In the Woods

23

We were still sitting there like that when Sam got in. "What's the story?" he said, rubbing rain out of his hair and switching on the lights.

Cassie stirred, lifted her head. "O'Kelly wants you and me to have another go at finding out Damien's motive. Uniforms are bringing him over."

"Grand," Sam said, "see if a new face shakes him up a bit," but he had taken us both in with one quick glance and I wondered how much he was guessing; wondered, for the first time, how much he had known all along and simply left alone.

He pulled over a chair and sat down next to Cassie, and they started discussing how to go at Damien. They had never interrogated anyone together before; their voices were tentative, earnest, deferring to each other and rising into open-ended little question marks: Do you think we should…? What if we…? Cassie switched the tapes in the VCR again, played Sam bits of last night's interview. The fax machine made a series of demented, cartoonish noises and spat out Damien's mobile-phone records, and they bent over the pages with a highlighter pen, murmuring.

When they finally left—Sam nodding to me, briefly, over his shoulder—I waited in the empty incident room until I was sure they must have started the interrogation, and then I went looking for them. They were in the main interview room. I ducked into the observation chamber furtively, ears burning, like someone diving into an adult bookshop. I knew this was going to be the very last thing in the world I wanted to see, but I didn't know how to stay away.

They had made the room as cozy as humanly possible: coats and bags and scarves thrown on chairs, the table strewn with coffee and sugar packets and mobile phones and a carafe of water and a plate of sticky Danishes from the café outside the castle grounds. Damien, bedraggled in the same oversized sweatshirt and combats—they looked like he'd slept in them—hugged himself and stared round, wide-eyed; after the alien chaos of a jail cell, this must have seemed a bright haven to him, safe and warm and almost homey. At certain angles you could see a fuzz of fair, pathetic stubble on his chin. Cassie and Sam were chattering, perching on the table and bitching about the weather and offering Damien milk. I heard footsteps in the corridor and tensed—if it was O'Kelly he would kick me out, back to the phone tips, this no longer had anything to do with me—but they went past without breaking stride. I leaned my forehead against the one-way glass and closed my eyes.

They took him through safe little details first. Cassie's voice, Sam's, weaving together dexterously, soothing as lullabies: How did you get out of the house without waking up your mam? Yeah? I used to do that, too, when I was a teenager… Had you done it before? God, this coffee's horrible, do you want a Coke or something instead? They were good together, Cassie and Sam; they were good. Damien was relaxing. Once he even laughed, a pathetic little breath.

"You're a member of Move the Motorway, right?" Cassie said eventually, just as easily as before; nobody but me would have recognized the tiny lift in her voice that meant she was getting down to business. I opened my eyes and straightened up. "When did you get involved with them?"

"This spring," Damien said readily, "like March or something. There was a thing on the department notice-board in college, about a protest. I knew I was going to be working at Knocknaree for the summer, so I felt sort of…I don't know, connected to it? So I went."

"Would that be the protest on the twentieth of March?" Sam asked, flipping through papers and rubbing the back of his head. He was doing solid country cop, friendly and not too quick.

"Yeah, I think so. It was outside the government buildings, if that helps." Damien seemed almost eerily at ease by this point, leaning forward across the table and playing with his coffee cup, chatty and eager as if this were a job interview. I'd seen this before, especially with first-time criminals: they're not used to thinking of us as the enemy, and once the shock of being caught has worn off they turn light-headed and helpful with the sheer relief of the long tension breaking.

"And that's when you joined the campaign?"

"Yeah. It's a really important site, Knocknaree, it's been inhabited ever since—"

"Mark told us," Cassie said, grinning. "As you can imagine. Was that when you met Rosalind Devlin, or did you know her before?"

A small, confused pause. "What?" Damien said.

"She was on the sign-up table that day. Was that the first time you'd met her?"

Another pause. "I don't know who you mean," Damien said finally.

"Come on, Damien," Cassie said, leaning forward to try to catch his eye; he was staring into his coffee cup. "You've been doing great all the way; don't flake out on me now, OK?"

"There are calls and texts to Rosalind all over your mobile-phone records," Sam said, pulling out the sheaf of highlighted pages and putting them in front of Damien. He gazed at them blankly.

"Why wouldn't you want us knowing you guys were friends?" Cassie asked. "There's no harm in that."

"I don't want her dragged into this," Damien said. His shoulders were starting to tense up.

"We're not trying to drag anyone into anything," Cassie said gently. "We just want to figure out what happened."

"I already told you."

"I know, I know. Bear with us, OK? We just have to clear up the details. Is that when you first met Rosalind, at that protest?"

Damien reached out and touched the mobile records with one finger. "Yeah," he said. "When I signed up. We got talking."

"You got on well, so you stayed in touch?"

"Yeah. I guess."

They backed off then. When did you start work at Knocknaree? Why'd you pick that dig? Yeah, it sounded fascinating to me, too… Gradually Damien relaxed again. It was still raining, thick curtains of water sliding down the windows. Cassie went for more coffee, came back with a look of guilty mischief and a packet of custard creams swiped from the canteen. There was no hurry, now that Damien had confessed. The only thing he could do was demand a lawyer, and a lawyer would advise him to tell them exactly what they were trying to find out; an accomplice meant shared blame, confusion, all a defense attorney's favorite things. Cassie and Sam had all day, all week, as long as it took.

"How soon did you and Rosalind start going out?" Cassie asked, after a while.

Damien had been folding the corner of a phone-record page into little pleats, but at this he glanced up, startled and wary. "What?…We didn't—um, we aren't. We're just friends."

