“Phew,” said Cassie, when we got out of the estate onto the road. She rubbed her hands through her hair, messing up her curls.
“I’ve seen that name somewhere, not too long ago,” I said. “Jonathan Devlin. As soon as we get back, let’s run him through the computer and see if he’s got a record.”
“God, I almost hope it turns out to be that simple,” Cassie said. “There is something deeply, deeply fucked up in that house.”
I was glad—relieved, actually—that she had said it. I’d found a number of things about the Devlins disturbing—Jonathan and Margaret hadn’t touched once, had barely looked at each other; where you would expect a bustle of curious, comforting neighbors, there had been nobody but shadowy Auntie Vera; each member of the household appeared to come from a completely different planet—but I was so edgy that I wasn’t sure I could trust my own judgment, so it was good to know Cassie had felt something off kilter, too. It wasn’t that I was having a breakdown or losing my mind or anything, I knew I would be fine once I got a chance to go home and sit down by myself and take all this in; but that first glimpse of Jessica had practically given me a heart attack, and the realization that she was Katy’s twin hadn’t been as reassuring as you might think. This case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels, and I couldn’t shake the uneasy sense that they were somehow deliberate. Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code.
When I first went to boarding school I told my dormmates I had a twin brother. My father was a good amateur photographer, and one Saturday that summer when he’d seen us trying out a new stunt on Peter’s bike—speeding along their knee-high garden wall and sailing off the end—he made us do it again and again, half the afternoon while he crouched on the grass changing lenses, until he’d used up a whole roll of black-and-white film and got the shot he wanted. We’re in midair; I am driving and Peter is on the handlebars with his arms spread wide, and both of us have our eyes screwed tight shut and our mouths open (high, rough-edged boy-yells) and our hair is streaming out in fiery haloes, and I’m pretty sure that just after the photo was taken we went tumbling and skidding across the lawn and my mother gave out to my father for encouraging us. He angled the shot so that the ground is out of the picture and we look like we’re flying, gravity-free against the sky.
I glued the photo to a piece of cardboard and propped it on my bedside table, where we were allowed two family pictures, and told the other boys detailed stories—some true, some imagined and I’m sure utterly implausible—about the adventures my twin and I had during the holidays. He was at a different school, I said, one in Ireland; our parents had read that it was healthier for twins to be separated. He was learning to ride horses.
By the time I came back for second year I had realized that it was only a matter of time before the twin story got me into excruciatingly embarrassing trouble (some classmate meeting my parents on Sports Day, asking chirpily why Peter hadn’t come, too), so I left the photo at home—tucked into a slit in my mattress, like some dirty secret—and stopped mentioning my brother, in the hope that everyone would forget I had had one. When this kid called Hull—he was the type to pull the limbs off small furry animals in his spare time—sensed my discomfort and latched on to the subject, I finally told him my twin had been thrown off a horse over the summer and died of concussion. I spent much of that year in terror that the rumor about Ryan’s dead brother would reach the teachers and, through them, my parents. In hindsight, of course, I’m fairly sure that it did, and that the teachers, already briefed on the Knocknaree saga, decided to be sensitive and understanding—I still cringe when I think about it—and let the rumor die out in its own time. I think I had a narrow escape: a couple of years further into the eighties and I would probably have been sent to kiddie counseling and forced to share my feelings with hand puppets.
Still, I regretted having to get rid of my twin. I’d found it comforting, the knowledge that Peter was alive and riding horseback, somewhere in a couple of dozen minds. If Jamie had been in the photo, I would probably have made us triplets and had a much harder time working my way out of that one.
By the time we got back to the site, the reporters had arrived. I gave them the standard preliminary spiel (I do this part, on the basis that I look more like a responsible adult than Cassie does): body of a young girl, name not being released till all the relatives are informed, treating it as a suspicious death, anyone who may have any information please contact us, no comment no comment no comment.
“Was this the work of a satanic cult?” asked a large woman in unflattering ski pants, whom we’d met before. She was from one of those tabloids with a penchant for punny headlines using alternative spellings.
“There’s absolutely no evidence to indicate that,” I said snottily. There never is. Homicidal satanic cults are the detective’s version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.
