I rang Missing Persons, and they came up with a possible ID almost immediately. Katharine Devlin, aged twelve, four foot nine, slim build, long dark hair, hazel eyes, reported missing from 29 Knocknaree Grove (I remembered that, suddenly: all the streets in the estate called Knocknaree Grove and Close and Place and Lane, everyone’s post constantly going astray) at 10:15 the previous morning, when her mother went to wake her and found her gone. Twelve and up is considered old enough to be a runaway, and she had apparently left the house of her own accord, so Missing Persons had been giving her a day to come home before sending in the troops. They already had the press release typed up, ready to send to the media in time for the evening news.
I was disproportionately relieved to have an ID, even a tentative one. Obviously I had known that a little girl—especially a healthy well-groomed little girl, in a place as small as Ireland—can’t turn up dead without someone coming forward to claim her; but a number of things about this case were giving me the willies, and I think a superstitious part of me had believed that this child would remain as nameless as if she had dropped from thin air and that her DNA would turn out to match the blood from my shoes and a variety of other X-Files–type stuff. We got an ID shot from Sophie—a Polaroid, taken from the least disturbing angle, to show to the family—and headed back to the Portakabins.
Hunt popped out of one of them as we approached, like the little man in old Swiss clocks. “Did you…I mean, it is definitely murder, is it? The poor child. Awful.”
“We’re treating it as suspicious,” I said. “What we’ll need to do now is have a quick word with your team. Then we’d like to speak to the person who found the body. The others can go back to work, as long as they stay outside the boundaries of the crime scene. We’ll speak with them later.”
“How will…Is there something to show where it—where they shouldn’t be? Tape, and all that.”
“There’s crime-scene tape in place,” I said. “If they stay outside it, they’ll be fine.”
“We’ll need to ask you for the lend of somewhere we can use as an onsite office,” Cassie said, “for the rest of the day and possibly a bit longer. Where would be best?”
“Better use the finds shed,” said Mark, materializing from wherever. “We’ll need the office, and everywhere else is soupy.” I hadn’t heard the term before, but the view through the Portakabin doors—layers of mud crazed with boot prints, low sagging benches, teetering heaps of farming implements and bicycles and luminous yellow vests that reminded me uncomfortably of my time in uniform—provided a fair explanation.
“As long as it has a table and a few chairs, that’ll be fine,” I said.
“Finds shed,” said Mark, and jerked his head towards a Portakabin.
“What’s up with Damien?” Cassie asked Hunt.
He blinked helplessly, mouth open in a caricature of surprise. “What…Damien who?”
“Damien on your team. Earlier you said that Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but Damien wouldn’t be able to show Detective Ryan around. Why’s that?”
“Damien’s one of the ones who found the body,” said Mark, while Hunt was catching up. “Gave them a shock.”
“Damien what?” said Cassie, writing.
“Donnelly,” Hunt said happily, on sure ground at last. “Damien Donnelly.”
“And he was with someone when he found the body?”
“Mel Jackson,” Mark said. “Melanie.”
“Let’s go talk to them,” I said.
The archaeologists were still sitting around the table in their makeshift canteen. There were fifteen or twenty of them; their faces turned towards the door, intent and synchronized as baby birds’, when we came in. They were all young, early twenties, and they were made younger by their grungy-student clothes and by a windblown, outdoorsy innocence that, although I was pretty sure it was illusory, made me think of kibbutzniks and Waltons. The girls wore no makeup and their hair was in plaits or ponytails, tightened to be practical rather than cutesy; the guys had stubble and peeling sunburns. One of them, with a guileless teacher’s-nightmare face and a woolly cap, had got bored and started melting stuff onto a broken CD with a lighter flame. The result (bent teaspoon, coins, smoke-packet cellophane, a couple of crisps) was surprisingly pleasing, like one of the less humorless manifestations of modern urban art. There was a food-stained microwave in one corner, and a small inappropriate part of me wanted to suggest that he put the CD in it, to see what would happen.
Cassie and I started to speak at the same time, but I kept going. Officially she was the primary detective, because she was the one who’d said, “We’ll have it”; but we have never worked that way, and the rest of the squad had grown used to seeing M & R scribbled under “Primary” on the case board, and I had a sudden, stubborn urge to make it clear that I was just as capable of leading this investigation as she was.
“Good morning,” I said. Most of them muttered something. Sculptor Boy said loudly and cheerfully, “Good afternoon!”—which, technically, it was—and I wondered which of the girls he was trying to impress. “I’m Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox. As you know, the body of a young girl was found on this site earlier today.”
