In the Woods

5

Neither of us felt like a pint. Cassie rang Sophie's mobile and gave her the story about recognizing the hair clip from her encyclopedic knowledge of cold cases—I got the sense Sophie didn't really buy it, but didn't much care either way. Then she went home to type up a report for O'Kelly, and I went home with the old file.

I share an apartment in Monkstown with an unspeakable woman named Heather, a civil servant with a little-girl voice that always sounds as though she is about to burst into tears. At first I found it appealing; now it just makes me nervous. I moved in because I liked the idea of living near the sea, the rent was affordable, and I fancied her (five foot nothing, tiny build, big blue eyes, hair down to her arse) and harbored Hollywood-style fantasies of a beautiful relationship blossoming to our mutual amazement. I stay because of inertia and because by the time I discovered her array of neuroses I had started saving for an apartment of my own, and her flat was—even after we both worked out that Harry and Sally were never going to materialize, and she raised my rent—the only one in the greater Dublin area that would allow me to do that.

I unlocked the door, shouted, "Hi," and made a dive for my room. Heather beat me to it: she appeared in the kitchen doorway with incredible speed and quavered, "Hi, Rob, how was your day?" Sometimes I have this mental picture of her sitting in the kitchen hour after hour, folding the hem of the tablecloth into perfect little pleats, poised to leap out of her chair and fasten on to me as soon as she hears my key in the lock.

"Fine," I said, keeping my body language pointed towards my room and unlocking my door (I installed the lock a few months after I moved in, ostensibly to prevent hypothetical burglars from making off with confidential police files). "How are you?"

"Oh, I'm all right," Heather said, pulling her pink fleece dressing gown more closely around herself. The martyred tone meant I had two options: I could say, "Great," and go into my room and close the door, in which case she would sulk and bang pans for days to register her displeasure at my lack of consideration, or I could say, "Are you OK?" in which case I would have to spend the next hour listening to a blow-by-blow account of the outrages perpetrated by her boss or her sinuses or whatever it was that was currently making her feel hard done by.

Fortunately I have an Option C, though it has to be saved for emergencies. "Are you sure?" I said. "There's this awful flu going round at work, and I think I'm coming down with it. I hope you don't get it, too."

"Oh, my God," said Heather, her voice going up another octave and her eyes getting even bigger. "Rob, pet, I so don't mean to be rude, but I'd probably better stay away from you. You know I just get colds so easily."

"I understand," I said reassuringly, and Heather disappeared back into the kitchen, presumably to add horse-sized capsules of vitamin C and echinacea to her frenetically balanced diet. I went into my room and closed the door.

I poured myself a drink—I keep a bottle of vodka and one of tonic behind my books, to avoid cozy convivial "drinkies" with Heather—and spread out the old case file on my desk. My room is not conducive to concentration. The whole building has the cheap, mean-spirited feel of so many new Dublin developments—ceilings a foot too low, frontage flat and mud-colored and hideous in an utterly unoriginal way, bedrooms insultingly narrow as if designed to rub in the fact that you can't afford to be picky—and the developer saw no need to waste insulation on us, so every footstep from above or musical selection from below echoes through our entire flat, and I know far more than I need to about the sexual tastes of the couple next door. Over four years I've more or less got used to it, but I still find all the basic premises of the place offensive.

The ink of the statement sheets was faded and spotty, almost illegible in places, and I tasted fine dust settling on my lips. The two detectives who had headed the case were both retired by this time, but I made a note of their names—Kiernan and McCabe—in case we, or rather Cassie, needed to talk to them at some stage.

One of the most startling things about the case, to modern eyes, is how slow our families were to become worried. Nowadays parents are on the phone to the police as soon as a child's mobile goes unanswered; Missing Persons have become jaded from taking too many reports on children kept after school or lingering over video games. It seems ingenuous to say that the 1980s were a more innocent time, given all that we now know about industrial schools and revered priests and fathers in rocky, lonely corners of the country. But then these were only unthinkable rumors happening somewhere else, people held on to their innocence with a simple and passionate tenacity, and it was perhaps no less real for being chosen and for carrying its own culpability; and Peter's mother called us from the edge of the wood, wiping her hands on her apron, and then left us to our absorbing game and went home to make the tea.

I found Jonathan Devlin in the margins of a minor witness statement, halfway through the pile. Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald of 27 Knocknaree Drive—oldish, by the cramped, curlicued handwriting—had told the detectives that a group of rough-looking teenagers hung around the edge of the wood, drinking and smoking and courting and sometimes hurling terrible abuse at passersby, and that you weren't safe walking your own road these times, and that what they needed was a good clatter round the ear. Kiernan or McCabe had scribbled names down the side of the page: Cathal Mills, Shane Waters, Jonathan Devlin.

