“You checked the rest of the body for semen, too, right?” Cassie said. Cooper gave her an austere look and didn’t bother answering. “After death,” he said, “she was placed in much the same position in which we found her, lying on her left side. There was no secondary lividity, indicating that she remained in this pose for at least twelve hours. The relative lack of insect activity leads me to believe that she was in an enclosed space, or possibly wrapped tightly in some material, for a considerable proportion of the time before discovery of the body. All this will be included in my notes, of course, but for now . . . Do you have any questions?”

The dismissal was delicate but clear. “Anything new on time of death?”

I asked.

“The gastrointestinal contents allow me to be a little more precise than I was at the scene—if, that is, you can determine the time of her last meal. She had eaten a chocolate biscuit only a few minutes before her death, and a full meal—the digestive process was fairly advanced, but beans appear to have been a component—approximately four to six hours earlier.”

Baked beans on toast, at around eight. She had died somewhere between midnight and two o’clock, give or take. The biscuit must have come either 88

Tana French

from the Devlins’ kitchen, sneaked on her way out of the house, or from her killer.

“My team should have her cleaned up within a few minutes,” Cooper said. He straightened Katy’s head with a precise, satisfied flourish. “If you’d like to notify the family.”

We stood outside the hospital and looked at one another. “Haven’t been to one of those in a while,” Sam said softly.

“And now you remember why,” I said.

“Post-mortem,” Cassie said, frowning absently back at the building.

“What the hell was this guy doing?”

Sam went off to find out more about the motorway, and I phoned the incident room and told two of the floaters to take the Devlins to the hospital. Cassie and I had already seen their first, crucial reaction to the news, we neither needed nor wanted to see it again; and we did need, urgently, to talk to Mark Hanly.

“Want to bring him in?” I said, in the car. There was no reason why we couldn’t interrogate Mark in the finds shed, but I wanted him off his territory and on ours, partly as a form of unreasonable revenge for my ruined shoes.

“Oh yeah,” said Cassie. “He said they only have a few weeks left, didn’t he? If I’ve got Mark right, the fastest way to get him talking is to waste his workday.”

We used the drive to make O’Kelly a nice long list of reasons why we did not feel that Knocknaree For Satan had been responsible for Katy Devlin’s death. “Don’t forget ‘no ritual positioning,’ ” I said. I was driving again; I was still edgy enough that, without something to do, I would have chainsmoked all the way to Knocknaree.