In the Woods

13

As I pulled up in front of the Devlins' house, Cassie said, "Rob, maybe you've already thought of it, but this could point in a whole other direction."

"How so?" I said absently.

"You know what I was saying about the token feel to Katy's rape—how it didn't seem like a sexual thing? You've given us someone who has a non-sexual motive for wanting Devlin's daughter to be raped, and who'd have to use an implement."

"Sandra? Suddenly, after twenty years?"

"All the publicity about Katy—the newspaper article, the fund-raiser…That could've set her off."

"Cassie," I said, taking a deep breath, "I'm just a simple small-town boy. I prefer to concentrate on the obvious. The obvious, right now, is Jonathan Devlin."

"I'm only saying. It might come in useful." She reached over and ruffled my hair, quickly and clumsily. "Go for it, small-town boy. Break a leg."

Jonathan was home, alone. Margaret had taken the girls to her sister's, he said, and I wondered how long ago and why. He looked awful. He had lost so much weight that his clothes and his face sagged loosely, and his hair was cut even shorter, tight to his head; it gave him a lonely, desperate look, somehow, and I thought of ancient civilizations where the bereaved offered their hair on loved ones' funeral pyres. He motioned me to the sofa and took an armchair opposite me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. The house felt deserted; there was no smell of cooking food, no TV or washing machine in the background, no books left open on chair arms, nothing to imply that when I arrived he had been doing anything at all.

He didn't offer me tea. I asked how they were getting on ("How do you think?"), explained that we were following up various leads, fended off his terse questions about specifics, asked if he had thought of anything else that might be relevant. The wild urgency I'd felt in the car had vanished as soon as he opened the door; I felt calmer and more lucid than I had in weeks. Margaret and Rosalind and Jessica could have come back at any moment, but somehow I was sure they wouldn't. The windows were grimy, and the late-afternoon sun filtering through them slid confusingly off glass-fronted cabinets and the polished wood of the dining table, giving the room a streaky, underwater luminescence. I could hear a clock ticking in the kitchen, heavy and achingly slow, but apart from that there wasn't a sound, even outside the house; all of Knocknaree might have gathered itself up and vanished into thin air, except me and Jonathan Devlin. It was just the two of us, facing each other across the little ringed coffee table, and the answers were so close I could hear them scuffling and twittering in the corners of the room; there was no need to hurry.

"Who's the Shakespeare fan?" I asked eventually, putting my notebook away. It wasn't relevant, obviously, but I thought it might lower his guard a little, and it had been intriguing me.

Jonathan frowned, irritated. "What?"

"Your daughters' names," I said. "Rosalind, Jessica, Katharine with an A; they're all out of Shakespeare comedies. I assumed it was deliberate."

He blinked, looking at me for the first time with something like warmth, and half-smiled. It was a rather engaging smile, pleased but shy, like a boy who's been waiting for someone to notice his new Scout badge. "Do you know, you're the first person ever to pick up on that? Yeah, that was me." I raised an encouraging eyebrow. "I went through a kind of self-improvement patch, I suppose you'd call it, after we got married—trying to work my way through all the things you're supposed to read: you know, Shakespeare, Milton, George Orwell… I wasn't mad about Milton, but Shakespeare—he was hard going, but I read my way through the lot, in the end. I used to tease Margaret that if the twins were a boy and a girl we'd have to call them Viola and Sebastian, but she said they'd be laughed out of it at school…"

His smile faded and he looked away. I knew this was my chance, now while he liked me. "They're beautiful names," I said. He nodded absently. "One more thing: are you familiar with the names Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?"

"Why?" Jonathan asked. I thought I caught a flicker of wariness in his eyes, but his back was to the window and it was hard to tell.

"They've been mentioned in the course of our investigation."

His eyebrows went down sharply and I saw his shoulders stiffen like a fighting dog's. "Are they suspects?"

"No," I said firmly. Even if they had been, I wouldn't have told him—not just because of procedure, but because he was way too volatile. That furious, spring-loaded tension: if he was innocent, of Katy's death at least, then one hint of uncertainty in my voice and he would probably have shown up on their doorsteps with an Uzi. "We're just following up every lead. Tell me about them."

He stared at me for another second; then he slumped, leaning back in the chair. "We were friends when we were kids. We've been out of touch for years now."

"When did you become friends?"

"When our families moved out here. Nineteen seventy-two, it would have been. We were the first three families on the estate, up at the top end—the rest was still being built. We had the whole place to ourselves. We used to play on the building sites, after the builders had gone home—it was like a huge maze. We would have been six, seven."

There was something in his voice, some deep, accustomed undercurrent of nostalgia, that made me realize what a lonely man he was; not just now, not just since Katy's death. "And how long did you remain friends?" I asked.

"Hard to say, exactly. We started going our separate ways when we were nineteen, about, but we kept in touch for a while longer. Why? What does this have to do with anything?"

"We have two separate witnesses," I said, keeping my voice expressionless, "who say that, in the summer of 1984, you, Cathal Mills and Shane Waters participated in the rape of a local girl."

He whipped upright, his hands jerking into fists. "What—what the fuck does that have to do with Katy? Are you accusing—what the fuck!"

