“Only, like, a few days before it happened. I had said to Rosalind, she should make sure she had a, an alibi, you know? Because we knew you guys would look at the family, she had read somewhere that the family were always the main suspects. So this one night—I think it was Friday—we met up and she said to me, she’d arranged it so she and Jessica were sleeping over at their cousins’ house the next Monday and they’d be up till like two o’clock talking, so that would be the perfect night. All I had to do was make sure it was done before two o’clock; the, the police would be able to tell—”
His voice was shaking. “And what did you say?” Cassie asked.
“I…I guess I sort of panicked. I mean, it hadn’t seemed real up until then, you know? I guess I hadn’t thought we were actually going to do it. It was just something we talked about. It was sort of like, you know Sean Callaghan, Sean from the dig? He used to be in this band only they broke up, and he’s always talking about ‘Oh, when we get the band back together, when we make it big…’ And, I mean, he knows they’re never gonna do it, but talking about it makes him feel better.”
“We’ve all been in that band,” Cassie said, smiling.
Damien nodded. “It was like that. But then Rosalind said, ‘Next Monday,’ and suddenly I felt like…it just seemed like a totally crazy thing to do, you know? I said to Rosalind, maybe we should go to the police or something instead. But she freaked out. She kept saying, ‘I trusted you, I really trusted you….’”
“Trusted you,” Cassie said. “But not enough to make love with you?”
“No,” Damien said softly, after a moment. “No, see, she had. After we first decided about Katy…it changed everything for Rosalind, knowing I’d do that for her. We…she’d given up hoping she’d ever be able to, but…she wanted to try. I was working on the dig by then, so I could afford a good hotel—she deserved something nice, you know? The first time, she…she couldn’t. But we went back there the next week, and—” He bit his lips. He was trying not to cry, again.
“And after that,” Cassie said, “you could hardly change your mind.”
“See, that was the thing. That night, when I said maybe we should go to the police, Rosalind—she thought I’d only ever said I’d do it so I could…could get her into bed. She’s so fragile, she’s been hurt so badly—I couldn’t let her think I was just using her. Can you imagine what it would have done to her?”
Another silence. Damien wiped a hand hard across his eyes and got himself back under control.
“So you decided to go through with it,” Cassie said, evenly. He nodded, a painful, adolescent duck of the head. “How did you get Katy to come to the site?”
“Rosalind told her she had this friend on the dig who’d found a, a thing….” He mimed vaguely. “A locket. An old locket with a little painting of a dancer inside it. Rosalind told Katy it was really old and like magic or something, so she’d saved up all her money and bought it from the friend—me—as a present to bring Katy luck in ballet school. Only Katy would have to go get it herself, because this friend thought she was such a great dancer he wanted her autograph for when she was famous, and she’d have to go at night, because he wasn’t allowed to sell finds, so it had to be a secret.”
I thought of Cassie, as a child, hovering at the door of a groundskeeper’s shed: Do you want marvels? Children think differently, she had said. Katy had walked into danger the same way Cassie had: on the unmissable off-chance of magic.
“I mean, see what I mean?” Damien said, with a note of pleading in his voice. “She totally believed that people were, like, queuing up for her autograph.”
“Actually,” Sam said, “she’d every reason to believe that. Plenty of people had asked for her autograph after the fund-raiser.” Damien blinked at him.
“So what happened when she reached the finds shed?” Cassie asked.
He shrugged uncomfortably. “Just what I already told you. I told her the locket was in this box on a shelf behind her, and when she turned around to get it, I…I just picked up the rock and…It was self-defense, like you said, or I mean defending Rosalind, I don’t know what that’s called—”
“What about the trowel?” Sam asked heavily. “Was that self-defense, too?”
He stared like a bunny in headlights. “The…yeah. That. I mean, I couldn’t…you know.” He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t do it to her. She was, she looked…I still dream about it. I couldn’t do it. And then I saw the trowel on the desk, so I thought…”
“You were supposed to rape her? It’s OK,” Cassie said gently, at the flash of queasy panic on Damien’s face, “we understand how this happened. You’re not getting Rosalind into any trouble.”
Damien looked uncertain, but she held his eyes steadily. “I guess,” he said, after a moment. He had turned that nasty greenish-white again. “Rosalind said—she was just upset, but she said it wasn’t fair that Katy would never know what Jessica had been through, so in the end I said I’d…Sorry, I think I’m gonna…” He made a sound between a cough and a gag.
“Breathe,” Cassie said. “You’re fine. You just need some water.” She took away the shredded cup, found him a new one and filled it; she squeezed his shoulder while he sipped it, holding it in both hands, and took deep breaths.
“There you go,” she said, when a little of the color had come back to his face. “You’re doing great. So you were supposed to rape Katy, but instead you just used the trowel after she was dead?”
“I chickened out,” Damien said into the water cup, low and savage. “She’d done way worse stuff, but I chickened out.”
“Is that why”—Sam flicked the phone records with one finger—“the calls between you and Rosalind dry up after Katy died? Two calls on the Tuesday, the day after the killing; one early Wednesday morning, one the next Tuesday, then nothing. Was Rosalind annoyed with you for letting her down?”
“I don’t even know how she knew. I was scared to tell her. We’d said we wouldn’t talk for a couple of weeks, so the police—you guys—wouldn’t connect us up, but she texted me like a week later and said maybe we shouldn’t get back in touch because obviously I didn’t really care about her. I phoned her to find out what was wrong—and, yeah, of course she was mad!” He was babbling, his voice rising. “I mean, we’ll work it out—but, Jesus, she has every right to be mad at me. Katy wasn’t even found till Wednesday ’cause I panicked, that could’ve totally ruined her alibi, and I hadn’t…I hadn’t…She trusted me so much, she didn’t have anyone else, and I couldn’t even do one thing right ’cause I’m a fucking wimp.”
