In the Woods

20

It rained hard all the rest of the day, the kind of thick, endless rain that can soak you to the skin as you run the few yards to your car. Every now and then lightning forked over the dark hills, and a distant rumble of thunder reached us. We left the Bureau gang to finish processing the scenes and took Hunt, Mark, Damien and, on the off-chance, a deeply aggrieved Sean ("I thought we were partners here!") back to work with us. We found them an interview room each and started rechecking their alibis.

Sean was easy to eliminate. He shared a flat in Rathmines with three other guys, all of whom remembered, to some extent, the night Katy had died: it had been one of the guys' birthday and they had had a party, at which Sean had DJed till four in the morning, then thrown up on someone's girlfriend's boots and passed out on the sofa. At least thirty witnesses could vouch for both his whereabouts and his tastes in music.

The other three were less straightforward. Hunt's alibi was his wife, Mark's was Mel; Damien lived in Rathfarnham with his widowed mother, who went to bed early but was positive he couldn't have left the house without waking her. These are the kind of alibis detectives hate, the thin, mulish kind that can wreck a case. I could tell you about a dozen cases where we know exactly whodunit, how and where and when, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about it because the guy's mammy swears he was tucked up on the sofa watching The Late Late Show.

"Right," O'Kelly said, in the incident room, after we had taken Sean's statement and sent him home (he had forgiven me for my treachery and offered me a farewell high five; he wanted to know if he could sell his story to the papers, but I told him if he did I would personally raid his flat for drugs every night until he was thirty). "One down, two to go. Place your bets, lads: who do ye fancy?" He was in a much better mood with us, now that he knew we had a suspect in one of the interview rooms, even if we weren't sure which one.

"Damien," Cassie said. "He fits the MO, bang on."

"Mark's admitted he was at the scene," I said. "And he's the only one with anything like a motive."

"As far as we know." I knew what she meant, or thought I did, but I wasn't going to bring up the hired-gun theory, not in front of either O'Kelly or Sam. "And I can't see him doing it."

"I'm aware of that. I can."

Cassie rolled her eyes, which I actually found slightly comforting: a small savage part of me had expected her to flinch.

"O'Neill?" O'Kelly asked.

"Damien," Sam said. "I brought them all a cup of tea. He's the only one picked his up with his left hand."

After a startled second, Cassie and I started to laugh. The joke was on us—I, at any rate, had forgotten all about the left-handed thing—but we were both wound tight and giddy, and we couldn't stop. Sam grinned and shrugged, pleased at the reaction. "I don't know what ye two are laughing about," O'Kelly said gruffly, but his mouth was twitching, too. "You should've spotted that yourselves. All this jibber—jabber about MOs…" I was laughing too hard, my face going red and my eyes watering. I bit down on my lip to stop myself.

"Oh, God," said Cassie, taking a deep breath. "Sam, what would we do without you?"

"That's enough fun and games," O'Kelly said. "You two take Damien Donnelly. O'Neill, get Sweeney and have another go at Hanly, and I'll find a few of the lads to talk to Hunt and the alibi witnesses. And, Ryan, Maddox, O'Neill—we need a confession. Don't fuck this up. Ándele." He scraped back his chair with an ear-splitting screech and left.

"Ándele?" said Cassie. She looked perilously near to another bout of the giggles.

"Well done, lads," Sam said. He held out a hand to each of us; his grip was strong and warm and solid. "Good luck."

"If Andrews hired one of them," I said, when Sam had gone to find Sweeney, and Cassie and I were alone in the incident room, "this is going to be the mess of the century."

Cassie raised one eyebrow noncommittally. She finished her coffee: it was going to be a very long day, we had all been spiking ourselves up on caffeine.

"How do you want to do this?" I asked.

"You head it up. He thinks of women as the source of sympathy and approval; I'll pat him on the head now and then. He's intimidated by men, so go easy: if you push him too hard, he'll freeze up and want to leave. Just take your time, and guilt-trip him. I still think he was in two minds about the whole thing from the start, and I bet he feels terrible about it. If we play to his conscience, it's only a matter of time before he goes to pieces."

"Let's do it," I said, and we shook our clothes straight and smoothed down our hair and walked, shoulder to shoulder, down the corridor towards the interview room.

