Sam gave him another tissue. "There's only one thing I don't understand," he said, an easy, soothing rumble. "You wanted to protect Rosalind-that's fair enough, sure, any man would have felt the same. But why get rid of Katy? Why not Jonathan? I'd have been going after him, myself."
"I said that, too," Damien said, and then stopped, his mouth open, as if he had said something incriminating. Cassie and Sam looked blandly back at him and waited.
"Um," he said, after a moment. "See, this one night Rosalind's stomach was hurting and finally I got it out of her-she didn't want to tell me, but he'd…he'd punched her in the stomach. Like four times. Just because Katy told him Rosalind wouldn't let her change the channel to watch some ballet thing on TV-and it wasn't even true, she would've changed it if Katy had asked… I just-I couldn't stand it any more. I was thinking about it every night, what she was going through, I couldn't sleep-I couldn't just let it keep happening!"
He took a breath, got his voice back under control. Cassie and Sam nodded understandingly.
"I said, um, I said, 'I'm gonna kill him.' Rosalind…she couldn't believe I would really do that for her. And yeah, I guess I was sort of-not joking, but like not totally serious about actually doing it. I'd never even thought about doing anything like that in my whole life. But when I saw how much it meant to her that I would even say it-nobody had ever tried to protect her before… She was almost crying, and she's not the kind of girl who cries, she's a really strong person."
"I'm sure she is," Cassie said. "So why didn't you go after Jonathan Devlin, once you'd got your head round the idea?"
"See, if he died"-Damien leaned forward, hands gesturing anxiously-"their mother wouldn't be able to look after them, because of money and because I think she's kind of spacey or something? They'd be sent to homes and they'd be split up, Rosalind wouldn't be there to take care of Jessica any more-and Jessica needs her, she's so messed up she can't do anything, Rosalind has to do her homework for her and stuff. And Katy-I mean, Katy would have gone and done the exact same thing to somebody else. If only Katy wasn't there, they'd all be fine! Their dad only, he only did stuff to them when Katy got him to. Rosalind said, and she felt so guilty about this-Jesus, she felt guilty!-sometimes she wished Katy had never been born…"
"And that gave you an idea," Cassie said evenly. I could tell by the set of her mouth that she was so angry she could hardly speak. "You suggested killing Katy instead."
"It was my idea," Damien said quickly. "Rosalind had nothing to do with it. She didn't even-At first she said no. She didn't want me taking a risk like that for her. She'd survived it for years, she said, she could survive for six more, till Jessica was old enough to move out. But I couldn't let her just stay! That time he fractured her skull, she was in the hospital for two months. She could have died."
Suddenly I was furious, too, but not with Rosalind: with Damien, for being such a fucking cretin, such a perfect sucker, like some goofy cartoon character blundering obediently into the right place for the Acme anvil to drop on his head. I am of course fully aware of both the irony and the tedious psychological explanations of this reaction, but at the time all I could think of was slamming into the interview room and shoving Damien's face into the medical reports: Do you see this, moron? Do you see a skull fracture anywhere here? Didn't it even occur to you to ask to see the scar before you slaughtered a child for it?
"So you insisted," Cassie said, "and, in the end, Rosalind somehow came round."
This time Damien caught the biting edge. "That was because of Jessica! Rosalind didn't mind what happened to her, but Jessica-Rosalind was worried she was going to have a nervous breakdown or something. She didn't think Jessica could take six more years!"
"But Katy wouldn't have been there for most of that time anyway," Sam said. "She was about to go to ballet school, in London. By now she would have been gone. Didn't you know that?"
Damien almost howled, "No! I said that, I asked-you don't understand… She didn't care about being a dancer. She just liked everyone making a fuss of her. In that school, where she wouldn't have been anything special-she'd have dropped out by Christmas and come back home!"
Of all the things they had done to her, between them, this was the one that shocked me most profoundly. It was the diabolical expertise of it, the icy precision with which it targeted, annexed and defiled the one thing that had lain at Katy Devlin's heart. I thought of Simone's deep quiet voice in the echoing dance studio: Sérieuse. In all my career I had never felt the presence of evil as I felt it then: strong and rancid-sweet in the air, curling invisible tendrils up the table legs, nosing with obscene delicacy at sleeves and throats. The hairs rose on the back of my neck.
"So it was self-defense," Cassie said, after a silence in which Damien fidgeted anxiously and she and Sam didn't look at him.
Damien leaped on this. "Yes. Exactly. I mean, we wouldn't even have thought of it if there'd have been any other way."
"I understand. And you know, Damien, it's happened before: wives snapping and killing abusive husbands, stuff like that. Juries understand, too."
"Yeah?" He looked up at her with huge, hopeful eyes.
"Course. Once they hear what Rosalind went through…I wouldn't worry too much about her. OK?"
"I just don't want her to get in any trouble."
"Then you're doing the right thing by telling us all the details. OK?"
Damien sighed, a small, tired sigh with something like relief in it. "OK."
"Well done," Cassie said. "So let's keep going. When did you decide on this?"
"Like July. The middle of July."
"And when did you set the date?"
"Only, like, a few days before it happened. I had said to Rosalind, she should make sure she had a, an alibi, you know? Because we knew you guys would look at the family, she had read somewhere that the family were always the main suspects. So this one night-I think it was Friday-we met up and she said to me, she'd arranged it so she and Jessica were sleeping over at their cousins' house the next Monday and they'd be up till like two o'clock talking, so that would be the perfect night. All I had to do was make sure it was done before two o'clock; the, the police would be able to tell-"
His voice was shaking. "And what did you say?" Cassie asked.
"I…I guess I sort of panicked. I mean, it hadn't seemed real up until then, you know? I guess I hadn't thought we were actually going to do it. It was just something we talked about. It was sort of like, you know Sean Callaghan, Sean from the dig? He used to be in this band only they broke up, and he's always talking about 'Oh, when we get the band back together, when we make it big…' And, I mean, he knows they're never gonna do it, but talking about it makes him feel better."
"We've all been in that band," Cassie said, smiling.
Damien nodded. "It was like that. But then Rosalind said, 'Next Monday,' and suddenly I felt like…it just seemed like a totally crazy thing to do, you know? I said to Rosalind, maybe we should go to the police or something instead. But she freaked out. She kept saying, 'I trusted you, I really trusted you…'"
"Trusted you," Cassie said. "But not enough to make love with you?"
"No," Damien said softly, after a moment. "No, see, she had. After we first decided about Katy…it changed everything for Rosalind, knowing I'd do that for her. We…she'd given up hoping she'd ever be able to, but…she wanted to try. I was working on the dig by then, so I could afford a good hotel-she deserved something nice, you know? The first time, she…she couldn't. But we went back there the next week, and-" He bit his lips. He was trying not to cry, again.