Are You Watching Me

by Sinéad Crowley

  It was a stunning day: warmer than usual for early November, the chill of the last week forgotten and the sun so bright that most of the other parents in the park were wearing shades. Claire had forgotten hers and squinted slightly as she allowed her gaze to roam lazily around the playground. These places had certainly changed since she was a child. She remembered one park, in particular, that she used to visit with her cousins on her yearly trip to Dublin: a large expanse of green and concrete with what seemed to her a huge and exotic playground at its centre. A row of swings, a slide even taller than her uncle and a high metal horse on top of which too many cousins used to balance precariously and scream uproariously.

  She also remembered the year the smallest cousin slipped and was dragged to and fro across the gravelled ground, her leg wrapped around the horse’s flank, for what seemed like minutes until her shocked mother was able to get to her side; could recall with perfect clarity the red rash on the little girl’s legs, seconds before the pin pricks of blood poked through, and the black gravel embedded in her knees and hands. Later, there had been the miserable bus journey home and, later still, the smell of Dettol and the consoling treat of chipper chips for dinner, served in front of the TV.

  Claire shook her head, surprised at how close the memory was to the surface. Stretching out her foot, she poked at the springy, multi-coloured safety surface she was now standing on. They weren’t all good, the old days.

  The swing’s momentum carried it back towards her and, as Anna glided through the air, Claire bent down and tickled the baby on her tummy. She couldn’t have been able to feel much under the heavy-quilted snowsuit, but chuckled, anyway, a hearty baby belly-laugh that Claire couldn’t help but return. Another tickle brought forward a high-pitched squeal. Brilliant. Hard to believe such a tiny person could make such a gloriously rich sound.

  Claire straightened up again and gave the swing another push, a little harder this time. It was mad, really; she’d lived minutes from this park for three years and hadn’t stepped inside the playground until this morning. Needs must, she supposed. After yet another argument with Matt, she’d been in a hurry to find somewhere to go.

  Anna had woken several times during the night and, although it had been her ‘turn’ to see to her, neither parent had had anything approaching a decent night’s sleep, and they had both been groggy and grumpy when they’d finally dragged themselves out of bed that morning.

  Aware that she still owed him for her unplanned overtime the previous week, Claire had offered to let Matt go back to bed. Or at least that’s what she had intended to say. But her gruff, ‘Just go back to sleep, will ya,’ hadn’t had the desired effect.

  ‘Are you telling me what to do now?’

  ‘I’m telling you to stay in bed; it’s my turn; I have her.’

  ‘You’re damn right it’s your turn; you’ve hardly seen the child all week.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right, I was off sunbathing while you changed nappies twenty-four seven. You’re such a saint.’

  Well, thought Claire, grimly, as her husband stomped into the bathroom, leaving Anna wailing in her mother’s arms, that escalated quickly. But, she reprimanded herself, she did owe him one. Actually, in the point-scoring competition their marriage seemed to have evolved into, she owed him several. But when he didn’t, as she expected, go back to bed, but instead appeared, minutes later, in running gear, her temper had flared again.

  ‘You’re going running? I thought you were exhausted.’

  She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, but she was tired, and frustrated and annoyed, and Matt was the only person there.

  Her husband was equally irritable. ‘What’s it to you what I do?’

  ‘Just that you can’t be that tired if you want to go running. I’ll remember that, the next time you claim you “slept through” her crying.’

  She pushed the child up further on her hip and rummaged in the dishwasher for a clean bowl.

  ‘So, how long will you be?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he said again, his head bent over as he laced up his runners.

  ‘Well I’m expecting a work call . . .’

  Matt looked up, his eyes narrowed. ‘Are you on today, or not? I mean, do you just want me to take her? Is that it? Jesus, if you’re expecting a work call . . .’ He reached out and made a grab for the little girl whose bottom lip was beginning to tremble again.

