In the Woods

6

By the time we got back to work, Cassie had managed to extract the information that bulldozers were used only in emergencies because they destroy valuable archaeological evidence and that the Time Team were a bunch of unprofessional hacks, as well as the end of a rollie Mark had made her, which meant that if necessary we could match his DNA to the butts from the clearing without getting a warrant. It was pretty clear who was going to be the good cop today. I frisked Mark (clench-jawed, shaking his head) and put him in an interview room, while Cassie left our Satan-Free Knocknaree list on O'Kelly's desk.

We let Mark simmer for a few minutes—he slouched in his chair and drummed an increasingly irritable riff on the table with his index fingers—before we went in. "Hi again," said Cassie cheerfully. "Do you want tea or coffee?"

"No. I want to get back to my job."

"Detectives Maddox and Ryan, interviewing Mark Conor Hanly," Cassie told the video camera, high up in a corner. Mark whipped round, startled; then he grimaced at the camera and eased back into his slump.

I pulled up a chair, threw a sheaf of crime-scene shots on the table and ignored them. "You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be used in evidence. Got it?"

"What the fuck—Am I under arrest?"

"No. Do you drink red wine?"

He shot me a brief, sarcastic glance. "Are you offering?"

"Why don't you want to answer the question?"

"That is my answer. I drink whatever's going. Why?" I nodded thoughtfully and wrote this down.

"What's with the tape?" Cassie asked curiously, leaning across the table to point at the masking tape wrapped around his hands.

"For blisters. Band-Aids don't stay on, when you're using a mattock in the rain."

"Couldn't you just wear gloves?"

"Some people do," Mark said. His tone implied that these people lacked testosterone, in one way or another.

"Would you have any objection to letting us see what's underneath?" I said.

He gave me a fishy look, but he unwound the tape, taking his time, and dropped it on the table. He held up his hands with a sardonic flourish. "See anything you like?"

Cassie leaned farther forward on her arms, took a good look, gestured to him to turn his hands over. I couldn't see any scrapes or fingernail marks, only the remains of large blisters, half healed, at the base of each finger. "Ow," Cassie said. "How'd you get those?"

Mark shrugged dismissively. "Usually I have calluses, but I was out for a few weeks there, hurt my back—had to stick to cataloguing finds. My hands went soft. When I went back to work, this is what I got."

"Must have driven you mental, not being able to work," Cassie said.

"Aye, it did all right," Mark said briefly. "Shite timing."

I picked up the masking tape between finger and thumb and dropped it in the bin. "Where were you Monday night?" I asked, leaning against the wall behind Mark.

"In the team house. Like I told you yesterday."

"Are you a member of Move the Motorway?" Cassie asked.

"Yeah, I am. Most of us are. Your man Devlin came round a while back, asking us if we wanted to join up. It's not illegal yet, as far as I know."

"So you know Jonathan Devlin?" I asked.

"That's what I just said. We're not bosom buddies, but yeah, I know the man."

I leaned over his shoulder and flicked through the crime-scene photos, giving him glimpses but not leaving him time for a proper look. I found one of the more disturbing shots and flipped it across to him. "But you told us you didn't know her."

Mark held the photo between the tips of his fingers and gave it a long, impassive look. "I told you I'd seen her around the dig but I didn't know her name, and I don't. Should I?"

"I think you should, yes," I said. "She's Devlin's daughter."

He spun to stare at me for a second, brows knitting; then he looked back at the photo. After a moment he shook his head. "Nah. I met a daughter of Devlin's at a protest, back in spring, but she was older. Rosemary, Rosaleen, something."

"What did you think of her?" Cassie asked.

Mark shrugged. "Good-looking girl. Talked a lot. She was working the membership table, signing people up, but I don't think she was really into the campaign; more into flirting with the fellas. She never bothered showing up again."

"You found her attractive," I said, wandering over to the one-way glass and checking my shave in the reflection.

"Pretty enough. Not my type."

"But you noticed that she wasn't at any subsequent protests. Why were you looking for her?"

I could see him, in the glass, staring suspiciously at the back of my head. Finally he shoved the photo away and settled back in his chair, chin jutting. "I wasn't."

"Did you make any attempt to get in contact with her again?"

"No."

"How did you know she was Devlin's daughter?"

"I don't remember."

