In the Woods

15

I got drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I'd been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed sickeningly with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally I realized that, while the nausea showed no signs of getting better, it probably wasn't going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on top of the covers without taking off my clothes.

My dreams were uneasy ones, with a clogged, tainted quality to them. Something thrashing and yowling in a burlap bag, laughter and a lighter moving closer. Shattered glass on the kitchen floor, and someone's mother was sobbing. I was a trainee again in some lonely border county, and Jonathan Devlin and Cathal Mills were hiding out in the hills with guns and a hunting dog, living wild and we had to catch them, me and two Murder detectives tall and cold as waxworks, our boots mired deep in treacly mud. I half woke fighting the bedclothes, sheets pulled away from the mattress into sweaty tangles, and was dragged down into sleep again even as I realized I had been dreaming.

But I woke up in the morning with one image brilliantly clear in my head, slapped across the front of my mind like a neon sign. Nothing to do with Peter or Jamie or Katy: Emmett, Tom Emmett, one of those two Murder detectives who had paid a flying visit to Ballygobackwards when I was a trainee. Emmett was tall and very thin, with subtly wonderful clothes (now that I think of it, this is probably where I got my first immutable impression of how Murder detectives are supposed to dress) and a face straight out of an old cowboy movie, scored and polished like ancient wood. He was still on the squad when I joined—he's retired now—and he seemed like a pretty nice guy, but I never managed to get past that first awe of him; whenever he talked to me I would instantly congeal into an inarticulate, schoolboyish mess.

I had been skulking in the Ballygobackwards car park one afternoon, smoking and trying not to be too obvious about eavesdropping on their conversation. The other detective had asked a question—what, I couldn't hear—and Emmett had shaken his head briefly. "If he doesn't, then we've made a bollocks of the whole thing," he'd said, taking a last crisp drag on his cigarette and extinguishing it under one elegant shoe. "We'll have to go back. Right back to the beginning, and see where we went wrong." Then they'd turned and gone into the station, side by side, shoulders hunched and secretive in their discreet dark jackets.

I had, I knew—there's nothing like booze for triggering abject self-reproach-made a complete bollocks of just about everything, in just about every possible way. But that barely mattered, because the solution was suddenly so clear. I felt as if everything that had happened throughout this case—the Kavanagh nightmare, the awful interview with Jonathan, all the sleepless nights and little treacheries of the mind—had been sent by the hand of some wise kind god to bring me to this moment. Here I had been avoiding Knocknaree wood like the plague, I think I would have interviewed everyone in the country and racked my brain till it exploded before it occurred to me to take a step back in there, if I hadn't been battered to the point where I had no defense left against the single blindingly obvious thing: I was the one person who beyond any doubt knew at least some of the answers, and if anything could give them back to me, it was (right back to the beginning) that wood.

It sounds facile, I'm sure. But I can't begin to describe to you what it meant to me, this thousand-watt bulb clicking on above my head, this beacon to tell me that I wasn't lost in a wilderness after all, that I knew exactly where to go. I almost burst out laughing, sitting there in bed with early-morning light streaming between the curtains. I should have had the mother of all hangovers, but I felt like I'd slept for a week; I was bubbling over with energy like a twenty-year-old. I showered and shaved and gave Heather such a cheerful "Good morning" that she looked taken aback and slightly suspicious, and then I drove into town singing along to terrible chart music on the car radio.

I found a parking space on Stephen's Green—it felt like a good omen; they're unheard of at that hour of the morning—and did some quick shopping on my way to work. In a little bookshop off Grafton Street I found a beautiful old copy of Wuthering Heights—thick pages browning at the edges, rich red binding stamped in gold, "For Sara, Christmas 1922" in faded ink on the title page. Then I went to Brown Thomas and bought a sleek, complicated little machine that made cappuccino; Cassie has a thing for coffee with froth on top, I had meant to get her this for Christmas but had somehow never got around to it. I walked to work without bothering to move my car. It cost me a ridiculous amount of money in the meter, but it was the kind of sunny, buoyant day that encourages extravagance.

Cassie was already at her desk with a pile of paperwork. Sam and the floaters, luckily for me, were nowhere to be seen. "Morning," she said, giving me a cool warning look.

"Here," I said, dumping the two bags in front of her.

"What's this?" she demanded, eyeing them suspiciously.

"That," I said, pointing at the coffee gadget, "is your belated Christmas present. And this one is an apology. I am so, so sorry, Cass—not just about yesterday, but about the way I've been all these last few weeks. I have been an utter pain in the arse and you have every right to be furious with me. But I absolutely promise that's over. From now on I will be a normal, sane, non-horrible human being."

"That'd be a first," Cassie said automatically, and my heart lifted. She opened the book—she loves Emily Brontë—and ran her fingers over the title page.

"Am I forgiven? I'll go down on my knees if you like. Seriously."

