In the Woods

25

That evening we started clearing out the incident room, Sam and Cassie and I. We worked methodically and in silence, taking down photographs, erasing the multicolored tangle from the whiteboard, sorting files and reports and packing them away in blue-stamped cardboard boxes. Someone had set fire to a flat off Parnell Street the previous night, killing a Nigerian asylum-seeker and her six-month-old baby; Costello and his partner needed the room.

O'Kelly and Sweeney were interviewing Rosalind, down the hall, with Jonathan in the background to protect her. I think I had expected Jonathan to come in with all guns blazing and possibly try to hit someone, but as it transpired he hadn't been the problem. When O'Kelly told the Devlins, outside the interview room, what Rosalind had confessed to, Margaret whirled on him, mouth gaping open; then she drew in a huge gulp of breath and screamed, "No!" hoarse and wild, her voice slamming off the walls of the corridor. "No. No. No. She was with her cousins. How can you do this to her? How can you…how…Ah, God, she warned me—she warned me you would do this! You"—she stabbed a thick, trembling finger at me, and I flinched before I could stop myself—"you, calling her a dozen times a day asking her out, and her only a child, you should be ashamed… And her"—Cassie—"she hated Rosalind from the start, Rosalind always said she would try to blame her for…What are you trying to do to her? Are you trying to kill her? Then will you be happy? Oh, God, my poor baby…Why do people tell these lies about her? Why?" Her hands clawed at her hair and she broke down into ugly, wrenching sobs.

Jonathan had stood still at the top of the stairs, holding on to the railing, while O'Kelly tried to calm Margaret down and shot us filthy looks over her shoulder. He was dressed for work, in a suit and tie. For some reason I remember it very clearly, that suit. It was dark blue and spotlessly clean, with a slight sheen where it had been ironed too many times, and somehow I found it almost inexpressibly sad.

Rosalind was under arrest for murder and for assaulting an officer. She had opened her mouth only once since her parents arrived, to claim—lip trembling—that Cassie had punched her in the stomach and that she had only been defending herself. We would send a file to the prosecutor's office on both charges, but we all knew the evidence for murder was slim at best. We no longer had even the Tracksuit Shadow link to show that Rosalind had been an accessory: my session with Jessica had not in fact been supervised by an appropriate adult, and I had no way of proving that it had ever happened. We had Damien's word and a bunch of mobile-phone records, and that was all.

It was getting late, maybe eight o'clock, and the building was very quiet, just our movements and a soft fitful rain pattering at the windows of the incident room. I took down the post-mortem photos and the Devlins' family snapshots, the scowling Tracksuit Shadow suspects and the grainy blowups of Peter and Jamie, picked the Blu-Tack off the backs and filed them away. Cassie checked each box, fitted a lid onto it and labeled it in squeaky black marker. Sam went around the room with a rubbish bag, collecting Styrofoam cups and emptying wastepaper baskets, brushing crumbs off the tables. There were smears of dried blood down the front of his shirt.

His map of Knocknaree was starting to curl at the edges, and one corner ripped away as I took it down. Someone had got spatters of water on it and the ink had run in spots, making Cassie's property-developer caricature look unpleasantly as if he had had a stroke. "Should we keep this on file," I asked Sam, "or…?"

I held it out to him and we looked at it: tiny gnarled tree trunks and smoke curling from the chimneys of the houses, fragile and wistful as a fairy tale. "Probably better not," Sam said, after a moment. He took the map from me, rolled it into a tube and maneuvered it into the rubbish bag.

"I'm missing a lid," Cassie said. Dark, shocking scabs had formed over the cuts on her cheek. "Any more over there?"

"There was one under the table," Sam said. "Here—" He threw Cassie the last lid, and she fitted it into place and straightened up.

We stood under the fluorescent lights and looked at one another, across the bare tables and the litter of boxes. My turn to make dinner… For a moment I almost said it, and I felt the same thought cross both Sam's and Cassie's minds, stupid and impossible and no less piercing for any of that.

"Well," Cassie said quietly, on a long breath. She glanced around the empty room, wiping her hands on the sides of her jeans. "Well, I guess that's it, then."

I am intensely aware, by the way, that this story does not show me in a particularly flattering light. I am aware that, within an impressively short time of meeting me, Rosalind had me coming to heel like a well-trained dog: running up and down stairs to bring her coffee, nodding along while she bitched about my partner, imagining like some starstruck teenager that she was a kindred soul. But before you decide to despise me too thoroughly, consider this: she fooled you, too. You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie.

It is difficult for me to describe the degree of horror and self-loathing inspired by the realization that Rosalind had suckered me. I'm sure Cassie would have said that my gullibility was only natural, that all the other liars and criminals I'd encountered had been mere amateurs while Rosalind was the real, the natural-born thing, and that she herself had been immune purely because she had fallen for the same technique once before; but Cassie wasn't there. A few days after we closed the case, O'Kelly told me that until the verdicts came in I would be working out of the main detective unit in Harcourt Street—"away from anything you can fuck up," as he put it, and I found it difficult to counter this. I was still officially on the Murder squad, so nobody knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing in the general unit. They gave me a desk and occasionally O'Kelly sent over a pile of bureaucracy, but for the most part I was free to wander the corridors as I chose, eavesdropping on fragments of conversation and evading curious stares, immaterial and unwanted as a ghost.

