He held his phone out and Claire watched as the familiar room swam into focus. Marvelling for a moment at how technology was changing her job, she kicked herself for letting Flynn come up with the idea first. But then a small photograph came into focus and she forgot about everything else.
‘I’ve seen him before,’ said Flynn quietly. ‘At Tír na nÓg.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Perception is everything. Was that a well-known phrase, Liz wondered? Or just something she had made up? The words danced in her skull and she dwelled on them for a moment, happy to focus on something that wasn’t in the room. Perception is everything. It was true, anyway. A place of security could become a dungeon; a kitchen chair, a cage.
She shifted on the chair, testing the strength of the belt, feeling it bite into her wrists. Felim had taken it from Stephen’s trousers, telling his son, with no small amount of pride, why he had done so.
‘Makes sense, you see, to use something of yours. So, when they find her, it’ll look like you had it all planned out.’
His voice was the same, that was the weird thing. Liz could still hear the softness in it, the low midlands burr. The reasonable tone. It was a gentle voice, a voice that had once soothed her.
The hand that had opened a packet of crisps to help her through her hangover, was now holding a knife to her throat.
Across the room, Stephen moaned softly. It hadn’t taken much for his father to persuade him to hand over the belt. Just the sight of the knife, and the promise that he would kill Liz if he didn’t do what was asked. So Stephen had looped his belt around her wrists, fastened them to the back of the chair, and left plenty of what his father termed ‘good, decent fingerprints’. Then he’d crept back across the room again. Because his father had told him to.
They were in the office. It was the only room in Tír na nÓg without a window, Felim explained, his head cocked to one side. He was taking all of this very seriously, he told them, as he turned off Liz’s phone and tossed it in a corner. Hadn’t come this far just to fall at the last hurdle.
‘That’s not my way, now, is it, son?’
‘No, Dad.’
A terrified squeak. A boy’s voice, coming from a man’s body. It was obvious the sound irritated Felim. But for Stephen not to answer would have irritated him too and Liz could see the strain of the dilemma in the younger man’s eyes. That’s what it must have been like for him, she realised, growing up as Felim’s son – knowing that every decision made would be the wrong one, every road taken would lead to pain.
And Felim O’Hagan – or Lar Millar, or whatever the hell he wanted to call himself – was a man who knew how to inflict pain. As he bent over his son, looping a rope around his neck, Liz could see muscles rippling under the thin material of his shirt. He was taller than Stephen, broader too, she realised. He’d kept himself in shape. From the back, he could have been forty years old. She had never noticed how fit he was before.
They all look the same to me.
Tom had told her off, the day she’d said it. ‘They’re all individuals,’ he’d told her. ‘Don’t patronise them; don’t make that mistake.’ Christ, how right he’d been.
Stephen gave a low, terrified moan. Giving him a rough shove in the small of his back, Felim forced him to stand on a chair and pushed the other end of the rope through the gap at the top of the badly constructed partition wall, hooking it around a nail that had been left there by the negligent builder. It was perfect for what he needed, Liz realised. He must have been planning this for quite some time.
Noose in place, Felim stepped back to admire his handiwork. Stephen, who was several inches shorter than his father, had to keep himself balanced on his toes to stop the rope from growing taut. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed frantically, the rope shifting slightly and then pressing against it. A cough, and he could breathe again. For the moment.
Liz closed her eyes. Felim had tied an old tea towel around her mouth as a gag. The taste of soap scum and old-man hands would once have made her nauseous, but she was far beyond that now. Instead, she sucked at it, swallowing the saliva that collected on the fibres, working at the cloth to try and get a rhythm going and move the water down her throat, keeping the passage clear. Suck, swallow. Breathe.
Her nose prickled and she thought, semi-hysterically, about all the times she had considered hoovering this room and decided not to. Well, that was a lesson learned. Dust lay on every surface, on the files in the corner, the discarded coffee mug on the table, the ancient computer whirring gently on the desk nearby. Her nostrils were beginning to swell. She sniffed, violently. Please, Jesus, don’t let me die of a stuffy nose. Please, Jesus, don’t let me die.
