by Claire Allan
‘I wish you were here now,’ I breathed down the phone.
‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘More than anything. I hate that I can’t comfort you.’
I heard footsteps on the stairs, recognised them as Beth’s. She was no doubt done with waiting for me to tell her what was going on.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I whispered into the phone and hung up, just as my daughter walked into the room, chewing on her lip, her eyes, clear blue like her sister’s, wide with concern.
There was no way to hide the fact I’d been crying. My face, I knew, would be puffy and red, my eyes bloodshot. The bed was crumpled from where I’d thrown myself onto it.
‘Mum, I’m scared …’ she said, walking towards me.
I gestured for her to sit down beside me and I pulled her into the biggest hug I could.
‘Oh, my darling girl, I need you to be brave, okay? But there’s been some really awful news.’
Chapter Six
Elizabeth
By teatime it was all over the news. This murder. How a dog walker had discovered the body of 41-year-old Clare Taylor, a civil servant, that morning.
They didn’t say on the news that she’d still been alive when the dog walker had found her. I was grateful for that. People didn’t need to know all the sordid details of everything. It was bad enough I knew them. I doubted the image would ever leave me.
Izzy sat forlornly at my feet. The house was quiet again. The grandchildren and my son-in-law had gone home. I hadn’t told him it was me who’d found the body. I didn’t want him worrying. He worried about me enough. I didn’t want any fuss. I’d rather just forget about it as much as possible, if the truth be told. It would have been different if Paddy were still alive. I’d have talked everything through with him and he’d have helped me to make sense of it in the way only he could. I’d been blessed to have been married to him. I only wished I could have had him in my life for longer.
An image flashed on the screen. A beautiful woman. Chestnut hair – the colour mine used to be before the grey took over. She was smiling at the camera, the faces of two others in the picture blurred. She looked nothing like the person who’d died in front of me. Nothing like that grey figure, covered in mud, almost translucent owing to blood loss. Her face twisted in fear.
That policeman who’d been out to see me earlier was speaking. Describing the crime as ‘particularly depraved’. Appealing for witnesses. Answering questions from the media. Or not answering them. It seems Clare Taylor was a well-liked woman. Police had no idea what the motive might be. How could there be any justification for this kind of attack? How could one human inflict this kind of suffering on another?
My muscles still ached. I’d taken a warm shower – too warm for this heat, really – to try to ease the stiffness. Still, I thought, I was alive. I could think and feel, even if I sometimes wished I couldn’t.
Clare Taylor. I think my daughter went to school with a few Clares. It was a very popular name the year she was born. Laura would have been just a little older than this woman, if she were still here. We’d have just celebrated her forty-second birthday. But both of them were gone. Before their time. Both horrifically. I wondered what this Clare’s story was. What her life was like. If she’d left behind a grieving husband, as Laura had. If there were two children left completely lost without her. I wondered if there was a mother out there who felt as if she’d let her daughter down, as if she more than anyone should have been able to save her.
I decided I’d contact that police officer, ask if there was any way I could meet this Clare’s mother. I wanted to talk to her. To assure her that her child hadn’t been alone when she died. That someone was with her, trying to keep her warm and comfort her. I knew that would mean something. I know I’d have loved to have heard that after my Laura died.
Normally quite content with my own company, or at least with the company of just Izzy, I felt unsettled. My house didn’t feel quite so safe and secure any more. Knowing that something so horrific could happen so close to me had unnerved me.
I got up and walked around the old farmhouse, closing all the windows and locking the doors. I tried to recall the days when there was always someone coming or going. The blaring of music from the children’s bedroom. Paddy coming in and out of the kitchen door, filling me in on what he’d been up to in the milking shed, or down in the back fields.
Now, there was no noise and no movement bar the smallest of breezes trying to push its way through the dusty window with little luck. The air was stifling, stagnant.
‘What do you think, Izzy?’ I asked the dog, who didn’t seem to think very much at all. ‘Am I being a selfish old woman wanting to meet her family?’
Izzy trotted off in the direction of the cool kitchen floor, not that I could blame her. I followed her. It was still too early to go to bed, even though a deep, all-embracing tiredness had engulfed me. Instead, I sat down on the armchair beside the range cooker and looked out of the window over the fields. Bathed in sunshine, the sky blue with not so much as a whisper of a cloud, it seemed almost unthinkable that something so brutal had happened so close by on such a beautiful day.
It was only then that I allowed myself to cry for poor Clare Taylor and my poor Laura, who should have been able to bring her children to see me herself but who’d never do so again.
Chapter Seven
Rachel
Did I feel guilty that I texted Michael from my car just after I left the police station and asked if I could call round to his? Yes. Of course. But my need to see him had grown as the hours had passed.
Beth had been devastated; hysterical. Her cries still echoed in my ears. Molly had teetered up the stairs upon hearing the commotion and had stood, open-mouthed, her teddy hanging from her arm, tears spilling over from those beautiful blue eyes down her cheeks.
I’d told Beth I’d handle how we told Molly what had happened, but that I needed time to find the words. So both Beth and I had just hugged her, reassured her through our tears that we were just sad about a ‘grown-up thing’ and that everything was okay.