I gazed blandly back and let him finish. "I can't help noticing that you haven't denied the allegation," I said.

"And I haven't admitted to a bloody thing, either. Do I need a lawyer for this?"

No lawyer in the world would let him say another word. "Look," I said, leaning forward and switching to an easy, confidential tone, "I'm from the Murder squad, not Sex Crime. I'm only interested in a twenty-year-old rape if—"

"Alleged rape."

"Fair enough, alleged rape. I don't care either way unless it has some bearing on a murder. That's all I'm here to find out."

Jonathan caught his breath to say something; for a second I thought he was going to order me to leave. "We need to get one thing straight if you're going to spend another second in my house," he said. "I never laid a finger on any of my girls. Never."

"Nobody's accused you of—"

"You've been dancing around it since the first day you came here, and I don't like insinuations. I love my daughters. I hug them good night. That's it. I've never once touched any of them in any way that anyone could call wrong. Is that clear?"

"Crystal," I said, trying not to let it sound sarcastic.

"Good." He nodded, one sharp, controlled jerk. "Now, about this other thing: I'm not stupid, Detective Ryan. Just assuming that I did something that might land me in jail, why the hell would I tell you about it?"

"Listen," I said earnestly, "we're considering the possibility"—Bless you, Cassie—"that the victim might have had something to do with Katy's death, as revenge for this rape." His eyes widened. "It's only an outside chance and we have absolutely no solid evidence, so I don't want you to put too much weight on this. In particular, I don't want you to contact her in any way. If we do turn out to have a case, that could ruin the whole thing."

"I wouldn't contact her. Like I said, I'm not stupid."

"Good. I'm glad that's understood. But I do need to hear your version of what happened."

"And then what? You charge me with it?"

"I can't guarantee you anything," I said. "I'm certainly not going to arrest you. It's not up to me to decide whether to file charges—that's down to the prosecutor's office and the victim—but I doubt she'll be willing to come forward. And I haven't cautioned you, so anything you say wouldn't be admissible in court anyway. I just need to know how it happened. It's up to you, Mr. Devlin. How badly do you want me to find Katy's killer?"

Jonathan took his time. He stayed where he was, leaning forward, hands clasped, and gave me a long, suspicious glare. I tried to look trustworthy and not blink.

"If I could make you understand," he said finally, almost to himself. He pulled himself restlessly up from the chair and went to the window, leaned back against the glass; every time I blinked his silhouette rose up in front of my eyelids, bright-edged and looming against the barred panes. "Have you any friends you've known since you were a little young fella?"

"Not really, no."

"Nobody knows you like people you grew up with. I could run into Cathal or Shane tomorrow, after all this time, and they'd still know more about me than Margaret does. We were closer than most brothers. None of us had what you'd call a happy family: Shane never knew his da, Cathal's was a waster who never did a decent day's work in his life, my parents were both drunks. I'm not saying any of this as an excuse, mind you; I'm only trying to tell you what we were like. When we were ten we did the blood-brothers thing—did you ever do that? cut your wrists, press them together?"

"I don't think so," I said. I wondered, fleetingly, whether we had. It felt like the kind of thing we would have done.

"Shane was scared to cut himself, but Cathal talked him into it. He could sell holy water to the pope, Cathal." He was smiling, a little; I could hear it in his voice. "When we saw The Three Musketeers on the telly, Cathal decided that would be our motto: all for one and one for all. We had to have each other's back, he said, there was nobody else on our side. He was right, too." His head turned towards me, a brief, measuring look. "What are you—thirty, thirty-five?"

I nodded.

"You missed the worst of it. When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn't go into Daddy's business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college—and we didn't—that just put it off for a few years. We'd nothing to do only hang around, nothing to look forward to, nothing to aim for; nothing at all, except each other. I don't know if you understand what a powerful thing that is. Dangerous."

I wasn't sure what I thought of the direction in which this appeared to be going, but I felt a sudden, unwelcome dart of something like envy. In school I had dreamed of friendships like this: the steel-tempered closeness of soldiers in battle or prisoners of war, the mystery attained only by men in extremis.

Jonathan took a breath. "Anyway. Then Cathal started going out with this girl—Sandra. It felt strange, at first: we'd all been out with girls here and there, but none of us had ever had a serious girlfriend before. But she was lovely, Sandra was; lovely. Always laughing, and this innocence about her—I think probably she was my first love, as well… When Cathal said she fancied me, too, wanted to be with me, I couldn't believe my luck."

"This didn't strike you as—well, slightly odd, to say the least?"

"Not as odd as you'd think. It sounds mad now, yeah; but we'd always shared everything. It was a rule with us. This just felt like more of the same. I was going out with a girl for a while around the same time, sure, and she went with Cathal, not a bother on her—I think she only went out with me in the first place because he was taken. He was a lot better looking than I was."

"Shane," I said, "appears to have fallen out of the loop."

"Yeah. That was where it all went wrong. Shane found out, and he went mental. He was always mad about Sandra, too, I think; but more than that, he felt like we'd betrayed him. He was devastated. We had huge rows about it practically every day, for weeks and weeks. Half the time he wouldn't even talk to us. I was miserable, felt like everything was falling apart—you know how it is when you're that age, any little thing is the end of the world…"

He stopped. "What happened then?" I said.

