“How much does it take to buy a county council?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “For that many decisions, over that amount of time, it must have added up to a decent old figure. The Big Three had a lot of money sunk in that land, one way or another. They wouldn’t have been best pleased at the idea of the motorway moving.”
“How much damage would it actually do them?”
He pointed to two dotted lines, just cutting across the northwest corner of the map. “According to my surveyors, that’s the nearest logical alternative route. That’s the one Move the Motorway wants. It’s a good two miles away, four or five in some places. The land to the north of the original route would still be accessible enough, but these lads all have plenty on the south side as well, and its value would go right down. I talked to a couple of estate agents, pretended I was interested in buying; they all said industrial land right on the motorway was worth up to twice as much as industrial land three miles off it. I haven’t done the exact maths, but it could add up to millions in the difference.”
“That’d be worth a few threatening phone calls,” Cassie said softly.
“There are people,” I said, “to whom that would be worth a few extra grand for a hit man.”
Nobody said anything for a few moments. Outside, the drizzle was starting to clear; a watery shaft of sun fell across the map like a helicopter’s searchlight, picked out a stretch of the river, rippling with delicate pen-strokes and shaded over with a dull red haze. Across the room, the floater manning the tip line was trying to get rid of someone too voluble to let him finish his sentences. Finally Cassie said, “But why Katy? Why not go after Jonathan?”
“Too obvious, maybe,” I said. “If Jonathan had been murdered, we’d have gone straight after any enemies he might have made through the campaign. With Katy, it can be set up to look like a sex crime, so our attention is diverted away from the motorway angle, but Jonathan still gets the message.”
“Unless I can find out who’s behind these three companies, though,” Sam said, “I’ve hit a dead end. The farmers don’t know any names, the county council claims they don’t either. I’ve seen a couple of deeds of sale and applications and that, but they were signed by lawyers—and the lawyers say they can’t release their clients’ names to me without permission from the clients.”
“Jesus.”
“What about journalists?” Cassie said suddenly.
Sam shook his head. “What about them?”
“You said there were articles about the motorway as far back as 1994. There must be journalists who followed the story, and they’d have a pretty good idea who bought up the land, even if they’re not allowed to print it. This is Ireland; there’s no such thing as a secret.”
“Cassie,” Sam said, his face lighting up, “you’re a gem. I’m buying you a pint for that.”
“Want to read my door-to-door reports for me instead? O’Gorman structures sentences like George Bush; most of the time I haven’t a clue what he’s on about.”
“Listen, Sam,” I said, “if this pans out, we’ll both be buying you pints for a very long time.” Sam bounded over to his end of the table, giving Cassie a clumsy, happy pat on the shoulder on his way, and started rooting through a file of newspaper clippings like a dog with a brand-new scent, and Cassie and I went back to our reports.
We left the map taped to the wall, where it got on my nerves for reasons I couldn’t quite define. It was the perfection of it, I think, the fragile, enchanting detail: tiny leaves curling in the wood, knobbly little stones in the wall of the keep. I suppose I had some kind of subconscious idea that one day I’d happen to glance up at it and catch two minute, laughing faces ducking out of sight among the pen-and-ink trees. Cassie drew a property developer, with a suit and horns and little dripping fangs, in one of the yellow patches; she draws like an eight-year-old, but I still jumped about a foot every time I caught the bloody thing leering at me in the corner of my eye.
I had started trying—for the first time, really—to remember what had happened in that wood. I prodded tentatively around the edges of it, barely acknowledging even to myself what I was doing, like a kid picking at a scab but afraid to look. I went for long walks—mostly in the early hours of the morning, on nights when I wasn’t staying at Cassie’s and couldn’t sleep—wandering through the city for hours in something like a trance, listening for delicate little noises in the corners of my mind. I would come to, dazed and blinking, to find myself staring up at the tacky neon sign of an unfamiliar shopping center, or the elegant gables of some Georgian home in the swankier part of Dun Laoghaire, with no idea how I had got there.