Felim’s eyes opened wide at the sound of the sniff and he smiled at her.
‘It doesn’t actually matter if you choke to death. It’ll just be a change of plan, that’s all. I don’t mind how you die, actually, as long as it all makes sense to whoever finds you. Tom, I suppose. Poor Tom. He’s had an awful few weeks of it.’
You prick.
She threw her weight forward in the chair, her breastbone colliding with the desk in front of her. The momentum caused the mouse to shift a fraction and the computer screen, knocked off sleep mode, glowed green. Turning his head, Felim darted across the room and pushed her backwards. He was wearing gloves, she noticed, plastic gloves, and, seeing her look at them, he gave her a thin smile.
‘I left the kitchen window open last night, none of ye noticed. Got in that way this afternoon and I’ll leave the same way. No CCTV out there! I’ve thought of everything. That’s why I’m not killing ye straight away, by the way. I want there to be some evidence of a struggle; what you’re doing there now, that jigging around, sure, that’s perfect. When they find you, it’ll be obvious what happened. Poor Stephen Millar, the weirdo, the abused child, flipped at last and killed the girl he was obsessed with. And then killed himself. And when the cops figure out the link between him and dear departed James Mannion – well, it’ll be easy to believe that Stephen killed him too. I’m sorry you had to become so closely involved, my dear, but once you told the police about those letters, well, you involved yourself, really, didn’t you? They know Stephen, here, was trying to contact you. And I don’t want them digging any deeper into my boy’s life, so it’s best for them to think that this was what he had in mind all along.’
He stepped into the centre of the room so they could both see his face.
‘But I don’t think Stephen would do it straight away, do you? No, I reckon poor lost Stephen Millar would take his time about it. He’d talk to you first, Elizabeth. Try to tell you things. Make you feel sorry for him, instead of despising him like the rest of us. You see, I know my son, Elizabeth. I knew if I called him today and told him I was sorry, and that I wanted to meet him, to make it up to him, that I’d listened to James and –’ his voice rose in a whine – ‘that I’d seen the error of my ways, I knew he’d turn up, and here he is. And here we all are.’
No.
Unable to think of anything else to do, Liz threw herself forward again. But there was less momentum this time and the belt kept her anchored, chafing against her skin.
Felim grinned.
‘Keep at it, love. That’s the type of action we’re looking for. Isn’t that right, son?’
He turned his back on her and walked towards Stephen, whose legs were starting to tremble. Felim moved closer until his head was level with his son’s chest.
‘You really are a pathetic piece of shit, aren’t you? I’m embarrassed you are my son. I always was. You used to think that was the drink talking, didn’t you? Well, I’ve been sober twenty years and you’re still a waste of space.’
Stephen swallowed and, when he spoke, Liz had to strain to hear him.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? It was you I saw in the hall here, behind that poor man who died, Eugene Cannon. I saw you the day I called looking for her. For Elizabeth.’
Felim nodded. ‘Indeed i
t was. I thought the game was up when you spotted me. Any normal man would have confronted me, asked me what the hell I was doing there, miles from where I was supposed to be. But you didn’t even have the guts to do that, did you? Instead, you ran away and told that Cork clown that you’d seen your father in the hall, and that he was a dangerous man, and that he was to tell your darling Elizabeth to keep away from me. Fool. What did you expect? Sure, Cannon came straight back inside and told me what you’d said. I said you were a madman, of course, that I’d never heard of you and that I hadn’t a clue what you were talking about. But, do you know what, Stephen? Afterwards, I got thinking. What if Eugene Cannon wasn’t as thick as he looked? What if, after you were found dead – and I knew already that you were going to be found dead, Stephen – what if he remembered that day and told the guards about it? No, it wasn’t worth the risk. So he had to die too. All your fault.’
A single tear ran down the younger man’s face and Liz looked away, unable to bear his terror. Her eyes landed on a euro-shop painting on the wall – a flowery blob, half falling out of a rust-coloured vase – and she wondered if it was going to be the last thing she ever saw.
