In the Woods полностью

"What are you on about?" We had been talking about Shakespeare, something to do with the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and my mind was still there. I half-thought she was going to come up with some late-night analogy between the way children think and the way people thought in the sixteenth century, and I was already preparing a rebuttal.

"We've been wondering how he got her to the kill site-no, knock it off and listen." I was shoving at her leg with my foot and whining, "Shut up, I'm off duty, I can't hear you, la la la…" I was hazy with vodka and lateness and I had decided I was sick of this frustrating, tangled, intractable case. I wanted to talk about Shakespeare some more, or maybe play cards. "When I was eleven a guy tried to molest me," Cassie said.

I stopped kicking and lifted my head to look at her. "What?" I asked, a little too carefully. This, I thought, this, finally, was Cassie's secret locked room, and I was at last going to be invited in.

She glanced over at me, amused. "No, he didn't actually do anything to me. It was no big deal."

"Oh," I said, feeling silly and, obscurely, a little miffed. "What happened, then?"

"Our school was going through this craze for marbles-everyone played marbles all the time, all through lunch, after school. You carried them around in a plastic bag and it was a big thing, how many you had. So this one day I'd been kept after school-"

"You? I'm astounded," I said. I rolled over and found my glass. I wasn't sure where this story was going.

"Fuck off; just because you were Prefect Perfect. Anyway I was leaving, and one of the staff-not a teacher; a groundskeeper or a cleaning guy or something-came out of this little shed and said, 'Do you want marbles? Come on in here and I'll give you marbles.' He was an old guy, maybe sixty, with white hair and a big mustache. So I sort of edged around the door of the shed for a while, and then I went in."

"God, Cass. You silly, silly thing," I said. I took another sip, put down my glass and pulled her feet into my lap to rub them.

"No, I told you, nothing happened. He went behind me and put his hands through under my arms, like he was going to lift me up, only then he started messing with the buttons on my shirt. I said, 'What are you doing?' and he said, 'I keep my marbles up on that shelf. I'm going to pick you up so you can get them.' I knew something was very badly wrong, even though I had no idea what, so I twisted away and said, 'I don't want any marbles,' and legged it home."

"You were lucky," I said. She had slim, high-arched feet; even through the soft thick socks she wore at home, I could feel the tendons, the small bones moving under my thumbs. I pictured her at eleven, all knees and bitten nails and solemn brown eyes.

"Yeah, I was. God knows what could've happened."

"Did you tell anyone?" I still wanted more from the story; I wanted to extract some rending revelation, some terrible, shameful secret.

"No. I felt too icky about the whole thing, and anyway I didn't even know what to tell. That's the point: it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with sex. I knew about sex, my friends and I talked about it all the time, I knew something was wrong, I knew he was trying to undo my shirt, but I never put it together. Years later, when I was like eighteen, something reminded me of it-I saw some kids playing marbles, or something-and it suddenly hit me: Oh, my God, that guy was trying to molest me!"

"And this has what to do with Katy Devlin?" I asked.

"Kids don't connect things in the same ways grown-ups do," said Cassie. "Give me your feet and I'll do them."

"I wouldn't. Can't you see the smell-waves off my socks?"

"God, you're disgusting. Don't you ever change them?"

"When they stick to the wall. In accordance with bachelor tradition."

"That's not tradition. That's reverse evolution."

"Go on, then," I said, unfolding my feet and shoving them at her.

"No. Get a girlfriend."

"What are you wittering about now?"

"Girlfriends aren't allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are." All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. "Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action."

"Look who's talking," I said, realizing as I spoke that I had no idea how much action Cassie got. There had been a semi-serious boyfriend before I knew her, a barrister called Aidan, but he had somehow faded from the scene around the time she joined Drugs; relationships seldom survive undercover work. Obviously I would have known if she'd had a boyfriend since, and I like to think I would have known if she'd even been dating someone, whatever that means, but beyond that I had no idea. I had always assumed that was because there was nothing to know, but suddenly I wasn't sure. I glanced encouragingly at Cassie, but she was kneading my heel and giving me her best enigmatic smile.