In the Woods

His map of Knocknaree was starting to curl at the edges, and one corner ripped away as I took it down. Someone had got spatters of water on it and the ink had run in spots, making Cassie's property-developer caricature look unpleasantly as if he had had a stroke. "Should we keep this on file," I asked Sam, "or…?"

I held it out to him and we looked at it: tiny gnarled tree trunks and smoke curling from the chimneys of the houses, fragile and wistful as a fairy tale. "Probably better not," Sam said, after a moment. He took the map from me, rolled it into a tube and maneuvered it into the rubbish bag.

"I'm missing a lid," Cassie said. Dark, shocking scabs had formed over the cuts on her cheek. "Any more over there?"

"There was one under the table," Sam said. "Here-" He threw Cassie the last lid, and she fitted it into place and straightened up.

We stood under the fluorescent lights and looked at one another, across the bare tables and the litter of boxes. My turn to make dinner… For a moment I almost said it, and I felt the same thought cross both Sam's and Cassie's minds, stupid and impossible and no less piercing for any of that.

"Well," Cassie said quietly, on a long breath. She glanced around the empty room, wiping her hands on the sides of her jeans. "Well, I guess that's it, then."

* * *

I am intensely aware, by the way, that this story does not show me in a particularly flattering light. I am aware that, within an impressively short time of meeting me, Rosalind had me coming to heel like a well-trained dog: running up and down stairs to bring her coffee, nodding along while she bitched about my partner, imagining like some starstruck teenager that she was a kindred soul. But before you decide to despise me too thoroughly, consider this: she fooled you, too. You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie.

It is difficult for me to describe the degree of horror and self-loathing inspired by the realization that Rosalind had suckered me. I'm sure Cassie would have said that my gullibility was only natural, that all the other liars and criminals I'd encountered had been mere amateurs while Rosalind was the real, the natural-born thing, and that she herself had been immune purely because she had fallen for the same technique once before; but Cassie wasn't there. A few days after we closed the case, O'Kelly told me that until the verdicts came in I would be working out of the main detective unit in Harcourt Street-"away from anything you can fuck up," as he put it, and I found it difficult to counter this. I was still officially on the Murder squad, so nobody knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing in the general unit. They gave me a desk and occasionally O'Kelly sent over a pile of bureaucracy, but for the most part I was free to wander the corridors as I chose, eavesdropping on fragments of conversation and evading curious stares, immaterial and unwanted as a ghost.

I spent sleepless nights conjuring up gory, detailed, improbable fates for Rosalind. I wanted her not just dead but obliterated from the face of the earth-crushed to unidentifiable pulp, pulverized in a shredder, burned to a handful of toxic ash. I had never suspected myself of this capacity for sadism, and it horrified me further to realize that I would joyfully have carried out any of these sentences myself. Every conversation I had had with her spooled over and over through my head, and I saw with merciless clarity how skillfully she had played me: how unerringly she had put her finger on everything from my vanities through my griefs through my deepest hidden fears, and drawn them out of me to work her will.

This was, in the end, the most hideous realization of all: Rosalind had not, after all, implanted a microchip behind my ear or drugged me into submission. I had broken every vow myself and steered every boat to shipwreck with my own hand. She had simply, like any good craftswoman, used what came her way. Almost with a glance she had assessed me and Cassie to the bone and discarded Cassie as unusable; but in me she had seen something, some subtle but fundamental quality, that made me worth keeping.

* * *

I didn't testify at Damien's trial. Too risky, the prosecutor said: there was too much of a chance that Rosalind had told Damien about my "personal history," as he put it. He was a guy named Mathews who wears flashy ties and gets called "dynamic" a lot, and he always makes me tired. Rosalind hadn't brought up the subject again-apparently Cassie had been convincing enough to make her drop it and move on to other, more promising weapons-and I doubted that she would have told Damien anything useful at all, but I didn't bother to argue.