In the Woods

Cassie didn't move. "Grand," Sam said. He rubbed his eyes, grimacing. "I think we're sorted, as far as Donnelly goes, anyway."

The phone rang. I picked it up: Bernadette, telling us all to stay in the incident room, O'Kelly wanted to see us. Sam nodded and sat down heavily, feet planted apart, like a farmer coming in from a hard day's work. Cassie lifted her head with an effort and fumbled in her back pocket for her rolled-up notebook.

Sort of characteristically, O'Kelly kept us waiting for a while. None of us spoke. Cassie doodled in her notebook, a spiky, vaguely sinister tree; Sam slumped at the table and gazed unseeingly at the crowded whiteboard; I leaned against the window frame looking out at the dark formal garden below, sudden little gusts of wind running through the bushes. Our positions around the room felt staged somehow, significant in some obscure but ominous way; the flicker and hum of the fluorescent lights had put me into an almost trancelike state and I was starting to feel as if we were in some existentialist play, where the ticking clock would stay at 7:38 forever and we would never be able to move from these predestined poses. When O'Kelly finally banged through the door, it came as something of a shock.

"First things first," he said grimly, pulling up a chair and slapping a pile of paperwork on the table. "O'Neill. Remind me: what are you going to do with this whole Andrews mess?"

"Drop it," Sam said quietly. He looked very tired. It wasn't that he had bags under his eyes or anything like that, to anyone who didn't know him he would have seemed fine, but his healthy rural ruddiness was gone and he looked somehow terribly young and vulnerable.

"Very good. Maddox, I'm docking you five days' holiday."

Cassie glanced up briefly. "Yes, sir." I checked, covertly, to see whether Sam looked startled or whether he already knew what this was all about, but his face gave away nothing.

"And Ryan, you're on desk duty until further notice. I don't know how the hell you three works of art managed to pick up Damien Donnelly, but you can thank your lucky stars that you did, or your careers would be in even worse shape than they are. Are we clear?"

None of us had the energy to answer. I detached myself from the window frame and took a seat, as far from everyone else as possible.

O'Kelly gave us a filthy look and decided to take our silence for acquiescence. "Right. Where are we on Donnelly?"

"I'd say we're doing well," Sam said, when it became clear that neither of us was going to say anything. "Full confession, including details that weren't released, and a fair bit of forensic evidence. I'd say his only chance of getting off would be to plead insanity-and that's what he'll do, if he gets a good lawyer. Just now he's feeling so bad about it, he wants to plead guilty, but that'll wear off after a few days in jail."

"That insanity shite shouldn't be allowed," O'Kelly said bitterly. "Some eejit getting up on the stand and saying, 'It's not his fault, Your Honor, his mammy toilet-trained him too early so he couldn't help killing that wee girl…' It's a load of my arse. He's no more insane than I am. Get one of ours to examine him and say so." Sam nodded and made a note.

O'Kelly flipped through his papers and waved a report at us. "Now. What's all this about the sister?"

The air in the room tightened. "Rosalind Devlin," Cassie said, raising her head. "She and Damien were seeing each other. From what he says, the murder was her idea; she pressured him into it."

"Yeah, right. Why?"

"According to Damien," Cassie said evenly, "Rosalind told him that Jonathan Devlin was sexually abusing all three of his daughters, and physically abusing Rosalind and Jessica. Katy, who was his favorite, encouraged and often incited the abuse against the other two. Rosalind said that if Katy was eliminated, the abuse would stop."

"Any evidence backing this up?"

"On the contrary. Damien says Rosalind told him Devlin had fractured her skull and broken Jessica's arm, but there's nothing like that on their medical records-nothing that indicates any kind of abuse, in fact. And Katy, after supposedly having regular sexual intercourse with her father for years, died virgo intacta."

"So why are you wasting our time on this bullshit?" O'Kelly slapped the report. "We've got our man, Maddox. Go home and let the lawyers sort out the rest."

"Because it's Rosalind's bullshit, not Damien's," Cassie said, and for the first time there was a faint spark in her voice. "Someone made Katy sick for years; that wasn't Damien. The first time she was about to go off to ballet school, long before Damien knew she existed, someone made her so sick she had to turn down the place. Someone put it into Damien's head to kill a girl he'd barely seen-you said it yourself, sir, he's not insane: he didn't hear little voices telling him to do it. Rosalind's the only person who fits."

"What's her motive?"