‘How long?’ Dod asks. He is on the sofa watching the television.
I check the time on the top of the oven.
‘Two minutes,’ I say.
He says something else. I can’t really hear him that well. The curry is sizzling too loudly. I step down off my little step that Dod set up for me in the kitchen and then go see what he was saying. I walk into the television room.
‘I couldn’t hear you. What did you say, Dod?’
‘I said hurry up, I’m bleedin’ starving.’
I feel sad. Dod is not good Dod today. I walk a little closer to him.
‘Are you okay, Dod?’
He stares at me. He has that angry look in his eye. I hate it when he has that look.
‘Are you a fuckin doctor now?’
I shake my head. I don’t know what to say. He is still looking at me. Then I hear a loud beep sound.
‘Ye little shit,’ Dod says. He runs by me and into the kitchen.
‘Look, you fuckin idiot.’ He shows me the pan. The food has gone a little bit black. It’s not much. But Dod is angry. He presses a button that turns the beep off and then throws the pan against the wall.
‘Clean that shit up and start the dinner again.’
He walks out of the kitchen. I think if I was younger I would cry. But now that I am eleven and nearly a grownup I don’t cry. I just get down on my hands and knees and begin to clean up. I like to think about story ideas when I am doing things I don’t like.
I have a story idea about a girl who becomes a magician and goes to a magic school. It’s a bit like Harry Potter but I want it to be different. Except anytime I sit down to write I get confused. My writing is not good and it takes me ages to write even one sentence. I wish I had have gone to school like the characters in my books do. If I did, I bet I could write much better and much quicker. Reading books has taught me a lot about words and I can talk really well. But when it comes to writing words, it takes me ages to spell them out. It has taken me nearly three months to write two pages of my story. The Harry Potter books have two-hundred and fifty pages in them. It will take me years to write a book that size. But there isn’t really anything else for me to do when I’m in my basement. So maybe I will finish my book one day. I think it’s going to be called Magical Mabel. That’s the name of the girl: Mabel. She is seven years old in it, has red hair and loads of freckles. Then she gets kidnapped and taken to a big school with lots of other children who have the same magic powers as she has. But she doesn’t like the school and wants to escape. Sometimes I think I would like to escape from here. But I can’t. If Dod caught me he would really hurt me. I don’t want to be hurt again. My back still gets sore from the last time. And that was years ago.
‘Here, let me help you,’ Dod says. He gets down on his hands and knees too and helps me put the dinner back into the pan. Then he brings the pan to the bin and tips the food into it. ‘I’m sorry for being so… so snappy,’ he says. ‘I’m just not feeling well.’
‘Did you call a doctor?’
‘I was at the doctors last week.’
‘Oh, that’s where you went that time you locked me in the room?’ I ask.
He nods his head.
‘Yeah, the doctor says I need to take some tablets and get some rest. But none of that seems to be working. I’m sorry I shouted at you and threw the pan against the wall. I’m gonna order us some take-away instead. You like pizza?’
‘Pizza?’ I never heard of it.
Dod laughs.
‘C’mon, come in and watch television with me. You can stay up here late tonight.’
We walk into the television room and I go to sit in the chair I sit on all the time.
‘Nah, Betsy. Come over here with me.’
Dod lifts the blanket he is lying under and I get in it with him. He throws his arm around me and hugs me as we both look at the television.
‘This is nice, huh?’ he says. I just nod my head. But I don’t think it’s nice. I would be more comfortable sitting on the chair I like. On my own. Then Dod kisses the back of my neck. Yuck.
13:25
Gordon
Walking the corridors of a hospital is hardly a recipe for relaxation. Every ward door that’s open offers me a view to another grey-skinned person lying in a bed, much like I had been minutes ago. Still, Elaine – god love her – is doing her very best to soothe me. She keeps talking about football, has assumed that because I said I like the sport that I know as much about it as she does. She’s been rabbiting on for the past couple of minutes, ranting about how much her beloved Manchester United have damaged their reputation ever since Sir Alex Ferguson retired. The amount of statistics she has thrown at me in the past three minutes is, I’m sure, quite impressive. But it all sounds like gobbledygook to me.
