In the Woods

17

For once I woke first. It was very early, the roads still silent and the sky—Cassie, high above the rooftops with no one to look in her window, almost never closes the curtains—turquoise mottled with palest gold, perfect as a film still; I could only have been asleep an hour or two. Somewhere a cluster of seagulls burst into wild, keening cries.

In the thin sober light the flat looked abandoned and desolate: last night's plates and glasses scattered on the coffee table, a tiny ghostly draft lifting the pages of notes, my sweater hunched in a dark blot on the floor and long distorting shadows slanting everywhere. I felt a pang under my breastbone, so intense and physical that I thought it must be thirst. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I reached over and drank it off, but the hollow ache didn't subside.

I had thought my movement might wake Cassie, but she didn't stir. She was deeply asleep in the crook of my arm, her lips slightly parted, one hand curled loosely on the pillow. I brushed the hair away from her forehead and woke her by kissing her.

We didn't get up till around three. The sky had turned gray and heavy, and a chill ran over me as I left the warmth of the duvet.

"I'm starving," Cassie said, buttoning her jeans. She looked very beautiful that day, tousled and full-lipped, her eyes still and mysterious as a daydreaming child's, and this new radiance—jarring against the grim afternoon—made me uneasy somehow. "Fry-up?"

"No, thanks," I said. This is our usual weekend routine when I stay over, a big Irish breakfast and a long walk on the beach, but I couldn't face either the excruciating thought of talking about anything that had happened the previous night or the heavy-handed complicity of avoiding it. The flat felt suddenly tiny and claustrophobic. I had bruises and scrapes in weird places: my stomach, my elbow, a nasty little gouge on one thigh. "I should really go get my car."

Cassie pulled a T-shirt over her head and said easily, through the material, "You want a lift?" but I had seen the swift, startled flinch in her eyes.

"I think I'll take the bus, actually," I said. I found my shoes under the sofa. "I could do with a bit of a walk. I'll ring you later, OK?"

"Fair enough," she said cheerfully, but I knew something had passed between us, something alien and slender and dangerous. We held on to each other for a moment, hard, at the door of her flat.

I made a sort of half-assed attempt at waiting for the bus, but after ten or fifteen minutes I told myself it was too much work—two different buses, Sunday schedules, this could take me all day. In truth, I had no desire to go anywhere near Knocknaree until I knew the site would be full of noisy energetic archaeologists; the thought of it today, deserted and silent under this low gray sky, made me feel slightly sick. I picked up a cup of dirty-tasting coffee at a petrol station and started to walk home. Monkstown is four or five miles from Sandymount, but I was in no hurry: Heather would be home, with biohazardous-looking green stuff on her face and Sex and the City turned up loud, wanting to tell me about all her speed-dating conquests and demanding to know where I had been and how my jeans had got all muddy and what I had done with the car. I felt as if someone had been setting off a relentless series of depth charges inside my head.

I knew, you see, that I had just made at least one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I had slept with the wrong people before, but I had never done anything at quite this level of monumental stupidity. The standard response after something like this happens is either to begin an official "relationship" or to cut off all communication—I had attempted both in the past, with varying degrees of success—but I could hardly stop speaking to my partner, and as for entering into a romantic relationship… Even if it hadn't been against regulations, I couldn't even manage to eat or sleep or buy toilet bleach, I was lunging at suspects and blanking on the stand and having to be rescued from archaeological sites in the middle of the night; the thought of trying to be someone's boyfriend, with all the attendant responsibilities and complications, made me want to curl up in a ball and whimper.

I was so tired that my feet, hitting the pavement, seemed to belong to someone else. The wind spat fine rain in my face and I thought, with a sick, growing sense of disaster, of all the things I couldn't do any more: stay up all night getting drunk with Cassie, tell her about girls I met, sleep on her sofa. There was no longer any way, ever again, to see her as Cassie-just-Cassie, one of the lads but a whole lot easier on the eye; not now that I had seen her the way I had. Every sunny familiar spot in our shared landscape had become a dark minefield, fraught with treacherous nuances and implications. I remembered her, only a few days before, reaching into my coat pocket for my lighter as we sat in the castle gardens; she hadn't even broken off her sentence to do it and I had loved the gesture so much, loved the sure, unthinking ease of it, the taking for granted.