I spent sleepless nights conjuring up gory, detailed, improbable fates for Rosalind. I wanted her not just dead but obliterated from the face of the earth-crushed to unidentifiable pulp, pulverized in a shredder, burned to a handful of toxic ash. I had never suspected myself of this capacity for sadism, and it horrified me further to realize that I would joyfully have carried out any of these sentences myself. Every conversation I had had with her spooled over and over through my head, and I saw with merciless clarity how skillfully she had played me: how unerringly she had put her finger on everything from my vanities through my griefs through my deepest hidden fears, and drawn them out of me to work her will.

This was, in the end, the most hideous realization of all: Rosalind had not, after all, implanted a microchip behind my ear or drugged me into submission. I had broken every vow myself and steered every boat to shipwreck with my own hand. She had simply, like any good craftswoman, used what came her way. Almost with a glance she had assessed me and Cassie to the bone and discarded Cassie as unusable; but in me she had seen something, some subtle but fundamental quality, that made me worth keeping.

I didn't testify at Damien's trial. Too risky, the prosecutor said: there was too much of a chance that Rosalind had told Damien about my "personal history," as he put it. He was a guy named Mathews who wears flashy ties and gets called "dynamic" a lot, and he always makes me tired. Rosalind hadn't brought up the subject again—apparently Cassie had been convincing enough to make her drop it and move on to other, more promising weapons—and I doubted that she would have told Damien anything useful at all, but I didn't bother to argue.

I went to see Cassie testify, though. I sat at the back of the courtroom, which was, unusually, packed; the trial had been filling front pages and talk radio since before it even began. Cassie was wearing a neat little dove-gray suit and her curls were slicked down smoothly against her head. I hadn't seen her in a few months. She looked thinner, more subdued; the quicksilver mobility I associate with her was gone, and her new stillness brought her face home to me—the delicate, marked arches above her eyelids, the wide clean curves of her mouth—as if I had never seen it before. She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones. I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.

She was good; Cassie has always been good in the courtroom. Juries trust her and she holds their attention, which is harder than it sounds, especially in a long trial. She answered Mathews's questions in a quiet, clear voice, her hands folded in her lap. On cross-examination she did what she could for Damien: yes, he had appeared agitated and confused; yes, he had seemed genuinely to believe that the murder had been necessary to protect Rosalind and Jessica Devlin; yes, in her opinion he had been under Rosalind's influence and had committed the crime at her urging. Damien huddled in his seat and stared at her like a little boy watching a horror movie, his eyes dazed and huge and uncomprehending. He had tried to commit suicide, using the time-honored prison bedsheet, when he heard that Rosalind was going to testify against him.

"When Damien confessed to this crime," the defense barrister asked, "did he tell you why he had committed it?"

Cassie shook her head. "Not that day, no. My partner and I asked him about his motive a number of times, but he either refused to answer or said that he wasn't sure."

"Even though he had already confessed, and telling you his motive couldn't possibly have done him any harm. Why do you think that was?"

"Objection: calls for speculation…"

My partner. I knew from Cassie's blink on the word, from the tiny shift in the angle of her shoulders, that she had seen me tucked away there at the back; but she never looked my way, not even when the lawyers finally finished with her and she stepped down from the stand and walked out of the courtroom. I thought of Kiernan then; of what it must have been to him when, after thirty years of partnership, McCabe had that heart attack and died. More than I have ever envied anything in the world, I envied Kiernan that, that unique and unattainable grief.

Rosalind was the next witness. She tiptoed up to the stand, through the sudden flurry of whispers and journalistic scribbling, and gave Mathews a timid little rosebud smile from under her mascara. I left. I read it in the newspapers the next day: how she had sobbed when she talked about Katy, trembled as she recounted how Damien had threatened to kill her sisters if she broke up with him; how, when his barrister started digging, she had cried, "How dare you! I loved my sister!" and then fainted, forcing the judge to adjourn the court for the afternoon.

She hadn't had a trial—her parents' decision, I'm sure, rather than hers; left to herself, I can't imagine she would have passed up that amount of attention. Mathews had plea-bargained her case. Conspiracy charges are notoriously difficult to prove; there was no hard evidence against Rosalind, her confession was inadmissible and she had of course recanted it anyway (Cassie, she explained, had terrified it out of her by making throat-slitting motions); and, besides, as a juvenile she wouldn't get much of a sentence even if by some chance she were found guilty. She was also claiming, off and on, that she and I had slept together, which left O'Kelly apoplectic and me even more so and brought the general confusion to a level nothing short of paralyzing.

Mathews had played the odds and concentrated on Damien. In exchange for her testimony, he had offered Rosalind a three-year suspended sentence for reckless endangerment and resisting arrest. I'd heard, through the grapevine, that she'd already received half a dozen proposals of marriage, and that newspapers and publishers were having a bidding war over her story.

On my way out of the courthouse I saw Jonathan Devlin, leaning against the wall and smoking. He was holding the cigarette close against his chest, tilting his head back to watch the gulls wheeling over the river. I got my smokes out of my coat and joined him.

He glanced at me, then away again.

"How are you doing?" I asked.

He shrugged heavily. "Much as you'd expect. Jessica tried to kill herself. Went to bed and cut her wrists with my razor."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "Is she all right?"

