I did the bad-reception routine, and we spent the rest of the drive making a list of possible lines of inquiry. O’Kelly likes lists; a good one might distract him from the fact that we hadn’t rung him back.
We work out of the grounds of Dublin Castle, and in spite of all the colonial connotations this is one of my favorite perks of the job. Inside, the rooms have been lovingly refurbished to be exactly like every corporate office in the country—cubicles, fluorescent lighting, staticky carpet and institution-colored walls—but the outsides of the buildings are protected and still intact: old, ornate red brick and marble, with battlements and turrets and worn carvings of saints in unexpected places. In winter, on foggy evenings, crossing the cobblestones is like walking through Dickens—hazy gold streetlamps throwing odd-angled shadows, bells pealing in the cathedrals nearby, every footstep ricocheting into darkness; Cassie says you can pretend you’re Inspector Abberline working on the Ripper murders. Once, on a ringingly clear full-moon night in December, she turned cartwheels straight across the main courtyard.
There was a light in O’Kelly’s window, but the rest of the building was dark: it was past seven, everyone else had gone home. We sneaked in as quietly as we could. Cassie tiptoed up to the squad room to run Mark and the Devlins through the computer, and I went down to the basement, where we keep the old case files. It used to be a wine cellar, and the crack Corporate Design Squad hasn’t got around to it yet, so it’s still all flagstones and columns and low-arched bays. Cassie and I have a pact to take a couple of candles down there someday, in spite of the electric lighting and in defiance of safety regulations, and spend an evening looking for secret passageways.
The cardboard box (Rowan G., Savage P., 33791/84) was exactly as I had left it more than two years before; I doubt anyone had touched it since. I pulled out the file and flipped to the statement Missing Persons had taken from Jamie’s mother and, thank God, there it was: blond hair, hazel eyes, red T-shirt, cut-off denim shorts, white runners, red hair clips decorated with strawberries.
I shoved the file under my jacket, in case I ran into O’Kelly (there was no reason why I shouldn’t have it, especially now that the link to the Devlin case was definite, but for some reason I felt guilty, furtive, as if I were absconding with some taboo artifact), and went back up to the squad room. Cassie was at her computer; she had left the lights off so O’Kelly wouldn’t spot them.
“Mark’s clean,” she said. “So’s Margaret Devlin. Jonathan has one conviction, just this February.”
“Kiddie porn?”
“Jesus, Ryan. You have a melodramatic mind. No, disturbing the peace: he was protesting about the motorway and crossed a police line. Judge gave him a hundred-quid fine and twenty hours of community service, then upped it to forty when Devlin said that as far as he was concerned he had just been arrested for performing a community service.”
That wasn’t where I’d seen Devlin’s name, then: as I’ve said, I had had only the vaguest idea that the motorway controversy even existed. But it did explain why he hadn’t reported the threatening phone calls. We would not have seemed like allies to him, especially not on anything related to the motorway. “The hair clip’s in the file,” I said.
“Nice one,” said Cassie, with a shade of a question in her voice. She was shutting down the computer and turned to look at me. “Are you pleased?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. It was, obviously, nice to know that I wasn’t losing my mind and imagining things; but now I was wondering whether I had actually remembered it at all or only seen it in the file, and which of those possibilities I liked less, and wishing I had just kept my mouth shut about the damn thing.
Cassie waited; in the evening light through the window her eyes looked huge, opaque and watchful. I knew she was giving me a chance to say, Fuck the hair clip, let’s forget we ever found it. Even now the temptation, tired and profitless though it may be, is to wonder what would have happened if I had.
But it was late, I had had a long day, I wanted to go home, and being handled with kid gloves—even by Cassie—has always made me itch; cutting short this whole line of inquiry seemed like so much more effort than simply leaving it to run its course. “Will you ring Sophie about the blood?” I asked. In that dim room, it seemed all right to admit this much weakness at least.
“Sure,” said Cassie. “Later, though, OK? Let’s go talk to O’Kelly before he has an aneurysm. He texted me while you were in the basement; I didn’t think he even knew how to do that, did you?”
I rang O’Kelly’s extension and told him we were back, to which he said, “About fucking time. What did you do, stop for a quickie?” and then told us to get into his office pronto.
