said he wasn't a bad lad, just easily led, but there's no call for that kind of carry-on." I wished, fleetingly, that we could introduce her to Sam. They would have liked each other.

"You told the police there were girls who used to hang around with them," I said, getting my notebook ready.

She sucked disapprovingly on her dentures. "Brazen hussies, the pair of them. I didn't mind showing a bit of leg myself, in my day—no better way to make the boys look, am I right?" She winked at me and laughed, a rusty cackle, but it lit up her face and you could see, still, that she had been pretty; a sweet, cheeky, bright-eyed girl. "But the getup on them young ones, sure, it was a waste of money altogether. They might as well have been in the nip, for all the difference them clothes made. Nowadays all the young ones are at it, with their belly tops and their hot shorts and what have you, but back then there was still a bit of decency."

"Would you remember their names?"

"Wait now till I think. One of them was Marie Gallagher's oldest. She's in London these fifteen year, comes back now and again to show off her fancy clothes and her fancy job, but Marie says at the end of the day she's only some class of a secretary. She always did have notions of herself." My heart sank—London—but Mrs. Fitzgerald took a hearty slurp of her tea and raised a finger. "Claire, that's it. Claire Gallagher, still; she never married. She was going out with a divorced fella for a few years, near gave Marie a heart attack, but it didn't last."

"And the other girl?" I said.

"Ah, her; she's still here. Lives with her mammy in the Close, up the top of the estate—the rough end, if you know what I mean. Two childer and no husband. Sure, what else would you expect? If you go looking for trouble, you'll never have far to look. One of the Scullys, she is. Jackie's the one married that Wicklow lad, Tracy's the one works in the betting shop—Sandra; that's herself. Sandra Scully. Finish that scone," she ordered Cassie, who had surreptitiously put it down and was trying to look as if she'd forgotten it was there.

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Fitzgerald. You've been a great help," I said. Cassie took the opportunity to jam the rest of her scone in her mouth and wash it down with tea. I put my notebook away and stood up.

"Wait a moment, now," said Mrs. Fitzgerald, flapping a hand at me. She stumped into the kitchen and came back with a plastic bag of frozen scones, which she pressed into Cassie's hand. "There, now. That's for you. No, no, no"—over Cassie's protests; personal tastes in food aside, we're not supposed to take gifts from witnesses—"they'll do you good. You're a lovely girl. Share them with your fella there if he behaves himself."

The rough end of the estate (I had never been there before, as far as I remembered; all our mothers had warned us to stay away) wasn't actually that different from the good end. The houses were a little dingier, and there were weeds and daisies growing in some of the gardens. The wall at the end of Knocknaree Close was sprinkled with graffiti, but it was pretty mild stuff—LIVERPOOL RULES, MARTINA + CONOR 4EVER, JONESY IS GAY—mostly done in what looked like colored marker; almost quaint, really, compared to what you get in your true hard-core areas. If for some reason I had had to leave my car there overnight, I wouldn't have panicked.

Sandra answered the door. For a moment I wasn't sure; she didn't look the way I remembered her. She had been one of those girls who bloom early and fade, bewildered, into blowsiness within a few years. In my hazy mental image she was firm and voluptuous as a ripe peach, haloed in glossy, red-gold eighties curls, but the woman at the door was overblown and sagging, with a weary, suspicious look and hair dyed to dull brassiness. A swift, tiny pang of loss went through me. I almost hoped it wasn't her.

Then she said, "Can I help you?" Her voice was deeper and rough around the edges, but I knew the sweet, breathy tone. ("Here, which of them's your fella?" A sparkly fingernail moving from me to Peter, while Jamie shook her head and said, "Ewww!" Sandra had laughed, feet kicking up from against the wall: "You'll change your mind soon enough!")

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

I felt Cassie shift almost imperceptibly beside me, clocking the signal. If I hadn't been sure, I would have said "we," and we would both have gone through the routine Katy Devlin questions with her until I made up my mind one way or the other. But I was sure, and Sandra was likely to be more comfortable talking about this without a guy in the room.

Sandra's jaw hardened. "Is this about Declan? Because you can tell that old bitch I took the stereo off him after the last time, so if she's hearing anything it's the voices in her head."

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

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

"Thanks," Cassie said. "I'll try not to take too much of your time." As she went into the house she glanced over her shoulder and gave me a tiny, reassuring wink. Then the door slammed behind her.

