In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad) by Tana French

Author:Tana French
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2007-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

It was some ungodly hour of the night, but I rang Cassie’s mobile anyway.

“Are you all right?” she said, sounding tousled and sleepy.

“I’m fine. I’ve got something, Cass.”

She yawned. “Jesus. This better be good, dickface. What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Listen. Sometime that summer, Peter and Jamie and I saw Jonathan Devlin and his friends raping a girl.”

There was a pause. Then Cassie said, sounding a lot more awake, “Are you sure? You could have misinterpreted—”

“No. I’m positive. She tried to scream and one of them hit her. They were holding her down.”

“Did they see you guys?”

“Yes. Yes. We ran, and they yelled after us.”

“Fucking hell,” she said. I could feel her slowly realizing: a raped little girl, a rapist in the family, two witnesses vanished. We were only a few steps away from an arrest warrant. “Fucking hell…Well done, Ryan. Do you know the girl’s name?”

“Sandra something.”

“The one you mentioned before? We’ll start tracking her down tomorrow.”

“Cassie,” I said, “if this pans out, how the hell do we explain how we knew?”

“Listen, Rob, don’t worry about that yet, OK? If we find Sandra, she’ll be all the witness we need. Otherwise we go at Devlin hard, hit him with all the details, freak him out till he confesses…. We’ll find a way.”

It almost undid me, her unquestioning assumption that the details would be correct. I had to swallow hard to keep my voice from cracking. “What’s the statute of limitations on rape? Can we get him for that even if we don’t have enough evidence on the other stuff?”

“Can’t remember. We’ll figure all that out in the morning. Are you going to be able to sleep, or are you too hyper?”

“Too hyper,” I said. I was almost hysterically jittery; I felt as though someone had injected sherbet into my bloodstream. “Talk for a while?”

“Sure,” Cassie said. I heard her curl up more comfortably in bed, sheets rustling; I found my vodka bottle and tucked the phone under my ear while I poured a shot.

She told me about a time when she was nine and convinced all the other local kids that a magic wolf lived in the hills near the village. “I said I’d found a letter under my floorboards telling me that he’d been there for four hundred years, and there was a map tied around his neck that would show us where to find treasure. I organized all the kids into a posse—God, I was a bossy little bitch—and every weekend we all went off up into the hills looking for this wolf. We were running away screaming every time we saw a sheepdog and falling into streams and having a brilliant time….”

I stretched out in bed and sipped my drink. The adrenaline was draining away and the low rhythms of Cassie’s voice were soothing; I felt warm and comfortably exhausted, like a kid after a long day. “And it wasn’t a German shepherd or anything, either,” I’m sure I heard her say, “it was way too big and it looked completely different, wild,” but I was already asleep.

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