"Damien," Sam said reproachfully, tapping the pages. "Look at this. You're ringing her three, four times a day, texting her half a dozen times, talking for hours in the middle of the night—"

"God, I've done that," Cassie said reminiscently. "The amount of phone credit you go through when you're in love…"

"You don't ring any of your other friends a quarter as much. She's ninety-five percent of your phone bill, man. And there's nothing wrong with that. She's a lovely girl, you're a nice young fella; why shouldn't you go out together?"

"Hang on," Cassie said suddenly, sitting up. "Was Rosalind involved in this? Is that why you don't want to talk about her?"

"No!" Damien almost shouted. "Leave her alone!"

Cassie and Sam stared, eyebrows raised.

"Sorry," he muttered after a moment, slumping in his chair. He was bright red. "I just…I mean, she didn't have anything to do with it. Can't you leave her out of it?"

"Then why the big secret, Damien?" Sam asked. "If she wasn't involved?"

He shrugged. "Because. We didn't tell anyone we were going out."

"Why not?"

"We just didn't. Rosalind's dad would've been mad."

"He didn't like you?" Cassie asked, with just enough surprise to be flattering.

"No, it wasn't that. She's not allowed to have boyfriends." Damien glanced nervously between them. "Could you—you know…could you not tell him? Please?"

"How mad would he have been," Cassie said softly, "exactly?"

Damien picked pieces off his Styrofoam cup. "I just didn't want to get her into trouble." But the flush hadn't died away and he was breathing fast; there was something there.

"We've a witness," Sam said, "who told us Jonathan Devlin may recently have hit Rosalind at least once. Do you know if that's true?"

A fast blink, a shrug. "How would I know?"

Cassie shot Sam a quick look and backed off again. "So how did you guys manage to meet up without her dad finding out?" she asked confidentially.

"At first we just met in town on weekends and went for coffee and stuff. Rosalind told them she was meeting her friend Karen, from school? So they were OK with that. Later, um…later we sometimes met at night. Out on the dig. I'd go out there and wait till her parents were asleep and she could sneak out of the house. We'd sit on the altar stone, or sometimes in the finds shed if it was raining, and just talk."

It was easy to imagine, easy and seductively sweet: a blanket around their shoulders and a country sky packed with stars, and moonlight making the rough landscape of the dig into a delicate, haunted thing. No doubt the secrecy and the complications had only added to the romance of it all. It carried the primal, irresistible power of myth: the cruel father, the fair maiden imprisoned in her tower, hedged in by thorns and calling for rescue. They had made their own nocturnal, stolen world, and to Damien it must have been a very beautiful one.

"Or some days she'd come to the dig, maybe bring Jessica, and I'd give them the tour. We couldn't really talk much, in case someone saw, but—just to see each other… And this one time, back in May"—he smiled a little, down at his hands, a shy, private smile—"see, I had a part-time job, making sandwiches in this deli? So I saved up enough that we could go away for a whole weekend. We took the train up to Donegal and stayed in this little B amp;B, we signed in like—like we were married. Rosalind told her parents she was spending the weekend with Karen, to study for her exams."

"And then what went wrong?" Cassie asked, and I caught that tautening in her voice again. "Did Katy find out about you two?"

Damien glanced up, startled. "What? No. Jesus, no. We were really careful."

"What, then? She was bothering Rosalind? Little sisters can be pretty annoying."

"No—"

"Rosalind was jealous of all the attention Katy was getting? What?"

"No! Rosalind's not like that—she was happy for Katy! And I wouldn't kill someone just for…I'm not—I'm not crazy!"

"And you're not violent, either," Sam said, slapping another heap of paper in front of Damien. "These are interviews about you. Your teachers remember you staying far away from fights, not starting them. Would you say that's accurate?"

"I guess—"

"Did you just do it for the buzz, after all?" Cassie cut in. "Did you want to see what it felt like to kill someone?"

"No! What are you—"

Sam moved round the table, surprisingly fast, and leaned in beside Damien. "The lads from the dig say George McMahon gave you hassle, just like he did everyone else, but you're one of the few who never lost your temper with him. So what got you angry enough to kill a little girl who never did you any harm?"

Damien huddled wretchedly into his sweatshirt, his chin tucked into his neck, and shook his head. They had closed in too soon, too hard; they were losing him.

"Hey. Look at me." Sam snapped his fingers in Damien's face. "Do I look anything like your mammy?"

"What? No—" But the unexpectedness of it had caught him; his eyes, wild and miserable, had flicked back up.

"Well spotted. That's because I'm not your mammy and this isn't some little thing you can get out of by sulking. This is as serious as it gets. You lured an innocent little girl out of her house in the middle of the night, you hit her on the head, you suffocated her and watched while she died, you shoved a trowel up inside her"—Damien flinched violently—"and now you're telling us you did it for no reason at all. Is that what you're going to tell the judge? What kind of sentence do you think he's going to give you?"

"You don't get it!" Damien cried. His voice cracked like a thirteen-year-old's.

"I know, I know we don't, but I want to. Help me get it, Damien." Cassie was leaning forward, holding both his hands in hers, forcing him to look at her.

"You don't understand! An innocent little girl? Everyone thinks she was, Katy was like some saint, they always thought she was so perfect—it wasn't like that! Just because she was a kid, that doesn't mean she was—You wouldn't believe me if I told you some of the stuff she did, you wouldn't even believe me."

"I will," Cassie said, low and urgent. "Whatever you're going to tell me, Damien, I've seen worse on this job. I'll believe you. Try me."

Damien's face was red, suffused, and his hands were shaking in Cassie's. "She used to get her dad mad at Rosalind and Jessica. Like all the time, they were always scared. She just made stuff up and told him—like Rosalind had been mean to her or Jessica had touched her stuff or something—it wasn't even true, she just made it up, and he always just believed her. Rosalind tried to tell him this one time that it wasn't true, she was trying to protect Jessica, but he just, he just…"

"What did he do?"

