In the Woods

4

The Cameron Dance Academy was above a video shop in Stillorgan. On the street outside, three kids in baggy trousers were flipping skateboards on and off a low wall and yelling. The assistant teacher—an extremely pretty young woman called Louise, in a black leotard and black pointe shoes and a full, calf-length black skirt; Cassie gave me an amused look as we followed her up the stairs—let us in and told us Simone Cameron was just finishing up a class, so we waited on the landing.

Cassie drifted over to a cork notice-board on the wall, and I looked around. There were two dance studios, with little round windows in the doors: in one, Louise was showing a bunch of toddlers how to be butterflies or birds or something; in the other, a dozen little girls in white leotards and pink tights were crossing the floor in pairs, in a series of jumps and twirls, to the "Valse des Fleurs" on an old scratchy record player. As far as I could tell there was, to put it mildly, a wide range of ability. The woman teaching them had white hair pulled back in a tight bun, but her body was as spare and straight as a young athlete's; she was wearing the same black outfit as Louise and holding a pointer, tapping at the girls' ankles and shoulders and calling instructions.

"Look at this," Cassie said quietly.

The poster showed Katy Devlin, though it took me a second to recognize her. She was wearing a gauzy white smock and had one leg raised behind her in an effortless, impossible arc. Below her it said, in a large font, "Send Katy to the Royal Ballet School! Help Her Make Us Proud!" and gave the details of the fund-raiser: St. Alban's Parish Hall, 20 June, 7:00 p.m., An Evening of Dance with the Pupils of the Cameron Dance Academy. Tickets a10/a7. All Proceeds will Go to Pay Katy's Fees. I wondered what would happen to the money now.

Under the poster was a newspaper clipping, with an arty soft-focus shot of Katy at the barre; her eyes, in the mirror, gazed out at the photographer with an ageless, intent gravity. DUBLIN'S TINY DANCER TAKES WING, The Irish Times, 23 June: "'I guess I'll miss my family, but I still can't wait,' Katy says. 'I've wanted to be a dancer ever since I was six. I can't believe I'm really going. Sometimes when I wake up I think maybe I dreamed it.'" No doubt the article had brought in donations towards Katy's fees—another thing we'd have to check up on—but it had done us no favors at all: pedophiles read morning papers, too, and it was an eye-catching photo, and the field of potential suspects had just widened to include most of the country. I glanced at the other notices: tutu for sale, size 7-8; would anyone living in the Blackrock area be interested in setting up a carpool to and from the intermediate class?

The studio door opened and a flood of matching little girls streamed past us, all chattering and shoving and shrieking at once. "Can I help you?" Simone Cameron asked, in the doorway.

She had a beautiful voice, deep as a man's without being in the least mannish, and she was older than I had thought: her face was bony and deeply, intricately lined. I realized that she probably took us for parents coming to ask about dance classes for our daughter, and for a moment I had a wild impulse to play along with it, ask about fees and schedules and go away, leave her her illusion and her star pupil a little longer.

"Ms. Cameron?"

"Simone, please," she said. She had extraordinary eyes, almost golden, huge and heavy-lidded.

"I'm Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox," I said for the thousandth time that day. "Could we speak to you for a few minutes?"

She brought us into the studio and set out three chairs in a corner. A mirror took up the whole of one long wall, three barres running along it at different heights, and I kept catching my own movements out of the corner of my eye. I angled my chair so I couldn't see it.

I told Simone about Katy—it was definitely my turn to do this part. I had expected her to cry, I think, but she didn't: her head went back a little and the lines in her face seemed to get even deeper, but that was all.

"You saw Katy in class on Monday evening, didn't you?" I said. "How did she seem?"

