Out in the corridor, we didn’t look at one another. Nobody made any move to go back to the incident room. Cassie leaned against the wall and scuffed up the carpet pile with the toe of her shoe.
“He’s right, in a way,” Sam said finally. “We’ll be grand on our own, so we will.”
“Don’t, Sam,” I said. “Just don’t.”
“What?” Sam asked, puzzled. “Don’t what?” I looked away.
“It’s the idea of it,” Cassie said. “We shouldn’t be snookered on this case. We’ve the body, the weapon, the…We should have someone by now.”
“Well,” I said, “I know what I’m going to do. I am going to find the nearest non-horrible pub and get absolutely legless. Anyone joining me?”
We went to Doyle’s, in the end: overamplified eighties music and too few tables, suits and students shouldering at the bar. None of us had any desire to go to a police pub where, inevitably, everyone we met would want to know how Operation Vestal was going. On about the third round, as I was coming back from the men’s room, I bumped elbows with a girl and her drink splashed over, splattering us both. It was her fault—she had reared back laughing at something one of her friends had said, and knocked straight into me—but she was extremely pretty, the tiny ethereal type I always go for, and she gave me a soft appreciative look while we were both apologizing and comparing damage, so I bought her another drink and struck up a conversation.
Her name was Anna and she was doing a Master’s in art history; she had a cascade of fair hair that made me think of warm beaches, and one of those floaty white cotton skirts, and a waist I could have got my hands around. I told her I was a professor of literature, over from a university in England to do research on Bram Stoker. She sucked on the rim of her glass and laughed at my jokes, showing little white teeth with an engaging overbite.
Behind her, Sam grinned and raised an eyebrow and Cassie did a panting, puppy-eyed impression of me, but I didn’t care. It had been a ridiculously long time since I had slept with anyone and I badly wanted to go home with this girl, sneak giggling into some student flat with art posters on the walls, wind that extravagant hair round my fingers and let my mind shimmer into blankness, lie in her sweet safe bed all night and most of tomorrow and not once think about either of these fucking cases. I put a hand on Anna’s shoulder to guide her out of the way of a guy precariously maneuvering four pints, and gave Cassie and Sam the finger behind her back.
The tide of people threw us closer and closer. We had got off the subject of our respective studies—I wished I knew more about Bram Stoker—and were on to the Aran Islands (Anna and a bunch of friends, the previous summer; the beauties of nature; the joy of escaping urban life in all its superficiality), and she had started touching my wrist to emphasize her points, when one of her friends detached himself from the howling group and came over to stand behind her.
“You all right, Anna?” he demanded ominously, putting an arm around her waist and giving me a bullocky stare.
Out of his line of vision, Anna rolled her eyes at me, with a conspiratorial little smile. “Everything’s fine, Cillian,” she said. I didn’t think he was her boyfriend—she hadn’t been acting taken, at any rate—but if he wasn’t then he clearly wanted to be. He was a big guy, handsome in a heavy-set way; he had obviously been drinking for some time and was itching for an excuse to invite me to take it outside.
For a moment I actually considered it. You heard the lady, pal, go back to your little buddies.…I glanced over at Sam and Cassie: they had given upon me and were deep in an intent conversation, heads bent close to hear through the noise, Sam illustrating something with a finger on the table. I was suddenly, viciously sick of myself and my professorial alter ego, and, by association, of Anna and whatever game she was playing with me and this Cillian guy. “I should get back to my girlfriend,” I said, “sorry again for spilling your drink,” and turned away from the startled pink O of her mouth and the confused, reflexive flare of belligerence in Cillian’s eyes.
I slipped my arm around Cassie’s shoulders for a moment as I sat down, and she gave me a suspicious look. “Get shot down?” Sam asked.
“Nah,” said Cassie. “I’m betting he changed his mind and told her he had a girlfriend. Hence the touchy-feely stuff. Next time you pull that one, Ryan, I’m gonna snog the face off Sam and let your lady friend’s mates beat you up for messing with her head.”
“Deadly,” Sam said happily. “I like this game.”
At closing time, Cassie and I went back to her flat. Sam had gone home, it was a Friday and we didn’t have to get up the next morning; there seemed no reason to do anything but lie on the sofa, drinking and occasionally changing the music and letting the fire burn down to a whispering glow.
“You know,” said Cassie idly, fishing a piece of ice out of her glass to chew on, “what we’ve been forgetting is that kids think differently.”
“What are you on about?” We had been talking about Shakespeare, something to do with the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and my mind was still there. I half-thought she was going to come up with some late-night analogy between the way children think and the way people thought in the sixteenth century, and I was already preparing a rebuttal.
