Damien was huddled in his chair, shoulders rigid, his cup of tea steaming away ignored on the table. When I cautioned him, he stared at me as if I were speaking Urdu.
The month since Katy’s death hadn’t been kind to him. He was wearing khaki combats and a baggy gray sweatshirt, but I could see that he had lost weight, and it made him seem gangly and somehow shorter than he actually was. The boy-band prettiness was looking a little ragged around the edges—purplish bags under his eyes, a vertical crease starting to form between his eyebrows; the youthful bloom that should have lasted him another few years was fading fast. The change was subtle enough that I hadn’t noticed it back on the dig, but now it gave me pause.
We started with easy questions, things he could answer with no need to worry. He was from Rathfarnham, right? Studying at Trinity? Just finished second year? How had the exams gone? Damien answered in monosyllables and twisted the hem of his sweatshirt around his thumb, clearly dying to know why we were asking but afraid to find out. Cassie steered him onto archaeology and gradually he relaxed; he disentangled himself from the sweatshirt and started drinking his tea and speaking in full sentences, and they had a long, happy conversation about the various finds that had turned up on the dig. I left them to it for at least twenty minutes before intervening (tolerant smile: “Hate to say this, guys, but we should probably get back to business before we all three get in trouble”).
“Ah, come on, Ryan, two seconds,” Cassie begged. “I’ve never seen a ring brooch. What does it look like?”
“They said it’s probably going to be in the National Museum,” Damien told her, flushed with pride. “It’s kind of this big, and it’s bronze, and it’s got a pattern incised into it….” He made vague squiggly motions, presumably intended to indicate an incised pattern, with one finger.
“Draw it for me?” Cassie asked, pushing her notebook and pen across the table to him. Damien drew obediently, brow furrowed in concentration.
“Sort of like this,” he said, giving Cassie back the notebook. “I can’t draw.”
“Wow,” Cassie said reverently. “And you found it? If I found something like that, I think I’d explode or have a heart attack or something.”
I looked over her shoulder: a broad circle with what appeared to be a pin across the back, decorated with fluid, balanced curves. “Pretty,” I said. Damien was indeed left-handed. His hands still looked a size too big for his body, like a puppy’s paws.
“Hunt’s out,” O’Kelly said, in the corridor. “Original statement says he was having his tea and watching telly with his wife all the Monday night, till he went to bed at eleven. Bloody documentaries, they watched, something about meerkats and one about Richard III—he told us every bloody detail, whether we wanted to know or not. The wife says the same, and the telly guide backs them up. And the neighbor has a dog, one of those little shites that barks all night; he says he heard Hunt shouting out the window at it around one in the morning. Why he wouldn’t tell the little fucker to shut up himself…. He’s sure of the date because it was the day they got the new decking in—says the workmen upset the dog. I’m sending Einstein home, before he has me driven mental. It’s a two-horse race, lads.”
“How’s Sam doing with Mark?” I asked.
“Getting nowhere. Hanly’s being snotty as fuck and sticking to the shag-fest story; the girlfriend’s backing him up. If they’re lying, they’re not going to crack any time soon. And he’s right-handed, for sure. How about your boy?”
“Left,” Cassie said.
“There’s our odds-on favorite, then. But that’s not going to be enough. I talked to Cooper….” O’Kelly’s face pulled into a disgusted grimace. “Position of the victim, position of the assailant, balance of probabilities—more shite than a pigsty, but what it boils down to is he thinks our man’s left-handed but he’s not willing to say for definite. He’s like a bloody politician. How’s Donnelly doing?”
“Nervous,” I said.
O’Kelly slapped the door of the interview room. “Good. Keep him that way.”
We went back in and set about making Damien nervous. “OK, guys,” I said, pulling up my chair, “time to get down to business. Let’s talk about Katy Devlin.”
Damien nodded attentively, but I saw him brace himself. He took a sip of his tea, though it had to be cold by now.
“When did you first see her?”
“I guess when we were like three quarters of the way up the hill? Higher up than the cottage, anyway, and the Portakabins. See, because of the way the hill slopes—”
“No,” Cassie said, “not the day you found her body. Before that.”
“Before…?” Damien blinked at her, took another sip of tea. “No—um, I didn’t; I hadn’t. Met her before that, that day.”
“You’d never even seen her before?” Cassie’s tone hadn’t changed, but I felt the sudden bird-dog stillness in her. “Are you sure? Think hard, Damien.”
He shook his head vehemently. “No. I swear. I’d never seen her in my entire life.”
There was a moment of silence. I gave Damien what I hoped was a look of mild interest, but my head was whirling.
I had cast my vote for Mark not out of sheer contrariness, as you might think, nor because something about him annoyed me in ways I didn’t care to explore. I suppose when you come down to it, given the choices available, I simply wanted it to be him. I had never been able to take Damien seriously—not as a man, not as a witness and certainly not as a suspect. He was such an abject little wimp, nothing to him but curls and stammers and vulnerability, you could have blown him away like a dandelion clock; the thought that all this past month might have stemmed from someone like him was outrageous. Mark, whatever we might think of each other, made an opponent and a goal worth having.
But this: it was such a pointless lie. The Devlin girls had hung around the dig often enough that summer, and they were hardly inconspicuous; all the other archaeologists had remembered them; Mel, who had stayed a safe distance from Katy’s body, had known her straight away. And Damien had given tours of the site; he was more likely than any of them to have spoken to Katy, spent time with her. He had bent over her body, supposedly to see if she was breathing (and even that much courage, I realized, was out of character). He had no reason in the world to deny having seen her before, unless he was clumsily dodging a trap we had never set; unless the thought of being linked to her in any way scared him so badly that he couldn’t think straight.
“OK,” Cassie said, “what about her father—Jonathan Devlin? Are you a member of Move the Motorway?” and Damien took a big gulp of cold tea and started nodding again, and we skated deftly away from the subject before he had a chance to realize what he had said.
Around three o’clock, Cassie and Sam and I went out for takeaway pizza—Mark was starting to bitch about being hungry, and we wanted to keep him and Damien happy. Neither of them was under arrest; they could decide to walk out of the building at any moment, and there would be nothing we could do to stop them. We were trading, as we so often do, on the basic human desires to please authority and to be a good guy; and, while I was pretty sure these would keep Damien in the interview room indefinitely, I was far from convinced about Mark.
“How are you getting on with Donnelly?” Sam asked me, in the pizza place. Cassie was up at the counter, leaning over it and laughing with the guy who had taken our order.
I shrugged. “Hard to tell. How’s Mark?”
“Raging. He says he’s spent half the year working his arse off for Move the Motorway, why would he risk scuppering the whole thing by killing the chairman’s kid? He thinks this is all political….” Sam winced. “About Donnelly,” he said, looking not at me but at Cassie’s back. “If he’s our man. What would…does he have a motive?”
“Not that we’ve found so far,” I said. I did not want to get into this.
“If anything does come up…” Sam shoved his fists deeper into his trouser pockets. “Anything you think I might want to know. Could you call me?”
“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t eaten all day, but food was the last thing on my mind; all I wanted was to get back to Damien, and the pizza seemed to be taking hours. “Sure.”