Excerpt
from In The Woods
by Tana French
1
I became a policeman because I wanted to be a Murder detective.
My time in training and in uniform -- Templemore College, endless complicated
physical exercises, wandering around small towns in a cartoonish
Day-Glo jacket, investigating which of the three unintelligible local
delinquents had broken Mrs. McSweeney's garden-shed window -- all felt
like an embarrassing daze scripted by Ionesco, a trial by tedium I had
to endure, for some dislocated bureaucratic reason, in order to earn my
actual job. I never think about those years and cannot remember them
with any clarity. I made no friends; to me my detachment from the whole
process felt involuntary and inevitable, like the side effect of a
sedative drug, but the other cops read it as deliberate
superciliousness, a studied sneer at their solid rural backgrounds and
solid rural ambitions. Possibly it was. I recently found a diary entry
from college in which I described my classmates as "a herd of
mouth-breathing fucktard yokels who wade around in a miasma of
cliché so thick you can practically smell the bacon and cabbage and cow shite
and altar candles." Even assuming I was having a bad day, I think this
shows a certain lack of respect for cultural differences.
When I made the Murder squad, I had already had my new work clothes --
beautifully cut suits in materials so fine they felt alive to your
fingers, shirts with the subtlest of blue or green pinstripes,
rabbit-soft cashmere scarves-hanging in my wardrobe for almost a year.
I love the unspoken dress code. It was one of the things that first
fascinated me about the job -- that and the private, functional,
elliptical shorthand: latents, trace, Forensics. One of the Stephen
King small towns where I was posted after Templemore had a murder: a
routine domestic-violence incident that had escalated beyond even the
perpetrator's expectations, but, because the man's previous girlfriend
had died in suspicious circumstances, the Murder squad sent down a pair
of detectives. All the week they were there, I had one eye on the
coffee machine whenever I was at my desk, so I could get my coffee when
the detectives got theirs, take my time adding milk and eavesdrop on
the streamlined, brutal rhythms of their conversation: when the Bureau
comes back on the tox, once the lab IDs the serrations. I started
smoking again so I could follow them out to the car park and smoke a
few feet from them, staring blindly at the sky and listening. They
would give me brief unfocused smiles, sometimes a flick of a tarnished
Zippo, before dismissing me with the slightest angle of a shoulder and
going back to their subtle, multidimensional strategies. Pull in the ma first, then give him an
hour or two to sit at home worrying
about what she's saying, then get him back in. Set up a scene room but
just walk him through it,
don't give him time for a good look.
Contrary to what you might assume, I did not become a detective on some
quixotic quest to solve my childhood mystery. I read the file once,
that first day, late on my own in the squad room with my desk lamp the
only pool of light (forgotten names setting echoes flicking like bats
around my head as they testified in faded Biro that Jamie had kicked
her mother because she didn't want to go to boarding school, that
"dangerous-looking" teenage boys spent evenings hanging around at the
edge of the wood, that Peter's mother once had a bruise on her
cheekbone), and then never looked at it again. It was these arcana I
craved, these near-invisible textures like a Braille legible only to
the initiated. They were like thoroughbreds, those two Murder
detectives passing through Ballygobackwards; like trapeze artists honed
to a sizzling shine. They played for the highest stakes, and they were
experts at their game.
I knew that what they did was cruel. Humans are feral and ruthless;
this, this watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting
one factor or another till a man's fundamental instinct for
self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished
and most highly evolved form.
We heard about Cassie days before she joined the squad, probably before
she even got the offer. Our grapevine is ridiculously, old-ladyishly
efficient. Murder is a high-pressure squad and a small one, only twenty
permanent members, and under any added strain (anyone leaving, anyone
new, too much work, too little work), it tends to develop a tinge of
cabin-fevery hysteria, full of complicated alliances and frantic
rumors. I am usually well out of the loop, but the Cassie Maddox buzz
was loud enough that even I picked up on it.