I flipped through the sheets to see if any of them had been interviewed. Outside my door I could hear the rhythmic, invariable sounds of Heather going through her nightly routine: determinedly cleansing and toning and moisturizing, brushing her teeth for the dentist-prescribed three minutes, genteelly blowing her nose an inexplicable number of times. Bang on schedule at five to eleven, she tapped on my door and cooed, "Night-night, Rob," in a coy stage whisper. "Night," I called back, adding a cough at the end.

The three statements were brief and almost identical, except for margin notes that described Waters as "v. nervous" and Mills as "uncoperative" [sic]. Devlin hadn't warranted any comment. On the afternoon of August 14, they had drawn their unemployment assistance and then gone by bus to the pictures in Stillorgan. They had got back to Knocknaree around seven—when we were already late for tea—and gone drinking in a field near the wood till around midnight. Yes, they had seen the searchers, but they had simply moved behind a hedge to be out of sight. No, they hadn't seen anything else unusual. No, they hadn't seen anyone who could confirm their whereabouts that day, but Mills had offered (presumably in a spirit of sarcasm, but they took him up on it) to lead the detectives to the field and show them the empty cider cans, which did indeed prove to be located in the spot he identified. The young man who had been working the box office at the Stillorgan cinema appeared to be under the influence of controlled substances and wasn't sure whether he remembered the three guys or not, even when the detectives searched his pockets and gave him a stern lecture about the evils of drugs.

I didn't get the impression that the "youths"—I hate that word—had been serious suspects. They weren't exactly hardened criminals (the local uniforms cautioned them for public intoxication on a semiregular basis, and Shane Waters had been given six months' probation for shoplifting when he was fourteen, but that was it), and why would they want to make a couple of twelve-year-olds disappear? They had simply been there, and vaguely unsavory, so Kiernan and McCabe had checked them out.

The bikers, we had called them, although I'm unsure whether any of them actually had motorbikes; probably they just dressed as though they did. Black leather jackets, unzipped at the wrists and trimmed with metal studs; stubble and long hair, and one of them had the inevitable mullet. High Doc boots. T-shirts with logos on the fronts: METALLICA, ANTHRAX. I thought those were their names, till Peter told me they were bands.

I had no idea which one had become Jonathan Devlin; I couldn't connect the sad-eyed man with the little paunch and the desk slump to any of the lean, sun-blurred, looming teenagers in my memory. I had forgotten all about them. I don't think the bikers had entered my mind once in twenty years, and I intensely disliked the thought that they had been there all along in spite of this, just waiting for their cue to pop up neatly as jacks-in-the-box, bobbing and grinning, and make me jump.

One of them wore shades all year round, even in the rain. Sometimes he offered us Juicy Fruit gum, which we took, at arm's length, even though we knew they had stolen it from Lowry's shop. "Don't go near them," my mother said, "don't answer if they talk to you," and wouldn't tell me why. Peter asked Metallica if we could have a drag of his cigarette, and he showed us how to hold it and laughed when we coughed. We stood in the sun, just out of reach, stretching to see the insides of their magazines; Jamie said one of them had a girl all nude. Metallica and Shades flicked plastic lighters, had competitions to see who could hold his finger over the flame longest. When they left, in the evening, we went over and smelled the squashed cans left behind in the dusty grass: sour, stale, grown-up.

I woke up because someone was screaming below my window. I sat up hard, my heart banging against my ribs. I had been dreaming, something tangled and feverish where Cassie and I were in a crowded bar and a guy in a tweed cap was yelling at her, and for a moment I thought it was her voice I had heard. I was disoriented, it was dark, heavy late-night silence; and someone, a girl or a child, was screaming again and again outside.

I went to the window and cautiously hooked the curtain open an inch. The complex where I live is made up of four identical apartment buildings around a little square of grass with a couple of iron benches, the kind of thing estate agents call a "communal recreation area," although nobody ever uses it (the couple in the ground-floor flat had lazy evening cocktails al fresco a couple of times, but people complained about the noise, and the management company put up a narky sign in the foyer). The white security lights gave the garden an eerie nightscope glow. It was empty; the slants of shadow in the corners were too low to hide anyone. The scream came again, high and chilling and very close, and an atavistic prickle went up my spine.

I waited, shivering a little in the cold air striking off the glass. After a few minutes something moved in the shadows, blacker against the black, then detached itself and stepped out onto the grass: it was a big dog-fox, alert and scrawny in his sparse summer coat. He raised his head and screamed again, and for a moment I imagined I caught his wild, alien scent. Then he trotted across the grass and disappeared through the front gate, pouring between the bars as sinuously as a cat. I heard his shrieks moving away into the darkness.

