"Look who's talking," O'Kelly snapped. "Any one of ye could have checked, any time in the past God knows how long, but no-"
Sam didn't even hear him. His eyes were locked on mine, blazing. "We took your word because you're supposed to be a bloody detective. You sent your own partner in there to get crucified, without even bothering-"
"I did check!" I shouted. "I checked the file!" But even as the words left my mouth I knew, with a horrible sick thud. A sunny afternoon, a long time ago; I had been fumbling through the file, with the phone jammed between my jaw and my shoulder and O'Gorman yammering in my other ear, trying to talk to Rosalind and make sure she was an appropriate adult to supervise my conversation with Jessica, all at the same time (And I must have known, I thought, I must have known even then that she couldn't be trusted, or why would I have bothered to check such a small thing?). I had found the page of family stats and skimmed down to Rosalind's DOB, subtracted the years-
Sam had swung away from me and was rooting urgently through the file, and I saw the moment when his shoulders sagged. "November," he said, very quietly. "Her birthday's the second of November. She'll be eighteen."
"Congratulations," O'Kelly said heavily, after a silence. "The three of ye. Well done."
Cassie let out her breath. "Inadmissible," she said. "Every fucking word." She slid down the wall to a sitting position, as if her knees had suddenly given way, and closed her eyes.
A faint, high, insistent sound came from the speakers. In the interview room, Rosalind had got bored and started humming.
25
That evening we started clearing out the incident room, Sam and Cassie and I. We worked methodically and in silence, taking down photographs, erasing the multicolored tangle from the whiteboard, sorting files and reports and packing them away in blue-stamped cardboard boxes. Someone had set fire to a flat off Parnell Street the previous night, killing a Nigerian asylum-seeker and her six-month-old baby; Costello and his partner needed the room.
O'Kelly and Sweeney were interviewing Rosalind, down the hall, with Jonathan in the background to protect her. I think I had expected Jonathan to come in with all guns blazing and possibly try to hit someone, but as it transpired he hadn't been the problem. When O'Kelly told the Devlins, outside the interview room, what Rosalind had confessed to, Margaret whirled on him, mouth gaping open; then she drew in a huge gulp of breath and screamed, "No!" hoarse and wild, her voice slamming off the walls of the corridor. "No. No. No. She was with her cousins. How can you do this to her? How can you…how…Ah, God, she warned me-she warned me you would do this! You"-she stabbed a thick, trembling finger at me, and I flinched before I could stop myself-"you, calling her a dozen times a day asking her out, and her only a child, you should be ashamed… And her"-Cassie-"she hated Rosalind from the start, Rosalind always said she would try to blame her for…What are you trying to do to her? Are you trying to kill her? Then will you be happy? Oh, God, my poor baby…Why do people tell these lies about her? Why?" Her hands clawed at her hair and she broke down into ugly, wrenching sobs.
Jonathan had stood still at the top of the stairs, holding on to the railing, while O'Kelly tried to calm Margaret down and shot us filthy looks over her shoulder. He was dressed for work, in a suit and tie. For some reason I remember it very clearly, that suit. It was dark blue and spotlessly clean, with a slight sheen where it had been ironed too many times, and somehow I found it almost inexpressibly sad.
Rosalind was under arrest for murder and for assaulting an officer. She had opened her mouth only once since her parents arrived, to claim-lip trembling-that Cassie had punched her in the stomach and that she had only been defending herself. We would send a file to the prosecutor's office on both charges, but we all knew the evidence for murder was slim at best. We no longer had even the Tracksuit Shadow link to show that Rosalind had been an accessory: my session with Jessica had not in fact been supervised by an appropriate adult, and I had no way of proving that it had ever happened. We had Damien's word and a bunch of mobile-phone records, and that was all.
It was getting late, maybe eight o'clock, and the building was very quiet, just our movements and a soft fitful rain pattering at the windows of the incident room. I took down the post-mortem photos and the Devlins' family snapshots, the scowling Tracksuit Shadow suspects and the grainy blowups of Peter and Jamie, picked the Blu-Tack off the backs and filed them away. Cassie checked each box, fitted a lid onto it and labeled it in squeaky black marker. Sam went around the room with a rubbish bag, collecting Styrofoam cups and emptying wastepaper baskets, brushing crumbs off the tables. There were smears of dried blood down the front of his shirt.
His map of Knocknaree was starting to curl at the edges, and one corner ripped away as I took it down. Someone had got spatters of water on it and the ink had run in spots, making Cassie's property-developer caricature look unpleasantly as if he had had a stroke. "Should we keep this on file," I asked Sam, "or…?"
I held it out to him and we looked at it: tiny gnarled tree trunks and smoke curling from the chimneys of the houses, fragile and wistful as a fairy tale. "Probably better not," Sam said, after a moment. He took the map from me, rolled it into a tube and maneuvered it into the rubbish bag.
"I'm missing a lid," Cassie said. Dark, shocking scabs had formed over the cuts on her cheek. "Any more over there?"
"There was one under the table," Sam said. "Here-" He threw Cassie the last lid, and she fitted it into place and straightened up.
We stood under the fluorescent lights and looked at one another, across the bare tables and the litter of boxes. My turn to make dinner… For a moment I almost said it, and I felt the same thought cross both Sam's and Cassie's minds, stupid and impossible and no less piercing for any of that.
"Well," Cassie said quietly, on a long breath. She glanced around the empty room, wiping her hands on the sides of her jeans. "Well, I guess that's it, then."
I am intensely aware, by the way, that this story does not show me in a particularly flattering light. I am aware that, within an impressively short time of meeting me, Rosalind had me coming to heel like a well-trained dog: running up and down stairs to bring her coffee, nodding along while she bitched about my partner, imagining like some starstruck teenager that she was a kindred soul. But before you decide to despise me too thoroughly, consider this: she fooled you, too. You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie.
It is difficult for me to describe the degree of horror and self-loathing inspired by the realization that Rosalind had suckered me. I'm sure Cassie would have said that my gullibility was only natural, that all the other liars and criminals I'd encountered had been mere amateurs while Rosalind was the real, the natural-born thing, and that she herself had been immune purely because she had fallen for the same technique once before; but Cassie wasn't there. A few days after we closed the case, O'Kelly told me that until the verdicts came in I would be working out of the main detective unit in Harcourt Street-"away from anything you can fuck up," as he put it, and I found it difficult to counter this. I was still officially on the Murder squad, so nobody knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing in the general unit. They gave me a desk and occasionally O'Kelly sent over a pile of bureaucracy, but for the most part I was free to wander the corridors as I chose, eavesdropping on fragments of conversation and evading curious stares, immaterial and unwanted as a ghost.