by Claire Allan
Still, I’d be polite and I’d do my bit because God knows Heidi didn’t need any more stress. It was bad enough to have Ciara and Stella, not to mention Kathleen, hovering around. That was a whole other complicated dynamic right there. There was no denying the tension that existed between them and Heidi.
She told me that she felt she’d never been accepted by any of them. Watching them interact with each other I could see that was true.
Just after ten thirty, or thereabouts, I’d gone upstairs to get Lily, stopping to use the bathroom first. I was so tired, I could feel my eyes starting to droop. I splashed my face with cold water, pushed the bathroom window open wide and had allowed the fresh, ice-cold air to wash over me. I prayed that Lily would sleep through the night. Both Heidi and I needed the rest.
I had just closed the window when I heard a strange, strangulated cough from Joe’s room, which was just next door.
I tapped on his bedroom door, quietly said his name in case he was sleeping, and opened it just a crack.
‘Are you okay, Joe?’ I asked, looking at the figure lying in the bed.
His bedside light was still on, an empty teacup on his locker, a notebook or diary and pen discarded on the bed. I could hear the faintest of rattles, so I moved closer.
‘Joe?’ I asked again, a little louder but not much.
He didn’t move. His eyes didn’t even flicker. I wasn’t sure for a moment or two if he was breathing, and then there it was again – a sickening gargling sound, not quite a breath but maybe. He went still. I couldn’t hear another breath. I started to panic a little, sat down on the edge of the bed and took his hand in mine, tried to feel for a pulse. I couldn’t feel one, or maybe I could. But it was so weak, I just wasn’t sure.
I reached over to grab his other hand, thinking maybe I’d get a better reading from his other wrist, but as I stepped closer my foot caught on something on the floor. I looked down and there was a book, what looked like a diary, and it was open. I don’t know, I’ll never know, what it was that made me look a little closer rather than just kick it under the bed, but I did and my stomach contracted.
I didn’t read it all. I swear I didn’t read it all. Not at first. Just words that were blurring together and then spinning. Snapshots. But enough, more than enough, to make me want to hurt Joe McKee more than I ever wanted to hurt anyone in my life.
Girls. Child. Sick. Hurt. Perverted. Illness. Abuse. Sorry.
The words became more important than the pulse I was supposed to be looking for. I stopped focusing on how frequently he was breathing. Any instinct I’d had to try to help or call for help slipped away. I reached for the book, turned it around. Focused on the words.
A confession of sorts. He needed to get it off his chest. He was sorry. He was a sick man. He had always been a sick man and he had tried to control it but he was weak.
He never meant to hurt anyone.
He just had a compulsion.
My stomach turned. ‘Just a compulsion’? Just who had he hurt? Had he hurt my Heidi? Was that why she seemed broken when she was around him? It would explain so much. How vulnerable she could be. How it had taken her a long time to start a physical relationship with me. My poor Heidi. And who else? Ciara? Unknown girls. Young girls. Just how young?
My mind flitted to my daughter. My innocent, beautiful daughter. Had he ever been alone with her? Had he changed her? I almost couldn’t breathe for thinking about it. I knew he had held her. I knew there were pictures of him, smiling at the camera. His creepy grin. And my child.
Something in me snapped as I closed his diary and looked at him there, the mouth slack, minute foamy bubbles forming on his lips.
I made a decision then, you see. I could’ve saved him, maybe. I could’ve called for help, but I didn’t. I sat and watched as those short, gasping breaths drew further and further apart, the odd gurgle growing quieter. I sat and wished he was at least conscious so I could tell him what a bastard he was. I hoped he knew he was dying. That he felt the struggle for every one of those short, shallow breaths. I hoped he felt fear. I hoped he felt pain. I hoped he knew I was there beside him, but there was no way I was going to help him. I hoped he felt as powerless as his victims had. Joe McKee, man of the people. Disgusting paedophile.