But the thought disrupted her rhythm and, as she felt herself grow dizzy, she forced herself to concentrate again. Suck, swallow, breathe. In through the nose, and out, and in. She tried not to think of her nostrils as two balloons, filling up and joining together. She thought instead of a menthol cigarette she had tried once and the way the cold smoke had sliced through her windpipe, down into her lungs. Thought of pine forests. Thought of jumping into the sea. She’d go for a swim in the sea when she got out of here. When she got out of here. When she got out of here.
Felim had left his son’s side now and was standing in the middle of the room again. He held himself poker straight, careful not to touch the desk or computer.
‘I didn’t set out to kill James, you know. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. But you forced me to.’
‘I didn’t . . .’
Please don’t say any more, Liz prayed. You’ll only make him even angrier.
But Felim simply looked up at his son, and smiled. ‘You didn’t mean to, is that what you’re saying?’ His voice rose again, a whining imitation of an overtired child. ‘You didn’t meeeeean to? Sure, you never meeeean to do anything, do you Stevie? Well, what the fuck did you think you were doing, eh? Going to McBride, feeding him all that bullshit about how you were going to report me, how you were going to tell on me. Tell on your daddy? Don’t make me laugh. McBride came straight back to me and told me what you were planning to do. Seriously, boy, what else did you think was going to happen? Richie McBride owes me. I have a long memory. He’d have had no business, no happy life in public service, no pretty pictures of himself in his mayoral chain without my help. He’d be destroyed if people found out how much money I gave him, money he didn’t pay a penny tax on. He owed me, and he paid me back by telling me exactly what you had in mind!’
Liz, unable to bear the hatred on his face, looked away. Her gaze fell on the computer again.
Felim was spitting out the words now. ‘McBride had Mannion’s address too; you didn’t think of that, did you? He gave it to me and I hung around outside for a while till I found him. No one spotted me. One of the neighbours, a darkie young one minding a clatter of kids, even said hello to me one day; I think she thought I was Mannion! We looked the same to her – which was useful, for what I had in mind. So, yeah, I found his house and I waited for him and then I followed him back here, to Tír na nÓg. I made a big deal of bumping into him here by accident – “Oh, my God, it’s yourself, small world, amazing, really, how we all ended up here?” I told him I was sorry, and that I wanted to make amends – that I’d come back home and changed my name because I wanted to start again. He believed me, poor bastard. Asked me to his house, even, to talk in private. Told me that he’d met you and had tea with you and that he was worried about you. Poor pet. Said you looked like life hadn’t been kind to you. Kind. Poor baby.’
He looked across at Stephen again.
‘I told him I was sorry, and, you know, maybe that could have been the end of it. We could have shook hands like men, left it there. But then, James Mannion never was much of a man, was he? He wouldn’t listen. He insisted he was going to go to the guards. Said he had no time left and he wanted to sort things out before he went, that it would be good for me if things were settled. Imagine! The cheek of him! He said it would be good for me to face up to things. That’s when I knew I had to kill him. I’ve had a long life, Stephen, but it’s not over yet. I could have twenty years left, more, and I’m not going to spend it with people muttering about me, saying I wasn’t a good father, a good husband. Criticising me for doing things I’d every right to do.’
Liz was fascinated now, despite herself, listening to the story, hearing the pieces fall into place. But Felim – and she couldn’t think of him by any other name – was still concentrating on the sweating, terrified Stephen.
‘And then I saw your letter. You foolish, foolish boy. Sure, herself, over there, showed it to half the centre. My darling Elizabeth . . . What did you think you were doing? Did you really think she was going to pay any heed to the likes of you? I’ll tell you, though, you did me a favour. Gave me a laugh – and a great idea.’
The second letter. Liz grunted, the gag blocking her words, and Felim looked at her.
