In the Woods

2

We caught the Devlin case on a Wednesday morning in August. It was, according to my notes, 11:48, so everyone else was out getting coffee. Cassie and I were playing Worms on my computer.

"Ha," said Cassie, sending one of her worms bopping over to mine with a baseball bat and thwacking him off a cliff. My worm, Groundsweeper Willy, yelled, "Och, ye big mammy's boy!" at me on his way down towards the ocean.

"I let you do that," I told her.

"Course you did," said Cassie. "No real man could actually be beaten by a little girl. Even the worm knows it: only a raisin-balled, testosterone-free cream puff could—"

"Fortunately I'm secure enough in my masculinity that I don't feel remotely threatened by—"

"Shh," said Cassie, turning my face back towards the monitor. "Nice boy. Shush, look pretty and play with your worm. God knows nobody else is going to."

"I think I'll transfer somewhere nice and peaceful, like ERU," I said.

"ERU needs fast response times, sweetie," Cassie said. "If it takes you half an hour to decide what to do with an imaginary worm, they're not gonna want you in charge of hostages."

At that point O'Kelly banged into the squad room and demanded, "Where is everyone?" Cassie hit Alt-Tab fast; one of her worms was named O'Smelly and she had been purposefully sending him into hopeless situations, to watch him get blown up by exploding sheep.

"Break," I said.

"Bunch of archaeologists found a body. Who's up?"

"We'll have it," said Cassie, shoving her foot off my chair so that hers shot back to her own desk.

"Why us?" I said. "Can't the pathologist deal with it?"

Archaeologists are required by law to call the police if they find human remains at a depth of less than nine feet below ground level. This is in case some genius gets the idea of concealing a murder by burying the corpse in a fourteenth-century graveyard and hoping it gets marked down as medieval. I suppose they figure that anyone who has the enterprise to dig down more than nine feet without getting spotted deserves a little leeway for sheer dedication. Uniforms and pathologists get called out fairly regularly, when subsidence and erosion have brought a skeleton close to the surface, but usually this is only a formality; it's relatively simple to distinguish between modern and ancient remains. Detectives are called only in exceptional circumstances, usually when a peat bog has preserved flesh and bone so perfectly that the body has all the clamoring immediacy of a fresh corpse.

"Not this time," said O'Kelly. "It's modern. Young female, looks like murder. Uniforms asked for us. They're only in Knocknaree, so you won't need to stay out there."

Something strange happened to my breath. Cassie stopped shoving things into her satchel and I felt her eyes flick to me for a split second. "Sir, I'm sorry, we really can't take on another full murder investigation right now. We're bang in the middle of the McLoughlin case and—"

"That didn't bother you when you thought this was just an afternoon off, Maddox," said O'Kelly. He dislikes Cassie for a series of mind-numbingly predictable reasons—her sex, her clothes, her age, her semiheroic record—and the predictability bothers her far more than the dislike. "If you had time for a day out down the country, you have time for a serious murder investigation. The Tech Bureau are already on their way." And he left.

"Oh, shit," said Cassie. "Oh, shit, the little wanker. Ryan, I'm so sorry. I just didn't think—"

"It's fine, Cass," I said. One of the best things about Cassie is that she knows when to shut up and leave you alone. It was her turn to drive, but she picked out my favorite unmarked—a '98 Saab that handles like a dream—and threw me the keys. In the car, she dug her CD holder out of her satchel and passed it to me; driver chooses the music, but I tend to forget to bring any. I picked the first thing that looked as if it had a hard pounding bass, and turned it up loud.

I hadn't been to Knocknaree since that summer. I went to boarding school a few weeks after Jamie should have gone—not the same school; one in Wiltshire, as far away as my parents could afford—and when I came back at Christmas we lived in Leixlip, out on the other side of Dublin. Once we hit the highway, Cassie had to dig out the map and find the exit, then navigate us down potholed side roads edged with long grass, hedges grown wild and scraping at the windows.

Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I'm deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it—not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved, who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs.

