“I vote we arrest him,” I said, that evening in Cassie’s. Sam was in Ballsbridge, at a champagne-reception-cum-dance for his cousin’s twenty-first, so it was just the two of us, sitting on the sofa drinking wine and deciding how to go after Jonathan Devlin.
“For what?” Cassie demanded, reasonably. “We can’t get him on the rape. We might just possibly maybe have enough to pull him in for questioning on Peter and Jamie, except we don’t have a witness who can put them at the rape scene, so we can’t show a motive. Sandra didn’t see you guys, and if you come forward, it’ll compromise your involvement in this whole case, besides which O’Kelly will cut off your bollocks and use them for Christmas decorations. And we don’t have a single thing linking Jonathan to Katy’s death—just some stomach trouble that might or might not have been abuse and might or might not have been him. All we can do is ask him to come in and talk to us.”
“I’d just like to get him out of that house,” I said slowly. “I’m worried about Rosalind.” It was the first time I had put this unease into words. It had been building in me, gradually and only half-acknowledged, ever since that first hurried phone call she had made, but over the past two days it had risen to a pitch I couldn’t ignore.
“Rosalind? Why?”
“You said our guy won’t kill unless he feels threatened. That fits with everything we’ve heard. According to Cathal, Jonathan was petrified that we’d tell someone about the rape; so he goes after us. Katy decided to stop getting sick, maybe threatened to tell, so he kills her. If he finds out Rosalind’s been talking to me…”
“I don’t think you need to be too worried about her,” Cassie said. She finished her wine. “We could be completely wrong about Katy; it’s all guesswork. And I wouldn’t put too much weight on anything Cathal Mills says. He strikes me as a psychopath, and they lie easier than they tell the truth.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You only met him for about five minutes. What, you’re diagnosing the guy? He just struck me as a prick.”
She shrugged. “I’m not saying I’m sure about Cathal. But they’re surprisingly easy to spot, if you know how.”
“Is this what they taught you at Trinity?”
Cassie held out her hand for my glass, got up to refill them. “Not exactly,” she said, at the fridge. “I knew a psychopath once.”
Her back was to me, and if there was an odd undertone in her voice I didn’t catch it. “I did see this thing on the Discovery Channel where they said up to five percent of the population are psychopaths,” I said, “but most of them don’t break the law so they never get diagnosed. How much would you bet that half the government—”
“Rob,” Cassie said. “Shut up. Please. I’m trying to tell you something here.”
This time I did hear the strain. She came over and gave me my glass, took hers to the window and leaned back on the sill. “You wanted to know why I dropped out of college,” she said, very evenly. “In second year I made friends with this guy in my class. He was popular, quite good-looking and very charming and intelligent and interesting—I didn’t fancy him or anything like that, but I guess I was flattered that he was paying all this attention to me. We used to skip all our classes and spend hours over coffee. He brought me presents—cheap ones, and some of them looked used, but we were broke students, and hey, it’s the thought that counts, right? Everyone thought it was sweet, how close we were.”
She took a sip of her drink, swallowed hard. “I worked out pretty fast that he told a lot of lies, mostly for no real reason, but I knew—well, he’d told me—that he’d had a terrible childhood and that he’d been bullied in school, so I figured he’d got into the habit of lying to protect himself. I thought—Jesus Christ—I thought I could help: if he knew he had a friend who’d stick by him no matter what, he’d get more secure and wouldn’t need to lie any more. I was only eighteen, nineteen.”
I was afraid to move, even to put down my glass; I was terrified that any tiny movement would be the one that would send her pushing herself up off the windowsill and spinning the subject away with some flippant comment. There was an odd, taut set to her mouth that made her look much older, and I knew she had never told this story to anyone, ever before.
“I didn’t even notice I was drifting away from all the other friends I’d made, because he went into this cold sulk if I spent time with them. He went into the cold sulk a lot, actually, for any reason or none, and I would have to spend ages trying to figure out what I’d done and apologizing and making up for it. When I went to meet him I never knew whether he’d be all hugs and compliments or all cold shoulder and disapproving looks; there was no logic to it. Sometimes the things he pulled—just little things: borrowing my lecture notes just before exams, then forgetting to bring them back in for days, then claiming he’d lost them, then getting outraged when I saw them sticking out of his bag, that kind of thing—it made me so furious I wanted to kill him with my bare hands, but he was lovely just often enough that I didn’t want to stop hanging around with him.” A tiny, crooked twist of a smile. “I didn’t want to hurt him.”
It took her three tries to light a cigarette; Cassie, who had told me about getting stabbed without so much as tensing up. “Anyway,” she said, “this went on for almost two years. In January of fourth year he made a pass at me, in my flat. I turned him down—I have no idea why, by that time I was so confused I barely knew what I was doing, but thank God I had a few of my instincts left. I said I just wanted to be friends, he seemed fine with it, we talked for a while, he left. The next day I went into class and everyone was staring at me and nobody would talk to me. It took me two weeks to find out what was going on. I finally cornered this girl Sarah-Jane—we’d been pretty good friends, back in first year—and she said that they all knew what I’d done to him.”
She drew on her cigarette, hard and fast. She was looking at me, but not quite meeting my eyes; hers were too wide, dilated. I thought of Jessica Devlin’s dazed, narcotized stare. “The night I turned him down, he’d gone straight to these other girls’ flat, girls from our class. He arrived in tears. He told them that he and I had been secretly going out for a while, that he’d decided it wasn’t working out, and that I had said if he broke up with me I’d tell everyone he’d raped me. He said I’d threatened to go to the police, the papers, to ruin his life.” She looked for an ashtray, flicked ash, missed.
