Heart Stopper

by R J Samuel

  “I left it in the Jury’s car park. It’s close to Michael’s apartment. I went straight from work on… yesterday.” She couldn’t even remember what day of the week it was. Saturday. No, the concert was on Saturday. So Sunday.

  Reyna got up.

  Catherine said, “I’m coming with you.”

  Reyna shook her head. “We can’t leave Priya here alone and we can’t take her in with us.”

  “And you will take much longer to find the place. Besides, do you know how to get into a locked car?” She turned to Priya. “I presume you locked it, and the keys were in your jacket.” Priya nodded, but was too tired to correct her about the keys. They had fallen somewhere. Catherine continued to Reyna, “Also, your rental car is too obvious. We’ll need to take my car, and it is stick shift.”

  “And you know how to get into a locked car?”

  “Yes.”

  Catherine thought for a moment and then said, “We’ll have to park in the little alley on the other side and I’ll get to Priya’s car and open it. I’ll only have few minutes because the alarm will go off. Get the papers and get back to the car. Nobody is going to look twice at an old lady.” Catherine smiled at their expressions. “I’ll dress like one.”

  Reyna looked at Priya.

  Priya said, “She’s right.”

  She looked out at the patio. A brown speckled bird loitering at the far end hopped towards the door, stopped, and cocked its head. It flew straight up into the air bursting into a harsh birdsong as it rose.

  Priya said, “Leave me the financials you were looking through. If that’s ok?”

  Reyna nodded. “Maybe you’ll see something I couldn’t.” She looked out at the track leading through the forest at the back of the house. “You should stay upstairs. You’d be able to hear better.” She looked back at Priya and hesitated. “Maybe, we could put you in the back seat and you could crouch down when we’re in town?”

  Priya shook her head. “Too risky. For all of us. I’ll stay alert. You should too.”

  ∞

  The sound of birds singing and squawking occasionally broke through, sometimes from the forest, and sometimes from the patio. She sat in a chair by the window in the bedroom upstairs. The one with Reyna’s things in it. Files covered the bed.

  Priya tried to concentrate on the financial details Reyna had collected from the Research Company. Her eyes wandered every few minutes and she stared at the tops of the trees bending in the drizzle that moved in waves over them, at the potholes in the track twisting through, at the crows that perched on the bows of the telephone wire strung from post to post.

  Reyna and Catherine had been gone for thirty minutes. They had driven off in Catherine’s station wagon that grumbled out of the galvanized steel barn as if woken from a long nap. The worry was evident on both their faces despite Priya’s repeated assurances that she would be fine. Priya had refused any thoughts though they tried to force their way in through the fog. She had locked all the doors and climbed the stairs, her steps heavy. She felt the dregs of whatever was in the tablets Reyna had given her, but she was calm. She thought that was probably the effects of what Catherine had mixed in the glass for her.

  Priya looked through the papers stacked in boxes beside Reyna’s bed.

  The sudden silence outside attracted her attention. The birds had found a reason to stop their noise. She opened the window and listened, willing her heart to slow and the blood to clear from her head, trying to tune in under the absence of natural sounds. She heard the vibration before the noise of the engine and before she saw the movement between the trees. It was about 500 yards away. The slightest of sounds and the slightest of motions, but it was enough. The car was crawling. She rapidly calculated the distance the car would need to cover before it would emerge from the shaded entry to the clearing and reach the back of the house. Just enough time to get out the front and into the forest below the front of the house. She assumed it wasn’t the Gardai; they wouldn’t be creeping around if they had tracked her down. She was not going to sit and wait for the other possibility to break down the door.

  She raced out of the bedroom and down the stairs trying not to let her momentum push her into a fall. Her shoes flapped off the flagstones in the hall echoing her rapid breaths. The large iron key was in the front door and her fingers tangled as she turned it in the lock, but it opened smoothly on her second attempt. The rain was now heavier than a drizzle. She ran to the edge of the clearing where the cream stones stopped and the ground dipped down into the trees. The stones had shifted under her feet, but they were steady compared to the wet grass and bushes on the slope. She grabbed on to the rough branches hanging from the bushes as she slid into the forest.

  She could not see the sky above her, the trees crowded, fighting against the light shining through. The ground was a yellow green mush of leaves, her feet slipped and she fell as she stopped to listen. The forest was still and damp and dark, like the inside of a thermos flask of day old tea. Rain droplets clung to leaves then hurtled down onto her face.

  All she could see around her were trees. Lines and lines of trees, their trunks bare and smooth, lifeless and slippery. She heard rustling, then silence. She heard a drumming and realized it was her heart thumping. She fought past the fear and scanned the surroundings for a hiding place.

  Then she noticed a cave, formed by the roots of a large tree twisted into the air and then sweeping down to create a dark empty space. She looked around at the other trees. The larger ones she could see had the same arrangement of roots, but there were no spaces beneath them. This cave was only visible because of the angle at which she had fallen.

  She heard the crunch of shoes on the stones behind her and made up her mind. As quietly as she could she crept into the moss-lined darkness beneath the thick roots. The shoes had stopped at the slope into the forest and the wearer seemed to be standing still, listening as she was. She wondered if he could also hear the shadows cry from the rooted lairs. The water smelt of mould and mist as it ran back out of her nostrils.