I waited until he was silent. Until there was no hope for him. I let him die.
The enormity of my actions, or my lack of action, hit me quickly. I was shocked, horrified at myself. Yes, he deserved to die, but was I now just as bad as him? Was I now a killer?
I lifted the diary and slipped it into the drawer of his locker. I’d deal with it later. Once I figured out how to talk to Heidi about it all. If she told me what I was now sure was true, if she confirmed what he had done, I could maybe find some way to justify it to myself. To live with it.
Of course, when I went back to look at the diary the next day, it was gone. Funeral arrangements were being made and I got swept up in it all. I tried to find the right time to tell Heidi, but is there ever a right time?
Then the police said it was murder and the crushing reality of the situation swept over me. I vowed I’d tell them the truth and I tried, I really tried, to find the courage to tell them. But then when they said he had been suffocated, I’d almost been sick. If I spoke up then, told them no, that he’d taken ill, and I’d just not called for help, they’d have no reason to believe me. Especially as I’d said nothing before.
They mentioned unexplained injuries and bruising, further test results from the postmortem. Things I knew I hadn’t done, but I’d gone too far then and I was too scared to speak up. Heidi was unravelling. I couldn’t make her life harder. And yes, I was a coward, too. I was scared of prison. I was scared of losing Heidi and Lily. I was scared that all anyone would see me as from now until the day I died was a cold-blooded killer.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Ciara
Now
I’m digging around upstairs trying to find my father’s diary, where I made him admit his crimes, when I hear Heidi call my name. She sounds almost hysterical, so I abandon my search and run down the stairs to find her pacing the living room.
Heidi is shaking her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You’re not making any sense, Alex. Why would you say that?’
‘Say what?’ I ask.
Alex looks at me, his face pale. ‘I did it,’ he says. ‘It was me.’
I feel dizzy, then I look at him again. Alex. Gentle, quiet Alex. I’m supposed to believe he was a killer? It just doesn’t ring true.
He speaks, tells me his story, and I try to absorb what he has said. He sat and watched Joe die. He could have, maybe, helped and he didn’t.
‘But you didn’t kill him?’ Heidi says. ‘You didn’t kill him. He was just sick and he passed away, and that means no one is guilty.’
‘But I didn’t get help,’ Alex says and he looks wretched. ‘I was so angry. I’d read those words and I was so enraged. I’d wanted to kill him. I was happy to watch him die. I never thought it would end up like this. All this hurt and pain and a murder investigation, and the further it went, the less I felt I could speak up.’
I’m stunned. It seems Alex, who I’d written off as wet and pathetic, had a backbone after all. He’d watched my father die. But at the same time, he didn’t have enough of a backbone to speak up about what really happened and to save us all from the nightmare we’ve been going through over the last few days. The topic of every over-the-garden-fence conversation in Derry, police interviews, newspaper reports, existing together in a virtual ticking time-bomb of tension.
‘I want to talk to the police now,’ he says, nodding. ‘This has all gone too far. I can’t run from it any more, Heidi. None of us can. We have to be honest. We can’t keep going on like this. None of us can,’ and he glances in my direction.
Heidi looks as if she’s trapped in the glare of oncoming headlights. Except the headlights are coming from all directions and no matter where she turns, where any of us turn, there is no way
out of this. She is shaking her head.
‘But you didn’t do anything wrong, not really wrong. He was very ill. He was dying. We don’t have to tell the police. There is no way they could ever know. We just keep it quiet. It might go away.’
She is pleading with him and she looks at me and I see desperation in her eyes.
Alex shakes his head, defeated. ‘It would always haunt me. The guilt. It’s already destroying me, Heidi. Whatever happens, I have to tell the police. I’ll not be able to live with myself if I don’t.’