For one thing she was a woman, which caused a certain amount of poorly
sublimated outrage. We are all well trained to be horrified by the
evils of prejudice, but there are deep stubborn veins of nostalgia for
the 1950s (even among people my age; in much of Ireland the fifties
didn't end until 1995, when we skipped straight to Thatcher's
eighties), when you could scare a suspect into confession by
threatening to tell his mammy and the only foreigners in the country
were med students and work was the one place where you were safe from
nagging females. Cassie was only the fourth woman Murder had taken on,
and at least one of the others had been a huge mistake (a deliberate
one, according to some people) who had entered squad lore when she
nearly got herself and her partner killed by freaking out and throwing
her gun at a cornered suspect's head.
Also, Cassie was only twenty-eight and only a few years out of
Templemore. Murder is one of the elite squads, and nobody under thirty
gets taken on unless his father is a politician. Generally you have to
spend a couple of years as a floater, helping out wherever someone is
needed for legwork, and then work your way up through at least one or
two other squads. Cassie had less than a year in Drugs under her belt.
The grapevine claimed, inevitably, that she was sleeping with someone
important, or alternatively that she was someone's illegitimate
daughter, or -- with a touch more originality -- that she had caught
someone important buying drugs and this job was a payoff for keeping
her mouth shut.
I had no problem with the idea of Cassie Maddox. I had been in Murder
only a few months, but I disliked the New Neanderthal locker-room
overtones, competing cars and competing aftershaves and subtly bigoted
jokes justified as "ironic," which always made me want to go into a
long pedantic lecture on the definition of irony. On the whole I prefer
women to men. I also had complicated private insecurities to do with my
own place on the squad. I was almost thirty-one and had two years as a
floater and two in Domestic Violence, so my appointment was less
sketchy than Cassie's, but I sometimes thought the brass assumed I was
a good detective in the mindless preprogrammed way that some men will
assume a tall, slim, blond woman is beautiful even if she has a face
like a hyperthyroid turkey: because I have I all the accessories. I
have a perfect BBC accent, picked up at boarding school as protective
camouflage, and all that colonization takes awhile to wear off: even
though the Irish will cheer for absolutely any team playing against
England, and I know a number of pubs where I couldn't order a drink
without risking a glass to the back of the head, they still assume that
anyone with a stiff upper lip is more intelligent, better educated and
generally more likely to be right. On top of this I am tall, with a
bony, rangy build that can look lean and elegant if my suit is cut just
right, and fairly good-looking in an offbeat way. Central Casting would
definitely think I was a good detective, probably the brilliant
maverick loner who risks his neck fearlessly and always gets his man.
I have practically nothing in common with that guy, but I wasn't sure
anyone else had noticed. Sometimes, after too much solitary vodka, I
came up with vivid paranoid scenarios in which the superintendent found
out I was actually a civil servant's son from Knocknaree and I got
transferred to Intellectual Property Rights. With Cassie Maddox around,
I figured, people were much less likely to spend time having suspicions
about me.
When she finally arrived, she was actually sort of an anticlimax. The
lavishness of the rumors had left me with a mental picture of someone
on the same TV-drama scale, with legs up to here and shampoo-ad hair
and possibly a catsuit. Our superintendent, O'Kelly, introduced her at
Monday-morning parade, and she stood up and said something standard
about being delighted to join the squad and hoping she'd live up to its
high standards; she was barely medium height, with a cap of dark curls
and a boyish, slim, square-shouldered build. She wasn't my type -- I
have always liked girlie girls, sweet, tiny bird-boned girls I can pick
up and whirl around in a one-armed hug -- but there was something about
her: maybe the way she stood, weight on one hip, straight and easy as a
gymnast; maybe just the mystery.
"I heard her family are Masons and they threatened to have the squad
dissolved if we didn't take her on," said Sam O'Neill, behind me. Sam
is a stocky, cheerful, unflappable guy from Galway. I hadn't had him
down as one of the people who would get swept up in the rumor tsunami.
"Oh for God's sake," I said, falling for it. Sam grinned and shook his
head at me, and slid past me to a seat. I went back to looking at
Cassie, who had sat down and propped one foot against the chair in
front of her, leaning her notebook on her thigh.