I was dazed and half asleep and keyed up with leftover adrenaline, and my mouth tasted foul; I needed something cold and sweet. I went out to the kitchen to look for juice. Heather, like me, sometimes has trouble sleeping, and I found myself almost hoping she would be awake and still wanting to complain about whatever it was, but there was no light under her door. I poured myself a glass of her orange juice and stood in front of the open fridge for a long time, holding the glass to my temple and swaying slightly in the flickering white light.

In the morning it was pouring rain. I texted Cassie to say I'd pick her up—the Golf Cart tends to go catatonic in wet weather. When I beeped my horn outside her flat, she ran down wearing a Paddington Bear duffle coat and carrying a thermos of coffee.

"Thank God it didn't do this yesterday," she said. "Bye-bye evidence."

"Look at this," I said, giving her the Jonathan Devlin stuff.

She sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and read, occasionally passing me the thermos. "Do you remember these guys?" she said, when she'd finished.

"Vaguely. Not well, but it was a small neighborhood and they were hard to miss. They were the nearest thing we had to juvenile delinquents."

"Did they strike you as dangerous?"

I thought about this for a while, as we crawled down Northumberland Road. "Depends what you mean," I said. "We were wary of them, but I think that was mainly because of their image, not because they ever did anything to us. I remember them being fairly tolerant of us, actually. I can't see them having made Peter and Jamie disappear."

"Who were the girls? Were they interviewed?"

"What girls?"

Cassie flicked back to Mrs. Fitzgerald's statement. "She said 'courting.' I'd say it's a safe bet that involved girls."

She was right, of course. I wasn't too clear on the exact definition of "courting," but I was pretty sure it would have excited a fair amount of comment if Jonathan Devlin and his mates had been doing it with each other. "They're not in the file," I said.

"What about you, do you remember them?"

We were still on Northumberland Road. The rain was sheeting down the windows so heavily it looked like we were underwater. Dublin was built for pedestrians and carriages, not for cars; it's full of tiny winding medieval streets, rush hour lasts from seven in the morning till eight at night, and at the first hint of bad weather the whole city goes into prompt, thorough gridlock. I wished we had left a note for Sam.

"I think so," I said eventually. It was nearer to a sensation than to a memory: powdery lemon bonbons, dimples, flowery perfume. Metallica and Sandra, sitting in a tree… "One of them might have been called Sandra." Something inside me flinched at the name—acrid taste like fear or shame at the back of my tongue—but I couldn't find why.

Sandra: round-faced and buxom, giggles and pencil skirts that rode up when she perched on the wall. She seemed very grown up and sophisticated to us; she must have been all of seventeen or eighteen. She gave us sweets out of a paper bag. Sometimes there was another girl there, tall, with big teeth and lots of earrings—Claire, maybe? Ciara? Sandra showed Jamie how to put on mascara, in a little heart-shaped mirror. Afterwards Jamie kept blinking, as though her eyes felt strange, heavy. "You look pretty," Peter said. Later Jamie decided she hated it. She washed it off in the river, scrubbing away the panda rings with the hem of her T-shirt.

"Green light," Cassie said quietly. I inched forward another few feet.

We stopped at a newsagent's and Cassie ran in and got the papers, so we could see what we were dealing with. Katy Devlin was front-page news in every one of them, and they all seemed to be focusing on the motorway link—KNOCKNAREE PROTEST LEADER'S DAUGHTER MURDERED, that kind of thing. The large tabloid reporter (whose story was headlined DIG BIGWIG'S DAUGHTER SLAUGHTER, a hyphen away from libel) had thrown in a few coy references to Druidic ceremonies but stayed clear of full-scale Satanism hysteria; she was obviously waiting to see which way the wind blew. I hoped O'Kelly would do his stuff well. Nobody, thank Christ, had mentioned Peter and Jamie, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

We palmed off the McLoughlin case (the one we had been working till we got this call: two God-awful little rich boys who had kicked another to death when he jumped the queue for a late-night taxi) on Quigley and his brand-new partner McCann, and went to find ourselves an incident room. The incident rooms are too small and always in demand, but we had no trouble getting one: children take priority. By that time Sam had got in—he had been held up in traffic as well; he has a house somewhere in Westmeath, a couple of hours out of town, which is as near as our generation can afford to buy—so we grabbed him and briefed him, with full harmonies and the official hair-clip story, while we set up the incident room.

"Ah, Jesus," he said, when we finished. "Tell me it wasn't the parents."

Every detective has a certain kind of case that he or she finds almost unbearable, against which the usual shield of practiced professional detachment turns brittle and untrustworthy. Cassie, though nobody else knows this, has nightmares when she works rape-murders; I, displaying a singular lack of originality, have serious trouble with murdered children; and, apparently, family killings gave Sam the heebie-jeebies. This case could turn out to be perfect for all three of us.