To some extent, at least, it worked. Unleashed, my mind threw out great streams of images like a slide show running on fast forward, and gradually I learned the knack of reaching out to catch one as they flew past, holding it lightly and watching as it unfurled in my hands. Our parents bringing us into town to shop for First Communion clothes; Peter and I, natty in our dark suits, doubled over howling with unfeeling laughter when Jamie—after a long, whispered battle with her mother—came out of the girls’ dressing room wearing a meringue and a look of horrified loathing. Mad Mick, the local nutter, who wore overcoats and fingerless gloves all year round and whispered to himself in an endless stream of small, bitter curses—Peter said Mick was crazy because when he was young he had done rude things with a girl and she was going to have a baby, so she hanged herself in the wood and her face went black. One day Mick started screaming, outside Lowry’s shop. The cops took him away in a police car, and we never saw him again. My desk in school, old deep-grained wood with an obsolete hole in the top for an inkwell, worn shiny and inlaid with years of doodles: a hurley stick, a heart with the initials inside scribbled over, DES PEARSE WAS HERE 12/10/67. Nothing special, I know, nothing that helped with the case; barely worth mentioning. But remember, I was used to taking it for granted that the first twelve years of my life were more or less gone for good. To me every salvaged scrap seemed tremendously potent and magical, a fragment of Rosetta stone carved with just one tantalizing character.
And on occasion I did manage to remember something that, if not useful, could at least be called relevant. Metallica and Sandra, sitting in a tree… We, I realized gradually and with an odd sense of insult, had not been the only people who claimed the wood as our territory and brought our private business there. There was a clearing deep in the wood, not far from the old castle—first bluebells in spring, sword fights with whippy branches that left long red weals on your arms, a tangled clump of bushes that by the end of summer was heavy with blackberries—and sometimes, when we had nothing more interesting to do, we used to spy on the bikers there. I remembered only one specific incident, but it had the taste of habit: we had done this before.
A hot summer day, sun on the back of my neck and the taste of Fanta in my mouth. The girl called Sandra was lying on her back in the clearing in a patch of flattened grass, with Metallica half on top of her. Her shirt was coming off her shoulder so her bra strap showed black and lacy. Her hands were in Metallica’s hair and they were kissing with their mouths wide open. “Ewww, you could catch germs that way,” Jamie whispered, by my ear.
I pressed myself closer against the ground, feeling grass print crisscross patterns on my stomach where my T-shirt had twisted up. We breathed through our mouths, to be quieter.
Peter made a long kissing noise, just soft enough that they couldn’t hear him, and we clamped our hands over our mouths, shaking with giggles, elbowing to make each other be quiet. Shades and the tall girl with five earrings were on the other side of the clearing. Anthrax mostly stayed at the edge of the wood, kicking the wall and smoking and throwing stones at beer cans. Peter held up a pebble, grinning; he flicked it, and it rattled into the grass only inches from Sandra’s shoulder. Metallica, breathing hard, didn’t even look up, and we had to duck our faces down into the long grass till we could stop laughing.
Then Sandra turned her head and she was looking at me; straight at me, through the long grass stalks and the chicory. Metallica was kissing her neck and she didn’t move. Somewhere near my hand a grasshopper was ticking. I looked back at her and felt my heart banging slowly against the ground.
“Come on,” Peter whispered urgently, “Adam, come on,” and their hands pulled my ankles. I wriggled backwards, scratching my legs on brambles, back into the deep shadow of the trees. Sandra was still looking at me.
There were other memories, ones I still find it difficult to think about. I remembered, for example, going down the stairs of our house without touching them. I can recall this in perfect detail: the ribbed texture of the wallpaper with its fading bouquets of roses, the way a shaft of light came through the bathroom door and down the stairwell, catching on dust-motes, to glow a deep auburn in the polish of the banister; the deft, accustomed flick of my hand with which I pushed off the rail to float serenely downstairs, my feet swimming slowly three or four inches above the carpet.
I remembered, too, the three of us finding a secret garden, somewhere in the heart of the wood. Behind some hidden wall or doorway, it had been. Fruit trees run wild, apple, cherry, pear; broken marble fountains, trickles of water still bubbling along tracks green with moss and worn deep into the stone; great ivy-draped statues in every corner, feet wild with weeds, arms and heads cracked away and scattered among long grass and Queen Anne’s lace. Gray dawn light, the swish of our feet and dew on our bare legs. Jamie’s hand small and rosy on the stone folds of a robe, her face upturned to look into blind eyes. The infinite silence. I was very well aware that if this garden had existed it would have been found when the archaeologists did their initial survey, and the statues would have been in the National Museum by now, and Mark would have done his level best to describe them to us in detail, but this was the problem: I remembered it, all the same.