In the Woods

7

We took Mark back to the site and left him to brood darkly in the back of the car while I talked to Mel and Cassie had a quick word with their housemates. When I asked her how she'd spent Tuesday night, Mel went sunburn-red and couldn't look at me, but she said she and Mark had talked in the garden till late, ended up kissing and spent the rest of the night in his room. He had only left her once, for no more than two minutes, to go to the bathroom. "We've always got on great—the others used to take the piss out of us about it. I guess it was on the cards." She also confirmed that Mark occasionally spent the night away from the house, and that he'd told her he slept in Knocknaree wood: "I don't know if any of the others would know that, though. He's kind of private about it."

"You don't find it a little odd?"

She shrugged clumsily, rubbing at the back of her neck. "He's an intense guy. That's one of the things I like about him." God, she was young; I had a sudden urge to pat her shoulder and remind her to use protection.

The rest of the housemates told Cassie that Mark and Mel had been the last ones left in the garden Tuesday night, that they had come out of his room together the next morning and that everyone had spent the first few hours of the day, until Katy's body turned up, mercilessly giving them grief about it. They also said Mark sometimes stayed out, but they didn't know where he went. Their version of "an intense guy" ranged from "a little weird" through "a total slave driver."

We got more plasticky sandwiches from Lowry's shop and had lunch sitting on the estate wall. Mark was organizing the archaeologists into some new activity, gesturing in big militant jerks like a traffic cop. I could hear Sean complaining vociferously about something, and everyone else yelling at him to shut up and stop skiving and get a grip.

"I swear to God, Macker, if I find it on you, I'm going to shove it so far up your hole—"

"Ooh, Sean's PMS-ing."

"Have you checked up your hole?"

"Maybe the cops took it away with them, Sean, better lie low for a while."

"Get to work, Sean," Mark shouted across.

"I can't work without my fucking trowel!"

"Borrow one."

"Spare over here," someone yelled. A trowel flew spinning from hand to hand, light spiking off the blade, and Sean caught it and settled down to work, still grumbling.

"If you were twelve," Cassie said, "what would get you out here in the middle of the night?"

I thought of the faint gold circle of light, bobbing like a will-o'-the-wisp among the severed tree roots and the shards of ancient walls; the silent watcher in the wood. "We did it a couple of times," I said. "Spent the night in our tree house. This was all wood back then, right up to the road." Sleeping bags on rough boards, torch-beams close against comic books. A rustle, and the beams skidding up to cross on a pair of golden eyes, rocking wild and luminous only a few trees away; all of us yelling, and Jamie leaping up to fire a spare satsuma as the thing bounded away with a crash of leaves—

Cassie glanced at me over her juice carton. "Yeah, but you were with your mates. What would get you out here on your own?"

"Meeting someone. A dare. Possibly getting something important that I'd forgotten here. We'll talk to her friends, see if she said anything to them."

"This wasn't a random thing," Cassie said. The archaeologists had put the Scissor Sisters back on and one of her feet swung, absently, in time with the beat. "Even if it wasn't the parents. This guy didn't go out and pick up the first vulnerable kid he saw. He put a lot of planning into this. He wasn't just looking to kill a kid; he was after Katy."

"And he knew the place pretty well," I said, "if he could find the altar stone in the dark, carrying a body. It's looking more and more like a local boy." The wood was gay and sparkly in the sunlight, all birdsong and flirting leaves; I could feel the rows upon rows of identical, trim, innocuous houses ranged behind me. This fucking place, I almost said, but I didn't.

After the sandwiches we went looking for Auntie Vera and the cousins. It was a hot, still afternoon, but the estate had an eerie Marie Celeste emptiness, all the windows tightly closed and not a single kid playing; they were all inside, confused and antsy and safe under their parents' eyes, trying to eavesdrop on the adult whispers and find out what was going on.

