The Killer in Me

by Olivia Kiernan

  Baz directs Cara to the car, and I wait for him to disappear down the stairwell and then phone Tanya. There’s no answer. Heat gathers around my neck and I feel panic beating against my temples. With shaking fingers I call Helen and ask her to patch me through to the uniforms that were sent out to Tanya’s house. When the officer connects, he tells me they’re at the property and all is safe and secure. I can hear Tanya in the background, her voice high with anger at being woken at an ungodly hour.

  Then, “Give me the phone,” I hear her demand, and the officer’s voice grows distant.

  “What’s this about, Frankie? They won’t tell us anything here.” Her voice is urgent down the line.

  “Our suspect, the killer, he’s on the run and we have reason to believe that you are a possible target.”

  She clicks her tongue in annoyance. “Give up the police speak. Who?”

  “We thought first Cara Hennessy but now”—I take a shaky breath—“now it’s looking like Seán.”

  She’s silent, then, “And you think he could come here?”

  “We don’t know. We don’t know where he is; all we know is he’s not finished and he’s dangerous.”

  “Okay.” She sounds stunned or stung, I’m not sure which.

  “I’ve got to go. Please stay where you are until we apprehend him.”

  “Yes,” she murmurs.

  I hang up, run down the stairs. CSI is pulling up. Keith climbs out of the front of the van. “Third floor, flat six,” I say. He nods and begins setting up.

  I go to my car, where I can just make out the crown of Cara Hennessy’s head through the back window. I get into the driver’s seat, clip on the belt.

  “Back to process her?”

  “Yes.” I turn the car around, head back down Strand Road, Dublin city in the distance. The traffic now heavier, commuters, tourist buses, and lorries trundling toward the motorways and city. “Tanya’s safe,” I say to Baz.

  “As are Clancy and Rona, he’s just texted.” He holds up his phone. “And I’ve put in an alert for Seán Hennessy’s whereabouts.”

  My hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Who else? Who else are we missing?”

  “Could he have just taken off?” Baz asks.

  This wins a sound from Cara, a sudden hissing snort. I study her face in the rearview. She’s staring out the window, watching the gray, flat sea pass beyond the seawall.

  “Do you know?” I direct the question to her reflection in the mirror but she doesn’t turn. Her chin juts in a display of stubbornness. I drive slowly; something tells me that if Cara is going to talk it’s here where the walls of the Bureau aren’t tight around her and the question of her freedom is not so definite.

  “Is it someone in law enforcement? Is that the justice he wants? Was it Tanya? Is that it?”

  I can see the small muscles in her neck tighten and relax as she swallows down a response.

  “Who is Justice, Cara?” She doesn’t answer. A cool smile growing on her lips. The blank sea passes to my left. Ahead, St. Catherine’s is tucked away behind the iron railings, bathed in the frigid dawn light. The church where the Shines were found, where Cara once bounced a dry stick on a dry day. Where Bríd Hennessy first approached my mum for help.

  I slow to a stop at the pedestrian crossing, let a woman and child cross. In the middle of the road the child bends, scoops up some precious find but the woman shakes her finger, her face glowering with a reprimand. The child throws her treasure down, glares at it for a moment, then strikes out with a small foot, against the woman, in retaliation.

  And suddenly, Cara’s voice comes from the back, chilled and steady. “You’re looking at justice with the eyes of the law; you should look at it through the eyes of the wronged.”

  I drive on. She’s right. From Cara and Seán’s perspective, they’re not interested in the justice that I serve. They are interested in the opposite.

  “Revenge,” I whisper.

  Then Cara, not quite able to contain her gloat, continues through taut lips. I watch her tiny teeth flash as she speaks. “She could’ve stopped it all if she’d taken the time to help my mum. She said she’d help. We waited and all we got was a stinking pamphlet. A pamphlet that my da found. Your ma turned her back, like everyone else, decided it wasn’t her problem. Wiped her hands clean of our dirt.”

