The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body.
The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Plough, Orion’s belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.
Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collected gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgement.
When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn’t go into Daddy’s business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college – and we didn’t – that just put it off for a few years.
Cassie’s eyes. “Thank you,” she said. She didn’t get up to see us out, and I realized it was because she wasn’t sure she could do it. As I closed the door I caught a last glimpse of her through the round window, still sitting straight-backed and motionless with her hands folded in her lap: a queen in a fairy tale, left alone in her tower to mourn her lost, witch-stolen princess.
She was doing a PhD in English literature,’ I pointed out. ‘I know zip about English literature, Frank. I got an A in my Leaving Cert, but that’s it. I don’t speak the jargon.
Then the pints will get further apart, and then one of us will get into a relationship and won’t be around as much; the texts will start with Hey, too long no see, and all of a sudden we’ll realize it’s been a year since we met up. And.
But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood.
It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.
Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.
There is a side of me that is most intensely attracted to women who annoy me.
I loved Rosie’s mind. If I could have got inside there, I would happily have spent the rest of my life wandering around, just looking.
What I wanted was someone I belonged with, beyond any doubt or denial; someone where every glance was a guarantee, solid proof that we were stuck to each other for life.
A man needs to know when to let things lie.” I.
Selena had been singing along, absently, gazing into nowhere. She looked at us like she was trying to work out who we were, before she got up.
I work Cold Cases. When we bring witnesses in, they want to believe this doesn’t count: not really a murder investigation, not a proper one with guns and cuffs, nothing that’ll slam through your life like a tornado. Something old and soft, instead, worn fuzzy round the edges.
I just knew nothing in the world, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning Lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful. Kevin.
If you know your job, you have a responsibility to pass the knowledge on.
All through this case, since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly, relentlessly thinning; it had grown so fine that I could hear the small furtive movements on the other side, beating wings and tiny scrabbling feet like a moth battering against your cupped hands.
The window had gone a clear lit purple, dusk that looked like thunder. Fine clouds shifted, restless.