"We haven't a clue," Cassie said, through a mouthful of marker cap; she was scribbling a timeline of Katy's last day across the whiteboard. "We might have a better idea once Cooper comes back with the results from the post, but right now it's wide open."

"We don't need you to look into the parents, though," I said. I was Blu-Tacking crime-scene photos to the other side of the board. "We want you to take the motorway angle—trace the phone calls to Devlin, find out who owns the land around the site, who has a serious stake in the motorway staying put."

"Is this because of my uncle?" Sam asked. He has a tendency to directness that I've always found slightly startling, in a detective.

Cassie spat out the marker cap and turned to face him. "Yeah," she said. "Is that going to be a problem?"

We all knew what she was asking. Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved. To an outside eye there is basically no difference between the two main parties, which occupy identical self-satisfied positions on the far right of the spectrum, but many people are still passionate about one or the other because of which side their great-grandfathers fought on during the Civil War, or because Daddy does business with the local candidate and says he's a lovely fella. Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonized is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.

And a huge amount of the corruption centers on that primal, clichéd Irish passion, land. Property developers and politicians are traditionally bosom buddies, and just about every major land deal involves brown envelopes and inexplicable rezoning and complicated transactions through offshore accounts. It would be a minor miracle if there weren't at least a few favors to friends woven into the Knocknaree motorway, somewhere. If there were, it was unlikely that Redmond O'Neill didn't know about them, and equally unlikely that he would want them to come out.

"No," Sam said, promptly and firmly. "No problem." Cassie and I must have looked dubious, because he glanced back and forth between us and laughed. "Listen, lads, I've known him all my life. I lived with them for a couple of years when I first came up to Dublin. I'd know if he was into anything dodgy. He's straight as a die, my uncle. He'll help us out any way he can."

"Perfect," Cassie said, and went back to the timeline. "We're having dinner at my place. Come over around eight and we'll swap updates." She found a clean corner of whiteboard and drew Sam a little map of how to get there.

By the time we had the incident room organized, the floaters were starting to arrive. O'Kelly had got us about three dozen of them, and they were the cream of the crop: up-and-comers, alert and smooth-shaven and dressed for success, tipped to make good squads as soon as the openings arose. They pulled out chairs and notebooks, slapped backs and resurrected old in-jokes and chose their seats like kids on the first day of school. Cassie and Sam and I smiled and shook hands and thanked them for joining us. I recognized a couple of them—an uncommunicative dark guy from Mayo called Sweeney, and a well-fed Corkman with no neck, O'Connor or O'Gorman or something, who compensated for having to take orders from two non-Corkonians by making some incomprehensible but clearly triumphalistic comment about Gaelic football. A lot of the others looked familiar, but the names went straight out of my head the moment their hands slid away from mine, and the faces merged into one big, eager, intimidating blur.

I've always loved this moment in an investigation, the moment before the first briefing begins. It reminds me of the focused, private buzz before a curtain goes up: orchestra tuning, dancers backstage doing last-minute stretches, ears pricked for the signal to throw off their wraps and leg warmers and explode into action. I had never been in charge of an investigation anything like this size before, though, and this time the sense of anticipation just made me edgy. The incident room felt too full, all that primed and cocked energy, all those curious eyes on us. I remembered the way I used to look at Murder detectives, back when I was a floater praying to be borrowed for cases like this one: the awe, the bursting, almost unbearable aspiration. These guys—a lot of them were older than I was—seemed to me to have a different air about them, a cool, unconcealed assessment. I've never liked being the center of attention.

O'Kelly slammed the door behind him, slicing off the noise instantaneously. "Right, lads," he said, into the silence. "Welcome to Operation Vestal. What's a vestal when it's at home?"

Headquarters picks the names for operations. They range from the obvious through the cryptic to the downright weird. Apparently the image of the little dead girl on the ancient altar had piqued someone's cultural tendencies. "A sacrificial virgin," I said.

"A votary," said Cassie.

"Jesus fuck," said O'Kelly. "Are they trying to make everyone think this was some cult thing? What the fuck are they reading up there?"

Cassie gave them a rundown on the case, skipping lightly over the 1984 connection—just an off-chance, something she could check out in her spare time—and we handed out jobs: go door-to-door through the estate, set up a tip line and a roster for manning it, get a list of all the sex offenders living near Knocknaree, check with the British cops and with the ports and airports to see if anyone suspicious had come over to Ireland in the last few days, pull Katy's medical records, her school records, run full background checks on the Devlins. The floaters snapped smartly into action, and Sam and Cassie and I left them to it and went to see how Cooper was getting on.