Very few people can hold a silence, but Simone Cameron was unusual: she waited, not moving, one arm thrown over the back of her chair, until she was ready to speak. After a long time she said, "Very much as usual. Slightly overexcited—it was a few minutes before she could settle and concentrate—but this was natural: she was to leave for the Royal Ballet School in a few weeks. She'd been growing more and more excited about it all summer." She turned her head away, very slightly. "She missed her class yesterday evening, but I simply assumed she was ill again. If I had rung her parents…"

"By yesterday evening she was dead," Cassie said gently. "There was nothing you could have done."

"Ill again?" I asked. "Had she been ill recently?"

Simone shook her head. "Not recently, no. But she isn't a strong child." Her eyelids dropped for a moment, hooding her eyes: "Wasn't." Then she looked up at me again. "I've taught Katy for six years now. For several of those years, beginning when she was perhaps nine, she was ill very often. So was her sister Jessica, but her illnesses were colds, coughs—she, I think, is simply delicate. Katy suffered from periods of vomiting, diarrhea. Sometimes it was serious enough to need hospitalization. The doctors thought it was some form of chronic gastritis. She should have gone to the Royal Ballet School last year, you know, but she had an acute attack at the end of the summer, and they operated on her to find out more; by the time she recovered, it was too far into the term for her to catch up. She had to reaudition this spring."

"But recently these attacks had disappeared?" I asked. We would need Katy's medical records, fast.

Simone smiled, remembering; it was a small, wrenching thing, and her eyes flicked away from us. "I was worried about whether she would be healthy enough for the training—dancers can't afford to miss many classes through illness. When Katy was accepted again this year, I kept her after class one day and warned her that she would have to keep seeing a doctor, to find out what was wrong. Katy listened, and then she shook her head and said—very solemnly, like a vow—'I'm not going to get sick any more.' I tried to impress upon her that this wasn't something she could ignore, that her career might depend on this, but that was all she would say. And, in fact, she hasn't been ill since. I thought perhaps she had simply outgrown whatever it was; but the will can be a powerful thing, and Katy is—was—strong-willed."

The other class was letting out; I heard parents' voices on the landing, another rush of small feet and chatter. "You taught Jessica as well?" Cassie said. "Did she audition for the Royal Ballet School?"

In the early stages of an investigation, unless you have an obvious suspect, all you can do is find out as much about the victim's life as possible and hope something sets off alarm bells; and I was pretty sure Cassie was right, we needed to know more about the Devlin family. And Simone Cameron wanted to talk. We see this a lot, people desperate to keep talking because when they stop we will leave and they will be left alone with what has happened. We listen and nod and sympathize, and file away everything they say.

"I taught all three of the sisters, at one time or another," Simone said. "Jessica seemed quite competent when she was younger, and she worked hard, but as she grew she became cripplingly self-conscious, to the point where any individual exercises seemed to be a painful ordeal for her. I told her parents I thought it would be better if she didn't have to go through this any more."

"And Rosalind?" Cassie asked.

"Rosalind had some talent, but she lacked application and wanted instant results. After a few months she switched to, I believe, violin lessons. She said it was by her parents' choice, but I thought it was because she was bored. We see this quite often with young children: when they aren't immediately proficient, and when they realize how much hard work is involved, they become frustrated and leave. Frankly, neither of them would ever have been Royal Ballet School material in any case."

"But Katy…" Cassie said, leaning forward.

Simone looked at her for a long time. "Katy was…sérieuse."

That was what gave her voice some of its distinctive quality: somewhere, far back, there was a touch of French shaping the intonations. "Serious," I said.

"More than that," said Cassie. Her mother was half French, and as a child she spent summers with her grandparents in Provence; she says she's forgotten most of her spoken French at this point, but she still understands it. "A professional."

Simone inclined her head. "Yes. She loved even the hard work—not only for the results it brought, but for its own sake. A real talent for dance is not common; the temperament to make a career of it is much rarer. To find both at once…" She looked away again. "Sometimes, on evenings when only one studio was being used, she would ask if she could come in and practice in the other."

