In the Woods

"And sooner or later," I said, from the shadows behind him, "he has a nervous breakdown, and he ends up spending the next few years in a padded cell, wearing pajamas and drugged up to the eyeballs. Or he ties a rope to the banisters one evening and hangs himself. More often than you'd think, Damien, they just can't face another day."

This was bullshit, by the way; of course it was. Of those dozen un-charged murderers I could name for you, only one killed himself, and he had a history of untreated mental problems to start with. The rest are living more or less exactly as they always did, holding down jobs and going to the pub and taking their kids to the zoo, and if they occasionally get the heebie-jeebies they keep it to themselves. Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened. But Katy had only been dead a month, and Damien hadn't had time to learn this. He was rigid in his chair, staring down at his 7-Up and breathing as if it hurt.

"You know which ones survive, Damien?" Cassie asked. She leaned across the table and laid her fingertips on his arm. "The ones who confess. The ones who do their time. Seven years later, or whatever, it's over; they get out of jail and they can start again. They don't have to see their victims' faces every time they close their eyes. They don't have to spend every second of every day terrified that this is the day they're going to be caught. They don't have to jump a mile every time they see a cop or there's a knock at the door. Believe me: in the long run, those are the ones who get away."

He was squeezing the can so hard that it buckled, with a sharp little crack. We all jumped.

"Damien," I asked, very quietly, "does any of this sound familiar?"

And, at long last, there it was: that tiny dissolution in the back of his neck, the sway of his head as his spine crumpled. Almost imperceptibly, after what seemed like an age, he nodded.

"Do you want to live like this for the rest of your life?"

His head moved, unevenly, from side to side.

Cassie gave his arm one last little pat and took her hand away: nothing that could look like coercion. "You didn't want to kill Katy, did you?" she said; gently, so gently, her voice falling soft as snow over the room. "It just happened."

"Yeah." He whispered it, barely a breath, but I heard. I was listening so hard I could almost hear his heart beating. "It just happened."

For a moment the room seemed to fold in on itself, as if some explosion too enormous to be heard had sucked all the air away. None of us could move. Damien's hands had gone limp around the can; it dropped to the table with a clunk, rocked crazily, came to a stop. The overhead light streaked his curls with hazy bronze. Then the room breathed in again, a slow, replete sigh.

"Damien James Donnelly," I said. I didn't go back around the table to face him; I wasn't sure my legs would carry me. "I arrest you on suspicion that, on or around the seventeenth of August of this year, at Knocknaree in County Dublin, you did murder Katharine Bridget Devlin, contrary to common law."

21

D

amien couldn't stop shaking. We took the photos away and brought him a fresh cup of tea, offered to find him an extra sweater or to heat up the leftover pizza for him, but he shook his head without looking at us. To me the whole scene felt wildly unreal. I couldn't take my eyes off Damien. I had razed half my mind in search of memories, I had gone into Knocknaree wood, I had risked my career and I was losing my partner; because of this boy.

Cassie went through the rights sheet with him-slowly and tenderly, as if he had been in a bad accident-and I held my breath in the background, but he didn't want a lawyer: "What's the point? I did it, you guys knew anyway, everyone's gonna know, there's nothing a lawyer can…I'm going to jail, right? Am I going to jail?" His teeth were chattering; he needed something a lot stronger than tea.

"Don't worry about that right now, OK?" Cassie said soothingly. This sounded like a pretty ludicrous suggestion to me, in the circumstances, but it seemed to calm Damien down a little; he even nodded. "Just keep helping us, and we'll do our best to help you."

"I didn't-like you said, I never wanted to hurt anyone, I swear to God." His eyes were locked on Cassie's as if his very life depended on her believing him. "Can you tell them that, can you tell the judge? I'm not, I'm not some, like, psycho or serial killer or…I'm not like that. I didn't want to hurt her, I swear on, on, on…"

"Shhh. I know." She had her hand on his again, her thumb rubbing the back of his wrist in a soothing rhythm. "Shhh, Damien. It's going to be OK. The worst part's over. Now all you need to do is tell us what happened, in your own words. Can you do that for me?"