In the Woods полностью

"She might not have told us, though," said Marianne. She was the quietest of the bunch, a pale fairy of a girl vanishing into her funky teenage clothes. "Katy's-Katy was very private about stuff. Like the first time she auditioned for ballet school, we didn't even know about it till she got accepted, remember?"

"Um, hel-lo, not the same thing," Christina said, but she had been crying, too and the stuffed nose took most of the authority off her voice. "We couldn't exactly have missed a boyfriend."

The floaters would re-interview every boy on the estate and in Katy's class, of course, just in case; but I realized that, at some level, this was exactly what I had been expecting. This case was like an endless, infuriating streetcorner shell game: I knew the prize was in there somewhere, right under my eye, but the game was rigged and the dealer much too fast for me, and every sure-thing shell I turned over came up empty.

Sophie rang me as we were leaving Knocknaree, to say that the lab results were back. She was walking somewhere; I could hear the mobile jolting and the fast, decisive taps of her shoes.

"I've got your results on the Devlin kid," she said. "The lab's got a six-week backlog, and you know what they're like, but I got them to jump this one up the queue. I practically had to sleep with the head geek before he'd do it."

My heart rate picked up. "Bless you, Sophie," I said. "We owe you another one." Cassie, driving, glanced across at me; I mouthed, "Results."

"Tox screen was negative: she wasn't drugged, drunk or on any medication. She was covered in trace, mostly outdoor stuff-dirt, pollen, the usual. It's all consistent with the soil composition around Knocknaree, even-this is the good part-even the stuff that was inside her clothes and stuck to the blood. So stuff she didn't just pick up at the dump site. Lab says there's some super-rare plant in that wood that doesn't grow anywhere else nearby-it got the plant geek very turned on, apparently-and the pollen wouldn't blow more than a mile or so. The odds are she was in Knocknaree the whole time."

"That fits with what we have," I said. "Get to the good stuff."

Sophie snorted. "That was the good stuff. The footprints are a dead end: half of them match the archaeologists, and the ones that don't are too blurry to be any use. Practically all the fibers are consistent with stuff we pulled from the home; a handful of unidentified ones, but nothing distinctive. One hair on the T-shirt matching the idiot who found her, two that match the mother-one on the combats, one on a sock, and she probably does the washing, so no big deal there."

"Any DNA? Or fingerprints or anything?"

"Ha," Sophie said. She was eating something crunchy, probably crisps-Sophie lives mainly on junk food. "A few bloody partials, but they came off a rubber glove-surprise, surprise. So no epithelials, either. And no semen and no saliva, and no blood that doesn't match the kid."

"Great," I said, my heart slowly sinking. I had fallen for the con all over again, I had got my hopes up, and I felt suckered and stupid.

"Except for that old spot Helen found. They got a blood type off it: it's A positive. Your victim's O neg."

She paused for another mouthful of crisps, while my stomach did something complicated. "What?" she demanded, when I said nothing. "That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it? Same as the blood from the old case. OK, so it's tentative, but at least it's a link."

"Yeah," I said. I could feel Cassie listening; I turned my shoulder to her. "That's great. Thanks, Sophie."

"We've sent the swabs and those shoes off for DNA testing," Sophie said, "but I wouldn't hold your breath if I were you. I bet it's all degraded to fuck. Who stores blood evidence in a basement?"

Cassie, by unspoken agreement, was following up on the old case while I concentrated on the Devlins. McCabe had died several years before, a heart attack, but she went to see Kiernan. He was retired and living in Laytown, a little commuter village up along the coast. He was well into his seventies, with a ruddy, good-humored face and the comfortably sloppy build of a rugby player gone to seed, but he brought Cassie for a long walk on the wide empty beach, seagulls and curlews screaming, while he told her what he remembered about the Knocknaree case. He seemed happy, Cassie said that evening, as she lit the fire and I spread mustard on ciabatta rolls and Sam poured the wine. He had taken up woodworking, there was sawdust on his soft worn trousers; his wife had wrapped a scarf around his neck and kissed his cheek as he went out.