It would take him at least an hour to round everyone up and get out to Knocknaree. I moved my car up the hill, out of sight of the archaeologists, and sat on the hood to wait. The air smelled of dead grass and thunder. Knocknaree had closed in on itself, the far hills invisible under cloud, the wood a dark illusive smear down the hillside. Enough time had passed that children were being allowed outside to play again, I heard faint high shrieks of glee or terror or both coming from inside the estate; that car alarm was still going, and somewhere a dog was barking mindlessly, frenetically, on and on and on.
Every sound wound me a notch tighter; I could feel the blood trembling in every corner of my body. My mind was still going full tilt, whirring through correlations and shards of evidence, fitting together what I needed to say to the others when they arrived. And somewhere under the adrenaline was the inexorable realization that, if I was right, then Katy Devlin’s death almost certainly had nothing at all to do with what had happened to Peter and Jamie; not, at least, in any way you could enter into evidence.
I was concentrating so hard that I almost forgot what I was waiting for. When the others started arriving, I saw them with the heightened, shocked gaze of a stranger: discreet dark cars and white van pulling in with a near-silent rush, doors sliding smoothly open; the black-suited men and the faceless techs with their glittering array of tools, cool and ready as surgeons to peel back the skin of this place inch by inch and reveal the darker, seething archaeology underneath. The slamming of car doors sounded small and deadly precise, muffled by the heavy air.
“What’s the story?” Sam said. He had brought Sweeney and O’Gorman and a red-haired guy whom I recognized, vaguely, from the blur of action in the incident room a few weeks earlier. I slid off the Land Rover and they moved into place around me, Sophie and her team pulling on their gloves, Cassie’s thin still face over Sam’s shoulder.
“The night Katy Devlin died,” I said, “a trowel disappeared from the locked finds shed on the dig. The trowels they use consist of a leaf-shaped metal blade attached to a wooden handle five or six inches long, tapering inwards towards the blade, with a rounded end. This particular trowel, which is still missing, had sc burned into the handle—the initials of the owner, Sean Callaghan, who claims he forgot it in the finds shed at five thirty on Monday evening. It matches Cooper’s description of the implement used to sexually assault Katy Devlin. Nobody knew it would be in the finds shed, which suggests that it was a weapon of opportunity and the shed may be our primary crime scene. Sophie, can you start there?”
“Luminol kit,” Sophie said to one of her mini-mes, and he broke away from the group and clicked open the back of the van.
“Three people had keys to the finds shed,” I said. “Ian Hunt, Mark Hanly and Damien Donnelly. We can’t rule out Sean Callaghan, either: he could have made up the whole story about leaving the trowel there. Hunt and Hanly have cars, which means if it’s one of them he might have hidden or transported the body in the trunk. Callaghan and Donnelly don’t, as far as I know, so either of them would have had to hide the body fairly nearby, probably on the site. We’ll have to go over the whole place with a fine-tooth comb and pray there’s some evidence left. We’re looking for the trowel, for a bloodstained plastic bag and for our primary and secondary crime scenes.”
“Do they have keys to the other sheds, too?” Cassie asked.
“Find out,” I said.
The tech was back, with the luminol kit in one hand and a roll of brown paper in the other. We looked at one another and nodded and fell into step, a swift, primed phalanx moving down the hill towards the dig.
A case breaking is like a dam breaking. Everything around you gathers itself up and moves effortlessly, unstoppably into top gear; every drop of energy you’ve poured into the investigation comes back to you, unleashed and gaining momentum by the second, subsuming you in its building roar. I forgot that I had never liked O’Gorman, forgot that Knocknaree wrecked my head and that I had almost blown this whole case a dozen times, almost forgot everything that had happened between me and Cassie. This, I think, is one of the things I always craved from the job: the way that, at certain moments, you can surrender everything else, lose yourself in the driving techno pulse of it and become nothing but one part of a perfectly calibrated, vital machine.
We fanned out, just in case, as we crossed the site towards the archaeologists. They gave us quick, apprehensive glances, but nobody bolted; no one even stopped working.
“Mark,” I said. He was still kneeling on top of his bank; he leaped up in one fast, dangerous movement and stared at me. “I’m going to have to ask you to bring all your team into the canteen.”
Mark exploded. “Jesus fuck! Have you not done enough? What are you afraid of? Even if we find the fucking Holy Grail today, your lot will still level this place on Monday morning. Could you not leave us our last few days in peace?”
For a second I almost thought he was going to come at me, and I felt Sam and O’Gorman moving in at my shoulders. “Settle down, boy,” O’Gorman said threateningly.
“Don’t you ‘boy’ me. We have till half past five on Friday and anything you want from us can wait till then, because we’re going nowhere.”