She was gone a long time. I sat in the car and chain-smoked until I ran out of cigarettes; then I bit my cuticles and drummed Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on the steering wheel and picked dirt out of the dashboard with my car key. I wished crazily that I had thought of putting a wire on Cassie, or something, just in case there was a moment when it might help if I went in there. It wasn't that I didn't trust her; but she hadn't been there that day, and I had, and Sandra appeared to have turned into a pretty tough cookie somewhere along the way, and I couldn't be positive that Cassie would know the right questions to ask. I had the windows rolled down and I could still hear the toddler yelling and banging; then Sandra's voice, raised sharply, and a smack, and the toddler howling, more in outrage than in pain. I remembered her neat little white teeth when she laughed, the mysterious shadowy valley in the V of her top.

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

My heart was pounding, whether with triumph or panic I couldn't tell. "What'd she say?"

Cassie already had her cigarettes out and was rummaging for a lighter. "Drive around the corner or something. She didn't like the car sitting outside; she says it looks like a cop car and the neighbors'll talk."

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

"Do you know what she said?" Cassie rolled down the window violently and blew smoke out of it, and I suddenly realized she was furious, furious and shaken. "She said, 'It wasn't rape or anything, they just made me do it.' She said it like three times. Thank God the kids are too young to be anything to do with—"

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

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

"Cass—"

She threw the lighter out of the window at a tree. Cassie has a pretty good arm; it cracked off the trunk and flew into the undergrowth. I had seen her in a temper before—I tell her it's her French grandfather's fault, Mediterranean lack of self-control—and I knew she'd settle down now that she'd taken it out on the tree. I made myself wait. She thumped back against her seat, drew on her cigarette and, after a moment, gave me a sheepish sideways grin.

"You owe me a lighter, prima donna," I told her. "Now what's the story?"

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

"When was this?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Let's go talk to Devlin," I said, starting the car.

"Just a sec," Cassie said. "There's something else. It might be nothing, but…After they finished, Cathal—honestly, I think we should investigate him anyway, we're bound to find something we can charge him with—Cathal said, 'That's my girl,' and gave her a kiss. She was sitting there shaking and trying to pull her clothes straight and get her head together. And they heard something in the trees, just a few yards away. Sandra says she's never heard anything like it. Like an enormous bird flapping its wings, she said, only she's positive it was a voiced sound, a call. They all jumped and yelled, and then Cathal shouted something like, 'Those fucking kids messing about again,' and threw a stone into the trees, but it kept going. It was in the shadows, they couldn't see anything. They were paralyzed, totally freaked out, they all just sat there screaming. Finally it stopped and they heard it moving away into the woods—it sounded big, she said, at least the size of a person. They legged it home. And there was a smell, Sandra says, a strong animal smell—like goats or something, or what you get at the zoo."

"What the hell?" I said. I was utterly taken aback.

"It wasn't you guys messing, then."

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

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

Ireland's most ferocious form of wildlife is probably badgers, but there are regular flurries of atavistic rumor, usually somewhere in the Midlands: dead sheep found with their throats torn out, late-night travelers crossing paths with huge slouching shadows or glowing eyes. Mostly the animal in question turns out to be a rogue sheepdog or a pet kitty seen in tricky lighting, but some go unexplained. I thought, unwillingly, of the rips across the back of my T-shirt. Cassie, without exactly believing in the mysterious wild animal, has always been fascinated by it—because its lineage goes back to the Black Dog that stalked medieval wayfarers, and because she loves the idea that not every inch of the country is mapped and regulated and monitored by CCTV, that there are still secret corners of Ireland where some untamed thing the size of a puma might be going about its hidden business.

I like the thought, too, normally, but I had no time for it just then. All through this case, since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly, relentlessly thinning; it had grown so fine that I could hear the small furtive movements on the other side, beating wings and tiny scrabbling feet like a moth battering against your cupped hands. I had no room for left-field theories about escaped exotic pets or leftover elk or the Loch Ness monster or whatever the hell Cassie had in mind.

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

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

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

She raised her eyebrows a fraction. "I was thinking I should, actually—well, not sit in the car, but drop you off and go talk to the cousins some more or something, and you can text me when you want me to pick you up. You and Devlin can have a guy chat. He's not going to talk about a rape if I'm there."

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

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