I was starting to get a bad feeling about this. Mark was impatient and pissed off, and the shower of disconnected questions was making him wary, but he didn't seem remotely nervous or scared or anything like that; his main feeling about the whole thing appeared to be irritation. Basically, he wasn't acting like a guilty man.

"Listen," Cassie said, tucking one foot up under her, "what's the real story on the dig and the motorway?"

Mark laughed, a mirthless little snort. "It's a lovely bedtime story. The government announced the plans in 2000. Everyone knew there was plenty of archaeology around Knocknaree, so they brought in a team to do a survey. The team came back, said the site was way more important than anyone had thought and only an idiot would build on it, the motorway would have to be moved. The government said that was very interesting, thanks very much, and they weren't moving it an inch. It took massive rows before they'd even allow an excavation. Finally they were gracious enough to say OK, we could do a two-year dig—it'd take at least five years to do that site justice. Since then there's been thousands of people fighting this every way we can—petitions, demonstrations, lawsuits. The government doesn't give a fuck."

"But why?" Cassie asked. "Why don't they just move the thing?"

He shrugged, his mouth twisting savagely. "Don't ask me. We'll find out all about it in some tribunal, when it's ten or fifteen years too late."

"What about Tuesday night?" I said. "Where were you?"

"The team house. Can I go now?"

"In a while," I told him. "When was the last time you spent the night on the site?"

His shoulders stiffened, almost imperceptibly. "I've never spent the night on the site," he said, after a moment.

"Don't split hairs. The wood beside the site."

"Who said I've ever slept there?"

"Look, Mark," Cassie told him, suddenly and bluntly, "you were in the wood either Monday night or Tuesday night. We can prove it with forensic evidence if we have to, but that's going to waste a lot of our time, and believe me, we'll make sure it wastes plenty of yours. I don't think you killed that girl, but we need to know when you were in the wood, what you were doing there and whether you saw or heard anything useful. So we can spend the rest of the day trying to drag it out of you, or you can just get it over with and go back to work. Your call."

"What forensic evidence?" Mark demanded skeptically.

Cassie gave him a little mischievous smile and pulled the rollie, neatly encased in a Ziploc bag, out of her pocket. She waved it at him. "DNA. You left your butts at your campsite."

"Jesus," Mark said, staring at it. He looked like he was deciding whether or not to be furious.

"Just doing my job," she said cheerfully, pocketing the bag.

"Jesus," he said again. He bit his lip, but he couldn't hide the grudging smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. "And I walked straight into it. You're some woman, all the same."

"So they tell me. About sleeping in the wood…"

Silence. Finally Mark stirred, glanced up at the clock on the wall, sighed. "Yeah. I've spent the odd night there."

I moved back around the table, sat down and opened my notebook. "Monday or Tuesday? Or both?"

"Monday, only."

"What time did you get there?"

"About half past ten. I lit a fire and went to sleep when it burned down, around two o'clock."

"Do you do that on every site?" Cassie asked. "Or just Knocknaree?"

"Just Knocknaree."

"Why?"

Mark watched his fingers, drumming slowly on the table again. Cassie and I waited.

"You know what it means, Knocknaree?" he said eventually. "Hill of the king. We're not sure when the name originated, but we're pretty sure it's a pre-Christian religious reference, not a political one. There's no evidence of any royal burials or dwelling places on the site, but we found Bronze Age religious artifacts all over the place—the altar stone, votive figurines, a gold offering cup, remains of animal sacrifices and some possible human ones. That used to be a major religious site, that hill."

"Who were they worshipping?"

He shrugged, drumming harder. I wanted to slam a hand down over his fingers.

"So you were keeping vigil," Cassie said quietly. She was leaning back casually in her chair, but every line of her face was alert and intent, focused on him.

Mark moved his head uncomfortably. "Something like that."

"The wine you spilled," Cassie said. He glanced up sharply, then cut his eyes away again. "A libation?"

"I suppose."

"Let me see if I have this right," I said. "You decide to sleep a few yards from where a little girl gets murdered, and you feel we should believe you were there for religious reasons."