The Foleys were an unprepossessing bunch. The fifteen-year-old settled into an armchair and folded her arms, hitching up her bust like someone's mammy, and gave us a pale, bored, supercilious stare; the ten-year-old looked like a cartoon pig and chewed gum with her mouth open, wriggling her rump on the sofa and occasionally flicking the gum out on her tongue and then back into her mouth again. Even the youngest was one of those deeply unnerving toddlers who look like bonsai adults: it had a prim, pudgy face with a beaky nose, and it stared at me from Vera's lap, its lips pursing, and then retracted its chin disapprovingly into the folds of its neck. I had a nasty conviction that, if it said anything, its voice would be a deep, forty-a-day rasp. The house smelled of cabbage. I could not fathom why on earth Rosalind and Jessica would choose to spend any time there, and the fact that they had bothered me.

With the exception of the toddler, though, they all told the same story. Rosalind and Jessica, and sometimes Katy, spent the night there every few weeks or so ("I'd love to have them more often, of course I would," said Vera, pinching tensely at a corner of a slipcover, "but I simply can't, not with my nerves, you know"); less often, Valerie and Sharon stayed with the Devlins. Nobody was sure whose idea this particular sleepover had been, although Vera thought vaguely that it might have been Margaret who suggested it. On Monday night Rosalind and Jessica had come over somewhere around half past eight, watched television and played with the baby (I couldn't imagine how; the kid had barely moved all the time we were there, it must have been like playing with a large potato), and gone to bed around eleven, sharing a camp bed in Valerie and Sharon's room.

This, apparently, was where the trouble had started: unsurprisingly, they had all four been up talking and giggling most of the night. "Now they're lovely girls, Officers, I'm not saying that, but sometimes the young people don't realize how much of a strain they can put on us old folks, isn't that right?" Vera tittered frantically and nudged the middle kid, who squirmed further away on the sofa. "I had to go in to them half a dozen times to tell them to be quiet—I can't bear noise, you know. It must have been half past two in the morning, can you imagine, before they finally went off to sleep. And by that time, of course, my nerves were in such a state that I couldn't settle at all, I had to get up and make myself a cup of tea. I didn't get a wink of sleep. I was shattered the next morning. And then when Margaret rang, sure, we were all going frantic, weren't we, girls? But I never imagined…sure, I thought she was only…" She pressed a thin, twitching hand over her mouth.

"Let's go back to the night before," Cassie said to the oldest kid. "What did you and your cousins talk about?"

The kid—Valerie, I think—rolled her eyes and pulled up her lip to show what a stupid question this was. "Stuff."

"Did you talk about Katy at all?"

"I don't know. Yeah, I guess. Rosalind was saying how brilliant it was that she was going to ballet school. I don't see what's so great about it."

"What about your aunt and uncle? Did you mention them?"

"Yeah. Rosalind was saying they're horrible to her. They never let her do anything."

Vera gave a breathless little hoot. "Oh, now, Valerie, don't be saying that! Sure, Officers, Margaret and Jonathan would do anything for those girls, they've themselves worn out—"

"Oh, yeah, sure. I guess that's why Rosalind ran away, because they were too nice to her."

Cassie and I both started to jump on this at once, but Vera got there first. "Valerie! What did I tell you? We don't talk about that. It was all a misunderstanding, only. Rosalind was a very bold girl to be worrying her poor parents like that, but it's all forgiven and forgotten…"

We waited for her to run down. "Why did Rosalind run away?" I asked Valerie.

She twitched one shoulder. "She was sick of her dad bossing her around. I think maybe he hit her or something."

"Valerie! Now, Officers, I don't know where she's getting this. Jonathan would never lay a finger on those children, so he wouldn't. Rosalind's a sensitive girl; she had an argument with her daddy, and he didn't realize how upset she was…"

Valerie sat back and stared at me, a smug smile creeping through the professional boredom. The middle kid wiped her nose on her sleeve and examined the result with interest.

"When was this?" Cassie asked.

"Ah, I wouldn't remember. A long time ago—last year, I think it was—"

"May," said Valerie. "This May."