  A terrific fear drops through me and my hands tighten on the steering wheel. I look to Baz; he already has the radio in his band.

  “Dispatch,” a voice says.

  “Armed unit to 43 Conquer Hill. Immediately,” he orders.

  Swallowing, I turn the car around, the hollow ring of dread in my ears. I reach for the lights. The dash and rear window bubble up in neon blues. The siren, sound unfolding, spiraling down. Cars and vans choke up the route, and I turn up a side road, navigate my way across the back streets of Clontarf, sirens raging.

  CHAPTER 25

  I PULL TO A STOP on my parents’ street and push out of the car. The street is still full with parked cars, curtains drawn on all the houses. The wind is damp and cold. It blows over my face, snakes round my neck, where it feels like a hand is gripping my throat. Looking at the house, at first it appears as if nothing is amiss and I have a stupid thought that maybe Cara has got her brother wrong. But then I see that the door is open, just a fraction, an inch or two. It creaks inwards then back again, sucked to and fro by the wind.

  I must move quickly because I’m at the gate. Baz is somewhere close, behind me, beside me, I’m not wholly aware but I know he’s here. The gate opens, groans beneath my palm. Then, fear stiffening my movements, I walk up the short path, put a hand on the shining varnished wood of the front door, hear the familiar sigh of the hinges, the drag of the doormat. I step into the hallway and the soft scent of the polish my mam uses drifts up around me but beneath the warm familiarity of the house there’s an unsettling silence. No sound of a kettle bubbling from the kitchen, no clink of cutlery, no murmur of the television from the living room or the crackle of a newspaper as Dad turns the pages.

  I sense Baz move in behind me, his presence swallowing up the light. I’m halfway down the hall when I feel the breeze. It threads up through the narrow corridor of family photos and lifts the hair from my forehead. I walk into the kitchen. The table is clear, no breakfast utensils out yet but the window is wide open. The blind, torn from its runners, is hanging partway down the pane. The stiff material puffs and flattens in the breeze. The back door is wide open. Finally, I look back at Baz; his eyes are on the back door. He moves to the other side of the room, prepares his firearm. Hands shaking, I do the same, then taking a big lungful of air, I step out into the garden.

  The breath leaves me, and for a moment I feel my legs want to fold, to drop me into nothingness. I take in a long breath and lock my elbows, keep my gun high and aimed at our target. Seán is sitting on the swing. One hand curled round the chain, the other bloody and resting in his lap, a knife gripped casually in his fingers. He’s breathing fast and even from the short distance between us I can see the wildness in his eyes. The excitement at what he’s just done.

  At his feet, my mum. I’m afraid to look but already I can feel the cry ripping up my throat. Tears blur my vision. My dad lies some way off to the left. I allow myself a quick glance at him. I can’t see any blood, and I’m not sure if I imagine the rise and fall of his chest. Baz moves slowly toward him, and Seán turns his head to watch.

  “Don’t move.” I hear the growling order come from between my teeth and it surprises me.

  Baz squats down, his hand going to my dad’s neck, searching for a pulse. After a moment, he glances over at me and nods.

  I take a tremulous breath and look properly at Mam. She’s in her nightdress, her slippers still warming her feet. She lies partly on her front as if Seán has just dropped her by accident. Her face is relaxed, her mouth slightly open. I cou
ld convince myself she was okay if it weren’t for the bright red staining her front. Pain explodes inside me, sends spikes of agony through my being, and the gun shakes in my outstretched hands. I can feel my mouth moving, opening, closing, dragging in air, my pulse thrumming in my ears. I have the sense that if I blink hard enough, look fast enough to the side, to another place, all of this will disappear, I’d sidestep it or rewind time and none of this would be happening.

  Then he moves and reality snaps around me. He lets go of the swing and draws the bloody knife higher onto his lap. I point the gun. The trigger hot beneath my finger. He looks right at me, and I see that he knows what I’m about to do. Knows that I mean to kill him. Acceptance is written over his face. I fix the gun more firmly in my hand. Cup my other hand beneath to steady the shaking.