We don't normally watch the autopsies. Someone who was at the crime scene has to go, to confirm that this is in fact the same body (it's happened, toe tags getting mixed up, the pathologist ringing a startled detective to report his finding of death from liver cancer), but mostly we palm this off on uniforms or techs and just go through the notes and photos with Cooper afterwards. By squad tradition you attend the post-mortem in your first murder case, and although supposedly the purpose is to impress you with the full solemnity of your new job, nobody is fooled: this is an initiation rite, as harshly judged as any primitive tribe's. I know an excellent detective who, after fifteen years on the squad, is still known as Secretariat because of the speed with which he left the morgue when the pathologist removed the victim's brain. I made it through mine (a teenage prostitute, thin arms layered with bruises and track marks) without flinching, but I was left with no desire to repeat the experience. I go only in those few cases—ironically, the most harrowing ones—that seem to demand this small, sacrificial act of devotion. I don't think anyone ever quite gets over that first time, really, the mind's violent revolt when the pathologist slices the scalp and the victim's face folds away from the skull, malleable and meaningless as a Halloween mask.

Our timing was a little off: Cooper was just coming out of the autopsy room in his green scrubs, a waterproof gown held away from him between finger and thumb. "Detectives," he said, raising his eyebrows. "What a surprise. If only you'd let me know you were planning to come, I would of course have waited until you managed to fit us in."

He was being snotty because we were too late for the post-mortem. It was, in all fairness, not even eleven o'clock, but Cooper gets into work between six and seven, leaves by three or four, and likes you to remember it. His morgue assistants all hate him for this, which doesn't bother him because he mostly hates them, too. Cooper prides himself on instant, unpredictable dislikes; as far as we've been able to figure out so far, he dislikes blond women, short men, anyone with more than two earrings and people who say "you know" too much, as well as various random people who don't fit into any of these categories. Fortunately he had decided to like me and Cassie, or he would have made us go back to work and wait until he sent over the post-mortem results (handwritten—Cooper writes all his reports in spidery fountain pen, an idea I sort of like but don't have the courage to try out in the squad room). There are days when I worry, secretly, that in a decade or two I might wake up and discover I've turned into Cooper.

"Wow," Sam said, trying. "Finished already?" Cooper gave him a chilly glance.

"Dr. Cooper, I'm so sorry to burst in on you at this hour," Cassie said. "Superintendent O'Kelly wanted to go over a few things, so we had a hard time getting away." I nodded wearily and raised my eyes to the ceiling.

"Ah. Well, yes," Cooper said. His tone implied that he found it slightly tasteless of us to mention O'Kelly at all.

"If by any chance you have a few moments," I said, "would you mind talking us through the results?"

"But of course," Cooper said, with an infinitesimal, long-suffering sigh. Actually, like any master craftsman, he loves showing off his work. He held the autopsy-room door open for us and the smell hit me, that unique combination of death and cold and rubbing alcohol that sends an instinctive animal recoil through you every time.

Bodies in Dublin go to the city morgue, but Knocknaree is outside the city limits; rural victims are simply brought to the nearest hospital, and the post-mortem is done there. Conditions vary. This room was windowless and grubby, layers of grime on the green floor-tiles and nameless stains in the old porcelain sinks. The two autopsy tables were the only things in the room that looked post-1950s; they were bright stainless steel, light flaring off those grooved edges.

Katy Devlin was naked under the merciless fluorescent lights and too small for the table, and she looked somehow much deader than she had the previous day; I thought of the old superstition that the soul lingers near the body for a few days, bewildered and unsure. She was gray-white, like something out of Roswell, with dark blotches of lividity down her left side. Cooper's assistant had already sewn her scalp back together, thank God, and was working on the Y incision across her torso, big sloppy stitches with a needle the size of a sailmaker's. I felt a momentary, crazy pang of guilt at being late, at leaving her all on her own—she was so small—through this final violation: we should have been there, she should have had someone to hold her hand while Cooper's detached, gloved fingers prodded and sliced. Sam, to my surprise, crossed himself unobtrusively.

"Pubescent white female," Cooper said, brushing past us to the table and motioning the assistant away, "aged twelve, so I'm told. Height and weight both on the low side, but within normal limits. Scars indicating abdominal surgery, possibly an exploratory laparotomy, some time ago. No obvious pathology; as far as I can tell, she died healthy, if you'll pardon the oxymoron."

We clustered around the table like obedient students; our footsteps threw small flat echoes off the tiled walls. The assistant leaned against one of the sinks and folded his arms, chewing stolidly on a piece of gum. One arm of the Y incision still gaped open, dark and unthinkable, the needle stuck casually through a flap of skin for safekeeping.