"How long was she gone?"

"Like three days. The police came and everything."

"And where had she been, do you know?"

"She went off somewhere with a fella," Valerie said, smirking.

"She did not," Vera snapped shrilly. "She was only saying that to frighten her poor mother, God forgive her. She was staying with that friend of hers from school—what's her name, Karen. She came home after the weekend and no harm done."

"Whatever," Valerie said, doing the one-shouldered shrug again.

"Want my tea," the toddler stated firmly. I had been right: it had a voice like a bassoon.

This, in all probability, explained something I had been meaning to check out: why Missing Persons had been so quick to assume that Katy was a runaway. Twelve is borderline, and normally they would have given her the benefit of the doubt, started the search and the media fireworks immediately rather than waiting the twenty-four hours. But running away tends to spread through families, the younger children getting the idea from the older. When Missing Persons ran the Devlins' address through their system, they would have come up with Rosalind's escapade and assumed that Katy had done the same thing, had a spat with her parents and stormed off to a friend's house; that she, like Rosalind, would be back as soon as she calmed down, and no harm done.

I was, callously, very glad that Vera had been up all Monday night. Though it was almost too horrible to admit, I had had moments of worry about both Jessica and Rosalind. Jessica didn't look very strong, but she definitely did look unbalanced, and the cliché about insanity lending strength has some basis in fact, and she could hardly have failed to be jealous of all the adulation Katy was getting. Rosalind was highly strung and fiercely protective of Jessica, and if Katy's success had been sending Jessica further and further into her daze…I knew Cassie had been thinking the same things, but she hadn't mentioned them either, and for some reason this had been getting on my nerves.

"I want to know why Rosalind ran away from home," I said, as we headed back down the Foleys' drive. The middle kid had her nose squashed up against the living-room window and was making faces at us.

"And where she went," said Cassie. "Can you talk to her? I think you'll get more out of her than I would."

"Actually," I said, a little awkwardly, "that was her on the phone, earlier. She's coming in to see me tomorrow afternoon. She says there's something she wants to talk about."

Cassie turned from stuffing her notebook into her satchel and gave me a long look I couldn't read. For a moment I wondered if she was miffed that Rosalind had asked for me instead of her. We were both used to Cassie being the families' favorite, and I felt a juvenile, shameful spark of triumph: Someone likes me best, so there. My relationship with Cassie has a brother-and-sister tinge that works well for us, but occasionally it does lead to sibling rivalry. But then she said, "Perfect. You can bring up the running-away thing without it seeming like a big deal."

She swung her satchel onto her back and we headed off down the road. She was looking out over the fields with her hands in her pockets, and I couldn't tell whether she was annoyed with me for not telling her about Rosalind Devlin's phone call earlier—which, in all fairness, I should have done. I gave her a little nudge with my elbow, testing. A few steps later she flipped up a foot behind her and kicked me in the arse.

We spent the rest of the afternoon going door-to-door through the estate. Door-to-door is boring, thankless work, and the floaters already had it covered, but we wanted to get a feel for what the neighbors thought of the Devlins. The general consensus was that they were a decent family but kept themselves firmly to themselves, which hadn't gone down very well: in a place the size and social class of Knocknaree, any kind of reserve is considered a general insult, half a step from the unforgivable sin of snobbery. But Katy herself was different: the Royal Ballet School place had made her Knocknaree's pride, their own personal cause. Even the obviously poor households had sent someone to the fund-raiser, everyone needed to describe her dancing to us; a few people cried. A lot of people were part of Jonathan's Move the Motorway campaign and gave us edgy, resentful looks when we asked about him. A few went into outraged speeches about how he was trying to stop progress and undermine the economy, and got special little stars beside their names in my notebook. Most people were of the opinion that Jessica wasn't the full shilling.

