I get up from the table, go to the coffee machine, place a paper cup under the spout. Select espresso. When the cup fills, I take it and move out of the café. My dad is recovering from a concussion at home, but it will be days, if not weeks, before I can take Mam home. Every time I visit her, I feel anger build at what Seán did, what he took from us; the sanctuary of our home forever scarred by his violence.
The squeaking polish of the hospital floor clicks under my heels. He’s been moved from intensive care. Stable. That’s the word they’ve used.
I pass the uniform at the door. Give him the espresso.
“Thanks, Chief,” he says.
I nod. Then, taking a deep breath, I open the door.
He’s awake. Frigid eyes looking out from a white face. The nurse orbits him, checking machines, tapping the bag of fluid on an IV stand. I wait by the window. The blind is rolled up and the view looks down on a full car park. Sheets of rain descend from gray heavens. The nurse makes a mark on a clipboard then returns it to a holder on the wall. She nods at me before she leaves and I nod back. The door closes and finally, I turn to him.
He speaks immediately: “I asked my mother once why she couldn’t leave him.” His eyes on the ceiling. “Your dad, she said, he was the monster but sometimes, sometimes he was the hero.”
I take out my notebook. “I need the names of who you worked with.”
He turns his face toward the window and I can see the clench of his jaw, the smooth columns of muscle along his neck.
“I didn’t attack my family, kill my parents. I wish I fucking had, but I don’t regret what happened to them. What happened to me. All that”—he turns his face back to me, smiles—“made me the man I am today.” He lets out a long, slow breath. Winces and the round caps of his shoulders tense against pain.
“You’d just murdered Geraldine Shine when you met with Tanya West and me,” I state.
He gives a little burst of laughter, his eyes dancing in his devil face. Hand braced on his chest. “That was a rush, I tell you. Thought it would be written all over me, for sure.” His expression seems to soften in remembrance. “Had only time to change my clothes. Can you imagine? I could smell her death all over me that evening. And you sitting right there.”
There’s a knock on the door and Baz enters. Clancy on his heels.
“Seán Hennessy,” I begin, “you are charged with four counts of murder. On the nineteenth of August 2012, you attacked Geraldine Shine with a knife with the intent to kill. The injuries she sustained resulted in the loss of her life. Somewhere between the dates of the fourteenth of August and the seventeenth of August, you abducted and strangled Alan Shine until he was dead. You are further charged with denying the victim the right to burial. On the fifteenth of August, you assaulted and abducted Conor Sheridan. You are charged with being complicit in his murder. You are further charged with denying the victim the right to burial.” I swallow. “You are charged with the attempted murder of Sharon Sheehan and the assault of Martin Sheehan on the twenty-seventh of August. Do you have anything to say?”
He takes his time. Looks at each of us individually, his eyes sparking with satisfaction. “You made me.”
* * *
—
I SIT IN THE DARK of my office, my eyes on the CCTV footage on my computer screen. I replay the film again. Watch Seán Hennessy appear on the camera outside Tony’s chip shop. He’s wearing his baseball cap. Navy blue, silver buckle at the back and his windbreaker is done up, collar so high around his throat it reaches his ears. His head is down, his face concealed from the camera. He deposits the outer paper wrapping from a bag of chips in a trash bin, then steps off the pavement, walks across the street toward a bench on the promenade.
I rewind the last few seconds, his long limbs, perhaps a little too thin, walk stiffly backward until I let the film play again. Now I see it, the right foot. A little quirk in his step. A bob at the knee. And I know that walk. I watched it on the footage taken of the street leading to the Shine house. I replay it again, watch the moment we made the mistake, where we failed to see that although Seán entered the shop for takeaway that evening, he was not the figure who made his way to a bench on the promenade. They’d switched. Robbie McDonagh, wearing a cap and clothing similar to Seán. Robbie was paid for this little stunt. Probably just enough to buy a few grams of weed. But it cost us another two victims. Not that he’ll admit to any of it. A bloke can buy chips, can’t he, he’d said, a dirty little grin pinching the corner of his mouth.
Baz steps into my office and stops. He reaches for the light, flicks it on. “Mood-lighting?” He closes the door then places a coffee on the desk.
I take it up, smile my thanks.
“Cara’s fingerprints were the unknown in the container,” he says.
I nod.
“You okay?”
“Yes. You?”
He pulls back a chair, flops down into it, rubs his face. “I don’t fucking know.”
Jimmy Lynch finally spilled when he was told of Cara’s arrest. He didn’t see manipulation. He saw love. I could’ve laughed, only I’d missed it. Missed the signs of Cara’s involvement. He told us of their eight-month-long affair. How he’d met her online, that Conor’s phantom girlfriend had really been his. He told us of how a couple of months into the relationship she told him who she really was, how her brother had been wronged. When he’d mentioned Conor’s name, she knew it, straight off. He told us she’d seemed obsessed with him. At first, he’d thought it would blow over but then she wanted Conor to pay. He said how she was going to get a gun. She convinced him to help her brother enact his revenge. If he loved her, he would. Jimmy was all she had.