Suddenly he caught fire, throwing himself forward and jabbing a finger at me, fast and feral. I flinched before I could stop myself. "Come here, Detective, you listen to me. I don't believe in the Church, do you get me? Any church. Religion exists to keep people in their place and paying into the collection plate. I had my name taken off the church register the day I turned eighteen. And I don't believe in any government. They're the same as the Church, every one of them. Different words, same goal: keep the poor under your thumb and supporting the rich. The only things I believe in are out on that there dig." His eyes were narrow, incandescent, eyes for behind a rifle atop a doomed barricade. "There's more to worship on that site than in any fucking church in the world. It's sacrilege that they're about to run a motorway over it. If they were about to tear down Westminster Abbey to build a car park, would you blame people for keeping vigil there? Then don't fucking patronize me for doing the same thing." He stared me out of it until I blinked, then flung himself back in the chair and folded his arms.

"I take it that was a denial that you had anything to do with the murder," I said coolly, when I was sure my voice was under control. For some reason, that little rant had got to me more than I liked to admit. Mark raised his eyes to the ceiling.

"Mark," Cassie said. "I know exactly what you mean. I feel the same way about what I do." He gave her a long, hard green stare, without moving, but finally he nodded. "But you've got to see Detective Ryan's point: a lot of people won't have a clue what you're on about. To them, it's going to look suspicious as hell. We need to eliminate you from the investigation."

"You want me to take a lie-detector test, I will. But I wasn't even there on Tuesday night. I was there on Monday. What does that have to do with anything?" I got that sinking feeling again. Unless he was a lot better at this than I thought, he was taking it for granted that Katy had died on Tuesday night, the night before her body had appeared on the site.

"OK," Cassie said. "Fair enough. Can you prove where you were from the time you left work on Tuesday till you went back in on Wednesday morning?"

Mark sucked his teeth and picked at a blister, and I suddenly realized he looked embarrassed; it made him seem much younger. "Yeah, actually, I can. I went back to the house, took a shower, had dinner with the rest of the lads, we played cards and had a few cans in the garden. You can ask them."

"And then?" I said. "What time did you go to bed?"

"Most people went in around one."

"And can anyone vouch for your whereabouts after that? Do you share a room?"

"Nah. I've a room to myself, because of being assistant site director. I stayed up awhile longer, in the garden. I was talking with Mel. I was with her till breakfast." He was doing his best to sound blasé, but all that arrogant self-possession had vanished; he looked prickly and self-conscious and about fifteen. I was dying to laugh. I didn't dare look at Cassie.

"All night?" I said, maliciously.

"Yeah."

"In the garden? Wasn't that a little chilly?"

"We went inside at maybe three o'clock. After that we were in my room, till eight. That's when we get up."

"Well, well, well," I said sweetly. "Most alibis aren't nearly that enjoyable." He shot me a poisonous look.

"Let's go back to Monday night," Cassie said. "While you were in the wood, did you see or hear anything unusual?"

"No. But it's dark out there—country-dark, not your city-dark. No streetlights or nothing. I wouldn't have seen someone ten feet away. And I mightn't have heard them, either; there are plenty of noises anyway." Dark, and wood-noises: that trill went down my spine again.

"Not necessarily in the wood," Cassie said. "On the dig, or on the road, maybe? Was anyone out there after, say, half past eleven?"

"Hang on, now," Mark said suddenly, almost reluctantly. "Out on the site. There was someone."

Neither Cassie nor I moved, but I felt the electric spark of alertness shoot between us. We had been about ready to give up on Mark, check his alibi and put him on a question-mark list and send him back to his mattock, at least for now—in the urgent first days of an investigation, you have no time to waste on any but the most crucial things—but he had our full attention again.

"Could you give us a description?" I asked.

He glanced at me with dislike. "Yeah. They looked a lot like a torch. It was dark."

"Mark," said Cassie. "From the beginning?"

"Someone carrying a torch cut across the site, from the estate towards the road. That's it. All I saw was the torch beam."

"What time?"

"I wasn't looking at my watch. One, maybe? A little before?"

"Think back. Could you tell anything about them at all—maybe their height, from the angle of the torch?"

He thought, eyes narrowing. "Nah. It looked fairly low to the ground, but the dark fucks up your sense of perspective, yeah? They were moving slow enough, but anyone would; you've seen the site, it's all ditches and bits of wall."

"Big torch or small?"

"Small beam, not that strong. It wasn't one of those big heavy things with the handle. Just a little torch."

"When you first saw it," Cassie said, "it was up by the estate wall—where, at the end farthest from the road?"

"Somewhere around there, yeah. I figured they'd come out of the back gate, or maybe over the wall." The back gate of the estate was at the end of the Devlins' street, only three houses away. He could have seen Jonathan or Margaret, slowed down by a body and looking for a place to leave it; or Katy, slipping through the dark to meet someone, armed with nothing but a torch-beam and a house key that would never be able to take her home.

"And they went out to the road."

Mark shrugged. "They cut down that way, diagonal across the site, but I didn't see where they ended up. The trees got in the way."

"Do you think whoever it was saw your fire?"

"How would I know?"

"OK, Mark," Cassie said, "this is important. Did you see a car go past around that time? Or maybe a car stopped on the road?"

Mark took his time. "Nah," he said, finally and definitely. "A couple went past when I first got there, but nothing after about eleven. They go to bed early around there; all the lights on the estate are out by midnight."

If he was telling the truth, then he had just done us a huge favor. Both the kill site and the secondary scene—wherever Katy's body had been hidden through Tuesday—were almost definitely within walking distance of the estate, quite probably on it, and our field of suspects no longer included most of the population of Ireland. "Are you sure you would have noticed if a car had gone past?" I asked.

"I noticed the torch, didn't I?"

"Which you've only just remembered," I said.

His lip curled. "My memory's grand, thanks. I didn't think it was important. This was Monday night, yeah? I didn't even pay much attention. I thought it was someone heading home from a mate's house, maybe, or one of the local kids going to meet someone—they hang out on the site at night, sometimes. Not my problem, either way. They weren't giving me any hassle."

At this point Bernadette, the squad administrator, tapped on the interview-room door; when I opened it, she said disapprovingly, "Detective Ryan, there's a telephone call for you. I told the person you couldn't be disturbed, but she said it was important." Bernadette has been with Murder for something like twenty-four years, her entire working life. She has a petulant marsupial face, five work outfits (one for each day of the week, which is helpful if you're too tired to remember what day it is) and, we all think, a Smithers-style hopeless passion for O'Kelly. There's a squad sweepstakes on when they'll finally get together.

"Go ahead," said Cassie. "I can finish up here—Mark, we just need to take your statement. Then we can give you a lift back to work."

"I'll take the bus."

"No you won't," I said. "We need to verify your alibi with Mel, and it's not exactly verification if you have a chance to talk to her first."

"For fuck's sake," Mark snapped, thudding back in his chair. "I'm not making it up. Ask anyone. It was all round the team before we even got up."

"Don't worry, we will," I said cheerfully, and left him and Cassie to it.

I went back to the incident room and waited for Bernadette to put the call through, which she did in her own time, to show me it wasn't her job to come looking for me. "Ryan," I said.

"Detective Ryan?" She sounded breathless and bashful, but I knew the voice instantly. "It's Rosalind. Rosalind Devlin."

"Rosalind," I said, flipping my notebook open and hunting for a pen. "How are you?"

"Oh, I'm fine." A small, brittle laugh. "Well, actually, no, I'm not. I'm devastated. But I think we're all still in shock, really. It hasn't sunk in yet. You never imagine something like this happening, do you?"

"No," I said gently. "I know how you must be feeling. Can I do anything to help?"

"I was wondering…do you think I could come in and talk to you sometime? Only if it's no trouble. There's something I need to ask you." A car went by in the background; she was outside somewhere, on a mobile or a pay phone.

"Of course. This afternoon?"

"No," she said hastily. "No—not today. You see, they'll be back any minute, they've only gone to…to view the…" Her voice trailed off. "Could I come tomorrow? Sometime in the afternoon?"

"Whenever you like," I said. "Let me give you my mobile number, OK?

Then you can reach me any time you need to. Just give me a ring tomorrow, and we'll meet up."

She took it down, murmuring the numbers under her breath. "I have to go," she said hurriedly. "Thank you, Detective Ryan. Thank you so much," and, before I could say good-bye, she was gone.

I checked the interview room: Mark was writing, and Cassie had managed to make him laugh. I flipped my fingernails against the glass. Mark's head snapped up, and Cassie threw me a tiny smile and a fractional shake of her head: apparently they were managing to get by without me. This, as you might expect, was fine with me. Sophie would be waiting for the blood sample we'd promised her; I left Cassie a "Back in 5" Post-it on the door of the interview room, and went down to the basement.