I’m sure she didn’t buy it but, thankfully, being three, she could be distracted by the allure of colourful TV characters and ice cream for dinner. Beth worried me. Her reaction was so visceral, as if any sense of innocence at the world she still possessed at fifteen had just been ripped from her.
She’d cried until she threw up and then she lay facing me on my bed while I stroked her face and tried to comfort her. But how could I? I couldn’t say everything was okay – because everything wasn’t okay. A woman she considered her aunt had been murdered. It would colour everything in her life from now on. She’d carry it with her.
I held her until I heard the front door open and the call of Paul from the bottom of the stairs, followed by Molly excitedly telling him she’d had three different flavours of ice cream for her tea. Her trauma was forgotten, or buried at least. I hoped it would stay there.
I didn’t cry when I saw Paul. I suppose, just as I’d expected to break down when I saw Julie, this surprised me. He sat on the edge of our bed and hugged a still-snivelling Beth, soothed her in the way he used to soothe me. Reassurances whispered into her hair, promises that he’d look after her. I drank in the tableau of father–daughter love in front of me and I felt another piece of my heart get chipped away.
When did Paul and I stop meaning everything to each other? When did the sight of him stop soothing my heart?
‘I’ve to go to the police station, make a statement,’ I said, breaking their moment.
‘Surely you don’t have to do that tonight?’ Paul asked, his face tilted, brow furrowed. He nodded surreptitiously towards Beth, as if to tell me she needed me more than the police did.
‘I want to do whatever I can to help,’ I said. ‘I want this man found, Paul, and soon. They want to build a complete picture of her life.’
‘But it’s weeks since you saw her,’ he said.
‘We talk, Paul. You know that. She
’s one of my oldest friends.’
I was starting to feel irritated now. I felt myself tense. I knew I was being terse with him and it wasn’t right – not in front of Beth. Not now.
‘Of course,’ he said, almost apologetic. ‘You do what you need to do. Should I come with you?’
I bristled again. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it’s best you stay with the girls. I don’t think Beth here is in any state to mind Molly. Are you, Beth?’
My beautiful daughter blinked up at me, her eyes red and puffy. In that second she looked very much like my little girl again, not the young woman she’d blossomed into. My heart ached for her. She shook her head.
‘Okay, then,’ Paul said. ‘I’ll stay here with the girls. Maybe once Molly’s in bed, we can order in some Chinese food?’ he said to Beth, who nodded.
‘I’m going to get a shower and change into my pjs,’ she said and stood up.
I hugged her and told her that I loved her before changing into a linen skirt and white T-shirt.
‘Dressing up for the police station?’ Paul asked.
‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘But my blouse is a bit stained, with tears and make-up from our beloved daughter, and I just want to be comfortable. I’m hot and sweaty, and I don’t know how long I’ll be there.’
Suddenly, I was very tired. And hungry. I realised I’d not finished my lunch, or eaten anything since, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep anything down now if I tried.
‘Well, hopefully they won’t keep you too long,’ Paul said, standing. ‘I’m really, really sorry this has happened,’ he said, pausing to look me up and down before leaving the room.
I’m sure he was talking about Clare, but he could just as easily have been talking about the ongoing disintegration of our marriage.
As it happened, I wasn’t in the police station all that long. Less than an hour. I didn’t have much to tell them, really. I just let him copy all the messages from Clare from my phone then talked about her life and if there was any way she could have enemies.
Even the thought of Clare Taylor having enemies was laughable. She was the most easy-going person I knew.
Of course they asked again about her new man, but I couldn’t tell them much more than what I’d told them at Julie’s. He was handsome, according to Clare, and kind-hearted. He’d insisted on paying for dinner on their first date. But that was about it. I didn’t have his name. There weren’t any pictures of them together anywhere. I didn’t know where he worked or even where he was from. I’d assumed he was a Derry man, but I didn’t know for sure. We’d just never had that conversation. Clare had always been one to play her cards close to her chest and that was okay.
‘Maybe I’ll introduce you all at our annual August barbecue,’ she’d told me, ‘if it keeps going well.’
They asked me how Clare got on with her ex-husband, James. Was there any residual animosity between them?
I told them that as far as I knew, they rarely spoke. They’d both moved on since the divorce – which was as amicable as could be in the end. There’d been tears and a lot of soul-searching. She’d been hurt when he’d told her he didn’t love her any more, of course she had. And then angry when she’d found out he already had someone else lined up. But when all was said and done, they’d simply grown apart. He’d never, to my knowledge, been violent towards Clare and I didn’t think he was the kind of man who would be. There was no reason to suspect that he’d have murdered his ex-wife. But then again, the notion that anyone at all would want to murder Clare seemed completely absurd.
I felt as if I was being singularly unhelpful, unable to give the police anything to go on. Any questions I’d asked, they didn’t really answer. Everything was ‘too early to tell’, or they weren’t ‘at liberty to say’. They’d assured me no stone was being left unturned, that every avenue was being explored.
