Tana French - In the Woods

Cassie and I started to speak at the same time, but I kept going. Officially she was the primary detective, because she was the one who'd said, "We'll have it"; but we have never worked that way, and the rest of the squad had grown used to seeing M amp; R scribbled under "Primary" on the case board, and I had a sudden, stubborn urge to make it clear that I was just as capable of leading this investigation as she was.

"Good morning," I said. Most of them muttered something. Sculptor Boy said loudly and cheerfully, "Good afternoon!"-which, technically, it was-and I wondered which of the girls he was trying to impress. "I'm Detective Ryan, and this is Detective Maddox. As you know, the body of a young girl was found on this site earlier today."

One of the guys let his breath out in a little burst and caught it again. He was in a corner, sandwiched protectively between two of the girls, clutching a big steaming mug in both hands; he had short brown curls and a sweet, frank, freckled boy-band face. I was pretty sure this was Damien Donnelly. The others seemed subdued (except for Sculptor Boy) but not traumatized, but he was white under the freckles and holding the mug way too hard.

"We'll need to talk to each of you," I said. "Please don't leave the site until we have. We may not have a chance to get to all of you for a while, so please bear with us if we need you to stay a bit late."

"Are we, like, suspects?" said Sculptor Boy.

"No," I said, "but we need to find out if you have any relevant information."

"Ahhh," he said, disappointed, and slumped back in his chair. He started to melt a square of chocolate onto the CD, caught Cassie's eye and put the lighter away. I envied him: I have often wanted to be one of those people who can take anything, the more horrific the better, as a deeply cool adventure.

"One other thing," I said. "Reporters will probably start arriving at any minute. Do not talk to them. Seriously. Telling them anything, even something that seems insignificant, could damage our whole case. We'll leave you our cards, in case at any point you think of anything we should know. Any questions?"

"What if they offer us, like, millions?" Sculptor Boy wanted to know.

The finds shed was less impressive than I'd expected. In spite of what Mark had said about taking away the valuable stuff, I think my mental image had included gold cups and skeletons and pieces of eight. Instead there were two chairs, a wide desk spread with sheets of drawing paper, and an incredible quantity of what appeared to be broken pottery, stuffed into plastic bags and crammed onto those perforated DIY metal shelves.

"Finds," said Hunt, flapping a hand at the shelves. "I suppose…Well, no, maybe some other time. Some very nice jettons and clothing hooks."

"We'd love to see them another day, Dr. Hunt," I said. "Could you give us about ten minutes and then send Damien Donnelly in to us?"

"Damien," said Hunt, and wandered off. Cassie shut the door behind him. I said, "How on earth does he run a whole excavation?" and started clearing away the drawings: fine, delicately shaded pencil sketches of an old coin, from various angles. The coin itself, sharply bent on one side and patchy with encrustations of earth, sat in the middle of the desk in a Ziploc bag. I found space for them on top of a filing cabinet.

"By hiring people like that Mark guy," Cassie said. "I bet he's plenty organized. What was with the hair clip?"

I squared off the edges of the drawings. "I think Jamie Rowan was wearing one that matched that description."

"Ah," she said. "I wondered. Is that in the file, do you know, or do you just remember it?"

"What difference does that make?" It came out sounding snottier than I'd intended.

"Well, if there's a link, we can't exactly keep it to ourselves," Cassie said reasonably. "Just for example, we're going to have to get Sophie to check that blood against the '84 samples, and we're going to have to tell her why. It would make things a whole lot simpler to explain if the link was right there in the file."

"I'm pretty sure it is," I said. The desk rocked; Cassie found a blank sheet of paper and folded it to wedge under the leg. "I'll double-check tonight. Hold off on talking to Sophie till then, OK?"

"Sure," said Cassie. "If it's not there, we'll find a way round it." She tested the desk again: better. "Rob, are you OK with this case?"

I didn't answer. Through the window I could see the morgue guys wrapping the body in plastic, Sophie pointing and gesturing. They barely had to brace themselves to lift the stretcher; it looked almost weightless as they carried it away towards the waiting van. The wind rattled the glass sharply in my face and I spun round. I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to shout, "Shut the hell up" or "Fuck this case, I quit" or something, something reckless and unreasonable and dramatic. But Cassie was just leaning against the desk and waiting, looking at me with steady brown eyes, and I have always had an excellent brake system, a gift for choosing the anticlimactic over the irrevocable every time.

"I'm fine with it," I said. "Just kick me if I get too moody."

"With pleasure," Cassie said, and grinned at me. "God, though, look at all this stuff… I hope we do get a chance to have a proper look. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was little, did I ever tell you?"

"Only about a million times," I said.

"Lucky you've got a goldfish memory, then, isn't it? I used to dig up the back garden, but all I ever found was a little china duck with the beak broken off."

"It looks like I should have been the one digging out the back," I said. Normally I would have made some remark about law enforcement's loss being archaeology's gain, but I was still feeling too nervy and dislocated for any decent level of back and forth; it would only have come out wrong. "I could have had the world's biggest private collection of pottery bits."

"Now there's a pick-up line," said Cassie, and dug out her notebook.

Damien came in awkwardly, with a plastic chair bumping along from one hand and his mug of tea still clutched in the other. "I brought this…" he said, using the mug to gesture uncertainly at his chair and the two we were sitting on. "Dr. Hunt said you wanted to see me?"

"Yep," said Cassie. "I would say, 'Have a seat,' but you already do."

It took him a moment; then he laughed a little, checking our faces to see if that was OK. He sat down, started to put his mug on the table, changed his mind and kept it in his lap, looked up at us with big obedient blue eyes. This was definitely Cassie's baby. He looked like the type who was accustomed to being taken care of by women; he was shaky already, and being interrogated by a guy would probably send him into a state where we would never get anything useful out of him. I got out a pen, unobtrusively.

"Listen," Cassie said soothingly, "I know you've had a bad shock. Just take your time and walk us through it, OK? Start with what you were doing this morning, before you went up to the stone."

Damien took a deep breath, licked his lips. "We were, um, we were working on the medieval drainage ditch. Mark wanted to see if we could follow the line a little further down the site. See, we're, we're sort of cleaning up loose ends now, 'cause it's coming up to the end of the dig-"

"How long's the dig been going on?" Cassie asked.

"Like two years, but I've only been on it since June. I'm in college."

"I used to want to be an archaeologist," Cassie told him. I nudged her foot, under the table; she stood on mine. "How's the dig going?"

Damien's face lit up; he looked almost dazzled with delight, unless dazzled was just his normal expression. "It's been amazing. I'm so glad I did it."