In the Woods полностью

He shook his head and wagged a finger at me, grinning: Nice try. "Who told you there was a rape?"

"Come on, man," I said, grinning back, "you know I can't tell you that. Witnesses."

Cathal cracked his gum slowly and stared at me. "OK," he said finally. The traces of the smile were still hanging at the corners of his mouth. "Let's put it this way. There was no rape, but if-let's just say-there had been, Jonner would never in a million years have had the balls to think of it. And, if it had ever happened, he would've spent the next few weeks so scared he was practically shitting his pants, convinced that someone had seen it and was going to go to the cops, babbling on about how we were all going to jail, wanting to turn himself in… The guy doesn't have the nerve to kill a kitten, never mind a kid."

"And you?" I said. "You wouldn't have been worried that these witnesses would rat you out?"

"Me?" The grin broadened again. "Not a chance, mate. If, hypothetically, any of this had ever happened, I would've been fucking delighted with myself, because I would have known I was going to get away with it."

"I vote we arrest him," I said, that evening in Cassie's. Sam was in Ballsbridge, at a champagne-reception-cum-dance for his cousin's twenty-first, so it was just the two of us, sitting on the sofa drinking wine and deciding how to go after Jonathan Devlin.

"For what?" Cassie demanded, reasonably. "We can't get him on the rape. We might just possibly maybe have enough to pull him in for questioning on Peter and Jamie, except we don't have a witness who can put them at the rape scene, so we can't show a motive. Sandra didn't see you guys, and if you come forward, it'll compromise your involvement in this whole case, besides which O'Kelly will cut off your bollocks and use them for Christmas decorations. And we don't have a single thing linking Jonathan to Katy's death-just some stomach trouble that might or might not have been abuse and might or might not have been him. All we can do is ask him to come in and talk to us."

"I'd just like to get him out of that house," I said slowly. "I'm worried about Rosalind." It was the first time I had put this unease into words. It had been building in me, gradually and only half-acknowledged, ever since that first hurried phone call she had made, but over the past two days it had risen to a pitch I couldn't ignore.

"Rosalind? Why?"

"You said our guy won't kill unless he feels threatened. That fits with everything we've heard. According to Cathal, Jonathan was petrified that we'd tell someone about the rape; so he goes after us. Katy decided to stop getting sick, maybe threatened to tell, so he kills her. If he finds out Rosalind's been talking to me…"

"I don't think you need to be too worried about her," Cassie said. She finished her wine. "We could be completely wrong about Katy; it's all guesswork. And I wouldn't put too much weight on anything Cathal Mills says. He strikes me as a psychopath, and they lie easier than they tell the truth."

I raised my eyebrows. "You only met him for about five minutes. What, you're diagnosing the guy? He just struck me as a prick."

She shrugged. "I'm not saying I'm sure about Cathal. But they're surprisingly easy to spot, if you know how."

"Is this what they taught you at Trinity?"

Cassie held out her hand for my glass, got up to refill them. "Not exactly," she said, at the fridge. "I knew a psychopath once."

Her back was to me, and if there was an odd undertone in her voice I didn't catch it. "I did see this thing on the Discovery Channel where they said up to five percent of the population are psychopaths," I said, "but most of them don't break the law so they never get diagnosed. How much would you bet that half the government-"

"Rob," Cassie said. "Shut up. Please. I'm trying to tell you something here."

This time I did hear the strain. She came over and gave me my glass, took hers to the window and leaned back on the sill. "You wanted to know why I dropped out of college," she said, very evenly. "In second year I made friends with this guy in my class. He was popular, quite good-looking and very charming and intelligent and interesting-I didn't fancy him or anything like that, but I guess I was flattered that he was paying all this attention to me. We used to skip all our classes and spend hours over coffee. He brought me presents-cheap ones, and some of them looked used, but we were broke students, and hey, it's the thought that counts, right? Everyone thought it was sweet, how close we were."