"He hit them!" Damien howled. His head shot up and his eyes, red-rimmed and blazing, locked on to Cassie's. "He beat them up! He broke Rosalind's skull with a poker, he threw Jessica into a wall and she broke her arm, he, Jesus, he did it to them, and Katy, she was watching and she laughed!" He ripped his hands out of Cassie's and swiped tears away furiously with the back of his wrist. He was gasping for breath.

"Do you mean Jonathan Devlin was having sexual intercourse with his daughters?" Cassie said calmly. Her eyes were huge.

"Yes. Yes. He did it to all of them. Katy…" Damien's face contorted. "Katy liked it. How sick is that? How can anyone…? That was why she was his favorite. He hated Rosalind because she…didn't want to…" He bit the back of his hand and cried.

I realized I had been holding my breath for so long I was light-headed; realized, too, that there was a chance I might throw up. I leaned against the cool glass and concentrated on breathing slowly and evenly. Sam found a tissue and passed it to Damien.

Unless I was even stupider than I had already proven myself to be, Damien believed every word he was saying. Why not? We see worse in the papers every other week, raped toddlers, children starving in basements, babies' limbs ripped off. As their private mythology grew to fill more and more of his mind, why not the evil sister keeping Cinderella in the dust?

And, though this is by no means an easy thing to admit, I wanted to believe it, too. For a moment I almost could. It made such perfect sense; it explained and excused so much, almost everything. But, unlike Damien, I had seen the medical records, the post-mortem report. Jessica had broken that arm falling off a jungle gym in full view of fifty witnesses, Rosalind had never had a fractured skull; Katy had died a virgin. Something like a cold sweat crawled across my shoulders, light and spreading.

Damien blew his nose. "It can't have been easy for Rosalind to tell you this," Cassie said gently. "That was pretty brave of her. Had she tried to tell anyone else?"

He shook his head. "He always said if she told he'd kill her. I was the first person she ever trusted enough to tell." There was something like wonder in his voice, wonder and pride, and under the tears and snot and redness his face lit up with a faint, awed radiance. He looked, for a second, like some young knight setting off in search of the Holy Grail.

"And when did she tell you?" Sam asked.

"Sort of in pieces. Like you said, it was hard for her. She didn't say anything till like May…" Damien flushed an even deeper red. "When we stayed in that B amp;B. We were, um, we were kissing? And I tried to touch her…her chest. Rosalind got sort of mad and pushed me away and said she wasn't like that, and I was I guess kind of surprised—I hadn't expected it to be that big of a deal, you know? We'd been going out for like a month—I mean, I know that didn't give me any right to…but…Anyway I was just startled, but Rosalind got all worried that I was mad at her. So she…she told me what her dad had been doing to her. To explain why she'd got so freaked out."

"And what did you say?" Cassie asked.

"I said she should move out! I wanted us to get a flat together, we could've got the money—I had this dig coming up and Rosalind could've got modeling jobs, this guy from a really big model agency had spotted her and he kept saying she could be a supermodel, only her father wouldn't let her… I didn't want her to ever go back to that house. But Rosalind wouldn't. She said she wouldn't leave Jessica. Can you imagine what kind of person it takes to do that? She went back to that just to protect her sister. I've never known anyone that brave."

If he had been just a couple of years older, the story would have sent him lunging for the phone to ring the police, Childline, anyone. But he was only nineteen; adults were still bossy aliens who didn't understand, to be told nothing because they would charge in and ruin everything. It had probably never even occurred to him to ask for help.

"She even said…" Damien looked away. He was tearing up again. I thought, vindictively, that he was going to be in big trouble in jail if he kept bawling at the drop of a hat. "She told me she might never be able to, to make love with me. Because of the bad associations. She didn't know if she could ever trust anyone that much. So she said, if I wanted to break up with her and find a normal girlfriend—she actually said that, normal—then she'd understand. The only thing she asked for was, if I was going to go, I should go right away, before she started to care too much about me…"

"But you didn't want to do that," Cassie said softly.

"Course not," Damien said simply. "I love her." There was something in his face, some reckless and consuming purity that, believe it or not, I envied.

Sam gave him another tissue. "There's only one thing I don't understand," he said, an easy, soothing rumble. "You wanted to protect Rosalind—that's fair enough, sure, any man would have felt the same. But why get rid of Katy? Why not Jonathan? I'd have been going after him, myself."

"I said that, too," Damien said, and then stopped, his mouth open, as if he had said something incriminating. Cassie and Sam looked blandly back at him and waited.

"Um," he said, after a moment. "See, this one night Rosalind's stomach was hurting and finally I got it out of her—she didn't want to tell me, but he'd…he'd punched her in the stomach. Like four times. Just because Katy told him Rosalind wouldn't let her change the channel to watch some ballet thing on TV—and it wasn't even true, she would've changed it if Katy had asked… I just—I couldn't stand it any more. I was thinking about it every night, what she was going through, I couldn't sleep—I couldn't just let it keep happening!"

He took a breath, got his voice back under control. Cassie and Sam nodded understandingly.

"I said, um, I said, 'I'm gonna kill him.' Rosalind…she couldn't believe I would really do that for her. And yeah, I guess I was sort of—not joking, but like not totally serious about actually doing it. I'd never even thought about doing anything like that in my whole life. But when I saw how much it meant to her that I would even say it—nobody had ever tried to protect her before… She was almost crying, and she's not the kind of girl who cries, she's a really strong person."

"I'm sure she is," Cassie said. "So why didn't you go after Jonathan Devlin, once you'd got your head round the idea?"

