I know this will sound incredible, given that everyone from my parents down to a cretin like Quigley had expected it, but I had never once seen this coming. Christ but we were smug: supremely arrogant, secure in our certainty that we were exempt from the oldest rule known to man. I swear I lay down as innocent as a child. Cassie tilted her head to take out her hair clips, made faces when they caught; I tucked my socks into my shoes, the way I always do, so she wouldn't fall over them in the morning. I know you'll say our naïveté was deliberate, but if you believe only one thing I tell you, make it this: neither of us knew.
When I reached Monkstown I still couldn't face going home. I walked on to Dun Laoghaire and sat on a wall at the end of the pier, watching tweedy couples on Sunday-afternoon constitutionals run into each other with simian hoots of delight, until it got dark and the wind started cutting through my coat and a uniform on patrol gave me a suspicious look. I thought about ringing Charlie, for some reason, but I didn't have his number in my mobile and anyway I wasn't sure what I wanted to say.
That night I slept as if I had been clubbed. When I got into work the next morning I was still dazed and bleary-eyed, and the incident room looked strange, different in sneaky little ways I couldn't pinpoint, as if I had slid through some crack into an alternate and hostile reality. Cassie had left the old case file spread out all over her corner of the table. I sat down and tried to work, but I couldn't focus; by the time I reached the end of each sentence I had forgotten the beginning and had to go back and start over.
Cassie came in bright-cheeked from the wind, curls chrysanthemum-wild under a little red tam-o'-shanter. "Hi, you," she said. "How're you doing?"
She ruffled my hair as she passed behind me, and I couldn't help it: I flinched, and felt her hand freeze for an instant before she moved on.
"Fine," I said.
She slung her satchel over the back of her chair. I could tell, out of the corner of my eye, that she was looking at me; I kept my head down. "Rosalind and Jessica's medical records are coming in on Bernadette's fax. She says for us to come get them in a few minutes, and to give out the incident-room fax number next time. And it's your turn to cook dinner, but I only have chicken, so if you and Sam want anything else…"
Her voice sounded casual, but there was a faint, tentative question behind it. "Actually," I said, "I can't make it to dinner tonight. I have to be somewhere."
"Oh. OK." Cassie pulled off her hat and ran her fingers through her hair. "Pint, then, depending on when we finish?"
"I can't tonight," I said. "Sorry."
"Rob," she said, after a moment, but I didn't look up. For a second I thought she was going to go on anyway, but then the door opened and Sam bounced in, all fresh and buoyant after his wholesome rural weekend, with a couple of tapes in one hand and a sheaf of fax pages in the other. I had never been so glad to see him.
"Morning, lads. These are for you, with Bernadette's compliments. How was the weekend?"
"Fine," we said, in unison, and Cassie turned away and started hanging up her jacket.
I took the pages from Sam and tried to skim through them. My concentration was shot to hell, the Devlins' doctor had handwriting so lousy that it had to be an affectation, and Cassie-the unaccustomed patience with which she waited for me to finish each page, the moment of enforced nearness as she leaned over to pick it up-set my teeth on edge. It took me a massive effort of will to disentangle even a few salient facts.
Apparently Margaret had been easily alarmed when Rosalind was a baby-there were multiple doctor visits for every cold and cough-but in fact Rosalind seemed to be the healthiest of the bunch: no major illnesses, no major injuries. Jessica had been in an incubator for three days when she and Katy were born, when she was seven she had broken her arm falling off a jungle gym at school, and she had been underweight since she was about nine. They had both had chicken pox. They had both had all their shots. Rosalind had had an ingrown toenail removed, the year before.
"There's nothing here that says either abuse or Munchausen by proxy," Cassie said at last. Sam had found the tape recorder; in the background, Andrews was giving a real estate agent a long, injured rant about something or other.
If he hadn't been there, I think I would have ignored her. "And there's nothing that rules them out, either," I said, hearing the edge in my voice.
"How would you rule abuse out, definitively? All we can do is say there's no evidence of it, which there isn't. And I think this does rule out Munchausen. Like I said before, Margaret doesn't fit the profile anyway, and with this…The whole point of Munchausen is that it leads to medical treatment. Nobody's been Munchausening these two."
"So this was pointless," I said. I shoved the records away, too hard; half the pages fluttered off the edge of the table, onto the floor. "Surprise, surprise. This case is fucked. It's been fucked right from the start. We might as well throw it into the basement right now and move on to something that has a snowball's chance in hell, because this is a waste of everyone's time."
Andrews's phone calls had come to an end and the tape recorder hissed, faintly but persistently, until Sam clicked it off. Cassie leaned over sideways and started collecting the spilled fax pages. Nobody said anything for a very long time.
I wonder what Sam thought. He never said a word, but he must have known something was wrong, he couldn't have missed it: all of a sudden the long happy studenty evenings à trois stopped, and the atmosphere in the incident room was like something out of Sartre. It's possible that Cassie told him the whole story at some point or other, cried on his shoulder, but I doubt it: she had too much pride, always. I think probably she kept inviting him round for dinner and explained that I had trouble with child-murders-which was, after all, true-and wanted to spend my evenings unwinding; explained it so casually and convincingly that, even if Sam didn't believe her, he knew not to ask questions.
I imagine other people noticed, too. Detectives do tend to be fairly observant, and the fact that the Wonder Twins weren't speaking would have been headline news. It must have been all around the squad within twenty-four hours, accompanied by an array of lurid explanations-somewhere among them, I'm sure, the truth.
Or maybe not. Through everything, this much of the old alliance remained: the shared, animal instinct to keep its dying private. In some ways this is the most heartbreaking thing of alclass="underline" always, always, right up until the end, the old connection was there when it was needed. We could spend excruciating hours not saying a word to each other unless it was unavoidable, and then in toneless voices, with averted eyes; but the instant O'Kelly threatened to take Sweeney and O'Gorman away we snapped to life, me methodically going through a long list of reasons why we still needed floaters, while Cassie assured me that the superintendent knew what he was doing and shrugged her shoulders and hoped the media wouldn't find out. It took all the energy I had. As the door closed and we were left alone again (or alone with Sam, who didn't count) the practiced sparkle would evaporate and I would turn expressionlessly away from her white, uncomprehending face, giving her my shoulder with the priggish aloofness of an offended cat.