"I would love to make you do it," Cassie said, "but somebody might see you, and the grapevine would blow a fuse on that one. Ryan, you little bastard. You ruined my perfectly good sulk."

"You couldn't have kept it up anyway," I said, enormously relieved. "You would have cracked by lunchtime."

"Don't push it. Come here, you." She held out an arm, and I bent and gave her a quick hug. "Thank you."

"You're very welcome," I said. "And I really mean it: no more obnoxiousness."

Cassie watched me as I took off my coat. "Look," she said, "it's not just that you've been a pain in the hole. I've been worried about you. If you don't want to deal with this any more—no, listen—then you could swap with Sam, go after Andrews and let him take the family. He's got far enough that any of us could take over; it's not like we're going to need help from his uncle or anything. Sam won't ask questions, you know what he's like. There's no reason for you to drive yourself nuts over this."

"Cass, I'm genuinely, honest-to-God fine," I said. "Yesterday was a huge wake-up call. I swear on anything you can think of, I've worked out how to deal with this case."

"Rob, remember how you said to kick you if you got too weird about this one? This is me kicking you. Metaphorically, for now."

"Look, give me one more week. If by the end of next week you think I'm still not handling this, I'll swap with Sam. OK?"

"OK," Cassie said finally, though she still looked unconvinced. I was in such a good mood that this unexpected protective streak, which normally would have given me the fidgets, seemed very touching; probably because I knew it was no longer necessary. I gave her shoulder a clumsy little squeeze on the way to my desk.

"Actually," she said, as I sat down, "this whole Sandra Scully thing has one major silver lining. You know how we've been wanting to get our hands on Rosalind and Jessica's medical records? Well, we've got Katy showing physical signs of abuse, Jessica showing psychological signs and now Jonathan admitting to rape. I think there's a good chance we've got enough circumstantial stuff to pull the records."

"Maddox," I said, "you're a star." This was the one thing that had been nagging at me, the fact that I had made a fool of myself by sending us off on a wild-goose chase. Apparently it hadn't been that pointless after all. "But I thought you thought Devlin wasn't our guy."

Cassie shrugged. "Not exactly. He's hiding something, but it could be just abuse—well, not just, you know what I mean—or he could be covering for Margaret, or…I'm not as sure as you are that he's guilty, but I'd like to see what's in those records, that's all."

"I'm not sure either."

She raised an eyebrow. "You seemed pretty sure yesterday."

"Speaking of which," I said, a little awkwardly, "do you have any idea whether he's filed a complaint on me? I don't have the bollocks to check."

"Because you apologized so nicely," Cassie told me, "I'm going to overlook that wonderful setup line. He didn't say anything about it to me, and anyway you'd know if he had: you'd be able to hear O'Kelly all the way to Knocknaree. That's why I'm assuming Cathal Mills hasn't filed anything on me for saying he had a teeny weenie, either."

"He won't. Can you seriously see him sitting down with some desk sergeant and explaining that you suggested he might have a limp mini-dick? Devlin's a different story, though. He's half off his trolley right now anyway—"

"Don't be bitching about Jonathan Devlin," Sam said, bouncing into the incident room. He was flushed and overexcited, his collar twisted and a forelock of fair hair tumbling into his eyes. "Devlin is The Man. Honestly, if I didn't think he might take me up wrong, I'd snog the face off him."

"You'll make a lovely couple," I said, putting down my pen. "What's he done?" Cassie spun her chair around, a smile of anticipation starting on her face.

Sam pulled out his chair with a flourish, dropped into it and swung his feet up onto the table like a private eye in an old movie; if he had had a hat, he would have sent it spinning across the room. "He's only after picking Andrews out of the voice lineup. Andrews and his lawyer nearly had a conniption about it, and Devlin wasn't best pleased to hear from me either—what the hell did ye say to him?—but they all did it in the end. I rang Devlin up—I figured that was the best way; you know how everyone always sounds different down the phone?—and I got Andrews and a bunch of the lads to say a few sentences from the phone calls: 'Nice little girl you've got there,' 'You have no idea what you're messing with…'"

He shoved the lock of hair away with his wrist; his face, laughing and open, was triumphant as a little boy's. "Andrews was mumbling and drawling and all sorts, trying to make his voice sound different, but my main man Jonathan picked him out in five seconds flat, not a bother on him. He was yelling at me down the phone, wanting to know who it was, and Andrews and his lawyer—I had your man Devlin on speakerphone so they could hear it themselves, I didn't want any arguments later—they were sitting there with faces on them like a pair of slapped arses. It was brilliant."

"Oh, well done, you," Cassie said, leaning across the table to high-five him. Sam, grinning, held up his other palm to me.

"To be honest, I'm delighted with myself. It's nowhere near enough to charge him with the murder, but we can probably bring some kind of harassment charge—and it's definitely enough for us to hold him for questioning and see how far we get."

