He didn't offer me tea. I asked how they were getting on ("How do you think?"), explained that we were following up various leads, fended off his terse questions about specifics, asked if he had thought of anything else that might be relevant. The wild urgency I'd felt in the car had vanished as soon as he opened the door; I felt calmer and more lucid than I had in weeks. Margaret and Rosalind and Jessica could have come back at any moment, but somehow I was sure they wouldn't. The windows were grimy, and the late-afternoon sun filtering through them slid confusingly off glass-fronted cabinets and the polished wood of the dining table, giving the room a streaky, underwater luminescence. I could hear a clock ticking in the kitchen, heavy and achingly slow, but apart from that there wasn't a sound, even outside the house; all of Knocknaree might have gathered itself up and vanished into thin air, except me and Jonathan Devlin. It was just the two of us, facing each other across the little ringed coffee table, and the answers were so close I could hear them scuffling and twittering in the corners of the room; there was no need to hurry.
"Who's the Shakespeare fan?" I asked eventually, putting my notebook away. It wasn't relevant, obviously, but I thought it might lower his guard a little, and it had been intriguing me.
Jonathan frowned, irritated. "What?"
"Your daughters' names," I said. "Rosalind, Jessica, Katharine with an A; they're all out of Shakespeare comedies. I assumed it was deliberate."
He blinked, looking at me for the first time with something like warmth, and half-smiled. It was a rather engaging smile, pleased but shy, like a boy who's been waiting for someone to notice his new Scout badge. "Do you know, you're the first person ever to pick up on that? Yeah, that was me." I raised an encouraging eyebrow. "I went through a kind of self-improvement patch, I suppose you'd call it, after we got married-trying to work my way through all the things you're supposed to read: you know, Shakespeare, Milton, George Orwell… I wasn't mad about Milton, but Shakespeare-he was hard going, but I read my way through the lot, in the end. I used to tease Margaret that if the twins were a boy and a girl we'd have to call them Viola and Sebastian, but she said they'd be laughed out of it at school…"
His smile faded and he looked away. I knew this was my chance, now while he liked me. "They're beautiful names," I said. He nodded absently. "One more thing: are you familiar with the names Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?"
"Why?" Jonathan asked. I thought I caught a flicker of wariness in his eyes, but his back was to the window and it was hard to tell.
"They've been mentioned in the course of our investigation."
His eyebrows went down sharply and I saw his shoulders stiffen like a fighting dog's. "Are they suspects?"
"No," I said firmly. Even if they had been, I wouldn't have told him-not just because of procedure, but because he was way too volatile. That furious, spring-loaded tension: if he was innocent, of Katy's death at least, then one hint of uncertainty in my voice and he would probably have shown up on their doorsteps with an Uzi. "We're just following up every lead. Tell me about them."
He stared at me for another second; then he slumped, leaning back in the chair. "We were friends when we were kids. We've been out of touch for years now."
"When did you become friends?"
"When our families moved out here. Nineteen seventy-two, it would have been. We were the first three families on the estate, up at the top end-the rest was still being built. We had the whole place to ourselves. We used to play on the building sites, after the builders had gone home-it was like a huge maze. We would have been six, seven."
There was something in his voice, some deep, accustomed undercurrent of nostalgia, that made me realize what a lonely man he was; not just now, not just since Katy's death. "And how long did you remain friends?" I asked.
"Hard to say, exactly. We started going our separate ways when we were nineteen, about, but we kept in touch for a while longer. Why? What does this have to do with anything?"
"We have two separate witnesses," I said, keeping my voice expressionless, "who say that, in the summer of 1984, you, Cathal Mills and Shane Waters participated in the rape of a local girl."
He whipped upright, his hands jerking into fists. "What-what the
I gazed blandly back and let him finish. "I can't help noticing that you haven't denied the allegation," I said.
"And I haven't admitted to a bloody thing, either. Do I need a lawyer for this?"
No lawyer in the world would let him say another word. "Look," I said, leaning forward and switching to an easy, confidential tone, "I'm from the Murder squad, not Sex Crime. I'm only interested in a twenty-year-old rape if-"
"Alleged rape."
