Tana French - In the Woods

Mathews had played the odds and concentrated on Damien. In exchange for her testimony, he had offered Rosalind a three-year suspended sentence for reckless endangerment and resisting arrest. I'd heard, through the grapevine, that she'd already received half a dozen proposals of marriage, and that newspapers and publishers were having a bidding war over her story.

On my way out of the courthouse I saw Jonathan Devlin, leaning against the wall and smoking. He was holding the cigarette close against his chest, tilting his head back to watch the gulls wheeling over the river. I got my smokes out of my coat and joined him.

He glanced at me, then away again.

"How are you doing?" I asked.

He shrugged heavily. "Much as you'd expect. Jessica tried to kill herself. Went to bed and cut her wrists with my razor."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "Is she all right?"

One corner of his mouth twitched in a humorless smile. "Yeah. Luckily she made a balls of it: cut across instead of down, or some such."

I lit my cigarette, cupping my hand around the flame-it was a windy day, purplish clouds starting to gather. "Can I ask you a question?" I said. "Strictly off the record?"

He looked at me: a dark, hopeless look tinged with something like contempt. "Why not."

"You knew, didn't you?" I said. "You knew all along."

He said nothing for a long time, so long that I wondered if he was going to ignore the question. Eventually he sighed and said, "Not knew. She couldn't have done it herself, she was with her cousins, and I didn't know anything about this lad Damien. But I wondered. I've known Rosalind all her life. I wondered."

"And you didn't do anything." I had meant my voice to be expressionless, but a note of accusation must have slipped in. He could have told us on the first day what Rosalind was; he could have told someone years earlier, when Katy first started getting sick. Although I knew that quite possibly this would have made no difference to anything at all, in the long run, I couldn't help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.

Jonathan tossed away his cigarette butt and turned to face me, hands shoved into the pockets of his overcoat. "What do you think I should have done?" he demanded in a low, hard voice. "She's my daughter, too. I'd already lost one. Margaret won't hear a word against her; years ago I wanted to send Rosalind to a psychologist, about the amount of lies she told, and Margaret got hysterical and threatened to leave me, take the girls with her. And I didn't know anything. I would have had fuck-all to tell you. I kept an eye on her and prayed it was some property developer. What would you have done?"

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "Quite possibly exactly what you did." He kept staring at me, breathing fast, his nostrils flaring slightly. I turned away and drew on my cigarette; after a while I heard him take a deep breath and lean back against the wall again.

"Now I've something to ask you," he said. "Did Rosalind have it right about you being that boy whose friends disappeared?"

The question didn't surprise me. He had the right to see or hear footage of all interviews with Rosalind, and at some level I think I had always expected him to ask, sooner or later. I knew I should deny it-the official story was that I had, legally if a little callously, made up the whole disappearance thing to gain Rosalind's trust-but I didn't have the energy, and I couldn't see the point. "Yeah," I said. "Adam Ryan."

Jonathan turned his head and looked at me for a long time, and I wondered what hazy memories he was trying to match to my face.

"We had nothing to do with that," he said, and the undertone in his voice-gentle, almost pitying-startled me. "I want you to know that. Nothing at all."

"I know," I said, eventually. "I'm sorry I went for you."

He nodded a few times, slowly. "I'd probably have done the same thing, in your place. And it's not as if I was some holy innocent. You saw what we did to Sandra, didn't you? You were there."

"Yeah," I said. "She's not going to press charges."

He moved his head as if the thought disturbed him. The river was dark and thick-looking, with an oily, unhealthy sheen. There was something in the water, a dead fish maybe, or a rubbish spill; the seagulls were screaming over it in a whirling frenzy.

"What are you going to do now?" I asked, inanely.

Jonathan shook his head, staring up at the lowering sky. He looked exhausted-not the kind of exhaustion that can be healed by a good night's sleep or a holiday; something bone-deep and indelible, settled in puffy grooves around his eyes and mouth. "Move house. We've had bricks through the windows, and someone spray-painted PEDAPHILE on the car-he couldn't spell, whoever he was, but the message came across clear enough. I can stick it out till the motorway thing is settled, one way or the other, but after that…"

Allegations of child abuse, no matter how baseless they may seem, have to be checked out. The investigation into Damien's accusations against Jonathan had found no evidence to substantiate them and a considerable amount to contradict them, and Sex Crime had been as discreet as was humanly possible; but the neighbors always know, by some mysterious system of jungle drums, and there are always plenty of people who believe there is no smoke without fire.

"I'm sending Rosalind to counseling, like the judge said. I've done some reading and all the books say it makes no difference to people like her, they're made that way and there's no cure, but I have to try. And I'll keep her at home as long as I can, where I can see what she's at and try to stop her pulling her tricks on anyone else. She's off to college in October, music at Trinity, but I've told her I won't pay her rent on a flat-she'll stay at home, if it's that or get a job. Margaret still believes she did nothing and you lot set her up, but she's glad enough to keep her at home awhile longer. She says Rosalind's sensitive." He cleared his throat with a harsh sound, as if the word tasted bad. "I'm sending Jess to live with my sister in Athlone as soon as the scars on her wrists go down; get her out of harm's way."

His mouth twisted in that bitter half-smile. "Harm. Her own sister." For an instant I thought of what that house must have been like for the past eighteen years, what it must be like now. It made a slow, sick horror heave in my stomach.

"Do you know something?" Jonathan said abruptly and painfully. "Margaret and I were only going out a couple of months when she found out she was pregnant. We were both terrified. I managed to bring it up once, that maybe she should think about…taking the boat to England. But…sure, she's very religious. She felt bad enough about getting pregnant to start with, never mind…She's a good woman, I don't regret marrying her. But if I'd known what was-what it-what Rosalind was going to be, God forgive me, I'd have dragged her on that boat myself."

I wish to God you had, I wanted to say, but it would have been cruelty. "I'm sorry," I said again, uselessly.

He glanced at me for a moment; then he took a breath and shrugged his coat closer around his shoulders. "I'd better head in, see if Rosalind's finished up."

"I think she'll be awhile."

"She probably will," he said tonelessly, and plodded up the steps into the courthouse, his overcoat flapping behind him, hunching a little against the wind.

The jury found Damien guilty. Given the evidence presented, they could hardly have done otherwise. There had been various complicated, multilateral legal fights about admissibility; psychiatrists had had jargon-heavy debates about the workings of Damien's mind. (All this I heard third-hand, in passing snatches of conversation or in interminable phone calls from Quigley, who had apparently made it his mission in life to find out why I had been relegated to paperwork in Harcourt Street.) His barrister went for a double-barreled defense-he was temporarily insane, and even if he wasn't, he believed he was protecting Rosalind from grievous bodily harm-which often generates enough confusion to be mistaken for reasonable doubt; but we had a full confession, and, perhaps more importantly, we had autopsy photos of a dead child. Damien was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life, which in practice usually works out at somewhere between ten and fifteen years.