When we asked if they had seen anything suspicious, they offered us the usual set of local weirdos—an old guy who yelled at bins, two fourteen-year-olds with a reputation for drowning cats in the river—and irrelevant ongoing feuds and nonspecific things that went bump in the night. A number of people, none of them with any useful information, mentioned the old case; until the dig and the motorway and Katy came along, it had been Knocknaree's one claim to fame. I thought I half-recognized a few names, a couple of faces. I gave them my best professional blank look.

After an hour or so of this we got to 27 Knocknaree Drive and found Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald—still, incredibly, very much alive and kicking. Mrs. Fitzgerald was great. She was eighty-eight, skinny and half blind and bent almost double; she offered us tea, ignored our refusals and shouted to us from the kitchen while she prepared a loaded, trembling tray, and then demanded to know whether we had found her purse that some young one had robbed off her in town three months ago, and why not. It was a bizarre sensation, after reading her faded handwriting in the old file, to watch her complain about her swollen ankles ("I'm a martyr to them, so I am") and indignantly refuse to let me take the tray. It was as if Tutankhamen or Miss Havisham had wandered into the pub one night and started bitching about the head on the pints.

She was from Dublin, she told us—"a Liberties girl, born and bred and buttered"—but she had moved to Knocknaree twenty-seven years ago, when her husband ("God rest him") retired from his job as a train driver. The estate had been her microcosm ever since, and I was pretty sure she could recite every coming and going and scandal in its history. She knew the Devlins, of course, and approved of them: "Ah, they're a lovely family altogether. She was always a great girl, Margaret Kelly, never a bit of worry to her mammy, only for"—she leaned sideways to Cassie and lowered her voice conspiratorially—"only for coming up pregnant that time. And do you know, love, the government and the Church do always be going on about what a shocking thing this teenage pregnancy is, but what I say is, every now and then it's no harm. That Devlin lad used to be a bit of a bowsie, so he did, but the moment he got that young one in the family way—sure, he wasn't the same fella at all. He got a job for himself, and a house, and they'd a lovely wedding. It was the making of him. It's only terrible what's after happening to that poor child, may she rest in peace."

She crossed herself and patted my arm. "And you're after coming all the way from England to find out who done it? Aren't you great? God bless you, young fella."

"The old heretic," I said, when we got outside. Mrs. Fitzgerald had cheered up my day immensely. "I hope I have that much zip when I'm eighty-eight."

We knocked off just before six and went to the local pub—Mooney's, next to the shop—to watch the news. We had only covered a small part of the estate, but we had a handle on the general atmosphere, and it had been a long day; the meeting with Cooper seemed to have happened at least forty-eight hours before. I had a dizzy urge to keep going until we got to my old road—see if Jamie's mother answered their door, what Peter's brothers and sisters looked like now, who was living in my old room—but I knew this would not be a good idea.

We had timed it well: as I carried our coffee over to the table, the barman turned up the volume on the TV and the news came on with a sweep of synthetic music. Katy was the lead story; the studio presenters looked suitably grave, their voices vibrating heartrendingly at the end of each sentence to indicate tragedy. The arty Irish Times shot flashed up in a corner of the screen.

"The young girl found dead yesterday on the controversial archaeological site at Knocknaree has been identified as Katharine Devlin, aged twelve," intoned the male presenter. Either the color on the TV set was off or he had used too much fake tan; his face was orange, the whites of his eyes spookily bright. The old guys at the bar stirred, tilting their faces slowly up to the screen, their glasses clicking down. "Katharine had been missing from her nearby home since early Tuesday morning. Police have confirmed that the death is suspicious, and have appealed to anyone with information to come forward." The tip-line number came up across the bottom of the screen, white lettering on a blue banner. "Orla Manahan is live at the scene."

Cut to a blonde with frozen hair and an overhanging nose, standing in front of the altar stone, which didn't appear to be doing anything that demanded live coverage. People had already started leaving tributes propped against it: flowers wrapped in colored cellophane, a pink teddy bear. In the background a stray piece of crime-scene tape, overlooked by Sophie's team, fluttered forlornly from a tree.