‘Yes. I wrote the second letter, Elizabeth. Brilliant, wasn’t it? When they discover your bodies, there’ll be a trail, there. It’ll all make perfect sense. Poor Stephen Millar, flips and kills the man who abused him all those years ago and then fixates on a young one and kills her too, and himself. I didn’t know, Stephen, how many people you’d been shooting your mouth off to. I was afraid, if you were found dead straight after James, that people might start asking questions. But if people thought you killed Elizabeth, here . . . well, then, it wouldn’t matter who you’d told or what you’d said I’d done. No one would believe a word.’
Stephen’s muscles must be screaming by now, Liz realised, as she gazed across the room. He’d been holding himself perfectly still for almost twenty minutes and the strain was etched on his features. If he relaxed even a fraction, the noose would tighten. As she stared at him, he shifted his head and his gaze met hers. She had heard, hadn’t she, of people passing messages with their eyes? Was he trying to tell her something? Had he a plan? For a moment, hope flared.
Then, still looking at her, he muttered something too low for either of them to hear.
Felim moved closer.
Stephen spoke again, much clearer this time.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy.’
And Liz felt all hope disappear.
Chapter Thirty-Four
‘I can’t believe we don’t have an address for him.’
‘Can’t you? I can. Jesus.’
Claire slapped her hand off the dashboard in frustration.
‘Take the next right. No, this one! How long have you been living in Dublin, Flynn? Christ.’
She dragged her phone out of her bag again but Anna’s face was the only thing on the screen. Where the fuck was Carthy? She’d left, what, three voice messages? And sent three texts in the last fifteen minutes. Surely he’d have enough sense to keep an eye on his phone, with everything that was going on?
Flynn braked suddenly and she braced herself with her feet as he rounded a corner. God, she hated being a passenger. She’d only let Flynn drive because she’d assumed Carthy would have called her back by now and she wanted to be able to give him her full attention. As soon as they’d realised who Stephen Ford’s father was, they’d both galloped out of the interview room, abandoning the open-mouthed McBrides. But a quick glance through their files had confirmed that, although the man calling himself Felim O’Hagan had indeed been interviewed, along with all of Tír na nÓg’s other clients, after James Mannion’s murder, he had given ‘no fixed abode’ as his address, and this hadn’t been investigated further. Clair
e didn’t blame the Garda who had taken the statement. Three other clients had said the same thing and the process of re-interviewing them, in the wake of Eugene Cannon’s murder, was still underway. They were a small team; there was a limit to their resources. But it was agonising to know they had the man they wanted, and no idea where to find him. And he was the man they wanted. Claire was sure of that now.
As Flynn turned on to the street leading to Tír na nÓg, her phone screen finally flashed, Tom Carthy.
‘You were looking for me, detective?’
He sounded exhausted. Didn’t even bother with the usual veneer of politeness that almost everyone adopted when speaking to the Gardaí. And his mood didn’t improve when she told him what she wanted.
‘Felim’s address? God, I don’t know. We might have it in the office somewhere. Liz deals with all of that, really, have you tried her?’
I have, Claire told him. Almost as often as I tried to get you.
‘Do you know where she is?’ she asked.
A thought flickered across her mind. Had she missed something? Were they a couple? Was there something there she hadn’t picked up on?
But the dull defeat in his voice indicated otherwise. ‘No. I don’t know where she is. We had a . . . a disagreement. I’ve been calling her myself but she must have turned her phone off.’
‘Well, we need to have a look around ourselves, then. Can you come by and let us in?’
‘To Tír na nÓg?’
Carthy’s inertia was seriously beginning to piss Claire off.
‘Yes, Tír na nÓg; we’re outside there now but the place is deserted. You close on weekends, don’t you?’
A deep sigh. ‘I’ll come as soon as I can. Half an hour, maybe. That’s the best I can do.’
Darkness was falling. Claire replaced the phone in her bag and looked at Flynn. ‘I can’t be dealing with sitting here for half an hour. You wait here, yeah?’
The gate clanged behind her as she walked up the path. The place was an awful mess, really. Fair enough, Carthy didn’t have much money, but he could have cut the grass or something. The place looked almost derelict. She kicked an empty crisp packet out of her way as she approached the scuffed wooden door and rang the bell, more in hope than anticipation. Nobody home.
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