One corner of his mouth twitched in a humorless smile. "Yeah. Luckily she made a balls of it: cut across instead of down, or some such."

I lit my cigarette, cupping my hand around the flame—it was a windy day, purplish clouds starting to gather. "Can I ask you a question?" I said. "Strictly off the record?"

He looked at me: a dark, hopeless look tinged with something like contempt. "Why not."

"You knew, didn't you?" I said. "You knew all along."

He said nothing for a long time, so long that I wondered if he was going to ignore the question. Eventually he sighed and said, "Not knew. She couldn't have done it herself, she was with her cousins, and I didn't know anything about this lad Damien. But I wondered. I've known Rosalind all her life. I wondered."

"And you didn't do anything." I had meant my voice to be expressionless, but a note of accusation must have slipped in. He could have told us on the first day what Rosalind was; he could have told someone years earlier, when Katy first started getting sick. Although I knew that quite possibly this would have made no difference to anything at all, in the long run, I couldn't help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.

Jonathan tossed away his cigarette butt and turned to face me, hands shoved into the pockets of his overcoat. "What do you think I should have done?" he demanded in a low, hard voice. "She's my daughter, too. I'd already lost one. Margaret won't hear a word against her; years ago I wanted to send Rosalind to a psychologist, about the amount of lies she told, and Margaret got hysterical and threatened to leave me, take the girls with her. And I didn't know anything. I would have had fuck-all to tell you. I kept an eye on her and prayed it was some property developer. What would you have done?"

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "Quite possibly exactly what you did." He kept staring at me, breathing fast, his nostrils flaring slightly. I turned away and drew on my cigarette; after a while I heard him take a deep breath and lean back against the wall again.

"Now I've something to ask you," he said. "Did Rosalind have it right about you being that boy whose friends disappeared?"

The question didn't surprise me. He had the right to see or hear footage of all interviews with Rosalind, and at some level I think I had always expected him to ask, sooner or later. I knew I should deny it—the official story was that I had, legally if a little callously, made up the whole disappearance thing to gain Rosalind's trust—but I didn't have the energy, and I couldn't see the point. "Yeah," I said. "Adam Ryan."

Jonathan turned his head and looked at me for a long time, and I wondered what hazy memories he was trying to match to my face.

"We had nothing to do with that," he said, and the undertone in his voice—gentle, almost pitying—startled me. "I want you to know that. Nothing at all."

"I know," I said, eventually. "I'm sorry I went for you."

He nodded a few times, slowly. "I'd probably have done the same thing, in your place. And it's not as if I was some holy innocent. You saw what we did to Sandra, didn't you? You were there."

"Yeah," I said. "She's not going to press charges."

He moved his head as if the thought disturbed him. The river was dark and thick-looking, with an oily, unhealthy sheen. There was something in the water, a dead fish maybe, or a rubbish spill; the seagulls were screaming over it in a whirling frenzy.

"What are you going to do now?" I asked, inanely.

Jonathan shook his head, staring up at the lowering sky. He looked exhausted—not the kind of exhaustion that can be healed by a good night's sleep or a holiday; something bone-deep and indelible, settled in puffy grooves around his eyes and mouth. "Move house. We've had bricks through the windows, and someone spray-painted PEDAPHILE on the car—he couldn't spell, whoever he was, but the message came across clear enough. I can stick it out till the motorway thing is settled, one way or the other, but after that…"

Allegations of child abuse, no matter how baseless they may seem, have to be checked out. The investigation into Damien's accusations against Jonathan had found no evidence to substantiate them and a considerable amount to contradict them, and Sex Crime had been as discreet as was humanly possible; but the neighbors always know, by some mysterious system of jungle drums, and there are always plenty of people who believe there is no smoke without fire.

"I'm sending Rosalind to counseling, like the judge said. I've done some reading and all the books say it makes no difference to people like her, they're made that way and there's no cure, but I have to try. And I'll keep her at home as long as I can, where I can see what she's at and try to stop her pulling her tricks on anyone else. She's off to college in October, music at Trinity, but I've told her I won't pay her rent on a flat—she'll stay at home, if it's that or get a job. Margaret still believes she did nothing and you lot set her up, but she's glad enough to keep her at home awhile longer. She says Rosalind's sensitive." He cleared his throat with a harsh sound, as if the word tasted bad. "I'm sending Jess to live with my sister in Athlone as soon as the scars on her wrists go down; get her out of harm's way."

His mouth twisted in that bitter half-smile. "Harm. Her own sister." For an instant I thought of what that house must have been like for the past eighteen years, what it must be like now. It made a slow, sick horror heave in my stomach.

"Do you know something?" Jonathan said abruptly and painfully. "Margaret and I were only going out a couple of months when she found out she was pregnant. We were both terrified. I managed to bring it up once, that maybe she should think about…taking the boat to England. But…sure, she's very religious. She felt bad enough about getting pregnant to start with, never mind…She's a good woman, I don't regret marrying her. But if I'd known what was—what it—what Rosalind was going to be, God forgive me, I'd have dragged her on that boat myself."

I wish to God you had, I wanted to say, but it would have been cruelty. "I'm sorry," I said again, uselessly.

He glanced at me for a moment; then he took a breath and shrugged his coat closer around his shoulders. "I'd better head in, see if Rosalind's finished up."

"I think she'll be awhile."

"She probably will," he said tonelessly, and plodded up the steps into the courthouse, his overcoat flapping behind him, hunching a little against the wind.