Outside, the light was beginning to dim towards evening; the skateboard kids' calls floated up, faint and crystalline through the glass. I thought of Katy Devlin alone in the studio, watching the mirror with detached absorption as she moved in slow spins and dips; the lift of a pointed foot; streetlamps throwing saffron rectangles across the floor, Satie's Gnossiennes on the crackly record player. Simone seemed pretty sérieuse herself, and I wondered how on earth she had ended up here: above a shop in Stillorgan, with the smell of grease wafting up from the chip shop next door, teaching ballet to little girls whose mothers thought it would give them good posture or wanted framed pictures of them in tutus. I realized, suddenly, what Katy Devlin must have meant to her.

"How did Mr. and Mrs. Devlin feel about Katy going to ballet school?" Cassie asked.

"They were very supportive," Simone said, without hesitation. "I was relieved, and also surprised; not every parent is willing to send a child that age away to school, and most, with good reason, are opposed to their children becoming professional dancers. Mr. Devlin, in particular, was very much in favor of Katy going. He was close to her, I think. I admired this, that he wanted what was best for her even if it meant letting her go away."

"And her mother?" Cassie said. "Was she close to her?"

Simone gave a little one-shouldered shrug. "Less, I think. Mrs. Devlin is…rather vague. She always seemed bewildered by all of her daughters. I think perhaps she isn't very intelligent."

"Have you noticed anyone strange hanging around in the past few months?" I asked. "Anyone who worried you?" Ballet schools and swimming clubs and scout troops are pedophile magnets. If someone had been looking for a victim, this was the obvious place where he might have spotted Katy.

"I understand what you mean, but no. We look for this. About ten years ago a man used to sit on a wall up the hill and look into the studio through binoculars. We complained to the police, but they did nothing until he tried to convince one little girl to get into his car. Since then we're very watchful."

"Did anyone take an interest in Katy to a level that you felt was unusual?"

She thought, shook her head. "No one. Everyone admired her dancing, many people supported the fund-raiser we held to help with her fees, but no one person more than others."

"Was there any jealousy of her talent?"

Simone laughed, a quick hard breath through her nose. "These are not stage parents we have here. They want their daughters to learn a little ballet, enough to be pretty; they don't want them to make a career of it. I'm sure a few of the other little girls were envious, yes. But enough to kill her? No."

She looked, suddenly, exhausted; her elegant pose hadn't changed, but her eyes were glazed with fatigue. "Thank you for your time," I said. "We'll contact you if we need to ask you any more questions."

"Did she suffer?" Simone asked abruptly. She wasn't looking at us.

She was the first person to ask. I started to give the standard non-answer involving the post-mortem results, but Cassie said, "There's no evidence of that. We can't be sure of anything yet, but it seems to have been quick."

Simone turned her head with an effort and met Cassie's eyes. "Thank you," she said.

She didn't get up to see us out, and I realized it was because she wasn't sure she could do it. As I closed the door I caught a last glimpse of her through the round window, still sitting straight-backed and motionless with her hands folded in her lap: a queen in a fairy tale, left alone in her tower to mourn her lost, witch-stolen princess.

"'I'm not going to get sick any more,'" Cassie said, in the car. "And she stopped getting sick."

"Willpower, like Simone said?"

"Maybe." She didn't sound convinced.

"Or she could have been making herself sick," I said. "Vomiting and diarrhea are both pretty easy to induce. Maybe she was looking for attention, and once she got into ballet school she didn't need to any more. She was getting plenty of attention without being sick—newspaper articles, fund-raisers, the lot… I need a cigarette."

"Junior Munchausen syndrome?" Cassie reached into the back, dug around in my jacket pockets and found my smokes. I smoke Marlboro Reds; Cassie has no particular brand loyalty but generally buys Lucky Strike Lights, which I consider to be girl cigarettes. She lit two and passed one to me. "Can we pull medical records on the two sisters as well?"