"Any chance of DNA?" I asked.

"One step at a time, if you please," Cooper said fussily. "Now. There were two blows to the head, both ante-mortem—before death," he added sweetly to Sam, who nodded solemnly. "Both were struck with a hard, rough object with protrusions but no distinct edges, consistent with the rock Ms. Miller presented to me for inspection. One was a light blow to the back of the head, near the crown. It caused a small area of abrasion and some bleeding, but no cracks to the skull." He turned Katy's head to one side, to show us the little bump. They had cleaned the blood off her face, to check for any injuries underneath, but there were still faint swipes of it across her cheek.

"So maybe she dodged, or she was running away from him while he was swinging," Cassie said.

We don't have profilers. When we really need one we bring one over from England, but most of the time a lot of the Murder guys just use Cassie, on the dubious basis that she studied psychology at Trinity for three and a half years. We don't tell O'Kelly this—he considers profilers to be one step up from psychics, and only grudgingly lets us listen even to the English guys—but I think she's probably fairly good at it, although presumably this is for reasons unrelated to her years of Freud and lab rats. She always comes up with a couple of useful new angles, and usually turns out to be quite close to the mark.

Cooper took his time thinking about it, to punish her for interrupting. Finally he shook his head judiciously. "I consider that unlikely. Had she been moving when this blow was struck, one would expect peripheral grazing, but there was none. The other blow, in contrast…" He tilted Katy's head to the other side and hooked back her hair with one finger. On her left temple a patch of skin had been shaved to expose a wide, jagged laceration, splinters of bone poking out. Someone, Sam or Cassie, swallowed.

"As you see," Cooper said, "the other blow was far more forceful. It landed just behind and above the left ear, causing a depressed skull fracture and a sizable subdural hematoma. Here and here"—he flicked his finger—"you'll observe the peripheral grazing to which I referred, at the proximal edge of the primary impact point: as the blow was struck, she appears to have turned her head away, so the weapon skidded along her skull briefly before achieving its full impact. Do I make myself clear?"

We all nodded. I glanced covertly across at Sam and was heartened by the fact that he looked like he was having a hard time, too.

"This blow would have been sufficient to cause death within hours. However, the hematoma had progressed very little, so we can safely say that she died of other causes within a short time of receiving this injury."

"Can you tell whether she was facing towards him or away from him?" Cassie asked.

"The indications are that she may have been prone when the harder blow was struck: there was considerable bleeding, and the flow was directed inwards across the left side of the face, with some pooling apparent around the central line of the nose and mouth." This was good news, if I can use the term at all in this context: there would be blood at the scene, if we ever found it. Also, it meant we were probably looking for someone left-handed, and, while this wasn't Agatha Christie and real cases seldom hinge on that kind of thing, at this point any tiny lead was an improvement.

"There was a struggle—prior to this blow, I may add: it would have rendered her unconscious immediately. There are defensive wounds to the hands and forearms—bruising, abrasions, three broken fingernails on the right hand—probably inflicted by the same weapon as she warded off blows." He lifted one of her wrists between finger and thumb, turned over her arm to show us the scrapes. Her fingernails had been clipped off short and taken away for analysis; on the back of her hand was a stylized flower with a smiley face in the middle, drawn in faded marker. "I also found bruising around the mouth and toothmarks on the insides of the lips, consistent with the perpetrator pressing a hand over her mouth."

Outside, down the corridor, a woman's high voice was giving out about something; a door slammed. The air in the autopsy room felt thick and too still, hard to breathe. Cooper glanced around at us, but nobody said anything. He knew this wasn't what we wanted to hear. In a case like this, the one thing you can hope for is that the victim never knew what was happening.

"When she was unconscious," Cooper said coolly, "some material, probably plastic, was placed around her throat and twisted at the top of the spine." He tilted her chin back: there was a faint, broad mark around her neck, striated where the plastic had buckled into folds. "As you see, the ligature mark is well defined, hence my conclusion that it was put in place only when she had been immobilized. She shows no signs of strangulation, and I consider it unlikely that the ligature was tight enough to cut off the airway; however, petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes and on the surface of the lungs indicates that she did in fact die of anoxia. I would hypothesize that something along the lines of a plastic bag was placed over her head, twisted at the back of the neck and held in place for several minutes. She died of suffocation, complicated by blunt-force trauma to the head."

"Hang on," Cassie said suddenly. "So she wasn't raped after all?"

"Ah," Cooper said. "Patience, Detective Maddox; we're coming to that. The rape was post-mortem, and was performed using an implement of some kind." He paused, discreetly enjoying the effect.