"Have you kept him in?" I asked.

Sam shook his head. "I didn't say a word to him after the lineup, just thanked him and said I'd be in touch. I want to let him worry about it for a while."

"Oh, that's underhanded, O'Neill," I said gravely. "I wouldn't have thought it of you." Sam was fun to tease. He didn't always fall for it, but when he did he got all earnest and stammery.

He gave me a withering look. "And, as well, I want to see if there's any chance I can tap his phone for a few days. If he's our boy, I'd bet he didn't do it himself. His alibi checks out, and anyway he's not the type to mess up his fancy gear doing his own dirty work; he'd hire someone. The voice ID might get him panicky enough to ring his hit man, or at least say something stupid to someone."

"Go through his old phone records again, too," I reminded him. "See who he was talking to last month."

"O'Gorman's already on it," Sam said smugly. "I'll give Andrews a week or two, see if anything turns up, and then pull him in. And"—he looked suddenly bashful, caught between shame and mischief—"you know how Devlin said Andrews sounded locked on the phone? And how we wondered if he was a little tipsy yesterday? I think our boyo might have a bit of a drinking problem. I wonder what he'd be like if we went to see him at, say, eight or nine in the evening. He might be—you know…more likely to talk, less likely to call his lawyer. I know it's bad to take advantage of the man's failing, but…"

"Rob's right," Cassie said, shaking her head. "You've got a cruel streak."

Sam's eyes rounded in dismay for an instant; then the penny dropped. "Feck the pair of ye," he said happily, and spun his chair round in a full circle, feet still in the air.

We were all giddy that night, giddy as children given an unexpected day off school. Sam, to our collective disbelief, had managed to coax O'Kelly into convincing a judge to give him an order to tap Andrews's phone for two weeks. Normally you can't get a tap unless there are large amounts of explosives involved, but Operation Vestal was still front-page news almost every other day—"NO NEW LEADS IN KATY'S MURDER (page 5: 'Is Your Child Safe?')"—and the high drama of it all gave us some extra leverage. Sam was jubilant: "I know the little bastard's hiding something, lads, I'd put money on it. All it'll take is a few too many pints one of these nights, and bang! we'll have him." He had brought a lovely buttery white wine to celebrate. I was light-headed with reprieve and hungrier than I'd been in weeks; I cooked a huge Spanish omelet, tried to flip it high like a pancake and nearly sent it into the sink. Cassie flew around the flat, barefoot below summery cropped jeans, slicing a baguette and turning Michelle Shocked up loud and slagging my hand-eye coordination—"And someone actually gave this guy a personal firearm, it's only a matter of time before he starts showing it off to impress some girl and shoots himself in the leg…"

After dinner we played Cranium, a slapdash, improvised three-person version—I am at a loss for words to adequately describe Sam, after four glasses of wine, trying to mime "carburetor." ("C-3PO? Milking a cow?…That little man out of Swiss clocks!") The long white curtains billowed and spun in the breeze through the open sash window and a sliver of moon hung in the dimming sky, and I couldn't remember the last time I had had an evening like this, a happy, silly evening with no tiny gray shades plucking at the edges of every conversation.

When Sam left, Cassie taught me how to swing dance. We had had inappropriate cappuccinos after dinner, to christen the new machine, and we were both hours away from being able to sleep, and scratchy old music was pouring out of the CD player; Cassie caught my hands and pulled me up from the sofa. "How the hell do you know how to swing dance?" I demanded.

"My aunt and uncle thought kids should have Lessons. Lots of them. I can do charcoal drawings and play piano, too."

"All at once? I can play the triangle. And I have two left feet."

"I don't care. I want to dance."

The flat was too small. "Come on," Cassie said. "Take your shoes off," and she grabbed the remote control and turned the music up to eleven and climbed out the window, down the fire escape to the roof of the extension below.

I'm no dancer, but she taught me the basic moves again and again, her feet skipping nimbly away from my missteps, until suddenly they clicked into place and we were dancing, spinning and swaying to the sassy, expert syncopations, recklessly close to the edges of the flat roof. Cassie's hands in mine were gymnast-strong and flexible. "You can too dance!" she called breathlessly, eyes shining, over the music.

"What?" I shouted, and tripped over my feet. Laughter, unrolling like streamers over the dark gardens below.

A window slammed up below us and a quavery Anglo-Irish voice screeched, "If you don't turn that down at once, I shall call the police!"

"We are the police!" Cassie yelled back. I clapped a hand over her mouth and we shook with explosive, suppressed laughter until, after a confused silence, the window banged shut. Cassie ran back up the fire escape and hung off it by one hand, still giggling, while she aimed the remote control through the window, changed the CD to Chopin's nocturnes, turned down the volume.

We lay side by side on the extension roof, hands behind our heads, elbows just touching. My head was still spinning a little, not unpleasantly, from the dancing and the wine. The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.