“And can anyone vouch for your whereabouts after that? Do you share a room?”

“Nah. I’ve a room to myself, because of being assistant site director. I stayed up awhile longer, in the garden. I was talking with Mel. I was with her till breakfast.” He was doing his best to sound blasé, but all that arrogant self-possession had vanished; he looked prickly and self-conscious and about fifteen. I was dying to laugh. I didn’t dare look at Cassie. 98

Tana French

“All night?” I said, maliciously.

“Yeah.”

“In the garden? Wasn’t that a little chilly?”

“We went inside at maybe three o’clock. After that we were in my room, till eight. That’s when we get up.”

“Well, well, well,” I said sweetly. “Most alibis aren’t nearly that enjoyable.” He shot me a poisonous look.

“Let’s go back to Monday night,” Cassie said. “While you were in the wood, did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“No. But it’s dark out there—country-dark, not your city-dark. No streetlights or nothing. I wouldn’t have seen someone ten feet away. And I mightn’t have heard them, either; there are plenty of noises anyway.” Dark, and wood-noises: that trill went down my spine again.

“Not necessarily in the wood,” Cassie said. “On the dig, or on the road, maybe? Was anyone out there after, say, half past eleven?”

“Hang on, now,” Mark said suddenly, almost reluctantly. “Out on the site. There was someone.”

Neither Cassie nor I moved, but I felt the electric spark of alertness shoot between us. We had been about ready to give up on Mark, check his alibi and put him on a question-mark list and send him back to his mattock, at least for now—in the urgent first days of an investigation, you have no time to waste on any but the most crucial things—but he had our full attention again.

“Could you give us a description?” I asked.

He glanced at me with dislike. “Yeah. They looked a lot like a torch. It was dark.”

“Mark,” said Cassie. “From the beginning?”

“Someone carrying a torch cut across the site, from the estate towards the road. That’s it. All I saw was the torch beam.”

“What time?”

“I wasn’t looking at my watch. One, maybe? A little before?”

“Think back. Could you tell anything about them at all—maybe their height, from the angle of the torch?”

He thought, eyes narrowing. “Nah. It looked fairly low to the ground, but the dark fucks up your sense of perspective, yeah? They were moving slow enough, but anyone would; you’ve seen the site, it’s all ditches and bits of wall.”

In the Woods 99

“Big torch or small?”

“Small beam, not that strong. It wasn’t one of those big heavy things with the handle. Just a little torch.”

“When you first saw it,” Cassie said, “it was up by the estate wall—

where, at the end farthest from the road?”