I know this will sound incredible, given that everyone from my parents down to a cretin like Quigley had expected it, but I had never once seen this coming. Christ but we were smug: supremely arrogant, secure in our certainty that we were exempt from the oldest rule known to man. I swear I lay down as innocent as a child. Cassie tilted her head to take out her hair clips, made faces when they caught; I tucked my socks into my shoes, the way I always do, so she wouldn't fall over them in the morning. I know you'll say our naïveté was deliberate, but if you believe only one thing I tell you, make it this: neither of us knew.

When I reached Monkstown I still couldn't face going home. I walked on to Dun Laoghaire and sat on a wall at the end of the pier, watching tweedy couples on Sunday-afternoon constitutionals run into each other with simian hoots of delight, until it got dark and the wind started cutting through my coat and a uniform on patrol gave me a suspicious look. I thought about ringing Charlie, for some reason, but I didn't have his number in my mobile and anyway I wasn't sure what I wanted to say.

That night I slept as if I had been clubbed. When I got into work the next morning I was still dazed and bleary-eyed, and the incident room looked strange, different in sneaky little ways I couldn't pinpoint, as if I had slid through some crack into an alternate and hostile reality. Cassie had left the old case file spread out all over her corner of the table. I sat down and tried to work, but I couldn't focus; by the time I reached the end of each sentence I had forgotten the beginning and had to go back and start over.

Cassie came in bright-cheeked from the wind, curls chrysanthemum-wild under a little red tam-o'-shanter. "Hi, you," she said. "How're you doing?"

She ruffled my hair as she passed behind me, and I couldn't help it: I flinched, and felt her hand freeze for an instant before she moved on.

"Fine," I said.

She slung her satchel over the back of her chair. I could tell, out of the corner of my eye, that she was looking at me; I kept my head down. "Rosalind and Jessica's medical records are coming in on Bernadette's fax. She says for us to come get them in a few minutes, and to give out the incident-room fax number next time. And it's your turn to cook dinner, but I only have chicken, so if you and Sam want anything else…"

Her voice sounded casual, but there was a faint, tentative question behind it. "Actually," I said, "I can't make it to dinner tonight. I have to be somewhere."

"Oh. OK." Cassie pulled off her hat and ran her fingers through her hair. "Pint, then, depending on when we finish?"

"I can't tonight," I said. "Sorry."

"Rob," she said, after a moment, but I didn't look up. For a second I thought she was going to go on anyway, but then the door opened and Sam bounced in, all fresh and buoyant after his wholesome rural weekend, with a couple of tapes in one hand and a sheaf of fax pages in the other. I had never been so glad to see him.

"Morning, lads. These are for you, with Bernadette's compliments. How was the weekend?"

"Fine," we said, in unison, and Cassie turned away and started hanging up her jacket.

I took the pages from Sam and tried to skim through them. My concentration was shot to hell, the Devlins' doctor had handwriting so lousy that it had to be an affectation, and Cassie—the unaccustomed patience with which she waited for me to finish each page, the moment of enforced nearness as she leaned over to pick it up—set my teeth on edge. It took me a massive effort of will to disentangle even a few salient facts.

Apparently Margaret had been easily alarmed when Rosalind was a baby—there were multiple doctor visits for every cold and cough—but in fact Rosalind seemed to be the healthiest of the bunch: no major illnesses, no major injuries. Jessica had been in an incubator for three days when she and Katy were born, when she was seven she had broken her arm falling off a jungle gym at school, and she had been underweight since she was about nine. They had both had chicken pox. They had both had all their shots. Rosalind had had an ingrown toenail removed, the year before.

"There's nothing here that says either abuse or Munchausen by proxy," Cassie said at last. Sam had found the tape recorder; in the background, Andrews was giving a real estate agent a long, injured rant about something or other.

If he hadn't been there, I think I would have ignored her. "And there's nothing that rules them out, either," I said, hearing the edge in my voice.

"How would you rule abuse out, definitively? All we can do is say there's no evidence of it, which there isn't. And I think this does rule out Munchausen. Like I said before, Margaret doesn't fit the profile anyway, and with this…The whole point of Munchausen is that it leads to medical treatment. Nobody's been Munchausening these two."