  In the distance she could hear nothing. Just forest, miles of it. The trees stood lonely in it, in the loneliness of the crowd. She tried to sink below the leaves. Into the soil. She tried to slow her heartbeat, to quiet her breathing. The darkness was suffocating, but welcome.

  Footsteps approached and she guessed there was a second person joining the first. The tread was heavier, firmer. She had only made it to the edge of the forest and was lying a few yards from the track. She prayed they would assume she’d go further into the forest. She had gambled on that.

  She wanted to see their faces. For the first time in her life, she wished she had a weapon. Something she could use to smash those people, no, they were not people, those monsters into the ground. And she would stand over them screaming her rage into every blow. But it was Michael’s voice in her ear, calming her, urging her preservation. He had never believed in revenge, he’d always felt the avenger lost more in the process. She wondered if he’d changed his mind.

  “No-one in the house. What do you think?”

  The accent was Irish, but she couldn’t pinpoint from where in Ireland. She knew she would recognize the extreme accents like the ones from Cork or Donegal and then she realized, it sounded like the people around her, from the West of Ireland, like her accent.

  “We have about two hours. If she’s here, they won’t leave her for too long. We need to be gone by…” He paused. “2 p.m. at the latest. That’s an hour and a bit.”

  This accent was American. She didn’t know anything about American accents, even from which coast. It wasn’t like Reyna or Catherine’s accents. It was the smoothness of his speech that terrified her, the confidence, even arrogance.

  The American continued, “Search in there. Until 1.45. I’ll be in the house.”

  The crunch of footsteps diminished as he walked away.

  “Search in there. Meet me here. Yessir. Stay nice and dry, why don’t ya?”

  The gr
umbling was low, but she heard the words and the giggle as the second man mimicked the American accent. He wasn’t a good mimic and it came out flat. He was passing the tree under whose sprawling roots she lay and she pushed her soaked body further into the ground. She prayed again, that he wouldn’t look under the roots of her tree and that there were no other caves visible under the trees to give him the idea. He was moving fast, probably scanning the ground level and between the trees. His passage was fitful; he paused often as he crackled through the trees, occasionally grunting probably from a low-lying branch. But he was moving away, in the direction of the lake.

  Priya figured from what the American had said they needed to get out before Reyna and Catherine got back. So the two women were not at risk from him. Which meant if she could just remain unseen for the next hour or so, the men would have no choice but to leave. She thought this time they might kill her. Strange how she didn’t want to die now, considering the long nights over the last few years when she had.

  As she lay there, the cold seeping into her heart, the reasons to live came trickling. Reyna’s face smiling at her as they sat on a timeless rock and watched an undying river flow by. Priya’s futile well-buried dreams of a family, and belonging. But most of all, the surfacing desperate wish to hold her father’s hand and say that she was sorry. To convince him of her regret and shame. To make him believe that she hadn’t meant what she’d screamed at him in her helpless rage beside her breathless mother.

  That he had killed her mother.

  Like his eyes, that died twice in the two seconds that circled the space of a minute. The one second it took to nod at a nurse because he could not speak the words, to permit her to switch off the life of his everyday partner of forty-six years, followed by the 60 seconds of rasping, grasping breaths that withered into silence, followed by the one second in which his only daughter turned away from the silence and screamed his guilt.

  Then the minutes and hours and days and months of seconds in which he and she flailed uselessly lost without their oars, drowning in tears yet too guilty to cry.

  Yes. She wanted to live. If only to see if life could live in their eyes again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The footsteps were running and the noise startled Priya out of the trance into which she had crept. The noise stopped.

  “Priya!”

  The questioning voice was Reyna’s and fear filled it. Priya’s heart jumped at the sound. She heard Catherine’s voice too, calling her name, calmer, but with an edge of anxiety, and Priya realized time had passed and the men had left.

  Priya crawled out of her haven. The rain had dried out and the sun broke through the tops of the trees in bright silver shards that hung in the air and lost their intensity by the time they reached the forest floor. The sweatshirt was damp and heavy with mud and the moss crumbled off as she swiped her jeans.

  “Priya?”

  Reyna’s voice was reaching into panic. Priya moved as fast as she could through the undergrowth and blinked in the sunshine at the bottom of the slope up to the clearing where the women stood. She tried to speak, but her voice failed her. She raised her arms and Reyna saw her and rushed over to the edge. Reyna slid down the short distance, grabbed Priya, and hugged her, tight, close.

  “What happened? When you weren’t in the house, I thought…” Reyna’s voice was shaking.

  Priya raised her head, saw, over Reyna’s shoulder, Catherine sink onto the edge of the slope, and sit there with a look of relief in her eyes.

  Priya stayed in Reyna’s arms. She related what had happened. She felt Reyna’s arms tighten slightly when Priya described the American, at least the impression of him she had gotten from her hiding place.

  Priya said, “They didn’t want to be here when you got back. They’re looking for me. I don’t know if they knew I was here or if they were just searching in case.”