"Then Cathal got it into his head that, since it was Sandra had come between us, it would have to be Sandra brought us together again. He was obsessed, wouldn't stop talking about it. If we were all with the same girl, he said, it'd be the final seal on our friendship—like the blood-brothers thing, only stronger. I don't know, any more, if he really believed that, or if he just…I don't know. He had an odd streak in him, Cathal, especially when it came to things like…Well. I had my doubts, but he kept on and on about it, and of course Shane was behind him all the way…"

"It didn't occur to any of you to ask Sandra's opinion about this?"

Jonathan let his head fall back against the glass, with a soft bump. "We should have," he said quietly, after a moment. "God knows we should have. But we lived in a world of our own, the three of us. Nobody else seemed real—I was wild about Sandra, but it was the same way I was wild about Princess Leia or whoever else we fancied that week, not the way you love a real woman. Not an excuse—there's no excuse for what we did, none. But a reason."

"What happened?"

He rubbed a hand over his face. "We were in the wood," he said. "The four of us—I wasn't with Claire any more. In this clearing where we used to go sometimes. I don't know would you remember, but we had a beauty of a summer that year—hot as Greece or somewhere, never a cloud in the sky, bright till after ten at night. We spent every day outside, in the wood or hanging around at the edge of it. We were all burned black—I looked like an Italian student only for these mad white patches round my eyes from my sunglasses…

"It was late one afternoon. We'd all been in the clearing all day, drinking and having a few joints. I think we were pretty much off our faces; not just the cider and the gear, but the sun, and the giddy way you get when you're that age… I'd been arm-wrestling with Shane—he was in a half-decent mood for once—and I'd let him win, and we were messing, pushing each other and fighting on the grass, you know the way young fellas do. Cathal and Sandra were yelling, cheering us on, and then Cathal started tickling Sandra—she was laughing and screaming. They rolled under our feet then; we went over in a heap on top of them. And all of a sudden Cathal yelled, 'Now!…'"

I waited for a long time. "Did all three of you rape her?" I asked quietly, in the end.

"Shane, only. Not that that makes it any better. I helped hold her…" He took a fast breath between his teeth. "I've never known anything like it. I think maybe we went a little out of our minds. It didn't feel real, you know? It was like a nightmare, or a bad trip. It went on forever. It was blazing hot, I was sweating like a pig, light-headed. I looked round at the trees and they were closing in on us, shooting out brand-new branches, I thought they were about to wrap round us and swallow us up; and all the colors looked wrong, off, like in one of those colorized old films. The sky had gone almost white, and there were things shooting across it, little black things. I looked back—I felt like I should warn the others that something was happening, something was wrong—and I was holding…holding her, but I couldn't feel my hands, they didn't look like mine. I couldn't work out whose hands those were. I was terrified. Cathal was there across from me and his breathing sounded like the loudest thing in the world, but I didn't recognize him; I couldn't remember who the hell he was or what we were doing. Sandra was fighting and there were these noises and—Jesus. For a second I swear I thought we were hunters and this was a, an animal we'd brought down, and Shane was killing it…"

I was starting to dislike the tone of this. "If I understand you correctly," I said coldly, "you were under the influence both of alcohol and of illegal drugs at the time, you may quite possibly have been suffering from heat-stroke, and you were presumably in a state of considerable excitement. Don't you think these factors might have had something to do with this experience?"

Jonathan's eyes went to me for a moment; then he shrugged, a defeated little twitch. "Yeah, sure," he said quietly. "Probably. Again, I'm not saying any of this is an excuse. I'm only telling you. You asked."

It was an absurd story, of course, melodramatic and self-serving and utterly predictable: every criminal I have ever interrogated had a long convoluted story proving conclusively that it wasn't actually his fault or at least that it wasn't as bad as it looked, and most of them were a whole lot better than this one. What bothered me was that some tiny part of me believed it. I wasn't at all convinced about Cathal's idealistic motives, but Jonathan: he had been lost somewhere in the wild borderlands of nineteen, half in love with his friends with a love passing the love of women, desperate for some mystical rite that would reverse time and put their disintegrating private world back together. It would not have been difficult for him to see this as an act of love, however dark and twisted and untranslatable to the harsh outside world. Not that this made any difference: I wondered what else he would have done for his cause.

"And you're no longer in any contact with Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?" I asked, a little cruelly, I know.

"No," he said quietly. He looked away, out the window, and laughed, a mirthless little breath. "After all that, eh? Cathal and I send Christmas cards; the wife signs his name to theirs. I haven't heard from Shane in years. I wrote him the odd letter, but he never wrote back. I stopped trying."

"You started drifting apart not long after the rape."

"It was a slow thing, took years. But yeah, when you come down to it, I suppose it started with that day in the woods. It was awkward, after—Cathal wanted to talk about it over and over, it made Shane nervous as a cat on hot bricks; I felt guilty as hell, didn't even want to think about it… Ironic, isn't it? Here we thought it was going to be the thing that brought us together forever." He shook his head quickly, like a horse twitching off a fly. "But I'd say we might have gone our separate ways anyway, sure. It happens. Cathal moved away, I got married…"

"And Shane?"

