In the Woods

Jonathan looked at Margaret; she shook her head, dabbing her eyes. "Sometime in April-late April, maybe. The second one was on the third of June, around half past one in the morning-I wrote it down. Katy-there's no phone in our bedroom, it's in the hall, and she's a light sleeper-she got there first. She says when she answered he said, 'Are you Devlin's daughter?' and she said, 'I'm Katy,' and he said, 'Katy, tell your father to back off the bloody motorway, because I know where you live.' Then I took the phone off her, and he said something like, 'Nice little girl you've got there, Devlin.' I told him never to ring my house again, and hung up."

"Can you remember anything about his voice?" I asked. "Accent, age, anything? Did it sound familiar at all?"

Jonathan swallowed. He was concentrating ferociously, clinging to the subject like a lifeline. "It didn't ring any bells. Not young. On the high side. A country accent, but not one I could pin down-not Cork or the North, nothing distinctive like that. He sounded…I thought maybe he was drunk."

"Were there any other calls?"

"One more, a few weeks ago. The thirteenth of July, two in the morning. I took it. The same guy said, 'Don't you-'" He glanced at Jessica. Rosalind had an arm round her, rocking her soothingly and murmuring in her ear. "'Don't you effing well listen, Devlin? I warned you to leave the effing motorway alone. You'll regret this. I know where your family lives.'"

"Did you report this to the police?" I asked.

"No," he said brusquely. I waited for a reason, but he didn't offer one.

"You weren't worried?"

"To be honest," he said, glancing up with a terrible mixture of misery and defiance, "I was delighted. I thought it meant we were getting somewhere. Whoever he was, he wouldn't have bothered ringing me if the campaign hadn't been a real threat. But now…" Suddenly he hunched towards me, staring me in the eye, fists pressed together. I had to fight not to lean back. "If you find out who made those calls, tell me. You tell me. I want your word."

"Mr. Devlin," I said, "I promise you we'll do everything in our power to find out who it was and whether he had anything to do with Katy's death, but I can't-"

"He scared Katy," Jessica said, in a small hoarse voice. I think we all jumped. I was as startled as if one of the armchairs had contributed to the conversation; I had been beginning to wonder if she was autistic or handicapped or something.

"Did he?" Cassie said quietly. "What did she say?"

Jessica gazed at her as if the question was incomprehensible. Her eyes started to slide away again; she was retreating back into her private daze.

Cassie leaned forward. "Jessica," she said, very gently, "is there anyone else Katy was scared of?"

Jessica's head swayed a little, and her mouth moved. A thin hand reached out and caught a pinch of Cassie's sleeve.

"Is this real?" she whispered.

"Yes, Jessica," Rosalind said softly. She detached Jessica's hand and gathered the child close against her, stroking her hair. "Yes, Jessica, it's real." Jessica stared out under her arm, her eyes wide and unfocused.

* * *

They had no internet access, which eliminated the deeply depressing possibility of some chat-room wacko from halfway around the world. They also had no alarm system, but I doubted that would turn out to be relevant: Katy hadn't been snatched from her bed by some intruder. We had found her fully and carefully dressed-yes, she always coordinated, Margaret said; she'd picked that up from her ballet teacher, whom she worshipped-in outdoor clothes. She had switched off her light and waited till her parents were asleep, and then, sometime in the night or the early morning, she had got up and got dressed and gone somewhere. Her house key had been in her pocket: she had been expecting to come back.

We searched her room anyway, partly for any clues to where she might have gone, and partly because of the brutal, obvious possibility that Jonathan or Margaret had killed her and then staged it to look as if she had left the house alive. She had shared a room with Jessica. The window was too small and the lightbulb too dim, which added to the creepy feeling the house was giving me. The wall on Jessica's side, a little eerily, was covered in sunshiny, idyllic art prints: Impressionist picnics, Rackham fairies, landscapes from the cheerier parts of Tolkien ("I gave her all those," said Rosalind, from the doorway. "Didn't I, pet?" Jessica nodded, at her shoes). Katy's wall, less surprisingly, had a strict ballet theme: photos of Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn that looked like they'd been cut from TV guides, a newsprint picture of Pavlova, her acceptance letter from the Royal Ballet School; a pretty nice pencil drawing of a young dancer, with TO KATY, 21/03/03. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! LOVE, DADDY scribbled on the corner of the pasteboard mount.