I don’t remember what I did for the rest of the day; sat at my desk and played with paper, I suppose. Sam headed out on another of his mysterious errands and Cassie went off to follow up some unpromising lead, taking O’Gorman with her and leaving silent Sweeney to man the tip line, for which I was devoutly grateful. After the bustle of the previous few weeks, the near-empty incident room had an eerie, derelict feel to it, the vanished floaters’ desks still strewn with leftover paperwork and coffee mugs they had forgotten to take back to the canteen.
I sent Cassie a text saying I wasn’t feeling well enough for dinner at her place; I couldn’t bear the thought of all that solicitous tact. I left work just in time to get home before Heather—she “does her Pilates” on Monday evenings—wrote her a note saying I had a migraine and locked myself in my room. Heather tends her health with the kind of tenacious, minute dedication some women devote to flower beds or china collections, but the upside of this is that she accords other people’s ailments the same awed respect as her own: she would leave me alone for the evening and keep the sound on the television down.
On top of everything else, I couldn’t shake the feeling that had blown away my last chance in the courtroom: the steadily growing feeling that MacSharry’s photo of Philomena Kavanagh reminded me of something, though I had no idea what. This sounds like a minor problem, especially in light of the kind of day I had had, and no doubt for someone else it would have been. Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.
Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals too far distant from the epicenter to be easily predictable. From that day on, any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential: this could be trivia, or it could be The Big One that blows your life and your mind wide open. Over the years, like someone living on a fault line, I had come to trust the equilibrium of the status quo, to believe that if The Big One hadn’t come by now then it wasn’t coming; but since we caught the Katy Devlin case little rumbles and tremors had been building ominously, and I was no longer anything like sure. The photo of Philomena Kavanagh spread-eagled and wide-mouthed could have been reminding me of some scene from a TV show or of something terrible enough to wipe my mind blank for twenty years, and I had no way of knowing which it was.
In the event, it turned out to be neither. It hit me somewhere in the middle of the night, as I was drifting in and out of a fitful, twitchy doze; hit me so hard that it knocked me awake and upright, heart pounding. I grabbed for the switch on my bedside lamp, stared at the wall while little transparent squiggles swirled in front of my eyes.
Even before we were near the clearing we could tell something was different, something was wrong. The noises were tangled and jagged, too many layers of them, grunts and gasps and squeaks stifled to small, wild bursts more menacing than a roar. “Get down,” Peter hissed, and we flattened ourselves closer against the ground. Roots and fallen twigs scrabbled at our clothes and my feet were boiling in my runners. A hot day, hot and still, the sky blazing blue in and out of the branches. We slid through the undergrowth in slow motion: dust in my mouth, slashes of sun, a fly’s horrible persistent dance loud as a chainsaw against my ear. Bees at the wild blackberries a few yards away, and a trickle of sweat running down my back. Peter’s elbow in the corner of my vision, angling forward as carefully as a cat’s; Jamie’s quick eye-blink, close behind a grain-topped stalk of grass.
There were too many people in the clearing. Metallica was holding Sandra’s arms down against the ground and Shades was holding her legs, and Anthrax was on top of her. Her skirt was twisted up around her waist and there were huge rips all down her tights. Her mouth past Anthrax’s moving shoulder was frozen wide and black, crisscrossed with slices of red-gold hair. She was making weird noises, like she was trying to scream and choking instead. Metallica hit her once, neatly, and she stopped.
We ran, not caring that they could see us, not hearing the yells—“Jesus Christ!” “Get the fuck out!”—until afterwards. Jamie and I saw Sandra the next day, down at the shop. She was wearing a big sweatshirt and had dark smudges under her eyes. We knew she had seen us, but none of us looked at each other.
It was some ungodly hour of the night, but I rang Cassie’s mobile anyway.
“Are you all right?” she said, sounding tousled and sleepy.
“I’m fine. I’ve got something, Cass.”
She yawned. “Jesus. This better be good, dickface. What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Listen. Sometime that summer, Peter and Jamie and I saw Jonathan Devlin and his friends raping a girl.”
There was a pause. Then Cassie said, sounding a lot more awake, “Are you sure? You could have misinterpreted—”
“No. I’m positive. She tried to scream and one of them hit her. They were holding her down.”
“Did they see you guys?”
“Yes. Yes. We ran, and they yelled after us.”
“Fucking hell,” she said. I could feel her slowly realizing: a raped little girl, a rapist in the family, two witnesses vanished. We were only a few steps away from an arrest warrant. “Fucking hell…Well done, Ryan. Do you know the girl’s name?”
“Sandra something.”
“The one you mentioned before? We’ll start tracking her down tomorrow.”
“Cassie,” I said, “if this pans out, how the hell do we explain how we knew?”
“Listen, Rob, don’t worry about that yet, OK? If we find Sandra, she’ll be all the witness we need. Otherwise we go at Devlin hard, hit him with all the details, freak him out till he confesses…. We’ll find a way.”
It almost undid me, her unquestioning assumption that the details would be correct. I had to swallow hard to keep my voice from cracking. “What’s the statute of limitations on rape? Can we get him for that even if we don’t have enough evidence on the other stuff?”
“Can’t remember. We’ll figure all that out in the morning. Are you going to be able to sleep, or are you too hyper?”
“Too hyper,” I said. I was almost hysterically jittery; I felt as though someone had injected sherbet into my bloodstream. “Talk for a while?”
“Sure,” Cassie said. I heard her curl up more comfortably in bed, sheets rustling; I found my vodka bottle and tucked the phone under my ear while I poured a shot.
She told me about a time when she was nine and convinced all the other local kids that a magic wolf lived in the hills near the village. “I said I’d found a letter under my floorboards telling me that he’d been there for four hundred years, and there was a map tied around his neck that would show us where to find treasure. I organized all the kids into a posse—God, I was a bossy little bitch—and every weekend we all went off up into the hills looking for this wolf. We were running away screaming every time we saw a sheepdog and falling into streams and having a brilliant time….”
I stretched out in bed and sipped my drink. The adrenaline was draining away and the low rhythms of Cassie’s voice were soothing; I felt warm and comfortably exhausted, like a kid after a long day. “And it wasn’t a German shepherd or anything, either,” I’m sure I heard her say, “it was way too big and it looked completely different, wild,” but I was already asleep.