"I'm betting you know Shane's in jail," he said dryly. "Shane…Listen, if that poor thick bastard had been born ten years later, he'd have been grand. I'm not saying he'd be some great success story, but he'd have a decent job and maybe a family. He was a casualty of the eighties. There's a whole generation out there that fell through the cracks. By the time the economy picked up it was too late for most of us, we were too old to start over. Cathal and I were just lucky. I was shite at everything else but good at maths, A's all through school, so I finally managed to get a job in the bank. And Cathal went out with some rich young one who had a computer and taught him how to use it, for the laugh; a few years later, when everyone was crying out for people who knew computers, he was one of the few in the country who could do more than turn the bloody things on. He always did land on his feet, Cathal. But Shane…He'd no job, no education, no prospects, no family. What did he have to lose by robbing?"

I was finding it hard to feel any particular sympathy towards Shane Waters. "In the minutes immediately after the rape," I said, almost against my will, "did you hear anything out of the ordinary—possibly a sound like a large bird flapping its wings?" I left out the part about it being a voiced sound. Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.

Jonathan gave me a funny look. "The wood was full of birds, foxes, what have you. I wouldn't have noticed one more or less—especially not just then. I don't know if I've given you any idea of the state we were all in. It wasn't just me, you know. It was like we were coming down off acid. I was shaking all over, couldn't see straight, everything kept sliding sideways. Sandra was—Sandra was gasping, like she couldn't breathe. Shane was lying on the grass just staring up at the trees and twitching. Cathal started laughing, he was staggering around the clearing howling, I told him I'd punch the face off him if he didn't—" He stopped.

"What is it?" I asked, after a moment.

"I'd forgotten," he said slowly. "I don't—sure, I don't like to think about the thing anyway. I'd forgotten…If it was anything, mind you. The way our heads were, it could easily have been just imagination."

I waited. Finally he sighed, made an uneasy movement like a shrug. "Well. The way I remember it, I grabbed Cathal and told him to shut up or I'd hit him, and he stopped laughing and caught me by my T-shirt—he looked half crazy, for a second there I thought it was going to turn into a fight. But there was still someone laughing—not one of us; away in the trees. Sandra and Shane both started screaming—maybe I did, too, I don't know—but it just got louder and louder, this huge voice laughing… Cathal let goof me and shouted something about those kids, but it didn't sound—"

"Kids?" I said coolly. I was fighting a violent impulse to get the hell out of there. There was no reason why Jonathan should recognize me—I had just been some little kid hanging around, my hair had been a lot fairer then, I had a different accent and a different name—but I felt suddenly horribly naked and exposed.

"Ah, there were these kids from the estate—little kids, ten, twelve—who used to play in the wood. Sometimes they'd spy on us; throw things and then run, you know the way. But it didn't sound like any kid to me. It sounded like a man—a young fella, maybe, around our age. Not a child."

For a split second I almost took the opening he had offered. The flash of wariness had dissolved and the quick little whispers in the corners had risen to a silent shout, so close, close as breath. It was on the tip of my tongue: Those kids, weren't they spying on you that day? Weren't you worried they would tell? What did you do to stop them? But the detective in me held me back. I knew I would only get one chance, and I needed to come to it on my own territory and with all the ammunition I could bring.

"Did any of you go to see what it was?" I asked, instead.

Jonathan thought for a moment, his eyes hooded and intent. "No. Like I said, we were all in some kind of shock anyway, and this was more than we could handle. I was frozen, couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. It kept getting louder, till I thought the whole estate would be out to see what was going on, and we were still yelling… Finally it stopped—moved off into the woods, maybe, I don't know. Shane kept screaming, till Cathal smacked him across the back of the head and told him to shut up. We got out of there as fast as we could. I went home, nicked some of my da's booze and got drunk as a lord. I don't know what the others did."

So much for Cassie's mysterious wild animal, then. But there had quite possibly been someone in the woods that day, someone who, if he had seen the rape, had in all probability seen us, too; someone who might have been there again, a week or two later. "Do you have any suspicion as to who the person laughing might have been?" I asked.

"No. I think Cathal asked us about that, later. He said we needed to know who it was, how much they had seen. I've no idea."

I stood up. "Thanks for your time, Mr. Devlin," I said. "I may need to ask you a few more questions about this at some stage, but that's all for now."

"Wait," he said suddenly. "Do you think Sandra killed Katy?"

He looked very short and pathetic, standing there at the window with his hands balled in his cardigan pockets, but he still had a kind of forlorn dignity about him. "No," I said. "I don't. But we have to investigate every possibility thoroughly."

Jonathan nodded. "I suppose that means you've no real suspect," he said. "No, I know, I know, you can't tell me… If you're talking to Sandra, tell her I'm sorry. We did a terrible thing. I know it's a bit late to be saying that, I should've thought of it twenty years ago, but…tell her, all the same."

