She ignored me. "Mr. Devlin," she said coolly, as if nothing at all had happened; there was only the faintest hint of a tremor in her voice. Jonathan-I had forgotten he was there-moved slowly out of the corner, his eyes still on me. "We'll be releasing you without charge for now. But I would strongly advise you to stay where we can find you and not to attempt to contact your rape victim in any way. Understood?"
"Yeah," Devlin said, after a moment. "Fine." He yanked the chair upright, pulled his tangled coat off the back and threw it on in quick, angry jabs. At the door he turned and gave me a hard look, and I thought for a moment he was going to say something, but he changed his mind and left, shaking his head disgustedly. Cassie followed him out and whipped the door shut behind her; it was too heavy for a proper slam, it closed with an unsatisfying thump.
I sank into a chair and put my face in my hands. I had never done anything like this before, ever. I abhor physical violence, I always have; the very thought makes me flinch. Even when I was a prefect, with arguably more power and less accountability than any adult outside of small South American countries, I never once caned anyone. But a minute ago I had been tussling with Cassie like some drunk in a bar brawl, ready to dogfight Jonathan Devlin on the interview-room floor, swept away by the overwhelming desire to knee him in the guts and beat his face to bloody pulp. And I had hurt Cassie. I wondered, with detached, lucid interest, whether I was losing my mind.
After a few minutes Cassie came back in, shut the door and leaned against it, hands shoved into her jeans pockets. Her lip had stopped bleeding.
"Cassie," I said, rubbing my hands over my face. "I'm really sorry. Are you OK?"
"What the hell was that?" She had a hot, bright spot of color on each cheekbone.
"I thought he knew something. I was sure." My hands were shaking so hard it looked phony, like an inept actor simulating shock. I clasped them together to stop it.
Eventually she said, very quietly, "Rob, you can't keep this up." I didn't answer. After a long time, I heard the door close behind her.
15
I got drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I'd been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed sickeningly with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally I realized that, while the nausea showed no signs of getting better, it probably wasn't going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on top of the covers without taking off my clothes.
My dreams were uneasy ones, with a clogged, tainted quality to them. Something thrashing and yowling in a burlap bag, laughter and a lighter moving closer. Shattered glass on the kitchen floor, and someone's mother was sobbing. I was a trainee again in some lonely border county, and Jonathan Devlin and Cathal Mills were hiding out in the hills with guns and a hunting dog, living wild and we had to catch them, me and two Murder detectives tall and cold as waxworks, our boots mired deep in treacly mud. I half woke fighting the bedclothes, sheets pulled away from the mattress into sweaty tangles, and was dragged down into sleep again even as I realized I had been dreaming.
But I woke up in the morning with one image brilliantly clear in my head, slapped across the front of my mind like a neon sign. Nothing to do with Peter or Jamie or Katy: Emmett, Tom Emmett, one of those two Murder detectives who had paid a flying visit to Ballygobackwards when I was a trainee. Emmett was tall and very thin, with subtly wonderful clothes (now that I think of it, this is probably where I got my first immutable impression of how Murder detectives are supposed to dress) and a face straight out of an old cowboy movie, scored and polished like ancient wood. He was still on the squad when I joined-he's retired now-and he seemed like a pretty nice guy, but I never managed to get past that first awe of him; whenever he talked to me I would instantly congeal into an inarticulate, schoolboyish mess.
I had been skulking in the Ballygobackwards car park one afternoon, smoking and trying not to be too obvious about eavesdropping on their conversation. The other detective had asked a question-what, I couldn't hear-and Emmett had shaken his head briefly. "If he doesn't, then we've made a bollocks of the whole thing," he'd said, taking a last crisp drag on his cigarette and extinguishing it under one elegant shoe. "We'll have to go back. Right back to the beginning, and see where we went wrong." Then they'd turned and gone into the station, side by side, shoulders hunched and secretive in their discreet dark jackets.
I had, I knew-there's nothing like booze for triggering abject self-reproach-made a complete bollocks of just about everything, in just about every possible way. But that barely mattered, because the solution was suddenly so clear. I felt as if everything that had happened throughout this case-the Kavanagh nightmare, the awful interview with Jonathan, all the sleepless nights and little treacheries of the mind-had been sent by the hand of some wise kind god to bring me to this moment. Here I had been avoiding Knocknaree wood like the plague, I think I would have interviewed everyone in the country and racked my brain till it exploded before it occurred to me to take a step back in there, if I hadn't been battered to the point where I had no defense left against the single blindingly obvious thing: I was the one person who beyond any doubt knew at least some of the answers, and if anything could give them back to me, it was (right back to the beginning) that wood.
It sounds facile, I'm sure. But I can't begin to describe to you what it meant to me, this thousand-watt bulb clicking on above my head, this beacon to tell me that I wasn't lost in a wilderness after all, that I knew exactly where to go. I almost burst out laughing, sitting there in bed with early-morning light streaming between the curtains. I should have had the mother of all hangovers, but I felt like I'd slept for a week; I was bubbling over with energy like a twenty-year-old. I showered and shaved and gave Heather such a cheerful "Good morning" that she looked taken aback and slightly suspicious, and then I drove into town singing along to terrible chart music on the car radio.
I found a parking space on Stephen's Green-it felt like a good omen; they're unheard of at that hour of the morning-and did some quick shopping on my way to work. In a little bookshop off Grafton Street I found a beautiful old copy of Wuthering Heights-thick pages browning at the edges, rich red binding stamped in gold, "For Sara, Christmas 1922" in faded ink on the title page. Then I went to Brown Thomas and bought a sleek, complicated little machine that made cappuccino; Cassie has a thing for coffee with froth on top, I had meant to get her this for Christmas but had somehow never got around to it. I walked to work without bothering to move my car. It cost me a ridiculous amount of money in the meter, but it was the kind of sunny, buoyant day that encourages extravagance.
Cassie was already at her desk with a pile of paperwork. Sam and the floaters, luckily for me, were nowhere to be seen. "Morning," she said, giving me a cool warning look.
"Here," I said, dumping the two bags in front of her.
"What's this?" she demanded, eyeing them suspiciously.
"That," I said, pointing at the coffee gadget, "is your belated Christmas present. And this one is an apology. I am so, so sorry, Cass-not just about yesterday, but about the way I've been all these last few weeks. I have been an utter pain in the arse and you have every right to be furious with me. But I absolutely promise that's over. From now on I will be a normal, sane, non-horrible human being."