  Claire hugged her closer. ‘Don’t be so bloody childish; I’m just wondering when you’ll be back, OK? Just a simple question. Oh, just get out.’

  The slam of the front door had been his only reply.

  At least, she thought, looking around the playground, the weather had stayed fine for his run. Hopefully that would put him in a better mood.

  ‘Are you enjoying that, pet?’

  She reached down and gave the swing another push. Still rattled by the row with Matt, she had only walked to the playground because she was too stressed to stay around the house any longer. Even after she’d arrived, she had assumed her daughter would be too small to use any of the equipment and had looked around, almost embarrassed, as she lifted Anna out of the buggy and settled her awkwardly between the metal safety bars of the baby swing. It was almost as if she was looking for permission, waiting for another mother, an experienced mother (a real mother) to tell her yes, she’s old enough – swing away. In the end, of course, nobody even turned to look at them. Meanwhile, Anna seemed enchanted with this new experience, and took flight.

  She was, Claire realised, well on the way to sitting up on her own now. Where had her newborn gone? Her little girl grinned up at her again, impossibly cute in a furry hat with rabbit ears, which Claire had spent far too much money on and didn’t regret in the slightest. A beam of sunlight struck the baby’s face, causing her to frown suddenly, and, in the expression, Claire could see for the first time the child she would soon become.

  But not yet. Claire gave the swing another gentle push. Anna was still a baby, still her baby. And, despite all the shit with Matt and everything else, at least today she was getting to enjoy every minute of her.

  And, God, she needed that. She raised her head slightly, closed her eyes and turned her face towards the winter sun. It must have been a week or more since she’d properly felt daylight on her skin. A week of leaving the house before daybreak and dashing home again through the drizzle and tension of rush-hour traffic, arriving just in time to give Anna a bath or, at the very least, plant a kiss on her cheek before Matt tucked her into bed. The worst of both worlds. In her pre-baby days, she’d have stayed in the office late every night while working on a case like this, persuading herself it was time well spent, that she was avoiding rush-hour traffic while getting extra work done. Even – and it was only now she was admitting this to herself – even on the days when there was very little to do. She’d enjoyed the reputation she was getting of being the first in and the last to leave.

  Now it was all about getting home and grabbing time, never enough of it, with the baby before she fell asleep, and, usually, working again late into the night while the monitor crackled beside her. Truth be told, she was getting just as much work done now as she had before the baby arrived. But no one could see her doing it. Did that make a difference? She’d find out soon enough, she supposed. Claire had always hated the word juggling, or, more specifically, the magazine articles that seemed to equate working mothers with circus performers, but she was beginning to see what they meant now as she darted from work to home and back again, tasks from both worlds jostling for space in her mind. It was worth it, though, to get the little baby kisses at the end of the evening, and the work done at the same time.

  Tickle, giggle, push.

  Course, the other frustrating fact was that, when it came to the Mannion and Cannon murders, she could have actually spent a couple of days in Lanzarote the previous week and still ended up with the same result: sweet feck all. Eugene Cannon had been dead for more than a week, James Mannion f
or nearly three, and the Gardaí – or, more to the point, Claire herself – were still no closer to finding out what had happened to either of them.

  The interview with Stephen Millar – or Stephen Ford, as he was now known – had been a disaster. Thanks to the CCTV footage and his admission that, yes, he had argued with Eugene Cannon some hours before his body was found, she and Flynn had had enough cause to question him about Cannon’s violent death. But, despite keeping him the full twenty-four hours allotted by law, they hadn’t learned much more. Ford said he had gone to Tír na nÓg to make a donation, having heard ‘that nice lady’ – Liz Cafferky, Claire presumed – speaking about the centre’s work on the radio the week before. That was also the reason he’d been looking at pictures of her on the internet. Claire hadn’t bothered to hide her smile when he came out with that one, but Ford hadn’t reacted, just stared straight ahead, reciting the facts in a monotone.

