"How soon did you and Rosalind start going out?" Cassie asked, after a while.

Damien had been folding the corner of a phone-record page into little pleats, but at this he glanced up, startled and wary. "What?…We didn't-um, we aren't. We're just friends."

"Damien," Sam said reproachfully, tapping the pages. "Look at this. You're ringing her three, four times a day, texting her half a dozen times, talking for hours in the middle of the night-"

"God, I've done that," Cassie said reminiscently. "The amount of phone credit you go through when you're in love…"

"You don't ring any of your other friends a quarter as much. She's ninety-five percent of your phone bill, man. And there's nothing wrong with that. She's a lovely girl, you're a nice young fella; why shouldn't you go out together?"

"Hang on," Cassie said suddenly, sitting up. "Was Rosalind involved in this? Is that why you don't want to talk about her?"

"No!" Damien almost shouted. "Leave her alone!"

Cassie and Sam stared, eyebrows raised.

"Sorry," he muttered after a moment, slumping in his chair. He was bright red. "I just…I mean, she didn't have anything to do with it. Can't you leave her out of it?"

"Then why the big secret, Damien?" Sam asked. "If she wasn't involved?"

He shrugged. "Because. We didn't tell anyone we were going out."

"Why not?"

"We just didn't. Rosalind's dad would've been mad."

"He didn't like you?" Cassie asked, with just enough surprise to be flattering.

"No, it wasn't that. She's not allowed to have boyfriends." Damien glanced nervously between them. "Could you-you know…could you not tell him? Please?"

"How mad would he have been," Cassie said softly, "exactly?"

Damien picked pieces off his Styrofoam cup. "I just didn't want to get her into trouble." But the flush hadn't died away and he was breathing fast; there was something there.

"We've a witness," Sam said, "who told us Jonathan Devlin may recently have hit Rosalind at least once. Do you know if that's true?"

A fast blink, a shrug. "How would I know?"

Cassie shot Sam a quick look and backed off again. "So how did you guys manage to meet up without her dad finding out?" she asked confidentially.

"At first we just met in town on weekends and went for coffee and stuff. Rosalind told them she was meeting her friend Karen, from school? So they were OK with that. Later, um…later we sometimes met at night. Out on the dig. I'd go out there and wait till her parents were asleep and she could sneak out of the house. We'd sit on the altar stone, or sometimes in the finds shed if it was raining, and just talk."

It was easy to imagine, easy and seductively sweet: a blanket around their shoulders and a country sky packed with stars, and moonlight making the rough landscape of the dig into a delicate, haunted thing. No doubt the secrecy and the complications had only added to the romance of it all. It carried the primal, irresistible power of myth: the cruel father, the fair maiden imprisoned in her tower, hedged in by thorns and calling for rescue. They had made their own nocturnal, stolen world, and to Damien it must have been a very beautiful one.

"Or some days she'd come to the dig, maybe bring Jessica, and I'd give them the tour. We couldn't really talk much, in case someone saw, but-just to see each other… And this one time, back in May"-he smiled a little, down at his hands, a shy, private smile-"see, I had a part-time job, making sandwiches in this deli? So I saved up enough that we could go away for a whole weekend. We took the train up to Donegal and stayed in this little B amp;B, we signed in like-like we were married. Rosalind told her parents she was spending the weekend with Karen, to study for her exams."

"And then what went wrong?" Cassie asked, and I caught that tautening in her voice again. "Did Katy find out about you two?"

Damien glanced up, startled. "What? No. Jesus, no. We were really careful."

"What, then? She was bothering Rosalind? Little sisters can be pretty annoying."

"No-"

"Rosalind was jealous of all the attention Katy was getting? What?"

"No! Rosalind's not like that-she was happy for Katy! And I wouldn't kill someone just for…I'm not-I'm not crazy!"

"And you're not violent, either," Sam said, slapping another heap of paper in front of Damien. "These are interviews about you. Your teachers remember you staying far away from fights, not starting them. Would you say that's accurate?"

"I guess-"

"Did you just do it for the buzz, after all?" Cassie cut in. "Did you want to see what it felt like to kill someone?"

"No! What are you-"

Sam moved round the table, surprisingly fast, and leaned in beside Damien. "The lads from the dig say George McMahon gave you hassle, just like he did everyone else, but you're one of the few who never lost your temper with him. So what got you angry enough to kill a little girl who never did you any harm?"

Damien huddled wretchedly into his sweatshirt, his chin tucked into his neck, and shook his head. They had closed in too soon, too hard; they were losing him.

"Hey. Look at me." Sam snapped his fingers in Damien's face. "Do I look anything like your mammy?"

"What? No-" But the unexpectedness of it had caught him; his eyes, wild and miserable, had flicked back up.

"Well spotted. That's because I'm not your mammy and this isn't some little thing you can get out of by sulking. This is as serious as it gets. You lured an innocent little girl out of her house in the middle of the night, you hit her on the head, you suffocated her and watched while she died, you shoved a trowel up inside her"-Damien flinched violently-"and now you're telling us you did it for no reason at all. Is that what you're going to tell the judge? What kind of sentence do you think he's going to give you?"

"You don't get it!" Damien cried. His voice cracked like a thirteen-year-old's.

"I know, I know we don't, but I want to. Help me get it, Damien." Cassie was leaning forward, holding both his hands in hers, forcing him to look at her.

"You don't understand! An innocent little girl? Everyone thinks she was, Katy was like some saint, they always thought she was so perfect-it wasn't like that! Just because she was a kid, that doesn't mean she was-You wouldn't believe me if I told you some of the stuff she did, you wouldn't even believe me."

"I will," Cassie said, low and urgent. "Whatever you're going to tell me, Damien, I've seen worse on this job. I'll believe you. Try me."

Damien's face was red, suffused, and his hands were shaking in Cassie's. "She used to get her dad mad at Rosalind and Jessica. Like all the time, they were always scared. She just made stuff up and told him-like Rosalind had been mean to her or Jessica had touched her stuff or something-it wasn't even true, she just made it up, and he always just believed her. Rosalind tried to tell him this one time that it wasn't true, she was trying to protect Jessica, but he just, he just…"

"What did he do?"

"He hit them!" Damien howled. His head shot up and his eyes, red-rimmed and blazing, locked on to Cassie's. "He beat them up! He broke Rosalind's skull with a poker, he threw Jessica into a wall and she broke her arm, he, Jesus, he did it to them, and Katy, she was watching and she laughed!" He ripped his hands out of Cassie's and swiped tears away furiously with the back of his wrist. He was gasping for breath.

"Do you mean Jonathan Devlin was having sexual intercourse with his daughters?" Cassie said calmly. Her eyes were huge.

"Yes. Yes. He did it to all of them. Katy…" Damien's face contorted. "Katy liked it. How sick is that? How can anyone…? That was why she was his favorite. He hated Rosalind because she…didn't want to…" He bit the back of his hand and cried.