In the Woods

"No, thanks," I said. I went over my harness, tightened the straps, made sure none of them were twisted. My fingers seemed thick and clumsy, detached from my body. I did not want Cassie to point out that, whoever this girl was and whenever she had been killed, it was unlikely that the murderer was skulking behind a Portakabin needing to be taken at gunpoint. She tipped her head back and blew smoke up into the branches overhead. It was your basic Irish summer day, irritatingly coy, all sun and skidding clouds and jackknifing breeze, ready at any second to make an effortless leap into bucketing rain or blazing sun or both.

"Come on," I said. "Let's get into character." Cassie put out her smoke on the sole of her shoe and tucked the butt back into the packet, and we headed across the road.

A middle-aged guy in an unraveling sweater was hovering between the Portakabins, looking lost. He perked up when he saw us.

"Detectives," he said. "You must be the detectives, yes? Dr. Hunt…I mean, Ian Hunt. Site director. Where would you like to-well, the office or the body or…? I'm not sure, you know. Protocol and things like that." He was one of those people whom your mind instantly starts turning into a cartoon: scribbled wings and beak and ta-da, Road Runner.

"Detective Maddox, and this is Detective Ryan," Cassie said. "If it's all right, Dr. Hunt, maybe one of your colleagues could give Detective Ryan an overview of the whole site, while you show me the remains?"

Little bitch, I thought. I felt jittery and dazed at the same time, as if I had a massive stone-over and had tried to clear it with way too much caffeine; the light jinking off fragments of mica in the rutted ground looked too bright, tricky and fevered. I was in no mood to be protected. But one of Cassie's and my unspoken rules is that, in public at least, we do not contradict each other. Sometimes one of us takes advantage of it.

"Um…yes," said Hunt, blinking at us through his glasses. He somehow gave the impression of constantly dropping things-lined yellow pages, chewed-looking tissues, half-wrapped throat lozenges-even though he wasn't holding anything. "Yes, of course. They're all…Well, Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but you see Damien's…Mark!" He aimed it in the general direction of the open door of a Portakabin, and I had a fleeting glimpse of a bunch of people crowded around a bare table: army jackets, sandwiches and steaming mugs, clods of earth on the floor. One of the guys tossed down a hand of cards and started disentangling himself from the plastic chairs.

"I told them all, stay in there," said Hunt. "I wasn't sure… Evidence. Footprints and…fibers."

"That's perfect, Dr. Hunt," Cassie said. "We'll try to clear the scene and let you get back to work as soon as possible."

"We've only got a few weeks left," said the guy at the Portakabin door. He was short and wiry, with a build that would have looked almost childishly slight under a heavy sweater; he was wearing a T-shirt, though, with muddy combats and Doc Martens, and below the sleeves his muscles were complex and corded as a featherweight's.

"Then you'd better get a move on and show my colleague around," Cassie told him.

"Mark," said Hunt. "Mark, this detective needs a tour. The usual, you know, around the site."

Mark eyed Cassie for another moment, then gave her a nod; she had apparently passed some private test. He moved on to me. He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, with a long fair ponytail and a narrow, foxy face with very green, very intense eyes. Men like him-men who are obviously interested purely in what they think of other people, not in what other people think of them-have always made me violently insecure. They have a kind of gyroscopic certainty that makes me feel bumbling, affected, spineless, in the wrong place in the wrong clothes.

"You'll want wellies," he told me, giving my shoes a sardonic look: QED. His accent had a hard border-country edge. "Spares in the tools shed."

"I'll be fine as I am," I said. I had an idea that archaeological digs involved trenches several feet deep in mud, but I was damned if I was going to spend the morning clumping around after this guy with my suit trailing off ludicrously into someone's discarded wellies. I wanted something-a cup of tea, a smoke, anything that would give me an excuse to sit still for five minutes and figure out how to do this.

Mark raised one eyebrow. "Fair enough. Over this way."

He headed off between the Portakabins without checking whether I was behind him. Cassie, unexpectedly, grinned at me as I followed him-a mischievous Gotcha! grin, which made me feel a little better. I scratched my cheek at her, with my middle finger.