In the Woods

"She doesn't deserve that," she said. This startled me. Heather and Cassie dislike each other-once, very early on, I brought Cassie home for dinner, and Heather was borderline rude all evening and then spent hours after Cassie left plumping up sofa cushions and straightening rugs and sighing noisily, while Cassie never mentioned Heather again-and I wasn't sure where this sudden access of sisterhood was coming from.

"Any more than I did," she added, and went back into her bedroom and banged the door. I took my ice to my room and made myself a strong vodka and tonic.

* * *

Not unnaturally, I couldn't sleep. When light started to filter through the curtains, I gave up: I would go in to work early, I decided, see if I could find anything that would tell me what Cassie had said to Rosalind, start preparing the file on Damien to send to the prosecutor's office. But it was still raining hard, traffic was already bumper to bumper, and of course the Land Rover threw a flat tire halfway down Merrion Road and I had to pull over and fumble about changing it, with rain pouring down my collar and all the drivers behind me leaning irately on their horns as if they would actually have been getting somewhere if it hadn't been for me. I finally slapped my flasher on the roof, which shut most of them up.

It was almost eight o'clock when I made it into work. The phone, inevitably, rang just as I took off my coat. "Incident room, Ryan," I said irritably. I was wet and cold and fed up and I wanted to go home and have a long bath and a hot whiskey; I did not want to deal with whoever this was.

"Get the fuck in here," said O'Kelly. "Now." And he hung up.

My body understood first: I went cold all over, my breastbone tightened and it was hard to breathe. I don't know how I knew. It was obvious that I was in trouble: if O'Kelly just wants your basic chat, he sticks his head in the door, barks, "Ryan, Maddox, my office," and disappears again, to be in place behind his desk by the time you can follow. Phone summonses are reserved for when you are in for a bollocking. It could have been anything, of course-a great tip I had missed, Jonathan Devlin complaining about my bedside manner, Sam pissing off the wrong politician; but I knew it wasn't.

O'Kelly was standing up, his back to the window and his fists jammed into his pockets. "Adam fucking Ryan," he said. "And it didn't occur to you that this was something I should know?"

I was engulfed by a wave of terrible, searing shame. My face burned. I hadn't felt it since school, this utter, crushing humiliation, the hollow clutch of your stomach when you know beyond any doubt you've been caught, snared, and there is absolutely nothing you can say to deny it or get out of it or make it any better. I stared at the side of O'Kelly's desk and tried to find pictures in the grain of the fake wood, like a doomed schoolboy waiting for the cane to come out. I had thought of my silence as some gesture of proud, lonely independence, something some weatherbeaten Clint Eastwood character would have done, and for the first time I saw it for what it essentially was: shortsighted and juvenile and traitorous and stupid, stupid, stupid.

"Do you have any idea of the extent to which you may have fucked up this investigation?" O'Kelly asked coldly. He always becomes more eloquent when he's angry, another reason I think he's brighter than he pretends to be. "Have a quick think about what a good defense attorney could do with this, just on the off-chance that it ever gets as far as a courtroom. A lead detective who was the only eyewitness and the only surviving victim in an unsolved related case-Jesus Christ. While the rest of us dream about pussy, defense attorneys dream about detectives like you. They can accuse you of anything from being incapable of running an unbiased investigation through being a potential suspect in one or both cases yourself. The media and the conspiracy shower and the anti-Garda mob will go wild. Within a week, not one person in the country will remember who's supposed to be on trial here."

I stared at him. The sucker punch, coming out of nowhere while I was still reeling from being found out, left me stunned and speechless. This will seem incredible, but I swear it had never occurred to me, not once in twenty years, that I could be a suspect in Peter and Jamie's disappearance. There was nothing like that in the file, nothing. Ireland's 1984 belonged more to Rousseau than to Orwell; children were innocents, fresh from God's hand, it would have been an outrage against nature to suggest that they could be murderers as well. Nowadays, we all know there is no such thing as too young to kill. I was big for twelve, I had someone else's blood in my shoes, puberty is a strange slippery unbalanced time. Suddenly and clearly I saw Cassie's face, the day she came back from talking to Kiernan: that tiny twist to the corners of her mouth that said she was keeping something back. I needed to sit down.