Lynch was the muscle. The man with a van. He didn’t kill but he watched when Conor Sheridan was dragged blindfolded into that container. He watched as Conor was forced to his knees. And he watched Cara shoot Conor through the chest. And it made sense to me. Cara had the stomach for revenge, but not for the head shot. The last time Lynch had visited the container had been the same night Baz and I discovered it. Our assailant unmasked at least.
Hennessy had left the journal in the freezer. He knew we’d find it. Hoped it would bring me close to him. Revenge is all the sweeter with an audience.
My report for the commissioner is thesis length. I bundle the interview summaries to one side and then shuffle through the crime scene photos. I stop at a picture of the slipway. It’s dark but morning light is stealing out over the sky. Conor Sheridan’s body a dark slump against the seawall.
I imagine the boat that carried him drawing close to the slipway. The moon, full that night, rolls on the black sea. The strand is empty. The promenade is clear of people. I picture Jimmy turning off the engine, throwing a rope around the wet wooden leg of the slipway. Then he eases into the water. It’s only to his knees and he knows they won’t have long before the water pulls away and the boat is left stranded.
He reaches back into the boat. Pushes his hands beneath the man’s shoulders. It’s pointless but he holds his breath anyway. The man stinks. He tries not to think about what he’s doing. He focuses on Cara, her small face, her eyes full of need for him. No one has ever needed him before. He heaves the upper body against his chest. The boat rocks as Seán Hennessy stands. He lifts the legs, holds one on either side of his waist.
“Don’t drop him,” he says to Jimmy. His voice is low but it slices across Jimmy’s nerves. It takes a lot to frighten Jimmy Lynch but there’s something about his girlfriend’s brother that could make a grown man piss down his own leg.
“I won’t,” he replies.
They maneuver the corpse toward the beach. Between the breath-holding and the weight, Jimmy is sweating and gasping by the time they set Conor Sheridan down. Jimmy looks at his flatmate. He’s pleased he’d gotten him the new suit. A dead man should have a suit.
“Leave,” Seán says.
&
nbsp; “You’re just gonna dump him here?”
“Leave.”
Jimmy doesn’t need to be told a third time. He’d walk to the ends of the earth for Cara but he wasn’t going to challenge this fucker. There was a look to his eyes. Jimmy couldn’t quite describe it, but he’d seen the same look on some of the more creative criminals inside. A living deadness.
He turns, wades back out to the boat, unhooks the rope from the wooden pier, and pushes away. He sniffs the sleeve of his sweater. The dead man’s stink is stuck to him. He’d have to burn his clothes. Cara had been impressed with him when he’d told her that Conor Sheridan was his flatmate. For a short while, he’d suspected that she’d singled him out for that reason. But in the end, he thought, it didn’t matter. Besides, she’d told him often enough. Apart from her brother, Jimmy was the only other man she’d ever trusted. And that was something to Jimmy. Women rarely fell for him, that’s for sure.
Baz breaks through my thoughts. He’s moved to the window and is looking pityingly at the well-clipped bonsai on the sill. He picks up a shorn branch. “You’ve fair gone after it here.”
I don’t say anything but I can see he’s struggling. He almost killed a man. But I don’t know which part of that sentence haunts him more, the killed or the almost.
“I wish I’d done it,” he says suddenly, as if reading my mind. “Killed him.”
I think of my hands round the gun. How ready I was to fire. To extinguish Seán Hennessy’s life. I think of my dad that day in my parents’ bedroom, how I almost walked away, let him die. We are none of us far from the killer inside us.
I look at Baz. “No, you don’t.”
He pushes his hands back on his hips, nods, a strained expression on his face. “It feels wrong, you know. Like the stain of his crimes can’t ever be washed out. Maybe if he was gone, he’d take all of it with him.”
I slide the photos back into the folder. They’re copies. Along with a summary. “You know that’s not how it works.”
Seán Hennessy’s documentary footage is stored on a USB. I take up my review on the old Hennessy case, slide both items into an evidence bag. Then add them to the case folder. I put the folder into an envelope, peel away the adhesive. Seal it closed then check the address. Donna Hegarty, Commissioner. I push the envelope to the edge of the desk.
Baz turns away from the window. “Do you think he had a point? That the system made him?”
I don’t get a chance to answer. A timid knock sounds at the door and Helen steps inside. “Sorry to disturb you,” she whispers. “Only, the assistant commissioner is waiting outside.”
