Nobody said anything for a few moments. Outside, the drizzle was starting to clear; a watery shaft of sun fell across the map like a helicopter's searchlight, picked out a stretch of the river, rippling with delicate pen-strokes and shaded over with a dull red haze. Across the room, the floater manning the tip line was trying to get rid of someone too voluble to let him finish his sentences. Finally Cassie said, "But why Katy? Why not go after Jonathan?"
"Too obvious, maybe," I said. "If Jonathan had been murdered, we'd have gone straight after any enemies he might have made through the campaign. With Katy, it can be set up to look like a sex crime, so our attention is diverted away from the motorway angle, but Jonathan still gets the message."
"Unless I can find out who's behind these three companies, though," Sam said, "I've hit a dead end. The farmers don't know any names, the county council claims they don't either. I've seen a couple of deeds of sale and applications and that, but they were signed by lawyers-and the lawyers say they can't release their clients' names to me without permission from the clients."
"Jesus."
"What about journalists?" Cassie said suddenly.
Sam shook his head. "What about them?"
"You said there were articles about the motorway as far back as 1994. There must be journalists who followed the story, and they'd have a pretty good idea who bought up the land, even if they're not allowed to print it. This is
"Cassie," Sam said, his face lighting up, "you're a gem. I'm buying you a pint for that."
"Want to read my door-to-door reports for me instead? O'Gorman structures sentences like George Bush; most of the time I haven't a clue what he's on about."
"Listen, Sam," I said, "if this pans out, we'll both be buying you pints for a very long time." Sam bounded over to his end of the table, giving Cassie a clumsy, happy pat on the shoulder on his way, and started rooting through a file of newspaper clippings like a dog with a brand-new scent, and Cassie and I went back to our reports.
We left the map taped to the wall, where it got on my nerves for reasons I couldn't quite define. It was the perfection of it, I think, the fragile, enchanting detail: tiny leaves curling in the wood, knobbly little stones in the wall of the keep. I suppose I had some kind of subconscious idea that one day I'd happen to glance up at it and catch two minute, laughing faces ducking out of sight among the pen-and-ink trees. Cassie drew a property developer, with a suit and horns and little dripping fangs, in one of the yellow patches; she draws like an eight-year-old, but I still jumped about a foot every time I caught the bloody thing leering at me in the corner of my eye.
I had started trying-for the first time, really-to remember what had happened in that wood. I prodded tentatively around the edges of it, barely acknowledging even to myself what I was doing, like a kid picking at a scab but afraid to look. I went for long walks-mostly in the early hours of the morning, on nights when I wasn't staying at Cassie's and couldn't sleep-wandering through the city for hours in something like a trance, listening for delicate little noises in the corners of my mind. I would come to, dazed and blinking, to find myself staring up at the tacky neon sign of an unfamiliar shopping center, or the elegant gables of some Georgian home in the swankier part of Dun Laoghaire, with no idea how I had got there.
