Tana French: In the Woods

Over the next couple of years we developed, I think, a good reputation within the squad. We pulled in the suspect from the alley beating and interrogated him for six hours-although, if you deleted every recurrence of "Ah, fuck, man" from the tape, I doubt it would run over forty minutes-until he confessed. He was a junkie called Wayne ( " Wayne," I said to Cassie, while we were getting him a Sprite and watching him pick his acne in the one-way glass. "Why didn't his parents just tattoo 'Nobody in my family has ever finished secondary school' on his forehead at birth?") and he had beaten up the homeless guy, who was known as Beardy Eddie, for stealing his blanket. After he signed his statement, Wayne wanted to know if he could have his blanket back. We handed him over to the uniforms and told him they would look into it, and then we went back to Cassie's with a bottle of champagne and stayed up talking till six in the morning, and came in to work late and sheepish and still a little giggly.

We went through the predictable process where Quigley and a few of the others spent awhile asking me whether I was shagging her and whether, if so, she was any good; once it dawned on them that I genuinely wasn't, they moved on to her probable dykehood (I have always considered Cassie to be very clearly feminine, but I could see how, to a certain kind of mind, the haircut and the lack of makeup and the boys'-department corduroys would add up to Sapphic tendencies). Cassie eventually got bored of this and tidied things up by appearing at the Christmas party with a strapless black velvet cocktail dress and a bullishly handsome rugby player named Gerry. He was actually her second cousin and happily married, but he was heartily protective of Cassie and had no objection to gazing adoringly at her for an evening if it would smooth her career path.

After that, the rumors faded and people more or less left us to our own devices, which suited us both. Contrary to appearances, Cassie is not a particularly social person, any more than I am; she is vivacious and quick with banter and can talk to anyone, but given the choice, she preferred my company to that of a big group. I slept on her sofa a lot. Our solve rate was good and rising; O'Kelly stopped threatening to split us up every time we were late turning in paperwork. We were in the courtroom to see Wayne found guilty of manslaughter ("Ah, fuck, man"). Sam O'Neill drew a deft little caricature of the two of us as Mulder and Scully (I still have it, somewhere) and Cassie stuck it to the side of her computer, next to a bumper sticker that said BAD COP! NO DOUGHNUT!

In retrospect, I think Cassie came along at just the right time for me. My dazzling, irresistible outsider's vision of the Murder squad had not included things like Quigley, or gossip, or interminable circular interrogations of junkies with six-word vocabularies and dentist's-drill accents. I had pictured a tensile, heightened mode of existence, everything small and petty bush-fired away by a readiness so charged it snapped sparks, and the reality had left me bewildered and let down, like a child opening a glittering Christmas present and finding woolly socks inside. If it hadn't been for Cassie, I think I might have ended up turning into that detective on Law amp; Order, the one who has ulcers and thinks everything is a government conspiracy.

We caught the Devlin case on a Wednesday morning in August. It was, according to my notes, 11:48, so everyone else was out getting coffee. Cassie and I were playing Worms on my computer.

"Ha," said Cassie, sending one of her worms bopping over to mine with a baseball bat and thwacking him off a cliff. My worm, Groundsweeper Willy, yelled, "Och, ye big mammy's boy!" at me on his way down towards the ocean.

"I let you do that," I told her.

"Course you did," said Cassie. "No real man could actually be beaten by a little girl. Even the worm knows it: only a raisin-balled, testosterone-free cream puff could-"

"Fortunately I'm secure enough in my masculinity that I don't feel remotely threatened by-"

"Shh," said Cassie, turning my face back towards the monitor. "Nice boy. Shush, look pretty and play with your worm. God knows nobody else is going to."

"I think I'll transfer somewhere nice and peaceful, like ERU," I said.

"ERU needs fast response times, sweetie," Cassie said. "If it takes you half an hour to decide what to do with an imaginary worm, they're not gonna want you in charge of hostages."

At that point O'Kelly banged into the squad room and demanded, "Where is everyone?" Cassie hit Alt-Tab fast; one of her worms was named O'Smelly and she had been purposefully sending him into hopeless situations, to watch him get blown up by exploding sheep.

"Break," I said.

"Bunch of archaeologists found a body. Who's up?"

"We'll have it," said Cassie, shoving her foot off my chair so that hers shot back to her own desk.

"Why us?" I said. "Can't the pathologist deal with it?"

Archaeologists are required by law to call the police if they find human remains at a depth of less than nine feet below ground level. This is in case some genius gets the idea of concealing a murder by burying the corpse in a fourteenth-century graveyard and hoping it gets marked down as medieval. I suppose they figure that anyone who has the enterprise to dig down more than nine feet without getting spotted deserves a little leeway for sheer dedication. Uniforms and pathologists get called out fairly regularly, when subsidence and erosion have brought a skeleton close to the surface, but usually this is only a formality; it's relatively simple to distinguish between modern and ancient remains. Detectives are called only in exceptional circumstances, usually when a peat bog has preserved flesh and bone so perfectly that the body has all the clamoring immediacy of a fresh corpse.

"Not this time," said O'Kelly. "It's modern. Young female, looks like murder. Uniforms asked for us. They're only in Knocknaree, so you won't need to stay out there."

Something strange happened to my breath. Cassie stopped shoving things into her satchel and I felt her eyes flick to me for a split second. "Sir, I'm sorry, we really can't take on another full murder investigation right now. We're bang in the middle of the McLoughlin case and-"

"That didn't bother you when you thought this was just an afternoon off, Maddox," said O'Kelly. He dislikes Cassie for a series of mind-numbingly predictable reasons-her sex, her clothes, her age, her semiheroic record-and the predictability bothers her far more than the dislike. "If you had time for a day out down the country, you have time for a serious murder investigation. The Tech Bureau are already on their way." And he left.

"Oh, shit," said Cassie. "Oh, shit, the little wanker. Ryan, I'm so sorry. I just didn't think-"

"It's fine, Cass," I said. One of the best things about Cassie is that she knows when to shut up and leave you alone. It was her turn to drive, but she picked out my favorite unmarked-a '98 Saab that handles like a dream-and threw me the keys. In the car, she dug her CD holder out of her satchel and passed it to me; driver chooses the music, but I tend to forget to bring any. I picked the first thing that looked as if it had a hard pounding bass, and turned it up loud.

I hadn't been to Knocknaree since that summer. I went to boarding school a few weeks after Jamie should have gone-not the same school; one in Wiltshire, as far away as my parents could afford-and when I came back at Christmas we lived in Leixlip, out on the other side of Dublin. Once we hit the highway, Cassie had to dig out the map and find the exit, then navigate us down potholed side roads edged with long grass, hedges grown wild and scraping at the windows.