"So this was pointless," I said. I shoved the records away, too hard; half the pages fluttered off the edge of the table, onto the floor. "Surprise, surprise. This case is fucked. It's been fucked right from the start. We might as well throw it into the basement right now and move on to something that has a snowball's chance in hell, because this is a waste of everyone's time."

Andrews's phone calls had come to an end and the tape recorder hissed, faintly but persistently, until Sam clicked it off. Cassie leaned over sideways and started collecting the spilled fax pages. Nobody said anything for a very long time.

I wonder what Sam thought. He never said a word, but he must have known something was wrong, he couldn't have missed it: all of a sudden the long happy studenty evenings à trois stopped, and the atmosphere in the incident room was like something out of Sartre. It's possible that Cassie told him the whole story at some point or other, cried on his shoulder, but I doubt it: she had too much pride, always. I think probably she kept inviting him round for dinner and explained that I had trouble with child-murders—which was, after all, true—and wanted to spend my evenings unwinding; explained it so casually and convincingly that, even if Sam didn't believe her, he knew not to ask questions.

I imagine other people noticed, too. Detectives do tend to be fairly observant, and the fact that the Wonder Twins weren't speaking would have been headline news. It must have been all around the squad within twenty-four hours, accompanied by an array of lurid explanations—somewhere among them, I'm sure, the truth.

Or maybe not. Through everything, this much of the old alliance remained: the shared, animal instinct to keep its dying private. In some ways this is the most heartbreaking thing of all: always, always, right up until the end, the old connection was there when it was needed. We could spend excruciating hours not saying a word to each other unless it was unavoidable, and then in toneless voices, with averted eyes; but the instant O'Kelly threatened to take Sweeney and O'Gorman away we snapped to life, me methodically going through a long list of reasons why we still needed floaters, while Cassie assured me that the superintendent knew what he was doing and shrugged her shoulders and hoped the media wouldn't find out. It took all the energy I had. As the door closed and we were left alone again (or alone with Sam, who didn't count) the practiced sparkle would evaporate and I would turn expressionlessly away from her white, uncomprehending face, giving her my shoulder with the priggish aloofness of an offended cat.

I genuinely felt, you see, although I'm unclear on the process by which my mind arrived at this conclusion, that I had been wronged in some subtle but unpardonable way. If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her for being hurt.

The blood results from the stains on my shoes and the drop on the altar stone were due back any day. Through the submarine haze in which I was navigating, this was one of the few things that remained clear in my mind. Just about every other lead had crashed and burned; this was all I had left, and I held on to it with grim desperation. I was sure, with a certainty far beyond logic, that all we needed was a DNA match; that if we got it everything else would fall into place with the soft precision of snowflakes, the case—both cases—spreading out before me, perfect and dazzling.

I was aware, vaguely, that if this happened we would need Adam Ryan's DNA for comparison, and that Detective Rob would very probably vanish forever in a puff of scandal-flavored smoke. At the time, though, this didn't always seem like such a bad idea. On the contrary: there were moments when I looked forward to it with a kind of dull relief. It seemed—since I knew I had neither the guts nor the energy to extricate myself from this hideous mess—my only, or at least my simplest, way out.

Sophie, who believes in multitasking, phoned me from her car. "The DNA guys called," she said. "Bad news."

"Hey," I said, shooting upright and swiveling my chair around so that my back was to the others. "What's up?" I tried to keep my voice casual, but O'Gorman stopped whistling and I heard the rustle of Cassie putting down a page.

"Those blood samples are useless—both of them, the shoes and the one Helen found." She smacked her horn. "Jesus Christ, idiot, pick a lane, any lane!…The lab tried everything, but they're way too degraded for DNA. Sorry about that, but I did warn you."

"Yeah," I said, after a moment. "It's been that kind of case. Thanks, Sophie."

I hung up and stared at the phone. Cassie, across the table, asked tentatively, "What did she say?" but I didn't answer.

That evening, on my walk home from the DART, I rang Rosalind. It went against all my loudest instincts to do this to her—I had wanted, very badly, to leave her alone until she was ready to talk, let her choose her own time for this rather than forcing her back against the wall; but she was all I had left.

She came in on the Thursday morning, and I went down to meet her in Reception, just as I had that first time, all those weeks ago. A part of me had been afraid she would change her mind at the last minute and not show up, and my heart lifted when I saw her, sitting in a big chair with her cheek leaning pensively on her hand and a rose-colored scarf trailing. It was good to see someone young and pretty; I hadn't realized, until that moment, how exhausted and gray and jaded we were all starting to look. That scarf seemed like the first note of color I had seen in days.

