"Cathal says…" She flipped pages. "Cathal Mills says you were terrified they'd go to the cops. He says you were, quote, so scared you were practically shitting your pants, unquote."
No response. He settled deeper into the chair, arms folded, solid as a wall.
"What'd you do to stop them turning you in?"
"Nothing."
Cassie laughed. "Ah, come on, Jonathan. We know who those witnesses were."
"You've one up on me, then." His face was still braced into hard angles, giving away nothing, but a red flush was building across his cheeks: he was getting angry.
"And only a few days after the rape," Cassie said, "two of them disappeared." She got up-unhurriedly, stretching-and crossed the room to the wall of photos.
"Peter Savage," she said, laying a finger on his school picture. "I'd like you to look at the photograph, please, Mr. Devlin." She waited until Jonathan's head came up and he stared, defiantly, at the picture. "People say he was a born leader. He might have been heading up the Move the Motorway campaign with you, if he'd lived. His parents can't move house, do you know that? Joseph Savage got offered his dream job, a few years back, but it would've involved moving to Galway, and they couldn't bear the thought that Peter might come home someday and find them gone."
Jonathan began to say something, but she didn't give him time. "Germaine Rowan"-her hand moved to the next picture-"a.k.a. Jamie. She wanted to be a vet when she grew up. Her mother hasn't moved a thing in her room. She dusts it every Saturday. When the phone numbers went to seven digits, back in the nineties-remember that?-Alicia Rowan went into Telecom Éireann's head office and begged them, in tears, to let her keep the old six-digit one, in case someday Jamie tried to ring home."
"We had nothing-" Jonathan started, but she cut him off again, her voice rising, bearing down on his.
"And Adam Ryan." The photo of my scraped knees. "His parents moved away, because of the publicity and because they were afraid that whoever did this would come back for him. They've dropped off the radar. But wherever he is, he's been living with the fallout every day of his life. You love Knocknaree, right, Jonathan? You love being part of a community where you've lived since you were a tiny kid? Adam might have felt the same way, if he'd got the chance. But now he's out there somewhere, could be anywhere in the world, and he can't ever come home."
The words tolled through me like the lost bells of some underwater city. She was good, Cassie: just for a split second, I was filled with such a wild and utter desolation that I could have thrown back my head and howled like a dog.
"Do you know how the Savages and Alicia Rowan feel about you, Jonathan?" Cassie demanded. "They envy you. You had to bury your daughter, but the only thing worse than that is never having the chance to do it. Remember how you felt the day Katy was missing? They've felt that way for twenty years."
"All these people deserve to know what happened, Mr. Devlin," I said quietly. "And it's not just for their sakes, either. We've been working on the assumption that the two cases are connected. If we're wrong, then we need to know that, or Katy's killer could slip straight through our fingers."
Something shot across Jonathan's eyes-something, I thought, like a strange, sick mixture of horror and hope, but it was gone too quickly for me to be sure.
"What happened that day?" Cassie asked. "The fourteenth of August, 1984. The day Peter and Jamie vanished."
Jonathan settled deeper into the chair and shook his head. "I've told you all I know."
"Mr. Devlin," I said, leaning forward to him, "it's easy to understand how this happened. You were utterly terrified about the whole thing with Sandra."
"You knew she was no threat," Cassie said. "She was mad about Cathal, she wouldn't say anything to get him into trouble-and if she did, it would be her word against all of yours. Juries have a tendency to doubt rape victims, especially rape victims who've had consensual sex with two of their assailants. You could call her a slut and be home free. But those kids…one word from them could land you in jail at any minute. You could never feel safe, as long as they were around."
She left the wall, pulled a chair close beside him and sat down. "You didn't go into Stillorgan at all that day," she said softly, "did you?"
Jonathan shifted, a tiny squaring of the shoulders. "Yeah," he said, heavily. "I did. Myself and Cathal and Shane. To the pictures."
"What'd you see?"
"Whatever I told the cops at the time. It's been twenty years."