"See, if he died"—Damien leaned forward, hands gesturing anxiously—"their mother wouldn't be able to look after them, because of money and because I think she's kind of spacey or something? They'd be sent to homes and they'd be split up, Rosalind wouldn't be there to take care of Jessica any more—and Jessica needs her, she's so messed up she can't do anything, Rosalind has to do her homework for her and stuff. And Katy—I mean, Katy would have gone and done the exact same thing to somebody else. If only Katy wasn't there, they'd all be fine! Their dad only, he only did stuff to them when Katy got him to. Rosalind said, and she felt so guilty about this—Jesus, she felt guilty!—sometimes she wished Katy had never been born…"

"And that gave you an idea," Cassie said evenly. I could tell by the set of her mouth that she was so angry she could hardly speak. "You suggested killing Katy instead."

"It was my idea," Damien said quickly. "Rosalind had nothing to do with it. She didn't even—At first she said no. She didn't want me taking a risk like that for her. She'd survived it for years, she said, she could survive for six more, till Jessica was old enough to move out. But I couldn't let her just stay! That time he fractured her skull, she was in the hospital for two months. She could have died."

Suddenly I was furious, too, but not with Rosalind: with Damien, for being such a fucking cretin, such a perfect sucker, like some goofy cartoon character blundering obediently into the right place for the Acme anvil to drop on his head. I am of course fully aware of both the irony and the tedious psychological explanations of this reaction, but at the time all I could think of was slamming into the interview room and shoving Damien's face into the medical reports: Do you see this, moron? Do you see a skull fracture anywhere here? Didn't it even occur to you to ask to see the scar before you slaughtered a child for it?

"So you insisted," Cassie said, "and, in the end, Rosalind somehow came round."

This time Damien caught the biting edge. "That was because of Jessica! Rosalind didn't mind what happened to her, but Jessica—Rosalind was worried she was going to have a nervous breakdown or something. She didn't think Jessica could take six more years!"

"But Katy wouldn't have been there for most of that time anyway," Sam said. "She was about to go to ballet school, in London. By now she would have been gone. Didn't you know that?"

Damien almost howled, "No! I said that, I asked—you don't understand… She didn't care about being a dancer. She just liked everyone making a fuss of her. In that school, where she wouldn't have been anything special—she'd have dropped out by Christmas and come back home!"

Of all the things they had done to her, between them, this was the one that shocked me most profoundly. It was the diabolical expertise of it, the icy precision with which it targeted, annexed and defiled the one thing that had lain at Katy Devlin's heart. I thought of Simone's deep quiet voice in the echoing dance studio: Sérieuse. In all my career I had never felt the presence of evil as I felt it then: strong and rancid-sweet in the air, curling invisible tendrils up the table legs, nosing with obscene delicacy at sleeves and throats. The hairs rose on the back of my neck.

"So it was self-defense," Cassie said, after a silence in which Damien fidgeted anxiously and she and Sam didn't look at him.

Damien leaped on this. "Yes. Exactly. I mean, we wouldn't even have thought of it if there'd have been any other way."

"I understand. And you know, Damien, it's happened before: wives snapping and killing abusive husbands, stuff like that. Juries understand, too."

"Yeah?" He looked up at her with huge, hopeful eyes.

"Course. Once they hear what Rosalind went through…I wouldn't worry too much about her. OK?"

"I just don't want her to get in any trouble."

"Then you're doing the right thing by telling us all the details. OK?"

Damien sighed, a small, tired sigh with something like relief in it. "OK."

"Well done," Cassie said. "So let's keep going. When did you decide on this?"

"Like July. The middle of July."

"And when did you set the date?"

"Only, like, a few days before it happened. I had said to Rosalind, she should make sure she had a, an alibi, you know? Because we knew you guys would look at the family, she had read somewhere that the family were always the main suspects. So this one night—I think it was Friday—we met up and she said to me, she'd arranged it so she and Jessica were sleeping over at their cousins' house the next Monday and they'd be up till like two o'clock talking, so that would be the perfect night. All I had to do was make sure it was done before two o'clock; the, the police would be able to tell—"

His voice was shaking. "And what did you say?" Cassie asked.

"I…I guess I sort of panicked. I mean, it hadn't seemed real up until then, you know? I guess I hadn't thought we were actually going to do it. It was just something we talked about. It was sort of like, you know Sean Callaghan, Sean from the dig? He used to be in this band only they broke up, and he's always talking about 'Oh, when we get the band back together, when we make it big…' And, I mean, he knows they're never gonna do it, but talking about it makes him feel better."

"We've all been in that band," Cassie said, smiling.

Damien nodded. "It was like that. But then Rosalind said, 'Next Monday,' and suddenly I felt like…it just seemed like a totally crazy thing to do, you know? I said to Rosalind, maybe we should go to the police or something instead. But she freaked out. She kept saying, 'I trusted you, I really trusted you…'"

"Trusted you," Cassie said. "But not enough to make love with you?"

"No," Damien said softly, after a moment. "No, see, she had. After we first decided about Katy…it changed everything for Rosalind, knowing I'd do that for her. We…she'd given up hoping she'd ever be able to, but…she wanted to try. I was working on the dig by then, so I could afford a good hotel—she deserved something nice, you know? The first time, she…she couldn't. But we went back there the next week, and—" He bit his lips. He was trying not to cry, again.

"And after that," Cassie said, "you could hardly change your mind."

"See, that was the thing. That night, when I said maybe we should go to the police, Rosalind—she thought I'd only ever said I'd do it so I could…could get her into bed. She's so fragile, she's been hurt so badly—I couldn't let her think I was just using her. Can you imagine what it would have done to her?"

Another silence. Damien wiped a hand hard across his eyes and got himself back under control.

"So you decided to go through with it," Cassie said, evenly. He nodded, a painful, adolescent duck of the head. "How did you get Katy to come to the site?"

