"What is it?" I asked, after a moment.
"I'd forgotten," he said slowly. "I don't-sure, I don't like to think about the thing anyway. I'd forgotten…If it was anything, mind you. The way our heads were, it could easily have been just imagination."
I waited. Finally he sighed, made an uneasy movement like a shrug. "Well. The way I remember it, I grabbed Cathal and told him to shut up or I'd hit him, and he stopped laughing and caught me by my T-shirt-he looked half crazy, for a second there I thought it was going to turn into a fight. But there was still someone laughing-not one of us; away in the trees. Sandra and Shane both started screaming-maybe I did, too, I don't know-but it just got louder and louder, this huge voice laughing… Cathal let goof me and shouted something about those kids, but it didn't sound-"
"Kids?" I said coolly. I was fighting a violent impulse to get the hell out of there. There was no reason why Jonathan should recognize me-I had just been some little kid hanging around, my hair had been a lot fairer then, I had a different accent and a different name-but I felt suddenly horribly naked and exposed.
"Ah, there were these kids from the estate-little kids, ten, twelve-who used to play in the wood. Sometimes they'd spy on us; throw things and then run, you know the way. But it didn't sound like any kid to me. It sounded like a man-a young fella, maybe, around our age. Not a child."
For a split second I almost took the opening he had offered. The flash of wariness had dissolved and the quick little whispers in the corners had risen to a silent shout, so close, close as breath. It was on the tip of my tongue: Those kids, weren't they spying on you that day? Weren't you worried they would tell? What did you do to stop them? But the detective in me held me back. I knew I would only get one chance, and I needed to come to it on my own territory and with all the ammunition I could bring.
"Did any of you go to see what it was?" I asked, instead.
Jonathan thought for a moment, his eyes hooded and intent. "No. Like I said, we were all in some kind of shock anyway, and this was more than we could handle. I was frozen, couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. It kept getting louder, till I thought the whole estate would be out to see what was going on, and we were still yelling… Finally it stopped-moved off into the woods, maybe, I don't know. Shane kept screaming, till Cathal smacked him across the back of the head and told him to shut up. We got out of there as fast as we could. I went home, nicked some of my da's booze and got drunk as a lord. I don't know what the others did."
So much for Cassie's mysterious wild animal, then. But there had quite possibly been someone in the woods that day, someone who, if he had seen the rape, had in all probability seen us, too; someone who might have been there again, a week or two later. "Do you have any suspicion as to who the person laughing might have been?" I asked.
"No. I think Cathal asked us about that, later. He said we needed to know who it was, how much they had seen. I've no idea."
I stood up. "Thanks for your time, Mr. Devlin," I said. "I may need to ask you a few more questions about this at some stage, but that's all for now."
"Wait," he said suddenly. "Do you think Sandra killed Katy?"
He looked very short and pathetic, standing there at the window with his hands balled in his cardigan pockets, but he still had a kind of forlorn dignity about him. "No," I said. "I don't. But we have to investigate every possibility thoroughly."
Jonathan nodded. "I suppose that means you've no real suspect," he said. "No, I know, I know, you can't tell me… If you're talking to Sandra, tell her I'm sorry. We did a terrible thing. I know it's a bit late to be saying that, I should've thought of it twenty years ago, but…tell her, all the same."
That evening I went out to Mountjoy to see Shane Waters. I'm sure Cassie would have come with me if I'd told her I was going, but I wanted to do this, as much as possible, on my own. Shane was rat-faced and nervy, with a repulsive little mustache, and he still had acne. He reminded me of Wayne the junkie. I tried every tactic I knew and promised him everything I could think of-immunity, early release on the armed robbery-banking on the fact that he wasn't smart enough to know what I could and couldn't deliver, but (always one of my blind spots) I'd underestimated the power of stupidity: with the infuriating mulishness of someone who has long ago given up trying to analyze possibilities and ramifications, Shane stuck to the one option he understood. "I don't know nothing," he told me, over and over, with a kind of anemic self-satisfaction that made me want to scream. "And you can't prove I do." Sandra, the rape, Peter and Jamie, even Jonathan Devlin: "Don't know what you're talking about, man." I finally gave up when I realized I was in serious danger of throwing something.
On my way home I swallowed my pride and phoned Cassie, who didn't even try to pretend she hadn't guessed where I'd gone. She had spent her evening eliminating Sandra Scully from the inquiry. On the night in question, Sandra had been working in a call center in town. Her supervisor and everyone else on the shift confirmed that she had been there until just before two in the morning, when she had clocked out and caught a night bus home. This was good news-it tidied things up, and I hadn't liked thinking of Sandra as a possible murderess-but it gave me a complicated little pang, the thought of her in an airless fluorescent cubicle, surrounded by part-timing students and actors waiting for the next gig.
I won't go into details, but we put a considerable amount of effort and ingenuity, most of it more or less legal, into identifying the worst possible time to go talk to Cathal Mills. He had some high position with a gibberish title, in a company that provided something called "corporate e-learning software localization solutions" (I was impressed: I hadn't thought it was possible for me to dislike him any more than I already did), so we walked in on him halfway through a crucial meeting with a big potential client. Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist's rat mazes. Cassie shot me a wide-eyed, horrified look as we followed some droid through the fifth set of swipe-card swing doors.
Cathal was in the boardroom, and he was easy to identify: he was the one with the PowerPoint presentation. He was still a handsome guy-tall and broad-shouldered, with bright blue eyes and hard, dangerous bones-but fat was starting to blur his waist and hang under his jaw; in a few more years he would have coarsened into piggishness. The new client was four identical, humorless Americans in inscrutable dark suits.
"Sorry, fellas," Cathal said, giving us an easy, warning smile, "the boardroom's being used."
"It is indeed," Cassie told him. She had dressed for the occasion, in ripped jeans and an old turquoise camisole that said YUPPIES TASTE LIKE CHICKEN in red across the front. "I'm Detective Maddox-"
"And I'm Detective Ryan," I said, flipping out my ID. "We'd like to ask you a few questions."
The smile didn't budge, but a savage flash shot across his eyes. "This isn't a good time."
"No?" Cassie inquired sociably, lounging against the table so that the PowerPoint image vanished into a blob on her camisole.