In the Woods: Dublin Murder Squad: 1. Winner of the Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Macavity and the IVCA Clarion awards (Dublin Murder Squad series) by Tana French

Author:Tana French [French, Tana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2008-11-12T23:00:00+00:00

That evening I went out to Mountjoy to see Shane Waters. I’m sure Cassie would have come with me if I’d told her I was going, but I wanted to do this, as much as possible, on my own. Shane was rat-faced and nervy, with a repulsive little moustache, and he still had spots. He reminded me of Wayne the junkie. I tried every tactic I knew and promised him everything I could think of – immunity, early release on the armed robbery – banking on the fact that he wasn’t smart enough to know what I could and couldn’t deliver, but (always one of my blind spots) I’d underestimated the power of stupidity: with the infuriating mulishness of someone who has long ago given up trying to analyse possibilities and ramifications, Shane stuck to the one option he understood. ‘I don’t know nothing,’ he told me, over and over, with a kind of anaemic self-satisfaction that made me want to scream. ‘And you can’t prove I do.’ Sandra, the rape, Peter and Jamie, even Jonathan Devlin: ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, man.’ I finally gave up when I realised I was in serious danger of throwing something.

On my way home I swallowed my pride and phoned Cassie, who didn’t even try to pretend she hadn’t guessed where I’d gone. She had spent her evening eliminating Sandra Scully from the inquiry. On the night in question, Sandra had been working in a call centre in town. Her supervisor and everyone else on the shift confirmed that she had been there until just before two in the morning, when she had clocked out and caught a Nitelink home. This was good news – it tidied things up, and I hadn’t liked thinking of Sandra as a possible murderess – but it gave me a complicated little pang, the thought of her in an airless fluorescent cubicle, surrounded by part-timing students and actors waiting for the next gig.

I won’t go into details, but we put a considerable amount of effort and ingenuity, most of it more or less legal, into identifying the worst possible time to go talk to Cathal Mills. He had some high position with a gibberish title, in a company that provided something called ‘corporate e-learning software localisation solutions’ (I was impressed: I hadn’t thought it was possible for me to dislike him any more than I already did), so we walked in on him halfway through a crucial meeting with a big potential client. Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist’s rat-mazes. Cassie shot me a wide-eyed, horrified look as we followed some droid through the fifth set of swipe-card swing doors.

Cathal was in the boardroom, and he was easy to identify: he was the one with the PowerPoint presentation.

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