The Knocknaree site was a huge field set on a shallow slope, down the side of a hill. It was stripped to bare earth, churned up by purposeful, indecipherable archaeological scribblings—trenches, giant anthills of soil, Portakabins, scattered fragments of rough stone wall like outlines for some lunatic maze—that made it surreal, postnuclear. It was bordered on one side by a thick stand of trees, on another by a wall, tidy gables peeking over it, that ran from the trees to the road. Towards the top of the slope, near the wall, techs were clustered around something cordoned off by blue-and-white crime-scene tape. I probably knew every one of them, but the context translated them—white coveralls, busy gloved hands, nameless delicate instruments—into something alien and sinister and possibly CIA-related. The one or two identifiable objects looked picture-book solid and comforting: a low whitewashed cottage just off the road, with a black-and-white sheepdog stretched in front of it, paws twitching; a stone tower covered in ivy that rippled like water in the breeze. Light fluttered off the dark slice of a river cutting across one corner of the field. runner heels dug into the earth of the bank, leaf-shadows dappling a red T-shirt, fishing-rods of branches and string, slapping at midges: Shut up! You'll scare the fish!—

This field was where the wood had been, twenty years ago. The strip of trees was what was left of it. I had lived in one of the houses beyond the wall.

I had not expected this. I don't watch Irish news; it always morphs into a migraine blur of identical sociopath-eyed politicians mouthing meaningless white noise, like the gibber you get when you play a 33-rpm record at 45. I stick to foreign news, where distance gives enough simplification for the comforting illusion that there is some difference between the various players. I had known, by vague osmosis, that there was an archaeological site somewhere around Knocknaree and that there was some controversy about it, but I hadn't picked up the details, or the exact location. I had not been expecting this.

I parked on the shoulder across the road from the Portakabin cluster, between the bureau van and a big black Merc-Cooper, the forensic pathologist. We got out of the car and I stopped to check my gun: clean, loaded, safety on. I wear a shoulder holster; anywhere more obvious feels gauche, a legal equivalent of flashing. Cassie says fuck gauche, when you are five foot five and young and female a little blatant authority isn't a bad thing, and wears a belt. Often the discrepancy works for us: people don't know who to worry about, the little girl with the gun or the big guy apparently without, and the distraction of deciding keeps them off balance.

Cassie leaned against the car and dug her smokes out of her satchel. "Want one?"

"No, thanks," I said. I went over my harness, tightened the straps, made sure none of them were twisted. My fingers seemed thick and clumsy, detached from my body. I did not want Cassie to point out that, whoever this girl was and whenever she had been killed, it was unlikely that the murderer was skulking behind a Portakabin needing to be taken at gunpoint. She tipped her head back and blew smoke up into the branches overhead. It was your basic Irish summer day, irritatingly coy, all sun and skidding clouds and jackknifing breeze, ready at any second to make an effortless leap into bucketing rain or blazing sun or both.

"Come on," I said. "Let's get into character." Cassie put out her smoke on the sole of her shoe and tucked the butt back into the packet, and we headed across the road.

A middle-aged guy in an unraveling sweater was hovering between the Portakabins, looking lost. He perked up when he saw us.

"Detectives," he said. "You must be the detectives, yes? Dr. Hunt…I mean, Ian Hunt. Site director. Where would you like to—well, the office or the body or…? I'm not sure, you know. Protocol and things like that." He was one of those people whom your mind instantly starts turning into a cartoon: scribbled wings and beak and ta-da, Road Runner.

"Detective Maddox, and this is Detective Ryan," Cassie said. "If it's all right, Dr. Hunt, maybe one of your colleagues could give Detective Ryan an overview of the whole site, while you show me the remains?"

Little bitch, I thought. I felt jittery and dazed at the same time, as if I had a massive stone-over and had tried to clear it with way too much caffeine; the light jinking off fragments of mica in the rutted ground looked too bright, tricky and fevered. I was in no mood to be protected. But one of Cassie's and my unspoken rules is that, in public at least, we do not contradict each other. Sometimes one of us takes advantage of it.

"Um…yes," said Hunt, blinking at us through his glasses. He somehow gave the impression of constantly dropping things—lined yellow pages, chewed-looking tissues, half-wrapped throat lozenges—even though he wasn't holding anything. "Yes, of course. They're all…Well, Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but you see Damien's…Mark!" He aimed it in the general direction of the open door of a Portakabin, and I had a fleeting glimpse of a bunch of people crowded around a bare table: army jackets, sandwiches and steaming mugs, clods of earth on the floor. One of the guys tossed down a hand of cards and started disentangling himself from the plastic chairs.

"I told them all, stay in there," said Hunt. "I wasn't sure… Evidence. Footprints and…fibers."

"That's perfect, Dr. Hunt," Cassie said. "We'll try to clear the scene and let you get back to work as soon as possible."

"We've only got a few weeks left," said the guy at the Portakabin door. He was short and wiry, with a build that would have looked almost childishly slight under a heavy sweater; he was wearing a T-shirt, though, with muddy combats and Doc Martens, and below the sleeves his muscles were complex and corded as a featherweight's.

"Then you'd better get a move on and show my colleague around," Cassie told him.

"Mark," said Hunt. "Mark, this detective needs a tour. The usual, you know, around the site."

Mark eyed Cassie for another moment, then gave her a nod; she had apparently passed some private test. He moved on to me. He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, with a long fair ponytail and a narrow, foxy face with very green, very intense eyes. Men like him—men who are obviously interested purely in what they think of other people, not in what other people think of them—have always made me violently insecure. They have a kind of gyroscopic certainty that makes me feel bumbling, affected, spineless, in the wrong place in the wrong clothes.

"You'll want wellies," he told me, giving my shoes a sardonic look: QED. His accent had a hard border-country edge. "Spares in the tools shed."

"I'll be fine as I am," I said. I had an idea that archaeological digs involved trenches several feet deep in mud, but I was damned if I was going to spend the morning clumping around after this guy with my suit trailing off ludicrously into someone's discarded wellies. I wanted something—a cup of tea, a smoke, anything that would give me an excuse to sit still for five minutes and figure out how to do this.

Mark raised one eyebrow. "Fair enough. Over this way."

He headed off between the Portakabins without checking whether I was behind him. Cassie, unexpectedly, grinned at me as I followed him—a mischievous Gotcha! grin, which made me feel a little better. I scratched my cheek at her, with my middle finger.

Mark took me across the site, along a narrow path between mysterious earthworks and clumps of stones. He walked like a martial artist or a poacher, a long, easy, balanced lope. "Medieval drainage ditch," he said, pointing. A couple of crows shot up from an abandoned wheelbarrow full of dirt, decided we were harmless and went back to picking through the earth. "And that's a Neolithic settlement. This site's been inhabited more or less nonstop since the Stone Age. Still is. See the cottage, that's eighteenth-century. It was one of the places where they planned the 1798 Rebellion." He glanced over his shoulder at me, and I had an absurd impulse to explain my accent and inform him that I was not only Irish but from just around the corner, so there. "The guy who lives there now is descended from the guy who built it."

We had reached the stone tower in the middle of the site. Arrow slits showed through gaps in the ivy, and a section of broken wall sloped down from one side. It looked vaguely, frustratingly familiar, but I couldn't tell whether this was because I actually remembered it or because I knew I should.

Mark pulled a packet of tobacco out of his combats and started rolling a cigarette. There was masking tape wrapped around both his hands, at the base of the fingers. "The Walsh clan built this keep in the fourteenth century, added a castle over the next couple of hundred years," he said. "This was all their territory, from those hills over there"—he jerked his head at the horizon, high overlapping hills furred with dark trees—"to a bend in the river down beyond that gray farmhouse. They were rebels, raiders. In the seventeenth century they used to ride into Dublin, all the way to the British barracks in Rathmines, grab a few guns, whack the heads off any soldiers they saw, and then leg it. By the time the British got organized to go after them, they'd be halfway back here."

He was the right person to tell the story. I thought of rearing hooves, torchlight and dangerous laughter, the rising pulse of war drums. Over his shoulder I could see Cassie, up by the crime-scene tape, talking to Cooper and taking notes.

"I hate to interrupt you," I said, "but I'm afraid I won't have time for the full tour. I just need a very basic overview of the site."

Mark licked the cigarette paper, sealed his rollie and found a lighter. "Fair enough," he said, and started pointing. "Neolithic settlement, Bronze Age ceremonial stone, Iron Age roundhouse, Viking dwellings, fourteenth-century keep, sixteenth-century castle, eighteenth-century cottage." "Bronze Age ceremonial stone" was where Cassie and the techs were.

"Is the site guarded at night?" I asked.

He laughed. "Nah. We lock the finds shed, obviously, and the office, but anything really valuable goes back to head office right away. And we started locking the tools shed a month or two ago—some of our tools went missing, and we found out the farmers had been using our hoses to water their fields in dry weather. That's it. What's the point of guarding it? In a month it'll all be gone anyway, except for this." He slapped the wall of the tower; something scuttled in the ivy above our heads.

"Why's that?" I asked.

He stared at me, giving it an impressive level of incredulous disgust. "In a month's time," he said, enunciating clearly for me, "the fucking government is going to bulldoze this whole site and build a fucking motorway over it. They graciously agreed to leave a fucking traffic island for the keep, so they can wank off about how much they've done to preserve our heritage."

I remembered the motorway now, from some news report: a bland politician being shocked at the archaeologists who wanted the taxpayer to pay millions to redesign the plans. I had probably changed the channel at that point. "We'll try not to delay you for too long," I said. "The dog at the cottage: does he bark when people come to the site?"

Mark shrugged and went back to his cigarette. "Not at us, but he knows us. We feed him scraps and all. He might if someone went too near the cottage, specially at night, but probably not for someone up by the wall. Off his territory."

"What about cars—does he bark at them?"

"Did he bark at yours? He's a sheepdog, not a guard dog." He sent out a narrow ribbon of smoke between his teeth.

So the killer could have come to the site from any direction: by road, from the estate, even along the river if he liked making things difficult. "That's all I need for now," I said. "Thanks for your time. If you'll wait with the others, we'll come and update you in just a few minutes."

"Don't walk on anything that looks like archaeology," Mark said, and loped off back to the Portakabins. I headed up the slope towards the body.

The Bronze Age ceremonial stone was a flat, massive block, maybe seven feet long by three wide by three high, chipped from a single boulder. The field around it had been crudely bulldozed away—not too long ago, judging by the way the ground gave under my shoes—but a cushion around the stone had been left untouched, so that it rode high like an island amid the churned earth. On top of it, something flashed blue and white between the nettles and long grass.

It wasn't Jamie. I had more or less known this already—if there had been a chance it might be, Cassie would have come to tell me—but it still blew my mind empty. This girl had long dark hair, one plait thrown across her face. That was all I noticed, at first, the dark hair. It didn't even occur to me that Jamie's body wouldn't have been in this condition.

I had missed Cooper: he was picking his way back towards the road, shaking his foot like a cat on every step. A tech was taking photos, another was dusting the table for prints; a handful of local uniforms were fidgeting and chatting with the morgue guys, over by their stretcher. The grass was scattered with triangular numbered markers. Cassie and Sophie Miller were crouching beside the stone table, looking at something on the edge. I knew it was Sophie right away; that backboard-straight posture cuts through the anonymous coveralls. Sophie is my favorite crime-scene tech. She is slim and dark and demure, and on her the white shower cap looks like she should be bending over wounded soldiers' beds with cannon fire in the background, murmuring something soothing and giving out sips of water from a canteen. In actual fact, she is quick and impatient and can put anyone from superintendents to prosecutors in their place with a few crisp words. I like incongruity.

"Which way?" I called, at the tape. You don't walk on a crime scene until the Bureau guys say you can.

"Hi, Rob," Sophie shouted, straightening up and pulling down her mask. "Hang on."

Cassie reached me first. "Only been dead a day or so," she said quietly, before Sophie caught up. She looked a little pale around the mouth; kids do that to most of us.

"Thanks, Cass," I said. "Hi, Sophie."

"Hey, Rob. You two still owe me a drink." We had promised to buy her cocktails if she got the lab to fast-track some blood analysis for us, a couple of months before. Since then we'd all been saying, "We have to meet up for that drink," on a regular basis, and never getting around to it.

"Come through for us on this one and we'll buy you dinner as well," I said. "What've we got?"

"White female, ten to thirteen," Cassie said. "No ID. There's a key in her pocket, looks like a house key, but that's it. Her head's smashed in, but Cooper found petechial hemorrhaging and some possible ligature marks on her neck, too, so we'll have to wait for the post for cause of death. She's fully dressed, but it looks like she was probably raped. This one's weird all round, Rob. Cooper says she's been dead somewhere around thirty-six hours, but there's been practically no insect activity, and I don't see how the archaeologists could have missed her if she'd been there all yesterday."

"This isn't the primary scene?"

"No way," Sophie said. "There's no spatter on the rock, not even any blood from the head wound. She was killed somewhere else, probably kept for a day or so and then dumped."

"Find anything?"

"Plenty," she said. "Too much. It looks like the local kids hang out here. Cigarette butts, beer cans, a couple of Coke cans, gum, the ends of three joints. Two used condoms. Once you find a suspect, the lab can try matching him to all this stuff—which will be a nightmare—but to be honest I think it's just your basic teenage debris. Footprints all over the place. A hair clip. I don't think it was hers—it was shoved right down into the dirt at the base of the stone, and I'd bet it's been there a good while—but you might want to check. It doesn't look like it belonged to some teenager; it's the all-plastic kind, with a plastic strawberry on the end, and you'd usually see them on younger kids."

blond wing lifting

I felt as though I had tilted sharply backwards; I had to stop myself jerking for balance. I heard Cassie say quickly, somewhere on the other side of Sophie, "Probably not hers. Everything she's wearing is blue and white, right down to the hair elastics. This kid coordinated. We'll check it out, though."

"Are you OK?" Sophie asked me.

"I'm fine," I said. "I just need coffee." The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation. This never worked in the era of tea, at least not at the same level of street cred.

"I'm going to get him an IV caffeine drip for his birthday," said Cassie. She likes Sophie, too. "He's even more useless without his fix. Tell him about the rock."

"Yeah, we found two interesting things," said Sophie. "There's a rock about this size"—she cupped her hands: about eight inches wide—"that I'm pretty sure is one of the weapons. It was in the grass by the wall. Hair and blood and bone fragments all over one end of it."

"Any prints?" I asked.

"No. A couple of smudges, but they look like they came from gloves. The interesting parts are where it was—up by the wall; could mean he came over it, from the estate, although that could be what we're meant to think—and the fact that he bothered dumping it. You'd think he'd just rinse it and stick it in his garden, rather than carrying it as well as a body."

"Couldn't it have been in the grass already?" I asked. "He might have dropped the body on it, maybe getting her over the wall."

"I don't think so," said Sophie. She was shifting her feet delicately, trying to nudge me towards the stone table; she wanted to get back to work. I looked away. I am not squeamish about bodies, and I was pretty sure I had seen even worse than this one—a toddler, the year before, whose father kicked him until he basically broke in half—but I still felt weird, light-headed, as though my eyes weren't focusing clearly enough to take in the image. Maybe I really do need coffee, I thought. "It was blood-side down. And the grass underneath it is fresh, still alive; the rock hadn't been there long."

"Plus, she wasn't bleeding any more by the time she was brought here," Cassie said.

"Oh, yeah—the other interesting thing," Sophie said. "Come look at this."

I bowed to the inevitable and ducked under the tape. The other techs glanced up and moved back from the stone to give us room. They were both very young, barely more than trainees, and suddenly I thought of how we must look to them: how much older, how aloof, how much more confident in the little arts and negotiations of adulthood. It steadied me somehow, the image of two Murder detectives with their practiced faces giving away nothing, walking shoulder to shoulder and in step towards this dead child.

She was lying curled on her left side, as though she had fallen asleep on the sofa under the peaceful murmurs of adult conversation. Her left arm was flung out over the edge of the rock; her right fell across her chest, the hand bent under at an awkward angle. She was wearing smoke-blue combats, the kind with tags and zippers in peculiar places, and a white T-shirt with a line of stylized cornflowers printed on the front, and white runners. Cassie was right, she had taken trouble: the thick plait trailing across her cheek was secured with a blue silk cornflower. She was small and very slight, but her calf showed taut and muscular where one leg of the combats was rucked up. Ten to thirteen sounded about right: her breasts were just beginning, barely denting the folds of the T-shirt. Blood was caked on her nose and mouth and the tips of her front teeth. The breeze whirled the soft, curling fronds at her hairline.

Her hands were covered in clear plastic bags, tied at the wrists. "Looks like she fought," Sophie said. "A couple of nails were broken off. I wouldn't bet on finding DNA under the others—they look pretty clean—but we should get fibers and trace off her clothes."

For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs' hands away, shout at the hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals' rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live.

"I have that same T-shirt," Cassie said quietly, at my shoulder. "Penney's kids' department." I had seen it on her before, but I knew she wouldn't wear it again. Violated, that innocence was too vast and final to allow any tongue-in-cheek claim of kinship.

"Here's what I wanted to show you," said Sophie briskly. She doesn't approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps. She pointed to the edge of the stone. "Want gloves?"

"I won't touch anything," I said, and crouched in the grass. From this angle I could see that one of the girl's eyes was a slit open, as if she was only pretending to be asleep, waiting for her moment to jump up and yell, Boo! Fooled you! A shiny black beetle ticked a methodical path over her forearm.

A groove about a finger wide had been carved around the top of the stone, an inch or two from the edge. Time and weather had worn it smooth, almost glossy, but in one place the maker's handmade chisel had slipped, gouging a chunk out of the side of the groove and leaving a tiny, jagged overhang. A smear of something dark, almost black, clung to the underside.

"Helen here spotted it," Sophie said. The girl tech glanced up and gave me a shy proud smile. "We've swabbed, and it's blood—I'll let you know if it's human. I doubt it has anything to do with our body; her blood had dried by the time she was brought here, and anyway I'd bet this is years old. It could be animal, or it could be from some teenage scrap or whatever, but still, it's interesting."

I thought of the delicate hollow by Jamie's wrist bone, the brown back of Peter's neck bordered by white after a haircut. I could feel Cassie not looking at me. "I don't see how it could be connected," I said. I stood up—it was getting hard to balance on my heels without touching the table—and felt a quick head-rush.

Before we left the site I stood on the little ridge above the girl's body and turned full circle, imprinting an overview of the scene on my mind: trenches, houses, fields, access and angles and alignments. Along the estate wall, a thin rim of trees had been left untouched, presumably to shield the residents' aesthetic sensibilities from the uncompromisingly archaeological view. One had a broken piece of blue plastic rope heavily knotted around a high branch, a couple of feet dangling. It was frayed and mildewed and implied sinister Gothic history—lynch mobs, midnight suicides—but I knew what it was. It was the remnant of a tire swing.

Though I had come to think of Knocknaree as though it had happened to another and unknown person, some part of me had been here all along. While I doodled in Templemore or sprawled on Cassie's futon, that relentless child had never stopped spinning in crazy circles on a tire swing, scrambling over a wall after Peter's bright head, vanishing into the wood in a flash of brown legs and laughter.

There was a time when I believed, with the police and the media and my stunned parents, that I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.