In the Woods

Though I had come to think of Knocknaree as though it had happened to another and unknown person, some part of me had been here all along. While I doodled in Templemore or sprawled on Cassie's futon, that relentless child had never stopped spi

There was a time when I believed, with the police and the media and my stu

3

I don't tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don't see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories or to sympathetic and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either. My parents know, obviously, and Cassie, and a boarding-school friend of mine called Charlie-he's a merchant banker in London now; we still keep in touch, occasionally-and this girl Gemma whom I went out with for a while when I was about nineteen (we spent a lot of our time together getting much too drunk, plus she was the intense angsty type and I thought it would make me sound interesting); nobody else.

When I went to boarding school I dropped the Adam and started using my middle name. I'm not sure whether this was my parents' idea or mine, but I think it was a good one. There are five pages of Ryans in the Dublin phone book alone, but Adam is not a particularly common name, and the publicity was overwhelming (even in England: I used to scan furtively through the newspapers I was supposed to be using to light prefects' fires, rip out anything relevant, memorize it later in a toilet cubicle before flushing it away). Sooner or later, someone would have made the co

I knew, of course, that I should tell O'Kelly, now that I was working on a case that looked like it might be co

And I suppose, if I'm being honest, it appealed both to my ego and to my sense of the picturesque, the idea of carrying this strange, charged secret through the case unsuspected. I suppose it felt, at the time, like the kind of thing that enigmatic Central Casting maverick would have done.

I rang Missing Persons, and they came up with a possible ID almost immediately. Katharine Devlin, aged twelve, four foot nine, slim build, long dark hair, hazel eyes, reported missing from 29 Knocknaree Grove (I remembered that, suddenly: all the streets in the estate called Knocknaree Grove and Close and Place and Lane, everyone's post constantly going astray) at 10:15 the previous morning, when her mother went to wake her and found her gone. Twelve and up is considered old enough to be a runaway, and she had apparently left the house of her own accord, so Missing Persons had been giving her a day to come home before sending in the troops. They already had the press release typed up, ready to send to the media in time for the evening news.

I was disproportionately relieved to have an ID, even a tentative one. Obviously I had known that a little girl-especially a healthy well-groomed little girl, in a place as small as Ireland-can't turn up dead without someone coming forward to claim her; but a number of things about this case were giving me the willies, and I think a superstitious part of me had believed that this child would remain as nameless as if she had dropped from thin air and that her DNA would turn out to match the blood from my shoes and a variety of other X-Files-type stuff. We got an ID shot from Sophie-a Polaroid, taken from the least disturbing angle, to show to the family-and headed back to the Portakabins.

Hunt popped out of one of them as we approached, like the little man in old Swiss clocks. "Did you…I mean, it is definitely murder, is it? The poor child. Awful."

"We're treating it as suspicious," I said. "What we'll need to do now is have a quick word with your team. Then we'd like to speak to the person who found the body. The others can go back to work, as long as they stay outside the boundaries of the crime scene. We'll speak with them later."

"How will…Is there something to show where it-where they shouldn't be? Tape, and all that."

"There's crime-scene tape in place," I said. "If they stay outside it, they'll be fine."

"We'll need to ask you for the lend of somewhere we can use as an onsite office," Cassie said, "for the rest of the day and possibly a bit longer. Where would be best?"

"Better use the finds shed," said Mark, materializing from wherever. "We'll need the office, and everywhere else is soupy." I hadn't heard the term before, but the view through the Portakabin doors-layers of mud crazed with boot prints, low sagging benches, teetering heaps of farming implements and bicycles and luminous yellow vests that reminded me uncomfortably of my time in uniform-provided a fair explanation.

"As long as it has a table and a few chairs, that'll be fine," I said.

"Finds shed," said Mark, and jerked his head towards a Portakabin.

"What's up with Damien?" Cassie asked Hunt.

He blinked helplessly, mouth open in a caricature of surprise. "What…Damien who?"

"Damien on your team. Earlier you said that Mark and Damien usually do the tours, but Damien wouldn't be able to show Detective Ryan around. Why's that?"

"Damien's one of the ones who found the body," said Mark, while Hunt was catching up. "Gave them a shock."

"Damien what?" said Cassie, writing.

"Do

"And he was with someone when he found the body?"

"Mel Jackson," Mark said. "Melanie."

"Let's go talk to them," I said.

The archaeologists were still sitting around the table in their makeshift canteen. There were fifteen or twenty of them; their faces turned towards the door, intent and synchronized as baby birds', when we came in. They were all young, early twenties, and they were made younger by their grungy-student clothes and by a windblown, outdoorsy i