That evening I went out to Mountjoy to see Shane Waters. I'm sure Cassie would have come with me if I'd told her I was going, but I wanted to do this, as much as possible, on my own. Shane was rat-faced and nervy, with a repulsive little mustache, and he still had acne. He reminded me of Wayne the junkie. I tried every tactic I knew and promised him everything I could think of—immunity, early release on the armed robbery—banking on the fact that he wasn't smart enough to know what I could and couldn't deliver, but (always one of my blind spots) I'd underestimated the power of stupidity: with the infuriating mulishness of someone who has long ago given up trying to analyze possibilities and ramifications, Shane stuck to the one option he understood. "I don't know nothing," he told me, over and over, with a kind of anemic self-satisfaction that made me want to scream. "And you can't prove I do." Sandra, the rape, Peter and Jamie, even Jonathan Devlin: "Don't know what you're talking about, man." I finally gave up when I realized I was in serious danger of throwing something.

On my way home I swallowed my pride and phoned Cassie, who didn't even try to pretend she hadn't guessed where I'd gone. She had spent her evening eliminating Sandra Scully from the inquiry. On the night in question, Sandra had been working in a call center in town. Her supervisor and everyone else on the shift confirmed that she had been there until just before two in the morning, when she had clocked out and caught a night bus home. This was good news—it tidied things up, and I hadn't liked thinking of Sandra as a possible murderess—but it gave me a complicated little pang, the thought of her in an airless fluorescent cubicle, surrounded by part-timing students and actors waiting for the next gig.

I won't go into details, but we put a considerable amount of effort and ingenuity, most of it more or less legal, into identifying the worst possible time to go talk to Cathal Mills. He had some high position with a gibberish title, in a company that provided something called "corporate e-learning software localization solutions" (I was impressed: I hadn't thought it was possible for me to dislike him any more than I already did), so we walked in on him halfway through a crucial meeting with a big potential client. Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist's rat mazes. Cassie shot me a wide-eyed, horrified look as we followed some droid through the fifth set of swipe-card swing doors.

Cathal was in the boardroom, and he was easy to identify: he was the one with the PowerPoint presentation. He was still a handsome guy—tall and broad-shouldered, with bright blue eyes and hard, dangerous bones—but fat was starting to blur his waist and hang under his jaw; in a few more years he would have coarsened into piggishness. The new client was four identical, humorless Americans in inscrutable dark suits.

"Sorry, fellas," Cathal said, giving us an easy, warning smile, "the boardroom's being used."

"It is indeed," Cassie told him. She had dressed for the occasion, in ripped jeans and an old turquoise camisole that said YUPPIES TASTE LIKE CHICKEN in red across the front. "I'm Detective Maddox—"

"And I'm Detective Ryan," I said, flipping out my ID. "We'd like to ask you a few questions."

The smile didn't budge, but a savage flash shot across his eyes. "This isn't a good time."

"No?" Cassie inquired sociably, lounging against the table so that the PowerPoint image vanished into a blob on her camisole.

"No." He cut his eyes sideways at the new client, who stared disapprovingly into space and shuffled papers.

"This looks like a good place to talk," she said, surveying the boardroom appreciatively, "but we could go back to headquarters if you'd prefer."

"What's this about?" Cathal demanded. It was a mistake, and he knew it as soon as the words were out. If we had said anything off our own bat, in front of the clones, it would have been an invitation to a harassment claim, and he looked like the type who would sue; but hey, he had asked.

"We're investigating a child-murder," Cassie said sweetly. "There's a possibility it's linked to the alleged rape of a young girl, and we have reason to believe you might be able to help us with our inquiries."

It only took him a fraction of a second to recover. "I can't imagine how," he said, gravely. "But if it's a question of a murdered child, then of course, anything I can do… Fellas"—this to the client—"I apologize for this interruption, but I'm afraid duty calls. Let me get Fiona to show you around the building. We'll pick up here in just a few minutes."

"Optimism," Cassie said approvingly. "I like that."

Cathal shot her a filthy look and hit a button on an object that turned out to be an intercom. "Fiona, could you come down to the boardroom and give these gentlemen a tour of the building?"

I held the door open for the clones, who filed out with prim poker faces unchanged. "It's been a pleasure," I told them.

"Were they CIA?" Cassie whispered, not quite quietly enough.

Cathal already had his mobile out. He phoned his lawyer—kind of ostentatiously; I think we were supposed to be intimidated—and then flipped his phone shut and tilted his chair back, legs spread wide, checking Cassie out with slow, deliberate enjoyment. For a giddy second I was tempted to say something to him—You gave me my first cigarette, do you remember?—just to see his brows draw sharply downwards, the greasy smirk fall away from his face. Cassie batted her lashes and gave him a mock—flirtatious smile, which pissed him off: he banged down the chair and shot his wrist out of his sleeve to check his Rolex.

"In a hurry?" Cassie inquired.

"My lawyer should be here within twenty minutes," Cathal said. "Let me save us all some time and hassle, though: I'll have nothing to say to you then either."

"Awww," Cassie said, perching on the desk with her backside on a pile of paperwork; Cathal eyeballed her, but decided not to rise to the bait. "We're wasting a whole twenty minutes of Cathal's valuable time, and all he ever did was gang-rape a teenage girl. Life is so unfair."

"Maddox," I said.

"I've never raped a girl in my life," Cathal said, with a nasty little smile. "Never needed to."

