In the Woods

"And you're not violent, either," Sam said, slapping another heap of paper in front of Damien. "These are interviews about you. Your teachers remember you staying far away from fights, not starting them. Would you say that's accurate?"

"I guess-"

"Did you just do it for the buzz, after all?" Cassie cut in. "Did you want to see what it felt like to kill someone?"

"No! What are you-"

Sam moved round the table, surprisingly fast, and leaned in beside Damien. "The lads from the dig say George McMahon gave you hassle, just like he did everyone else, but you're one of the few who never lost your temper with him. So what got you angry enough to kill a little girl who never did you any harm?"

Damien huddled wretchedly into his sweatshirt, his chin tucked into his neck, and shook his head. They had closed in too soon, too hard; they were losing him.

"Hey. Look at me." Sam snapped his fingers in Damien's face. "Do I look anything like your mammy?"

"What? No-" But the unexpectedness of it had caught him; his eyes, wild and miserable, had flicked back up.

"Well spotted. That's because I'm not your mammy and this isn't some little thing you can get out of by sulking. This is as serious as it gets. You lured an innocent little girl out of her house in the middle of the night, you hit her on the head, you suffocated her and watched while she died, you shoved a trowel up inside her"-Damien flinched violently-"and now you're telling us you did it for no reason at all. Is that what you're going to tell the judge? What kind of sentence do you think he's going to give you?"

"You don't get it!" Damien cried. His voice cracked like a thirteen-year-old's.

"I know, I know we don't, but I want to. Help me get it, Damien." Cassie was leaning forward, holding both his hands in hers, forcing him to look at her.

"You don't understand! An innocent little girl? Everyone thinks she was, Katy was like some saint, they always thought she was so perfect-it wasn't like that! Just because she was a kid, that doesn't mean she was-You wouldn't believe me if I told you some of the stuff she did, you wouldn't even believe me."

"I will," Cassie said, low and urgent. "Whatever you're going to tell me, Damien, I've seen worse on this job. I'll believe you. Try me."

Damien's face was red, suffused, and his hands were shaking in Cassie's. "She used to get her dad mad at Rosalind and Jessica. Like all the time, they were always scared. She just made stuff up and told him-like Rosalind had been mean to her or Jessica had touched her stuff or something-it wasn't even true, she just made it up, and he always just believed her. Rosalind tried to tell him this one time that it wasn't true, she was trying to protect Jessica, but he just, he just…"

"What did he do?"

"He hit them!" Damien howled. His head shot up and his eyes, red-rimmed and blazing, locked on to Cassie's. "He beat them up! He broke Rosalind's skull with a poker, he threw Jessica into a wall and she broke her arm, he, Jesus, he did it to them, and Katy, she was watching and she laughed!" He ripped his hands out of Cassie's and swiped tears away furiously with the back of his wrist. He was gasping for breath.

"Do you mean Jonathan Devlin was having sexual intercourse with his daughters?" Cassie said calmly. Her eyes were huge.

"Yes. Yes. He did it to all of them. Katy…" Damien's face contorted. "Katy liked it. How sick is that? How can anyone…? That was why she was his favorite. He hated Rosalind because she…didn't want to…" He bit the back of his hand and cried.

I realized I had been holding my breath for so long I was light-headed; realized, too, that there was a chance I might throw up. I leaned against the cool glass and concentrated on breathing slowly and evenly. Sam found a tissue and passed it to Damien.

Unless I was even stupider than I had already proven myself to be, Damien believed every word he was saying. Why not? We see worse in the papers every other week, raped toddlers, children starving in basements, babies' limbs ripped off. As their private mythology grew to fill more and more of his mind, why not the evil sister keeping Cinderella in the dust?

And, though this is by no means an easy thing to admit, I wanted to believe it, too. For a moment I almost could. It made such perfect sense; it explained and excused so much, almost everything. But, unlike Damien, I had seen the medical records, the post-mortem report. Jessica had broken that arm falling off a jungle gym in full view of fifty witnesses, Rosalind had never had a fractured skull; Katy had died a virgin. Something like a cold sweat crawled across my shoulders, light and spreading.

Damien blew his nose. "It can't have been easy for Rosalind to tell you this," Cassie said gently. "That was pretty brave of her. Had she tried to tell anyone else?"