She wasn't dressed like a Murder detective. You learn by osmosis, as
soon as you set your sights on the job, that you are expected to look
professional, educated, discreetly expensive with just a soupçon
of
originality. We give the taxpayers their money's worth of comforting
cliché. We mostly shop at Brown Thomas, during the sales, and
occasionally come into work wearing embarrassingly identical
soupçons.
Up until then, the wackiest our squad had got was this cretin called
Quigley, who sounded like Daffy Duck with a Donegal accent and wore
slogan T-shirts (MAD BASTARD) under his suits because he thought he was
being daring. When he eventually realized that none of us were shocked,
or even remotely interested, he got his mammy to come up for the day
and take him shopping at BT.
That first day I put Cassie in the same category. She was wearing
combat trousers and a wine-colored woollen sweater with sleeves that
came down past her wrists, and clunky runners, and I put this down as
affectation: Look, I'm too cool for
your conventions.
The spark of animosity this ignited increased my attraction to her.
There is a side of me that is most intensely attracted to women who
annoy me.
I didn't register her very much over the next couple of weeks, except
in the general way that you do register any decent-looking woman when
you're surrounded by men. She was being shown the ropes by Tom
Costello, our resident grizzled veteran, and I was working on a
homeless man found battered to death in an alleyway. Some of the
depressing, inexorable flavor of his life had leaked over into his
death, and it was one of those cases that are hopeless from the start
-- no leads, nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, whoever killed
him was probably so drunk or high he didn't even remember doing it --
so my gung-ho newbie sparkle was starting to look a little patchy. I
was also partnered with Quigley, which wasn't working out; his idea of
humor was to reenact large segments of Wallace & Gromit
and then do a Woody Woodpecker laugh to show you they were funny, and
it was dawning on me that I'd been teamed up with him not because he
would be friendly to the new boy but because nobody else wanted him. I
didn't have the time or the energy to get to know Cassie. Sometimes I
wonder how long we might have gone on like that. Even in a small squad,
there are always people with whom you never get beyond nods and smiles
in corridors, simply because your paths never happen to cross anywhere
else.
We became friends because of her moped, a cream 1981 Vespa that
somehow, in spite of its classic status, reminds me of a happy mutt
with some border collie in its pedigree. I call it the Golf Cart to
annoy Cassie; she calls my battered white Land Rover the Compensation
Wagon, with the odd compassionate remark about my girlfriends, or the
Ecomobile when she is feeling bolshie. The Golf Cart chose a viciously
wet, windy day in September to break down outside work. I was on my way
out of the car park and saw this little dripping girl in a red rain
jacket, looking like Kenny out of South
Park,
standing beside this little dripping bike and yelling after a bus that
had just drenched her. I pulled over and called out the window, "Could
you use a hand?"
She looked at me and shouted back, "What makes you think that?" and
then, taking me completely by surprise, started to laugh.
For about five minutes, as I tried to get the Vespa to start, I fell in
love with her. The oversized raincoat made her look about eight, as
though she should have had matching Wellies with ladybugs on them, and
inside the red hood were huge brown eyes and rain-spiked lashes and a
face like a kitten's. I wanted to dry her gently with a big fluffy
towel, in front of a roaring fire. But then she said, "Here, let me --
you have to know how to twist the thingy," and I raised an eyebrow and
said, "The thingy? Honestly, girls."
I immediately regretted it --I have never been talented at banter, and
you never know, she could have been some earnest droning feminist
extremist who would lecture me in the rain about Amelia Earhart. But
Cassie gave me a deliberate, sideways look, and then clasped her hands
with a wet spat and said in a breathy Marilyn voice, "Ohhh, I've always
dreamed of a knight in shining
armor coming along and rescuing little me! Only in my dreams he was
good-looking."
What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I
stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely. I
looked at her hoodie jacket and said, "Oh my God, they're about to kill
Kenny." Then I loaded the Golf Cart into the back of my Land Rover and
drove her home.
Copyright © 2007 by Tana French