"Dodgy," I said. "They're alive, so there's confidentiality. If we got the parents' consent…" She shook her head. "Why, what are you thinking?"

She opened her window a few inches, and the wind blew her hair sideways. "I don't know… The twin, Jessica—the bunny-in-headlights thing could just be stress from Katy being missing, but she's way too thin. Even through that big huge woolly thing you could tell she's half the size of Katy, and Katy was no heifer. And then the other sister…There's something off about her, too."

"Rosalind?" I said.

There must have been something funny in my tone. Cassie shot me an oblique glance. "You liked her."

"Yes, I suppose I did," I said, defensive and not sure why. "She seemed like a nice girl. She's very protective of Jessica. What, you didn't?"

"What's that got to do with it?" Cassie said coolly and, I felt, a little unfairly. "Regardless of who likes her, she dresses funny, she wears too much makeup—"

"She's well groomed, so there's something wrong with her?"

"Please, Ryan, do us both a favor and grow up; you know exactly what I mean. She smiles at inappropriate times, and, as you spotted, she wasn't wearing a bra." I had noticed that, but I hadn't realized that Cassie had as well, and the dig irritated me. "She may well be a very nice girl, but there's something off there."

I didn't say anything. Cassie threw the rest of her cigarette out the window and dug her hands into her pockets, slumped in her seat like a sulky teenager. I turned on dipped headlights and sped up. I was annoyed with her and I knew she was annoyed with me, too, and I wasn't sure quite how this had happened.

Cassie's mobile rang. "Oh, for God's sake," she said, looking at the screen. "Hello, sir… Hello?…Sir?…Bloody phones." She hung up.

"Reception?" I said coldly.

"The fucking reception is fine," she said. "He just wanted to know when we'd be back and what was taking us so long, and I didn't feel like talking to him."

I can usually hold a sulk for much longer than Cassie, but I couldn't help it, I laughed. After a moment Cassie did, too.

"Listen," she said, "I wasn't being bitchy about Rosalind. More like worried."

"Are you thinking sexual abuse?" I realized that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had been wondering about the same thing, but I disliked the thought so much that I had been avoiding it. One sister oversexual, one badly underweight, and one, after various unexplained illnesses, murdered. I thought of Rosalind's head bent over Jessica's and felt a sudden, unaccustomed surge of protectiveness. "The father's abusing them. Katy's coping strategy is making herself sick, either out of self-hatred or to lessen the chances of abuse. When she gets into ballet school, she decides she needs to be healthy and the cycle has to stop; maybe she confronts the father, threatens to tell. So he kills her."

"It plays," said Cassie. She was watching the trees flash past on the roadside; I could only see the back of her head. "But so does, for example, the mother—if it turns out Cooper was wrong about the rape, obviously. Munchausen by proxy. She seemed way at home in the victim role, did you notice?"

I had. In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask, but in others it pares people to the essentials (and this is, of course, the real and icy reason why we try to tell families about their losses ourselves, rather than leaving it to the uniforms: not to show how much we care, but to see how they react), and we had borne bad news often enough to know the usual variations. Most people are shocked senseless, struggling for their footing, with no idea how to do this; tragedy is new territory that comes with no guide, and they have to work out, step by dazed step, how to negotiate it. Margaret Devlin had been unsurprised, almost resigned, as though grief was her familiar default state.

"So basically the same pattern," I said. "She's making one or all of the girls sick, when Katy gets into ballet school she tries to put her foot down, and the mother kills her."

"It could explain why Rosalind dresses like a forty-year-old, too," Cassie said. "Trying to be a grown-up to get away from her mother."

My mobile rang. "Ah, fuck, man," we both said, in unison.

I did the bad-reception routine, and we spent the rest of the drive making a list of possible lines of inquiry. O'Kelly likes lists; a good one might distract him from the fact that we hadn't rung him back.