The jury found Damien guilty. Given the evidence presented, they could hardly have done otherwise. There had been various complicated, multilateral legal fights about admissibility; psychiatrists had had jargon-heavy debates about the workings of Damien's mind. (All this I heard third-hand, in passing snatches of conversation or in interminable phone calls from Quigley, who had apparently made it his mission in life to find out why I had been relegated to paperwork in Harcourt Street.) His barrister went for a double-barreled defense—he was temporarily insane, and even if he wasn't, he believed he was protecting Rosalind from grievous bodily harm—which often generates enough confusion to be mistaken for reasonable doubt; but we had a full confession, and, perhaps more importantly, we had autopsy photos of a dead child. Damien was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life, which in practice usually works out at somewhere between ten and fifteen years.

I doubt that he appreciated the multiple ironies of this, but that trowel quite possibly saved his life, and certainly spared him various unsavory prison experiences. Because of the sexual assault on Katy, he was considered a sex offender and sentenced to be held in the high-risk unit, with the pedophiles and rapists and other prisoners who would not fare well in general population. This was presumably something of a mixed blessing, but it did at least increase his chances of getting out of jail alive and without any communicable diseases.

There was a minor lynch mob, maybe a few dozen people, waiting for him outside the courthouse after the sentencing. I watched the news in a dingy little pub near the quays, and a low, dangerous rumble of approval rose from the regulars as, on screen, impassive uniforms guided Damien stumbling through the crowd and the van pulled away under a hail of fists and hoarse shouts and the odd half-brick. "Bring in the bloody death penalty," someone muttered in a corner. I was aware that I should feel sorry for Damien, that he had been fucked from the moment he walked over to that sign-up table and that I of all people ought to be able to muster up some compassion for this, but I couldn't; I couldn't.

I really don't have the heart to go into detail about what "suspended pending investigation" turned out to mean: the tense, endless hearings, the various stern authorities in sharply pressed suits and uniforms, the clumsy humiliating explanations and self-justifications, the sick through-the-looking-glass sensation of being trapped on the wrong side of the interrogation process. To my surprise, O'Kelly turned out to be my most vehement defender, going into long impassioned speeches about my solve rate and my interview technique and all kinds of things he had never mentioned before. Although I knew this was probably due not to some unsuspected vein of affection but to self-protection—my misbehavior reflected badly on him, he needed to justify the fact that he had harbored a renegade like me on his squad for so long—I was pathetically, almost tearfully grateful: he seemed my one remaining ally in the world. I even tried to thank him once, in the corridor after one of these sessions, but I only got out a few words before he gave me a look of such profound disgust that I started stammering and backed away.

Eventually the various authorities decided not to fire me, or even—which would have been far worse—to revert me back to uniform. Again, I don't put this down to any particular feeling on their part that I deserved a second chance; more likely it was simply because firing me could have caught the eye of some journalist and led to all kinds of inconvenient questions and consequences. They kicked me off the squad, of course. Even in my wildest moments of optimism, I had hardly dared to hope they wouldn't. They sent me back to the floater pool, with a hint (beautifully delivered, really, in delicate, steely subtext) that I shouldn't expect to get out of it again for a long time, if at all. Sometimes Quigley, with a more refined sense of cruelty than I gave him credit for, requests me for tip lines or door-to-door.

The whole process was, of course, nowhere near as simple as I'm making it out to be. It took months, months during which I sat around the apartment in a wretched nightmarish daze, with my savings draining away and my mother timidly bringing over macaroni and cheese to make sure I ate, and Heather buttonholing me to explain the underlying character flaw at the root of all my problems (apparently I needed to learn to be more considerate of other people's feelings, hers in particular) and give me her therapist's phone number.

By the time I got back to work, Cassie was gone. I heard, from various sources, that she had been offered a promotion to Detective Sergeant if she would stay; that, conversely, she had quit the force because she was about to be booted off the squad; that someone had seen her in a pub in town, holding hands with Sam; that she had gone back to college and was studying archaeology. The moral of most of the stories, by implication, was that women never really had belonged on the Murder squad.

Cassie had not, as it turned out, left the force at all. She had transferred to Domestic Violence and negotiated time out to finish her psychology degree—hence the college story, I suppose. No wonder there were rumors: Domestic Violence is possibly the single most excruciating job in the force, combining as it does all the worst elements of Murder and Sex Crime with none of the kudos, and the thought of leaving one of the elite squads for that was inconceivable to most people. Her nerve must have gone, the grapevine said.

Personally, I don't believe Cassie's transfer had anything to do with losing her nerve; and, though I'm sure this sounds facile and self-serving, I really doubt that it had anything to do with me, or at least not in the way you might think. If the only problem had been the fact that we couldn't bear to be in the same room, she would have found a new partner and dug in her heels, shown up for work a little thinner and more defiant every day, until we came up with a new way to be around each other or until I put in for a transfer. She was always the stubborn one, of us two. I think she transferred because she had lied to O'Kelly and she had lied to Rosalind Devlin, and both of them had believed her; and because, when she told me the truth, I had called her a liar.

In some ways, I was disappointed that the archaeology story had turned out to be untrue. It was an easy picture to imagine, and one I liked to think about: Cassie on some green hill, with a mattock and combats, her hair blown off her face, brown and muddy and laughing.