"Rosalind told her she had this friend on the dig who'd found a, a thing…" He mimed vaguely. "A locket. An old locket with a little painting of a dancer inside it. Rosalind told Katy it was really old and like magic or something, so she'd saved up all her money and bought it from the friend—me—as a present to bring Katy luck in ballet school. Only Katy would have to go get it herself, because this friend thought she was such a great dancer he wanted her autograph for when she was famous, and she'd have to go at night, because he wasn't allowed to sell finds, so it had to be a secret."

I thought of Cassie, as a child, hovering at the door of a groundskeeper's shed: Do you want marvels? Children think differently, she had said. Katy had walked into danger the same way Cassie had: on the unmissable off-chance of magic.

"I mean, see what I mean?" Damien said, with a note of pleading in his voice. "She totally believed that people were, like, queuing up for her autograph."

"Actually," Sam said, "she'd every reason to believe that. Plenty of people had asked for her autograph after the fund-raiser." Damien blinked at him.

"So what happened when she reached the finds shed?" Cassie asked.

He shrugged uncomfortably. "Just what I already told you. I told her the locket was in this box on a shelf behind her, and when she turned around to get it, I…I just picked up the rock and…It was self-defense, like you said, or I mean defending Rosalind, I don't know what that's called—"

"What about the trowel?" Sam asked heavily. "Was that self-defense, too?"

He stared like a bunny in headlights. "The…yeah. That. I mean, I couldn't…you know." He swallowed hard. "I couldn't do it to her. She was, she looked…I still dream about it. I couldn't do it. And then I saw the trowel on the desk, so I thought…"

"You were supposed to rape her? It's OK," Cassie said gently, at the flash of queasy panic on Damien's face, "we understand how this happened. You're not getting Rosalind into any trouble."

Damien looked uncertain, but she held his eyes steadily. "I guess," he said, after a moment. He had turned that nasty greenish-white again. "Rosalind said—she was just upset, but she said it wasn't fair that Katy would never know what Jessica had been through, so in the end I said I'd…Sorry, I think I'm gonna…" He made a sound between a cough and a gag.

"Breathe," Cassie said. "You're fine. You just need some water." She took away the shredded cup, found him a new one and filled it; she squeezed his shoulder while he sipped it, holding it in both hands, and took deep breaths.

"There you go," she said, when a little of the color had come back to his face. "You're doing great. So you were supposed to rape Katy, but instead you just used the trowel after she was dead?"

"I chickened out," Damien said into the water cup, low and savage. "She'd done way worse stuff, but I chickened out."

"Is that why"—Sam flicked the phone records with one finger—"the calls between you and Rosalind dry up after Katy died? Two calls on the Tuesday, the day after the killing; one early Wednesday morning, one the next Tuesday, then nothing. Was Rosalind annoyed with you for letting her down?"

"I don't even know how she knew. I was scared to tell her. We'd said we wouldn't talk for a couple of weeks, so the police—you guys—wouldn't connect us up, but she texted me like a week later and said maybe we shouldn't get back in touch because obviously I didn't really care about her. I phoned her to find out what was wrong—and, yeah, of course she was mad!" He was babbling, his voice rising. "I mean, we'll work it out—but, Jesus, she has every right to be mad at me. Katy wasn't even found till Wednesday 'cause I panicked, that could've totally ruined her alibi, and I hadn't…I hadn't…She trusted me so much, she didn't have anyone else, and I couldn't even do one thing right 'cause I'm a fucking wimp."

Cassie didn't answer. Her back was to me; I saw the frail knobs of bone at the top of her spine and I felt grief like a solid weight dragging in my wrists and throat. I couldn't listen any more. That little gem about Katy dancing for attention had knocked all the anger out of me, knocked me hollow. All I wanted to do was sleep, drugged obliterated sleep, let someone wake me when this day was over and the steady rain had washed all this away.

"You know something?" Damien said softly, just before I left. "We were going to get married. As soon as Jessica had, like, recovered enough that Rosalind could leave her there. I guess that's not going to happen now, right?"

They were with him all day. I knew what they were doing, more or less: they had the gist of the story, now they were going back over it, filling in times and dates and details, checking for any tiny gap or inconsistency. Getting a confession is only the beginning; after that you need to waterproof it, second-guess defense lawyers and juries, make sure you get everything in writing while your guy is feeling talkative and before he has a chance to come up with alternative explanations. Sam is the painstaking type; they would do a good job.

Sweeney and O'Gorman came in and out of the incident room: Rosalind's mobile records, more background interviews about her and about Damien. I sent them to the interview room. O'Kelly stuck his head in and scowled at me, and I pretended to be deep in phone tips. Halfway through the afternoon Quigley came in to share his thoughts on the case. Quite apart from the fact that I had no desire to talk to anyone, least of all him, this was a very bad sign: Quigley's one talent is an unerring nose for weakness, and, apart from the odd embarrassing attempt to ingratiate himself, he had generally left me and Cassie alone and stuck to battening on newbies and burnouts and those whose careers had taken sudden nosedives. He pulled his chair too close to mine and hinted darkly that we should have caught our man weeks earlier, intimated that he would explain how this could have been done if I asked with sufficient deference, sadly pointed out my unconscionable psychological error in allowing Sam to take my place in the interrogation, inquired about Damien's phone records and then cunningly suggested we should consider the possibility that the sister had been involved. I seemed to have forgotten how to get rid of him, and this increased my sense that his presence was not just annoying but horribly ominous. He was like a huge smug albatross waddling around my desk, squawking vacuously and crapping all over my paperwork.

Finally, like the bullies in school, he seemed to recognize that I was too wretched to provide value for money, so he bridled back to whatever he was supposed to be doing, an offended look spread over his large flat features. I gave up on any pretense of filing the phone tips and went to the window, where I spent the next few hours staring out at the rain and listening to the faint, familiar noises of the squad behind me: Bernadette laughing, phones ringing, the rise of arguing male voices suddenly muffled by a slamming door.

