In the Woods полностью

"The beginning of that summer: June of '84. Apparently Jonathan went out with some girl for a while soon after-must be Claire Gallagher-and Sandra thinks he returned the favor. She had a big row with Cathal about that, but the whole thing had her so confused that eventually she just decided to forget it."

"Jesus," I said. "Apparently I was living in the middle of The Jerry Springer Show. 'Teenage Wife-Swappers Speak Out.'" Only a few yards and a few years away, Jamie and Peter and I had been giving each other dead arms and aiming lawn darts at the Carmichaels' horrible yappy Jack Russell. All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space. I thought of the dark strata of archaeology underfoot; of the fox outside my window, calling out to a city that barely overlapped with mine.

"Then, though," Cassie said, "Shane found out and wanted to play, too. Cathal was of course fine with this, but Sandra wasn't. She didn't like Shane-'that spotty little wanker,' she called him. I get the feeling he was a bit of a reject, but the other two hung around with him out of habit, because they'd all been mates since they were tiny kids. Cathal kept trying to convince her-I can't wait to find out what Cathal's internet history looks like, can you?-she kept saying she'd think about it, and finally they jumped her in the wood, Cathal and our boy Jonathan held her down and Shane raped her. She's not sure of the exact date, but she knows she had bruises on her wrists and she was worried about whether they'd be gone by the time school started back, so it has to have been sometime in August."

"Did she see us?" I asked, keeping my voice level. The fact that this story was starting to dovetail with my own was disorienting but also, horribly, tremendously exciting.

Cassie looked at me; her face gave away nothing, but I knew she was checking whether I was OK with all this. I tried to look casual. "Not properly. She was…well, you know the state she was in. But she remembers hearing someone in the undergrowth, and then the guys yelling. Jonathan ran after you, and when he came back he said something like, 'Bloody kids.'"

She tapped ash out of the window. I could tell by the set of her shoulders that she hadn't finished. Across the road on the dig, Mark and Mel and a couple of the others were doing something with rods and yellow measuring tapes, yelling back and forth. Mel laughed, hearty and clear, and called, "You wish!"

"And?" I said, when I couldn't stand it any longer. I was trembling like a gun dog holding a point. As I say, I don't hit suspects, but my mind was racing with Sipowicz-style images of slamming Devlin up against a wall, screaming into his face, punching answers out of him.

"You know something?" Cassie said. "She didn't even break up with Cathal Mills. She went out with him for another few months, till he dumped her."

I almost said, Is that all? "I think the statute of limitations is different if she was a minor," I said instead. My mind was going a hundred miles an hour, flying through interrogation strategies. "We might still have time. He sounds like the kind of guy I'd love to arrest in the middle of a board meeting."

Cassie shook her head. "There's not a chance she'll press charges. She thinks it was basically all her own fault for sleeping with him in the first place."

"Let's go talk to Devlin," I said, starting the car.

"Just a sec," Cassie said. "There's something else. It might be nothing, but…After they finished, Cathal-honestly, I think we should investigate him anyway, we're bound to find something we can charge him with-Cathal said, 'That's my girl,' and gave her a kiss. She was sitting there shaking and trying to pull her clothes straight and get her head together. And they heard something in the trees, just a few yards away. Sandra says she's never heard anything like it. Like an enormous bird flapping its wings, she said, only she's positive it was a voiced sound, a call. They all jumped and yelled, and then Cathal shouted something like, 'Those fucking kids messing about again,' and threw a stone into the trees, but it kept going. It was in the shadows, they couldn't see anything. They were paralyzed, totally freaked out, they all just sat there screaming. Finally it stopped and they heard it moving away into the woods-it sounded big, she said, at least the size of a person. They legged it home. And there was a smell, Sandra says, a strong animal smell-like goats or something, or what you get at the zoo."

"What the hell?" I said. I was utterly taken aback.

"It wasn't you guys messing, then."