In the Woods

While the trio continues to enjoy dinners at Cassie’s flat, their days on the case are irritating and unproductive. Rosalind doesn’t call Rob when she promised, and he begins to worry for her safety.

The detectives attend Katy’s funeral on the off chance that the killer might show up too. After the ceremony, Rosalind runs to Rob for reassurance that he will catch the killer. She says she couldn’t get away to contact him earlier.

In the weeks that follow, the detectives and floaters perform an exhaustive investigation, pursuing every possible angle without success. Rob says of that time, “It was only much later, in the stale cold light of hindsight, that the little things rose up and rearranged themselves […] to form the pattern we should have seen all along” (199).

The detectives review the Devlin children’s health records. Katy suffered bouts of acute gastritis that baffled the doctors. Jessica seemed normal until she exhibited signs of autism around age seven. The detectives also check the Devlin phone records and identify the anonymous caller as someone local.

A week after the funeral, Rosalind finally shows up to speak to Rob. Rob is smitten with her, though he doesn’t want to admit it to himself. Rosalind says she trusts him but doesn’t like Cassie. She presses Rob for details about Katy’s murder and hints that Katy may have had a boyfriend.

The lab calls with test results from the old bloodstain found at the crime scene. It matches the blood type of one of Rob’s childhood friends.

That evening, Cassie tells the other two about her interview with Detective Kiernan, who worked the missing persons case. His theory is that the children never left Knocknaree. The crime was committed either in the woods or very nearby. His partner, McCabe, thought a tourist dragged the children away.

Discussing the old case stirs up something in Rob’s mind:

I was sure I had seen something shoot out of the fireplace into the room, some small, black, clawed thing—baby bird, maybe, fallen down the chimney? – but there was nothing there. (223)

On Saturday, Rosalind calls Rob and asks him to meet at a hotel bar because Jessica has something to tell him. At the bar, Jessica still appears out of touch with reality and won’t speak. Rosalind is on the point of leaving again when Rob explains that he knows how she feels because he lost two friends when he was a child.

Eventually, Jessica says that she and Katy encountered a bald man in a blue tracksuit who said Katy was pretty and invited them to come to his house to meet his daughter.

While Rob unsuccessfully searches for the mysterious man in the tracksuit, Sam makes progress in his motorway investigation. Three foreign shell companies bought up the land and influenced the city council to approve the motorway near their properties. Sam will next track down individual names associated with these companies.

Rob makes a concerted effort to remember events that occurred the summer his friends disappeared. To him, “every salvaged scrap seemed tremendously potent and magical, a fragment of Rosetta stone carved with just one tantalizing character” (243). Among other things, he recalls one of the bikers and a girl named Sandra kissing in the woods.

Thinking the Devlin murder might be tied to the missing children’s case, Cassie and Rob go to Knocknaree to question Peter and Jamie’s parents. Rob stays in the car to avoid being recognized by Peter’s parents but goes along to question Jamie’s mother. She suspects Jamie and Peter ran away because Jamie resisted the idea of going to boarding school that fall.

As Jamie’s mother talks, Rob is hit with a wave of outrage. He thinks of all the normal life experiences he and his friends have missed: “I had been robbed blind” (258).

Sam tracks down a journalist who dug into the motorway issue years earlier but was ordered off the story. He slips Sam a list with the names of the three men behind the land purchases around the proposed route.

Two and a half weeks into the investigation, O’Kelly reassigns the floater resources for Operation Vestal. The three detectives protest that the case is being dropped. O’Kelly tells them it’s a simple cutback, not an end to their investigation. He tells them to take the weekend off for a change.

Later that evening, Rob and Cassie speculate about how the murderer lured Katy to the kill site. Cassie says that kids don’t mentally connect things in the same way adults do. The killer might have appealed to her imagination in some way.

Rob contemplates the rich relationship he shares with Cassie because she isn’t his girlfriend; she’s his partner. He reflects that “the girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows […] But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver” (276).