"See, that's what's interesting, Cathal," Cassie said confidentially. "You look to me like you used to be a pretty good-looking guy. So I can't help wondering—do you have some problems with your sexuality? A lot of rapists do, you know. That's why you need to rape women: you're desperately trying to prove to yourselves that you're actually real men, in spite of the little problem."

"Maddox—"

"If you know what's good for you," Cathal said, "you'll shut your mouth right now."

"What is it, Cathal? Can't get it up? In the closet? Underendowed?"

"Show me your ID," Cathal snapped. "I'm going to file a complaint about this. You'll be out on your arse before you know what hit you."

"Maddox," I said sharply, doing O'Kelly. "A word with you. Now."

"You know, Cathal," Cassie told him sympathetically, on her way out, "medical science can help with most of that stuff, these days." I grabbed her arm and shoved her through the door.

In the corridor I chewed her out, keeping my voice low but carrying: stupid bitch, have some respect, he's not even a suspect, yada yada yada. (The "not a suspect" part was actually true: along the way we had learned, to our disappointment, that Cathal had spent the first three weeks of August drumming up business in the United States and had some fairly impressive credit-card bills to prove it.) Cassie gave me a grin and an A-OK sign.

"I'm really sorry about that, Mr. Mills," I said, going back into the boardroom.

"I don't envy you your job, mate," Cathal said. He was furious, red spots high on his cheekbones, and I wondered if Cassie had actually hit the mark, somewhere in there; if Sandra had told her some little detail she hadn't shared.

"Tell me about it," I said, sitting down opposite him and running a weary hand over my face. "She's a token, obviously. I wouldn't even bother filing a complaint; the brass are scared to reprimand her in case she runs to the Equality Commission. The lads and I will sort her out, though, believe me. Just give us time."

"You know what that bitch needs, don't you?" Cathal said.

"Hey, we all know what she needs," I said, "but would you want to get close enough to give it to her?"

We shared a manly little snigger. "Listen," I said, "I should tell you there's not a chance of us arresting anyone for this alleged rape. Even if the story's true, the statute of limitations ran out years ago. I'm working a murder case; I don't give a fuck about this other thing."

Cathal pulled a packet of tooth-whitening gum out of his pocket, tossed a piece into his mouth and jerked the pack at me. I hate gum, but I took a piece anyway. He was calming down, the high color fading. "You looking into what happened to the Devlin kid?"

"Yeah," I said. "You know her father, right? Did you ever meet Katy?"

"Nah. I knew Jonathan when we were kids, but we don't stay in touch. His wife's a nightmare. It's like trying to make conversation with wallpaper."

"I've met her," I said, with a wry grin.

"So what's all this about a rape?" Cathal asked. He was cracking easily at his gum, but his eyes were wary, animal.

"Basically," I said, "we're checking out anything in the Devlins' lives that smells funny. And we hear you and Jonathan Devlin and Shane Waters did something dodgy to a girl in the summer of '84. What's the real story?" I would have liked to spend a few more minutes on the male bonding, but we didn't have time. Once his lawyer got there, my chance would be over.

"Shane Waters," Cathal said. "Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while."

"You don't have to say anything till your lawyer gets here," I said, "but you're not a suspect in this murder. I know you weren't in the country that week. I just want all the information I can get about the Devlins."

"You think Jonathan knocked off his own kid?" Cathal looked amused.

"You tell me," I said. "You know him better than I do."

Cathal leaned his head back and laughed. It eased his shoulders and took twenty years off him, and for the first time he looked familiar to me: the cruel, handsome cut of his lips, the tricky glitter in his eyes. "Listen, mate," he said, "let me tell you something about Devlin. The man's a fucking pussy. He probably still acts the hard man, but don't let that fool you: he's never taken a risk in his life without me there to give him a shove. That's why he's where he is today, and I'm"—he tilted his chin at the boardroom—"I'm here."

"So this rape wasn't his idea."

He shook his head and wagged a finger at me, grinning: Nice try. "Who told you there was a rape?"

"Come on, man," I said, grinning back, "you know I can't tell you that. Witnesses."

Cathal cracked his gum slowly and stared at me. "OK," he said finally. The traces of the smile were still hanging at the corners of his mouth. "Let's put it this way. There was no rape, but if—let's just say—there had been, Jonner would never in a million years have had the balls to think of it. And, if it had ever happened, he would've spent the next few weeks so scared he was practically shitting his pants, convinced that someone had seen it and was going to go to the cops, babbling on about how we were all going to jail, wanting to turn himself in… The guy doesn't have the nerve to kill a kitten, never mind a kid."

"And you?" I said. "You wouldn't have been worried that these witnesses would rat you out?"

"Me?" The grin broadened again. "Not a chance, mate. If, hypothetically, any of this had ever happened, I would've been fucking delighted with myself, because I would have known I was going to get away with it."

"I vote we arrest him," I said, that evening in Cassie's. Sam was in Ballsbridge, at a champagne-reception-cum-dance for his cousin's twenty-first, so it was just the two of us, sitting on the sofa drinking wine and deciding how to go after Jonathan Devlin.