She stops talking, then turns to face me.
‘You’re not really that big a fan of football are you?’
It didn’t take her long to realise that. I laugh, my first laugh of the day, then shake my head.
‘Certainly not as much as you are. No, I mean – I might watch the odd game if it’s on tele, but no… maybe I exaggerated a bit. I’m not that big a football fan.’
She giggles.
‘Okay – then what do you like, what can we talk about that will help you relax?’
I shrug both shoulders.
‘Don’t know really.’
‘What hobbies have you got? What do you do when you’re not working?’
‘I don’t work. Not anymore. Got paid off by the company I founded less than a year after Betsy went missing. I understood why. I couldn’t focus. But it was tough. Y’know… I lost my daughter, my wife and my business all in the space of ten months.’
Elaine does that pursed lips thing again, then reaches her left arm around my shoulders as we continue to walk.
‘I’m so sorry, Gordon.’
She doesn’t know what else to say other than apologise for something that isn’t even remotely close to her fault. I wrap my arm around the small of her back and suddenly we are strolling as if we’re a happily married couple. I know it feels a little awkward for both of us, but I’m gonna take the slight intimacy while I can get it. After a few seconds, she relents, takes her arm from around me so that we’re just linking arms again.
‘So what do you do with your spare time?’ she asks.
I don’t have an answer. Not really.
‘I watch some TV and I eh… obsess about Betsy. Y’know… talking about Betsy is probably the only thing that would relax me.’
Elaine makes a slight pop sound with her mouth, then stops walking.
‘Okay, well… tell me all about Betsy.’
I raise my eyebrows, then let out a steady breath as we stand facing each other in the middle of a corridor.
‘She was the cutest little thing, y’know. Brown hair, a splash of freckles across her face. She had the smallest little nose too. Tiny it was.’
I already feel my shoulders relax.
‘I bet you doted on her, huh?’ Elaine says.
‘Yeah,’ I reply smiling. But my smile is disingenuous. I was a shit dad. And I know it. I was just too obsessed with work at the time to care for the little person who was turning our house upside down. Ironically, back then Betsy was second in my thoughts. Now I can’t stop obsessing about her. ‘I’d give anything to go back in time.’
Elaine takes a step closer to me, then places a curled knuckle under my chin and lifts my head slightly.
‘You’re supposed to be relaxing now, okay? Not evoking feelings of guilt. You shouldn’t feel guilt anyway. You are not the one who took her.’
That’s the first time anyone has agreed with me in years; that Betsy was taken… abducted.
‘Y’know the police don’t believe somebody took her. They think somebody knocked her down, killed her, then hid her body. All seems a bit convenient to me, that. It took them seven years to come up with that theory.’
Elaine stares into my eye
s, intensely.
‘Gordon—’
‘It’s fine. I’m relaxed talking about her. Honestly.’
‘Okay,’ Elaine says, relenting. She links my arm again and we continue on our mission to walk up and down every corridor of floor three.
‘Y’know they all think I’m mad when I say she was taken. But I’m not mad, Elaine. I’m not crazy. I just have a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that somebody took her and that she’s still out there… out there somewhere. I just hope wherever she is, she’s happy; that she’s being taken care of.’
Elaine seems to have fallen silent, is either happy to just listen, or perhaps she agrees with the rest of them. That my theory is the one that’s wrong. I place my hand across her, stop her from walking and then stare into her eyes.
‘You don’t think I’m mad, do you, Elaine?’
She squints a smile at me, the tiny lines on the edge of her eyes creasing.
‘I think you’re being a great dad. You’re not giving up on your daughter. I know that if I was Betsy, I’d hope I had a dad like you who would never give up trying to find me.’
I step into Elaine, give her a hug and breathe in her hair. It feels so good to have somebody who’ll listen to me.
