In the Woods полностью

She slung her satchel over the back of her chair. I could tell, out of the corner of my eye, that she was looking at me; I kept my head down. "Rosalind and Jessica's medical records are coming in on Bernadette's fax. She says for us to come get them in a few minutes, and to give out the incident-room fax number next time. And it's your turn to cook dinner, but I only have chicken, so if you and Sam want anything else…"

Her voice sounded casual, but there was a faint, tentative question behind it. "Actually," I said, "I can't make it to dinner tonight. I have to be somewhere."

"Oh. OK." Cassie pulled off her hat and ran her fingers through her hair. "Pint, then, depending on when we finish?"

"I can't tonight," I said. "Sorry."

"Rob," she said, after a moment, but I didn't look up. For a second I thought she was going to go on anyway, but then the door opened and Sam bounced in, all fresh and buoyant after his wholesome rural weekend, with a couple of tapes in one hand and a sheaf of fax pages in the other. I had never been so glad to see him.

"Morning, lads. These are for you, with Bernadette's compliments. How was the weekend?"

"Fine," we said, in unison, and Cassie turned away and started hanging up her jacket.

I took the pages from Sam and tried to skim through them. My concentration was shot to hell, the Devlins' doctor had handwriting so lousy that it had to be an affectation, and Cassie-the unaccustomed patience with which she waited for me to finish each page, the moment of enforced nearness as she leaned over to pick it up-set my teeth on edge. It took me a massive effort of will to disentangle even a few salient facts.

Apparently Margaret had been easily alarmed when Rosalind was a baby-there were multiple doctor visits for every cold and cough-but in fact Rosalind seemed to be the healthiest of the bunch: no major illnesses, no major injuries. Jessica had been in an incubator for three days when she and Katy were born, when she was seven she had broken her arm falling off a jungle gym at school, and she had been underweight since she was about nine. They had both had chicken pox. They had both had all their shots. Rosalind had had an ingrown toenail removed, the year before.

"There's nothing here that says either abuse or Munchausen by proxy," Cassie said at last. Sam had found the tape recorder; in the background, Andrews was giving a real estate agent a long, injured rant about something or other.

If he hadn't been there, I think I would have ignored her. "And there's nothing that rules them out, either," I said, hearing the edge in my voice.

"How would you rule abuse out, definitively? All we can do is say there's no evidence of it, which there isn't. And I think this does rule out Munchausen. Like I said before, Margaret doesn't fit the profile anyway, and with this…The whole point of Munchausen is that it leads to medical treatment. Nobody's been Munchausening these two."

"So this was pointless," I said. I shoved the records away, too hard; half the pages fluttered off the edge of the table, onto the floor. "Surprise, surprise. This case is fucked. It's been fucked right from the start. We might as well throw it into the basement right now and move on to something that has a snowball's chance in hell, because this is a waste of everyone's time."

Andrews's phone calls had come to an end and the tape recorder hissed, faintly but persistently, until Sam clicked it off. Cassie leaned over sideways and started collecting the spilled fax pages. Nobody said anything for a very long time.

I wonder what Sam thought. He never said a word, but he must have known something was wrong, he couldn't have missed it: all of a sudden the long happy studenty evenings à trois stopped, and the atmosphere in the incident room was like something out of Sartre. It's possible that Cassie told him the whole story at some point or other, cried on his shoulder, but I doubt it: she had too much pride, always. I think probably she kept inviting him round for dinner and explained that I had trouble with child-murders-which was, after all, true-and wanted to spend my evenings unwinding; explained it so casually and convincingly that, even if Sam didn't believe her, he knew not to ask questions.

I imagine other people noticed, too. Detectives do tend to be fairly observant, and the fact that the Wonder Twins weren't speaking would have been headline news. It must have been all around the squad within twenty-four hours, accompanied by an array of lurid explanations-somewhere among them, I'm sure, the truth.