In the Woods - Страница 5

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We went through the predictable process where Quigley and a few of the others spent awhile asking me whether I was shagging her and whether, if so, she was any good; once it dawned on them that I genuinely wasn't, they moved on to her probable dykehood (I have always considered Cassie to be very clearly feminine, but I could see how, to a certain kind of mind, the haircut and the lack of makeup and the boys'-department corduroys would add up to Sapphic tendencies). Cassie eventually got bored of this and tidied things up by appearing at the Christmas party with a strapless black velvet cocktail dress and a bullishly handsome rugby player named Gerry. He was actually her second cousin and happily married, but he was heartily protective of Cassie and had no objection to gazing adoringly at her for an evening if it would smooth her career path.

After that, the rumors faded and people more or less left us to our own devices, which suited us both. Contrary to appearances, Cassie is not a particularly social person, any more than I am; she is vivacious and quick with banter and can talk to anyone, but given the choice, she preferred my company to that of a big group. I slept on her sofa a lot. Our solve rate was good and rising; O'Kelly stopped threatening to split us up every time we were late turning in paperwork. We were in the courtroom to see Wayne found guilty of manslaughter ("Ah, fuck, man"). Sam O'Neill drew a deft little caricature of the two of us as Mulder and Scully (I still have it, somewhere) and Cassie stuck it to the side of her computer, next to a bumper sticker that said BAD COP! NO DOUGHNUT!

In retrospect, I think Cassie came along at just the right time for me. My dazzling, irresistible outsider's vision of the Murder squad had not included things like Quigley, or gossip, or interminable circular interrogations of junkies with six-word vocabularies and dentist's-drill accents. I had pictured a tensile, heightened mode of existence, everything small and petty bush-fired away by a readiness so charged it snapped sparks, and the reality had left me bewildered and let down, like a child opening a glittering Christmas present and finding woolly socks inside. If it hadn't been for Cassie, I think I might have ended up turning into that detective on Law amp; Order, the one who has ulcers and thinks everything is a government conspiracy.

2

We caught the Devlin case on a Wednesday morning in August. It was, according to my notes, 11:48, so everyone else was out getting coffee. Cassie and I were playing Worms on my computer.

"Ha," said Cassie, sending one of her worms bopping over to mine with a baseball bat and thwacking him off a cliff. My worm, Groundsweeper Willy, yelled, "Och, ye big mammy's boy!" at me on his way down towards the ocean.

"I let you do that," I told her.

"Course you did," said Cassie. "No real man could actually be beaten by a little girl. Even the worm knows it: only a raisin-balled, testosterone-free cream puff could-"

"Fortunately I'm secure enough in my masculinity that I don't feel remotely threatened by-"

"Shh," said Cassie, turning my face back towards the monitor. "Nice boy. Shush, look pretty and play with your worm. God knows nobody else is going to."

"I think I'll transfer somewhere nice and peaceful, like ERU," I said.

"ERU needs fast response times, sweetie," Cassie said. "If it takes you half an hour to decide what to do with an imaginary worm, they're not gonna want you in charge of hostages."

At that point O'Kelly banged into the squad room and demanded, "Where is everyone?" Cassie hit Alt-Tab fast; one of her worms was named O'Smelly and she had been purposefully sending him into hopeless situations, to watch him get blown up by exploding sheep.

"Break," I said.

"Bunch of archaeologists found a body. Who's up?"

"We'll have it," said Cassie, shoving her foot off my chair so that hers shot back to her own desk.

"Why us?" I said. "Can't the pathologist deal with it?"

Archaeologists are required by law to call the police if they find human remains at a depth of less than nine feet below ground level. This is in case some genius gets the idea of concealing a murder by burying the corpse in a fourteenth-century graveyard and hoping it gets marked down as medieval. I suppose they figure that anyone who has the enterprise to dig down more than nine feet without getting spotted deserves a little leeway for sheer dedication. Uniforms and pathologists get called out fairly regularly, when subsidence and erosion have brought a skeleton close to the surface, but usually this is only a formality; it's relatively simple to distinguish between modern and ancient remains. Detectives are called only in exceptional circumstances, usually when a peat bog has preserved flesh and bone so perfectly that the body has all the clamoring immediacy of a fresh corpse.

"Not this time," said O'Kelly. "It's modern. Young female, looks like murder. Uniforms asked for us. They're only in Knocknaree, so you won't need to stay out there."

Something strange happened to my breath. Cassie stopped shoving things into her satchel and I felt her eyes flick to me for a split second. "Sir, I'm sorry, we really can't take on another full murder investigation right now. We're bang in the middle of the McLoughlin case and-"

"That didn't bother you when you thought this was just an afternoon off, Maddox," said O'Kelly. He dislikes Cassie for a series of mind-numbingly predictable reasons-her sex, her clothes, her age, her semiheroic record-and the predictability bothers her far more than the dislike. "If you had time for a day out down the country, you have time for a serious murder investigation. The Tech Bureau are already on their way." And he left.

"Oh, shit," said Cassie. "Oh, shit, the little wanker. Ryan, I'm so sorry. I just didn't think-"

"It's fine, Cass," I said. One of the best things about Cassie is that she knows when to shut up and leave you alone. It was her turn to drive, but she picked out my favorite unmarked-a '98 Saab that handles like a dream-and threw me the keys. In the car, she dug her CD holder out of her satchel and passed it to me; driver chooses the music, but I tend to forget to bring any. I picked the first thing that looked as if it had a hard pounding bass, and turned it up loud.

I hadn't been to Knocknaree since that summer. I went to boarding school a few weeks after Jamie should have gone-not the same school; one in Wiltshire, as far away as my parents could afford-and when I came back at Christmas we lived in Leixlip, out on the other side of Dublin. Once we hit the highway, Cassie had to dig out the map and find the exit, then navigate us down potholed side roads edged with long grass, hedges grown wild and scraping at the windows.

Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I'm deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it-not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved, who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs.

* * *

The Knocknaree site was a huge field set on a shallow slope, down the side of a hill. It was stripped to bare earth, churned up by purposeful, indecipherable archaeological scribblings-trenches, giant anthills of soil, Portakabins, scattered fragments of rough stone wall like outlines for some lunatic maze-that made it surreal, postnuclear. It was bordered on one side by a thick stand of trees, on another by a wall, tidy gables peeking over it, that ran from the trees to the road. Towards the top of the slope, near the wall, techs were clustered around something cordoned off by blue-and-white crime-scene tape. I probably knew every one of them, but the context translated them-white coveralls, busy gloved hands, nameless delicate instruments-into something alien and sinister and possibly CIA-related. The one or two identifiable objects looked picture-book solid and comforting: a low whitewashed cottage just off the road, with a black-and-white sheepdog stretched in front of it, paws twitching; a stone tower covered in ivy that rippled like water in the breeze. Light fluttered off the dark slice of a river cutting across one corner of the field. runner heels dug into the earth of the bank, leaf-shadows dappling a red T-shirt, fishing-rods of branches and string, slapping at midges: Shut up! You'll scare the fish!-

This field was where the wood had been, twenty years ago. The strip of trees was what was left of it. I had lived in one of the houses beyond the wall.

I had not expected this. I don't watch Irish news; it always morphs into a migraine blur of identical sociopath-eyed politicians mouthing meaningless white noise, like the gibber you get when you play a 33-rpm record at 45. I stick to foreign news, where distance gives enough simplification for the comforting illusion that there is some difference between the various players. I had known, by vague osmosis, that there was an archaeological site somewhere around Knocknaree and that there was some controversy about it, but I hadn't picked up the details, or the exact location. I had not been expecting this.