"This is the place where, just yesterday morning, little Katy Devlin's body was found. In spite of her youth, Katy was a well-known figure in the small, close-knit community of Knocknaree. She had just been awarded a place at the prestigious Royal Ballet School, where she was due to begin her studies in only a few weeks. Today, local residents were devastated at the tragic death of the little girl who was all of their pride and joy."

A shaky handheld camera on an old woman with a flowery headscarf, outside Lowry's shop. "Ah, it's awful." A long pause while she looked down and shook her head, her mouth working; a guy on a bike went past behind her, gawking at the camera. "It's only terrible. We're all saying prayers for the family. How could anyone want to harm that gorgeous wee girl?" There was a low, angry murmur from the old men at the bar.

Back to the blonde. "But this may not be the first violent death Knocknaree has seen. Thousands of years ago, this stone"—she swept her arm out, like an estate agent displaying a fitted kitchen—"was a ceremonial altar where archaeologists say the Druids may have practiced human sacrifice. This afternoon, however, detectives said there was no evidence that Katy's death was the work of a religious cult."

Cut to O'Kelly, in front of an imposing piece of cardboard with a police seal stamped on it. He was wearing a vile checked jacket that, on camera, seemed to ripple and heave of its own accord. He cleared his throat and went through our list, nonexistent dead livestock and all. Cassie held out a hand, not taking her eyes off the screen, and I found a fiver.

The orange presenter again. "And Knocknaree holds yet another mystery. In 1984, two local children…" The screen filled up with those overused school pictures: Peter grinning wickedly from under his hair, Jamie—she hated photos—giving the photographer a dubious, humoring-the-adults half-smile.

"Here we go," I said, trying to make it sound light and wry.

Cassie took a sip of her coffee. "Are you going to tell O'Kelly?" she asked.

I had been waiting for this, and I knew all the reasons why she had to ask, but still it hit me with a jolt. I glanced at the guys at the bar; they were intent on the screen. "No," I said. "No. I'd be off the case. I want to work this one, Cass."

She nodded, slowly. "I know. If he finds out, though."

If he found out, there was a pretty good chance that both of us would be reverted back to uniform, or at the very least thrown off the squad. I had been trying not to think about this. "He won't," I said. "How could he? And if he does, we'll both say you had no idea."

"He wouldn't believe that for a second. And anyway that's not the point."

Fuzzy old footage of a cop with a hyperactive German shepherd, plunging into the wood. A diver pulling himself out of the river, shaking his head. "Cassie," I said. "I know what I'm asking. But please; I need to do this. I won't fuck it up."

I saw her lashes flicker and realized that my tone had come out more desperate than I intended. "We don't even know for sure that there's a link," I said, more quietly. "And if there is, I could end up remembering something that's useful to the investigation. Please, Cass. Back me up on this one."

She was silent for a moment, drinking her coffee and gazing thoughtfully at the TV. "Is there any chance that a really determined reporter could…?"

"No," I said briskly. I had, as you would expect, thought about this a lot. Even the file didn't mention my new name or my new school, and when we moved my father gave the police my grandmother's address; she died when I was about twenty, and the family sold her house. "My parents are unlisted, and my number's listed under Heather Quinn—"

"—And these days your name's Rob. We should be fine."

The "we," and the practical, considering tone—as if this were just another routine complication, in the same category as a reluctant witness or a suspect gone on the run—warmed me. "If it all goes horribly wrong, I'll let you fend off the paparazzi," I said.

"Cool. I'll learn karate."

On the screen the old footage was over, and the blonde was working up to a big finish. "…But, for now, all the people of Knocknaree can do is wait…and hope." They panned to the altar stone for a long moment, poignantly, and then cut back to the studio, and the orange presenter started giving the latest update on some endless depressing tribunal.

