in Ireland, is a metaphorical term: your average down-and-out alcoholic goes for hard cider or cheap vodka. I wondered briefly about a couple, with an adventurous streak or nowhere else to go, but the flattened patch was barely wide enough for one person. “Find anything else?”

“We’ll go through the ash in case someone was burning bloody clothes or something, but it looks like straight wood. We’ve got boot prints, five cigarette butts and this.” Sophie handed me a Ziploc bag labeled in felt-tip. I held it up to the shifting light, and Cassie tiptoed to look over my shoulder: a single long, fair, wavy hair. “Found it near the fire,” Sophie said, and jerked her thumb at a plastic evidence marker.

“Any idea how recently this place was used?” Cassie asked.

“The ash hasn’t been rained on. I’ll check rainfall for this area, but I know where I live it rained early Monday morning, and I’m only about two miles away. It looks like someone stayed here either last night or the night before.”

“Can I see those cigarette butts?” I asked.

58

Tana French

“Be my guest,” said Sophie. I found a mask and tweezers in my case and squatted by one of the markers near the fire. The butt was from a rollie, made thin and smoked down low; someone was being careful with tobacco.

“Mark Hanly smokes rollies,” I said, straightening up. “And has long fair hair.”

Cassie and I looked at each other. It was past six o’clock, O’Kelly would be on the phone demanding a briefing any minute, and the conversation we needed to have with Mark was likely to take awhile, even assuming we could disentangle the side roads and find the archaeologists’ house.

“Forget it, let’s talk to him tomorrow,” Cassie said. “I want to go see the ballet teacher on the way in. And I’m starving.”

“It’s like having a puppy,” I told Sophie. Helen looked shocked.

“Yes, but a pedigree one,” Cassie said cheerfully.

As we headed back across the site towards the car (my shoes were a mess, just like Mark had said they would be—there was red-brown muck grained into every seam—and they had been fairly nice shoes; I comforted myself with the thought that the killer’s footwear would be in the same unmistakable condition), I looked back at the wood and saw that flutter of white again: Sophie and Helen and the boy tech, moving back and forth among the trees as silently and intently as ghosts.

4

The Cameron Dance Academy was above a video shop in Stillorgan. On the street outside, three kids in baggy trousers were flipping skateboards on and off a low wall and yelling. The assistant teacher—an extremely pretty young woman called Louise, in a black leotard and black pointe shoes and a full, calf-length black skirt; Cassie gave me an amused look as we followed her up the stairs—let us in and told us Simone Cameron was just finishing up a class, so we waited on the landing. Cassie drifted over to a cork notice-board on the wall, and I looked around. There were two dance studios, with little round windows in the doors: in one, Louise was showing a bunch of toddlers how to be butterflies or birds or something; in the other, a dozen little girls in white leotards and pink tights were crossing the floor in pairs, in a series of jumps and twirls, to the “Valse des Fleurs” on an old scratchy record player. As far as I could tell there was, to put it mildly, a wide range of ability. The woman teaching them had white hair pulled back in a tight bun, but her body was as spare and straight as a young athlete’s; she was wearing the same black outfit as Louise and holding a pointer, tapping at the girls’ ankles and shoulders and calling instructions.