I kept a vague eye on the papers for a while, but no scandal concerning the Knocknaree motorway ever surfaced. Uncle Redmond's name showed up, well down the list, in some tabloid's chart of how much taxpayers were spending on various politicians' makeup, but that was all. The fact that Sam was still on the Murder squad tended to make me think that he had done as O'Kelly told him, in the end—although it's possible, of course, that he did in fact take his tape to Michael Kiely, and no newspaper would touch it. I don't know.

Sam didn't sell his house, either. Instead, I heard, he rented it out at a nominal rate to a young widow whose husband had died of a brain aneurysm, leaving her with a toddler, a difficult pregnancy and no life insurance. As she was a freelance cellist, she couldn't even collect unemployment benefit; she had fallen behind on her rent, her landlord had evicted her, and she and the children had been living in a B amp;B provided by a charity organization. I have no idea how Sam found this woman—I'd have thought you would need to go to Victorian London for that level of picturesque, deserving pathos; he had presumably put in a characteristic amount of research. He had moved to a rental flat in Blanchardstown, I think, or some equivalent suburban hell. The main theories were that he was about to leave the force for the priesthood, and that he had a terminal disease.

Sophie and I went out once or twice—I did, after all, owe her dinner and cocktails several times over. I thought we had a good time, and she didn't ask any difficult questions, which I took as a good sign. After a few dates, though, and before the relationship had really progressed enough to merit the name, she dumped me. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. "You should go for younger women," she advised me. "They can't always tell."

Inevitably, sometime during those interminable months in my apartment (hand after hand of late-night solitaire poker, near-lethal quantities of Radiohead and Leonard Cohen), my thoughts turned back to Knocknaree. I had, of course, sworn never to let the place cross my mind again; but human beings can't help being curious, I suppose, as long as the knowledge doesn't come at too high a price.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I realized that there was nothing there. Everything before my first day of boarding school had apparently been excised from my mind, with surgical precision and this time for good. Peter, Jamie, the bikers and Sandra, the wood, every scrap of memory I had retrieved with such laborious care over the course of Operation Vestal: gone. I could remember what it had been like to remember these scenes, once upon a time, but now they had the remote, secondhand quality of old films I had watched or stories I had been told, I saw them as if from a vast distance—three brown-skinned kids in battered shorts, spitting on Willy Little's head from the branches and scrambling away, giggling—and I knew with cold certainty that over time even these deracinated images would shrivel up to nothing and blow away. They no longer seemed to belong to me, and I couldn't shake the dark, implacable sense that this was because I had forfeited my right to them, once and for all.

Only one image remained. A summer afternoon, Peter and me sprawled on the grass in his front garden. We had been trying, in a halfhearted kind of way, to make a periscope from instructions in an old comic book, but we were supposed to have a cardboard tube out of a roll of paper towel, and we couldn't ask our mothers for one because we weren't talking to them. We had used rolled-up newspaper instead, but it kept buckling, so all we could see through the periscope was the sports page, backwards.

We were both in a really bad mood. It was the first week of the holidays and it was sunny, so it should have been a brilliant day, we should have been fixing the tree house or freezing our mickeys off swimming in the river or something; but on our way home from the last day of school on Friday, Jamie had said, to her shoes, "Three months and I go to boarding school."

"Shut up," Peter had said, shoving her, not hard. "No you won't. She'll give in." But it had taken all the shine off the holidays, like a huge black smoke-cloud hanging over everything in sight. We couldn't go inside because our parents were all mad at us for not talking, and we couldn't go into the wood or do anything good because everything we thought of felt stupid, and we couldn't even go find Jamie and get her to come out because she would just shake her head and say "What's the point?" and make everything even worse. So we were lying in the garden, bored and itchy and annoyed with each other and with the periscope for not working and with the entire world for being a pain in the hole. Peter was pulling up blades of grass, biting the ends off and spitting them up into the air, in a restless automatic rhythm. I was lying on my stomach, one eye open to stare down at the ants bustling back and forth, and the sun was making my hair sweat. This summer doesn't even count, I thought. This summer sucks.

Jamie's door slammed open and she shot out like she had been fired from a cannon, her mother calling after her with a rueful smile in her voice and the door ricocheting shut with a bang and the Carmichaels' horrible Jack Russell exploding into high-pitched inbred hysteria. Peter and I sat up. Jamie skidded to a halt at her gate, head whipping round to look for us, and when we shouted to her she raced down the path, leaped over Peter's garden wall and tumbled flat on the grass with an arm hooked round each of our necks, bringing us down with her. We were all yelling at the same time and it took a few seconds before I figured out what Jamie was shouting: "I'm staying! I'm staying! I don't have to go!"

The summer came to life. It burst from gray to fierce blue and gold in the blink of an eye; the air pealed with grasshoppers and lawnmowers, swirled with branches and bees and dandelion seeds, it was soft and sweet as whipped cream, and over the wall the wood was calling us in the loudest of silent voices, it was shaking out all its best treasures to welcome us home. Summer tossed out a fountain of ivy tendrils, caught us straight under the breastbones and tugged; summer, redeemed and unfurling in front of us, a million years long.

We disentangled ourselves and sat up panting, barely able to believe it.

"Seriously?" I said. "For definite?"