We work out of the grounds of Dublin Castle, and in spite of all the colonial connotations this is one of my favorite perks of the job. Inside, the rooms have been lovingly refurbished to be exactly like every corporate office in the country—cubicles, fluorescent lighting, staticky carpet and institution-colored walls—but the outsides of the buildings are protected and still intact: old, ornate red brick and marble, with battlements and turrets and worn carvings of saints in unexpected places. In winter, on foggy evenings, crossing the cobblestones is like walking through Dickens—hazy gold streetlamps throwing odd-angled shadows, bells pealing in the cathedrals nearby, every footstep ricocheting into darkness; Cassie says you can pretend you're Inspector Abberline working on the Ripper murders. Once, on a ringingly clear full-moon night in December, she turned cartwheels straight across the main courtyard.

There was a light in O'Kelly's window, but the rest of the building was dark: it was past seven, everyone else had gone home. We sneaked in as quietly as we could. Cassie tiptoed up to the squad room to run Mark and the Devlins through the computer, and I went down to the basement, where we keep the old case files. It used to be a wine cellar, and the crack Corporate Design Squad hasn't got around to it yet, so it's still all flagstones and columns and low-arched bays. Cassie and I have a pact to take a couple of candles down there someday, in spite of the electric lighting and in defiance of safety regulations, and spend an evening looking for secret passageways.

The cardboard box (Rowan G., Savage P., 33791/84) was exactly as I had left it more than two years before; I doubt anyone had touched it since. I pulled out the file and flipped to the statement Missing Persons had taken from Jamie's mother and, thank God, there it was: blond hair, hazel eyes, red T-shirt, cut-off denim shorts, white runners, red hair clips decorated with strawberries.

I shoved the file under my jacket, in case I ran into O'Kelly (there was no reason why I shouldn't have it, especially now that the link to the Devlin case was definite, but for some reason I felt guilty, furtive, as if I were absconding with some taboo artifact), and went back up to the squad room. Cassie was at her computer; she had left the lights off so O'Kelly wouldn't spot them.

"Mark's clean," she said. "So's Margaret Devlin. Jonathan has one conviction, just this February."

"Kiddie porn?"

"Jesus, Ryan. You have a melodramatic mind. No, disturbing the peace: he was protesting about the motorway and crossed a police line. Judge gave him a hundred-quid fine and twenty hours of community service, then upped it to forty when Devlin said that as far as he was concerned he had just been arrested for performing a community service."

That wasn't where I'd seen Devlin's name, then: as I've said, I had had only the vaguest idea that the motorway controversy even existed. But it did explain why he hadn't reported the threatening phone calls. We would not have seemed like allies to him, especially not on anything related to the motorway. "The hair clip's in the file," I said.

"Nice one," said Cassie, with a shade of a question in her voice. She was shutting down the computer and turned to look at me. "Are you pleased?"

"I'm not sure," I said. It was, obviously, nice to know that I wasn't losing my mind and imagining things; but now I was wondering whether I had actually remembered it at all or only seen it in the file, and which of those possibilities I liked less, and wishing I had just kept my mouth shut about the damn thing.

Cassie waited; in the evening light through the window her eyes looked huge, opaque and watchful. I knew she was giving me a chance to say, Fuck the hair clip, let's forget we ever found it. Even now the temptation, tired and profitless though it may be, is to wonder what would have happened if I had.

But it was late, I had had a long day, I wanted to go home, and being handled with kid gloves—even by Cassie—has always made me itch; cutting short this whole line of inquiry seemed like so much more effort than simply leaving it to run its course. "Will you ring Sophie about the blood?" I asked. In that dim room, it seemed all right to admit this much weakness at least.

"Sure," said Cassie. "Later, though, OK? Let's go talk to O'Kelly before he has an aneurysm. He texted me while you were in the basement; I didn't think he even knew how to do that, did you?"