‘That’s why I have a private investigator looking for her now,’ I whisper into her ear. ‘I just couldn’t lie there on that bed after being told I may only have five hours left to live and not do anything.’
Elaine nods her head slowly on my shoulder. I know from a personal point of view she agrees with me, but I also know she’s conflicted; from a professional point of view she thinks I’m doing the worst thing I could possibly do given my situation. I hold her off me a little, so that we are facing each other.
‘Don’t answer this question as a nurse,’ I say. ‘Answer it as the beautiful human being you are, okay?’
She nods her head, then squints her eyes at me again.
‘I’m doing the right thing amn’t I?’
Elaine glances down at her feet, then back up at my face.
‘If I was your best friend, not your nurse, I would be giving you this advice, Gordon. Your best chance of finding out what happened to your daughter is by staying alive and giving yourself more time to look for her. Surviving the surgeries is everything to you right now. It’s all you’ve got. I’m sorry to say this, because I know it’s not the answer you want to hear, but… relaxing right now, not obsessing over finding Betsy, is genuinely the best thing for you to do.’
I look up to the ceiling. Then rub my thumb firmly across my forehead, as if I’m erasing what I’ve just heard from my memory.
‘It’s just the detective who looked after the case is currently talking with the private investigator I hired this morning. What if… what if somehow—’
‘Gordon,’ Elaine says, just like a school teacher would say to a student who’s rambling on too much about nothing. ‘It’s been seventeen years. The fact of the matter is, Betsy is not going to be found in the next hour or two. I mean, what more can I say? You have to agree with me on that.’
I look back down at her, stare at her entire face.
‘I do agree – of course I do. It’s just… if I do die today… I wanna give it my all until my last breath. Like you said, if you were Betsy, you wouldn’t want your dad to stop looking for you, would you?’
I can spot a moistness form in her eyes. I’m not the only one close to tears. She removes her old-school pocket watch from the top of her scrubs and sucks at her own lips.
‘You’re going for make or break surgery in the next hour and a half. I’m going to be straight and honest with you. You’re not going to get any information in the next ninety minutes that you couldn’t find in the past seventeen years. I’m sorry if that’s a hard truth for you to take; but I owe it you to be totally honest.’
I thumb the tear that has just fallen out of her eye away from her cheek, then grab her close. The two of us sob in unison in the middle of the corridor; her sobbing with pity for me, me sobbing because I’m being pitied. Again. Surely there can’t be anything more pathetic than strangers pitying you a couple of hours after they’ve just met you for the first time? But everyone pities me. I am the living, breathing definition of a loser. I literally lost everything I ever had.
13:25
Lenny
‘Independent House, how can I help you?’
‘I need to talk with Frank Keville please?’
‘Frank Keville – and which newspaper does he write for?’
‘Ah… I don’t know, doesn’t he write for them all? Surely you know Frank Keville, the guy in the wheelchair, does all the crime stuff?’
‘Hold on one moment, Sir.’
Lenny tenses his jaw, his eyes focused and controlled by his deep thoughts. He can’t even feel the rain anymore; the weather a concern deep beneath him now. He continues to walk towards the main Terenure Road where he told the taxi company he would be waiting.
‘I’m afraid Mr Keville is busy right now; is there anybody else you can speak to?’
Lenny takes the phone away from his mouth and exhales a disappointed grunt.
‘I need to speak to Keville urgently. It’s an emergency. Can you ask him to ring this number as soon as he can? My name is Lenny Moon; I’m a private investigator and I need to talk to him about a story he spent years working on.’
Lenny listens in as the receptionist mumbles back his name and number, then politely says goodbye before hanging up.
A small ball of excitement has resurrected itself within him. He knows quite well that he’s not going to solve the case of Betsy Blake’s disappearance, but that’s not his task. All he has to do is bring something different to the table, then Gordon Blake will sign off on the will.
Lenny bites his bottom lip as his selfishness calls out to him. It’s becoming more and more apparent to him that he may be an hour away from hoping a man dies; a man that has already given him a thousand euro. A man who’s had an awful life. Poor Gordon Blake.
