In the Woods

We stopped at a newsagent's and Cassie ran in and got the papers, so we could see what we were dealing with. Katy Devlin was front-page news in every one of them, and they all seemed to be focusing on the motorway link-KNOCKNAREE PROTEST LEADER'S DAUGHTER MURDERED, that kind of thing. The large tabloid reporter (whose story was headlined DIG BIGWIG'S DAUGHTER SLAUGHTER, a hyphen away from libel) had thrown in a few coy references to Druidic ceremonies but stayed clear of full-scale Satanism hysteria; she was obviously waiting to see which way the wind blew. I hoped O'Kelly would do his stuff well. Nobody, thank Christ, had mentioned Peter and Jamie, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

We palmed off the McLoughlin case (the one we had been working till we got this call: two God-awful little rich boys who had kicked another to death when he jumped the queue for a late-night taxi) on Quigley and his brand-new partner McCann, and went to find ourselves an incident room. The incident rooms are too small and always in demand, but we had no trouble getting one: children take priority. By that time Sam had got in-he had been held up in traffic as well; he has a house somewhere in Westmeath, a couple of hours out of town, which is as near as our generation can afford to buy-so we grabbed him and briefed him, with full harmonies and the official hair-clip story, while we set up the incident room.

"Ah, Jesus," he said, when we finished. "Tell me it wasn't the parents."

Every detective has a certain kind of case that he or she finds almost unbearable, against which the usual shield of practiced professional detachment turns brittle and untrustworthy. Cassie, though nobody else knows this, has nightmares when she works rape-murders; I, displaying a singular lack of originality, have serious trouble with murdered children; and, apparently, family killings gave Sam the heebie-jeebies. This case could turn out to be perfect for all three of us.

"We haven't a clue," Cassie said, through a mouthful of marker cap; she was scribbling a timeline of Katy's last day across the whiteboard. "We might have a better idea once Cooper comes back with the results from the post, but right now it's wide open."

"We don't need you to look into the parents, though," I said. I was Blu-Tacking crime-scene photos to the other side of the board. "We want you to take the motorway angle-trace the phone calls to Devlin, find out who owns the land around the site, who has a serious stake in the motorway staying put."

"Is this because of my uncle?" Sam asked. He has a tendency to directness that I've always found slightly startling, in a detective.

Cassie spat out the marker cap and turned to face him. "Yeah," she said. "Is that going to be a problem?"

We all knew what she was asking. Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved. To an outside eye there is basically no difference between the two main parties, which occupy identical self-satisfied positions on the far right of the spectrum, but many people are still passionate about one or the other because of which side their great-grandfathers fought on during the Civil War, or because Daddy does business with the local candidate and says he's a lovely fella. Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonized is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.

And a huge amount of the corruption centers on that primal, clichéd Irish passion, land. Property developers and politicians are traditionally bosom buddies, and just about every major land deal involves brown envelopes and inexplicable rezoning and complicated transactions through offshore accounts. It would be a minor miracle if there weren't at least a few favors to friends woven into the Knocknaree motorway, somewhere. If there were, it was unlikely that Redmond O'Neill didn't know about them, and equally unlikely that he would want them to come out.

"No," Sam said, promptly and firmly. "No problem." Cassie and I must have looked dubious, because he glanced back and forth between us and laughed. "Listen, lads, I've known him all my life. I lived with them for a couple of years when I first came up to Dublin. I'd know if he was into anything dodgy. He's straight as a die, my uncle. He'll help us out any way he can."

"Perfect," Cassie said, and went back to the timeline. "We're having dinner at my place. Come over around eight and we'll swap updates." She found a clean corner of whiteboard and drew Sam a little map of how to get there.

* * *