“We’ve been wondering how he got her to the kill site—no, knock it off and listen.” I was shoving at her leg with my foot and whining, “Shut up, I’m off duty, I can’t hear you, la la la….” I was hazy with vodka and lateness and I had decided I was sick of this frustrating, tangled, intractable case. I wanted to talk about Shakespeare some more, or maybe play cards. “When I was eleven a guy tried to molest me,” Cassie said.
I stopped kicking and lifted my head to look at her. “What?” I asked, a little too carefully. This, I thought, this, finally, was Cassie’s secret locked room, and I was at last going to be invited in.
She glanced over at me, amused. “No, he didn’t actually do anything to me. It was no big deal.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling silly and, obscurely, a little miffed. “What happened, then?”
“Our school was going through this craze for marbles—everyone played marbles all the time, all through lunch, after school. You carried them around in a plastic bag and it was a big thing, how many you had. So this one day I’d been kept after school—”
“You? I’m astounded,” I said. I rolled over and found my glass. I wasn’t sure where this story was going.
“Fuck off; just because you were Prefect Perfect. Anyway I was leaving, and one of the staff—not a teacher; a groundskeeper or a cleaning guy or something—came out of this little shed and said, ‘Do you want marbles? Come on in here and I’ll give you marbles.’ He was an old guy, maybe sixty, with white hair and a big mustache. So I sort of edged around the door of the shed for a while, and then I went in.”
“God, Cass. You silly, silly thing,” I said. I took another sip, put down my glass and pulled her feet into my lap to rub them.
“No, I told you, nothing happened. He went behind me and put his hands through under my arms, like he was going to lift me up, only then he started messing with the buttons on my shirt. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘I keep my marbles up on that shelf. I’m going to pick you up so you can get them.’ I knew something was very badly wrong, even though I had no idea what, so I twisted away and said, ‘I don’t want any marbles,’ and legged it home.”
“You were lucky,” I said. She had slim, high-arched feet; even through the soft thick socks she wore at home, I could feel the tendons, the small bones moving under my thumbs. I pictured her at eleven, all knees and bitten nails and solemn brown eyes.
“Yeah, I was. God knows what could’ve happened.”
“Did you tell anyone?” I still wanted more from the story; I wanted to extract some rending revelation, some terrible, shameful secret.
“No. I felt too icky about the whole thing, and anyway I didn’t even know what to tell. That’s the point: it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with sex. I knew about sex, my friends and I talked about it all the time, I knew something was wrong, I knew he was trying to undo my shirt, but I never put it together. Years later, when I was like eighteen, something reminded me of it—I saw some kids playing marbles, or something—and it suddenly hit me: Oh, my God, that guy was trying to molest me!”
“And this has what to do with Katy Devlin?” I asked.
“Kids don’t connect things in the same ways grown-ups do,” said Cassie. “Give me your feet and I’ll do them.”
“I wouldn’t. Can’t you see the smell-waves off my socks?”
“God, you’re disgusting. Don’t you ever change them?”
“When they stick to the wall. In accordance with bachelor tradition.”
“That’s not tradition. That’s reverse evolution.”
“Go on, then,” I said, unfolding my feet and shoving them at her.
“No. Get a girlfriend.”
“What are you wittering about now?”
“Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.” All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said, realizing as I spoke that I had no idea how much action Cassie got. There had been a semi-serious boyfriend before I knew her, a barrister called Aidan, but he had somehow faded from the scene around the time she joined Drugs; relationships seldom survive undercover work. Obviously I would have known if she’d had a boyfriend since, and I like to think I would have known if she’d even been dating someone, whatever that means, but beyond that I had no idea. I had always assumed that was because there was nothing to know, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. I glanced encouragingly at Cassie, but she was kneading my heel and giving me her best enigmatic smile.
“The other thing,” she said, “is why I went in there in the first place.” Cassie has a mind like a cloverleaf flyover: it can spin off in wildly divergent directions and then, by some Escherian defiance of dimension, swoop dizzily back to the crux. “It wasn’t just for the marbles. He had this very thick country accent—Midlands, I think—and it sounded like he might have said, ‘Do you want marvels?’ I mean, I knew he hadn’t, I knew he’d said ‘marbles,’ but a part of me thought just maybe he was one of those mysterious old men out of stories, and inside the shed would be shelves and shelves of scrying glasses and potions and ancient parchments and tiny dragons in cages. I knew it was only a shed and he was only a groundskeeper, but at the same time I thought this might just be my chance to be one of the children who go through the wardrobe into the other world, and I couldn’t stand the thought of spending the rest of my life knowing I’d missed it.”