Tana French - In the Woods

I sat there for a very long time, watching the sky lighten outside my window and realizing that my name hadn't come up on Cassie's mobile. I could feel the vodka working its way out of my blood; the headache was starting to kick in. Sam snored, very gently. I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.

The motorway went ahead on the route originally planned, of course. Move the Motorway stalled it for an impressive amount of time-injunctions, constitutional challenges, I think they might have taken it all the way to the European High Court-and a grungy bunch of unisex protesters calling themselves Knocknafree (and including, I would be willing to bet, Mark) set up camp on the site to stop the bulldozers going through, which held things up for another few weeks while the government got a court order against them. They never had a chance in hell. I wish I could have asked Jonathan Devlin whether he actually believed, in the teeth of all the historical evidence, that this one time public opinion would make a difference, or whether he knew, all along, and needed to try anyway. I envied him, either way.

I went down there, the day I saw in the paper that construction had begun. I was supposed to be going door-to-door in Terenure, trying to find someone who'd seen a stolen car that had been used in a robbery, but nobody would miss me for an hour or so. I'm not sure why I went. It wasn't a dramatic final bid for closure or anything like that; I just had some belated impulse to see the place, one more time.

It was a mess. I had expected this, but I hadn't foreseen the scale of it. I could hear the mindless roar of machinery long before I reached the top of the hill. The whole site was unrecognizable, men in neon protective gear swarming like ants and shouting hoarse unintelligible commands over the noise, huge grimy bulldozers tossing aside great clumps of earth and nosing with slow, obscene delicacy at the excavated remnants of walls.

I parked at the side of the road and got out of the car. There was a disconsolate little huddle of protesters on the shoulder (it was still untouched, so far; the chestnuts were starting to fall again), waving hand-lettered signs-Save Our Heritage, History Is Not For Sale-in case the media showed up again. The raw, churning earth seemed to go on and on into the distance, it seemed huger than the dig had ever been, and it took me a few moments to realize why this was: that last strip of wood was almost gone. Pale, splintered trunks; roots exposed, thrusting crazily at the gray sky. Chainsaws were gibbering at the handful of trees that were left.

The memory smacked me in the solar plexus so hard it took my breath away: scrambling up the castle wall, crisp packets crackling in my T-shirt and the sound of the river chuckling somewhere far below; Peter's runner searching for a foothold just above me, Jamie's blond flag flying high among the swaying leaves. My whole body remembered it, the familiar scrape of stone against my palm, the brace of my thigh muscle as I pushed myself upwards, into the whirl of green and exploding light. I had become so used to thinking of the wood as the invincible and stalking enemy, the shadow over every secret corner of my mind; I had completely forgotten that, for much of my life, it had been our easy playground and our best-loved refuge. It hadn't really occurred to me, until I saw them cutting it down, that it had been beautiful.

At the edge of the site, near the road, one of the workmen had pulled a squashed packet of cigarettes from under his orange vest and was methodically patting down his pockets for a lighter. I found mine and went over to him.

"Ta, son," he said through the cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. He was somewhere in his fifties, small and wiry, with a face like a terrier: friendly, noncommittal, with bushy eyebrows and a thick handlebar mustache.

"How's it going?" I asked.

He shrugged, inhaled and handed the lighter back to me. "Ah, sure. I've seen worse. Bleeding great rocks everywhere, that's the only thing."

"From the castle, maybe. This used to be an archaeological site."

"You're telling me," he said, nodding towards the protesters.

I smiled. "Found anything interesting?"

His eyes returned sharply to my face, and I could see him giving me a quick, concise appraisal: protester, archaeologist, government spy? "Like what?"

"I don't know; archaeological bits and pieces, maybe. Animal bones. Human bones."

His eyebrows twitched together. "You a cop?"

"No," I said. The air smelled wet and heavy, rich with turned earth and latent rain. "Two of my friends went missing here, back in the eighties."

He nodded thoughtfully, unsurprised. "I remember that, all right," he said. "Two young kids. Are you the little fella was with them?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's me."

He took a deep, leisurely drag on his cigarette and squinted up at me with mild interest. "Sorry for your trouble."

"It's a long time ago," I said.

He nodded. "We've found no bones that I know of. Rabbits and foxes might've turned up, maybe; nothing bigger. We'd have called the cops if we had."

"I know," I said. "I was just checking."

He thought about this for a while, gazing back over the site. "One of the lads found this, earlier," he said. He went through his pockets, working from the bottom up, and pulled something out from under the vest. "What d'you make of that, now?"

He dropped the thing into my palm. It was leaf-shaped, flat and narrow and about as long as my thumb, made of some smooth metal coated matt black with age. One end was jagged; it had snapped off something, a long time ago. He had tried to clean it up, but it was still patched with small, hard encrustations of earth. "I don't know," I said. "An arrowhead, maybe, or part of a pendant."

"Found it in the muck on his boot, at the tea break," the man said. "He gave it to me to bring home to my daughter's young fella; mad into the old archaeology, he is."

The thing was cool in my palm, heavier than you would expect. Narrow grooves, half worn away, formed a pattern on one side. I tilted it to the light: a man, no more than a stick-figure, with the wide, pronged antlers of a stag.

"You can hang on to that if you like," the man said. "The young fella won't miss what he's never had."

I closed my hand over the object. The edges bit into my palm; I could feel my pulse beating against it. It should probably have been in a museum. Mark would have gone nuts over it. "No," I said. "Thank you. I think your grandson should have it."

He shrugged, eyebrows jumping. I tipped the object into his hand. "Thank you for showing it to me," I said.

"No bother," the man said, tucking it back into his pocket. "Good luck."

"You, too," I said. It was starting to rain, a fine, misty drizzle. He threw his cigarette butt into a tire track and headed back to work, turning up his collar as he went.

I lit a cigarette of my own and watched them working. The metal object had left slender red marks across my palm. Two little kids, maybe eight or nine, were balancing on their stomachs across the estate wall; the workmen waved their arms and shouted over the roar of machinery till the kids disappeared, but a minute or two later they were back again. The protesters put up umbrellas and handed around sandwiches. I watched for a long time, until my mobile began vibrating insistently in my pocket and the rain started to come down more heavily, and then I put out my cigarette and buttoned my coat and headed back to the car.

I've taken a number of liberties with the workings of the Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. To pick the most obvious example, there is no Murder squad in Ireland-in 1997 various units were amalgamated to form the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which assists local officers in investigating serious crimes, including murder-but the story seemed to require one. I owe David Walsh special thanks for helping me with a wild variety of questions about police procedure. All inaccuracies are mine and not his.