  He had wanted to give her the money, he said, because she sounded genuine. So when Cannon, or the man he now knew to be Eugene Cannon, had opened the door and told him she wasn’t in, he didn’t want to leave the money with him and, instead, had turned and left, deciding to come back another day. That’s when Cannon had grown angry, Ford said, following him back down the path and insisting he leave the money with him. Ford had felt intimidated, and simply ran away.

  On the surface, at least, the story sounded plausible. Claire felt he was leaving something out but had nothing other than instinct to go on, and the D.P.P. wasn’t a big fan of cases based entirely on intuition. So, they’d released Ford and immediately rearrested him in connection with James Mannion’s death. Then things had turned even stranger.

  When questioned about his former teacher, Stephen Ford had had quite literally nothing to say. Claire had never seen anything like it. Even the so-called ‘Hard Men’ usually cracked in the end – whether through clever questioning or simply out of sheer boredom – they said something, anything, in the hope that it would allow them to leave the station and go home. But for hour after mind-numbing hour, Ford had said nothing at all. He’d just stared past them at the wall.

  Ford didn’t seem, to Claire, to be a stupid man, nor, in fairness, a particularly difficult one. But once the topic of James Mannion was introduced, he shut down completely. If she had to make a guess as to what he was feeling, she would have said it was fear, but she had no idea why he was so terrified.

  Claire had felt the defeat like a dull thud inside her stomach as they’d finally admitted they’d have to let him go. She’d seen her emotions mirrored on Flynn’s face – frustration mixed with rage that they still had nothing – and had muttered about preparing a file for the D.P.P., while unsure if they had enough to do that, even. The whole episode had been a total disaster.

  At least Stephen Ford wasn’t the gloating type. In fact, he hadn’t said anything at all when they’d told him he could go. He’d just stood up, looked at them with the same dead-eyed stare he’d adopted throughout the questioning, and waited patiently for someone to open the door. He’d stopped by the front desk on the way out, then, and asked the sergeant the way to the nearest bus stop. Claire wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t the money for a taxi or, indeed, the phone number of a friend willing to pick him up. There was something lonely about him, something pathetic. Stephen Ford was the type of man you just knew had been bullied in school. He was probably still bullied, daily, in a thousand tiny, mean ways. A pale man with a slight build, he looked like a person who’d never get served at a busy bar and would always have his place in the taxi queue stolen on a rainy day.

  Even his clothes gave the impression that he’d stopped caring years ago – that was, if he’d ever started. A cheap blue shirt, the same type a kid would wear to school, was tucked too tightly into black trousers, worn shiny at the knees. The school-uniform impression continued with his shoes, which were large, laced, lumpy and scuffed, and turned up slightly at the toes. His greying hair was sparse on top, curly tufts springing from a pink scalp, and cut tight at the sides, but worn long and straggling at the back, a clump of greasy ringlets covering his collar. He was the type of man you wouldn’t want to touch; after shaking his hand, you’d want to wash your own.

  But, regardless of how he looked, his ability to stay silent in the face of everything she threw at him showed a strength of character Claire couldn’t help but admire.

  A file is being prepared for the D.P.P. – the sentence that ended every news report when the journalist had nothing else to say. Well, this file would be a bloody thin one. What did they have, really? Confirmation that Stephen Ford had argued with Eugene Cannon on the day he died. Cannon was a crook; it was highly likely there was a list of people who wanted to do him harm. What else? Confirmation that Mannion had taught Miller thirty years ago; sure, half the men in Rathoban could say the same. Confirmation that he’d been looking up pictures of Liz Cafferky on his computer; again, there was a strong chance many of the men in Rathoban could plead guilty to that one, and in other towns around the country as well. And with both of the letters destroyed . . .