"Rosalind," I said, and saw her face light up.

"Detective Ryan!"

"It's just occurred to me," I said. "Shouldn't you be in school?"

She gave me a conspiratorial sideways look. "My teacher likes me. I won't get in trouble." I knew I ought to lecture her about the evils of truancy, or something, but I couldn't help it: I laughed.

The door opened and Cassie came in from outside, tucking her cigarettes into her jeans pocket. She met my eyes for a second, glanced at Rosalind; then she brushed past us, up the stairs.

Rosalind bit her lip and looked up at me, her face troubled. "Your partner's annoyed that I'm here, isn't she?"

"Well, that's not really her problem," I said. "Sorry about that."

"Oh, it's all right." Rosalind managed a small smile. "She's never liked me very much, has she?"

"Detective Maddox doesn't dislike you."

"Don't worry about it, Detective Ryan, really. I'm used to it. A lot of girls don't like me. My mother says"—she ducked her head, embarrassed—"my mother says it's because they're jealous, but I don't see how that could be true."

"I do," I said, smiling down at her. "But I don't think that's the case with Detective Maddox. That had nothing to do with you. OK?"

"Did you have a fight?" she asked timidly, after a moment.

"Sort of," I said. "It's a long story."

I held the door open for her, and we crossed the cobbles towards the gardens. Rosalind's brow was furrowed thoughtfully. "I wish she didn't dislike me so much. I really admire her, you know. It can't be easy being a woman detective."

"It's not easy being a detective, period," I said. I did not want to talk about Cassie. "We manage."

"Yes, but it's different for women," she told me, a little reproachfully.

"How's that?" She was so young and earnest; I knew she would be offended if I laughed.

"Well, for example…Detective Maddox must be at least thirty, isn't she? She must want to get married soon, and have children, and things like that. Women can't afford to wait like men can, you know. And being a detective must make it hard to have a serious relationship, doesn't it? It must be a lot of pressure for her."

A vicious twist of unease caught at my stomach. "I don't think Detective Maddox is the broody type," I said.

Rosalind looked troubled, little white teeth catching at her bottom lip. "You're probably right," she said, carefully. "But you know, Detective Ryan…sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't."

That twist tightened. A part of me badly wanted to push her, to find out what exactly it was that she had seen in Cassie and I had missed; but the past week had brought it home to me, with considerable force, that there are some things in this life we are better off not knowing. "Detective Maddox's personal life isn't my problem," I said. "Rosalind…"

But she had darted off, down one of the carefully wild little pathways that ring the grass, calling back over her shoulder: "Oh, Detective Ryan—look! Isn't it lovely?"

Her hair danced in the sun coming through the leaves, and in spite of everything I smiled. I followed her down the pathway—we were going to need privacy anyway, for this conversation—and caught up with her at a secluded little bench overhung by branches, birds twittering in the bushes all around. "Yes," I said, "it's lovely. Would you like to talk here?"

She settled herself on the bench and gazed up at the trees with a happy little sigh. "Our secret garden."

It was idyllic, and I hated the thought of wrecking it. For a moment I let myself toy with the thought of ditching the whole purpose of this meeting, having a chat about how she was doing and what a beautiful day it was and then sending her home; of being, for a few minutes, just a guy sitting in the sunshine talking to a pretty girl.

"Rosalind," I said, "I need to ask you about something. This is going to be very difficult, and I wish I knew some way to make it easier on you, but I don't. I wouldn't be asking you if I had any other choice. I need you to help me. Will you try?"

Something crossed her face, a flash of some vivid emotion, but it was gone before I could pinpoint it. She clasped her hands around the rails of the bench on either side, bracing herself. "I'll do my best."

"Your father and mother," I said, keeping my voice very gentle and even. "Has either of them ever hurt you or your sisters?"

Rosalind gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth and she stared at me over it, eyes round and startled, until she realized what she had done, snatched her hand away and clasped it tightly around the rail again. "No," she said, in a strained, compressed little voice. "Of course not."

"I know you must be frightened. I can protect you. I promise."

"No." She shook her head, biting her lip, and I knew she was on the verge of tears. "No."

