Tana French - In the Woods

Mark raised one eyebrow. "Fair enough. Over this way."

He headed off between the Portakabins without checking whether I was behind him. Cassie, unexpectedly, grinned at me as I followed him-a mischievous Gotcha! grin, which made me feel a little better. I scratched my cheek at her, with my middle finger.

Mark took me across the site, along a narrow path between mysterious earthworks and clumps of stones. He walked like a martial artist or a poacher, a long, easy, balanced lope. "Medieval drainage ditch," he said, pointing. A couple of crows shot up from an abandoned wheelbarrow full of dirt, decided we were harmless and went back to picking through the earth. "And that's a Neolithic settlement. This site's been inhabited more or less nonstop since the Stone Age. Still is. See the cottage, that's eighteenth-century. It was one of the places where they planned the 1798 Rebellion." He glanced over his shoulder at me, and I had an absurd impulse to explain my accent and inform him that I was not only Irish but from just around the corner, so there. "The guy who lives there now is descended from the guy who built it."

We had reached the stone tower in the middle of the site. Arrow slits showed through gaps in the ivy, and a section of broken wall sloped down from one side. It looked vaguely, frustratingly familiar, but I couldn't tell whether this was because I actually remembered it or because I knew I should.

Mark pulled a packet of tobacco out of his combats and started rolling a cigarette. There was masking tape wrapped around both his hands, at the base of the fingers. "The Walsh clan built this keep in the fourteenth century, added a castle over the next couple of hundred years," he said. "This was all their territory, from those hills over there"-he jerked his head at the horizon, high overlapping hills furred with dark trees-"to a bend in the river down beyond that gray farmhouse. They were rebels, raiders. In the seventeenth century they used to ride into Dublin, all the way to the British barracks in Rathmines, grab a few guns, whack the heads off any soldiers they saw, and then leg it. By the time the British got organized to go after them, they'd be halfway back here."

He was the right person to tell the story. I thought of rearing hooves, torchlight and dangerous laughter, the rising pulse of war drums. Over his shoulder I could see Cassie, up by the crime-scene tape, talking to Cooper and taking notes.

"I hate to interrupt you," I said, "but I'm afraid I won't have time for the full tour. I just need a very basic overview of the site."

Mark licked the cigarette paper, sealed his rollie and found a lighter. "Fair enough," he said, and started pointing. "Neolithic settlement, Bronze Age ceremonial stone, Iron Age roundhouse, Viking dwellings, fourteenth-century keep, sixteenth-century castle, eighteenth-century cottage." "Bronze Age ceremonial stone" was where Cassie and the techs were.

"Is the site guarded at night?" I asked.

He laughed. "Nah. We lock the finds shed, obviously, and the office, but anything really valuable goes back to head office right away. And we started locking the tools shed a month or two ago-some of our tools went missing, and we found out the farmers had been using our hoses to water their fields in dry weather. That's it. What's the point of guarding it? In a month it'll all be gone anyway, except for this." He slapped the wall of the tower; something scuttled in the ivy above our heads.

"Why's that?" I asked.

He stared at me, giving it an impressive level of incredulous disgust. "In a month's time," he said, enunciating clearly for me, "the fucking government is going to bulldoze this whole site and build a fucking motorway over it. They graciously agreed to leave a fucking traffic island for the keep, so they can wank off about how much they've done to preserve our heritage."

I remembered the motorway now, from some news report: a bland politician being shocked at the archaeologists who wanted the taxpayer to pay millions to redesign the plans. I had probably changed the channel at that point. "We'll try not to delay you for too long," I said. "The dog at the cottage: does he bark when people come to the site?"

Mark shrugged and went back to his cigarette. "Not at us, but he knows us. We feed him scraps and all. He might if someone went too near the cottage, specially at night, but probably not for someone up by the wall. Off his territory."

"What about cars-does he bark at them?"

"Did he bark at yours? He's a sheepdog, not a guard dog." He sent out a narrow ribbon of smoke between his teeth.

So the killer could have come to the site from any direction: by road, from the estate, even along the river if he liked making things difficult. "That's all I need for now," I said. "Thanks for your time. If you'll wait with the others, we'll come and update you in just a few minutes."

"Don't walk on anything that looks like archaeology," Mark said, and loped off back to the Portakabins. I headed up the slope towards the body.

The Bronze Age ceremonial stone was a flat, massive block, maybe seven feet long by three wide by three high, chipped from a single boulder. The field around it had been crudely bulldozed away-not too long ago, judging by the way the ground gave under my shoes-but a cushion around the stone had been left untouched, so that it rode high like an island amid the churned earth. On top of it, something flashed blue and white between the nettles and long grass.

It wasn't Jamie. I had more or less known this already-if there had been a chance it might be, Cassie would have come to tell me-but it still blew my mind empty. This girl had long dark hair, one plait thrown across her face. That was all I noticed, at first, the dark hair. It didn't even occur to me that Jamie's body wouldn't have been in this condition.

I had missed Cooper: he was picking his way back towards the road, shaking his foot like a cat on every step. A tech was taking photos, another was dusting the table for prints; a handful of local uniforms were fidgeting and chatting with the morgue guys, over by their stretcher. The grass was scattered with triangular numbered markers. Cassie and Sophie Miller were crouching beside the stone table, looking at something on the edge. I knew it was Sophie right away; that backboard-straight posture cuts through the anonymous coveralls. Sophie is my favorite crime-scene tech. She is slim and dark and demure, and on her the white shower cap looks like she should be bending over wounded soldiers' beds with cannon fire in the background, murmuring something soothing and giving out sips of water from a canteen. In actual fact, she is quick and impatient and can put anyone from superintendents to prosecutors in their place with a few crisp words. I like incongruity.

"Which way?" I called, at the tape. You don't walk on a crime scene until the Bureau guys say you can.

"Hi, Rob," Sophie shouted, straightening up and pulling down her mask. "Hang on."

Cassie reached me first. "Only been dead a day or so," she said quietly, before Sophie caught up. She looked a little pale around the mouth; kids do that to most of us.

"Thanks, Cass," I said. "Hi, Sophie."

"Hey, Rob. You two still owe me a drink." We had promised to buy her cocktails if she got the lab to fast-track some blood analysis for us, a couple of months before. Since then we'd all been saying, "We have to meet up for that drink," on a regular basis, and never getting around to it.

"Come through for us on this one and we'll buy you dinner as well," I said. "What've we got?"

"White female, ten to thirteen," Cassie said. "No ID. There's a key in her pocket, looks like a house key, but that's it. Her head's smashed in, but Cooper found petechial hemorrhaging and some possible ligature marks on her neck, too, so we'll have to wait for the post for cause of death. She's fully dressed, but it looks like she was probably raped. This one's weird all round, Rob. Cooper says she's been dead somewhere around thirty-six hours, but there's been practically no insect activity, and I don't see how the archaeologists could have missed her if she'd been there all yesterday."