It was our last partnership. I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or the most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives know each other's every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners in a pas de deux. I never knew and never will whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.

Damien was huddled in his chair, shoulders rigid, his cup of tea steaming away ignored on the table. When I cautioned him, he stared at me as if I were speaking Urdu.

The month since Katy's death hadn't been kind to him. He was wearing khaki combats and a baggy gray sweatshirt, but I could see that he had lost weight, and it made him seem gangly and somehow shorter than he actually was. The boy-band prettiness was looking a little ragged around the edges—purplish bags under his eyes, a vertical crease starting to form between his eyebrows; the youthful bloom that should have lasted him another few years was fading fast. The change was subtle enough that I hadn't noticed it back on the dig, but now it gave me pause.

We started with easy questions, things he could answer with no need to worry. He was from Rathfarnham, right? Studying at Trinity? Just finished second year? How had the exams gone? Damien answered in monosyllables and twisted the hem of his sweatshirt around his thumb, clearly dying to know why we were asking but afraid to find out. Cassie steered him onto archaeology and gradually he relaxed; he disentangled himself from the sweatshirt and started drinking his tea and speaking in full sentences, and they had a long, happy conversation about the various finds that had turned up on the dig. I left them to it for at least twenty minutes before intervening (tolerant smile: "Hate to say this, guys, but we should probably get back to business before we all three get in trouble").

"Ah, come on, Ryan, two seconds," Cassie begged. "I've never seen a ring brooch. What does it look like?"

"They said it's probably going to be in the National Museum," Damien told her, flushed with pride. "It's kind of this big, and it's bronze, and it's got a pattern incised into it…" He made vague squiggly motions, presumably intended to indicate an incised pattern, with one finger.

"Draw it for me?" Cassie asked, pushing her notebook and pen across the table to him. Damien drew obediently, brow furrowed in concentration.

"Sort of like this," he said, giving Cassie back the notebook. "I can't draw."

"Wow," Cassie said reverently. "And you found it? If I found something like that, I think I'd explode or have a heart attack or something."

I looked over her shoulder: a broad circle with what appeared to be a pin across the back, decorated with fluid, balanced curves. "Pretty," I said. Damien was indeed left-handed. His hands still looked a size too big for his body, like a puppy's paws.

"Hunt's out," O'Kelly said, in the corridor. "Original statement says he was having his tea and watching telly with his wife all the Monday night, till he went to bed at eleven. Bloody documentaries, they watched, something about meerkats and one about Richard III—he told us every bloody detail, whether we wanted to know or not. The wife says the same, and the telly guide backs them up. And the neighbor has a dog, one of those little shites that barks all night; he says he heard Hunt shouting out the window at it around one in the morning. Why he wouldn't tell the little fucker to shut up himself… He's sure of the date because it was the day they got the new decking in—says the workmen upset the dog. I'm sending Einstein home, before he has me driven mental. It's a two-horse race, lads."

"How's Sam doing with Mark?" I asked.

"Getting nowhere. Hanly's being snotty as fuck and sticking to the shag-fest story; the girlfriend's backing him up. If they're lying, they're not going to crack any time soon. And he's right-handed, for sure. How about your boy?"

"Left," Cassie said.

"There's our odds-on favorite, then. But that's not going to be enough. I talked to Cooper…" O'Kelly's face pulled into a disgusted grimace. "Position of the victim, position of the assailant, balance of probabilities—more shite than a pigsty, but what it boils down to is he thinks our man's left-handed but he's not willing to say for definite. He's like a bloody politician. How's Donnelly doing?"

"Nervous," I said.

O'Kelly slapped the door of the interview room. "Good. Keep him that way."

We went back in and set about making Damien nervous. "OK, guys," I said, pulling up my chair, "time to get down to business. Let's talk about Katy Devlin."

Damien nodded attentively, but I saw him brace himself. He took a sip of his tea, though it had to be cold by now.

"When did you first see her?"

"I guess when we were like three quarters of the way up the hill? Higher up than the cottage, anyway, and the Portakabins. See, because of the way the hill slopes—"

"No," Cassie said, "not the day you found her body. Before that."

