Then on Tuesday-a muggy, petulant, drizzly morning, Cassie and I grimly going through the floaters' door-to-door reports again in case we had missed something-he came in with a big roll of paper, the heavy kind that children use to make valentines and Christmas decorations in school. "Right," he said, pulling tape out of his pocket and starting to stick the paper to the wall in our corner of the incident room. "Here's what I've been doing all this time."
It was a huge map of Knocknaree, beautifully detailed: houses, hills, the river, the wood, the keep, all sketched in fine pen and ink with the delicate, flowing precision of a children's-book illustrator. It must have taken him hours. Cassie whistled.
"Thank you, thankyouverymuch," Sam said in a deep Elvis voice, grinning. We both abandoned our stacks of reports and went over for a closer look. Much of the map had been divided into irregular blocks, shaded in colored pencil-green, blue, red, a few in yellow. Each block held a tiny, mysterious jumble of abbreviations:
"I'll explain it now." He bit off another piece of tape and secured the last corner. Cassie and I sat on the edge of the table, where we were close enough to see the details.
"OK. See this?" Sam pointed to two parallel dashed lines curving across the map, cutting through the wood and the dig. "That's where the motorway's going to be. The government announced the plans in March of 2000 and bought the land off local farmers over the next year, under a compulsory purchase order. Nothing dodgy there."
"Well," Cassie said. "Depending on your point of view."
"Shhh," I told her. "Just look at the pretty picture."
"Ah, you know what I mean," Sam said. "Nothing you wouldn't expect. Where it gets interesting is the land around the motorway. That was all agricultural land, too, up until late 1995. Then, bit by bit, over the next four years, it started getting bought up and rezoned, from agricultural to industrial and residential."
"By clairvoyants who knew where the motorway was going to be, five years before it was announced," I said.
"That's not actually that dodgy either," Sam said. "There was talk about a motorway coming into Dublin from the southwest-I've found newspaper articles-starting in about 1994, when the economic boom kicked in. I talked to a couple of surveyors, and they said this was the most obvious route for a motorway, because of topography and settlement patterns and a load of other things. I didn't understand the whole of it, but that's what they said. There's no reason why property developers couldn't have done the same thing-got wind of the motorway and hired surveyors to tell them where it was likely to go."
Neither of us said anything. Sam glanced from me to Cassie and flushed slightly. "I'm not being naïve. Yeah, they might have been tipped off by someone in government-but, then again, they might not. Either way, it's not something we can prove, and I don't think it means anything to our case." I tried not to smile. Sam is one of the most efficient detectives on the squad, but it was very sweet, somehow, how earnest he was about it all.
"Who bought the land?" Cassie asked, relenting.
Sam looked relieved. "A bunch of different companies. Most of them don't exist, not really; they're just holding companies, owned by other companies that are owned by other companies. That's what's been taking all my time-trying to find out who actually owns the bloody land. So far I've traced each buy back to one of three companies: Global Irish Industries, Futura Property Consultants and Dynamo Development. The blue bits here are Global, see; the green ones are Futura, and the red are Dynamo. I'm having a hell of a time finding out who's behind them, though. Two of them are registered in the Czech Republic, and Futura's in Hungary."
"Now that does sound dodgy," Cassie said. "By any definition."
"Sure," Sam said, "but it's most likely tax evasion. We can pass all this on to the Revenue, but I don't see how it can have anything to do with our case."
"Unless Devlin had found out about it and was using it to put pressure on someone," I said.
Cassie looked skeptical. "Found out how? And he would've told us."
"You never know. He's weird."
"You think everyone's weird. First Mark-"