They used all the clichéd terms that police could use, which just made it all feel even less real. As if we were all acting in a TV show, saying our lines. A grisly-faced detective would show up at any minute and swear at his underlings before declaring there’d been a murder, in a thick Scottish accent.
It was impossible to get my head around the idea that somewhere my friend was lying cold, dead, carved up by a pathologist. I shook that image from my head each and every time it pushed back in and tried to focus on what the police were saying.
By the time I left, all I wanted to do was to feel something tangible. Michael replied to my text message almost immediately – telling me that of course I could call round. He looked forward to it. He hoped I was okay.
A wave of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on washed over me. It was desire, mixed with affection, mixed with guilt. I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror, glad I’d fixed my make-up and brushed my hair at home. My look still screamed middle-aged teacher, but it was presentable. I didn’t look as haggard as I had earlier.
Guessing I could probably spend an hour at most with Michael before any suspicion was aroused, I set off, eager to get to him as soon as I could.
Michael lived in a house close to the Irish border at Ballyarnett. It was an old house that he was midway through renovating. Still a bit ragged around the edges, there were more than a few half-finished projects on the go; the kitchen was minimal and due to be replaced by something sleek and modern, the bathroom was basic but work had begun on replumbing, and a new floor had been laid in the living room. Half of the house’s rattling old windows had been replaced with double-glazing. The whole thing was starting to take shape, but Michael didn’t seem overly bothered about getting it done quickly. ‘I’d rather take my time and do it right,’ he’d said. And being a single man living alone he had the luxury of being able to do that.
We didn’t spend an awful lot of time there, anyway; in fact, I’d only been to his house a handful of times. Most of the time we’d spent together had been walking through the nearby country park and sitting in my car, talking and kissing, of course. His kisses took me to somewhere where I felt like an unburdened teenager again.
I rang his doorbell and he answered within seconds – a sight for sore eyes. Standing there in his jeans and a red T-shirt, his dark hair messy and curly, unshaven but with deep green eyes that looked at me with such concern I felt myself melt into them. He pulled me into a hug, a hug that I didn’t let Paul give me earlier. He told me he was so, so sorry for what happened. That he wished he could make it better for me.
He poured me a glass of wine, which I knew I shouldn’t drink because I had the car with me, but I gave in to the temptation anyway. Just as I gave in to the temptation of his kiss – his lips full, soft, determined. His hands roaming. His body pushing against mine. It was wrong, but it felt right. It felt as if it was the perfect thing to do – to allow my nerve endings to fizz into life as a big two fingers up to death.
I needed to feel alive. I needed him. So when he wordlessly led me from the kitchen up the stairs to his bedroom, I didn’t hesitate. When he took the wine glass from me and sat it on his bedside table – before gently pushing me back onto his unmade bed, his eyes filled with longing – I responded by reaching for his belt and unbuckling it, desperate to feel as alive as I possibly could.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked as I unzipped his jeans, reached my hand inside, desperate to touch him.
I couldn’t speak. I could only nod. I desperately needed him. I knew this was taking whatever it was we had to the next level, that there’d be no going back once we did this, but I was powerless to stop. Life was just too short not to get what I wanted any more.
We lay curled together afterwards, in the fading light of his room. Still half-dressed. Passion had taken over. The need to have him. I could feel his heart beating in his chest against my back as he held me.
‘I wish you didn’t have to go,’ he said, kissing my shoulder. ‘I’d love to have you to myself all night. To be there for you.’
I took his hand in mine. Revelled in how strong it felt. ‘I wi
sh I could stay, too. I don’t want to go home and face reality.’
He pulled back a little and I rolled onto my back, looking up into his eyes.
‘Then don’t go home, Rachel. Stay here, with me. This is real,’ he said.
‘You know I can’t stay,’ I said. ‘Beth was so distraught. Molly’s so confused …’
‘And him?’ Michael asked, avoiding using Paul’s name as if saying it would conjure him into the room between us. ‘You have him, too.’
‘Yes, he’s there. But it’s not that simple. You know it’s complicated,’ I said as I reached up and stroked his face, tried to convince him that I cared. Properly cared.
I knew I was just sounding like a serial cheat now. Spouting the oldest line in the book. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. I’d never been tempted to stray before I met him. Not even once.
‘It’s not fair of me to ask, not now,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He turned away, sat up and started getting dressed. ‘Do you ever think, though, Rachel, especially at times like this, that you have a right to be truly happy? If you tell me that you’re happy with him and all he has to offer you, then that’s fine. I’ll find a way to deal with that.’ He turned to look at me while putting his T-shirt on. ‘But I don’t think you are happy and you don’t deserve to be miserable for the rest of your life. You don’t know what’s coming next, none of us do. Clare would agree, I’m sure.’
I showered when I got home, washing away any scent of Michael and what we’d done; let my guilt at having slept with another man wash down the drain along with the soapy water. I slipped into fresh pyjamas and lay down on top of the bed, it being too warm to climb under the covers. Exhaustion washed over me. I was just about to switch off the bedside light, when Paul walked in and sat down on the edge of the bed at my feet.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve handled this all wrong,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know what to say. I can’t get my head around it, so God knows what it’s like for you.’