"Before…?" Damien blinked at her, took another sip of tea. "No—um, I didn't; I hadn't. Met her before that, that day."

"You'd never even seen her before?" Cassie's tone hadn't changed, but I felt the sudden bird-dog stillness in her. "Are you sure? Think hard, Damien."

He shook his head vehemently. "No. I swear. I'd never seen her in my entire life."

There was a moment of silence. I gave Damien what I hoped was a look of mild interest, but my head was whirling.

I had cast my vote for Mark not out of sheer contrariness, as you might think, nor because something about him annoyed me in ways I didn't care to explore. I suppose when you come down to it, given the choices available, I simply wanted it to be him. I had never been able to take Damien seriously—not as a man, not as a witness and certainly not as a suspect. He was such an abject little wimp, nothing to him but curls and stammers and vulnerability, you could have blown him away like a dandelion clock; the thought that all this past month might have stemmed from someone like him was outrageous. Mark, whatever we might think of each other, made an opponent and a goal worth having.

But this: it was such a pointless lie. The Devlin girls had hung around the dig often enough that summer, and they were hardly inconspicuous; all the other archaeologists had remembered them; Mel, who had stayed a safe distance from Katy's body, had known her straight away. And Damien had given tours of the site; he was more likely than any of them to have spoken to Katy, spent time with her. He had bent over her body, supposedly to see if she was breathing (and even that much courage, I realized, was out of character). He had no reason in the world to deny having seen her before, unless he was clumsily dodging a trap we had never set; unless the thought of being linked to her in any way scared him so badly that he couldn't think straight.

"OK," Cassie said, "what about her father—Jonathan Devlin? Are you a member of Move the Motorway?" and Damien took a big gulp of cold tea and started nodding again, and we skated deftly away from the subject before he had a chance to realize what he had said.

Around three o'clock, Cassie and Sam and I went out for takeaway pizza—Mark was starting to bitch about being hungry, and we wanted to keep him and Damien happy. Neither of them was under arrest; they could decide to walk out of the building at any moment, and there would be nothing we could do to stop them. We were trading, as we so often do, on the basic human desires to please authority and to be a good guy; and, while I was pretty sure these would keep Damien in the interview room indefinitely, I was far from convinced about Mark.

"How are you getting on with Donnelly?" Sam asked me, in the pizza place. Cassie was up at the counter, leaning over it and laughing with the guy who had taken our order.

I shrugged. "Hard to tell. How's Mark?"

"Raging. He says he's spent half the year working his arse off for Move the Motorway, why would he risk scuppering the whole thing by killing the chairman's kid? He thinks this is all political…" Sam winced. "About Donnelly," he said, looking not at me but at Cassie's back. "If he's our man. What would…does he have a motive?"

"Not that we've found so far," I said. I did not want to get into this.

"If anything does come up…" Sam shoved his fists deeper into his trouser pockets. "Anything you think I might want to know. Could you call me?"

"Yeah," I said. I hadn't eaten all day, but food was the last thing on my mind; all I wanted was to get back to Damien, and the pizza seemed to be taking hours. "Sure."

Damien took a can of 7-Up, but he refused the pizza; he wasn't hungry, he said. "Sure?" Cassie asked, trying to catch strings of cheese with her finger. "God, when I was a student I'd never have turned down free pizza."

"You never turn down food, period," I told her. "You're a human Hoover." Cassie, unable to answer through a huge mouthful, nodded cheerfully and gave us the thumbs-up. "Go on, Damien, have some. You should keep your strength up; we're going to be here for a while."

His eyes widened. I waved a slice at him, but he shook his head, so I shrugged and kept it for myself. "OK," I said, "let's talk about Mark Hanly. What's he like?"

Damien blinked. "Mark? Um, he's OK. He's strict, I guess, but he sort of has to be. We don't have a lot of time."

"Ever seen him get violent? Lose his temper?" I wiggled a hand at Cassie; she threw me a paper napkin.

"Yeah—no…I mean, yeah, he gets mad sometimes, if someone's messing, but I never saw him hit anyone, or anything like that."

"Do you think he would, if he was angry enough?" I wiped my hands and thumbed through my notebook, trying not to get grease on the pages. "You're such a slob," Cassie told me; I gave her the finger. Damien glanced between us, flustered and off balance.

