“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

institution-colored walls—but the outsides of the buildings are protected and still intact: old, ornate red brick and marble, with battlements and turrets and worn carvings of saints in unexpected places. In winter, on foggy evenings, crossing the cobblestones is like walking through Dickens—hazy gold streetlamps throwing odd-angled shadows, bells pealing in the cathedrals nearby, every footstep ricocheting into darkness; Cassie says you can pretend you’re Inspector Abberline working on the Ripper murders. Once, on a ringingly clear full-moon night in December, she turned cartwheels straight across the main courtyard.