IN THE WOODS

2 of Chapter 1

We heard about Cassie days before she joined the squad,probably before she even got the offer.Our grapevine in 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 rumours.I am usually well out of loop,but the Cassie Maddox buzz was loud enough that even I picked up on it.

For one thing was 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 confessiom 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 floaters, helping out wherever someone is needed for legwork, and then work your way up through at least one or other two 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 hsd caught sometime 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,completing cars and completing 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 woman 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 floated and two in Domestic Violence, so my appointments was less sketcgy than Cassie's, but I sometimes though 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 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 stil 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 thay 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 around me.

When she finally arrived, she was actually sort of an anticlimax.The lavishness of the rumours 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 girld,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.