I waited. Finally he sighed, made an uneasy movement like a shrug. "Well. The way I remember it, I grabbed Cathal and told him to shut up or I'd hit him, and he stopped laughing and caught me by my T-shirt-he looked half crazy, for a second there I thought it was going to turn into a fight. But there was still someone laughing-not one of us; away in the trees. Sandra and Shane both started screaming-maybe I did, too, I don't know-but it just got louder and louder, this huge voice laughing… Cathal let goof me and shouted something about those kids, but it didn't sound-"
"Kids?" I said coolly. I was fighting a violent impulse to get the hell out of there. There was no reason why Jonathan should recognize me-I had just been some little kid hanging around, my hair had been a lot fairer then, I had a different accent and a different name-but I felt suddenly horribly naked and exposed.
"Ah, there were these kids from the estate-little kids, ten, twelve-who used to play in the wood. Sometimes they'd spy on us; throw things and then run, you know the way. But it didn't sound like any kid to me. It sounded like a man-a young fella, maybe, around our age. Not a child."
For a split second I almost took the opening he had offered. The flash of wariness had dissolved and the quick little whispers in the corners had risen to a silent shout, so close, close as breath. It was on the tip of my tongue:
"Did any of you go to see what it was?" I asked, instead.
Jonathan thought for a moment, his eyes hooded and intent. "No. Like I said, we were all in some kind of shock anyway, and this was more than we could handle. I was frozen, couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. It kept getting louder, till I thought the whole estate would be out to see what was going on, and we were still yelling… Finally it stopped-moved off into the woods, maybe, I don't know. Shane kept screaming, till Cathal smacked him across the back of the head and told him to shut up. We got out of there as fast as we could. I went home, nicked some of my da's booze and got drunk as a lord. I don't know what the others did."
So much for Cassie's mysterious wild animal, then. But there had quite possibly been someone in the woods that day, someone who, if he had seen the rape, had in all probability seen us, too; someone who might have been there again, a week or two later. "Do you have any suspicion as to who the person laughing might have been?" I asked.
"No. I think Cathal asked us about that, later. He said we needed to know who it was, how much they had seen. I've no idea."
I stood up. "Thanks for your time, Mr. Devlin," I said. "I may need to ask you a few more questions about this at some stage, but that's all for now."
"Wait," he said suddenly. "Do you think Sandra killed Katy?"
He looked very short and pathetic, standing there at the window with his hands balled in his cardigan pockets, but he still had a kind of forlorn dignity about him. "No," I said. "I don't. But we have to investigate every possibility thoroughly."
Jonathan nodded. "I suppose that means you've no real suspect," he said. "No, I know, I know, you can't tell me… If you're talking to Sandra, tell her I'm sorry. We did a terrible thing. I know it's a bit late to be saying that, I should've thought of it twenty years ago, but…tell her, all the same."
That evening I went out to Mountjoy to see Shane Waters. I'm sure Cassie would have come with me if I'd told her I was going, but I wanted to do this, as much as possible, on my own. Shane was rat-faced and nervy, with a repulsive little mustache, and he still had acne. He reminded me of Wayne the junkie. I tried every tactic I knew and promised him everything I could think of-immunity, early release on the armed robbery-banking on the fact that he wasn't smart enough to know what I could and couldn't deliver, but (always one of my blind spots) I'd underestimated the power of stupidity: with the infuriating mulishness of someone who has long ago given up trying to analyze possibilities and ramifications, Shane stuck to the one option he understood. "I don't know nothing," he told me, over and over, with a kind of anemic self-satisfaction that made me want to scream. "And you can't prove I do." Sandra, the rape, Peter and Jamie, even Jonathan Devlin: "Don't know what you're talking about, man." I finally gave up when I realized I was in serious danger of throwing something.
