In the Woods

"I did check!" I shouted. "I checked the file!" But even as the words left my mouth I knew, with a horrible sick thud. A sunny afternoon, a long time ago; I had been fumbling through the file, with the phone jammed between my jaw and my shoulder and O'Gorman yammering in my other ear, trying to talk to Rosalind and make sure she was an appropriate adult to supervise my conversation with Jessica, all at the same time (And I must have known, I thought,

I must have known even then that she couldn't be trusted, or why would I have bothered to check such a small thing?). I had found the page of family stats and skimmed down to Rosalind's DOB, subtracted the years-

Sam had swung away from me and was rooting urgently through the file, and I saw the moment when his shoulders sagged. "November," he said, very quietly. "Her birthday's the second of November. She'll be eighteen."

"Congratulations," O'Kelly said heavily, after a silence. "The three of ye. Well done."

Cassie let out her breath. "Inadmissible," she said. "Every fucking word." She slid down the wall to a sitting position, as if her knees had suddenly given way, and closed her eyes.

A faint, high, insistent sound came from the speakers. In the interview room, Rosalind had got bored and started humming.

25

That evening we started clearing out the incident room, Sam and Cassie and I. We worked methodically and in silence, taking down photographs, erasing the multicolored tangle from the whiteboard, sorting files and reports and packing them away in blue-stamped cardboard boxes. Someone had set fire to a flat off Parnell Street the previous night, killing a Nigerian asylum-seeker and her six-month-old baby; Costello and his partner needed the room.

O'Kelly and Sweeney were interviewing Rosalind, down the hall, with Jonathan in the background to protect her. I think I had expected Jonathan to come in with all guns blazing and possibly try to hit someone, but as it transpired he hadn't been the problem. When O'Kelly told the Devlins, outside the interview room, what Rosalind had confessed to, Margaret whirled on him, mouth gaping open; then she drew in a huge gulp of breath and screamed, "No!" hoarse and wild, her voice slamming off the walls of the corridor. "No. No. No. She was with her cousins

. How can you do this to her? How can you…how…Ah, God, she warned me-she warned me you would do this! You"-she stabbed a thick, trembling finger at me, and I flinched before I could stop myself-"you, calling her a dozen times a day asking her out, and her only a child, you should be ashamed… And her"-Cassie-"she hated Rosalind from the start, Rosalind always said she would try to blame her for…What are you trying to do to her? Are you trying to kill her? Then will you be happy? Oh, God, my poor baby…Why do people tell these lies about her? Why?" Her hands clawed at her hair and she broke down into ugly, wrenching sobs.

Jonathan had stood still at the top of the stairs, holding on to the railing, while O'Kelly tried to calm Margaret down and shot us filthy looks over her shoulder. He was dressed for work, in a suit and tie. For some reason I remember it very clearly, that suit. It was dark blue and spotlessly clean, with a slight sheen where it had been ironed too many times, and somehow I found it almost inexpressibly sad.

Rosalind was under arrest for murder and for assaulting an officer. She had opened her mouth only once since her parents arrived, to claim-lip trembling-that Cassie had punched her in the stomach and that she had only been defending herself. We would send a file to the prosecutor's office on both charges, but we all knew the evidence for murder was slim at best. We no longer had even the Tracksuit Shadow link to show that Rosalind had been an accessory: my session with Jessica had not in fact been supervised by an appropriate adult, and I had no way of proving that it had ever happened. We had Damien's word and a bunch of mobile-phone records, and that was all.

It was getting late, maybe eight o'clock, and the building was very quiet, just our movements and a soft fitful rain pattering at the windows of the incident room. I took down the post-mortem photos and the Devlins' family snapshots, the scowling Tracksuit Shadow suspects and the grainy blowups of Peter and Jamie, picked the Blu-Tack off the backs and filed them away. Cassie checked each box, fitted a lid onto it and labeled it in squeaky black marker. Sam went around the room with a rubbish bag, collecting Styrofoam cups and emptying wastepaper baskets, brushing crumbs off the tables. There were smears of dried blood down the front of his shirt.