Heidi is crying. Silent tears running in rivulets down her cheeks. They both look so broken and I think of the little baby upstairs, the baby who curled her hand around my fingers not that long ago. Who trusted me to rock her back and forth. Those big, innocent eyes that had looked at me with such trust. And I realise that no one is really guilty here at all. Except for Joe.
And Joe, now dead and buried, holds the key to all this.
‘It was his diary that I was looking for,’ I interject. ‘The one Alex saw. It will help back up Alex’s story, won’t it? It’s not where I left it, but it has to be here somewhere. We just have to keep looking.’
‘Then we’ll do just that, we’ll keep looking,’ Heidi says, squeezing Alex’s hands tightly.
She stands up and starts sorting through the drawers in the sideboard in the living room – pulling out old paperwork and shuffling through it. My father was nothing if not fastidious about keeping his affairs in order and it soon becomes obvious there’s no diary of any kind hidden in the back of a drawer or under mounds of old bank statements.
I look in the drawer of the console table in the hall. Again, there is nothing of note. It’s neat and organised. A book of stamps. Some pens held together with an elastic band. A packet of envelopes and a small address book, in which Dad had painstakingly written the names of his friends and colleagues in block capitals and always in black ink.
We both go together into the bedroom. I double-check the wardrobe, as does Heidi.
‘It was there,’ she says, pointing to the far left corner of the wardrobe, which is now just an empty shelf. ‘That is where you put it. Remember?’
‘Yes, but I looked and it’s definitely not there any more.’
She pulls aside the rail of pressed shirts and trousers and looks down at the floor of the wardrobe. ‘They’re all gone,’ she says, looking up at me.
‘All what?’
‘All his diaries and notebooks. He kept them there, in shoeboxes. A diary for every year. There were at least twenty of them here.’
‘Would the police have taken them?’ I ask. ‘Those SOCO guys were quite thorough. It’s the only logical explanation.’
It strikes me that Heidi was able to open the wardrobe door without using a key – a key I knew I had. I run my finger to the lock, noticing that it has been broken.
‘Someone’s been in here. They used force,’ I tell her, pointing to the door.
‘Would the police have busted a lock? They left everything else just as it was,’ Heidi says.
I shrug. I only know what I see in front of me.
‘And if they had the diaries, and he’d written his confession of sorts, wouldn’t they have found it? DI Bradley seems very thorough.’
‘I don’t know, Heidi.’
I can hear a harsh, frustrated tone to my voice. I was just angry that it was gone. I wanted to have proof. I wanted to have his apology to look at. It was the only thing I wanted from that man.
She winces at my tone and I apologise. Sincerely. Explain that I’m stressed. She nods. She understands. She feels it too.
‘I’ll call DI Bradley,’ I tell her. ‘Ask him outright. Tell him where to look if he has the diary to see what Joe wrote.’
‘You’re okay about all of this – what he did – becoming public?’ Heidi asks.
I see the worry, the fear in her eyes.
‘I’m not okay with it,’ I tell her truthfully, ‘but it’s the right thing to do. For me. For you and for Alex. We’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Heidi. We never asked to be abused.’
Her bottom lip is trembling and I watch tears spill over from her eyes and run down her cheeks.
I reach out my hand to her, a gesture that would have seemed insane just an hour ago, and to my surprise she reaches back.
‘My phone’s downstairs. Let’s go phone DI Bradley and get this all sorted once and for all.’
‘But what about all their evidence? Injuries and suffocation and whatever? Won’t they say Alex is lying?’
She looks frightened. Vulnerable. I feel so very sorry for her. Her life has been lacking in any real security for so long.
I wish I could reassure her, but I can’t. I can only give her hand a squeeze.
‘We have to trust that the truth will be enough. Something else must’ve happened to make him take so ill.’
‘Or someone else hurt him first,’ Heidi says.
But I can’t help but feel she is grasping at straws. I suppose I’d do the same if it was Stella in the frame.
Unable to speak, I just shrug at Heidi and lead her downstairs. The first step is to call DI Bradley, I think. Get him to come here.