I leaned closer and put my hand over hers. She smelled of some flowery, musky scent decades too old for her. "Rosalind, if something's wrong, we need to know. You're in danger."

"I'll be all right."

"Jessica's in danger, too. I know you take care of her, but you can't keep doing that on your own forever. Please, let me help you."

"You don't understand," she whispered. Her hand was trembling under mine. "I can't, Detective Ryan. I just can't."

She almost broke my heart. This fragile, indomitable slip of a girl: in a situation that would have crippled people twice her age, she was holding it together by the skin of her teeth, walking a slim tightrope twisted out of nothing but tenacity and pride and denial. That was all she had, and I, of all people, was trying to pull it out from under her.

"I'm sorry," I said, suddenly horribly ashamed of myself. "There may come a time when you're ready to talk about this, and when that happens, I'll be right here. But until then…I shouldn't have tried to push you. I'm sorry."

"You're so kind to me," she murmured. "I can't believe you've been so kind."

"I just wish I could help you," I said. "I wish I knew how."

"I…I don't trust people easily, Detective Ryan. But if I trust anyone, it'll be you."

We sat there in silence. Rosalind's hand was soft under mine, and she didn't move it away.

Then she turned her hand, slowly, and interlaced her fingers in mine. She was smiling at me, an intimate little smile with a dare lurking in the corners.

I caught my breath. It went through me like an electric current, how badly I wanted to lean forward and cup my hand around the back of her head and kiss her. Images tumbled in my mind—crisp hotel sheets and her curls falling free, buttons under my fingers, Cassie's drawn face—and I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all. I could see myself reflected, tiny and dazzled and moving closer, in her eyes.

She was eighteen years old and she might still end up being my main witness; she was more vulnerable than she would ever be again in her life; and she idolized me. She did not need to find out the hard way that I had developed a tendency to wreck everything I touched. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek and disengaged my hand from hers.

"Rosalind," I said.

Her face had shuttered over. "I should go," she said coldly.

"I don't want to hurt you. That's the last thing you need."

"Well, you have." She slung her bag over her shoulder, not looking at me. Her mouth was set in a tight line.

"Rosalind, please, wait—" I reached out for her hand, but she whipped it away.

"I thought you cared about me. Obviously, I was wrong. You just let me think so because you wanted to see if I knew anything about Katy. You wanted what you could get from me, just like everyone else."

"That's not true," I began; but she was gone, clicking down the path with angry little steps, and I knew there was no point in going after her. The birds in the bushes scattered, with a harsh tattoo of wings, as she passed.

My head was spinning. I gave her a few minutes to calm down and then rang her mobile, but she didn't answer. I left a babbling, apologetic message on her voicemail; then I hung up and slumped back on the bench.

"Shit," I said aloud, to the empty bushes.

I think it's important to reiterate that, no matter what I may have claimed at the time, for most of Operation Vestal I was not in anything resembling a normal frame of mind. This may not be an excuse, but it is a fact. When I went into that wood, for example, I went into it on very little sleep and even less food and a considerable amount of accumulated tension and vodka, and I feel I should point out that it's entirely possible that the subsequent events were either a dream or some kind of weird hallucination. I have no way of knowing, and I can't think of an answer, either way, that would be particularly comforting.

Since that night I had, at least, started sleeping again—sleeping, actually, with a level of dedication so intense it made me nervous. By the time I staggered in from work every evening I was practically sleepwalking. I would fall into bed as if drawn by a powerful magnet and find myself in the same position, still in my clothes, when the alarm clock dragged me awake twelve or thirteen hours later. Once I forgot to set my alarm and woke at two o'clock in the afternoon, to the seventh phone call from a very snotty Bernadette.

The memories and the more bizarre side effects had stopped, too; clicked off as sharply and as definitively as a lightbulb burning out. You'd think this would be a relief, and at the time it was: as far as I was concerned, absolutely anything to do with Knocknaree was the worst possible kind of news, and I was a lot better off without it. I should have pretty much figured this out awhile back, I felt, and I could not believe that I had been stupid enough to ignore everything I knew and prance gaily back into that wood. I had never been so angry with myself in my life. It was only much later, when the case was over and the dust had settled on the debris, when I prodded cautiously at the edges of my memory and came up empty; it was only then that I began to think this might be not a deliverance but a vast missed chance, an irrevocable and devastating loss.