But Lenny can’t allow sentiment to get in the way; there’s fuck all he can do about Gordon’s chances of surviving the surgeries. All Lenny has to focus on is the task in hand: speak to Frank Keville, find out who the other suspect was that Ray De Brun had alluded to. Gordon mustn’t be aware there was another suspect. Otherwise he would have named him in the note earlier. If Lenny finds out who the other suspect is, then that’s brand new information. That should be enough.
Lenny picks up his phone, dials Gordon’s number and waits. But the tone is dead. He tries again. Same result. He’s gurning and tutting to himself when he hears a car horn. A maroon-coloured taxi has just pulled up outside the Centra and is awaiting his fare.
Lenny opens the back door, slides into the seat.
‘Thanks. Independent House, ye know it? On Talbot Street?’
‘That’s where all the newspapers are, mate?’
‘That’s the one.’
Lenny chews on the butt of his mobile phone as the taxi man pulls away. He’s cursing, under his breath. The fact that Sally has always dismissed his need for a smart phone is grating on him now more than ever and it’s always grated on him in some way.
Lenny looks up, realises the taxi man’s smart phone – resting in the small cradle on the dashboard – is not currently in use.
‘Guess you don’t need the satnav to get to Talbot Street, huh?’ he says.
The taxi man looks in the rear-view mirror, offers a polite laugh.
‘Course not,’ he says.
Lenny grinds his teeth together, blinks rapidly.
‘Any chance I could take a look at your phone. I don’t need to call anyone, but I need to check something online. My phone’s a piece of shit and… look, you can add an extra fiver to the journey fare.’
The taxi man sniffs.
‘Make it an extra tenner and I’ll give it you, but I’m locking the doors.’
‘Perfect,’ Lenny says, shifting in the back seat. He reaches f
orward, takes the phone from the taxi man.
He immediately presses at the internet browser and then hesitates, biting his lip.
He types the words ‘Betsy Blake Dead’ into the search bar. The first option that pops up is an article from the Irish Independent. Lenny speed reads it, finds out little information than he had already been given. Ray De Brun closed the case in 2009 after a Toyota Corolla that had been used in multiple robberies over the years had been found with Betsy’s DNA inside it. Lenny shakes his head, realises it was ridiculously farfetched to conclude that the cops made all this up just to close the case. It has to be true. Betsy must be dead. He continues his internet search, desperate to find out why the owner of the car hadn’t been charged or even arrested over the findings, but the report was void of these details. He swipes out of that story, into the next one. Ironically, it was written by the man he was hoping to meet in the next few minutes: Frank Keville.
This article included more detail. It suggested the car wasn’t specifically registered to anyone on the date Betsy was supposedly killed, and that it had been swapped between many different arms of criminal gangs over the years. It had once been owned by a woman called Sandra Wilson who had reported it stolen in 2000, but since then it was off the grid until the cops found it abandoned almost eight years later. It was suspected of being involved in a post office heist and when the cops carried out tests on it they – rather surprisingly – answered the question a whole nation had been asking for years: whatever happened to Betsy Blake?
‘Fuckin hell,’ Lenny mutters to himself.
The taxi man twists in his chair.
‘Y’okay, mate?’
‘Sorry – yeah. Just having one of those days.’
Lenny tilts his head down, gets back into the information on the taxi man’s phone. He decides to Google ‘Frank Keville’.
Like most people in the country, he’s aware of what Keville looks like. Aside from writing the news, Keville had also become the news. He often appears on TV chat shows and has a picture by-line in the newspaper that’s ridiculously oversized. It’s Keville’s professional mission to rid the streets of gangland crime. And he’s good at his job; so good in fact that a gangland member tried to assassinate him. Lenny was aware – as was most of the country – that it was most likely Alan Keating who ordered the failed hit on him – but trying to prove that was an impossibility.
Whatever Happened to Betsy Blake? Page 14