I can usually hold a sulk for much longer than Cassie, but I couldn’t help it, I laughed. After a moment Cassie did, too.

“Listen,” she said, “I wasn’t being bitchy about Rosalind. More like worried.”

“Are you thinking sexual abuse?” I realized that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had been wondering about the same thing, but I disliked the thought so much that I had been avoiding it. One sister oversexual, one 66

Tana French

badly underweight, and one, after various unexplained illnesses, murdered. I thought of Rosalind’s head bent over Jessica’s and felt a sudden, unaccustomed surge of protectiveness. “The father’s abusing them. Katy’s coping strategy is making herself sick, either out of self-hatred or to lessen the chances of abuse. When she gets into ballet school, she decides she needs to be healthy and the cycle has to stop; maybe she confronts the father, threatens to tell. So he kills her.”

“It plays,” said Cassie. She was watching the trees flash past on the roadside; I could only see the back of her head. “But so does, for example, the mother—if it turns out Cooper was wrong about the rape, obviously. Munchausen by proxy. She seemed way at home in the victim role, did you notice?”

I had. In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask, but in others it pares people to the essentials (and this is, of course, the real and icy reason why we try to tell families about their losses ourselves, rather than leaving it to the uniforms: not to show how much we care, but to see how they react), and we had borne bad news often enough to know the usual variations. Most people are shocked senseless, struggling for their footing, with no idea how to do this; tragedy is new territory that comes with no guide, and they have to work out, step by dazed step, how to negotiate it. Margaret Devlin had been unsurprised, almost resigned, as though grief was her familiar default state.

“So basically the same pattern,” I said. “She’s making one or all of the girls sick, when Katy gets into ballet school she tries to put her foot down, and the mother kills her.”

“It could explain why Rosalind dresses like a forty-year-old, too,” Cassie said. “Trying to be a grown-up to get away from her mother.”

My mobile rang. “Ah, fuck, man,” we both said, in unison. I did the bad-reception routine, and we spent the rest of the drive making a list of possible lines of inquiry. O’Kelly likes lists; a good one might distract him from the fact that we hadn’t rung him back.

We work out of the grounds of Dublin Castle, and in spite of all the colonial connotations this is one of my favorite perks of the job. Inside, the rooms have been lovingly refurbished to be exactly like every corporate office in the country—cubicles, fluorescent lighting, staticky carpet and In the Woods 67