I rang O'Kelly's extension and told him we were back, to which he said, "About fucking time. What did you do, stop for a quickie?" and then told us to get into his office pronto.

The office has only one chair apart from O'Kelly's own, one of those faux-leather ergonomic things. The implication is that you shouldn't take up too much of his space or time. I sat in the chair, and Cassie perched on a table behind me. O'Kelly gave her an irritated look.

"Make it fast," he said. "I've to be somewhere at eight." His wife had left him the year before; since then the grapevine had picked up a series of awkward attempts at relationships, including one spectacularly unsuccessful blind date where the woman turned out to be an ex-hooker he had arrested regularly in his Vice days.

"Katharine Devlin, aged twelve," I said.

"The ID's definite, so?"

"Ninety-nine percent," I said. "We'll have one of the parents view the body when the morgue's patched her up, but Katy Devlin was an identical twin, and the surviving twin looks exactly like our victim."

"Leads, suspects?" he snapped. He had a sort of nice tie on, ready for his date, and he was wearing too much cologne; I couldn't place it, but it smelled expensive. "I'm going to have to give a fucking press conference tomorrow. Tell me you've got something."

"She was hit over the head and asphyxiated, probably raped," Cassie said. The fluorescent lighting smudged gray under her eyes. She looked too tired and too young to be saying the words so calmly. "We won't know anything definite till the post-mortem tomorrow morning."

"Fucking tomorrow?" O'Kelly said, outraged. "Tell that shite Cooper to give this priority."

"Already did, sir," said Cassie. "He had to be in court this afternoon. He said first thing tomorrow is the best he can do." (Cooper and O'Kelly hate each other; what Cooper had actually said was, "Kindly explain to Mr. O'Kelly that his cases aren't the only ones in the world.") "We've identified four primary lines of inquiry, and—"

"Good, that's good," said O'Kelly, grabbing drawers open and rummaging for a pen.

"First, there's the family," said Cassie. "You know the stats, sir: most murdered kids are killed by their parents."

"And there's something odd about that family, sir," I said. This was my line; we had to get the point across, in case we ever needed a little leeway in investigating the Devlins, but if Cassie had said it O'Kelly would have gone off into a long snide boring routine about women's intuition. We were good at O'Kelly by this time. Our counterpoint has been polished to the seamlessness of a Beach Boys harmony—we can sense exactly when to swap the roles of front man and backup, good cop and bad cop, when my cool detachment needs to strike a balancing note of gravitas against Cassie's bright ease—and it is for use even against our own. "I can't put my finger on it, but there's something up in that house."

"Never ignore a hunch," said O'Kelly. "Dangerous." Cassie's foot, swinging casually, nudged my back.

"Second," she said, "we're going to have to at least check out the possibility of some kind of cult."

"Oh, God, Maddox. What, did Cosmo run an article on Satanism this month?" O'Kelly's disregard for cliché is so sweeping that it almost has its own panache. I find this entertaining or irritating or mildly comforting, depending on my mood, but at least it makes it very easy to prepare your script in advance.

"I think it's a load of rubbish, too, sir," I said, "but we've got a murdered little girl on a sacrificial altar. The reporters were asking about it already. We'll have to eliminate it." It is, obviously, difficult to prove that something does not exist, and saying it without solid proof just brings out the conspiracy theorists, so we take a different tack. We would spend several hours finding ways in which Katy Devlin's death didn't match the putative MO of a hypothetical group (no bloodletting, no sacrificial garment, no occult symbols, yada yada yada), and then O'Kelly, who luckily has absolutely no sense of the absurd, would explain all this to the cameras.

"Waste of time," O'Kelly said. "But yeah, yeah, do it. Talk to Sex Crime, talk to the parish priest, whoever, just get it out of the way. What's third?"