We dumped our stuff at Cassie's and went for a walk on the beach. I love Sandymount strand. It's pretty enough on the rare summery afternoons, brochure-blue sky and all the girls in camisoles and red shoulders, but for some reason I love it most of all on your bog-standard Irish days, when wind blows rain-spatter in your face and everything blurs into elusive, Puritan half-tones: gray-white clouds, gray-green sea off on the horizon, great sweep of bleached-fawn sand edged with a scatter of broken shells, wide abstract curves of dull silver where the tide is coming in unevenly. Cassie was wearing sage-green cords and her big russet duffel coat, and the wind was turning her nose red. A large earnest girl in shorts and a baseball cap—probably an American student—was jogging on the sand in front of us; up on the promenade, an underage mother in a tracksuit heaved along a twin stroller.

"So what are you thinking?" I asked.

I meant about the case, obviously, but Cassie was in a giddy mood—she generates more energy than most people, and she'd been sitting indoors most of the day. "Will you listen to him? A woman asking a guy what he's thinking is the ultimate crime, she's clingy and needy and he runs a mile, but when it's the other—"

"Behave yourself," I said, pulling her hood over her face.

"Help! I'm being oppressed!" she yelled through it. "Call the Equality Commission." The stroller girl gave us a sour look.

"You're overexcited," I told Cassie. "Calm down or I'll take you home with no ice cream."

She shook back the hood and took off down the strand in a long chain of cartwheels and flips, her coat tumbling around her shoulders. My initial impression of Cassie was satisfyingly spot-on: she did gymnastics for eight years as a kid and was apparently quite good. She quit because competitions and routines bored her; it was the moves themselves she loved, their taut, sprung, risky geometry, and fifteen years later her body still remembers almost all of them. When I caught up with her she was breathless and dusting sand off her hands.

"Better?" I asked.

"Much. You were saying?"

"The case. Work. Dead person."

"Ah. That," she said, instantly serious. She pulled her coat straight and we wandered on down the strand, scuffing at half-buried shells.

"I was wondering," Cassie said, "what Peter Savage and Jamie Rowan were like."

She was watching a ferry, small and neat as a toy, chug determinedly across the horizon line; her face, tipped up to the soft rain, was unreadable. "Why?" I said.

"I'm not sure. Just wondering."

I thought about the question for a long time. My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind: Jamie scrambling intent and surefooted up to a high branch, Peter's laugh arcing out of the trompe-l'oeil dazzle of green ahead. Through some slow sea change they had become children out of a haunting storybook, bright myths from a lost civilization; it was hard to believe they had once been real and my friends.

"In what sense?" I said eventually and inanely. "Personality, or looks, or what?"

Cassie shrugged. "Whichever."

"They were both about the same height as me," I said. "Average height, I suppose, whatever that is. They both had a slim build. Jamie had white-blond hair, cut in a bob, and a snub nose. Peter had light brown hair, that floppy cut that little boys have when their mothers cut it for them, and green eyes. I think he would probably have been very handsome."

"And their personalities?" Cassie glanced up at me; the wind flattened her hair sleek as a seal's against her head. Occasionally when we go for walks she links a hand through my arm, but I knew she wouldn't do it now.

In my first year of boarding school I thought about them all the time. I was wildly, devastatingly homesick; I know every child is, in that situation, but I think my wretchedness went well beyond the norm. It was a constant agony, consuming and debilitating as a toothache. At the start of every term I had to be extracted howling and struggling from the car and dragged inside while my parents drove away. You'd think this kind of thing would have made me a perfect target for bullies, but actually they left me severely alone, recognizing, I suppose, that nothing they could do would make me feel any worse. It wasn't that the school was hell on earth or anything, in fact I think it was probably pretty OK as these places go—a smallish school in the countryside, with an elaborate house system and an obsession with sports and various other clichés—but I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything in my life, to go home.