It was twenty past seven when I finally heard Cassie and Sam coming down the corridor. Their voices were too subdued and sporadic for me to make out any words, but I recognized the tones. It's funny, the things a change of perspective can make you notice; I hadn't realized how deep Sam's voice was, till I listened to him interviewing Damien.

"I want to go home," Cassie said as they came into the incident room. She dropped into a chair and rested her forehead on the heels of her hands.

"Nearly over," Sam said. It wasn't clear whether he meant the day or the investigation. He went around the table to his seat; on the way, to my utter surprise, he laid his hand briefly, lightly, on Cassie's head.

"How did it go?" I asked, hearing the stilted note in my voice.

Cassie didn't move. "Grand," Sam said. He rubbed his eyes, grimacing. "I think we're sorted, as far as Donnelly goes, anyway."

The phone rang. I picked it up: Bernadette, telling us all to stay in the incident room, O'Kelly wanted to see us. Sam nodded and sat down heavily, feet planted apart, like a farmer coming in from a hard day's work. Cassie lifted her head with an effort and fumbled in her back pocket for her rolled-up notebook.

Sort of characteristically, O'Kelly kept us waiting for a while. None of us spoke. Cassie doodled in her notebook, a spiky, vaguely sinister tree; Sam slumped at the table and gazed unseeingly at the crowded whiteboard; I leaned against the window frame looking out at the dark formal garden below, sudden little gusts of wind running through the bushes. Our positions around the room felt staged somehow, significant in some obscure but ominous way; the flicker and hum of the fluorescent lights had put me into an almost trancelike state and I was starting to feel as if we were in some existentialist play, where the ticking clock would stay at 7:38 forever and we would never be able to move from these predestined poses. When O'Kelly finally banged through the door, it came as something of a shock.

"First things first," he said grimly, pulling up a chair and slapping a pile of paperwork on the table. "O'Neill. Remind me: what are you going to do with this whole Andrews mess?"

"Drop it," Sam said quietly. He looked very tired. It wasn't that he had bags under his eyes or anything like that, to anyone who didn't know him he would have seemed fine, but his healthy rural ruddiness was gone and he looked somehow terribly young and vulnerable.

"Very good. Maddox, I'm docking you five days' holiday."

Cassie glanced up briefly. "Yes, sir." I checked, covertly, to see whether Sam looked startled or whether he already knew what this was all about, but his face gave away nothing.

"And Ryan, you're on desk duty until further notice. I don't know how the hell you three works of art managed to pick up Damien Donnelly, but you can thank your lucky stars that you did, or your careers would be in even worse shape than they are. Are we clear?"

None of us had the energy to answer. I detached myself from the window frame and took a seat, as far from everyone else as possible.

O'Kelly gave us a filthy look and decided to take our silence for acquiescence. "Right. Where are we on Donnelly?"

"I'd say we're doing well," Sam said, when it became clear that neither of us was going to say anything. "Full confession, including details that weren't released, and a fair bit of forensic evidence. I'd say his only chance of getting off would be to plead insanity—and that's what he'll do, if he gets a good lawyer. Just now he's feeling so bad about it, he wants to plead guilty, but that'll wear off after a few days in jail."

"That insanity shite shouldn't be allowed," O'Kelly said bitterly. "Some eejit getting up on the stand and saying, 'It's not his fault, Your Honor, his mammy toilet-trained him too early so he couldn't help killing that wee girl…' It's a load of my arse. He's no more insane than I am. Get one of ours to examine him and say so." Sam nodded and made a note.

O'Kelly flipped through his papers and waved a report at us. "Now. What's all this about the sister?"

The air in the room tightened. "Rosalind Devlin," Cassie said, raising her head. "She and Damien were seeing each other. From what he says, the murder was her idea; she pressured him into it."

"Yeah, right. Why?"

"According to Damien," Cassie said evenly, "Rosalind told him that Jonathan Devlin was sexually abusing all three of his daughters, and physically abusing Rosalind and Jessica. Katy, who was his favorite, encouraged and often incited the abuse against the other two. Rosalind said that if Katy was eliminated, the abuse would stop."

"Any evidence backing this up?"

"On the contrary. Damien says Rosalind told him Devlin had fractured her skull and broken Jessica's arm, but there's nothing like that on their medical records—nothing that indicates any kind of abuse, in fact. And Katy, after supposedly having regular sexual intercourse with her father for years, died virgo intacta."

"So why are you wasting our time on this bullshit?" O'Kelly slapped the report. "We've got our man, Maddox. Go home and let the lawyers sort out the rest."

"Because it's Rosalind's bullshit, not Damien's," Cassie said, and for the first time there was a faint spark in her voice. "Someone made Katy sick for years; that wasn't Damien. The first time she was about to go off to ballet school, long before Damien knew she existed, someone made her so sick she had to turn down the place. Someone put it into Damien's head to kill a girl he'd barely seen—you said it yourself, sir, he's not insane: he didn't hear little voices telling him to do it. Rosalind's the only person who fits."

"What's her motive?"

"She couldn't stand the fact that Katy was getting all the attention and admiration. Sir, I'd put a lot of money on this. I think that years ago, as soon as she realized Katy had a serious talent for ballet, Rosalind started poisoning her. It's horribly easy to do: bleach, emetics, plain table salt—your average household has several dozen things that can give a little girl some mysterious gastric disorder, if you can just convince her to take them. Maybe you tell her it's a secret medicine, it'll make her better; and if she's only eight or nine, and you're her big sister, she'll probably believe you… But when Katy got her second chance at ballet school, she stopped being convinced. She was twelve now, old enough to start questioning what she was told. She refused to take the stuff any more. That—topped off by the newspaper article and the fund-raiser and the fact that Katy was becoming Knocknaree's main celebrity—was the last straw: she had actually dared to defy Rosalind outright, and Rosalind wasn't going to allow that. When she met Damien, she saw her chance. The poor little bastard is a born patsy; he's not all that bright, and he'd do anything to make someone happy. She spent the next few months using sex, sob stories, flattery, guilt trips, everything at her disposal, to persuade him that he had to kill Katy. And finally, by last month, she had him so dazed and hyped up that he felt like he didn't have any other choice. Actually, he probably was a little insane by that time."

