Mark Hanly sees a torch at the site

Mark Hanly’s recalled sighting of a torch at the Knocknaree archaeological site becomes a consequential, though incomplete, piece of evidence in the investigation into Katy Devlin’s murder. He saw no identifiable person: only a small beam moving from the direction of the Knocknaree estate toward the road. The clue matters less as an identification than as a possible narrowing of the search area, especially when Mark adds that he noticed no cars passing after about eleven at night.

The delayed recollection

The sighting emerges during questioning by Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox, after Mark has already described how difficult it was to see or hear anything in the darkness. He stresses that the site was dark in a rural way, without streetlights, and full of other noises. When Cassie asks whether anyone might have been outside on the dig or road after half past eleven, Mark hesitates and then remembers that someone had been on the site. His reluctance and the delay matter: the detectives had been close to setting his account aside and returning him to work, but the new detail immediately renews their attention.

Mark’s first description is deliberately limited. Asked to describe the person, he says that what he saw looked like a torch; he could not make out the person carrying it. At Cassie’s prompting, he reconstructs the movement rather than supplying an identity: a torch crossed the site from the estate toward the road. The evidence is therefore a remembered light and route, not a face, a reliable estimate of height, or direct confirmation of who was present.

Route and limits of the sighting

Mark places the first appearance of the light somewhere near the estate wall, at the end farthest from the road. He thought the person might have come through the estate’s back gate or over the wall. That point of entry matters geographically: the back gate was at the end of the Devlins’ street, only three houses away. The proximity makes the Devlin household one possible point of reference for the detectives, but Mark’s account does not establish that anyone from the family carried the torch.

The light then moved diagonally across the archaeological site in the direction of the road. Mark did not see where it ended up because trees blocked his view. He could not give a confident estimate of the carrier’s height: the torch seemed low, but he recognized that darkness distorted perspective. The movement seemed slow, which he considered unsurprising on ground broken by ditches and sections of wall. He described the beam as small and not especially powerful, rather than the beam of a large, heavy torch. These details make the remembered route concrete while underscoring how little it can prove about the person.

The question of vehicles

Cassie asks whether a car passed or stopped on the road around the time of the sighting. Mark takes time before answering, then says that a couple of cars had gone by when he first arrived but none after about eleven. He adds that people in the area went to bed early and that the lights on the estate were out by midnight. His account thus supplies a second, distinct observation: not just a light crossing the site, but an apparent absence of later traffic.

Rob Ryan immediately tests how dependable that absence is. Mark had noticed the torch, Ryan points out, but had only just remembered it. The exchange leaves the detectives with a potentially valuable lead whose reliability still requires scrutiny. Mark’s late recollection does not become certain simply because it is useful; the detail has to be checked against the rest of the investigation.

Investigative consequence

If Mark is telling the truth about the road, the detectives reason that both the place where Katy was killed and the separate place where her body had been hidden through Tuesday were almost certainly within walking distance of the estate, and quite possibly on it. That deduction sharply reduces the scale of the search: instead of treating most of Ireland as a plausible source of a vehicle and its occupants, the investigators can concentrate on the nearby area. The inference remains conditional on Mark’s account, and it does not itself identify a suspect or locate either scene.

The sighting’s force lies in this combination of a narrow visual fact and a broad practical consequence. A person remains hidden inside the beam, while the beam’s route connects the excavation to the estate and road. In a case where darkness, obstructed sightlines, and delayed memory limit what a witness can establish, the torch does not solve the crime; it changes where the detectives have reason to look.