I coped, in the grand tradition of children everywhere, by retreating into my imagination. I sat on wobbly chairs through droning assemblies and pictured Jamie fidgeting beside me, conjured up every detail of her, the shape of her kneecaps, the tilt of her head. At night I lay awake for hours, boys snoring and muttering all around me, and concentrated with every cell in my body until I knew, beyond any doubt, that when I opened my eyes Peter would be in the next bed. I used to float messages in cream-soda bottles down the stream that ran through the school grounds: "To Peter and Jamie. Please come back please. Love Adam." I knew, you see, that I had been sent away because they had disappeared; and I knew that if they were to run back out of the wood some evening, grubby and nettle-stung and demanding their tea, I would be allowed to come home.

"Jamie was a tomboy," I said. "Very shy of strangers, especially adults, but physically absolutely fearless. You two would have liked each other."

Cassie gave me a sideways half-grin. "In 1984 I was only ten, remember? You guys wouldn't have talked to me."

I had come to think of 1984 as a separate, private world; it came as something of a shock to realize that Cassie had been there, too, only a few miles away. At the moment when Peter and Jamie disappeared she had been playing with her own friends or riding a bike or eating her tea, oblivious to what was happening and to the long, complicated paths that would lead her to me and to Knocknaree. "Of course we would have," I said. "We would have said, 'Give us your lunch money, you little twit.'"

"You do that anyway. Go on about Jamie."

"Her mother was sort of a hippie-long floaty skirts and long hair, and she used to give Jamie yogurt with wheat germ in it for her break at school."

"Ewww," Cassie said. "I didn't even know you could get wheat germ in the eighties. Supposing you wanted to."

"I think she may have been illegitimate—Jamie, not her mother. Her father wasn't in the picture. A few kids used to pick on her about it, till she beat one of them up. I asked my mother where Jamie's dad was, after that, and she told me not to be nosy." I had asked Jamie, too. She had shrugged and said, "Who cares?"

"And Peter?"

"Peter was the leader," I said. "Always, even when we were tiny kids. He could talk to anyone, he was always talking us out of trouble—not that he was a smart arse, I don't think he was, but he was confident and he liked people. And he was kind."

There was a kid on our road, Willy Little. The name would have caused him enough trouble all by itself—I wonder what on earth his parents were thinking—but on top of that he had Coke-bottle glasses, and he had to wear thick hand-knit sweaters with bunnies across the front all year round because there was something wrong with his chest, and he started most of his sentences with "My mother says…" We had cheerfully tortured him all our lives—drawing the obvious pictures on his school copybooks, spitting on his head out of trees, saving up droppings from Jamie's rabbit and telling him they were chocolate raisins, that kind of thing—but the summer we were twelve Peter made us stop. "It's not fair," he said. "He can't help it."

Jamie and I sort of saw his point, although we did argue that Willy could perfectly well have called himself Bill and quit telling people what his mother thought about things. I felt guilty enough to offer him half a Mars bar the next time I saw him, but understandably he gave me a suspicious look and scuttled away. I wondered, absently, what Willy was doing these days. In the movies he would have been a Nobel-prize-winning genius with a supermodel wife; this being real life, he was probably making a living as a medical-research guinea pig and still wearing bunny sweaters.

"That's rare," Cassie said. "Most kids that age are vicious. I'm sure I was."

"I think Peter was an unusual kid," I said.

She stopped to pick up a bright orange cockleshell and examine it. "There's still a chance they could be alive, isn't there?" She dusted sand off the shell against her sleeve, blew on it. "Somewhere."

"I suppose there is," I said. Peter and Jamie, out there somewhere, specks of faces blurring into some vast moving throng. When I was twelve this was in some ways the worst possibility of all: that they had simply kept running that day, left me behind and never once looked back. I still have a reflexive habit of scanning for them in crowds—airports, gigs, train stations; it's faded a lot now, but when I was younger it would build to something like panic and I would end up whipping my head back and forth like a cartoon character, terrified that the one face I missed might be one of them. "I doubt it, though. There was a lot of blood."

Cassie was putting the shell in her pocket; she glanced up at me for a second. "I don't know the details."

