"Shut up," she said coldly, behind me. I clenched my hands together and stared at the TV. I was almost too angry to see.
On the screen, Cassie hadn't even flinched; she was tilting her chair back on two legs and shaking her head, amused. "Sorry, Miss Devlin, but I don't get distracted that easily. Detective Ryan and I feel exactly the same way about your sister's death: we want to find her killer. So why is it, again, that you suddenly don't want to talk about it?"
Rosalind laughed. "Exactly the same way? Oh, I don't think so, Detective. He has a very special connection to this case, doesn't he?"
Even in the blurry picture I could see Cassie's fast blink, and the savage flash of triumph on Rosalind's face as she realized she had got past her guard this time. "Oh," she said, sweetly. "You mean you don't know?"
She only paused for a fraction of a second, just enough to heighten the effect, but to me it seemed to last forever; because I knew, with a hideous vortexing sense of inevitability, I knew what she was going to say. I suppose this must be what stuntmen feel when a fall goes horribly wrong, or jockeys coming off at full gallop: that oddly calm splinter of time, just before your body shatters against the ground, when your mind is wiped clean of everything except the one simple certainty: This is it, then. Here it comes.
"He's that boy whose friends disappeared in Knocknaree, ages ago," Rosalind told Cassie. Her voice was high and musical and almost uninterested; except for a tiny, smug trace of pleasure, there was nothing in it, nothing at all. "Adam Ryan. It looks like he doesn't tell you everything, after all, doesn't it?" I had thought, only a few minutes before, that there was no way I could feel any worse and still survive.
Cassie, on the screen, thumped the chair legs down and rubbed at one ear. She was biting her lip to hold back a smile, but I had nothing left in me with which to wonder what she was doing. "Did he tell you that?"
"Yes. We've got very close, really."
"Did he also tell you he had a brother who died when he was sixteen? That he grew up in a children's home? That his father was an alcoholic?"
Rosalind stared. The smile was gone from her face and her eyes were narrow, electric. "Why?" she asked.
"Just checking. Sometimes he does those, too-it depends. Rosalind," she said, somewhere between amused and embarrassed, "I don't know how to tell you this, but sometimes, when detectives are trying to build up a relationship with a witness, they say things that aren't exactly true. Things that they think will help the witness feel comfortable enough to share information. Do you understand?"
Rosalind kept staring, unmoving.
"Listen," Cassie said gently, "I know for a fact that Detective Ryan has never had a brother, that his father is a very nice guy with no alcoholic tendencies, and that he grew up in Wiltshire-hence the accent-nowhere near Knocknaree. And not in a children's home, either. But, whatever he told you, I know he only wanted to make it easier for you to help us find Katy's killer. Don't hold it against him. OK?"
The door slammed open-Cassie jumped about a mile; Rosalind didn't move, didn't even take her eyes off Cassie's face-and O'Kelly, foreshortened to a blob by the camera angle but instantly recognizable by his spidery comb-over, leaned into the room. "Maddox," he said curtly. "A word."
O'Kelly, as I walked Damien out: in the observation room, rocking back and forth on his heels, staring impatiently through the glass. I couldn't watch any more. I fumbled with the remote, hit Stop and stared blindly at the vibrating blue square.
"Cassie," I said, after a very long time.
"He asked me if it was true," she said, as evenly as if she were reading out a report. "I said that it wasn't, and that if it were you would hardly have told her."
"I didn't," I said. It seemed important that she should know this. "I didn't. I told her that two of my friends disappeared when we were little-so she'd realize I understood what she was going through. I never thought she'd know about Peter and Jamie and put two and two together. It never occurred to me."
Cassie waited for me to finish. "He accused me of covering for you," she said, when I stopped talking, "and added that he should have split us up a long time ago. He said he was going to check your prints against the ones from the old case-even if he had to drag a print tech out of bed to do it, even if it took all night. If the prints matched, he said, we would both be lucky to keep our jobs. He told me to send Rosalind home. I handed her over to Sweeney and started ringing you."
Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible. We sat there like that, not speaking, for a long time. The wind whipped spatters of rain against the window. Once I heard Cassie take a deep breath, and I thought she might be crying, but when I looked up there were no tears on her face; it was pale and quiet and very, very sad.
23
We were still sitting there like that when Sam got in. "What's the story?" he said, rubbing rain out of his hair and switching on the lights.
Cassie stirred, lifted her head. "O'Kelly wants you and me to have another go at finding out Damien's motive. Uniforms are bringing him over."
"Grand," Sam said, "see if a new face shakes him up a bit," but he had taken us both in with one quick glance and I wondered how much he was guessing; wondered, for the first time, how much he had known all along and simply left alone.
He pulled over a chair and sat down next to Cassie, and they started discussing how to go at Damien. They had never interrogated anyone together before; their voices were tentative, earnest, deferring to each other and rising into open-ended little question marks: Do you think we should…? What if we…? Cassie switched the tapes in the VCR again, played Sam bits of last night's interview. The fax machine made a series of demented, cartoonish noises and spat out Damien's mobile-phone records, and they bent over the pages with a highlighter pen, murmuring.
When they finally left-Sam nodding to me, briefly, over his shoulder-I waited in the empty incident room until I was sure they must have started the interrogation, and then I went looking for them. They were in the main interview room. I ducked into the observation chamber furtively, ears burning, like someone diving into an adult bookshop. I knew this was going to be the very last thing in the world I wanted to see, but I didn't know how to stay away.
They had made the room as cozy as humanly possible: coats and bags and scarves thrown on chairs, the table strewn with coffee and sugar packets and mobile phones and a carafe of water and a plate of sticky Danishes from the café outside the castle grounds. Damien, bedraggled in the same oversized sweatshirt and combats-they looked like he'd slept in them-hugged himself and stared round, wide-eyed; after the alien chaos of a jail cell, this must have seemed a bright haven to him, safe and warm and almost homey. At certain angles you could see a fuzz of fair, pathetic stubble on his chin. Cassie and Sam were chattering, perching on the table and bitching about the weather and offering Damien milk. I heard footsteps in the corridor and tensed-if it was O'Kelly he would kick me out, back to the phone tips, this no longer had anything to do with me-but they went past without breaking stride. I leaned my forehead against the one-way glass and closed my eyes.
They took him through safe little details first. Cassie's voice, Sam's, weaving together dexterously, soothing as lullabies: How did you get out of the house without waking up your mam? Yeah? I used to do that, too, when I was a teenager… Had you done it before? God, this coffee's horrible, do you want a Coke or something instead? They were good together, Cassie and Sam; they were good. Damien was relaxing. Once he even laughed, a pathetic little breath.