"What?" he asked at last, uncertainly.

"Do you think Mark could get violent if he was provoked?"

"I guess maybe. I don't know."

"What about you? Ever hit anyone?"

"What…no!"

"We should've got garlic bread," Cassie said.

"I'm not sharing an interview room with two people and garlic. What do you think it would take to make you hit someone, Damien?"

His mouth opened.

"You don't seem like the violent type to me, but everyone's got a breaking point. Would you hit someone if he insulted your mother, for example?"

"I—"

"Or for money? Or in self-defense? What would it take?"

"I don't…" Damien blinked fast. "I don't know. I mean, I've never—but I guess everyone's, like you said, everyone's got a breaking point, I don't know…"

I nodded and made a careful note of this. "Would you rather a different kind?" Cassie asked, inspecting the pizza. "I think ham-and-pineapple rules, personally, but they have some macho pepperoni-and-sausage thing next door."

"What? Um—no, thanks. Who's…?" We waited, chewing. "Who's next door? Am I, like, allowed to ask?"

"Sure," I said. "That's Mark. We sent Sean and Dr. Hunt home, awhile back, but we haven't been able to let Mark go yet."

We watched Damien turn a shade paler as he processed this information and its implications. "Why not?" he asked faintly.

"Can't go into that," Cassie said, reaching for more pizza. "Sorry." Damien's eyes ricocheted, disoriented, from her hand to her face to mine.

"What I can tell you," I said, pointing at him with a crust, "is that we're taking this case very, very seriously. I've seen a lot of bad stuff in my career, Damien, but this… There's no crime in the world worse than murdering a child. Her whole life's gone, the entire community's terrified, her friends will never get over it, her family's devastated—"

"Emotional wrecks," Cassie said indistinctly, through a mouthful. Damien swallowed, looked down at his 7-Up as if he had forgotten it and started fumbling with the tab.

"Whoever did this…" I shook my head. "I don't know how he can live with himself."

"Tomato check," Cassie told me, dabbing a finger at the corner of her mouth. "Can't take you anywhere."

We finished off most of the pizza. I didn't want it—even the smell, greasy and pervasive, was too much for me—but the whole thing was getting Damien more and more flustered. He accepted a slice, in the end, and sat wretchedly picking off the pineapple and nibbling on it, his head whipping from Cassie to me and back as if he were trying to follow a tennis match from too close by. I spared a thought for Sam: Mark was unlikely to be sent into a tailspin by pepperoni and extra cheese.

My mobile vibrated in my pocket. I checked the screen: Sophie. I took it out into the corridor; Cassie, behind me, said, "Detective Ryan leaving the interview room."

"Hi, Sophie," I said.

"Hey. Here's the update: no signs that either lock was forced or picked. And the trowel's your rape weapon, all right. It looks like it's been washed, but we've got traces of blood in the cracks on the handle. We've also got a fair amount of blood on one of those tarps. We're still checking gloves and plastic bags—we'll still be checking gloves and plastic bags when we're eighty. We found a torch under the tarps, too. There are prints all over it, but they're all small and the torch has Hello Kitty on it, so I'm betting it's your victim's and so are the prints. How're you guys doing?"

"Still working on Hanly and Donnelly. Callaghan and Hunt are out."

"Now you tell me? For Christ's sake, Rob. Thanks a bunch. We've gone over Hunt's fucking car. Nothing—well, obviously. No blood in Hanly's car, either. About a million hairs and fibers and blah blah blah; if he had her in there, he wasn't worried enough to clean up after himself, so we might get a match. Matter of fact, I doubt he's ever cleaned that thing. If he ever runs out of archaeological sites, he can start work under his front seat."

I slammed the door behind me, told the camera, "Detective Ryan entering the interview room," and started clearing away the pizza things. "That was the Technical Bureau," I said to Cassie. "They've confirmed our evidence is exactly what we thought it was. Damien, are you finished with that?" I threw the pineappleless slice of pizza back into the box before he could answer.

"That's what we like to hear," Cassie said, grabbing a napkin and giving the table a quick wipe. "Damien, do you need anything before we get to work?"

Damien stared, trying to catch up; shook his head.