  I hear the click of Baz’s gun, the safety released, and then the warning in his voice, telling me to stand down. “Frankie.”

  But all I can see are Seán’s eyes, intense and victorious, at the end of the chamber. And all I want to do is tear him down. Throw away gun and knife, go at him, fingernails and clawing hands until he is crying out in agony, until he can feel something of what I’m feeling. Then she moves, my mum, a little heave of her back followed by a weak, choking cough. And relief splinters through my insides, a huge breath of it rushing in so quickly it could split me open. Seán’s eyes go to her then back to mine in a second. Confusion and anger on his face. He hadn’t meant to leave her alive. His eyes narrow, darken on her prone form.

  “Don’t move!” I shout.

  But even as I scream, he’s tightening his grip on the knife, moving over her. His arm is a blur as it descends but it never reaches its target.

  The sound of the shot cracks against my ear, and Seán’s body gives a sudden lurch as if he’d been punched in the throat by some invisible force. His face registers a brief moment of surprise and the knife slips free of his sticky grasp. He tries to reach for the swing but his hands flutter blindly in front of him and he slumps down onto the lawn.

  I pull back my weapon. Unsure about what’s just happened. I look to Baz. He’s still in a firing stance, the gun trained at Seán as if he was fighting some battle not to shoot again.

  I run to Mam, crouch at her head; my fingers looking for the pulse along her neck, my ear low to catch her breath. I find it, a quick flicker of life just above her collarbone, and I grip her hand in relief. Tell her to hold on, that I’m here. Baz is kneeling at my dad’s side, phone to his ear, already calling in paramedics. They arrive swiftly, swarm in through the house, lay down stretchers and equipment over the lawn. They take away both my parents, shouting instructions as they go, and I follow them back into the house but at the door, I pause, look back. Baz is standing watchful to the side of the garden. Seán laid out in the middle of the lawn, his limbs spread and unmoving. Two medics are working a tube down his throat, working to save his life.

  CHAPTER 26

  THEY PLAY CLIPS from the documentary between the news segments.

  “Did I feel sad that my dad was gone?” Seán Hennessy asks. “No. I didn’t. The only emotion I felt was anger. Anger at what had happened to me. Anger that he’d gotten away with it. He’d escaped. He succeeded in screwing me over. Ma, she planned to leave him. I saw her try but she couldn’t quite do it. Even for us. That made me angry too.

  “Inside, I learned all I could about the little cogs of psychology that left us imprisoned in a childhood of terror. I learned that I should have felt sorry for my ma. I learned about the terror that reigned over our lives, infused by the mundaneness of domesticity, having breakfast together while nursing bruises. Ironing school uniforms, polishing shoes among the mayhem. All the small events that told us that we were normal. But we weren’t.

  “That is how it happens. And another hour, another day slips by and into that web you go, deeper until you wake one day and realize you don’t have what it takes to extricate yourself. The hurdles have risen when you weren’t looking and now you can’t get over them. The only way out for my parents was death. Isn’t that the way out for us all.”

  The hospital café is quiet. Relatives asking to be distracted from their individual crises. Eyes trained on the TV in the corner of the room. And Hennessy is a good distraction. Completely absorbing. They are looking for the signs of a killer and finally they’re visible. He’s visible. Occasionally, a doctor, a cleaner steps away from their work to eat, chew through a stale sandwich.

  In the end we discovered Cara Hennessy’s isolation in Athlone was not as isolated as it should have been. The search of her house turned up a suitcase filled with letters, the envelopes showing the sender’s address as Bríd Hennessy’s sister, Cara’s aunt, Irene Duffy.

