"Kiernan and McCabe," I said, "both thought the children were murdered, then."
"McCabe wasn't sure, apparently. He thought there was a chance someone had abducted them-maybe someone mentally ill and desperate to have kids, or maybe…Well. At first they thought they might have just run away, but two twelve-year-olds with no money? They'd have been found within days."
"Well, Katy was no random tourist killing," Sam said. "He had to set up the meeting, keep her somewhere for the day…"
"Actually," I said, impressed by the pleasant, everyday tone of my voice, "I can't really see the old case as a car snatch, either. As far as I remember, the shoes were only put back on the kid after the blood in them had started to congeal. In other words, the abductor spent some time with all three of them, in the area, before one got away. To me, that says local."
"Knocknaree's a small place," Sam said. "What are the odds of two different child-murderers living there?"
Cassie balanced her plate on her crossed legs, linked her hands behind her neck and arched stiffness out of it. There were dark shadows under her eyes; I realized suddenly that her afternoon with Kiernan had hit her hard, and that her reluctance to tell the story might not have been just for my sake. There is a specific tiny compression to the corners of her mouth when she is holding something back, and I wondered what Kiernan had told her that she wasn't saying.
"They even searched the trees, you know that?" she said. "After a few weeks, some smart floater remembered an old case where a kid climbed a hollow tree and fell into a hole in the trunk; he wasn't found till forty years later. Kiernan and McCabe had people checking every tree, shining torches into hollows…"
Her voice drifted off and we fell silent. Sam munched his sandwich with even, unhurried appreciation, put down the plate and sighed contentedly. Finally Cassie stirred, held out a hand; I put her smoke packet into it. "Kiernan still dreams about it, you know," she said quietly, fishing out a cigarette. "Not as much as he used to, he said; only every few months, since he retired. He dreams that he's searching for the two kids in the wood at night, calling them, and someone leaps out of the bushes and rushes at him. He knows it's the person who took them, he can see his face-'Clear as I see you,' he said-but when he wakes up, he can't remember it."
The fire cracked and spat sharply. I caught it out of the corner of my eye and whipped round; I was sure I had seen something shoot out of the fireplace into the room, some small, black, clawed thing-baby bird, maybe, fallen down the chimney?-but there was nothing there. When I turned back Sam's eyes were on me, gray and calm and somehow sympathetic, but he only smiled and leaned across the table to refill my glass.
I was having trouble sleeping, even when I got the opportunity. I often do, as I've said, but this was different: in those weeks I kept finding myself trapped in some twilight zone between sleep and waking, unable to force my way into either. "Look out!" voices said suddenly and loudly in my ear; or, "I can't hear you. What? What?" I half-dreamed dark intruders moving stealthily around the room, riffling through my work notes and fingering the shirts in my wardrobe; I knew they couldn't be real, but it took me a panicky eternity to drag myself awake to either confront or dispel them. Once I woke to find myself slumped against the wall by my bedroom door, pawing crazily at the light switch, my legs barely able to hold me up. My head was swimming and there was a muffled moaning sound coming from somewhere, and it was a long time before I realized that it was my voice. I turned on the light, and my desk lamp, and crawled back into bed, where I lay, too shaken to go back to sleep, until my alarm went off.
In this limbo I kept hearing children's voices, too. Not Peter's and Jamie's, or anything: this was a group of children a long way off, chanting playground rhymes that I didn't remember ever having known. Their voices were gay and uncaring and too pure to be human, and underneath them were the brisk expert rhythms of complicated hand-clapping. Say say my playmate, come out and play with me, climb up my apple tree…Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-o, one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so… Sometimes their faint chorus stayed in my head all day, a high inescapable underscore to whatever I was doing. I lived in mortal dread that O'Kelly would catch me humming one of the rhymes.
Rosalind phoned my mobile that Saturday. I was in the incident room; Cassie had gone off to talk to Missing Persons; behind me, O'Gorman was bellowing about some guy who had failed to give him proper respect during the door-to-door. I had to press the phone to my ear to hear her. "Detective Ryan, it's Rosalind… I'm so sorry to bother you, but do you think you might have the time to come talk to Jessica?"
City noises in the background: cars, loud conversation, the frenetic beeping of a pedestrian signal. "Of course," I said. "Where are you?"
"We're in town. Could we meet you in the Central Hotel bar in, say, ten minutes? Jessica has something to tell you."
I dug out the main file and started flipping through it for Rosalind's date of birth: if I was going to talk to Jessica, I needed an "appropriate adult" present. "Are your parents with you?"
"No, I…no. I think Jessica might be more comfortable talking without them, if that's all right."
My antennae prickled. I had found the page of family stats: Rosalind was eighteen, and appropriate as far as I was concerned. "No problem," I said. "I'll see you there."
"Thank you, Detective Ryan, I knew I could come to you-I'm sorry to rush you, but we really should get home before-" A beep, and she was gone: either her battery or her credit had run out. I wrote Cassie a "Back soon" note and left.
Rosalind had good taste. The Central bar has a stubbornly old-fashioned feel-ceiling moldings, huge comfortable armchairs taking up inefficient quantities of space, shelves of weird old books in elegant bindings-that contrasts satisfyingly with the manic overdrive of the streets below. Sometimes I used to go there on Saturdays, have a glass of brandy and a cigar-this was before the smoking ban-and spend the afternoon reading the 1938 Farmer's Almanac or third-rate Victorian poems.
Rosalind and Jessica were at a table by the window. Rosalind's curls were caught up loosely and she was wearing a white outfit, long skirt and gauzy ruffled blouse, that blended perfectly with the surroundings; she looked as if she had just stepped in from some Edwardian garden party. She was leaning over to whisper in Jessica's ear, one hand stroking her hair in a slow, soothing rhythm.
Jessica was in an armchair, her legs curled under her, and the sight of her hit me all over again, almost as hard as it had that first time. The sun streaming through the high window held her in a column of light that transformed her into a radiant vision of someone else, someone vivid and eager and lost. The fine crooked Vs of her eyebrows, the tilt of her nose, the full, childish curve of her lip: the last time I had looked into that face, it had been empty and blood-smeared on Cooper's steel table. She was like a reprieve; like Eurydice, gifted back to Orpheus from the darkness for a brief miraculous moment. I wanted, so intensely it took my breath away, to reach out and lay a hand on her soft dark head, to pull her tightly against me and feel her slight and warm and breathing, as if by protecting her hard enough I could somehow undo time and protect Katy, too.