Tana French - In the Woods

Rosalind thought about this for a long time. I could hear their feet crunching in fallen leaves, Cassie's sweater grating faintly against the mike at each step; somewhere a wood dove cooed, cozy and contented. Sam's eyes were on me, and through the gloom of the van I thought I saw condemnation in them. I thought of his uncle and stared back.

"She's lost her," said O'Kelly. He stretched, heavy shoulders rolling back, and cracked his neck. "It's the bloody caution that does it. When I was coming up there was none of this shite: you gave them a few digs, they told you what you wanted to know, that was good enough for any judge. Well, sure, at least we can get back to work now."

"Hang on," Sam said. "She'll get her back."

"Listen," Cassie said at last, on a long breath, "about going to our boss-"

"Just a moment," Rosalind said coldly. "We're not finished."

"Yes we are," Cassie said, but her voice wavered treacherously. "As far as Katy goes, we are. I am not going to just stand here and listen to-"

"I don't like people trying to bully me, Detective. I'll say whatever I like. You're going to listen. If you interrupt me again, this conversation is over. If you repeat it to anyone else, I'll make it clear to them exactly what kind of person you are, and Detective Ryan will confirm it. Nobody will believe a word you say, and you'll lose your precious job. Do you understand?"

Silence. My stomach was still heaving, slowly and horribly; I swallowed hard. "The arrogance of her," Sam said softly. "The fucking arrogance."

"Don't knock it," O'Kelly said. "It's Maddox's best shot."

"Yes," Cassie said, very low. "I understand."

"Good." I heard the prim, satisfied little smile in Rosalind's voice. Her heels tapped on tarmac; they had turned onto the main road, heading down towards the entrance of the estate. "So, as I was saying, I decided that someone needed to stop Katy from getting too full of herself. It really should have been my mother and father's job, obviously; if they had done it, I wouldn't have had to. But they couldn't be bothered. I think that's actually a form of child abuse, don't you-that kind of neglect?"

She waited until Cassie said tightly, "I don't know."

"Oh, it is. It made me very upset. So I told Katy that she should really stop doing ballet, since it was having such a bad effect on her, but she wouldn't listen. She needed to learn that she didn't have some kind of divine right to be the center of attention. Not everything in this world was all about her. So I stopped her from dancing, now and then. Do you want to know how?"

Cassie was breathing fast. "No. I don't."

"I made her sick, Detective Maddox," Rosalind said. "God, you mean you hadn't even figured out that much?"

"We wondered. We thought maybe your mother had been doing something-"

"My mother ?" That note again, that dismissal beyond contempt. "Oh, please. My mother would have got herself caught within a week, even with you people in charge. I mixed juice with detergent, or cleaning things, or whatever I felt like that day, and I told Katy it was a secret recipe to improve her dancing . She was stupid enough to believe me. I was interested to see whether anyone would work it out, but nobody did. Can you imagine?"

"Jesus," Cassie said, barely above a whisper.

"Go, Cassie," Sam muttered. "That's grievous bodily harm. Go ."

"She won't," I said. My voice sounded strange, jerky. "Not till she has her on murder."

"Look," Cassie said, and I heard her swallow. "We're about to go into the estate, and you said I only had till we got back to your house… I need to know what you're going to do about-"

"You'll know when I tell you. And we'll go in when I decide to go in. Actually, I think we might go back this way, so I can finish telling you my story."

"All the way back around the estate?"

"You were the one who demanded to talk to me, Detective Maddox," Rosalind said, reprovingly. "You're going to have to learn to take the consequences of your own actions."

"Shit," Sam murmured. They were moving away from us.

"She's not going to need backup, O'Neill," O'Kelly said. "The girl's a bitch, but it's not like she has an Uzi ."

"Anyway. Katy just wouldn't learn." That sharp, dangerous note was seeping into Rosalind's voice again. "She finally managed to work out why she was getting sick-God, it took her years -and she threw an absolute tantrum at me. She said she was never going to drink anything I gave her again, blah blah blah, she actually threatened to tell our parents-I mean, they would never have believed her, she always did get hysterical about nothing, but all the same… See what I mean about Katy? She was a spoiled little brat. She always, always had to have her own way. If she didn't get it, she ran to Mummy and Daddy to tell tales."

"She just wanted to be a dancer," Cassie said quietly.

"And I had told her that wasn't acceptable," Rosalind snapped. "If she had simply done as she was told, none of this would have happened. Instead, she tried to threaten me. That's exactly what I knew this ballet-school thing would do to her, all those articles and fund-raisers, it was disgusting-she thought she could do whatever she liked. She said to me-this is exactly what she said, I'm not making this up-she stood there with her hands on her hips, God what a little prima donna, and she said, 'You shouldn't have done that to me. Don't ever do it again.' Who on earth did she think she was? She was completely out of control, the way she behaved to me was absolutely outrageous, and there was no way I was going to allow it."

Sam's hands were clenched into fists and I wasn't breathing. I was covered in a sick, cold sweat. I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind's eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched.

"I've run into people who tried to tell me what to do," Cassie said. Her voice sounded tight, breathless. Even though she was the only one of us who had understood what to expect, this story had knocked the wind right out of her. "I didn't get someone to kill them."

"I think you'll find, actually, that I never told Damien to do anything to Katy." I heard Rosalind's smirk. "I can't help it if men always want to do things for me, can I? Ask him, if you want: he was the one who came up with every single idea. And, my God, it took him forever, it would have been quicker to train a monkey." O'Kelly snorted. "When the idea finally hit him, he looked like he had just discovered gravity, like he was some kind of genius . And then he kept having these doubts, it just went on and on-God, a few more weeks and I think I would have had to give up on him and start all over, before I lost my mind."

"He did what you wanted in the end," Cassie said. "So why did you break up with him? The poor guy's devastated."

"The same reason Detective Ryan broke up with you. I was so bored I wanted to scream. And no, actually, he didn't do what I wanted. He made a complete mess of the whole thing." Rosalind's voice was rising, cold and furious. "Panicking and hiding her body-he could have ruined everything. He could have got me into serious trouble. Honestly, he's just unbelievable . I even went to the bother of coming up with a story for him to tell you, to put you off his trail, but he couldn't even manage to get that right."

"The guy in the tracksuit?" Cassie said, and I heard that tautening at the edges of her voice: any minute now. "No, he told us that one. He just wasn't very convincing. We thought he was making a big deal out of nothing."