"Great," I said, shoving the pizza box into a corner and pulling up a chair. "Then let's start by updating you on some of what we've found out today. Why do you think we brought the four of you in here?"

"About that girl," he said, faintly. "Katy Devlin."

"Well, yeah, sure. But why do you think we only wanted the four of you? Why not the rest of the team?"

"You said…" Damien motioned to Cassie with the 7-Up can; he was clutching it in both hands, as if afraid I might take that away, too. "You asked about the keys. Who had keys to the sheds."

"Bingo," Cassie said, nodding approvingly. "Well spotted."

"Did you, um…?" He swallowed. "Did you, like, find something in one of the sheds?"

"Exactly," I said. "Actually, we found something in two of the sheds, but close enough. We can't go into details, obviously, but here's the gist of it: we've got evidence that Katy was killed in the finds shed on the Monday night and stashed in the tools shed through the Tuesday. There was no forced entry. What do you think that means?"

"I dunno," Damien said, at last.

"It means we're looking for someone who had the key. That's Mark, Dr. Hunt or you. And Hunt's got an alibi."

Damien actually half-raised his hand, as if he were in school. "Um, me, too. I mean, an alibi."

He looked at us hopefully, but we were both shaking our heads. "Sorry," Cassie said. "Your mother was asleep during the time we're looking at; she can't vouch for you. And anyway, mothers…" She shrugged, smiling. "I mean, I'm sure your mammy's honest and everything, but as a rule, they'll say whatever it takes to keep their kids out of trouble. God love them for it, but it means we can't really take their word on something this important."

"Mark's got the same kind of problem," I said. "Mel says she was with him, but she's his girlfriend, and they're not much more reliable than mothers. A little, but not much. So here we all are."

"And if you've got anything to tell us, Damien," Cassie said softly, "now's the time."

Silence. He took a sip of his 7-Up and then looked up at us, all transparent blue eyes and bewilderment, and shook his head.

"OK," I said. "Fair enough. There's something I want you to look at, Damien." I went through the file, making kind of a big deal of it—Damien's eyes followed my hand, apprehensively—and finally pulled out a bunch of photos. I laid them out in front of him, one by one, taking a good look at each before I put it down; letting him wait.

"Katy and her sisters, last Christmas," I said. Plastic tree, garish with red and green lights; Rosalind in the middle, wearing blue velvet and giving the camera an impish little smile, her arms around the twins; Katy straight-backed and laughing, waving a white fake-sheepskin jacket, and Jessica smiling uncertainly down at a beige one, like a reflection in some uncanny mirror. Unconsciously, Damien smiled back.

"Katy at a family picnic, two months ago." The snapshot with the green lawn and the sandwich.

"She looks happy, doesn't she?" Cassie said, aside to me. "She was about to go off to ballet school, everything was just beginning… It's good to know she was happy, before…"

One of the crime scene Polaroids: a full-length shot of her curled on the altar stone. "Katy just after you found her. Remember that?" Damien shifted in his chair, caught himself and sat still.

Another crime-scene shot, this one a close-up: dried blood on her nose and mouth, that one eye a slit open. "Same again: Katy where her killer dumped her."

One of the post-mortem shots: "Katy the next day." The breath went out of Damien. We had chosen the nastiest picture we had: her face folded down on itself to reveal the skull, a gloved hand holding up a steel ruler to the fracture above her ear, clotted hair and splinters of bone.

"Hard to look at, isn't it?" Cassie said, almost to herself. Her fingers hovered over the photos, moved to the crime-scene close-up, stroked the line of Katy's cheek. She glanced up, at Damien.

"Yeah," he whispered.

"See, to me," I said, leaning back in my chair and tapping the post-mortem shot, "that looks like something that only a raving psycho would do to a little girl. Some animal with no conscience, who gets his kicks out of hurting the most vulnerable people he can find. But I'm just a detective. Now Detective Maddox here, she's studied psychology. Do you know what a profiler is, Damien?"

A tiny shake of the head. His eyes were still riveted to the photographs, but I didn't think he was seeing them.

"Someone who studies what kind of person commits what kind of crime, tells the police what type of guy to look for. Detective Maddox, she's our resident profiler, and she's got her own theory about the guy who did this."

