9
In my memory, we spent a million nights in Cassie’s flat, the three of us. The investigation only lasted a month or so, and I’m sure there must have been days when one or another of us was off doing something else; but over time those evenings have colored the whole season for me, like a brilliant dye flowering slowly through water. The weather dipped in and out of an early, bitter autumn; wind whined through the eaves, and raindrops seeped in the warped sash windows and trickled down the panes. Cassie would light a fire and we would all spread out our notes on the floor and bat theories back and forth, then take turns getting dinner—mainly pasta variations from Cassie, steak sandwiches from me, surprisingly exotic experiments from Sam: lavish tacos, some Thai thing with spicy peanut sauce. We would have wine with dinner, move on to whiskey in various forms afterwards; when we started to get tipsy, we would pack the case file away and kick off our shoes and put on music and talk.
Cassie, like me, is an only child, and we were both enthralled by Sam’s stories about his childhood—four brothers and three sisters piled into an old white farmhouse in Galway, playing mile-wide games of Cowboys and Indians and sneaking out at night to explore the haunted mill, with a big quiet father and a mother dealing out oven-warm bread and raps with a wooden spoon and counting heads at mealtimes to make sure nobody had fallen into the stream. Cassie’s parents died in a car crash when she was five, and she was brought up by a gentle, older aunt and uncle, in a ramshackle house in Wicklow, miles from anything. She talks about reading unsuitable books from their library—The Golden Bough, Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Madame Bovary, which she hated but finished anyway—curled up in a window seat on the landing, eating apples from the garden, with soft rain going past the panes. Once, she says, she wriggled under an ancient and hideous wardrobe and found a china saucer, a George VI penny and two letters from a World War I soldier whose name nobody recognized, with bits blacked out by censors. I don’t remember much from before I was twelve, and after that my memories are mainly arranged in rows—rows of gray-white dormitory beds, rows of echoing, bleach-smelling cold showers, rows of boys in archaic uniforms droning Protestant hymns about duty and constancy. To both of us, Sam’s childhood was something out of a storybook; we pictured it in pencil drawings, apple-cheeked children with a laughing sheepdog jumping around them. “Tell us about when you were little,” Cassie would say, snuggling into the futon and pulling her sleeves down over her hands to hold her hot whiskey.
In many ways, though, Sam was the odd man out in these conversations, and a part of me was pleased at this. Cassie and I had spent two years building our routine, our rhythm, our subtle private codes and indicators; Sam was, after all, there by our favor, and it seemed only fair that he should play a supporting role, present but not too present. It never seemed to bother him. He would stretch out on the sofa, tilting his whiskey glass to make the firelight throw spots of amber on his sweater, and watch and smile as Cassie and I argued over the nature of Time, or T. S. Eliot, or scientific explanations for ghosts. Adolescent conversations, no doubt, and made more so by the fact that Cassie and I brought out the brat in each other (“Bite me, Ryan,” she would say, narrowing her eyes at me across the futon, and I would grab her arm and bite her wrist till she yelled for mercy), but I had never had them in my adolescence and I loved them, I loved every moment.
I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine. Don’t let me deceive you: the evenings may have been roast chestnuts around a cozy turf fire, but the days were a grim, tense, frustrating slog. Officially we were on the nine-to-five shift, but we were in before eight every morning, seldom left before eight at night, took work home with us—questionnaires to correlate, statements to read, reports to write. Those dinners started at nine o’clock, ten; it was midnight before we stopped talking shop, two in the morning by the time we had unwound enough to go to bed. We developed an intense, unhealthy relationship with caffeine and forgot what it was like not to be exhausted. On the first Friday evening, a very new floater called Corry said, “See you Monday, lads,” and got a round of sardonic laughter and slaps on the back, as well as a humorless “No, Whatsyourname, I’ll see you at eight tomorrow morning and don’t be late” from O’Kelly.
Rosalind Devlin hadn’t come in to see me that first Friday, after all.
Around five o’clock, edgy from waiting and unaccountably worried that something might have happened to her, I rang her mobile. She didn’t answer. She was with her family, I told myself, she was helping with the funeral arrangements or looking after Jessica or crying in her room; but that unease stayed with me, tiny and sharp as a pebble in my shoe.