It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder why she was telling me this story, why now. This may seem strange, but everything did that month, strange and precarious. The moment when Cassie had said, “We’ll have it,” had set in motion some unstoppable tectonic shift; familiar things were cracking open and twisting inside out before my eyes, the world turning beautiful and dangerous as a bright spinning blade. Cassie opening the door to one of her secret rooms seemed like a natural, inevitable part of this massive sea change. In a way, I suppose it was. It was only much later that I understood she had actually been telling me something very specific, if I had just been paying attention.
“My God,” I said, after a while. “Just because you bruised his ego?”
“Not just that,” Cassie said. She was wearing a soft cherry-colored sweater and I could see it vibrating, very fast, just above her breast, and I realized my heart was speeding, too. “Because he was bored. Because, by turning him down, I had made it clear that he’d got as much entertainment out of me as he was going to, so this was the only other use he had for me. Because, when you come right down to it, it was fun.”
“Did you tell this Sarah-Jane what had happened?”
“Oh, yeah,” Cassie said levelly. “I told everyone who would still talk to me. Not one of them believed me. They all believed him—all our classmates, all our mutual acquaintances, which added up to just about everyone I knew. People who were supposed to be my friends.”
“Oh, Cassie,” I said. I was aching to go over to her, put my arms around her, hold her close until that terrible rigidity melted out of her body and she came back from whatever remote place she had gone to. But the immobility of her, her braced shoulders: I couldn’t tell whether she would welcome it or whether it would be the worst thing I could do. Blame boarding school; blame, if you prefer, some deep-seated character flaw. The fact is that I didn’t know how. I doubt that, in the long run, it would have made any difference; but this only makes me wish even more intensely that, at least for that one moment, I had known what to do.
“I stuck it out for another couple of weeks,” Cassie said. She lit another cigarette off the end of the old one, something I had never seen her do before. “He was always surrounded by this knot of people giving him protective pats and glaring at me. People were coming up to me to tell me that I was the reason why genuine rapists got away with it. One girl said I deserved to be raped so I’d realize what a horrible thing I’d done.”
She laughed, a small harsh sound. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? A hundred psychology students, and not one of us recognized a classic psychopath. You know the strange thing? I wished I had done everything he claimed I had. If I had, then it would all have made sense: I would have been getting what I deserved. But I hadn’t done any of it, and yet that made absolutely no difference to what happened. There was no such thing as cause and effect. I thought I was losing my mind.”
I leaned over—slowly, the way you would reach out towards a terrified animal—and took her hand; that much, at least, I managed to do. She gave a quick breath of a laugh, squeezed my fingers, then let them go. “Anyway. Finally he came up to me one day, in the Buttery—all these girls were trying to stop him, but he sort of shook them off bravely and came over to me and said, loud, so they could hear him, ‘Please, stop ringing me in the middle of the night. What have I ever done to you?’ I was completely stunned, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. All I could think of to say was, ‘But I haven’t rung you.’ He smiled and shook his head, like, Yeah, right, and then he leaned in and said—just quietly, in this chirpy businesslike voice—‘If I ever did break into your flat and rape you, I don’t think the charges would stick, do you?’ Then he smiled again and went back to his mates.”
“Hon,” I said finally, carefully, “maybe you should put in an alarm on this place. I don’t want to scare you, but—”
Cassie shook her head. “And what, never leave the flat again? I can’t afford to start getting paranoid. I’ve got good locks, and I keep my gun beside my bed.” I had noticed that, of course, but there are plenty of detectives who don’t feel right unless they have their guns within reach. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure he’d never actually do it. I know the way he works—unfortunately. It’s a lot more fun for him to think that I’m always wondering than to just do it and get it over with.”
She took a last pull on her cigarette, leaned forward to stub it out. Her spine was so rigid that the movement looked painful. “At the time, though, the whole thing freaked me out enough that I dropped out of college. I went over to France—I’ve got cousins in Lyons, I stayed with them for a year and worked as a waitress in this café. It was nice. That’s where I got the Vespa. Then I came back and applied to Templemore.”
“Because of him?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Probably. So maybe one good thing came out of it. Two: I’ve got good psychopath sensors now. It’s like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you’re supersensitized.” She finished her drink in a long swallow. “I ran into Sarah-Jane last year, in a pub in town. I said hi. She told me he was doing fine, ‘in spite of your best efforts,’ and then walked off.”
“Is that what your nightmares are about?” I said gently, after a moment. I had woken her from these dreams—flailing at me, gasping incomprehensible spates of words—twice before, when we had worked rape-murders, but she would never tell me the details.
“Yeah. I dream he’s the guy we’re after, but we can’t prove it, and when he finds out I’m on the case, he…Well. He does his thing.”
I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.
“What was his name?” I asked. I was desperate to do something, fix this somehow, and running a background check on this guy, trying to find something to arrest him for, was the only thing I could think of to do. And I suppose a small part of me, whether through cruelty or detached curiosity or whatever, had noticed that Cassie refused to say it, and wanted to see what would happen if she did.
Cassie’s eyes finally focused on mine, and I was shaken by the concentrated, diamond-hard hatred. “Legion,” she said.