  Cara Hennessy has refused to speak since her arrest but her aunt gave us the background we needed. Irene is a shy woman. From the moment she opened her front door to us, she half-hid behind it, then after inviting Clancy and me in, she retreated back into her home as if she were the one who didn’t belong there. She lives alone and when she spoke her face took on a startled expression as if unused to the sound of her own voice. I liked her. Sometimes you get a sense of the goodness in people and to me, it was clear Irene Duffy’s involvement in this case was down to misguided good intention.

  “I’ve let her down,” she said. Quiet. Referring to Bríd. “I should have pushed more, insisted that Cara stayed with me but social services, the guards they thought I wouldn’t handle it so well. They did tests.” She touched the side of her head then looked to the floor, hair all thick fuzz, still dark despite her age. Her mouth had puckered a bit, and she rolled her lips one over the other before she spoke again. “But I couldn’t go without trying to reach out to Cara. To let her know that her family was still here. I know Bríd wouldn’t have wanted her to be alone. She was the baby. I gave her the locket and asked her to write to me. That it would be a secret.”

  It was seven years before Cara wrote that first letter. And she had one request for her aunt. To contact her brother. She wanted to know why he’d killed their parents.

  But Irene had never believed her nephew killed his parents. “John.” She had pressed her lips then, as if she’d just uttered a swear word, her eyes taking on a brittle hardness. “I knew it’d been him. Poor Seán.” She looked up at me then, testing my reaction. “He must have been very frightened. He was just a child really.”

  She hadn’t visited Seán though, which said something behind all her regret. Perhaps it was her natural shyness that kept her away, perhaps guilt at not helping her sister sooner, or maybe she’d sensed that badness, saw it had been cracked open and was already leaking into the future.

  Then came the complex exchange of mail. Seán sending his letters to Irene, who would then send them to Cara, ensuring their correspondence went unnoticed by authorities. Unchecked. Until it was too late.

  “I thought I was doing something for Bríd; she would’ve wanted them to know one another.”

  Shortly before Seán’s release, Irene had written to Cara, suggesting they should all meet up. But no reply came. After a month, she wrote again and was met with more silence. She could’ve visited her, she supposed, but she knew her niece wouldn’t have welcomed an intrusion, so she didn’t.

  Clancy and I gathered up all the correspondence between Seán and Cara and then the texts and emails that had continued between the siblings after Seán’s release. Finally I could hear Seán Hennessy’s true voice. Could see the killer in the man, clear as morning dew. Seven years of preparation and careful manipulation.

  I read through the correspondence, saw the new narrative that he drip-fed patiently into a vulnerable ear. How wronged they were. How alone. They owed it to themselves to act, to do something grand that would finally allow their story and the many like theirs to be heard. A slow coercion of his sister until she saw their past, saw their future as he did. Saw that someone needed to pay. Eventually,
Cara began to offer up ideas on how they could take revenge. Her courtship of Jimmy Lynch. Her excitement at the progression of their relationship. He’ll do it, she wrote. He’ll do anything for me. Then the letters grew longer. More hatred of the system, of those responsible. As Baz said, seventeen years is enough time to cultivate hatred. They took their time stalking potential victims. It was at a pub that Seán heard about the Shines, McDonagh mouthing off about his affair with a battered wife.

  Geraldine Shine, an innocent who did nothing to deserve her end, only that the abusive marriage she found herself in had awakened some slumbering anger Seán had at his mother. The blouse returned to the house may be one of those things that will remain elusive to us, the reason never fully accessible. But Baz’s comments on a deeper psychological need ring true. Maybe it was some odd attempt at restoring his mother’s dignity. Or maybe, there was some part of Seán and Cara that wanted to make a point about her partial nakedness, wanted to show how their mother’s clothes were never straightened, that Seán was swept away or wasn’t allowed near her to cover her up, not before all those medics and forensic examiners had photographed and pawed at her body. Something they both know she would have hated.

  Alan Shine, the church worker, wife beater, was everything that Seán despised about his own father, and Conor Sheridan had never left Seán’s sights, his anger further fanned when Conor wrote to him suggesting that they should meet.