"I'll leave you the file," I said. Annoyingly, it took an effort to say it, as if I were handing over my diary or something. "See what you think."

The tide was starting to come in. Sandymount beach slopes so gradually that at low tide the sea is almost invisible, a tiny gray edge far off on the horizon; it swoops in dizzyingly fast, from all directions at once, and sometimes people get stranded. In a few minutes it would be up to our feet. "We'd better head back," Cassie said. "Sam's coming over for dinner, remember?"

"Oh, that's right," I said, without much enthusiasm. I do like Sam—everyone likes Sam, except Cooper—but I wasn't sure I was in the mood for other people. "Why did you invite him?"

"The case?" she said sweetly. "Work? Dead person?" I made a face at her; she grinned back.

The two sticky toddlers in the stroller were whacking at each other with luridly colored toys. "Britney! Justin!" the mother screamed over their yells. "Shurrup or I'll kill the fucking pair of yous!" I got an arm around Cassie's neck and managed to pull her a safe distance away before we both burst out laughing.

I did eventually settle in to boarding school, by the way. When my parents dropped me off for the beginning of second year (me weeping, begging, clutching the car door handle as the disgusted housemaster plucked me up by the waist and prized my fingers away one by one) I recognized that, no matter what I did or how I pleaded, they were never going to let me come home. After that I stopped being homesick.

I had very little choice. My unrelenting misery in first year had worn me almost to breaking point (I had grown used to flashes of dizziness every time I stood up, moments when I couldn't remember a classmate's name or the way to the dining hall), and even thirteen-year-old resilience has its limits; a few more months of that and I would probably have ended up having some kind of embarrassing nervous breakdown. But when it comes to the crunch I have, as I say, excellent survival instincts. That first night of second year I sobbed myself to sleep, and then I woke up the next morning and decided that I would never be homesick again.

After that I found it, to my slight surprise, quite easy to settle in. Without really paying attention, I had picked up much of the bizarre, inbred school slang ("scrots" for juniors, "mackos" for teachers), and my accent went from County Dublin to Home Counties within a week. I made friends with Charlie, who sat next to me in geography and had a round solemn face and an irresistible chuckle; when we got old enough, we shared a study and experimental joints that his brother at Cambridge gave him and long, confused, yearning conversations about girls. My academic work was mediocre at best—I had bent myself so fiercely to the idea of school as an eternal, inescapable fate that I had trouble imagining anything beyond it, so it was hard to remember why I was supposed to be studying—but I turned out to be a pretty good swimmer, good enough for the school team, which got me a lot more respect from both masters and boys than good exam results would have. In fifth year they even made me a prefect; I tend to attribute this, like my Murder appointment, to the fact that I looked the part.

I spent a lot of the holidays at Charlie's home in Herefordshire, learning to drive on his dad's old Mercedes (jolting country roads, the windows wide open, Bon Jovi blaring on the car stereo and both of us singing along out of tune at the top of our lungs) and falling in love with his sisters. I found I no longer particularly wanted to go home. The house in Leixlip was flimsy and dark and smelled of damp, and my mother had arranged my stuff all wrong in my new bedroom; it felt awkward and temporary, like hurriedly assembled refugee accommodation, not like a home. All the other kids on the street had dangerous-looking haircuts and made unintelligible fun of my accent.

My parents had noticed the change in me, but rather than being pleased that I had settled in at school, as you'd expect, they seemed taken aback, nervous of the unfamiliar, self-contained person I was becoming. My mother tiptoed around the house and asked me timidly what I would like for my tea; my father tried to start man-to-man chats that always ran aground, after much throat-clearing and newspaper-rattling, on my vacant, passive silence. I understood, rationally, that they had sent me to boarding school to protect me from the unrelenting waves of journalists and futile police interviews and curious classmates, and I was aware that this had probably been an excellent decision; but some part of me believed, unassailably and wordlessly and perhaps with a fleck of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had—simply by surviving—become a freak of nature.