In the Woods

"He's that boy whose friends disappeared in Knocknaree, ages ago," Rosalind told Cassie. Her voice was high and musical and almost uninterested; except for a tiny, smug trace of pleasure, there was nothing in it, nothing at all. "Adam Ryan. It looks like he doesn't tell you everything, after all, doesn't it?" I had thought, only a few minutes before, that there was no way I could feel any worse and still survive.

Cassie, on the screen, thumped the chair legs down and rubbed at one ear. She was biting her lip to hold back a smile, but I had nothing left in me with which to wonder what she was doing. "Did he tell you that?"

"Yes. We've got very close, really."

"Did he also tell you he had a brother who died when he was sixteen? That he grew up in a children's home? That his father was an alcoholic?"

Rosalind stared. The smile was gone from her face and her eyes were narrow, electric. "Why?" she asked.

"Just checking. Sometimes he does those, too-it depends. Rosalind," she said, somewhere between amused and embarrassed, "I don't know how to tell you this, but sometimes, when detectives are trying to build up a relationship with a witness, they say things that aren't exactly true. Things that they think will help the witness feel comfortable enough to share information. Do you understand?"

Rosalind kept staring, unmoving.

"Listen," Cassie said gently, "I know for a fact that Detective Ryan has never had a brother, that his father is a very nice guy with no alcoholic tendencies, and that he grew up in Wiltshire-hence the accent-nowhere near Knocknaree. And not in a children's home, either. But, whatever he told you, I know he only wanted to make it easier for you to help us find Katy's killer. Don't hold it against him. OK?"

The door slammed open-Cassie jumped about a mile; Rosalind didn't move, didn't even take her eyes off Cassie's face-and O'Kelly, foreshortened to a blob by the camera angle but instantly recognizable by his spidery comb-over, leaned into the room. "Maddox," he said curtly. "A word."

O'Kelly, as I walked Damien out: in the observation room, rocking back and forth on his heels, staring impatiently through the glass. I couldn't watch any more. I fumbled with the remote, hit Stop and stared blindly at the vibrating blue square.

"Cassie," I said, after a very long time.

"He asked me if it was true," she said, as evenly as if she were reading out a report. "I said that it wasn't, and that if it were you would hardly have told her."

"I didn't," I said. It seemed important that she should know this. "I didn't. I told her that two of my friends disappeared when we were little-so she'd realize I understood what she was going through. I never thought she'd know about Peter and Jamie and put two and two together. It never occurred to me."

Cassie waited for me to finish. "He accused me of covering for you," she said, when I stopped talking, "and added that he should have split us up a long time ago. He said he was going to check your prints against the ones from the old case-even if he had to drag a print tech out of bed to do it, even if it took all night. If the prints matched, he said, we would both be lucky to keep our jobs. He told me to send Rosalind home. I handed her over to Sweeney and started ringing you."

Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible. We sat there like that, not speaking, for a long time. The wind whipped spatters of rain against the window. Once I heard Cassie take a deep breath, and I thought she might be crying, but when I looked up there were no tears on her face; it was pale and quiet and very, very sad.

23

We were still sitting there like that when Sam got in. "What's the story?" he said, rubbing rain out of his hair and switching on the lights.

Cassie stirred, lifted her head. "O'Kelly wants you and me to have another go at finding out Damien's motive. Uniforms are bringing him over."

"Grand," Sam said, "see if a new face shakes him up a bit," but he had taken us both in with one quick glance and I wondered how much he was guessing; wondered, for the first time, how much he had known all along and simply left alone.

He pulled over a chair and sat down next to Cassie, and they started discussing how to go at Damien. They had never interrogated anyone together before; their voices were tentative, earnest, deferring to each other and rising into open-ended little question marks: Do you think we should…? What if we…? Cassie switched the tapes in the VCR again, played Sam bits of last night's interview. The fax machine made a series of demented, cartoonish noises and spat out Damien's mobile-phone records, and they bent over the pages with a highlighter pen, murmuring.