"Post-mortem?" I said. "You're sure?" This was a relief in the obvious way, eliminating some of the most excruciating mental images; but, at the same time, it did imply a special level of wacko. Sam's face was pulled into an unconscious grimace.

"There are fresh abrasions to the exterior of the vagina and to the first three inches of the interior, and a fresh tear in the hymen, but there was no bleeding and no inflammation. Post-mortem, beyond a doubt." I felt the collective, panicky flinch—none of us wanted to see this, the thought was obscene—but Cooper gave us a tiny amused glance and stayed where he was, at the head of the table.

"What kind of implement," Cassie said. She was staring at the mark on Katy's throat, intent and expressionless.

"Inside the vagina we found particles of earth and two minute splinters of wood, one severely charred, the other overlaid with what appears to be thin, clear varnish. I would postulate something at least four inches in length and approximately one to two inches in diameter, made of lightly varnished wood, with considerable wear, a burn mark of some kind and no sharp edges—a broom handle, something along those lines. The abrasions were discrete and well defined, implying a single insertion. I found nothing to suggest that there was also penile penetration. The rectum and mouth showed no signs of any sexual assault."

"So no body fluids," I said grimly.

"And there appeared to be no blood or skin beneath her fingernails," said Cooper, with faint, pessimistic satisfaction. "The tests are incomplete, of course, but I feel I should warn you not to place too much hope in the possibility of DNA samples."

"You checked the rest of the body for semen, too, right?" Cassie said.

Cooper gave her an austere look and didn't bother answering. "After death," he said, "she was placed in much the same position in which we found her, lying on her left side. There was no secondary lividity, indicating that she remained in this pose for at least twelve hours. The relative lack of insect activity leads me to believe that she was in an enclosed space, or possibly wrapped tightly in some material, for a considerable proportion of the time before discovery of the body. All this will be included in my notes, of course, but for now…Do you have any questions?"

The dismissal was delicate but clear. "Anything new on time of death?" I asked.

"The gastrointestinal contents allow me to be a little more precise than I was at the scene—if, that is, you can determine the time of her last meal. She had eaten a chocolate biscuit only a few minutes before her death, and a full meal—the digestive process was fairly advanced, but beans appear to have been a component—approximately four to six hours earlier."

Baked beans on toast, at around eight. She had died somewhere between midnight and two o'clock, give or take. The biscuit must have come either from the Devlins' kitchen, sneaked on her way out of the house, or from her killer.

"My team should have her cleaned up within a few minutes," Cooper said. He straightened Katy's head with a precise, satisfied flourish. "If you'd like to notify the family."

We stood outside the hospital and looked at one another. "Haven't been to one of those in a while," Sam said softly.

"And now you remember why," I said.

"Post-mortem," Cassie said, frowning absently back at the building. "What the hell was this guy doing?"

Sam went off to find out more about the motorway, and I phoned the incident room and told two of the floaters to take the Devlins to the hospital. Cassie and I had already seen their first, crucial reaction to the news, we neither needed nor wanted to see it again; and we did need, urgently, to talk to Mark Hanly.

"Want to bring him in?" I said, in the car. There was no reason why we couldn't interrogate Mark in the finds shed, but I wanted him off his territory and on ours, partly as a form of unreasonable revenge for my ruined shoes.

"Oh yeah," said Cassie. "He said they only have a few weeks left, didn't he? If I've got Mark right, the fastest way to get him talking is to waste his workday."

We used the drive to make O'Kelly a nice long list of reasons why we did not feel that Knocknaree For Satan had been responsible for Katy Devlin's death. "Don't forget 'no ritual positioning,'" I said. I was driving again; I was still edgy enough that, without something to do, I would have chain-smoked all the way to Knocknaree.

"And no…slaughtered…livestock," Cassie said, writing.

"He is not going to say that at the press conference. 'We didn't find a dead chicken'?"

"Bet you a fiver he does. He won't even miss a beat."

The day had changed while we were in with Cooper: the rain had spent itself and a hot, benevolent sun was already drying the roads. The trees on the shoulder were glittering with leftover raindrops, and when we got out of the car the air smelled new, washed clean, vital with wet earth and leaves. Cassie pulled off her sweater and tied it around her waist.

The archaeologists were spread out across the bottom half of the site, doing energetic things with mattocks and shovels and wheelbarrows. Their jackets were thrown over rocks and some of the guys had stripped off their T-shirts, and—presumably in reaction to yesterday's shock and hush—they were all in a giddy mood. A boom box was pumping out the Scissor Sisters at full volume, and they were singing along, in between mattock blows; one girl was using her shovel as a microphone. Three of them were having a water fight, shrieking and dodging with bottles and a hose.