"For what?" Cassie demanded, reasonably. "We can't get him on the rape. We might just possibly maybe have enough to pull him in for questioning on Peter and Jamie, except we don't have a witness who can put them at the rape scene, so we can't show a motive. Sandra didn't see you guys, and if you come forward, it'll compromise your involvement in this whole case, besides which O'Kelly will cut off your bollocks and use them for Christmas decorations. And we don't have a single thing linking Jonathan to Katy's death—just some stomach trouble that might or might not have been abuse and might or might not have been him. All we can do is ask him to come in and talk to us."

"I'd just like to get him out of that house," I said slowly. "I'm worried about Rosalind." It was the first time I had put this unease into words. It had been building in me, gradually and only half-acknowledged, ever since that first hurried phone call she had made, but over the past two days it had risen to a pitch I couldn't ignore.

"Rosalind? Why?"

"You said our guy won't kill unless he feels threatened. That fits with everything we've heard. According to Cathal, Jonathan was petrified that we'd tell someone about the rape; so he goes after us. Katy decided to stop getting sick, maybe threatened to tell, so he kills her. If he finds out Rosalind's been talking to me…"

"I don't think you need to be too worried about her," Cassie said. She finished her wine. "We could be completely wrong about Katy; it's all guesswork. And I wouldn't put too much weight on anything Cathal Mills says. He strikes me as a psychopath, and they lie easier than they tell the truth."

I raised my eyebrows. "You only met him for about five minutes. What, you're diagnosing the guy? He just struck me as a prick."

She shrugged. "I'm not saying I'm sure about Cathal. But they're surprisingly easy to spot, if you know how."

"Is this what they taught you at Trinity?"

Cassie held out her hand for my glass, got up to refill them. "Not exactly," she said, at the fridge. "I knew a psychopath once."

Her back was to me, and if there was an odd undertone in her voice I didn't catch it. "I did see this thing on the Discovery Channel where they said up to five percent of the population are psychopaths," I said, "but most of them don't break the law so they never get diagnosed. How much would you bet that half the government—"

"Rob," Cassie said. "Shut up. Please. I'm trying to tell you something here."

This time I did hear the strain. She came over and gave me my glass, took hers to the window and leaned back on the sill. "You wanted to know why I dropped out of college," she said, very evenly. "In second year I made friends with this guy in my class. He was popular, quite good-looking and very charming and intelligent and interesting—I didn't fancy him or anything like that, but I guess I was flattered that he was paying all this attention to me. We used to skip all our classes and spend hours over coffee. He brought me presents—cheap ones, and some of them looked used, but we were broke students, and hey, it's the thought that counts, right? Everyone thought it was sweet, how close we were."

She took a sip of her drink, swallowed hard. "I worked out pretty fast that he told a lot of lies, mostly for no real reason, but I knew—well, he'd told me—that he'd had a terrible childhood and that he'd been bullied in school, so I figured he'd got into the habit of lying to protect himself. I thought—Jesus Christ—I thought I could help: if he knew he had a friend who'd stick by him no matter what, he'd get more secure and wouldn't need to lie any more. I was only eighteen, nineteen."

I was afraid to move, even to put down my glass; I was terrified that any tiny movement would be the one that would send her pushing herself up off the windowsill and spinning the subject away with some flippant comment. There was an odd, taut set to her mouth that made her look much older, and I knew she had never told this story to anyone, ever before.

"I didn't even notice I was drifting away from all the other friends I'd made, because he went into this cold sulk if I spent time with them. He went into the cold sulk a lot, actually, for any reason or none, and I would have to spend ages trying to figure out what I'd done and apologizing and making up for it. When I went to meet him I never knew whether he'd be all hugs and compliments or all cold shoulder and disapproving looks; there was no logic to it. Sometimes the things he pulled—just little things: borrowing my lecture notes just before exams, then forgetting to bring them back in for days, then claiming he'd lost them, then getting outraged when I saw them sticking out of his bag, that kind of thing—it made me so furious I wanted to kill him with my bare hands, but he was lovely just often enough that I didn't want to stop hanging around with him." A tiny, crooked twist of a smile. "I didn't want to hurt him."

It took her three tries to light a cigarette; Cassie, who had told me about getting stabbed without so much as tensing up. "Anyway," she said, "this went on for almost two years. In January of fourth year he made a pass at me, in my flat. I turned him down—I have no idea why, by that time I was so confused I barely knew what I was doing, but thank God I had a few of my instincts left. I said I just wanted to be friends, he seemed fine with it, we talked for a while, he left. The next day I went into class and everyone was staring at me and nobody would talk to me. It took me two weeks to find out what was going on. I finally cornered this girl Sarah-Jane—we'd been pretty good friends, back in first year—and she said that they all knew what I'd done to him."

She drew on her cigarette, hard and fast. She was looking at me, but not quite meeting my eyes; hers were too wide, dilated. I thought of Jessica Devlin's dazed, narcotized stare. "The night I turned him down, he'd gone straight to these other girls' flat, girls from our class. He arrived in tears. He told them that he and I had been secretly going out for a while, that he'd decided it wasn't working out, and that I had said if he broke up with me I'd tell everyone he'd raped me. He said I'd threatened to go to the police, the papers, to ruin his life." She looked for an ashtray, flicked ash, missed.

