Tana French - In the Woods

"She should've gone into politics. Hang on; here we go." O'Kelly jerked his head at the glass: Sam was showing Rosalind into the interview room. "Let's see her try to get out of this one. This should be good for a laugh."

Rosalind glanced around the room and sighed. "I'd like you to ring my parents now," she told Sam. "Tell them to get me a lawyer and then come down here." She pulled a dainty little pen and diary out of her blazer pocket, wrote something on a page, then ripped it out and handed it to Sam, as if he were a concierge. "That's their number. Thank you so much."

"You can see your parents once we've finished talking," Sam said. "If you want a lawyer-"

"I think I'll see them sooner than that, actually." Rosalind smoothed her skirt over her backside and sat down, with a little moue of distaste at the plastic chair. "Don't minors have the right to have a parent or guardian present during an interview?"

There was a moment when everyone froze, except Rosalind, who crossed her knees demurely and smiled up at Sam, savoring the effect.

"Interview suspended," Sam said curtly. He whipped the file off the table and headed for the door.

"Jesus Christ on a bike," said O'Kelly. "Ryan, are you telling me-"

"She could be lying," Cassie said. She was staring intently through the glass; her hand had closed into a fist around the tissue.

My heart, which had stopped beating, resumed at double speed. "Of course she is. Look at her, there's no way she's under-"

"Aye, right. Do you know how many men have landed in jail for saying that?"

Sam banged the observation-room door open so hard it bounced off the wall. "What age is that girl?" he demanded, of me.

" Eighteen, " I said. My head was spinning; I knew I was sure, but I couldn't remember how. "She told me-"

"Sweet Jesus! And you took her word for it?" I had never seen Sam lose his temper before, and it was more impressive than I would have expected. "If you asked that girl the time at half past two, she'd tell you it was three o'clock just to fuck with your head. You didn't even check ?"

"Look who's talking," O'Kelly snapped. "Any one of ye could have checked, any time in the past God knows how long, but no-"

Sam didn't even hear him. His eyes were locked on mine, blazing. "We took your word because you're supposed to be a bloody detective . You sent your own partner in there to get crucified, without even bothering-"

"I did check!" I shouted. "I checked the file!" But even as the words left my mouth I knew, with a horrible sick thud. A sunny afternoon, a long time ago; I had been fumbling through the file, with the phone jammed between my jaw and my shoulder and O'Gorman yammering in my other ear, trying to talk to Rosalind and make sure she was an appropriate adult to supervise my conversation with Jessica, all at the same time ( And I must have known , I thought, I must have known even then that she couldn't be trusted, or why would I have bothered to check such a small thing? ). I had found the page of family stats and skimmed down to Rosalind's DOB, subtracted the years-

Sam had swung away from me and was rooting urgently through the file, and I saw the moment when his shoulders sagged. "November," he said, very quietly. "Her birthday's the second of November. She'll be eighteen."

"Congratulations," O'Kelly said heavily, after a silence. "The three of ye. Well done."

Cassie let out her breath. "Inadmissible," she said. "Every fucking word." She slid down the wall to a sitting position, as if her knees had suddenly given way, and closed her eyes.

A faint, high, insistent sound came from the speakers. In the interview room, Rosalind had got bored and started humming.

That evening we started clearing out the incident room, Sam and Cassie and I. We worked methodically and in silence, taking down photographs, erasing the multicolored tangle from the whiteboard, sorting files and reports and packing them away in blue-stamped cardboard boxes. Someone had set fire to a flat off Parnell Street the previous night, killing a Nigerian asylum-seeker and her six-month-old baby; Costello and his partner needed the room.

O'Kelly and Sweeney were interviewing Rosalind, down the hall, with Jonathan in the background to protect her. I think I had expected Jonathan to come in with all guns blazing and possibly try to hit someone, but as it transpired he hadn't been the problem. When O'Kelly told the Devlins, outside the interview room, what Rosalind had confessed to, Margaret whirled on him, mouth gaping open; then she drew in a huge gulp of breath and screamed, "No!" hoarse and wild, her voice slamming off the walls of the corridor. "No. No. No. She was with her cousins . How can you do this to her? How can you…how…Ah, God, she warned me-she warned me you would do this! You"-she stabbed a thick, trembling finger at me, and I flinched before I could stop myself-"you, calling her a dozen times a day asking her out, and her only a child, you should be ashamed… And her"-Cassie-"she hated Rosalind from the start, Rosalind always said she would try to blame her for…What are you trying to do to her? Are you trying to kill her? Then will you be happy? Oh, God, my poor baby…Why do people tell these lies about her? Why?" Her hands clawed at her hair and she broke down into ugly, wrenching sobs.

Jonathan had stood still at the top of the stairs, holding on to the railing, while O'Kelly tried to calm Margaret down and shot us filthy looks over her shoulder. He was dressed for work, in a suit and tie. For some reason I remember it very clearly, that suit. It was dark blue and spotlessly clean, with a slight sheen where it had been ironed too many times, and somehow I found it almost inexpressibly sad.

Rosalind was under arrest for murder and for assaulting an officer. She had opened her mouth only once since her parents arrived, to claim-lip trembling-that Cassie had punched her in the stomach and that she had only been defending herself. We would send a file to the prosecutor's office on both charges, but we all knew the evidence for murder was slim at best. We no longer had even the Tracksuit Shadow link to show that Rosalind had been an accessory: my session with Jessica had not in fact been supervised by an appropriate adult, and I had no way of proving that it had ever happened. We had Damien's word and a bunch of mobile-phone records, and that was all.

It was getting late, maybe eight o'clock, and the building was very quiet, just our movements and a soft fitful rain pattering at the windows of the incident room. I took down the post-mortem photos and the Devlins' family snapshots, the scowling Tracksuit Shadow suspects and the grainy blowups of Peter and Jamie, picked the Blu-Tack off the backs and filed them away. Cassie checked each box, fitted a lid onto it and labeled it in squeaky black marker. Sam went around the room with a rubbish bag, collecting Styrofoam cups and emptying wastepaper baskets, brushing crumbs off the tables. There were smears of dried blood down the front of his shirt.

His map of Knocknaree was starting to curl at the edges, and one corner ripped away as I took it down. Someone had got spatters of water on it and the ink had run in spots, making Cassie's property-developer caricature look unpleasantly as if he had had a stroke. "Should we keep this on file," I asked Sam, "or…?"

I held it out to him and we looked at it: tiny gnarled tree trunks and smoke curling from the chimneys of the houses, fragile and wistful as a fairy tale. "Probably better not," Sam said, after a moment. He took the map from me, rolled it into a tube and maneuvered it into the rubbish bag.

"I'm missing a lid," Cassie said. Dark, shocking scabs had formed over the cuts on her cheek. "Any more over there?"