  “Let’s go back into the house.” Catherine’s voice had regained its strength. Reyna looked as if she didn’t trust herself to speak. She took Priya’s hand, but it was Priya who helped her up the slope and into the house.

  ∞

  Priya took a shower and joined them in the living room. Catherine had lit a fire and the flames were dancing, the occasional spark lighting and fading as a fiber of turf burnt bright then burnt out. Reyna was standing looking out of the window; Catherine was sitting on the couch. The cold had eaten its way into Priya and she tried to warm herself by the fireplace, holding her palms out to the heat for a few seconds. When she turned from the fire, Catherine patted the couch beside her. There was a cup of tea steaming on the little table beside the couch.

  Michael handing her a coffee like he had done so many times. The knife from his kitchen sticking out of his chest.

  Priya’s legs buckled and she sank onto the couch.

  “Drink up, get some warmth into you.” Catherine said.

  Reyna turned from the window. She looked startled out of her thoughts and her eyes were lost in worry. She smiled when she saw Priya, then seemed to draw a veil over her eyes, the usual control back in place.

  “The phone is not working. Don’t know if they cut the line or it’s just a temporary glitch. Seems too much of a coincidence though.” Reyna’s voice had also regained its control.

  Priya swallowed a gulp of tea and welcomed the heat that burned her throat and stomach. Her voice was shaky when she spoke.

  “I get the feeling that they are not going to come back while you two are here. The American guy went back to the house instead of looking for me with the other guy. We need to see if anything is missing.”

  Reyna shook her head.

  “I don’t think anything is gone. The papers from the Research Company are all spread out on my bed, but there seems to be the same amount. I can’t be sure of course. Not yet. And your papers and Daniel’s were with us.”

  Priya said, “So, they were looking for the stuff Daniel sent us.”

  “Why not your stuff?”

  “Because they are probably the ones who searched my house and they would have seen the papers on the Controller Mark II, which they left behind. They also left the financials today. That leaves Daniel’s envelope.” She paused. “Actually, the only other things are the Excel sheets from my original PhD.”

  Priya put down the cup of tea and got up.

  She said, “Have you got them? We need to figure out what the hell they are looking for?”

  Catherine asked, “Priya, are you sure you’re okay to do this right now?” Reyna was already at the door and she disappeared into the kitchen, appearing a moment later with Priya’s tightly stuffed briefcase.

  Priya said, “Right now it feels like I’m never going to be okay to do anything again. But I’m going to find out what those bastards think is worth killing Michael for.”

  Reyna said, “And Daniel.”

  Priya sat down on the floor and pulled out the folders with her PhD work. She took out the printouts. One set of Excel sheets had the voltage readings and the other had the battery readings. She had obviously transcribed these figures while she was at the research company. She didn’t remember. She grabbed a pen and starting highlighting every voltage or battery reading that was low.

  Michael’s foot encased in his brown shoe, its laces undone, sticking out from behind the couch.

  Priya caught her breath as the image flashed into her head. She pushed it away and tried to concentrate.

  Three hours passed in a daze of figures. Priya had drawn out a graphical representation of the figures she had questioned before. Reyna had dragged down the box of financials and joined her on the floor. She was studying every sheet of paper, every brochure, every file contained in it and was and was scribbling notes in an A4 notepad.

  They could hear Catherine in the kitchen and she came in every few minutes to check if they had found anything. The radio was on in the kitchen and they had put on the small television in the living room. There were no news programs on the TV, but it was coming u
p to 6 p.m. and Priya knew that most Irish stations showed the news at that time. Catherine came in and sat on the couch.

  The reception was terrible and they had to switch off the sound, but they all gasped when the picture of Priya flashed onto the screen. It was the picture she had taken nine years before when she’d renewed her driving license. She had just met Kathy and the face that laughed out of the square box looked younger than 27 years even with the white lines of interference. That youthful innocence so pronounced that she had often been carded going into the discos whose age of entry, and age for drinking, was 18. She still looked younger than her 35 years though the last two years had reduced the gap in perception from a decade to a couple.

  The footage showed Quay Street, the alleyway leading to Michael’s apartment, the activity at the door, a female garda standing at the door, her hands behind her back, the blue peaked cap pointing straight at the crumbling stone wall across the alley. The yellow tape with blue writing stretched across the entrance to the alley, the white van with the stark blue writing, Garda Technical Bureau. The men in their white cotton spacesuits. There were shots of the clinic; only exterior shots, the clinic lay deserted for the weekend.

  “I wonder what the guys at the clinic are thinking. I wonder if they think I went mad and killed Michael. They thought I was with Daniel, well, some of them did. The gossips. The ones I never told I was gay. Now they’ll know I’m gay and they’ll think that I was fooling around with Daniel for…, God knows what?”

  Reyna looked away from the TV and looked at her.

  Priya said, “I didn’t mean you.”

  Reyna frowned. She said, “I know, though I was as guilty of that.”

  Priya sighed. “Okay.” She paused then asked, “Why are they targeting me? And not you?”

  Reyna said, “They must think that Daniel gave you the information that he actually posted here to the house. He did give you some of the other papers. Who would have known about that?”