We go back downstairs to fetch my phone. Alex is still in the living room, his head in his hands. He looks up at us expectantly, and sags again when Heidi shakes her head.
‘Alex, we’re going to call DI Bradley now. We’re going to tell him everything,’ I say as calmly as I can.
He nods and Heidi sits beside him and holds him to her as he cries.
I pick up the phone and call the number DI Bradley had given me.
This is all such a mess.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Heidi
Now
I gave up believing in God a long time ago. Probably around the time my mother died. I couldn’t understand how any god, who my teachers described to me as loving and caring, would take a mammy away from their only child. And if that is hard to get my head around, I sure as hell can’t understand how any god would let what is going to happen next happen.
Nonetheless, sitting in the living room of my childhood home, holding hands with my husband and waiting for the police to arrive, I can’t help but offer up a silent prayer.
Please, I beg, please just make this nightmare end. Alex is not a bad man. Alex doesn’t have it in him to be a bad man. ‘Please, God,’ I beg, ‘don’t take someone else I love from me.’
Ciara is restless. She is pacing up and down the living room, chewing on her thumbnail. It’s doing nothing to soothe my nerves. She’s looking a little manic again. Then again, I’m feeling a little manic myself right now. She jumps with every noise. Alex is silent, but he is wringing his hands. The only person daring to make a sound is Lily, who has started to fuss as if the tension is nipping at her, too.
I jump when I hear a car pull up, and again when I hear the car doors slam.
‘It’s DC King and DC Black,’ Ciara says as if it could be anyone else. ‘I’ll let them in,’ she says and I turn to Alex, tell him I love him and we’ll get through this. That he did nothing wrong and they’re bound to find that out in time. The coroner has made a mistake. Something was very wrong with Joe when he died and yes, Alex was there, but he didn’t kill him. Not calling for help is not the same as killing someone.
He squeezes my hand back and tells me he loves me too, and that he’s sorry.
That’s all we have time for before the two police officers come into the room, followed by Ciara.
‘Alex, Heidi,’ DC King says, nodding her head in greeting.
‘Do you mind if we sit down?’ DC King asks.
‘Not at all,’ I say, and I can hear the tremor in my voice.
I can feel a panic attack threaten. This is worse than anything I could’ve imagined.
DC Black is the next to speak.
‘You’ve asked us to come here because you say you have more information for us about what happened here on the night Joe died.’
‘It’s okay, Alex. Take your time,’ DC King says.
I like her. She’s friendly. A gentle soul. I don’t know how long she’ll stay friendly or gentle for, though.
‘Should we maybe get a solicitor?’ I ask Alex suddenly. I’m nervous about how this will go down.
Alex shakes his head. ‘I’ve nothing to hide. Not any more.’
I can’t help but think of all the things that have been hidden. If I’d told him before now, on my own terms, would I have had the strength to break contact with Joe altogether? Would this even have happened? Oh God, it hurts that this is my fault. I’ll never forgive myself.
DC King speaks. ‘If you think that a solicitor would help, then by all means we can arrange one or you can call a solicitor of your choosing. If you decide to proceed without one, you can request one at any stage, if what you’re going to tell us is that serious,’ she says. ‘You may want to continue this conversation down at the station. Just so we make sure it’s all recorded properly. We will have to caution you, which isn’t to say we’ll charge you without anything.’ She pauses. ‘Do you think it’s that kind of information, Alex?’ she asks.
I can’t stop the tears from falling.
‘I think it might be,’ he says slowly. ‘I know I should’ve told you this before. I was scared. I’m sorry. I was with Joe when he died. It was me.’
I see DC Black sit up and take notice. There’s something about him that reminds me of an over-eager watchdog. DC King shows more subtlety in her responses.
‘Okay,’ she says softly before launching into an official caution.
Words I’ve heard a thousand times on the TV but never dreamed I would hear in real life: