In the Woods

3

I don't tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don't see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories or to sympathetic and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either. My parents know, obviously, and Cassie, and a boarding-school friend of mine called Charlie—he's a merchant banker in London now; we still keep in touch, occasionally—and this girl Gemma whom I went out with for a while when I was about nineteen (we spent a lot of our time together getting much too drunk, plus she was the intense angsty type and I thought it would make me sound interesting); nobody else.

When I went to boarding school I dropped the Adam and started using my middle name. I'm not sure whether this was my parents' idea or mine, but I think it was a good one. There are five pages of Ryans in the Dublin phone book alone, but Adam is not a particularly common name, and the publicity was overwhelming (even in England: I used to scan furtively through the newspapers I was supposed to be using to light prefects' fires, rip out anything relevant, memorize it later in a toilet cubicle before flushing it away). Sooner or later, someone would have made the connection. As it is, nobody is likely to link up Detective Rob and his English accent with little Adam Ryan from Knocknaree.

I knew, of course, that I should tell O'Kelly, now that I was working on a case that looked like it might be connected to that one, but to be frank I never for a second considered doing it. It would have got me booted off the case—you are very definitely not allowed to work on anything where you might be emotionally involved—and probably questioned all over again about that day in the wood, and I failed to see how this would benefit either the case or the community in general. I still have vivid, disturbing memories of being questioned the first time round: male voices with a rough undertow of frustration yammering faintly at the edges of my hearing, while in my mind white clouds drifted endlessly across a vast blue sky and wind sighed through some huge expanse of grass. That was all I could see or hear, the first couple of weeks afterwards. I don't remember feeling anything about this at the time, but in retrospect the thought was a horrible one—my mind wiped clean, replaced by a test pattern—and every time the detectives came back and tried again it resurfaced, by some process of association, seeping in at the back of my head and frightening me into sullen, uncooperative edginess. And they did try—at first every few months, in the school holidays, then every year or so—but I never had anything to tell them, and around the time I left school they finally stopped coming. I felt that this had been an excellent decision, and I could not for the life of me see how reversing it at this stage would serve any useful purpose.

And I suppose, if I'm being honest, it appealed both to my ego and to my sense of the picturesque, the idea of carrying this strange, charged secret through the case unsuspected. I suppose it felt, at the time, like the kind of thing that enigmatic Central Casting maverick would have done.

I rang Missing Persons, and they came up with a possible ID almost immediately. Katharine Devlin, aged twelve, four foot nine, slim build, long dark hair, hazel eyes, reported missing from 29 Knocknaree Grove (I remembered that, suddenly: all the streets in the estate called Knocknaree Grove and Close and Place and Lane, everyone's post constantly going astray) at 10:15 the previous morning, when her mother went to wake her and found her gone. Twelve and up is considered old enough to be a runaway, and she had apparently left the house of her own accord, so Missing Persons had been giving her a day to come home before sending in the troops. They already had the press release typed up, ready to send to the media in time for the evening news.

I was disproportionately relieved to have an ID, even a tentative one. Obviously I had known that a little girl—especially a healthy well—groomed little girl, in a place as small as Ireland—can't turn up dead without someone coming forward to claim her; but a number of things about this case were giving me the willies, and I think a superstitious part of me had believed that this child would remain as nameless as if she had dropped from thin air and that her DNA would turn out to match the blood from my shoes and a variety of other X-Files-type stuff. We got an ID shot from Sophie—a Polaroid, taken from the least disturbing angle, to show to the family—and headed back to the Portakabins.

Hunt popped out of one of them as we approached, like the little man in old Swiss clocks. "Did you…I mean, it is definitely murder, is it? The poor child. Awful."

"We're treating it as suspicious," I said. "What we'll need to do now is have a quick word with your team. Then we'd like to speak to the person who found the body. The others can go back to work, as long as they stay outside the boundaries of the crime scene. We'll speak with them later."

"How will…Is there something to show where it—where they shouldn't be? Tape, and all that."

"There's crime-scene tape in place," I said. "If they stay outside it, they'll be fine."

"We'll need to ask you for the lend of somewhere we can use as an onsite office," Cassie said, "for the rest of the day and possibly a bit longer. Where would be best?"

"Better use the finds shed," said Mark, materializing from wherever. "We'll need the office, and everywhere else is soupy." I hadn't heard the term before, but the view through the Portakabin doors—layers of mud crazed with boot prints, low sagging benches, teetering heaps of farming implements and bicycles and luminous yellow vests that reminded me uncomfortably of my time in uniform—provided a fair explanation.

"As long as it has a table and a few chairs, that'll be fine," I said.

"Finds shed," said Mark, and jerked his head towards a Portakabin.

"What's up with Damien?" Cassie asked Hunt.

He blinked helplessly, mouth open in a caricature of surprise. "What…Damien who?"

"Damien on your team. Earlier you said that Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but Damien wouldn't be able to show Detective Ryan around. Why's that?"

"Damien's one of the ones who found the body," said Mark, while Hunt was catching up. "Gave them a shock."

"Damien what?" said Cassie, writing.

"Donnelly," Hunt said happily, on sure ground at last. "Damien Donnelly."

"And he was with someone when he found the body?"

"Mel Jackson," Mark said. "Melanie."

"Let's go talk to them," I said.

The archaeologists were still sitting around the table in their makeshift canteen. There were fifteen or twenty of them; their faces turned towards the door, intent and synchronized as baby birds', when we came in. They were all young, early twenties, and they were made younger by their grungy-student clothes and by a windblown, outdoorsy innocence that, although I was pretty sure it was illusory, made me think of kibbutzniks and Waltons. The girls wore no makeup and their hair was in plaits or ponytails, tightened to be practical rather than cutesy; the guys had stubble and peeling sunburns. One of them, with a guileless teacher's—nightmare face and a woolly cap, had got bored and started melting stuff onto a broken CD with a lighter flame. The result (bent teaspoon, coins, smoke-packet cellophane, a couple of crisps) was surprisingly pleasing, like one of the less humorless manifestations of modern urban art. There was a food-stained microwave in one corner, and a small inappropriate part of me wanted to suggest that he put the CD in it, to see what would happen.

Cassie and I started to speak at the same time, but I kept going. Officially she was the primary detective, because she was the one who'd said, "We'll have it"; but we have never worked that way, and the rest of the squad had grown used to seeing M amp; R scribbled under "Primary" on the case board, and I had a sudden, stubborn urge to make it clear that I was just as capable of leading this investigation as she was.

"Good morning," I said. Most of them muttered something. Sculptor Boy said loudly and cheerfully, "Good afternoon!"—which, technically, it was—and I wondered which of the girls he was trying to impress. "I'm Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox. As you know, the body of a young girl was found on this site earlier today."

One of the guys let his breath out in a little burst and caught it again. He was in a corner, sandwiched protectively between two of the girls, clutching a big steaming mug in both hands; he had short brown curls and a sweet, frank, freckled boy-band face. I was pretty sure this was Damien Donnelly. The others seemed subdued (except for Sculptor Boy) but not traumatized, but he was white under the freckles and holding the mug way too hard.

"We'll need to talk to each of you," I said. "Please don't leave the site until we have. We may not have a chance to get to all of you for a while, so please bear with us if we need you to stay a bit late."

"Are we, like, suspects?" said Sculptor Boy.

"No," I said, "but we need to find out if you have any relevant information."

"Ahhh," he said, disappointed, and slumped back in his chair. He started to melt a square of chocolate onto the CD, caught Cassie's eye and put the lighter away. I envied him: I have often wanted to be one of those people who can take anything, the more horrific the better, as a deeply cool adventure.

"One other thing," I said. "Reporters will probably start arriving at any minute. Do not talk to them. Seriously. Telling them anything, even something that seems insignificant, could damage our whole case. We'll leave you our cards, in case at any point you think of anything we should know. Any questions?"

"What if they offer us, like, millions?" Sculptor Boy wanted to know.

The finds shed was less impressive than I'd expected. In spite of what Mark had said about taking away the valuable stuff, I think my mental image had included gold cups and skeletons and pieces of eight. Instead there were two chairs, a wide desk spread with sheets of drawing paper, and an incredible quantity of what appeared to be broken pottery, stuffed into plastic bags and crammed onto those perforated DIY metal shelves.

"Finds," said Hunt, flapping a hand at the shelves. "I suppose…Well, no, maybe some other time. Some very nice jettons and clothing hooks."

"We'd love to see them another day, Dr. Hunt," I said. "Could you give us about ten minutes and then send Damien Donnelly in to us?"

"Damien," said Hunt, and wandered off. Cassie shut the door behind him. I said, "How on earth does he run a whole excavation?" and started clearing away the drawings: fine, delicately shaded pencil sketches of an old coin, from various angles. The coin itself, sharply bent on one side and patchy with encrustations of earth, sat in the middle of the desk in a Ziploc bag. I found space for them on top of a filing cabinet.

"By hiring people like that Mark guy," Cassie said. "I bet he's plenty organized. What was with the hair clip?"

I squared off the edges of the drawings. "I think Jamie Rowan was wearing one that matched that description."

"Ah," she said. "I wondered. Is that in the file, do you know, or do you just remember it?"

"What difference does that make?" It came out sounding snottier than I'd intended.

"Well, if there's a link, we can't exactly keep it to ourselves," Cassie said reasonably. "Just for example, we're going to have to get Sophie to check that blood against the '84 samples, and we're going to have to tell her why. It would make things a whole lot simpler to explain if the link was right there in the file."

"I'm pretty sure it is," I said. The desk rocked; Cassie found a blank sheet of paper and folded it to wedge under the leg. "I'll double-check tonight. Hold off on talking to Sophie till then, OK?"

"Sure," said Cassie. "If it's not there, we'll find a way round it." She tested the desk again: better. "Rob, are you OK with this case?"

I didn't answer. Through the window I could see the morgue guys wrapping the body in plastic, Sophie pointing and gesturing. They barely had to brace themselves to lift the stretcher; it looked almost weightless as they carried it away towards the waiting van. The wind rattled the glass sharply in my face and I spun round. I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to shout, "Shut the hell up" or "Fuck this case, I quit" or something, something reckless and unreasonable and dramatic. But Cassie was just leaning against the desk and waiting, looking at me with steady brown eyes, and I have always had an excellent brake system, a gift for choosing the anticlimactic over the irrevocable every time.

"I'm fine with it," I said. "Just kick me if I get too moody."

"With pleasure," Cassie said, and grinned at me. "God, though, look at all this stuff… I hope we do get a chance to have a proper look. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was little, did I ever tell you?"

"Only about a million times," I said.

"Lucky you've got a goldfish memory, then, isn't it? I used to dig up the back garden, but all I ever found was a little china duck with the beak broken off."

"It looks like I should have been the one digging out the back," I said. Normally I would have made some remark about law enforcement's loss being archaeology's gain, but I was still feeling too nervy and dislocated for any decent level of back and forth; it would only have come out wrong. "I could have had the world's biggest private collection of pottery bits."

"Now there's a pick-up line," said Cassie, and dug out her notebook.

Damien came in awkwardly, with a plastic chair bumping along from one hand and his mug of tea still clutched in the other. "I brought this…" he said, using the mug to gesture uncertainly at his chair and the two we were sitting on. "Dr. Hunt said you wanted to see me?"

"Yep," said Cassie. "I would say, 'Have a seat,' but you already do."

It took him a moment; then he laughed a little, checking our faces to see if that was OK. He sat down, started to put his mug on the table, changed his mind and kept it in his lap, looked up at us with big obedient blue eyes. This was definitely Cassie's baby. He looked like the type who was accustomed to being taken care of by women; he was shaky already, and being interrogated by a guy would probably send him into a state where we would never get anything useful out of him. I got out a pen, unobtrusively.

"Listen," Cassie said soothingly, "I know you've had a bad shock. Just take your time and walk us through it, OK? Start with what you were doing this morning, before you went up to the stone."

Damien took a deep breath, licked his lips. "We were, um, we were working on the medieval drainage ditch. Mark wanted to see if we could follow the line a little further down the site. See, we're, we're sort of cleaning up loose ends now, 'cause it's coming up to the end of the dig—"

"How long's the dig been going on?" Cassie asked.

"Like two years, but I've only been on it since June. I'm in college."

"I used to want to be an archaeologist," Cassie told him. I nudged her foot, under the table; she stood on mine. "How's the dig going?"

Damien's face lit up; he looked almost dazzled with delight, unless dazzled was just his normal expression. "It's been amazing. I'm so glad I did it."

"I'm so jealous," Cassie said. "Do they let people volunteer for just, like, a week?"

"Maddox," I said stuffily, "can you discuss your career change later?"

"Sor-ry," said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours—he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence—but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it's the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy. "OK," she said, "so then you went up to the stone…?"

"We needed to take back all the grass and soil around it," Damien said. "The rest of that bit got bulldozed last week, but they left a patch round the stone, because we didn't want to risk the bulldozer hitting it. So after the tea break Mark told me and Mel to go up there and mattock it back while the others did the drainage ditch."

"What time was that?"

"Tea break ends at quarter past eleven."

"And then…?"

He swallowed, took a sip from his mug. Cassie leaned forward encouragingly and waited.

"We, um…There was something on the stone. I thought it was a jacket or something, like somebody had forgotten their jacket there? I said, um, I said, 'What's that?' so we went closer and…" He looked down into his mug. His hands were shaking again. "It was a person. I thought she might be, you know, unconscious or something, so I shook her, her arm, and um…she felt weird. Cold and, and stiff. And I put my head down to see if she was breathing, but she wasn't. There was blood on her, I saw blood. On her face. So I knew she was dead." He swallowed again.

"You're doing great," Cassie said gently. "What did you do then?"

"Mel said, 'Oh, my God,' or something, and we ran back and told Dr. Hunt. He told us all to go into the canteen."

"OK, Damien, I need you to think carefully," Cassie said. "Did you see anything that seemed weird today, or over the last few days? Anyone unusual hanging around, anything out of place?"

He gazed into space, lips slightly parted; took another sip of his tea. "This probably isn't the kind of thing you mean…"

"Anything could help us," Cassie told him. "Even the tiniest thing."

"OK." Damien nodded earnestly. "OK, on Monday I was waiting for the bus home, out by the gate? And I saw this guy come down the road and go into the estate. I don't know why I even noticed him, I just—He sort of looked around before he went into the estate, like he was checking if anyone was watching him or something."

"What time was this?" Cassie asked.

"We finish at half past five, so maybe twenty to six? That was the other weird thing. I mean, there's nothing round here that you can get to without a car, except the shop and the pub, and the shop closes at five. So I wondered where he was coming from."

"What did he look like?"

"Sort of tall, like six foot. In his thirties, I guess? Heavy. I think he was bald. He had on a dark blue tracksuit."

"Would you be able to work with a sketch artist to come up with a drawing of him?"

Damien blinked fast, looking alarmed. "Um…I didn't see him all that well. I mean, he was coming from up the road, on the other side of the estate entrance. I wasn't really looking—I don't think I'd remember…"

"That's all right," Cassie said. "Don't worry about it, Damien. If you feel like you might be able to give us some more details, let me know, OK? Meanwhile, just take care of yourself."

We got Damien's address and phone number, gave him a card (I wanted to give him a lollipop, too, for being such a brave boy, but they're not standard department issue) and shooed him back to the others, with orders to send in Melanie Jackson.

"Sweet kid," I said noncommittally, testing.

"Yeah," said Cassie dryly. "If I ever want a pet, I'll keep him in mind."

Mel was a lot more useful than Damien. She was tall and skinny and Scottish, with muscled brown arms and sandy hair in a messy ponytail, and she sat like a boy, feet planted firmly apart.

"Maybe you know this already, but she's from the estate," she said straightaway. "Or from somewhere round here, anyway."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"The local kids come around the site sometimes. There's not much else for them to do during the summer. They mostly want to know if we've found buried treasure, or skeletons. I've seen her a few times."

"When was the last time?"

"Maybe two, three weeks ago."

"Was she with anyone?"

Mel shrugged. "Nobody that I remember. Just a bunch of other kids, I think."

I liked Mel. She was shaken but refusing to show it; she was fidgeting with an elastic band, cat's-cradling it into shapes between her callused fingers. She told basically the same story as Damien, but with a lot less coaxing and petting.

"At the end of the tea break, Mark told me to go mattock back around the ceremonial stone so we could see the base. Damien said he'd go, too—we don't usually work on our own, it's boring. Partway up the slope we saw something blue and white on the stone. Damien said, 'What's that?' and I said, 'Somebody's jacket, maybe.' When we got a bit closer I realized it was a kid. Damien shook her arm and checked whether she was breathing, but you could tell she was dead. I never saw a dead body before, but—" She bit the inside of her cheek, shook her head. "It's bullshit, isn't it, when they say, 'Oh, he looked like he was just sleeping?' You could tell."

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. The body had shocked Mel Jackson far more deeply than it would have the most sheltered Victorian virgin.

"Could you have missed the body if it had been on the stone yesterday?" I asked.

Mel glanced up, wide eyed. "Ah, shit—you mean it was there all the time we were…?" Then she shook her head. "No. Mark and Dr. Hunt went round the whole site yesterday afternoon, to make a list of what needs doing. They'd have seen it—her. We only missed it this morning because we were all down the bottom of the site, at the end of the drainage ditch. The way the hill slopes, we couldn't see the top of the stone."

She hadn't seen anyone or anything unusual, including Damien's weirdo: "But I wouldn't have anyway. I don't take the bus. Most of us who aren't from Dublin live in this house they rented for us, a couple of miles down the road. Mark and Dr. Hunt have cars, so they drive us back. We don't go past the estate."

The "anyway" interested me: it suggested that Mel, like me, had her doubts about the sinister tracksuit. Damien struck me as the type who would say just about anything if he thought it would make you happy. I wished I had thought of asking him whether the guy had been wearing stilettos.

Sophie and her baby techs had finished up with the ceremonial stone and were working their way outwards in a circle. I told her that Damien Donnelly had touched the body and leaned over it; we'd need his prints and hair, for elimination. "What an idiot," Sophie said. "I suppose we should be thankful he didn't decide to cover her up with his coat." She was sweating in her coveralls. The boy tech covertly ripped a page out of his sketchbook, behind her back, and started over.

We left the car at the site and walked round to the estate by the road (I still remembered, somewhere in my muscles, going over the wall: where the foothold was, the scrape of the concrete on my kneecap, the jar of landing). Cassie demanded to go to the shop on the way; it was well past two o'clock and we might not have another chance at lunch for a while. Cassie eats like a teenage boy and hates missing meals, which normally I enjoy—women who live on weighed portions of salad annoy me—but I wanted to get today over with as quickly as possible.

I waited outside the shop, smoking, but Cassie came out with two sandwiches in plastic cartons and handed one to me. "Here."

"I'm not hungry."

"Eat the damn sandwich, Ryan. I'm not carrying you home if you faint." I have in fact never fainted in my life, but I do tend to forget to eat until I start getting irritable or spacy.

"I said I'm not hungry," I said, hearing the whine in my voice, but I opened the sandwich anyway: Cassie had a point, it was likely to be a very long day. We sat on the curb, and she pulled a bottle of lemon Coke out of her satchel. The sandwich was officially chicken and stuffing, but it tasted mainly of plastic wrapper, and the Coke was warm and too sweet. I felt slightly sick.

I don't want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past, smiling sadly at the world from behind a bittersweet veil of cigarette smoke and memories. Knocknaree didn't leave me with night terrors or impotence or a pathological fear of trees or any of the other good stuff that, in a made-for-TV movie, would have led me to a therapist and redemption and a more communicative relationship with my supportive but frustrated wife. To be honest, I could go for months on end without ever thinking about it. Occasionally some newspaper or other would run a feature on missing people and there they would be, Peter and Jamie, smiling from the cover of a Sunday supplement in grainy photographs made premonitory by hindsight and overuse, between vanished tourists and runaway housewives and all the mythic, murmuring ranks of Ireland's lost. I'd see the article and notice, detachedly, that my hands were shaking and it was hard to breathe, but this was purely a physical reflex and only lasted a few minutes anyway.

I suppose the whole thing must have had its effects on me, but it would be impossible—and, to my mind, pointless—to figure out exactly what they were. I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are; and a few weeks later I went to boarding school, which shaped and scarred me in far more dramatic, obvious ways. It would feel naïve and basically cheesy to unweave my personality, hold up a strand and squeal: Golly, look, this one's from Knocknaree! But here it was again, all of a sudden, resurfacing smugly and immovably in the middle of my life, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

"That poor kid," Cassie said suddenly, out of nowhere. "That poor, poor little kid."

The Devlins' house was a flat-fronted semi-d with a patch of grass in front, exactly like all the others on the estate. All of the neighbors had made frantic little declarations of individuality via ferociously trimmed shrubs or geraniums or something, but the Devlins just mowed their lawn and left it at that, which in itself argued a certain level of originality. They lived halfway up the estate, five or six streets from the site; far enough that they had missed the uniforms, the techs, the morgue van, all the terrible, efficient bustle that in one glance would have told them everything they needed to know.

When Cassie rang the bell, a man about forty answered. He was a few inches shorter than me, starting to thicken around the middle, with neatly clipped dark hair and big bags under his eyes. He was wearing a cardigan and khaki trousers and holding a bowl of cornflakes, and I wanted to tell him that this was all right, because I already knew what he would learn over the next few months: this is the kind of thing people remember in agony all their lives, that they were eating cornflakes when the police came to tell them their daughter was dead. I once saw a woman break down on the witness stand, sobbing so hard they had to call a recess and give her a sedative shot, because when her boyfriend was stabbed she was at a yoga class.

"Mr. Devlin?" Cassie said. "I'm Detective Maddox, and this is Detective Ryan."

His eyes widened. "From Missing Persons?" There was mud on his shoes, and the hems of his trousers were wet. He must have been out looking for his daughter, somewhere in the wrong fields, come in to get something to eat before he tried again and again.

"Not exactly," Cassie said gently. I mostly leave these conversations to her, not just out of cowardice but because we both know she is much better at it. "May we come in?"

He stared at the bowl, put it down clumsily on the hall table. A little milk slopped onto sets of keys and a child's pink cap. "What do you mean?" he demanded; fear put an aggressive edge on his voice. "Have you found Katy?"

I heard a tiny sound and looked over his shoulder. A girl was standing at the foot of the stairs, holding on to the banister with both hands. The interior of the house was dim even in the sunny afternoon, but I saw her face, and it transfixed me with a bright shard of something like terror. For an unimaginable, swirling moment I knew I was seeing a ghost. It was our victim; it was the dead little girl on the stone table. I heard a roaring noise in my ears.

A split second later, of course, the world righted itself, the roaring subsided and I realized what I was seeing. We wouldn't be needing the ID shot. Cassie had seen her as well. "We're not sure yet," she said. "Mr. Devlin, is this Katy's sister?"

"Jessica," he said hoarsely. The little girl edged forward; without taking his eyes from Cassie's face, Devlin reached back, caught her shoulder and pulled her into the doorway. "They're twins," he said. "Identical. Is this—Have you—Did you find a girl who looks like this?" Jessica stared somewhere between me and Cassie. Her arms hung limply by her sides, hands invisible under an oversized gray sweater.

"Please, Mr. Devlin," Cassie said. "We need to come in and speak with you and your wife in private." She flicked a glance at Jessica. Devlin looked down, saw his hand on her shoulder and moved it away, startled. It stayed frozen in midair, as if he had forgotten what to do with it.

He knew, by that point; of course he knew. If she had been found alive, we would have said so. But he moved back from the door automatically and made a vague gesture to one side, and we went into the sitting room. I heard Devlin say, "Go back upstairs to your Auntie Vera." Then he followed us in and closed the door.

The terrible thing about the sitting room was how normal it was, how straight out of some satire on suburbia. Lace curtains, a flowery four-piece suite with those little covers on the arms and headrests, a collection of ornate teapots on top of a sideboard, everything polished and dusted to an immaculate shine: it seemed—victims' homes and even crime scenes almost always do—far too banal for this level of tragedy. The woman sitting in an armchair matched the room: heavy in a solid shapeless way, with a helmet of permed hair and big, drooping blue eyes. There were deep lines from her nose to her mouth.

"Margaret," Devlin said. "They're detectives." His voice was taut as a guitar string, but he didn't go to her; he stayed by the sofa, fists clenched in the pockets of his cardigan. "What is it?" he demanded.

"Mr. and Mrs. Devlin," Cassie said, "there's no easy way to say this. The body of a little girl has been found on the archaeological site beside this estate. I'm afraid we think she's your daughter Katharine. I'm so sorry."

Margaret Devlin let out her breath as if she'd been hit in the stomach. Tears began to fall down her cheeks, but she didn't seem to notice.

"Are you sure?" Devlin snapped. His eyes were huge. "How can you be sure?"

"Mr. Devlin," Cassie said gently, "I've seen the little girl. She looks exactly like your daughter Jessica. We'll be asking you to come see the body tomorrow, to confirm her identity, but there's no doubt in my mind. I'm sorry."

Devlin swung towards the window, away again, pressed a wrist against his mouth, lost and wild-eyed. "Oh, God," said Margaret. "Oh, God, Jonathan—"

"What happened to her?" Devlin cut in harshly. "How did she—how—"

"I'm afraid it looks as if she was murdered," Cassie said.

Margaret was heaving herself up out of the chair, in slow, underwater movements. "Where is she?" The tears were still pouring down her face, but her voice was eerily calm, almost brisk.

"She's with our doctors," Cassie said gently. If Katy had died differently, we might have taken them to her. But as it was, her skull smashed open, her face covered in blood…At the post-mortem, the morgue guys would wash off at least that gratuitous layer of horror.

Margaret looked around, dazed, patting mechanically at the pockets of her skirt. "Jonathan. I can't find my keys."

"Mrs. Devlin," Cassie said, putting a hand on her arm. "I'm afraid we can't take you to Katy yet. The doctors need to examine her. We'll let you know as soon as you can see her."

Margaret twitched away from her and moved in slow motion towards the door, dragging a clumsy hand across her face to smear the tears away. "Katy. Where is she?" Cassie shot a glance of appeal over her shoulder at Jonathan, but he was leaning both palms against the windowpane and staring out, unseeing, breathing too fast and too hard.

"Please, Mrs. Devlin," I said urgently, trying to unobtrusively get between her and the door. "I promise we'll take you to Katy as soon as we can, but at the moment you can't see her. It's simply not possible."

She stared at me, red-eyed, her mouth hanging open. "My baby," she gasped. Then her shoulders slumped and she started to weep, in deep, hoarse, unrestrained sobs. Her head fell back and she let Cassie take her gently by the shoulders and ease her back into her chair.

"How did she die?" Jonathan demanded, still staring fixedly out the window. The words were blurred, as if his lips were numb. "What way?"

"We won't know that until the doctors have finished examining her," I said. "We'll keep you informed of every development."

I heard light footsteps running down the stairs; the door flew open, and a girl stood in the doorway. Behind her Jessica was still in the hall, sucking a lock of hair and staring in at us.

"What is it?" said the girl breathlessly. "Oh, God…is it Katy?"

Nobody answered. Margaret pressed a fist to her mouth, turning her sobs into terrible choking sounds. The girl looked from face to face, her lips parted. She was tall and slim, with chestnut curls tumbling down her back, and it was hard to tell how old she was—eighteen or twenty, maybe, but she was made up far more expertly than any teenager I'd ever known, and she was wearing tailored black trousers and high-heeled shoes and a white shirt that looked expensive, with a purple silk scarf flung round her neck. She had a kind of vital, electric presence that filled the room. In that house, she was utterly, startlingly incongruous.

"Please," she said, appealing to me. Her voice was high and clear and carrying, with a newsreader accent that didn't match Jonathan and Margaret's soft, small-town working-class. "What's happened?"

"Rosalind," Jonathan said. His voice came out rough, and he cleared his throat. "They found Katy. She's dead. Someone killed her."

Jessica made a small, wordless noise. Rosalind stared at him for a moment; then her eyelids fluttered and she swayed, one hand going out to the door frame. Cassie got an arm around her waist and supported her to the sofa.

Rosalind leaned her head back against the cushions and gave Cassie a weak, grateful smile; Cassie smiled back. "Could I have some water?" she whispered.

"I'll get it," I said. In the kitchen—scrubbed linoleum, varnished faux-rustic table and chairs—I turned on the tap and had a quick look around. Nothing noteworthy, except that one high cupboard held an array of vitamin tubs and, at the back, an industrial-size bottle of Valium with a label made out to Margaret Devlin.

Rosalind sipped the water and took deep breaths, one slim hand to her breastbone. "Take Jess and go upstairs," Devlin told her.

"Please, let me stay," Rosalind said, lifting her chin. "Katy was my sister—whatever happened to her, I can…I can listen to it. I'm all right now. I'm sorry for being so…I'll be fine, really."

"We'd like Rosalind and Jessica to stay, Mr. Devlin," I said. "It's possible they might know something that could help us."

"Katy and I were very close," Rosalind said, looking up at me. Her eyes were her mother's, big and blue, with that touch of a droop at the outer corners. They shifted, over my shoulder: "Oh, Jessica," she said, holding out her arms. "Jessica, darling, come here." Jessica edged past me, with a flash of bright eyes like a wild animal's, and pressed up against Rosalind on the sofa.

"I'm very sorry to intrude at a time like this," I said, "but there are some questions we need to ask you as soon as possible, to help us find whoever did this. Do you feel able to talk now, or shall we come back in a few hours?"

Jonathan Devlin pulled over a chair from the dining table, slammed it down and sat, swallowing hard. "Do it now," he said. "Ask away."

Slowly we took them through it. They had last seen Katy on Monday evening. She had had a ballet class in Stillorgan, a few miles in towards the center of Dublin, from five o'clock till seven. Rosalind had met her at the bus stop at about 7:45 p.m. and walked her home. ("She said she'd had a lovely time," Rosalind said, her head bent over her clasped hands; a curtain of hair fell across her face. "She was such a wonderful dancer… She had a place in the Royal Ballet School, you know. She would have been leaving in just a few weeks…" Margaret sobbed, and Jonathan's hands gripped the arms of his chair convulsively.) Rosalind and Jessica had then gone to their Aunt Vera's house, across the estate, to spend the night with their cousins.

Katy had had her tea—baked beans on toast and orange juice—and then walked a neighbor's dog: her summer job, to earn money towards ballet school. She had got back at approximately ten to nine, taken a bath and then watched television with her parents. She had gone to bed at ten o'clock, as usual during the summer, and read for a few minutes before Margaret told her to turn out the light. Jonathan and Margaret watched more television and went to bed a little before midnight. On his way to bed Jonathan, as a matter of routine, checked that the house was secure: doors locked, windows locked, chain on the front door.

At 7:30 the next morning, he got up and left for work—he was a senior teller in a bank—without seeing Katy. He noticed that the chain was off the front door, but he assumed that Katy, who was an early riser, had gone to her aunt's house to have breakfast with her sisters and cousins. ("She does that sometimes," Rosalind said. "She likes fry-ups, and Mum…Well, in the mornings Mum's too tired to cook." A terrible, rending sound from Margaret.) All the girls had keys to the front door, Jonathan said, just in case. At 9:20, when Margaret got up and went to wake Katy, she was gone. Margaret waited for a while, assuming, like Jonathan, that Katy had woken early and gone to her aunt's; then she rang Vera, just to be sure; then she rang all Katy's friends, and finally she rang the police.

Cassie and I perched awkwardly on the edges of armchairs. Margaret cried, quietly but continuously; after awhile Jonathan went out of the room and came back with a box of tissues. A birdlike, pop-eyed little woman—Auntie Vera, I assumed—tiptoed down the stairs and hovered uncertainly in the hallway for a few minutes, wringing her hands, then slowly retreated to the kitchen. Rosalind rubbed Jessica's limp fingers.

Katy, they said, had been a good child, bright but not outstanding in school, passionate about ballet. She had a temper, they said, but she hadn't had any arguments with family or friends recently; they gave us the names of her best friends, so we could check. She had never run away from home, nothing like that. She had been happy lately, excited about going away to ballet school. She wasn't into boys yet, Jonathan said, she was only twelve, for God's sake; but I saw Rosalind dart a sudden glance at him and then at me, and I made a mental note to talk to her without her parents.

"Mr. Devlin," I said, "what was your relationship with Katy like?"

Jonathan stared. "What the fuck are you accusing me of?" he said heavily. Jessica let out a high, hysterical yelp of laughter, and I jumped. Rosalind pursed her lips and shook her head at her, frowning, then gave her a pat and a tiny reassuring smile. Jessica bowed her head and put her hair back in her mouth.

"Nobody's accusing you of anything," Cassie said firmly, "but we have to be able to say we've explored and eliminated every possibility. If we leave anything out, then when we catch this person—and we will—the defense can make that into reasonable doubt. I know answering these questions will be painful, but I promise you, Mr. Devlin, it would be even more painful to see this person acquitted because we didn't ask them."

Jonathan took a breath through his nose, relaxed a fraction. "My relationship with Katy was great," he said. "She talked to me. We were close. I…maybe I made a pet of her." A twitch from Jessica, a swift up-glance from Rosalind. "We argued, the way any father and daughter do, but she was a wonderful daughter and a wonderful girl, and I loved her." For the first time his voice cracked; he jerked his head up angrily.

"And you, Mrs. Devlin?" Cassie said.

Margaret was shredding a tissue in her lap; she looked up, obedient as a child. "Sure, they're all great," she said. Her voice was thick and wobbly. "Katy was…a little angel. She was always an easy child. I don't know what we'll do without her." Her mouth convulsed.

Neither of us asked Rosalind or Jessica. Kids are unlikely to be frank about their siblings when their parents are around, and once a kid lies, especially a kid as young and as confused as Jessica, the lie becomes fixed in his mind and the truth recedes into the background. Later, we would try to get the Devlins' permission to speak to Jessica—and, if she was under eighteen, Rosalind—on her own. I didn't get the sense this would be easy.

"Can any of you think of anyone who might want to harm Katy for any reason?" I asked.

For a moment nobody said anything. Then Jonathan shoved his chair back and stood up. "Jesus," he said. His head swung back and forth, like a baited bull's. "Those phone calls."

"Phone calls?" I said.

"Christ. I'll kill him. You said she was found on the dig?"

"Mr. Devlin!" Cassie said. "You need to sit down and tell us about the phone calls."

Slowly he focused on her. He sat down, but I could still see an abstracted quality in his eyes, and I would have been willing to bet he was privately considering the best way to hunt down whoever had made these calls. "You know about the motorway going over the archaeological site, right?" he said. "Most people around here are against it. A few are more interested in how much the value of their houses would go up, with it going right past the estate, but most of us…That should be a Heritage Site. It's unique and it's ours, the government has no right to destroy it without even asking us. There's a campaign here in Knocknaree, Move the Motorway. I'm the chairman; I set it up. We picket government buildings, write letters to politicians—for all the good it does."

"Not much response?" I said. Talking about his cause was steadying him. And it intrigued me: he had seemed at first like a downtrodden little man, not the type to lead a crusade, but there was clearly more to him than met the eye.

"I thought it was just bureaucracy, they never want to make changes. But the phone calls made me wonder… The first one was late at night; the guy said something like, 'You thick bastard, you have no idea what you're messing with.' I thought he had a wrong number, I hung up on him and went back to bed. It was only after the second one that I remembered and connected it up."

"When was this first call?" I said. Cassie was writing.

Jonathan looked at Margaret; she shook her head, dabbing her eyes. "Sometime in April—late April, maybe. The second one was on the third of June, around half past one in the morning—I wrote it down. Katy—there's no phone in our bedroom, it's in the hall, and she's a light sleeper—she got there first. She says when she answered he said, 'Are you Devlin's daughter?' and she said, 'I'm Katy,' and he said, 'Katy, tell your father to back off the bloody motorway, because I know where you live.' Then I took the phone off her, and he said something like, 'Nice little girl you've got there, Devlin.' I told him never to ring my house again, and hung up."

"Can you remember anything about his voice?" I asked. "Accent, age, anything? Did it sound familiar at all?"

Jonathan swallowed. He was concentrating ferociously, clinging to the subject like a lifeline. "It didn't ring any bells. Not young. On the high side. A country accent, but not one I could pin down—not Cork or the North, nothing distinctive like that. He sounded…I thought maybe he was drunk."

"Were there any other calls?"

"One more, a few weeks ago. The thirteenth of July, two in the morning. I took it. The same guy said, 'Don't you—'" He glanced at Jessica. Rosalind had an arm round her, rocking her soothingly and murmuring in her ear. "'Don't you effing well listen, Devlin? I warned you to leave the effing motorway alone. You'll regret this. I know where your family lives.'"

"Did you report this to the police?" I asked.

"No," he said brusquely. I waited for a reason, but he didn't offer one.

"You weren't worried?"

"To be honest," he said, glancing up with a terrible mixture of misery and defiance, "I was delighted. I thought it meant we were getting somewhere. Whoever he was, he wouldn't have bothered ringing me if the campaign hadn't been a real threat. But now…" Suddenly he hunched towards me, staring me in the eye, fists pressed together. I had to fight not to lean back. "If you find out who made those calls, tell me. You tell me. I want your word."

"Mr. Devlin," I said, "I promise you we'll do everything in our power to find out who it was and whether he had anything to do with Katy's death, but I can't—"

"He scared Katy," Jessica said, in a small hoarse voice. I think we all jumped. I was as startled as if one of the armchairs had contributed to the conversation; I had been beginning to wonder if she was autistic or handicapped or something.

"Did he?" Cassie said quietly. "What did she say?"

Jessica gazed at her as if the question was incomprehensible. Her eyes started to slide away again; she was retreating back into her private daze.

Cassie leaned forward. "Jessica," she said, very gently, "is there anyone else Katy was scared of?"

Jessica's head swayed a little, and her mouth moved. A thin hand reached out and caught a pinch of Cassie's sleeve.

"Is this real?" she whispered.

"Yes, Jessica," Rosalind said softly. She detached Jessica's hand and gathered the child close against her, stroking her hair. "Yes, Jessica, it's real." Jessica stared out under her arm, her eyes wide and unfocused.

They had no internet access, which eliminated the deeply depressing possibility of some chat-room wacko from halfway around the world. They also had no alarm system, but I doubted that would turn out to be relevant: Katy hadn't been snatched from her bed by some intruder. We had found her fully and carefully dressed—yes, she always coordinated, Margaret said; she'd picked that up from her ballet teacher, whom she worshipped—in outdoor clothes. She had switched off her light and waited till her parents were asleep, and then, sometime in the night or the early morning, she had got up and got dressed and gone somewhere. Her house key had been in her pocket: she had been expecting to come back.

We searched her room anyway, partly for any clues to where she might have gone, and partly because of the brutal, obvious possibility that Jonathan or Margaret had killed her and then staged it to look as if she had left the house alive. She had shared a room with Jessica. The window was too small and the lightbulb too dim, which added to the creepy feeling the house was giving me. The wall on Jessica's side, a little eerily, was covered in sunshiny, idyllic art prints: Impressionist picnics, Rackham fairies, landscapes from the cheerier parts of Tolkien ("I gave her all those," said Rosalind, from the doorway. "Didn't I, pet?" Jessica nodded, at her shoes). Katy's wall, less surprisingly, had a strict ballet theme: photos of Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn that looked like they'd been cut from TV guides, a newsprint picture of Pavlova, her acceptance letter from the Royal Ballet School; a pretty nice pencil drawing of a young dancer, with TO KATY, 21/03/03. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! LOVE, DADDY scribbled on the corner of the pasteboard mount.

The white pajamas Katy had worn on Monday night were tangled on her bed. We bagged them just in case, along with the sheets and her mobile phone, which was on her bedside table, switched off. She hadn't kept a diary—"She started one awhile ago, but after a couple of months she got bored and 'lost' it," Rosalind said, putting the word in quotation marks and giving me a small, sad, knowing smile, "and she never bothered to start another"—but we took school copybooks, an old homework diary, anything whose scribbles might give us some hint. Each of the girls had a tiny faux wood desk, and on Katy's there was a little round tin holding a jumble of hair elastics; I recognized, with a small sudden pang, two silk cornflowers.

"Phew," said Cassie, when we got out of the estate onto the road. She rubbed her hands through her hair, messing up her curls.

"I've seen that name somewhere, not too long ago," I said. "Jonathan Devlin. As soon as we get back, let's run him through the computer and see if he's got a record."

"God, I almost hope it turns out to be that simple," Cassie said. "There is something deeply, deeply fucked up in that house."

I was glad—relieved, actually—that she had said it. I'd found a number of things about the Devlins disturbing—Jonathan and Margaret hadn't touched once, had barely looked at each other; where you would expect a bustle of curious, comforting neighbors, there had been nobody but shadowy Auntie Vera; each member of the household appeared to come from a completely different planet—but I was so edgy that I wasn't sure I could trust my own judgment, so it was good to know Cassie had felt something off kilter, too. It wasn't that I was having a breakdown or losing my mind or anything, I knew I would be fine once I got a chance to go home and sit down by myself and take all this in; but that first glimpse of Jessica had practically given me a heart attack, and the realization that she was Katy's twin hadn't been as reassuring as you might think. This case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels, and I couldn't shake the uneasy sense that they were somehow deliberate. Every coincidence felt like a sea—worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code.

When I first went to boarding school I told my dormmates I had a twin brother. My father was a good amateur photographer, and one Saturday that summer when he'd seen us trying out a new stunt on Peter's bike—speeding along their knee-high garden wall and sailing off the end—he made us do it again and again, half the afternoon while he crouched on the grass changing lenses, until he'd used up a whole roll of black-and-white film and got the shot he wanted. We're in midair; I am driving and Peter is on the handlebars with his arms spread wide, and both of us have our eyes screwed tight shut and our mouths open (high, rough-edged boy-yells) and our hair is streaming out in fiery haloes, and I'm pretty sure that just after the photo was taken we went tumbling and skidding across the lawn and my mother gave out to my father for encouraging us. He angled the shot so that the ground is out of the picture and we look like we're flying, gravity-free against the sky.

I glued the photo to a piece of cardboard and propped it on my bedside table, where we were allowed two family pictures, and told the other boys detailed stories—some true, some imagined and I'm sure utterly implausible—about the adventures my twin and I had during the holidays. He was at a different school, I said, one in Ireland; our parents had read that it was healthier for twins to be separated. He was learning to ride horses.

By the time I came back for second year I had realized that it was only a matter of time before the twin story got me into excruciatingly embarrassing trouble (some classmate meeting my parents on Sports Day, asking chirpily why Peter hadn't come, too), so I left the photo at home—tucked into a slit in my mattress, like some dirty secret—and stopped mentioning my brother, in the hope that everyone would forget I had had one. When this kid called Hull—he was the type to pull the limbs off small furry animals in his spare time—sensed my discomfort and latched on to the subject, I finally told him my twin had been thrown off a horse over the summer and died of concussion. I spent much of that year in terror that the rumor about Ryan's dead brother would reach the teachers and, through them, my parents. In hindsight, of course, I'm fairly sure that it did, and that the teachers, already briefed on the Knocknaree saga, decided to be sensitive and understanding—I still cringe when I think about it—and let the rumor die out in its own time. I think I had a narrow escape: a couple of years further into the eighties and I would probably have been sent to kiddie counseling and forced to share my feelings with hand puppets.

Still, I regretted having to get rid of my twin. I'd found it comforting, the knowledge that Peter was alive and riding horseback, somewhere in a couple of dozen minds. If Jamie had been in the photo, I would probably have made us triplets and had a much harder time working my way out of that one.

By the time we got back to the site, the reporters had arrived. I gave them the standard preliminary spiel (I do this part, on the basis that I look more like a responsible adult than Cassie does): body of a young girl, name not being released till all the relatives are informed, treating it as a suspicious death, anyone who may have any information please contact us, no comment no comment no comment.

"Was this the work of a satanic cult?" asked a large woman in unflattering ski pants, whom we'd met before. She was from one of those tabloids with a penchant for punny headlines using alternative spellings.

"There's absolutely no evidence to indicate that," I said snottily. There never is. Homicidal satanic cults are the detective's version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.

"But she was found on an altar that the Druids used for human sacrifice, wasn't she?" the woman demanded.

"No comment," I said automatically. I had just realized what the stone table reminded me of, that deep groove round the edge: the autopsy tables in the morgue, grooved to drain away blood. I had been so busy wondering whether I recognized it from 1984, it hadn't even occurred to me that I recognized it from a few months ago. Jesus.

Eventually the reporters gave up and started drifting off. Cassie had been sitting on the steps of the finds shed, blending into the scenery and keeping an eye on things. When she saw the large journalist homing in on Mark, who had come out of the canteen heading for the Portaloo, she got up and wandered towards them, making sure Mark could see her. I saw him catch her eye, over the reporter's shoulder; after a minute Cassie shook her head, amused, and left them to it.

"What was that all about?" I asked, fishing out the key to the finds shed.

"He's giving her a lecture about the site," said Cassie, dusting off the seat of her jeans and grinning. "Every time she tries to ask anything about the body, he says, 'Hang on,' and goes into a rant about how the government is about to destroy the most important discovery since Stonehenge, or starts explaining Viking settlements. I'd love to stay and watch; I think she may finally have met her match."

The rest of the archaeologists had very little to add, except that Sculptor Boy, whose name was Sean, felt we should consider the possibility of vampire involvement. He sobered up a lot when we showed him the ID shot, but although he, like the others, had seen Katy or possibly Jessica around the site a few times—sometimes with other kids her age, sometimes with an older girl matching Rosalind's description—none of them had seen anyone odd watching her or anything like that. None of them had seen anything sinister at all, in fact, although Mark added, "Except for the politicians who show up to have their photos taken in front of their heritage before they pimp it out. Do you want descriptions?" Nobody remembered the Tracksuit Shadow, either, which reinforced my suspicion that he had been either some perfectly normal guy from the estate out for a walk, or else Damien's imaginary friend. You get people like this in every investigation, people who end up wasting huge amounts of your time with their compulsion to say whatever they think you want to hear.

The archaeologists from Dublin—Damien, Sean and a handful of others—had all been at home on Monday and Tuesday nights; the rest had been in their rented house, a couple of miles from the dig. Hunt, who of course turned out to be pretty lucid on anything archaeological, had been home in Lucan with his wife. He confirmed the large reporter's theory that the stone where Katy had been dumped was a Bronze Age sacrificial altar. "We can't be sure whether the sacrifices were human or animal, naturally, although the…um…the shape certainly suggests they may have been human. The right dimensions, you know. Very rare artifact. It implies that this hill was a site of immense religious importance in the Bronze Age, yes? Such a terrible shame…this road."

"Have you found anything else to suggest this?" I asked. If he had, it would be months before we could disentangle our case from the media-versus-New-Age frenzy.

Hunt gave me a wounded look. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," he told me reproachfully.

He was the last interview. As we were putting our stuff away, the boy tech knocked on the door of the Portakabin and stuck his head in. "Um," he said. "Hi. Sophie says to tell you we're finishing up for today and there's one more thing you might want to see."

They'd packed up the markers and left the altar stone alone in its field again, and at first the whole site looked deserted; the reporters had long since moved on, and all the archaeologists had gone home except Hunt, who was clambering into a muddy red Ford Fiesta. Then we came out from among the Portakabins, and I saw a flash of white between the trees.

The familiar, uneventful routine of the interviews had settled my mood considerably (Cassie calls these preliminary background interviews the nuthin' stage of a case: nobody saw nuthin', nobody heard nuthin', nobody did nuthin'), but still I felt something zip down my spine as we stepped into the wood. Not fear: more like the sudden shot of alertness when someone wakes you by calling your name, or when a bat shrills past just too high to be heard. The undergrowth was thick and soft, years of fallen leaves sinking under my feet, and the trees grew heavily enough to filter the light into a restless green glow.

Sophie and Helen were waiting for us in a tiny clearing, maybe a hundred yards in. "I left it for you to take a look at," Sophie said, "but I want to bag all this shit before the light starts going. I'm not setting up the lighting rig."

Someone had been using the place as a campsite. A sleeping-bag-sized patch had been cleared of sharp branches, and the layers of leaves were pressed flat; a few yards away were the remains of a campfire, in a wide circle of bare earth. Cassie whistled.

"Is this our kill site?" I asked, without much hope: for that, Sophie would have interrupted the interviews.

"Not a chance," she said. "We've done a fingertip search: no signs of a struggle and not a drop of blood—there's a big spill of something near the fire, but it tests negative, and from the smell I'm pretty sure it's red wine."

"That's one up-market camper," I said, raising my eyebrows. I had been picturing some bucolic homeless guy, but market forces mean that "wino," in Ireland, is a metaphorical term: your average down-and-out alcoholic goes for hard cider or cheap vodka. I wondered briefly about a couple, with an adventurous streak or nowhere else to go, but the flattened patch was barely wide enough for one person. "Find anything else?"

"We'll go through the ash in case someone was burning bloody clothes or something, but it looks like straight wood. We've got boot prints, five cigarette butts and this." Sophie handed me a Ziploc bag labeled in felt-tip. I held it up to the shifting light, and Cassie tiptoed to look over my shoulder: a single long, fair, wavy hair. "Found it near the fire," Sophie said, and jerked her thumb at a plastic evidence marker.

"Any idea how recently this place was used?" Cassie asked.

"The ash hasn't been rained on. I'll check rainfall for this area, but I know where I live it rained early Monday morning, and I'm only about two miles away. It looks like someone stayed here either last night or the night before."

"Can I see those cigarette butts?" I asked.

"Be my guest," said Sophie. I found a mask and tweezers in my case and squatted by one of the markers near the fire. The butt was from a rollie, made thin and smoked down low; someone was being careful with tobacco.

"Mark Hanly smokes rollies," I said, straightening up. "And has long fair hair."

Cassie and I looked at each other. It was past six o'clock, O'Kelly would be on the phone demanding a briefing any minute, and the conversation we needed to have with Mark was likely to take awhile, even assuming we could disentangle the side roads and find the archaeologists' house.

"Forget it, let's talk to him tomorrow," Cassie said. "I want to go see the ballet teacher on the way in. And I'm starving."

"It's like having a puppy," I told Sophie. Helen looked shocked.

"Yes, but a pedigree one," Cassie said cheerfully.

As we headed back across the site towards the car (my shoes were a mess, just like Mark had said they would be—there was red-brown muck grained into every seam—and they had been fairly nice shoes; I comforted myself with the thought that the killer's footwear would be in the same unmistakable condition), I looked back at the wood and saw that flutter of white again: Sophie and Helen and the boy tech, moving back and forth among the trees as silently and intently as ghosts.