“Mark,” Cassie said sharply, beside me. “This has nothing to do with the motorway. Here’s how we’re going to work this: we need you and Damien Donnelly and Sean Callaghan to come with us right now. Non-negotiable. If you quit giving us hassle, the rest of your team can keep working, under Detective Johnston’s supervision. Fair enough?”
Mark glared at her for another second, but then he spat into the dust and jerked his chin at Mel, who was already moving towards him. The rest of the archaeologists stared, wide-eyed and sweating. Mark snapped instructions at Mel in an undertone, stabbing a finger at various parts of the site; then he gave her shoulder a light, unexpected squeeze and strode off towards the Portakabins, fists shoved deep in his jacket pockets. O’Gorman went after him.
“Sean,” I called. “Damien.” Sean bounded over eagerly and held up his hand for a high five, gave me a knowing look when I ignored it. Damien came more slowly, hitching up his combats. He looked dazed almost to the point of concussion, but coming from him this didn’t exactly set my alarm bells ringing.
“We need to talk to you,” I said. “We’d like you to wait in the canteen for a while, until we’re ready to take you back to headquarters.”
Both their mouths opened. I turned and left before they could ask.
We put them in the canteen, along with a flustered Dr. Hunt—still clutching handfuls of paperwork—and left O’Gorman to keep an eye on them. Hunt gave us permission to search the site, with an alacrity that moved him further down the suspect list (Mark demanded to see our warrant, but backed off fast when I told him I’d be happy to get one if he didn’t mind waiting around for a few hours), and Sophie and her team headed for the finds shed and started taping brown paper over the windows. Johnston, out on the dig, moved among the archaeologists with his notebook out, checking trowels and pulling people aside for brief tête-à-têtes.
“The same key fits all the Portakabins,” Cassie said, coming out of the canteen. “Hunt, Mark and Damien have one each—not Sean. No spares. They all say they’ve never lost, lent or missed their keys.”
“So let’s start with the sheds,” I said, “and then we can work our way outwards if we need to. Sam, will you and Cassie take the tools shed? Sweeney and I will do the office.”
The office was tiny and crammed—shelves sagging with books and house-plants, desk piled with papers and mugs and bits of pottery and an elephantine, obsolete computer. Sweeney and I worked fast and methodically, pulling out drawers, taking down books and checking behind them and stacking them back roughly in place. I didn’t actually expect to find anything. There was nowhere here to stash a body, and I was fairly sure the trowel and the plastic bag had been either dumped in the river or buried somewhere on the dig, where we would need the metal detector and huge amounts of luck and time to find them. All my hopes were pinned on Sophie and her team and whatever arcane rites they were performing in the finds shed. My hands moved automatically along the shelves; I was listening, so hard it nearly paralyzed me, for some sound from outside, footsteps, Sophie’s voice calling. When Sweeney dropped a drawer and cursed softly, I almost screamed at him to shut up.
It was gradually dawning on me just how high I had staked on this. I could have simply rung Sophie and got her to come down and check out the finds shed, no need to mention it to anyone if it didn’t pan out. Instead, I had taken over the entire site and pulled in just about every person who had anything to do with the investigation, and if this turned out to be a wild-goose chase I didn’t even want to think about what O’Kelly would say.
After what felt like an hour I heard, outside, “Rob!” I leaped up from the floor, scattering papers everywhere, but it was Cassie’s voice: clear, boyish, excited. She bounded up the steps, caught the door handle and swung round it into the office. “Rob, we’ve got it. The trowel. In the tools shed, under all these tarps—” She was flushed and breathless, and she had obviously completely forgotten that we were barely on speaking terms. I forgot it myself, for a moment; her voice sent the old, bright dart of warmth straight to my heart.
“Stay here,” I said to Sweeney, “keep searching,” and followed her. She was already running back to the tools shed, feet flashing as she jumped the ruts and puddles.
The tools shed was a mess: wheelbarrows at various wild angles, picks and shovels and mattocks tangled against the walls, great teetering stacks of dented metal buckets and foam kneeling mats and neon-yellow visibility vests (someone had written INSERT FOOT HERE, with an arrow pointing downwards, on the back of the top one), everything crusted in ragged layers of dried mud. A few people kept their bikes there. Cassie and Sam had been working from left to right; the left-hand side had that unmistakable post-search look, discreetly tidy and invaded.
Sam was kneeling at the back of the shed between a broken wheelbarrow and a heap of green tarpaulins, holding up the corner of the tarps with one gloved hand. We picked our way through the tools and squeezed in beside him.
The trowel had been jammed down behind the pile of tarps, between them and the wall; jammed hard enough that the point, when it caught halfway down, had gouged a rip into the tough material. There was no lightbulb and the shed was dim even with the big doors open, but Sam shone his torch on the handle: sc, big uneven letters with Gothic serifs, charred deep into the varnished wood.
There was a long silence; only the dog and the car alarm, on and on in the distance, with identical mechanical determination.