"Yeah. She said, 'We'll see, I'll have another think about it and we'll sort something out,' but that always means it's OK but she just doesn't want to say so yet. I'm going nowhere!"

Jamie ran out of words, so she pushed me over. I grabbed her arm, got on top of her and gave her a Chinese burn. There was a huge grin straight across my face, and I was so happy that I thought it would never come off again.

Peter was on his feet. "We have to celebrate. Picnic in the castle. Go home and get stuff and meet there."

Rocketing through the house to the kitchen, my mother hoovering somewhere upstairs—"Mam! Jamie's staying, can I take stuff for a picnic?" as I grabbed three packets of crisps and a half-package of custard creams and shoved them up my T-shirt—then out the door again, waving to my mother's startled face on the landing, and one-handed over the wall.

Coke cans fizzing and foaming over, and us on our feet on top of the castle wall to clank them together. "We won!" Peter shouted up into the branches and the glittering bands of light, head thrown back and fist punching the air. "We did it!"

Jamie screamed, "I'm gonna stay here forever!" and danced on the wall like a thing made of air, "Forever and ever and ever!" And I just yelled, wild wordless whoops, and the wood caught our voices and tossed them outwards in great expanding ripples, wove them into the whirlpool of leaves and the jink and bubble of the river and the rustling calling web of rabbits and beetles and robins and all the other denizens of our domain, into one long high paean.

This memory, alone of all my hoard, did not dissolve into smoke and slide away through my fingers. It remained—still remains—sharp-edged and warm and mine, a single bright coin left in my hand. I suppose that, if the wood was going to leave me only one moment, that was a kind one to choose.

In one of those merciless little codicils that such cases sometimes have, Simone Cameron rang me not long after I got back to work. My mobile number was on the card I had given her, and she had no way of knowing that I was cross-checking joyriders' statements in Harcourt Street and no longer had anything to do with the Katy Devlin case. "Detective Ryan," she said, "we've found something I think you must see."

It was Katy's diary, the one Rosalind had told us she'd got bored with and thrown away. The Cameron Academy's cleaning lady, in an unaccustomed fit of thoroughness, had found it taped to the back of a framed poster of Anna Pavlova that hung on the studio wall. She had rung Simone, agog with excitement, when she read the name on the cover. I should have given Simone Sam's number and hung up, but instead I left the joyriders' statements unchecked and drove down to Stillorgan.

It was eleven in the morning and Simone was the only person at the Academy. The studio was flooded with sunlight and the photos of Katy had been taken off the notice-board, but one breath of that specific professional smell—resin, hard clean sweat, floor polish—brought it all back: skateboarders calling on the dark street below, rush of padded feet and chatter in the corridor, Cassie's voice beside me, the high singing urgency we had brought with us into the room.

The poster lay facedown on the floor. Dusty sheets of paper had been taped to the back of the frame to form a makeshift pouch, and on top of them was the diary. It was just a copybook, the kind kids use in school, lined pages and the cover that grubby recycled orange. "Paula, who found this, had to go on to her next job," Simone said, "but I have her phone number if you like."

I picked it up. "Have you read it?" I asked.

Simone nodded. "Some. Enough." She was wearing narrow black trousers and a soft black pullover, and they somehow made her look more exotic, not less, than the full skirt and leotard had. Her extraordinary eyes had the same immobilized look they had held when we told her about Katy.

I sat down on one of the plastic chairs. "Katy Devlin VERY PRIVATE KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU!!!" the cover said, but I opened it anyway. It was about three-quarters full. The handwriting was rounded and careful, just beginning to develop touches of individuality: strong flourishes on y's and g's, a tall curled capital S. Simone sat opposite me and watched, one hand laid over the other in her lap, while I read.

The diary covered almost eight months. The entries were regular at first, maybe half a page a day, but after a few months they became intermittent, two a week, one. Much of it was about ballet. "Simone says my arabesque is better but I still have to think about it coming from the whole body not just the leg specially on the left the line has to go straigt through." "Were learning a new piece for the end of year show it has music from Giselle + I have fouettés. Simone says remember this is Giselles way to tell her boyfriend how he broke her heart + how much shell miss him this is her only chance so that has to be the reason for everything I do. Some of it goes like this" and then a few lines of labored, mysterious notation, like some coded musical score. The day she got her acceptance from the Royal Ballet School was a wild, overexcited burst of capital letters and exclamation marks and stickers shaped like stars: "IM GOING IM GOING IM REALLY REALLY GOING!!!!!!"

There were passages about things she did with her friends: "We had a sleep over at Christinas house her mum gave us weird pizza with olives + we played truth or dare Beth fancies Matthew. I dont fancy anyone dancers mostly dont get married till after their career so maybe when Im thirty five or forty. We put on make up Marianne looked really pretty but Christina put too much eye shadow she looked like her mum!!" The first time she and her friends were allowed into town on their own: "We took the bus + went shopping to Miss Selfrige Marianne + I got the same top but hers is pink with purple writing mine is light blue with red. Jess couldnt come so I got her a flower clip for in her hair. Then we went to Mac Donalds Christina stuck her finger in my barbcue sauce so I put some on her icecream we laughed so much the gaurd said hed put us out if we didnt stop. Beth asked him do you want some barbcue icecream?"