One of the guys let his breath out in a little burst and caught it again. He was in a corner, sandwiched protectively between two of the girls, clutching a big steaming mug in both hands; he had short brown curls and a sweet, frank, freckled boy-band face. I was pretty sure this was Damien Donnelly. The others seemed subdued (except for Sculptor Boy) but not traumatized, but he was white under the freckles and holding the mug way too hard.
“We’ll need to talk to each of you,” I said. “Please don’t leave the site until we have. We may not have a chance to get to all of you for a while, so please bear with us if we need you to stay a bit late.”
“Are we, like, suspects?” said Sculptor Boy.
“No,” I said, “but we need to find out if you have any relevant information.”
“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, and slumped back in his chair. He started to melt a square of chocolate onto the CD, caught Cassie’s eye and put the lighter away. I envied him: I have often wanted to be one of those people who can take anything, the more horrific the better, as a deeply cool adventure.
“One other thing,” I said. “Reporters will probably start arriving at any minute. Do not talk to them. Seriously. Telling them anything, even something that seems insignificant, could damage our whole case. We’ll leave you our cards, in case at any point you think of anything we should know. Any questions?”
“What if they offer us, like, millions?” Sculptor Boy wanted to know.
The finds shed was less impressive than I’d expected. In spite of what Mark had said about taking away the valuable stuff, I think my mental image had included gold cups and skeletons and pieces of eight. Instead there were two chairs, a wide desk spread with sheets of drawing paper, and an incredible quantity of what appeared to be broken pottery, stuffed into plastic bags and crammed onto those perforated DIY metal shelves.
“Finds,” said Hunt, flapping a hand at the shelves. “I suppose…Well, no, maybe some other time. Some very nice jettons and clothing hooks.”
“We’d love to see them another day, Dr. Hunt,” I said. “Could you give us about ten minutes and then send Damien Donnelly in to us?”
“Damien,” said Hunt, and wandered off. Cassie shut the door behind him. I said, “How on earth does he run a whole excavation?” and started clearing away the drawings: fine, delicately shaded pencil sketches of an old coin, from various angles. The coin itself, sharply bent on one side and patchy with encrustations of earth, sat in the middle of the desk in a Ziploc bag. I found space for them on top of a filing cabinet.
“By hiring people like that Mark guy,” Cassie said. “I bet he’s plenty organized. What was with the hair clip?”
I squared off the edges of the drawings. “I think Jamie Rowan was wearing one that matched that description.”
“Ah,” she said. “I wondered. Is that in the file, do you know, or do you just remember it?”
“What difference does that make?” It came out sounding snottier than I’d intended.
“Well, if there’s a link, we can’t exactly keep it to ourselves,” Cassie said reasonably. “Just for example, we’re going to have to get Sophie to check that blood against the ’84 samples, and we’re going to have to tell her why. It would make things a whole lot simpler to explain if the link was right there in the file.”
“I’m pretty sure it is,” I said. The desk rocked; Cassie found a blank sheet of paper and folded it to wedge under the leg. “I’ll double-check tonight. Hold off on talking to Sophie till then, OK?”
“Sure,” said Cassie. “If it’s not there, we’ll find a way round it.” She tested the desk again: better. “Rob, are you OK with this case?”
I didn’t answer. Through the window I could see the morgue guys wrapping the body in plastic, Sophie pointing and gesturing. They barely had to brace themselves to lift the stretcher; it looked almost weightless as they carried it away towards the waiting van. The wind rattled the glass sharply in my face and I spun round. I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to shout, “Shut the hell up” or “Fuck this case, I quit” or something, something reckless and unreasonable and dramatic. But Cassie was just leaning against the desk and waiting, looking at me with steady brown eyes, and I have always had an excellent brake system, a gift for choosing the anticlimactic over the irrevocable every time.
“I’m fine with it,” I said. “Just kick me if I get too moody.”
“With pleasure,” Cassie said, and grinned at me. “God, though, look at all this stuff…. I hope we do get a chance to have a proper look. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was little, did I ever tell you?”
“Only about a million times,” I said.
“Lucky you’ve got a goldfish memory, then, isn’t it? I used to dig up the back garden, but all I ever found was a little china duck with the beak broken off.”
“It looks like I should have been the one digging out the back,” I said. Normally I would have made some remark about law enforcement’s loss being archaeology’s gain, but I was still feeling too nervy and dislocated for any decent level of back and forth; it would only have come out wrong. “I could have had the world’s biggest private collection of pottery bits.”
“Now there’s a pick-up line,” said Cassie, and dug out her notebook.