The office has only one chair apart from O’Kelly’s own, one of those faux-leather ergonomic things. The implication is that you shouldn’t take up too much of his space or time. I sat in the chair, and Cassie perched on a table behind me. O’Kelly gave her an irritated look.
“Make it fast,” he said. “I’ve to be somewhere at eight.” His wife had left him the year before; since then the grapevine had picked up a series of awkward attempts at relationships, including one spectacularly unsuccessful blind date where the woman turned out to be an ex-hooker he had arrested regularly in his Vice days.
“Katharine Devlin, aged twelve,” I said.
“The ID’s definite, so?”
“Ninety-nine percent,” I said. “We’ll have one of the parents view the body when the morgue’s patched her up, but Katy Devlin was an identical twin, and the surviving twin looks exactly like our victim.”
“Leads, suspects?” he snapped. He had a sort of nice tie on, ready for his date, and he was wearing too much cologne; I couldn’t place it, but it smelled expensive. “I’m going to have to give a fucking press conference tomorrow. Tell me you’ve got something.”
“She was hit over the head and asphyxiated, probably raped,” Cassie said. The fluorescent lighting smudged gray under her eyes. She looked too tired and too young to be saying the words so calmly. “We won’t know anything definite till the post-mortem tomorrow morning.”
“Fucking tomorrow?” O’Kelly said, outraged. “Tell that shite Cooper to give this priority.”
“Already did, sir,” said Cassie. “He had to be in court this afternoon. He said first thing tomorrow is the best he can do.” (Cooper and O’Kelly hate each other; what Cooper had actually said was, “Kindly explain to Mr. O’Kelly that his cases aren’t the only ones in the world.”) “We’ve identified four primary lines of inquiry, and—”
“Good, that’s good,” said O’Kelly, grabbing drawers open and rummaging for a pen.
“First, there’s the family,” said Cassie. “You know the stats, sir: most murdered kids are killed by their parents.”
“And there’s something odd about that family, sir,” I said. This was my line; we had to get the point across, in case we ever needed a little leeway in investigating the Devlins, but if Cassie had said it O’Kelly would have gone off into a long snide boring routine about women’s intuition. We were good at O’Kelly by this time. Our counterpoint has been polished to the seamlessness of a Beach Boys harmony—we can sense exactly when to swap the roles of front man and backup, good cop and bad cop, when my cool detachment needs to strike a balancing note of gravitas against Cassie’s bright ease—and it is for use even against our own. “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something up in that house.”
“Never ignore a hunch,” said O’Kelly. “Dangerous.” Cassie’s foot, swinging casually, nudged my back.
“Second,” she said, “we’re going to have to at least check out the possibility of some kind of cult.”
“Oh, God, Maddox. What, did Cosmo run an article on Satanism this month?” O’Kelly’s disregard for cliché is so sweeping that it almost has its own panache. I find this entertaining or irritating or mildly comforting, depending on my mood, but at least it makes it very easy to prepare your script in advance.
“I think it’s a load of rubbish, too, sir,” I said, “but we’ve got a murdered little girl on a sacrificial altar. The reporters were asking about it already. We’ll have to eliminate it.” It is, obviously, difficult to prove that something does not exist, and saying it without solid proof just brings out the conspiracy theorists, so we take a different tack. We would spend several hours finding ways in which Katy Devlin’s death didn’t match the putative MO of a hypothetical group (no bloodletting, no sacrificial garment, no occult symbols, yada yada yada), and then O’Kelly, who luckily has absolutely no sense of the absurd, would explain all this to the cameras.
“Waste of time,” O’Kelly said. “But yeah, yeah, do it. Talk to Sex Crime, talk to the parish priest, whoever, just get it out of the way. What’s third?”
“Third,” Cassie said, “is a straight-up sex crime—a pedophile who killed her either to stop her talking or because killing is part of his thing. And if things point that way, we’re going to have to look at the two kids who disappeared at Knocknaree in 1984. Same age, same location, and right beside our victim’s body we found a drop of old blood—lab’s working on matching it to the ’84 samples—and a hair clip that fits the description of one the missing girl was wearing. We can’t rule out a connection.” This was definitely Cassie’s line. I am, as I’ve said, a pretty good liar, but just hearing her say it made my heart rate go up annoyingly, and in many ways O’Kelly is more perceptive than he pretends to be.