Tana French - In the Woods

They had no internet access, which eliminated the deeply depressing possibility of some chat-room wacko from halfway around the world. They also had no alarm system, but I doubted that would turn out to be relevant: Katy hadn't been snatched from her bed by some intruder. We had found her fully and carefully dressed-yes, she always coordinated, Margaret said; she'd picked that up from her ballet teacher, whom she worshipped-in outdoor clothes. She had switched off her light and waited till her parents were asleep, and then, sometime in the night or the early morning, she had got up and got dressed and gone somewhere. Her house key had been in her pocket: she had been expecting to come back.

We searched her room anyway, partly for any clues to where she might have gone, and partly because of the brutal, obvious possibility that Jonathan or Margaret had killed her and then staged it to look as if she had left the house alive. She had shared a room with Jessica. The window was too small and the lightbulb too dim, which added to the creepy feeling the house was giving me. The wall on Jessica's side, a little eerily, was covered in sunshiny, idyllic art prints: Impressionist picnics, Rackham fairies, landscapes from the cheerier parts of Tolkien ("I gave her all those," said Rosalind, from the doorway. "Didn't I, pet?" Jessica nodded, at her shoes). Katy's wall, less surprisingly, had a strict ballet theme: photos of Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn that looked like they'd been cut from TV guides, a newsprint picture of Pavlova, her acceptance letter from the Royal Ballet School; a pretty nice pencil drawing of a young dancer, with TO KATY, 21/03/03. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! LOVE, DADDY scribbled on the corner of the pasteboard mount.

The white pajamas Katy had worn on Monday night were tangled on her bed. We bagged them just in case, along with the sheets and her mobile phone, which was on her bedside table, switched off. She hadn't kept a diary-"She started one awhile ago, but after a couple of months she got bored and 'lost' it," Rosalind said, putting the word in quotation marks and giving me a small, sad, knowing smile, "and she never bothered to start another"-but we took school copybooks, an old homework diary, anything whose scribbles might give us some hint. Each of the girls had a tiny faux wood desk, and on Katy's there was a little round tin holding a jumble of hair elastics; I recognized, with a small sudden pang, two silk cornflowers.

"Phew," said Cassie, when we got out of the estate onto the road. She rubbed her hands through her hair, messing up her curls.

"I've seen that name somewhere, not too long ago," I said. "Jonathan Devlin. As soon as we get back, let's run him through the computer and see if he's got a record."

"God, I almost hope it turns out to be that simple," Cassie said. "There is something deeply, deeply fucked up in that house."

I was glad-relieved, actually-that she had said it. I'd found a number of things about the Devlins disturbing-Jonathan and Margaret hadn't touched once, had barely looked at each other; where you would expect a bustle of curious, comforting neighbors, there had been nobody but shadowy Auntie Vera; each member of the household appeared to come from a completely different planet-but I was so edgy that I wasn't sure I could trust my own judgment, so it was good to know Cassie had felt something off kilter, too. It wasn't that I was having a breakdown or losing my mind or anything, I knew I would be fine once I got a chance to go home and sit down by myself and take all this in; but that first glimpse of Jessica had practically given me a heart attack, and the realization that she was Katy's twin hadn't been as reassuring as you might think. This case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels, and I couldn't shake the uneasy sense that they were somehow deliberate. Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code.

When I first went to boarding school I told my dormmates I had a twin brother. My father was a good amateur photographer, and one Saturday that summer when he'd seen us trying out a new stunt on Peter's bike-speeding along their knee-high garden wall and sailing off the end-he made us do it again and again, half the afternoon while he crouched on the grass changing lenses, until he'd used up a whole roll of black-and-white film and got the shot he wanted. We're in midair; I am driving and Peter is on the handlebars with his arms spread wide, and both of us have our eyes screwed tight shut and our mouths open (high, rough-edged boy-yells) and our hair is streaming out in fiery haloes, and I'm pretty sure that just after the photo was taken we went tumbling and skidding across the lawn and my mother gave out to my father for encouraging us. He angled the shot so that the ground is out of the picture and we look like we're flying, gravity-free against the sky.

I glued the photo to a piece of cardboard and propped it on my bedside table, where we were allowed two family pictures, and told the other boys detailed stories-some true, some imagined and I'm sure utterly implausible-about the adventures my twin and I had during the holidays. He was at a different school, I said, one in Ireland; our parents had read that it was healthier for twins to be separated. He was learning to ride horses.

By the time I came back for second year I had realized that it was only a matter of time before the twin story got me into excruciatingly embarrassing trouble (some classmate meeting my parents on Sports Day, asking chirpily why Peter hadn't come, too), so I left the photo at home-tucked into a slit in my mattress, like some dirty secret-and stopped mentioning my brother, in the hope that everyone would forget I had had one. When this kid called Hull-he was the type to pull the limbs off small furry animals in his spare time-sensed my discomfort and latched on to the subject, I finally told him my twin had been thrown off a horse over the summer and died of concussion. I spent much of that year in terror that the rumor about Ryan's dead brother would reach the teachers and, through them, my parents. In hindsight, of course, I'm fairly sure that it did, and that the teachers, already briefed on the Knocknaree saga, decided to be sensitive and understanding-I still cringe when I think about it-and let the rumor die out in its own time. I think I had a narrow escape: a couple of years further into the eighties and I would probably have been sent to kiddie counseling and forced to share my feelings with hand puppets.

Still, I regretted having to get rid of my twin. I'd found it comforting, the knowledge that Peter was alive and riding horseback, somewhere in a couple of dozen minds. If Jamie had been in the photo, I would probably have made us triplets and had a much harder time working my way out of that one.

By the time we got back to the site, the reporters had arrived. I gave them the standard preliminary spiel (I do this part, on the basis that I look more like a responsible adult than Cassie does): body of a young girl, name not being released till all the relatives are informed, treating it as a suspicious death, anyone who may have any information please contact us, no comment no comment no comment.

"Was this the work of a satanic cult?" asked a large woman in unflattering ski pants, whom we'd met before. She was from one of those tabloids with a penchant for punny headlines using alternative spellings.

"There's absolutely no evidence to indicate that," I said snottily. There never is. Homicidal satanic cults are the detective's version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.