“Would that be the protest on the twentieth of March?” Sam asked, flipping through papers and rubbing the back of his head. He was doing solid country cop, friendly and not too quick.
“Yeah, I think so. It was outside the government buildings, if that helps.” Damien seemed almost eerily at ease by this point, leaning forward across the table and playing with his coffee cup, chatty and eager as if this were a job interview. I’d seen this before, especially with first-time criminals: they’re not used to thinking of us as the enemy, and once the shock of being caught has worn off they turn light-headed and helpful with the sheer relief of the long tension breaking.
“And that’s when you joined the campaign?”
“Yeah. It’s a really important site, Knocknaree, it’s been inhabited ever since—”
“Mark told us,” Cassie said, grinning. “As you can imagine. Was that when you met Rosalind Devlin, or did you know her before?”
A small, confused pause. “What?” Damien said.
“She was on the sign-up table that day. Was that the first time you’d met her?”
Another pause. “I don’t know who you mean,” Damien said finally.
“Come on, Damien,” Cassie said, leaning forward to try to catch his eye; he was staring into his coffee cup. “You’ve been doing great all the way; don’t flake out on me now, OK?”
“There are calls and texts to Rosalind all over your mobile-phone records,” Sam said, pulling out the sheaf of highlighted pages and putting them in front of Damien. He gazed at them blankly.
“Why wouldn’t you want us knowing you guys were friends?” Cassie asked. “There’s no harm in that.”
“I don’t want her dragged into this,” Damien said. His shoulders were starting to tense up.
“We’re not trying to drag anyone into anything,” Cassie said gently. “We just want to figure out what happened.”
“I already told you.”
“I know, I know. Bear with us, OK? We just have to clear up the details. Is that when you first met Rosalind, at that protest?”
Damien reached out and touched the mobile records with one finger. “Yeah,” he said. “When I signed up. We got talking.”
“You got on well, so you stayed in touch?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
They backed off then. When did you start work at Knocknaree? Why’d you pick that dig? Yeah, it sounded fascinating to me, too…. Gradually Damien relaxed again. It was still raining, thick curtains of water sliding down the windows. Cassie went for more coffee, came back with a look of guilty mischief and a packet of custard creams swiped from the canteen. There was no hurry, now that Damien had confessed. The only thing he could do was demand a lawyer, and a lawyer would advise him to tell them exactly what they were trying to find out; an accomplice meant shared blame, confusion, all a defense attorney’s favorite things. Cassie and Sam had all day, all week, as long as it took.
“How soon did you and Rosalind start going out?” Cassie asked, after a while.
Damien had been folding the corner of a phone-record page into little pleats, but at this he glanced up, startled and wary. “What?…We didn’t—um, we aren’t. We’re just friends.”
“Damien,” Sam said reproachfully, tapping the pages. “Look at this. You’re ringing her three, four times a day, texting her half a dozen times, talking for hours in the middle of the night—”
“God, I’ve done that,” Cassie said reminiscently. “The amount of phone credit you go through when you’re in love…”
“You don’t ring any of your other friends a quarter as much. She’s ninety-five percent of your phone bill, man. And there’s nothing wrong with that. She’s a lovely girl, you’re a nice young fella; why shouldn’t you go out together?”
“Hang on,” Cassie said suddenly, sitting up. “Was Rosalind involved in this? Is that why you don’t want to talk about her?”
“No!” Damien almost shouted. “Leave her alone!”
Cassie and Sam stared, eyebrows raised.
“Sorry,” he muttered after a moment, slumping in his chair. He was bright red. “I just…I mean, she didn’t have anything to do with it. Can’t you leave her out of it?”
“Then why the big secret, Damien?” Sam asked. “If she wasn’t involved?”
He shrugged. “Because. We didn’t tell anyone we were going out.”
“Why not?”
“We just didn’t. Rosalind’s dad would’ve been mad.”
“He didn’t like you?” Cassie asked, with just enough surprise to be flattering.
“No, it wasn’t that. She’s not allowed to have boyfriends.” Damien glanced nervously between them. “Could you—you know…could you not tell him? Please?”
“How mad would he have been,” Cassie said softly, “exactly?”
Damien picked pieces off his Styrofoam cup. “I just didn’t want to get her into trouble.” But the flush hadn’t died away and he was breathing fast; there was something there.
“We’ve a witness,” Sam said, “who told us Jonathan Devlin may recently have hit Rosalind at least once. Do you know if that’s true?”
A fast blink, a shrug. “How would I know?”
Cassie shot Sam a quick look and backed off again. “So how did you guys manage to meet up without her dad finding out?” she asked confidentially.
“At first we just met in town on weekends and went for coffee and stuff. Rosalind told them she was meeting her friend Karen, from school? So they were OK with that. Later, um…later we sometimes met at night. Out on the dig. I’d go out there and wait till her parents were asleep and she could sneak out of the house. We’d sit on the altar stone, or sometimes in the finds shed if it was raining, and just talk.”
It was easy to imagine, easy and seductively sweet: a blanket around their shoulders and a country sky packed with stars, and moonlight making the rough landscape of the dig into a delicate, haunted thing. No doubt the secrecy and the complications had only added to the romance of it all. It carried the primal, irresistible power of myth: the cruel father, the fair maiden imprisoned in her tower, hedged in by thorns and calling for rescue. They had made their own nocturnal, stolen world, and to Damien it must have been a very beautiful one.
“Or some days she’d come to the dig, maybe bring Jessica, and I’d give them the tour. We couldn’t really talk much, in case someone saw, but—just to see each other…. And this one time, back in May”—he smiled a little, down at his hands, a shy, private smile—“see, I had a part-time job, making sandwiches in this deli? So I saved up enough that we could go away for a whole weekend. We took the train up to Donegal and stayed in this little B&B, we signed in like—like we were married. Rosalind told her parents she was spending the weekend with Karen, to study for her exams.”
“And then what went wrong?” Cassie asked, and I caught that tautening in her voice again. “Did Katy find out about you two?”
Damien glanced up, startled. “What? No. Jesus, no. We were really careful.”
“What, then? She was bothering Rosalind? Little sisters can be pretty annoying.”
“No—”
“Rosalind was jealous of all the attention Katy was getting? What?”
“No! Rosalind’s not like that—she was happy for Katy! And I wouldn’t kill someone just for…I’m not—I’m not crazy!”
“And you’re not violent, either,” Sam said, slapping another heap of paper in front of Damien. “These are interviews about you. Your teachers remember you staying far away from fights, not starting them. Would you say that’s accurate?”
“I guess—”