"Don't be saying that outside this room," O'Kelly said sharply and automatically. Cassie moved, something like a shrug, and went back to her drawing.

A silence fell over the room. The story was a hideous one in itself, ancient as Cain and Abel but with all its own brand-new jagged edges, and it is impossible for me to describe the mixture of emotions with which I had heard Cassie tell it. I had been looking not at her but at our frail silhouettes in the window, but there was no way to avoid listening. She has a very beautiful speaking voice, Cassie, low and flexible and woodwind; but the words she said seemed to crawl hissing up the walls, spin sticky dark trails of shadow across the lights, nest in tangled webs in the high corners.

"Got any evidence?" O'Kelly demanded, finally. "Or are you just going on Donnelly's word?"

"No hard evidence, no," Cassie said. "We can prove the connection between Damien and Rosalind—we've got calls between their mobiles—and they both gave us the same fake lead about some nonexistent guy in a tracksuit, which means she was an accessory after the fact, but there's no proof that she even knew about the murder beforehand."

"Of course there isn't," he said flatly. "Why did I ask. Are you all three on board with this? Or is this just Maddox's personal little crusade?"

"I'm with Detective Maddox, sir," Sam said firmly and promptly. "I've been interrogating Donnelly all day, and I think he's telling the truth."

O'Kelly sighed, exasperated, and jerked his chin at me. Obviously he felt Cassie and Sam were being gratuitously difficult, he just wanted to finish Damien's paperwork and declare this case closed; but in spite of his best efforts he is not a despot at heart, and he wouldn't override his team's unanimous opinion. I felt for him, really: I was presumably the last person he wanted to look to for support.

Finally—somehow I couldn't bear to say it out loud—I nodded. "Brilliant," O'Kelly said wearily. "That's just brilliant. All right. Donnelly's story's barely enough for us to charge her, never mind convict her. We need to get a confession. What age is she?"

"Eighteen," I said. I hadn't spoken in so long that my voice came out as a startled croak; I cleared my throat. "Eighteen."

"Thank Christ for small mercies. At least we don't have to have the parents there when we interrogate her. Right: O'Neill and Maddox, pull her in, go at her as hard as you can, scare the bejasus out of her till she cracks."

"Won't work," Cassie said, adding another branch to the tree. "Psychopaths have very low anxiety levels. You'd have to stick a gun to her head to scare her that badly."

"Psychopaths?" I said, after a startled instant.

"Jesus, Maddox," O'Kelly said, annoyed. "Less of the Hollywood. She didn't eat the sister."

Cassie glanced up from her doodle, her eyebrows lifting into cool, delicate arcs. "I wasn't talking about movie psychos. She fits the clinical definition. No conscience, no empathy, pathological liar, manipulative, charming, intuitive, attention-seeking, easily bored, narcissistic, turns very nasty when she's thwarted in any way…I'm sure I'm forgetting a few of the criteria, but does that sound about right?"

"That's enough to be going on with," Sam said dryly. "Hang on; so even if we go to trial, she'll get off on insanity?" O'Kelly mumbled something disgusted, no doubt to do with psychology in general and Cassie in particular.

"She's perfectly sane," Cassie said crisply. "Any psychiatrist will say so. It's not a mental illness."

"How long have you known this?" I asked.

Her eyes flicked to me. "I started wondering the first time we met her. It didn't seem relevant to the case: the killer clearly wasn't a psychopath, and she had a perfect alibi. I considered telling you anyway, but do you really think you would have believed me?"

You should have trusted me, I almost said. I saw Sam look back and forth between us, perplexed and unsettled.

"Anyway," Cassie said, going back to her sketching, "there's no point in trying to scare a confession out of her. Psychopaths don't really do fear; mainly just aggression, boredom or pleasure."

"OK," Sam said. "Fair enough. Then what about the other sister—Jessica, is it? Would she know anything?"

"Quite possibly," I said. "They're close." One corner of Cassie's mouth went up wryly at the word I had chosen.

"Ah, Jesus," O'Kelly said. "She's twelve, am I right? That means the parents."

"Actually," Cassie said, not looking up, "I doubt talking to Jessica would be any use either. She's completely under Rosalind's control. Whatever Rosalind's done to her, she's so punch-drunk that she can hardly think for herself. If we find a way to charge Rosalind, yeah, we might get something out of Jessica sooner or later; but as long as Rosalind's in that house, she'll be too terrified of saying something wrong to say anything at all."

O'Kelly lost patience. He hates being baffled, and the charged, crisscrossing tensions in the room must have been setting his teeth on edge just as badly as the case itself. "That's great, Maddox. Thanks for that. So what the hell do you suggest? Come on; let's hear you come up with something useful, instead of sitting there shooting down everyone else's ideas."

Cassie stopped drawing and carefully balanced her pen across one finger. "OK," she said. "Psychopaths get their kicks by having power over other people—manipulating them, inflicting pain. I think we should try playing to that. Give her all the power she can eat, and see if she gets carried away."

"What are you talking about?"

"Last night," Cassie said slowly, "Rosalind accused me of sleeping with Detective Ryan."

Sam's head turned sharply towards me. I kept my eyes on O'Kelly. "Oh, I hadn't forgotten, believe me," he said heavily. "And it bloody well better not be true. You two are both in deep enough shite already."

"No," Cassie said, a trifle wearily, "it's not true. She was just trying to distract me and hoping she would hit a nerve. She didn't, but she doesn't know that for sure; I could just have been covering very well."

