In the Woods

"See, if he died"-Damien leaned forward, hands gesturing anxiously-"their mother wouldn't be able to look after them, because of money and because I think she's kind of spacey or something? They'd be sent to homes and they'd be split up, Rosalind wouldn't be there to take care of Jessica any more-and Jessica needs her, she's so messed up she can't do anything, Rosalind has to do her homework for her and stuff. And Katy-I mean, Katy would have gone and done the exact same thing to somebody else. If only Katy wasn't there, they'd all be fine! Their dad only, he only did stuff to them when Katy got him to. Rosalind said, and she felt so guilty about this-Jesus, she felt guilty!-sometimes she wished Katy had never been born…"

"And that gave you an idea," Cassie said evenly. I could tell by the set of her mouth that she was so angry she could hardly speak. "You suggested killing Katy instead."

"It was my idea," Damien said quickly. "Rosalind had nothing to do with it. She didn't even-At first she said no. She didn't want me taking a risk like that for her. She'd survived it for years, she said, she could survive for six more, till Jessica was old enough to move out. But I couldn't let her just stay! That time he fractured her skull, she was in the hospital for two months. She could have died

."

Suddenly I was furious, too, but not with Rosalind: with Damien, for being such a fucking cretin, such a perfect sucker, like some goofy cartoon character blundering obediently into the right place for the Acme anvil to drop on his head. I am of course fully aware of both the irony and the tedious psychological explanations of this reaction, but at the time all I could think of was slamming into the interview room and shoving Damien's face into the medical reports: Do you see this, moron? Do you see a skull fracture anywhere here? Didn't it even occur to you to ask to see the scar before you slaughtered a child for it?

"So you insisted," Cassie said, "and, in the end, Rosalind somehow came round."

This time Damien caught the biting edge. "That was because of Jessica! Rosalind didn't mind what happened to her, but Jessica-Rosalind was worried she was going to have a nervous breakdown or something. She didn't think Jessica could take six more years!"

"But Katy wouldn't have been there for most of that time anyway," Sam said. "She was about to go to ballet school, in London. By now she would have been gone. Didn't you know that?"

Damien almost howled, "No!

I said that, I asked-you don't understand… She didn't care about being a dancer. She just liked everyone making a fuss of her. In that school, where she wouldn't have been anything special-she'd have dropped out by Christmas and come back home!"

Of all the things they had done to her, between them, this was the one that shocked me most profoundly. It was the diabolical expertise of it, the icy precision with which it targeted, annexed and defiled the one thing that had lain at Katy Devlin's heart. I thought of Simone's deep quiet voice in the echoing dance studio: Sérieuse. In all my career I had never felt the presence of evil as I felt it then: strong and rancid-sweet in the air, curling invisible tendrils up the table legs, nosing with obscene delicacy at sleeves and throats. The hairs rose on the back of my neck.

"So it was self-defense," Cassie said, after a silence in which Damien fidgeted anxiously and she and Sam didn't look at him.

Damien leaped on this. "Yes. Exactly. I mean, we wouldn't even have thought of it if there'd have been any other way."

"I understand. And you know, Damien, it's happened before: wives snapping and killing abusive husbands, stuff like that. Juries understand, too."

"Yeah?" He looked up at her with huge, hopeful eyes.

"Course. Once they hear what Rosalind went through…I wouldn't worry too much about her. OK?"

"I just don't want her to get in any trouble."

"Then you're doing the right thing by telling us all the details. OK?"

Damien sighed, a small, tired sigh with something like relief in it. "OK."

"Well done," Cassie said. "So let's keep going. When did you decide on this?"

"Like July. The middle of July."

"And when did you set the date?"

"Only, like, a few days before it happened. I had said to Rosalind, she should make sure she had a, an alibi, you know? Because we knew you guys would look at the family, she had read somewhere that the family were always the main suspects. So this one night-I think it was Friday-we met up and she said to me, she'd arranged it so she and Jessica were sleeping over at their cousins' house the next Monday and they'd be up till like two o'clock talking, so that would be the perfect night. All I had to do was make sure it was done before two o'clock; the, the police would be able to tell-"

His voice was shaking. "And what did you say?" Cassie asked.