  Finally bored of the swing, Anna started to whimper and Claire lifted her out. Pushing the buggy with one hand, she carried her baby daughter towards a bench at the side of the playground. The letters to Liz Cafferky had been signed Stephen. The letters, that was, that she claimed to have received. But then she’d destroyed them, and, with them, any chance of linking them to Ford. At least the first one had been seen by Dean and a number of others at the centre. At this stage, there was no evidence to suggest that the second one existed at all.

  Anna grizzled again and Claire smoothed her hat back from her forehead and nuzzled the soft downy skin of her forehead.

  ‘Are you hungry, lovey?’

  Ah, there was plenty of baby left in her yet, Claire mused, as she propped her against her shoulder and reached down with her other hand to the bag hanging off the back of the buggy. She just wasn’t sure how she was going to . . .

  A shadow fell over her.

  ‘Here – give her to me!’

  ‘Hi.’ Claire looked up but didn’t smile as Matt took the baby and eased himself down on the bench beside her. ‘Good run?’

  ‘Great, thanks.’

  He stretched his long legs out in front of him and gave an exaggerated sigh.

  ‘Bit rusty, you know, yourself. But it was nice to get away.’

  You’re not exactly chained to the kitchen sink, was what she wanted to snap. But the time spent with Anna had lifted her spirits and, given that it looked like her husband was willing to put the row behind them, she decided to do the same.

  ‘Great.’ As she was speaking, she filled the clean bottle from the formula carton and handed it to him. ‘Want to feed her?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Matt grinned down at his daughter, but she was too hungry to respond and tugged at the bottle, whimpering until he was able to get her into a comfortable position and start the feed.

  ‘I thought we might go out for brunch later? After she’s finished?’ He nodded down to where their daughter was now sucking pleasurably at the bottle, its level diminishing before their eyes. ‘She’ll probably conk out after this.’

  ‘Brilliant idea!’

  Claire stretched her own legs out and sighed. Matt was right; after all the fresh air and excitement, Anna would sleep for an hour or more. There was a new café opened right outside the main entrance to the park; they could even grab a paper and—

  Deep inside her pocket, her phone buzzed.

  Anna twitched and gave her mother an accusatory glare as the bottle fell from her mouth. Before Matt could put it back, she reached for it herself and jammed it back in, sucking frantically before settling into a rhythm again.

  ‘Little Madam!’ Smiling broadly, Claire reached into her pocket for her phone. And then stopped laughing. ‘I’m sorry, I have to—’

  ‘Go on.’

  Instinctively, she moved away from her husband and daughter to take
the call, stood up straight, deepened her voice. There were two men, the voice on the other end told her. They were on their way to Collins Street and wanted to speak to Claire, and only to Claire.

  ‘OK,’ she replied and then looked back to the bench, to where her husband and child were looking like the stars of some classy advert on TV. ‘But I have to check something first.’

  As she walked towards them, Matt looked over Anna’s head and narrowed his eyes. ‘No brunch, so?’

  ‘They want me to come in.’ She sat back down on the bench and looked squarely at him. Ready for the row.

  But instead her husband simply shrugged. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m not going to offer twice. And, Claire?’

  She bent down to give the baby a kiss then looked up at him again.

  ‘Good luck with it, OK?’

  She wasn’t quite sure what they were advertising, her tall, broad-shouldered husband and his equally gorgeous and adorable daughter, now sitting straight up on his lap and looking lazily around. But she’d buy it in a heartbeat.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ‘Will you say a few words, so?’

  Noeleen Kavanagh was a small, pink-nosed dormouse in her mid fifties, friendly and eager in black quilted coat and green bobbled hat. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach Liz’s ear.

  ‘They’d really appreciate it.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Liz shrugged, then dug her hands deep into her pockets. Her breath froze in the air in front of her and, behind the haze, she could see that the crowd was growing. There must have been two hundred people there, maybe more, huddled together on the traffic island at the centre of O’Connell Street. Dean would know the exact number, she thought. He was out there somewhere, filming a report for the evening news, picking out the people holding candles and the signs that would look best on TV, asking others, ‘Why are you here?’