She tried on Louise's pointe shoes, hated cabbage and got kicked out of Irish class for texting Beth across the aisle. A happy child, you would say, giggly and determined and running too fast for punctuation; nothing special about her except dancing, and contented that way. But in between: terror rose off the pages like petrol fumes, acrid and dizzying. "Jess is sad that Im going to ballet school she cried. Rosalind said if I go Jess will kill her self + it will be my fault I shouldnt be so selfish all the time. I dont know what to do if I ask Mum and Dad they might not let me go. I dont want Jess to die."

"Simone said I cant get sick any more so tonight I said to Rosalind I dont want to drink it. Rosalind says I have to or I wont be good at dancing any more. I was really scared because she got so mad but I was mad too and I said no I dont beleive her I think it just makes me sick. She says Ill be sorry + Jess isnt allowed to talk to me."

"Christina is mad at me on Tuesday she came over + Rosalind told her I said she wont be good enough for me once I go to ballet school + Christina wont beleive me I didnt. Now Christina and Beth wont talk to me Marianne still does though. I hate Rosalind I HATE HER I HATE HER."

"Yesterday this diary was under my bed like always then I couldnt find it. I didnt say anything but then Mum took Rosalind + Jess to Auntie Veras I stayed home + looked all over in Rosalinds room it was inside her shoe box in her wardrobe. I was scared to take it because now shell know and shell be really mad but I dont care. Im going to keep it here at Simones I can write in it when I practice by myself."

The last entry in the diary was dated three days before Katy died. "Rosalind is sorry she was so horrible about me going away she was only worried about Jess + upset about me being so far away shell miss me too. To make up for it shes going to get me a lucky charm to bring me luck dancing."

Her voice rang small and bright through the rounded Biro letters, swirled in the sunlight with the dust-motes. Katy, a year dead; bones in the gray geometric churchyard at Knocknaree. I had thought of her very little since the trial ended. Even during the investigation, to be frank, she had occupied a less prominent place in my mind than you might expect. The victim is the one person you never know; she had been only a cluster of translucent, conflicting images refracted through other people's words, crucial not in herself but for her death and the urgent firework trail of consequences it left behind. One moment on the Knocknaree dig had eclipsed everything else she had ever been. I thought of her lying on her stomach on this blond wooden floor, the frail wings of her shoulder blades moving as she wrote, music spiraling around her.

"Would it have made some difference if we'd found this earlier?" Simone asked. Her voice made me start and set my heart pounding; I had almost forgotten she was there.

"Probably not," I said. I had no idea whether this was true, but she needed to hear it. "There's nothing here that ties Rosalind directly to any crime. There's the mention of her making Katy drink something, but she would have explained that away—claimed it was a vitamin drink, maybe; Lucozade. The same for the lucky charm: it doesn't prove anything."

"But if we had found it before she died," Simone said quietly, "then," and of course there was nothing I could say to that, nothing at all.

I put the diary and the little paper pouch into an evidence bag and sent them over to Sam, at Dublin Castle. They would go into a box in the basement, somewhere near my old clothes; the case was closed, there was nothing he could do with them unless, or until, Rosalind did the same thing to someone else. I would have liked to send the diary to Cassie, as some kind of wordless and useless apology, but it wasn't her case any more either, and anyway I could no longer be sure she would understand how I meant it.

A few weeks later I heard that Cassie and Sam were engaged; Bernadette sent round an e-mail, looking for contributions towards a present. That evening I told Heather someone's kid had scarlet fever, locked myself in my room and drank vodka, slowly but purposefully, until four in the morning. Then I rang Cassie's mobile.

On the third ring she said blurrily, "Maddox."

"Cassie," I said. "Cassie, you're not actually going to marry that boring little yokel. Are you?"

I heard her catch her breath, ready to say something. After a while she let it out again.

"I'm sorry," I said. "For everything. I'm so, so sorry. I love you, Cass. Please."

I waited again. After a long time I heard a clunk. Then Sam, somewhere in the background, said, "Who was that?"

"Wrong number," Cassie said, farther away now. "Some drunk guy."

"What were you on so long for, then?" There was a grin in his voice: teasing. A rustle of sheets.

"He told me he loved me, so I wanted to see who it was," said Cassie. "But he turned out to be looking for Britney."

"Aren't we all," said Sam; then, "Ow!" and Cassie giggled. "You bit my nose."

"Serves you right," said Cassie. More low laughter, a rustle, a kiss; a long contented sigh. Sam said, soft and happy, "Baby." Then nothing but their breathing, easing into tandem and slowing gradually back into sleep.

I sat there for a very long time, watching the sky lighten outside my window and realizing that my name hadn't come up on Cassie's mobile. I could feel the vodka working its way out of my blood; the headache was starting to kick in. Sam snored, very gently. I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.

The motorway went ahead on the route originally planned, of course. Move the Motorway stalled it for an impressive amount of time—injunctions, constitutional challenges, I think they might have taken it all the way to the European High Court—and a grungy bunch of unisex protesters calling themselves Knocknafree (and including, I would be willing to bet, Mark) set up camp on the site to stop the bulldozers going through, which held things up for another few weeks while the government got a court order against them. They never had a chance in hell. I wish I could have asked Jonathan Devlin whether he actually believed, in the teeth of all the historical evidence, that this one time public opinion would make a difference, or whether he knew, all along, and needed to try anyway. I envied him, either way.

