There were passages about things she did with her friends: "We had a sleep over at Christinas house her mum gave us weird pizza with olives + we played truth or dare Beth fancies Matthew. I dont fancy anyone dancers mostly dont get married till after their career so maybe when Im thirty five or forty. We put on make up Marianne looked really pretty but Christina put too much eye shadow she looked like her mum!!" The first time she and her friends were allowed into town on their own: "We took the bus + went shopping to Miss Selfrige Marianne + I got the same top but hers is pink with purple writing mine is light blue with red. Jess couldnt come so I got her a flower clip for in her hair. Then we went to Mac Donalds Christina stuck her finger in my barbcue sauce so I put some on her icecream we laughed so much the gaurd said hed put us out if we didnt stop. Beth asked him do you want some barbcue icecream?"
She tried on Louise's pointe shoes, hated cabbage and got kicked out of Irish class for texting Beth across the aisle. A happy child, you would say, giggly and determined and running too fast for punctuation; nothing special about her except dancing, and contented that way. But in between: terror rose off the pages like petrol fumes, acrid and dizzying. "Jess is sad that Im going to ballet school she cried. Rosalind said if I go Jess will kill her self + it will be my fault I shouldnt be so selfish all the time. I dont know what to do if I ask Mum and Dad they might not let me go. I dont want Jess to die."
"Simone said I cant get sick any more so tonight I said to Rosalind I dont want to drink it. Rosalind says I have to or I wont be good at dancing any more. I was really scared because she got so mad but I was mad too and I said no I dont beleive her I think it just makes me sick. She says Ill be sorry + Jess isnt allowed to talk to me."
"Christina is mad at me on Tuesday she came over + Rosalind told her I said she wont be good enough for me once I go to ballet school + Christina wont beleive me I didnt. Now Christina and Beth wont talk to me Marianne still does though. I hate Rosalind I HATE HER I HATE HER."
"Yesterday this diary was under my bed like always then I couldnt find it. I didnt say anything but then Mum took Rosalind + Jess to Auntie Veras I stayed home + looked all over in Rosalinds room it was inside her shoe box in her wardrobe. I was scared to take it because now shell know and shell be really mad but I dont care. Im going to keep it here at Simones I can write in it when I practice by myself."
The last entry in the diary was dated three days before Katy died. "Rosalind is sorry she was so horrible about me going away she was only worried about Jess + upset about me being so far away shell miss me too. To make up for it shes going to get me a lucky charm to bring me luck dancing."
Her voice rang small and bright through the rounded Biro letters, swirled in the sunlight with the dust-motes. Katy, a year dead; bones in the gray geometric churchyard at Knocknaree. I had thought of her very little since the trial ended. Even during the investigation, to be frank, she had occupied a less prominent place in my mind than you might expect. The victim is the one person you never know; she had been only a cluster of translucent, conflicting images refracted through other people's words, crucial not in herself but for her death and the urgent firework trail of consequences it left behind. One moment on the Knocknaree dig had eclipsed everything else she had ever been. I thought of her lying on her stomach on this blond wooden floor, the frail wings of her shoulder blades moving as she wrote, music spiraling around her.
"Would it have made some difference if we'd found this earlier?" Simone asked. Her voice made me start and set my heart pounding; I had almost forgotten she was there.
"Probably not," I said. I had no idea whether this was true, but she needed to hear it. "There's nothing here that ties Rosalind directly to any crime. There's the mention of her making Katy drink something, but she would have explained that away-claimed it was a vitamin drink, maybe; Lucozade. The same for the lucky charm: it doesn't prove anything."
"But if we had found it before she died," Simone said quietly, "then," and of course there was nothing I could say to that, nothing at all.
I put the diary and the little paper pouch into an evidence bag and sent them over to Sam, at Dublin Castle. They would go into a box in the basement, somewhere near my old clothes; the case was closed, there was nothing he could do with them unless, or until, Rosalind did the same thing to someone else. I would have liked to send the diary to Cassie, as some kind of wordless and useless apology, but it wasn't her case any more either, and anyway I could no longer be sure she would understand how I meant it.
A few weeks later I heard that Cassie and Sam were engaged; Bernadette sent round an e-mail, looking for contributions towards a present. That evening I told Heather someone's kid had scarlet fever, locked myself in my room and drank vodka, slowly but purposefully, until four in the morning. Then I rang Cassie's mobile.
On the third ring she said blurrily, "Maddox."
"Cassie," I said. "Cassie, you're not actually going to marry that boring little yokel. Are you?"
I heard her catch her breath, ready to say something. After a while she let it out again.
"I'm sorry," I said. "For everything. I'm so, so sorry. I love you, Cass. Please."
I waited again. After a long time I heard a clunk. Then Sam, somewhere in the background, said, "Who was that?"
"Wrong number," Cassie said, farther away now. "Some drunk guy."
"What were you on so long for, then?" There was a grin in his voice: teasing. A rustle of sheets.
"He told me he loved me, so I wanted to see who it was," said Cassie. "But he turned out to be looking for Britney."
"Aren't we all," said Sam; then, "Ow!" and Cassie giggled. "You bit my nose."
"Serves you right," said Cassie. More low laughter, a rustle, a kiss; a long contented sigh. Sam said, soft and happy, "Baby." Then nothing but their breathing, easing into tandem and slowing gradually back into sleep.
I sat there for a very long time, watching the sky lighten outside my window and realizing that my name hadn't come up on Cassie's mobile. I could feel the vodka working its way out of my blood; the headache was starting to kick in. Sam snored, very gently. I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.
The motorway went ahead on the route originally planned, of course. Move the Motorway stalled it for an impressive amount of time-injunctions, constitutional challenges, I think they might have taken it all the way to the European High Court-and a grungy bunch of unisex protesters calling themselves Knocknafree (and including, I would be willing to bet, Mark) set up camp on the site to stop the bulldozers going through, which held things up for another few weeks while the government got a court order against them. They never had a chance in hell. I wish I could have asked Jonathan Devlin whether he actually believed, in the teeth of all the historical evidence, that this one time public opinion would make a difference, or whether he knew, all along, and needed to try anyway. I envied him, either way.
I went down there, the day I saw in the paper that construction had begun. I was supposed to be going door-to-door in Terenure, trying to find someone who'd seen a stolen car that had been used in a robbery, but nobody would miss me for an hour or so. I'm not sure why I went. It wasn't a dramatic final bid for closure or anything like that; I just had some belated impulse to see the place, one more time.
It was a mess. I had expected this, but I hadn't foreseen the scale of it. I could hear the mindless roar of machinery long before I reached the top of the hill. The whole site was unrecognizable, men in neon protective gear swarming like ants and shouting hoarse unintelligible commands over the noise, huge grimy bulldozers tossing aside great clumps of earth and nosing with slow, obscene delicacy at the excavated remnants of walls.