It didn't occur to me at the time to wonder why she was telling me this story, why now. This may seem strange, but everything did that month, strange and precarious. The moment when Cassie had said, "We'll have it," had set in motion some unstoppable tectonic shift; familiar things were cracking open and twisting inside out before my eyes, the world turning beautiful and dangerous as a bright spinning blade. Cassie opening the door to one of her secret rooms seemed like a natural, inevitable part of this massive sea change. In a way, I suppose it was. It was only much later that I understood she had actually been telling me something very specific, if I had just been paying attention.

"My God," I said, after a while. "Just because you bruised his ego?"

"Not just that," Cassie said. She was wearing a soft cherry-colored sweater and I could see it vibrating, very fast, just above her breast, and I realized my heart was speeding, too. "Because he was bored. Because, by turning him down, I had made it clear that he'd got as much entertainment out of me as he was going to, so this was the only other use he had for me. Because, when you come right down to it, it was fun."

"Did you tell this Sarah-Jane what had happened?"

"Oh, yeah," Cassie said levelly. "I told everyone who would still talk to me. Not one of them believed me. They all believed him—all our classmates, all our mutual acquaintances, which added up to just about everyone I knew. People who were supposed to be my friends."

"Oh, Cassie," I said. I was aching to go over to her, put my arms around her, hold her close until that terrible rigidity melted out of her body and she came back from whatever remote place she had gone to. But the immobility of her, her braced shoulders: I couldn't tell whether she would welcome it or whether it would be the worst thing I could do. Blame boarding school; blame, if you prefer, some deep-seated character flaw. The fact is that I didn't know how. I doubt that, in the long run, it would have made any difference; but this only makes me wish even more intensely that, at least for that one moment, I had known what to do.

"I stuck it out for another couple of weeks," Cassie said. She lit another cigarette off the end of the old one, something I had never seen her do before. "He was always surrounded by this knot of people giving him protective pats and glaring at me. People were coming up to me to tell me that I was the reason why genuine rapists got away with it. One girl said I deserved to be raped so I'd realize what a horrible thing I'd done."

She laughed, a small harsh sound. "It's ironic, isn't it? A hundred psychology students, and not one of us recognized a classic psychopath. You know the strange thing? I wished I had done everything he claimed I had. If I had, then it would all have made sense: I would have been getting what I deserved. But I hadn't done any of it, and yet that made absolutely no difference to what happened. There was no such thing as cause and effect. I thought I was losing my mind."

I leaned over—slowly, the way you would reach out towards a terrified animal—and took her hand; that much, at least, I managed to do. She gave a quick breath of a laugh, squeezed my fingers, then let them go. "Anyway. Finally he came up to me one day, in the Buttery—all these girls were trying to stop him, but he sort of shook them off bravely and came over to me and said, loud, so they could hear him, 'Please, stop ringing me in the middle of the night. What have I ever done to you?' I was completely stunned, I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. All I could think of to say was, 'But I haven't rung you.' He smiled and shook his head, like, Yeah, right, and then he leaned in and said—just quietly, in this chirpy businesslike voice—'If I ever did break into your flat and rape you, I don't think the charges would stick, do you?' Then he smiled again and went back to his mates."

"Hon," I said finally, carefully, "maybe you should put in an alarm on this place. I don't want to scare you, but—"

Cassie shook her head. "And what, never leave the flat again? I can't afford to start getting paranoid. I've got good locks, and I keep my gun beside my bed." I had noticed that, of course, but there are plenty of detectives who don't feel right unless they have their guns within reach. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure he'd never actually do it. I know the way he works—unfortunately. It's a lot more fun for him to think that I'm always wondering than to just do it and get it over with."

She took a last pull on her cigarette, leaned forward to stub it out. Her spine was so rigid that the movement looked painful. "At the time, though, the whole thing freaked me out enough that I dropped out of college. I went over to France—I've got cousins in Lyons, I stayed with them for a year and worked as a waitress in this café. It was nice. That's where I got the Vespa. Then I came back and applied to Templemore."

"Because of him?"

She shrugged. "I guess. Probably. So maybe one good thing came out of it. Two: I've got good psychopath sensors now. It's like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you're supersensitized." She finished her drink in a long swallow. "I ran into Sarah-Jane last year, in a pub in town. I said hi. She told me he was doing fine, 'in spite of your best efforts,' and then walked off."

"Is that what your nightmares are about?" I said gently, after a moment. I had woken her from these dreams—flailing at me, gasping incomprehensible spates of words—twice before, when we had worked rape-murders, but she would never tell me the details.

"Yeah. I dream he's the guy we're after, but we can't prove it, and when he finds out I'm on the case, he…Well. He does his thing."

I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.

"What was his name?" I asked. I was desperate to do something, fix this somehow, and running a background check on this guy, trying to find something to arrest him for, was the only thing I could think of to do. And I suppose a small part of me, whether through cruelty or detached curiosity or whatever, had noticed that Cassie refused to say it, and wanted to see what would happen if she did.

Cassie's eyes finally focused on mine, and I was shaken by the concentrated, diamond-hard hatred. "Legion," she said.