I throw Baz an apologetic look and he nods. I get up, follow Helen out of the room to where Jack Clancy is standing next to her desk. He holds a large bouquet of lavender. The sight of the flowers is so incongruous in Clancy’s hand that despite how I’m feeling, I could laugh.
He throws a miserable glance down at them when I appear. “Helen said they mean serenity, peace, or something. She thought we could take them there.”
“That sounds . . . very Helen,” I reply, and he gives me a pained grin.
* * *
—
THE HENNESSY HOUSE no longer exists. The site where it once stood holds only an outline of concrete in memory. I sit in the car, peer out the window. The hedgerow has grown, green and high. It looks impenetrable, like something from the fable of Sleeping Beauty, shielding a home that no longer exists. A little way down the street, the other houses are all turned away as if in the aftermath of tragedy, like bricks and mortar could shift perspective with the sheer horror of what they’ve witnessed. Behind me, a new overpass trembles overhead, ensuring that this plot won’t become home to another family. There’s no second chance here.
Clancy sits in the driver’s seat next to me, the bouquet resting on his knee. “Ye all right?”
I open the door. “Come on.”
I get out of the car, walk toward the hedge, find a gate at the side. Someone has trimmed back the shrubbery so the entrance is clear. I lift the latch, push the gate open, and we step into the Hennessys’ yard. The lawn has been cut recently, and the foundations of the house are bare apart from a few determined thistles growing up between cracks in the concrete.
We move toward a large sycamore in what would have been the back garden, neither of us wanting to traverse the area where the home once stood. We stand beneath the tree in silence and survey the site, the mean sky looking down, a soft drizzle blowing in our faces.
The patio still skirts the house and gives the area a sense of geography. From my position, I can imagine easily where the back door stood, wide and open. The kitchen window, Bríd Hennessy’s face, white and worried, looking out at her family in the garden. To the right, the crooked shed where John once locked the dog. To the left, the corner where Seán drowned four pups in a bucket.
Clancy holds up the flowers. “For Bríd,” he says, and I nod.
He locates the patch of lawn where she was found. Bends with a huff and lays them down.
He straightens with a quick brush of his palms, relieved. “We should go,” he says.
I look back at the sycamore. And picture Bríd in that ridiculous green coat, her hands resting on Cara’s tiny shoulders. Cara in her Communion dress, all lace and tulle, a white rosary dangling from her fingers, a prayer book suspended at her elbow by a white ribbon. Cara Hennessy grew into her role as killer but I can’t quite see her as bad. Seán Hennessy’s grip was so tight on her broken heart, she ceased existing long ago.
Taking a deep breath, I start back across the garden. “Yeah,” I say to Clancy as I pass, “let’s get out of here.”
Sitting in the passenger seat, I wait for Clancy to start the car, my eyes still lingering on the thick hedgerow, seventeen years of growth blocking out the Hennessy home. Time consuming everything but grief.
“We didn’t create Seán Hennessy,” I say. More to myself than to Clancy. “He was made in the home. He was made right here.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THERE ARE A FEW PEOPLE I’d like to thank for their support and help during the writing of The Killer in Me.
At riverrun, I’d like to thank my incredible editor, Richard Arcus, for his detailed reading, enthusiasm, and brilliant editorial advice. My heartfelt gratitude to all the team at riverrun, to my copy editor, the design team, and everyone who has helped get this novel “out there” and into the hands of readers.
Thank you to all the publishing team at Dutton, in particular my wonderful editor, Stephanie Kelly, whose patience and editorial excellence have been invaluable.
Huge thanks to my fantastic agent, Susan Armstrong, and to all the rights team at C&W Agency, and to Zoe Sandler at ICM. Special thanks to my sister, Ann Kiernan, to whom this book is dedicated, for her friendship and for making me laugh (at myself). Thank you to all the friends and writing groups, especially the LadyKillers, who continue to support, read, and shout about my books.
For research, thank you to those members of the Thames Valley Police and An Garda Síochána who patiently answered my queries on police procedure, and to solicitor Brian P. Doyle for talking me through some of the more technical legal subjects in this novel; any errors or bending of reality are my own.
Finally, thank you to Matthew for his encouragement, belief, and love—and to my daughter, Grace, who inspires me to do better every day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivia Kiernan grew up in the Irish countryside, a background that left her with a great appreciation of storytelling. Being almost sensible, she shelved aspirations of becoming a writer and embarked on a career in science, spending six years in university studying anatomy and physiology before receiving a BSc in Chiropractic in 2003. She worked in this vein for more than a decade, always writing in the evenings after work and completing an MA in Creative Writing through part-time study in 2012.
In 2015, she began writing her debut novel, Too Close to Breathe, the first in a crime thriller series featuring Detective Frankie Sheehan, which published in 2017. The Killer in Me is her second novel.
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The Killer in Me Page 29