IN THE WOODS

3 of Chapter 1

"I heard her family are Masons and they are 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 the 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 soupcon 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 soupcons. 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-shirt (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 wooden sweater with sleeves that came down past her wrists, and clunky runners, and I put this down as affection: Look, I'm too cool for your conventions. The spark of animosity this ignited increased my attraction for 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 in 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 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 remarks about my girlfriends, or the Ecomobile when she is feeling bolshie. The Gold Cart chose a viciously wet 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 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 would 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 and 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.