"Damien," Cassie said, "let me tell you something. I've said all along, right from day one, that this was done by someone who didn't want to do it. Someone who wasn't violent, wasn't a killer, didn't enjoy causing pain; someone who did this because he had to. He didn't have any choice. That's what I've been saying since the day we got this case."

"It's true, she has," I said. "The rest of us said she was off her head, but she stuck to her guns: this wasn't a psycho, or a serial killer, or a child-rapist." Damien flinched, a quick jerk of the chin. "What do you think, Damien? Do you think it takes a sick bastard to do something like this, or do you think this could just happen to a normal guy who never wanted to hurt anyone?"

He tried to shrug, but his shoulders were too tense and it came out as a grotesque twitch. I got up and wandered around the table, taking my time, to lean against the wall behind him. "Well, we'll never know for sure one way or the other, unless he tells us. But let's just say for a moment that Detective Maddox is right. I mean, she's the one with the psychology training; I'm willing to admit she could have a point. Let's say this guy isn't the violent type; he was never meant to be a murderer. It just happened."

Damien had been holding his breath. He let it out, caught it again with a little gasp.

"I've seen guys like that before. Do you know what happens to them, afterwards? They go to fucking pieces, Damien. They can't live with themselves. We've seen it, over and over."

"It's not pretty," Cassie said softly. "We know what happened, the guy knows we know, but he's scared to confess. He thinks going to jail is the worst thing that could happen to him. God, is he ever wrong. Every day, for the rest of his life, he wakes up in the morning and it hits him all over again, like it was yesterday. Every night he's scared to go to sleep because of the nightmares. He keeps thinking it has to get better, but it never does."

"And sooner or later," I said, from the shadows behind him, "he has a nervous breakdown, and he ends up spending the next few years in a padded cell, wearing pajamas and drugged up to the eyeballs. Or he ties a rope to the banisters one evening and hangs himself. More often than you'd think, Damien, they just can't face another day."

This was bullshit, by the way; of course it was. Of those dozen un-charged murderers I could name for you, only one killed himself, and he had a history of untreated mental problems to start with. The rest are living more or less exactly as they always did, holding down jobs and going to the pub and taking their kids to the zoo, and if they occasionally get the heebie-jeebies they keep it to themselves. Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened. But Katy had only been dead a month, and Damien hadn't had time to learn this. He was rigid in his chair, staring down at his 7-Up and breathing as if it hurt.

"You know which ones survive, Damien?" Cassie asked. She leaned across the table and laid her fingertips on his arm. "The ones who confess. The ones who do their time. Seven years later, or whatever, it's over; they get out of jail and they can start again. They don't have to see their victims' faces every time they close their eyes. They don't have to spend every second of every day terrified that this is the day they're going to be caught. They don't have to jump a mile every time they see a cop or there's a knock at the door. Believe me: in the long run, those are the ones who get away."

He was squeezing the can so hard that it buckled, with a sharp little crack. We all jumped.

"Damien," I asked, very quietly, "does any of this sound familiar?"

And, at long last, there it was: that tiny dissolution in the back of his neck, the sway of his head as his spine crumpled. Almost imperceptibly, after what seemed like an age, he nodded.

"Do you want to live like this for the rest of your life?"

His head moved, unevenly, from side to side.

Cassie gave his arm one last little pat and took her hand away: nothing that could look like coercion. "You didn't want to kill Katy, did you?" she said; gently, so gently, her voice falling soft as snow over the room. "It just happened."

"Yeah." He whispered it, barely a breath, but I heard. I was listening so hard I could almost hear his heart beating. "It just happened."

For a moment the room seemed to fold in on itself, as if some explosion too enormous to be heard had sucked all the air away. None of us could move. Damien's hands had gone limp around the can; it dropped to the table with a clunk, rocked crazily, came to a stop. The overhead light streaked his curls with hazy bronze. Then the room breathed in again, a slow, replete sigh.

"Damien James Donnelly," I said. I didn't go back around the table to face him; I wasn't sure my legs would carry me. "I arrest you on suspicion that, on or around the seventeenth of August of this year, at Knocknaree in County Dublin, you did murder Katharine Bridget Devlin, contrary to common law."