"So?" O'Kelly demanded.

"So," Cassie said, "I could go talk to her, admit that Detective Ryan and I have a longstanding affair, and beg her not to turn us in—maybe tell her we suspect she was involved in Katy's death and offer to tell her how much we know in exchange for her silence, something like that."

O'Kelly snorted. "And what, you think she'll just spill her guts?"

She shrugged. "I don't see why not. Yeah, most people hate to admit they've done something terrible, even if they won't get in trouble for it; but that's because they feel bad about it, and because they don't want other people to think less of them. To this girl, other people aren't real, any more than characters in a video game, and right and wrong are just words. It's not like she feels any guilt or remorse or anything about having Damien kill Katy. In fact, I'm willing to bet she's over the moon with herself. This is her greatest achievement yet, and she hasn't been able to brag to anyone about it. If she's sure she has the upper hand, and she's sure I'm not wearing a wire—and would I wear a wire to admit to sleeping with my partner?—I think she'll jump at the chance. The thought of telling a detective exactly what she did, knowing there's not a thing I can do about it, knowing it must be killing me… It'll be one of the most delicious buzzes of her life. She won't be able to resist."

"She can say whatever she bloody well likes," O'Kelly said. "Without a caution, none of it will be admissible."

"So I'll caution her."

"And you think she'll keep talking? I thought you said the girl's not crazy."

"I don't know," Cassie said. She sounded, just for a second, exhausted and openly pissed off, and it made her seem very young, like a teenager unable to conceal her frustration with the idiotic adult world. "I just think it's our best shot. If we go for a formal interview, she'll be on her guard, she'll sit there and deny everything, and we'll have blown our shot: she'll go home knowing there's no way we can pin anything on her. This way, at least there's a chance she'll figure I can't prove anything and take the risk of talking."

O'Kelly was grating a thumbnail, monotonously and infuriatingly, over the fake-wood grain of the table; he was obviously thinking about it. "If we do it, you wear a wire. I'm not risking this on your word against hers."

"I wouldn't have it any other way," Cassie said coolly.

"Cassie," Sam said very gently, leaning forward across the table, "are you sure you're able for this?" I felt a sudden flare of anger, no less painful for being utterly unjustifiable: it should have been my place, not his, to ask the question.

"I'll be fine," Cassie told him, with a little one-sided smile. "Hey, I did undercover for months and never got spotted once. Oscar material, me."

I didn't think this was what Sam had been asking. Just telling me about that guy in college had left her practically catatonic, and I could see that same distant, dilated look starting in her eyes again, hear the too-detached note in her voice. I thought of that first evening, across the stalled Vespa: how I had wanted to sweep her under my coat, protect her even from the rain.

"I could do it," I said, too loudly. "Rosalind likes me."

"No," O'Kelly snapped, "you couldn't."

Cassie rubbed her eyes with finger and thumb, pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache starting. "No offense," she said flatly, "but Rosalind Devlin doesn't like you any more than she likes me. She's not capable of that emotion. She finds you useful. She knows she has you wrapped around her little finger—or had you; whichever—and she's sure you're the one cop who, if it comes to it, will believe she's been wrongfully accused and fight her corner. Believe me, there's not a chance in hell she's going to throw that away by confessing to you. Me, I'm no use to her anyway; she has nothing to lose by talking to me. She knows I dislike her, but that just means she'll get an extra thrill out of having me at her mercy."

"All right," O'Kelly said, shoving his stuff into a pile and pushing back his chair. "Let's do it. Maddox, I hope to God you know what you're talking about. First thing tomorrow morning, we'll get you wired up and you can go have a girly chat with Rosalind Devlin. I'll make sure they give you something voice-activated, so you can't forget to hit Record."

"No," Cassie said. "No recorder. I want a transmitter, feeding to a backup van less than two hundred yards away."

"To interview an eighteen-year-old kid?" O'Kelly said contemptuously. "Have some balls, Maddox. This isn't Al-Qaeda here."

"To go one-on-one with a psychopath who just murdered her little sister."

"She's got no history of violence herself," I said. I didn't intend it to sound bitchy, but Cassie's eyes passed briefly over me, with no expression in them at all, as if I didn't exist.

"Transmitter and backup," she repeated.

I didn't go home that night until three in the morning, when I could be sure that Heather would be asleep. Instead I drove out to Bray, to the seafront, and sat there in the car. It had finally stopped raining and the night was dense with mist; the tide was in, I could hear the slap and rush of the water, but I caught only the odd glimpse of the waves between the swirls of erasing gray. The gay little pavilion drifted in and out of existence like something from Brigadoon. Somewhere a foghorn sounded one melancholy note over and over, and people walking home along the seafront materialized gradually out of nothingness, silhouettes floating in midair like dark messengers.

I thought about a lot of things, that night. I thought of Cassie in Lyons, just a girl in an apron, serving coffee at sunny outdoor tables and bantering in French with the customers. I thought of my parents getting ready to go out dancing: the careful lines my father's comb left in his Brylcreemed hair, the rousing scent of my mother's perfume and her flower-patterned dress whisking out the door. I thought of Jonathan and Cathal and Shane, long-limbed and rash and laughing fiercely over their lighter games; of Sam at a big wooden table amid seven noisy brothers and sisters, and of Damien in some hushed college library filling out an application for a job at Knocknaree. I thought of Mark's reckless eyes—The only things I believe in are out on that there dig—and then of revolutionaries waving ragged, gallant banners, of refugees swimming swift nighttime currents; of all those who hold life so light, or the stakes so dear, that they can walk steady and open-eyed to meet the thing that will take or transform their lives and whose high cold criteria are far beyond our understanding. I tried, for a long time, to remember bringing my mother wildflowers.