“I’d say the tarps aren’t used very often,” Sam said quietly. “They were behind everything else, under broken tools and all. And didn’t Cooper say she was probably wrapped in something, the day before she was found?”
I stood up and dusted bits of muck off my knees. “Right here,” I said. “Her family was going crazy looking for her, and she was right here all the time.” I had got up too fast, and for a moment the shed rocked around me and receded; there was a high white buzz in my ears.
“Who’s got the camera?” Cassie said. “We’ll need to photograph this before we bag it.”
“Sophie’s lot,” I said. “We’ll need them to go over this place, too.”
“And look,” Sam said. He shone the torch over at the right-hand side of the shed, picked out a big plastic bag half full of gloves, those green rubber gardening gloves with woven backs. “If I needed gloves, I’d just take a pair out of there and throw them back in afterwards.”
“Detectives!” Sophie yelled, somewhere outside. Her voice sounded tinny, compressed by the lowering sky. I jumped.
Cassie started to spring up, glanced back at the trowel. “Someone should probably—”
“I’ll stay,” Sam said. “You two go on ahead.”
Sophie was on the steps of the finds shed, a black-light in her hand. “Yeah,” she said, “definitely your crime scene. He tried to clean up, but…Come see.”
The two baby techs were crammed into a corner, the guy holding two big black spray bottles, Helen with a video camera; her eyes were large and stunned over her mask. The finds shed was too small for five and the sinister, clinical incongruity the techs had brought with them turned it into some makeshift guerrilla torture chamber: paper covering the windows, bare lightbulb swinging overhead, masked and gloved figures waiting for their moment to step forward. “Stay back by the desk,” Sophie said, “away from the shelves.” She slammed the door—everyone flinched—and pressed tape back into place over the cracks.
Luminol reacts with even the tiniest amount of blood, making it glow under ultraviolet light. You can paint over a splattered wall, scrub a carpet till it looks brand-new, keep yourself off the radar for years or decades; luminol will resurrect the crime in delicate, merciless detail. If only Kiernan and McCabe had had luminol, I thought, they could have commandeered a crop-spraying plane and misted the wood, and fought down a hysterical desire to laugh. Cassie and I pressed back against the desk, inches apart. Sophie motioned to the boy tech for the spray, flicked on her black-light and switched off the overhead bulb. In the sudden darkness I could hear all of us breathing, five sets of lungs fighting for the dusty air.
Hiss of a spray bottle, the video camera’s tiny red eye moving in. Sophie squatted and held her black-light close to the floor, near the shelves. “There,” she said.
I heard Cassie’s small, sharp intake of breath. The floor blazed blue-white with frantic patterns like some grotesque abstract painting: spattered arcs where blood had burst outwards, blotchy circles where it had pooled and started to dry, great swipes and scrub-marks where someone panting and desperate had tried to clean it away. It glowed like something radioactive from cracks between the floorboards, etched the rough grain of the wood in high relief. Sophie moved the black-light upwards and sprayed again: tiny droplets fanning across the bottom of the metal shelves, a smudge like a wild grabbing handprint. The darkness stripped away the finds shed, the messy papers and bags of broken pottery, and left us suspended in black space with the murder: luminescent, howling, replaying itself again and again before our eyes.
I said, “Jesus Christ.” Katy Devlin had died on this floor. We had sat in this shed and interviewed the killer, smack bang on the scene of the crime.
“No chance that’s bleach or something,” said Cassie. Luminol gives false positives for anything from household bleach through copper, but we both knew Sophie wouldn’t have called us in here until she was sure.
“We’ve swabbed,” Sophie said briefly. I could hear the dirty look in her voice. “Blood.”
Deep down, I think I had stopped believing in this moment. I had thought an awful lot about Kiernan, over the past few weeks: Kiernan, with his cozy seaside retirement and his haunted dreams. Only the luckiest of detectives makes it through a whole career without at least one of these cases, and some traitor part of me had insisted from the start that Operation Vestal—the last one in the world I would have chosen—was going to be mine. It took a strange, almost painful adjustment of focus to understand that our guy was no longer a faceless archetype, coalesced out of collective nightmare for one deed and then dissolved back into darkness; he was sitting in the canteen, just a few yards away, wearing muddy Docs and drinking tea under O’Gorman’s fishy eye.
“There you go,” Sophie said. She straightened up and switched on the overhead light. I blinked at the bland, innocent floor.
“Look,” said Cassie. I followed the tilt of her chin: on one of the bottom shelves was a plastic bag stuffed with more plastic bags, the big, clear, heavy kind the archaeologists used for storing pottery. “If the trowel was a weapon of opportunity…”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sophie said. “We’re going to have to test every bag in this whole bloody place.”
The windowpanes rattled and there was a sudden, wild thrumming on the roof of the shed: it had started to rain.