"Third," Cassie said, "is a straight-up sex crime—a pedophile who killed her either to stop her talking or because killing is part of his thing. And if things point that way, we're going to have to look at the two kids who disappeared at Knocknaree in 1984. Same age, same location, and right beside our victim's body we found a drop of old blood—lab's working on matching it to the '84 samples—and a hair clip that fits the description of one the missing girl was wearing. We can't rule out a connection." This was definitely Cassie's line. I am, as I've said, a pretty good liar, but just hearing her say it made my heart rate go up annoyingly, and in many ways O'Kelly is more perceptive than he pretends to be.

"What, a serial sex killer? After twenty years? And how do you know about this hair clip anyway?"

"You told us to familiarize ourselves with cold cases, sir," said Cassie virtuously. It was true, he had—I think he heard it in a seminar, or maybe on CSI—but he told us a lot of things, and anyway none of us ever had time. "And the guy could have been out of the country, or in prison, or he only kills when he's under a lot of stress—"

"We're all under a lot of stress," said O'Kelly. "Serial killer. That's all we need. What's next?"

"Fourth is the one that could get dodgy, sir," said Cassie. "Jonathan Devlin, the father, runs the Move the Motorway campaign in Knocknaree. Apparently that's pissed off a few people. He says he's had three anonymous phone calls in the last couple of months, threatening his family if he doesn't back off. We're going to have to find out who has a serious stake in that motorway going through Knocknaree."

"Which means fucking about with property developers and county councils," said O'Kelly. "Jesus."

"We'll need as many floaters as we can get, sir," I said, "and I think we'll need someone else from Murder."

"Too bloody right, you will. Take Costello. Leave him a note; he's always in early."

"Actually, sir," I said, "I'd like to have O'Neill." I have nothing against Costello, but I definitely did not want him on this one. Apart from the fact that he was basically dreary and this case was depressing enough without him, he was the dogged type who would go through the old case file with a fine-tooth comb and start trying to trace Adam Ryan.

"I'm not putting three rookies on a high-profile case. You two are only on this because you spend your breaks surfing for porn, or whatever you were doing, instead of getting some fresh air like everyone else."

"O'Neill's hardly a rookie, sir. He's been in Murder for seven years."

"And we all know why," said O'Kelly, nastily. Sam made the squad at twenty-seven; his uncle is a mid-level politician, Redmond O'Neill, who is usually junior Minister for Justice or the Environment or something. Sam deals with it well: whether by nature or by strategy, he is placid, reliable, everyone's favorite backup, and this deflects most of the potential for snide commentary. He still gets the odd bitchy remark, but these are usually reflexive, like O'Kelly's had been, rather than actively malicious.

"That's exactly why we need him, sir," I said. "If we're going to poke our noses into county council business and all the rest of it without making too many waves, we need someone who's got contacts in that circle."

O'Kelly glanced at the clock, moved to smooth his comb-over and then thought better of it. It was twenty to eight. Cassie recrossed her legs, settled more comfortably on the table. "I guess there could be pros and cons," she said. "Maybe we should discuss—"

"Ah, whatever, have O'Neill," said O'Kelly irritably. "Just get the job done and don't let him piss anyone off. I want reports on my desk every morning." He stood up and started patting papers into rough piles: we were dismissed.

Out of absolutely nowhere I felt a sudden sweet shot of joy, piercing and distilled as the jolt I imagine heroin users get when the fix hits the vein. It was my partner bracing herself on her hands as she slid fluidly off the desk, it was the neat practiced movement of flipping my notebook shut one-handed, it was my superintendent wriggling into his suit jacket and covertly checking his shoulders for dandruff, it was the garishly lit office with a stack of marker-labeled case files sagging in the corner and evening rubbing up against the window. It was the realization, all over again, that this was real and it was my life. Maybe Katy Devlin, if she had made it that far, would have felt this way about the blisters on her toes, the pungent smell of sweat and floor wax in the dance studios, the early-morning breakfast bells raced down echoing corridors. Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I remember that moment because, if I am honest, I have them so seldom. I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.