Mel heaved a full wheelbarrow up the side of a huge heap of earth, caught it expertly on her thigh while she changed her grip to empty it out. On her way back down, she got a hoseful of water in the face. "You bastards!" she screamed, dropping the wheelbarrow and chasing after the little redheaded girl holding the hose. The redhead shrieked and ran, but she caught a foot in the coils; Mel grabbed her in a headlock and they wrestled for the hose, laughing and spluttering, wide arcs of water flying everywhere.

"Ah, deadly," one of the guys called. "Lesbo action."

"Where's the camera?"

"Here, is that a hickey on your neck?" the redhead shouted. "Lads, Mel's got a hickey!" A burst of congratulatory whoops and laughter.

"Fuck off," Mel yelled, bright red and grinning.

Mark called something sharp at them all and they shouted back, cheekily—"Ooo, touchy!"—and drifted back to work, shaking sparkling fans of water out of their hair. I felt a sudden, unexpected surge of envy, for the unselfconscious freedom of their shouting and tussling, the satisfying arc and thud of the mattocks, their muddy clothes left to dry in the sun as they worked; for the loose-limbed, efficient assurance of it all. "Not a bad way to make a living," Cassie said, tipping her head back and smiling a private little smile up at the sky.

The archaeologists had spotted us; one by one they lowered their tools and looked up, shielding their eyes against the sun with bare forearms. We picked our way across to Mark under their collective, startled gaze. Mel stood up out of a trench, puzzled, swiping hair off her face and leaving a muddy streak; Damien, kneeling among his protective phalanx of girls, still looked woebegone and faintly bedraggled, but Sean the sculptor perked up when he saw us, and waved his shovel. Mark leaned on his mattock like some taciturn old mountainy man, squinting at us inscrutably.

"Yeah?"

"We'd like a word with you," I said.

"We're working. Can it not wait till lunch?"

"No. Bring your things; we're going back to headquarters."

His jaw tightened and for a moment I thought he was going to argue, but then he tossed down the mattock, wiped his face with his T-shirt and headed off up the hill. "Bye," I said to the archaeologists, as we followed him. Not even Sean answered.

In the car Mark pulled out his tobacco packet. "No smoking," I said.

"What the fuck?" he demanded. "You both smoke. I saw you yesterday."

"Department cars count as workplaces. It's illegal to smoke in them." I wasn't even making this up; it takes a committee to come up with something that ludicrous.

"Ah, what the hell, Ryan, let him have a cigarette," Cassie said. She added in a nicely judged undertone, "It'll save us having to take him out for a smoke break for a few hours." I caught Mark's startled glance in the rearview mirror. "Can I have a rollie?" she asked him, twisting round to lean between the seats.

"How long is this going to take?" he said.

"That depends," I told him.

"On what? I don't even know what this is about."

"We'll get to that. Settle down and have your smoke before I change my mind."

"How's the dig going?" Cassie asked sociably.

One corner of Mark's mouth twisted sourly. "How do you think? We've got four weeks to do a year's work. We've been using bulldozers."

"And that's not a good thing?" I said.

He glared at me. "Do we look like the fucking Time Team?"

The Time Team is a bunch of TV archaeologists with manic haircuts and an obsession with digging up entire medieval monasteries in three days. I wasn't sure how to answer this one, given that as far as I was concerned Mark and his buddies did in fact look exactly like the fucking Time Team. Cassie turned on the radio; Mark lit up and blew a noisy, disgusted stream of smoke out of the window. It was obviously going to be a long day.

I didn't say much on the drive back. I knew it was very possible that Katy Devlin's killer was sulking in the back seat of the car, and I wasn't sure how I felt about this. In a lot of ways, of course, I would have loved him to be our guy: he had been getting right up my nose, and if it was him then we could get rid of this eerie, dicey case almost before it began. It could be over that afternoon; I could put the old file back in the basement—Mark, who in 1984 had been about five and living somewhere very far from Dublin, was not a viable suspect—collect my pat on the back from O'Kelly, take back the taxi-rank wankers from Quigley, and forget all about Knocknaree.

And yet, somehow, that felt all wrong. Partly it was the crashing, embarrassing anticlimax of the idea—I had spent much of the past twenty-four hours trying to prepare myself for wherever this case might take me, and I had expected something a lot more dramatic than one interrogation and an arrest. It was more than that, though. I am not superstitious, but if the call had come in a few minutes earlier or later, after all, or if Cassie and I hadn't just discovered Worms, or if we had wanted a smoke, this case would have gone to Costello or someone, never to us, and it seemed impossible that so powerful and heady a thing could be coincidence. I had a sense of things stirring, rearranging themselves in some imperceptible but crucial way, tiny unseen cogs beginning to shift. Deep down, I think—ironic as it may seem—a part of me couldn't wait to see what would happen next.