In the Woods полностью

There was a pause. Then Cassie said, sounding a lot more awake, "Are you sure? You could have misinterpreted-"

"No. I'm positive. She tried to scream and one of them hit her. They were holding her down."

"Did they see you guys?"

"Yes. Yes. We ran, and they yelled after us."

"Fucking hell," she said. I could feel her slowly realizing: a raped little girl, a rapist in the family, two witnesses vanished. We were only a few steps away from an arrest warrant. "Fucking hell…Well done, Ryan. Do you know the girl's name?"

"Sandra something."

"The one you mentioned before? We'll start tracking her down tomorrow."

"Cassie," I said, "if this pans out, how the hell do we explain how we knew?"

"Listen, Rob, don't worry about that yet, OK? If we find Sandra, she'll be all the witness we need. Otherwise we go at Devlin hard, hit him with all the details, freak him out till he confesses… We'll find a way."

It almost undid me, her unquestioning assumption that the details would be correct. I had to swallow hard to keep my voice from cracking. "What's the statute of limitations on rape? Can we get him for that even if we don't have enough evidence on the other stuff?"

"Can't remember. We'll figure all that out in the morning. Are you going to be able to sleep, or are you too hyper?"

"Too hyper," I said. I was almost hysterically jittery; I felt as though someone had injected sherbet into my bloodstream. "Talk for a while?"

"Sure," Cassie said. I heard her curl up more comfortably in bed, sheets rustling; I found my vodka bottle and tucked the phone under my ear while I poured a shot.

She told me about a time when she was nine and convinced all the other local kids that a magic wolf lived in the hills near the village. "I said I'd found a letter under my floorboards telling me that he'd been there for four hundred years, and there was a map tied around his neck that would show us where to find treasure. I organized all the kids into a posse-God, I was a bossy little bitch-and every weekend we all went off up into the hills looking for this wolf. We were running away screaming every time we saw a sheepdog and falling into streams and having a brilliant time…"

I stretched out in bed and sipped my drink. The adrenaline was draining away and the low rhythms of Cassie's voice were soothing; I felt warm and comfortably exhausted, like a kid after a long day. "And it wasn't a German shepherd or anything, either," I'm sure I heard her say, "it was way too big and it looked completely different, wild," but I was already asleep.

In the morning we started trying to trace a Sandra or Alexandra Something who had lived in or near Knocknaree in 1984. It was one of the more frustrating mornings of my life. I rang the census bureau and got a nasal, uninterested woman who said she couldn't release any information to me without a court order. When I started getting passionate about the fact that a murdered child was involved, and she realized I wasn't going to go away, she told me I needed to speak to someone else, put me on hold (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, apparently played with one finger on a vintage Casio) and finally transferred me to an identical uninterested woman who went through the identical process.

Opposite me, Cassie was trying to get hold of the Dublin South-West electoral register for 1988-by which time I was pretty sure Sandra would have been old enough to vote, but probably not old enough to have moved away from home-with much the same results; I could hear a saccharine quacking sound telling her, at intervals, that her call was important to them and would be answered in rotation. She was bored and restless, changing position every thirty seconds: sitting cross-legged, perching on the table, swiveling her chair around and around until she got tangled up in the phone cord. I was blurry-eyed from lack of sleep, and sticky with sweat-the central heating was up to full, although it wasn't even a cold day-and just about ready to scream.

"Well, fuck this," I said finally, slamming down the phone. I knew Eine Kleine Nachtmusik would be playing in my head for weeks. "This is bloody pointless."

"Your irritation is important to us," Cassie droned, looking at me upside down with her head tipped backwards over her headrest, "and will be exacerbated in rotation. Thank you for holding."

"Even if these morons ever give us anything, it won't be on disk or in a database. It'll be five million shoeboxes full of paper and we'll have to go through every single fucking name. It'll take weeks."

"And she's probably moved and got married and emigrated and died anyway, but have you got a better idea?"

Suddenly I had a brainwave. "Actually, I do," I said, grabbing my coat. "Come on."

"Hello? Where are we going?"

I spun Cassie's chair around to face the door as I went past. "We are going to talk to Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald. Who's your favorite genius?"