Cassie didn’t answer. Her back was to me; I saw the frail knobs of bone at the top of her spine and I felt grief like a solid weight dragging in my wrists and throat. I couldn’t listen any more. That little gem about Katy dancing for attention had knocked all the anger out of me, knocked me hollow. All I wanted to do was sleep, drugged obliterated sleep, let someone wake me when this day was over and the steady rain had washed all this away.
“You know something?” Damien said softly, just before I left. “We were going to get married. As soon as Jessica had, like, recovered enough that Rosalind could leave her there. I guess that’s not going to happen now, right?”
They were with him all day. I knew what they were doing, more or less: they had the gist of the story, now they were going back over it, filling in times and dates and details, checking for any tiny gap or inconsistency. Getting a confession is only the beginning; after that you need to waterproof it, second-guess defense lawyers and juries, make sure you get everything in writing while your guy is feeling talkative and before he has a chance to come up with alternative explanations. Sam is the painstaking type; they would do a good job.
Sweeney and O’Gorman came in and out of the incident room: Rosalind’s mobile records, more background interviews about her and about Damien. I sent them to the interview room. O’Kelly stuck his head in and scowled at me, and I pretended to be deep in phone tips. Halfway through the afternoon Quigley came in to share his thoughts on the case. Quite apart from the fact that I had no desire to talk to anyone, least of all him, this was a very bad sign: Quigley’s one talent is an unerring nose for weakness, and, apart from the odd embarrassing attempt to ingratiate himself, he had generally left me and Cassie alone and stuck to battening on newbies and burnouts and those whose careers had taken sudden nosedives. He pulled his chair too close to mine and hinted darkly that we should have caught our man weeks earlier, intimated that he would explain how this could have been done if I asked with sufficient deference, sadly pointed out my unconscionable psychological error in allowing Sam to take my place in the interrogation, inquired about Damien’s phone records and then cunningly suggested we should consider the possibility that the sister had been involved. I seemed to have forgotten how to get rid of him, and this increased my sense that his presence was not just annoying but horribly ominous. He was like a huge smug albatross waddling around my desk, squawking vacuously and crapping all over my paperwork.
Finally, like the bullies in school, he seemed to recognize that I was too wretched to provide value for money, so he bridled back to whatever he was supposed to be doing, an offended look spread over his large flat features. I gave up on any pretense of filing the phone tips and went to the window, where I spent the next few hours staring out at the rain and listening to the faint, familiar noises of the squad behind me: Bernadette laughing, phones ringing, the rise of arguing male voices suddenly muffled by a slamming door.
It was twenty past seven when I finally heard Cassie and Sam coming down the corridor. Their voices were too subdued and sporadic for me to make out any words, but I recognized the tones. It’s funny, the things a change of perspective can make you notice; I hadn’t realized how deep Sam’s voice was, till I listened to him interviewing Damien.
“I want to go home,” Cassie said as they came into the incident room. She dropped into a chair and rested her forehead on the heels of her hands.
“Nearly over,” Sam said. It wasn’t clear whether he meant the day or the investigation. He went around the table to his seat; on the way, to my utter surprise, he laid his hand briefly, lightly, on Cassie’s head.
“How did it go?” I asked, hearing the stilted note in my voice.
Cassie didn’t move. “Grand,” Sam said. He rubbed his eyes, grimacing. “I think we’re sorted, as far as Donnelly goes, anyway.”
The phone rang. I picked it up: Bernadette, telling us all to stay in the incident room, O’Kelly wanted to see us. Sam nodded and sat down heavily, feet planted apart, like a farmer coming in from a hard day’s work. Cassie lifted her head with an effort and fumbled in her back pocket for her rolled-up notebook.
Sort of characteristically, O’Kelly kept us waiting for a while. None of us spoke. Cassie doodled in her notebook, a spiky, vaguely sinister tree; Sam slumped at the table and gazed unseeingly at the crowded whiteboard; I leaned against the window frame looking out at the dark formal garden below, sudden little gusts of wind running through the bushes. Our positions around the room felt staged somehow, significant in some obscure but ominous way; the flicker and hum of the fluorescent lights had put me into an almost trancelike state and I was starting to feel as if we were in some existentialist play, where the ticking clock would stay at 7:38 forever and we would never be able to move from these predestined poses. When O’Kelly finally banged through the door, it came as something of a shock.
“First things first,” he said grimly, pulling up a chair and slapping a pile of paperwork on the table. “O’Neill. Remind me: what are you going to do with this whole Andrews mess?”
“Drop it,” Sam said quietly. He looked very tired. It wasn’t that he had bags under his eyes or anything like that, to anyone who didn’t know him he would have seemed fine, but his healthy rural ruddiness was gone and he looked somehow terribly young and vulnerable.
“Very good. Maddox, I’m docking you five days’ holiday.”
Cassie glanced up briefly. “Yes, sir.” I checked, covertly, to see whether Sam looked startled or whether he already knew what this was all about, but his face gave away nothing.
“And Ryan, you’re on desk duty until further notice. I don’t know how the hell you three works of art managed to pick up Damien Donnelly, but you can thank your lucky stars that you did, or your careers would be in even worse shape than they are. Are we clear?”
None of us had the energy to answer. I detached myself from the window frame and took a seat, as far from everyone else as possible.