Evidence storage procedures in the early 1980s, especially for cold cases, were not sophisticated. Peter and Jamie's box was on a high shelf and I had never taken it down before, but I knew, from the lumpy shifting when I had pulled out the main file from the top, that there were other things in there, and those had to be whatever evidence Kiernan and McCabe and their team had collected. The case had four other boxes, but they were labeled, in neat black lettering as careful as a child's: 2) Questionaires, 3) Questionaires, 4) Statements, 5) Leads. Either Kiernan or McCabe couldn't spell. I tugged the main box off the shelf, dust-motes fountaining through the bare lightbulb's glare, and dumped it on the floor.

It was half full of plastic evidence bags, furred with thick layers of dust that gave the objects inside a shadowy, sepia-toned look, like mysterious artifacts found by chance in a centuries-sealed chamber. I pulled them out gently, one by one, blew on them and laid them in a row on the flagstones.

There was very little, for a major case. A child's watch, a glass tumbler, a dull-orange Donkey Kong game, all coated in what looked like fingerprint powder. Various scraps of trace evidence, mainly dried leaves and chips of bark. A pair of white gym socks stippled with dark brown, with neat square holes where swatches had been razored out for testing. A grubby white T-shirt; faded denim shorts, the hems starting to fray. Last of all the runners, with their childish scuff marks and their stiff, black, buckled lining. They were the padded kind, but the blood had soaked almost all the way through: the outsides had tiny dark stains spreading from the stitching holes, splashes around the top, faint brownish patches where it lay just beneath the surface.

I had been bracing myself quite hard for this, actually. I think I'd had some vague idea that seeing the evidence would trigger a dramatic flash flood of memories; I hadn't exactly expected to end up in a fetal position on the basement floor, but there was a reason I'd picked a moment when no one was likely to come looking for me. In the event, though, I realized with a definite sense of anticlimax that none of this stuff looked even remotely familiar—except, of all things, Peter's Donkey Kong game, which was presumably only there for fingerprint comparison and which ignited a brief and fairly useless flare of memory (me and Peter sitting on sunlit carpet working a button each, concentrated and elbowing, Jamie leaning over our shoulders and yelping excited instructions) so intense I could practically hear the game's brisk, bossy chirrups and beeps. The clothes, though I knew they were mine, rang no bells whatsoever. It seemed inconceivable that I had actually got up one morning and put them on. All I could see was the pathos of them—how small the T-shirt was, the Biro Mickey Mouse on the toe of one runner. Twelve had seemed terrifyingly grown up, at the time.

I picked up the T-shirt bag between finger and thumb and turned it over. I had read about the rips across the back, but I had never seen them before, and somehow I found them more shocking even than those terrible shoes. There was something unnatural about them—the perfect parallels, the neat shallow arcs; a stark, implacable impossibility. Branches? I thought, staring blankly down at them. Had I jumped out of a tree, or ducked through bushes, and somehow caught my shirt on four sharp twigs at once? My back itched, between the shoulder blades.

Suddenly and compulsively, I wanted to be somewhere else. The low ceiling pressed down claustrophobically and the dusty air was hard to breathe; it was oppressively quiet, only the odd ominous vibration in the walls when a bus went past outside. I practically threw all the stuff back into the box, heaved it onto its shelf and snatched up the shoes, which I had left on the floor, ready to send to Sophie.

It was only then that it hit me, there in the chilly basement with half-forgotten cases all around and tiny sharp crackles coming from the box as the plastic bags settled: the immensity of what I had set in motion. Somehow, what with everything that was on my mind, I had failed to think this through. The old case seemed such a private thing that I had forgotten it could have implications in the outside world, too. But I (what the hell, I wondered, had I been thinking?) was about to take these shoes up to the buzzing incident room and put them in a padded envelope and tell one of the floaters to take them to Sophie.

It would have happened anyway, sooner or later-missing-child cases are never closed, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of running the old evidence through new technology. But if the lab managed to get DNA off the runners, and especially if they somehow matched it to the blood from the altar stone, this would no longer be just a minor lead in the Devlin case, a long shot between us and Sophie: the old case would explode back into active status. Everyone from O'Kelly up would want to make a huge deal of this shiny new high-tech evidence: the police never give up, no unsolved case is ever closed, the public can rest assured that behind the scenes we are moving in our own mysterious ways. The media would leap on the possibility of a serial child-killer in our midst. And we would have to follow through; we would need DNA samples from Peter's parents and Jamie's mother and—oh, God—from Adam Ryan. I looked down at the shoes and had a sudden mental image of a car, brakes come loose, drifting down a hill: slowly at first, harmless, almost comic, then gathering momentum and transforming into a merciless wrecking ball.