On the Sunday we went to Katy’s funeral, Cassie and Sam and I. The thing about murderers being irresistibly drawn to the graveside is mostly legend, but still, the off-chance was worth it, and anyway O’Kelly had told us to go on the grounds that it was good PR. The church had been built in the 1970s, when concrete was an artistic statement and when Knocknaree was supposed to become a major metropolis any day now; it was huge and chill and ugly, gauche semi-abstract Stations of the Cross, echoes creeping dismally up to the angled concrete ceiling. We stood at the back, in our best unobtrusive dark clothes, and watched as the church filled up: farmers holding flat caps, old women in headscarves, trendy teenagers trying to look blasé. The little white coffin, gold-trimmed and terrible, in front of the altar. Rosalind stumbling up the aisle, shoulders heaving, supported by Margaret on one side and Auntie Vera on the other; behind them Jonathan, glassy-eyed, guided Jessica towards the front pew.
Candles guttered in an unceasing draught; the air smelled of damp and incense and dying flowers. I was light-headed—I had forgotten to eat breakfast—and the whole scene had the glass-covered quality of memory. It took me awhile to realize that this was, in fact, for good reason: I had attended Mass here every Sunday for twelve years, had quite possibly sat through a memorial service for Peter and Jamie in one of the cheap wooden pews. Cassie blew into her hands, surreptitiously, to warm them.
The priest was very young and solemn, trying painfully hard to rise to the occasion with his frail seminary arsenal of clichés. A choir of pale little girls in school uniforms—Katy’s schoolmates; I recognized some of the faces—huddled shoulder to shoulder, sharing hymn sheets. The hymns had been chosen to offer comfort, but the voices were thin and uncertain and a few girls kept breaking down. “Be not afraid, I go before you always; come, follow me….”
Simone Cameron caught my eye on her way back from Communion and gave me a tiny stiff nod; her golden eyes were bloodshot, monstrous. The family filed out of their pew one by one and laid mementoes on the coffin: a book from Margaret, a stuffed toy shaped like a ginger cat from Jessica, from Jonathan the pencil drawing that had hung above Katy’s bed. Last of all Rosalind knelt down and placed a pair of small pink ballet shoes, bound together by their ribbons, on the lid. She stroked the shoes gently and then bent her head onto the coffin and sobbed, her warm brown ringlets tumbling over the white and gold. A faint, inhuman wail rose from somewhere in the front pew.
Outside, the sky was gray-white and wind was whipping leaves off the trees in the churchyard. Reporters were leaning over the railings, cameras firing in swift bursts. We found a discreet corner and scanned the area and the crowd, but unsurprisingly no one rang any alarm bells. “Some turnout,” Sam said quietly. He was the only one of us who had gone up for Communion. “Let’s get film off some of these lads tomorrow, check if anyone’s here who shouldn’t be.”
“He’s not here,” Cassie said. She dug her hands into her jacket pockets. “Not unless he has to be. This guy won’t even be reading the newspapers. He’ll change the subject if anyone starts talking about the case.”
Rosalind, moving slowly down the church steps with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, raised her head and saw us. She shook off the supporting arms and ran across the grass, long black dress fluttering in the wind. “Detective Ryan…” She caught my hand in both of hers and raised a tear-stained face to me. “I can’t bear it. You have to catch the man who did this to my sister.”
“Rosalind!” Jonathan called hoarsely, somewhere, but she didn’t look away. Her hands were long-fingered and soft and very cold. “We’ll do everything we can,” I said. “Will you come in and talk to me tomorrow?”
“I’ll try. I’m sorry about Friday, but I couldn’t…” She glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I couldn’t get away. Please find him, Detective Ryan—please….”
I felt, more than heard, the spatter of the cameras. One of the photos—Rosalind’s anguished, upturned profile, an unflattering shot of me with my mouth open—made it onto the front page of a tabloid the next morning, with PLEASE GIVE MY SISTER JUSTICE below it in letters an inch high, and Quigley gave me grief about it all week.