“But she was found on an altar that the Druids used for human sacrifice, wasn’t she?” the woman demanded.
“No comment,” I said automatically. I had just realized what the stone table reminded me of, that deep groove round the edge: the autopsy tables in the morgue, grooved to drain away blood. I had been so busy wondering whether I recognized it from 1984, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I recognized it from a few months ago. Jesus.
Eventually the reporters gave up and started drifting off. Cassie had been sitting on the steps of the finds shed, blending into the scenery and keeping an eye on things. When she saw the large journalist homing in on Mark, who had come out of the canteen heading for the Portaloo, she got up and wandered towards them, making sure Mark could see her. I saw him catch her eye, over the reporter’s shoulder; after a minute Cassie shook her head, amused, and left them to it.
“What was that all about?” I asked, fishing out the key to the finds shed.
“He’s giving her a lecture about the site,” said Cassie, dusting off the seat of her jeans and grinning. “Every time she tries to ask anything about the body, he says, ‘Hang on,’ and goes into a rant about how the government is about to destroy the most important discovery since Stonehenge, or starts explaining Viking settlements. I’d love to stay and watch; I think she may finally have met her match.”
The rest of the archaeologists had very little to add, except that Sculptor Boy, whose name was Sean, felt we should consider the possibility of vampire involvement. He sobered up a lot when we showed him the ID shot, but although he, like the others, had seen Katy or possibly Jessica around the site a few times—sometimes with other kids her age, sometimes with an older girl matching Rosalind’s description—none of them had seen anyone odd watching her or anything like that. None of them had seen anything sinister at all, in fact, although Mark added, “Except for the politicians who show up to have their photos taken in front of their heritage before they pimp it out. Do you want descriptions?” Nobody remembered the Tracksuit Shadow, either, which reinforced my suspicion that he had been either some perfectly normal guy from the estate out for a walk, or else Damien’s imaginary friend. You get people like this in every investigation, people who end up wasting huge amounts of your time with their compulsion to say whatever they think you want to hear.
The archaeologists from Dublin—Damien, Sean and a handful of others—had all been at home on Monday and Tuesday nights; the rest had been in their rented house, a couple of miles from the dig. Hunt, who of course turned out to be pretty lucid on anything archaeological, had been home in Lucan with his wife. He confirmed the large reporter’s theory that the stone where Katy had been dumped was a Bronze Age sacrificial altar. “We can’t be sure whether the sacrifices were human or animal, naturally, although the…um…the shape certainly suggests they may have been human. The right dimensions, you know. Very rare artifact. It implies that this hill was a site of immense religious importance in the Bronze Age, yes? Such a terrible shame…this road.”
“Have you found anything else to suggest this?” I asked. If he had, it would be months before we could disentangle our case from the media-versus-New-Age frenzy.
Hunt gave me a wounded look. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.
He was the last interview. As we were putting our stuff away, the boy tech knocked on the door of the Portakabin and stuck his head in. “Um,” he said. “Hi. Sophie says to tell you we’re finishing up for today and there’s one more thing you might want to see.”
They’d packed up the markers and left the altar stone alone in its field again, and at first the whole site looked deserted; the reporters had long since moved on, and all the archaeologists had gone home except Hunt, who was clambering into a muddy red Ford Fiesta. Then we came out from among the Portakabins, and I saw a flash of white between the trees.
The familiar, uneventful routine of the interviews had settled my mood considerably (Cassie calls these preliminary background interviews the nuthin’ stage of a case: nobody saw nuthin’, nobody heard nuthin’, nobody did nuthin’), but still I felt something zip down my spine as we stepped into the wood. Not fear: more like the sudden shot of alertness when someone wakes you by calling your name, or when a bat shrills past just too high to be heard. The undergrowth was thick and soft, years of fallen leaves sinking under my feet, and the trees grew heavily enough to filter the light into a restless green glow.
Sophie and Helen were waiting for us in a tiny clearing, maybe a hundred yards in. “I left it for you to take a look at,” Sophie said, “but I want to bag all this shit before the light starts going. I’m not setting up the lighting rig.”