Her voice came to me thin and meaningless through the huge red roaring in my head. All I could see was Jonathan, brows down and chin braced like a boxer, cornered and waiting only a few feet away. I reefed my arm forward with all my strength and felt her stumble back as her grip slipped away, but the chair got under my feet and before I could kick it aside and reach him she had recovered, caught my other arm and twisted it up behind my back, one fast, clinical move. I gasped.
"Are you out of your fucking mind?" she said straight into my ear, low and furious. "He
The words hit me like a slap of cold water in the face. I knew that even if she was wrong there was nothing in the world I could do about it, and it left me breathless, helpless. I felt as if I had been filleted.
Cassie felt the fight drain out of me. She shoved me away and stepped back swiftly, her hands still tense and ready. We stared at each other across the room like enemies, both of us breathing hard.
There was something dark and spreading on her lower lip, and after a moment I realized it was blood. For a hideous, free-falling second I thought I had hit her. (Later I found out that I hadn't, in fact: when I pulled away, the recoil flung one of her wrists back to smack her in the mouth, cutting her lip on her front teeth; not that this makes much of a difference.) It brought me back to myself, a little. "Cassie-" I said.
She ignored me. "Mr. Devlin," she said coolly, as if nothing at all had happened; there was only the faintest hint of a tremor in her voice. Jonathan-I had forgotten he was there-moved slowly out of the corner, his eyes still on me. "We'll be releasing you without charge for now. But I would strongly advise you to stay where we can find you and not to attempt to contact your rape victim in any way. Understood?"
"Yeah," Devlin said, after a moment. "Fine." He yanked the chair upright, pulled his tangled coat off the back and threw it on in quick, angry jabs. At the door he turned and gave me a hard look, and I thought for a moment he was going to say something, but he changed his mind and left, shaking his head disgustedly. Cassie followed him out and whipped the door shut behind her; it was too heavy for a proper slam, it closed with an unsatisfying thump.
I sank into a chair and put my face in my hands. I had never done anything like this before, ever. I abhor physical violence, I always have; the very thought makes me flinch. Even when I was a prefect, with arguably more power and less accountability than any adult outside of small South American countries, I never once caned anyone. But a minute ago I had been tussling with Cassie like some drunk in a bar brawl, ready to dogfight Jonathan Devlin on the interview-room floor, swept away by the overwhelming desire to knee him in the guts and beat his face to bloody pulp. And I had hurt Cassie. I wondered, with detached, lucid interest, whether I was losing my mind.
After a few minutes Cassie came back in, shut the door and leaned against it, hands shoved into her jeans pockets. Her lip had stopped bleeding.
"Cassie," I said, rubbing my hands over my face. "I'm really sorry. Are you OK?"
"What the hell was that?" She had a hot, bright spot of color on each cheekbone.
"I thought he knew something. I was sure." My hands were shaking so hard it looked phony, like an inept actor simulating shock. I clasped them together to stop it.
Eventually she said, very quietly, "Rob, you can't keep this up." I didn't answer. After a long time, I heard the door close behind her.
I got drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I'd been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed sickeningly with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally I realized that, while the nausea showed no signs of getting better, it probably wasn't going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on top of the covers without taking off my clothes.
My dreams were uneasy ones, with a clogged, tainted quality to them. Something thrashing and yowling in a burlap bag, laughter and a lighter moving closer. Shattered glass on the kitchen floor, and someone's mother was sobbing. I was a trainee again in some lonely border county, and Jonathan Devlin and Cathal Mills were hiding out in the hills with guns and a hunting dog, living wild and we had to catch them, me and two Murder detectives tall and cold as waxworks, our boots mired deep in treacly mud. I half woke fighting the bedclothes, sheets pulled away from the mattress into sweaty tangles, and was dragged down into sleep again even as I realized I had been dreaming.