I went down there, the day I saw in the paper that construction had begun. I was supposed to be going door-to-door in Terenure, trying to find someone who'd seen a stolen car that had been used in a robbery, but nobody would miss me for an hour or so. I'm not sure why I went. It wasn't a dramatic final bid for closure or anything like that; I just had some belated impulse to see the place, one more time.

It was a mess. I had expected this, but I hadn't foreseen the scale of it. I could hear the mindless roar of machinery long before I reached the top of the hill. The whole site was unrecognizable, men in neon protective gear swarming like ants and shouting hoarse unintelligible commands over the noise, huge grimy bulldozers tossing aside great clumps of earth and nosing with slow, obscene delicacy at the excavated remnants of walls.

I parked at the side of the road and got out of the car. There was a disconsolate little huddle of protesters on the shoulder (it was still untouched, so far; the chestnuts were starting to fall again), waving hand-lettered signs—Save Our Heritage, History Is Not For Sale—in case the media showed up again. The raw, churning earth seemed to go on and on into the distance, it seemed huger than the dig had ever been, and it took me a few moments to realize why this was: that last strip of wood was almost gone. Pale, splintered trunks; roots exposed, thrusting crazily at the gray sky. Chainsaws were gibbering at the handful of trees that were left.

The memory smacked me in the solar plexus so hard it took my breath away: scrambling up the castle wall, crisp packets crackling in my T-shirt and the sound of the river chuckling somewhere far below; Peter's runner searching for a foothold just above me, Jamie's blond flag flying high among the swaying leaves. My whole body remembered it, the familiar scrape of stone against my palm, the brace of my thigh muscle as I pushed myself upwards, into the whirl of green and exploding light. I had become so used to thinking of the wood as the invincible and stalking enemy, the shadow over every secret corner of my mind; I had completely forgotten that, for much of my life, it had been our easy playground and our best-loved refuge. It hadn't really occurred to me, until I saw them cutting it down, that it had been beautiful.

At the edge of the site, near the road, one of the workmen had pulled a squashed packet of cigarettes from under his orange vest and was methodically patting down his pockets for a lighter. I found mine and went over to him.

"Ta, son," he said through the cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. He was somewhere in his fifties, small and wiry, with a face like a terrier: friendly, noncommittal, with bushy eyebrows and a thick handlebar mustache.

"How's it going?" I asked.

He shrugged, inhaled and handed the lighter back to me. "Ah, sure. I've seen worse. Bleeding great rocks everywhere, that's the only thing."

"From the castle, maybe. This used to be an archaeological site."

"You're telling me," he said, nodding towards the protesters.

I smiled. "Found anything interesting?"

His eyes returned sharply to my face, and I could see him giving me a quick, concise appraisal: protester, archaeologist, government spy? "Like what?"

"I don't know; archaeological bits and pieces, maybe. Animal bones. Human bones."

His eyebrows twitched together. "You a cop?"

"No," I said. The air smelled wet and heavy, rich with turned earth and latent rain. "Two of my friends went missing here, back in the eighties."

He nodded thoughtfully, unsurprised. "I remember that, all right," he said. "Two young kids. Are you the little fella was with them?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's me."

He took a deep, leisurely drag on his cigarette and squinted up at me with mild interest. "Sorry for your trouble."

"It's a long time ago," I said.

He nodded. "We've found no bones that I know of. Rabbits and foxes might've turned up, maybe; nothing bigger. We'd have called the cops if we had."

"I know," I said. "I was just checking."

He thought about this for a while, gazing back over the site. "One of the lads found this, earlier," he said. He went through his pockets, working from the bottom up, and pulled something out from under the vest. "What d'you make of that, now?"

He dropped the thing into my palm. It was leaf-shaped, flat and narrow and about as long as my thumb, made of some smooth metal coated matt black with age. One end was jagged; it had snapped off something, a long time ago. He had tried to clean it up, but it was still patched with small, hard encrustations of earth. "I don't know," I said. "An arrowhead, maybe, or part of a pendant."

"Found it in the muck on his boot, at the tea break," the man said. "He gave it to me to bring home to my daughter's young fella; mad into the old archaeology, he is."

The thing was cool in my palm, heavier than you would expect. Narrow grooves, half worn away, formed a pattern on one side. I tilted it to the light: a man, no more than a stick-figure, with the wide, pronged antlers of a stag.

"You can hang on to that if you like," the man said. "The young fella won't miss what he's never had."

I closed my hand over the object. The edges bit into my palm; I could feel my pulse beating against it. It should probably have been in a museum. Mark would have gone nuts over it. "No," I said. "Thank you. I think your grandson should have it."

He shrugged, eyebrows jumping. I tipped the object into his hand. "Thank you for showing it to me," I said.

"No bother," the man said, tucking it back into his pocket. "Good luck."

"You, too," I said. It was starting to rain, a fine, misty drizzle. He threw his cigarette butt into a tire track and headed back to work, turning up his collar as he went.

I lit a cigarette of my own and watched them working. The metal object had left slender red marks across my palm. Two little kids, maybe eight or nine, were balancing on their stomachs across the estate wall; the workmen waved their arms and shouted over the roar of machinery till the kids disappeared, but a minute or two later they were back again. The protesters put up umbrellas and handed around sandwiches. I watched for a long time, until my mobile began vibrating insistently in my pocket and the rain started to come down more heavily, and then I put out my cigarette and buttoned my coat and headed back to the car.