I remembered, too, the three of us finding a secret garden, somewhere in the heart of the wood. Behind some hidden wall or doorway, it had been. Fruit trees run wild, apple, cherry, pear; broken marble fountains, trickles of water still bubbling along tracks green with moss and worn deep into the stone; great ivy-draped statues in every corner, feet wild with weeds, arms and heads cracked away and scattered among long grass and Queen Anne's lace. Gray dawn light, the swish of our feet and dew on our bare legs. Jamie's hand small and rosy on the stone folds of a robe, her face upturned to look into blind eyes. The infinite silence. I was very well aware that if this garden had existed it would have been found when the archaeologists did their initial survey, and the statues would have been in the National Museum by now, and Mark would have done his level best to describe them to us in detail, but this was the problem: I remembered it, all the same.
The guys from Computer Crime rang me early Wednesday morning: they had finished trawling through our last Tracksuit Shadow suspect's computer, and they confirmed that he had, in fact, been online when Katy died. With a certain amount of professional satisfaction, they added that, although the poor bastard shared the house and the computer with both his parents and his wife, e-mails and discussion-board posts showed that each of the occupants made characteristic spelling and punctuation errors. The posts made while Katy was dying matched our suspect's pattern to a T.
"Buggery," I said, hanging up and putting my face in my hands. We already had security footage of the night-bus guy in Supermac's, dipping chips into barbecue sauce with the glacial concentration of the very drunk. Deep down, a part of me had been expecting this, but I was feeling pretty ropy-no sleep, not enough coffee, nagging headache-and it was way too early in the morning to find out that my one good lead had gone south.
"What?" Cassie asked, looking up from whatever she was doing.
"The Kawasaki Kid's alibi checked out. If this guy Jessica saw is our man, he's not from Knocknaree, and I don't have the first clue where to look for him. I'm back to bloody square one."
Cassie tossed down a handful of paper and rubbed her eyes. "Rob, our guy's local. Everything's pointing that way."
"Then who the fuck is Tracksuit Boy? If he's got an alibi for the murder and he just happened to talk to Katy one day, why hasn't he said so?"
"Assuming," Cassie said, glancing at me sideways, "he actually exists."
A flare of disproportionate, almost uncontrollable fury shot through me. "Sorry, Maddox, but what the hell are you talking about? Are you suggesting that Jessica made the whole thing up, just for laughs? You've barely seen those girls. Do you have any idea quite how devastated they are?"
"I'm saying," Cassie said coolly, her eyebrows lifting, "that I can think of circumstances in which they might feel they had a very good reason to make up a story like that."
In the fraction of a second before I lost my temper altogether, the penny dropped.
"Hallelujah. Signs of intelligent life."
"Sorry," I said. "Sorry for biting your head off, Cass. The parents…Shit. If Jessica thinks one of their parents did it, and she made up this whole thing-"
"Jessica? You think she could come up with something like this? She can hardly
"OK, then Rosalind. She comes up with Tracksuit Boy to take our attention off her parents, coaches Jessica-the whole Damien thing is just a coincidence. But if she bothered to do that, Cass…if she went to this much hassle, she must know something pretty bloody definitive. Either she or Jessica must have seen something, heard something."
"On the Tuesday…" Cassie said, and checked herself; but the thought passed between us all the same, too horrible to be voiced. On that Tuesday, Katy's body must have been somewhere.
"I need to talk to Rosalind," I said, going for the phone.
"Rob, don't chase her. She'll only back off. Let her come to you."
She was right. Kids can be beaten, raped, abused in any number of unthinkable ways, and still find it all but impossible to betray their parents by asking for help. If Rosalind was shielding Jonathan or Margaret or both, then her whole world would crumble when she told the truth, and she needed to come to that in her own time. If I tried to push her, I would lose her. I put the phone down.
But Rosalind didn't ring me. After a day or two my self-restraint ran out and I called her mobile-for a variety of reasons, some more inchoate and troubling than others, I didn't want to phone the land line. There was no answer. I left messages, but she never rang me back.
