I was finding it hard to swallow, a lump the size of a peach stone in my throat. Not crying, though. No fucking way was I crying.
And all the time, Ann was watching, assessing me and what I had said. Then she went to the door and spoke into the hallway.
‘You can come back now,’ she said.
Sean Carney came into the room again and Ann returned to her seat.
‘You were right,’ Ann said. ‘She knows nothing.’
I leapt to my feet.
‘What the hell is going on?’
‘I’m sorry, Finn,’ Sean said. ‘We haven’t been completely honest with you.’
‘We?’ Ann Carney said.
‘Me,’ Sean said. ‘I haven’t. You see, there was another reason I contacted you. It’s about your birth mother. After you, a few years after you, she had another baby she gave up for adoption, and we … Well, what I’m saying is, our Deirdre was your sister.’
6
For a time, the only sound in the room came from the fireplace, the coal and logs collapsing into ash. Then Sean Carney started talking again.
‘We met her, your mother, via the Adoption Society, while she was pregnant with Deirdre. We met her a few times, she wanted that before she’d agree to us. We had long talks with her. She talked about you too, about how much she loved you, wanted the best for you. She said she’d wronged you, but she’d make it up to you. Sadly, well, she, as you know …’
I know.
‘She didn’t want any contact with Deirdre after the adoption. She kept saying she wanted Deirdre to grow up without baggage. And that she wanted her to have a good life. She said that’s what she wanted for both of you.’
‘We kept our word, never told,’ Ann said. ‘And, especially after our lovely girl got sick, we thought we were shielding her from the pain of knowing how her mother had died. Deirdre never knew a thing about that. For all the good it did in the end.’
‘She didn’t know she had a sister either,’ Sean said. ‘We regretted that later. Maybe if she’d known you, she’d have seen a way forward for herself, she might have been able to … I don’t know what would have changed, maybe nothing, but we should have tried. That’s why, when I found out about Jeremy Gill, I thought about contacting you. I’d kept an eye on you over the years, saw that you’d become a solicitor and I knew you had an in with the Film Festival. When I saw that Gill was due back in town, I was sure that it was meant to be, that I was meant to contact you.’
‘I didn’t agree,’ Ann said. ‘We’d made a promise. I didn’t want to break it. And then when he told me you were coming to the house, I thought you knew. But then you didn’t seem to know anything after all. And I wondered if Sean had the right girl, or if he’d made some mistake. You look a little like Deirdre, though not much. But it’s the way you have about you, how you hold yourself. You’re her sister all right. There’s no doubt in my mind.’
I thought of all the things I should have said when I was halfway down the street; things like if I’d wanted to know more about my mother, I’d have gone looking; and did I fall asleep and wake up in an episode of EastEnders; and what gives you the right to lure me out here under false pretences and blow a giant hole in who I thought I was; and how dare you spring on me like it’s nothing that I had a sister I knew sweet fuck all about and, by the way, she topped herself too, just like her mother, so my all-new sibling is dead as well; and what am I to do with that; fast-forward through a non-existent relationship, do not pass Go, proceed directly to bereavement, speed mourning, is that what you fucking expect, is that what you want?
I said none of that, muttering instead something about fresh air, pushing my way past Sean – who was he to me now, some kind of relative? – slamming the door behind me, that at least, and talking to myself, walking as fast as I could, putting distance between them and me.
When I came to, I found myself on Pearse Road. For want of a better idea, I took a right on to Connolly. The streets around there are named for the executed signatories to the 1916 proclamation. Too injured to stand, James Connolly was shot by firing squad while strapped to a chair. He had had a daughter called Nora, I remembered.
All around me, it was Saturday afternoon. Cars drove by, and people went in and out of the corner shop, oblivious. I couldn’t bear the regularity, the din, of normal life but my legs wouldn’t carry me home. I thought about calling for a cab. And then I saw the sign for St Joseph’s, a short distance east of the roundabout.
I stumbled down the hill.
‘NO WOOD’, the sign by the entrance said, ‘STONE ONLY’. The cemetery was crammed with it, tall thin pointed slabs and high Celtic crosses, carved angels and obelisks, and decorative ironwork, rusted and vulnerable, footpaths and tracks snaking through the vastness of the place, and silver birch trees, their papery bark peeling like forgotten elegies. Most of the graves were old, recalling lost merchant fortunes and extinct surnames, all tightly packed, money and social status irrelevant now. The only open space was the smooth grassy mound, bordered by a rough stone retaining wall, that held the bodies of the Great Famine dead, fever and cholera victims and those who had starved. In the middle, on its own, was the grave of Father Mathew, who had preached temperance to the Catholic poor; fresh offerings set by his headstone.
I thought about my birth mother then, and how little I knew about her, and how little I had wanted to know. And I thought about my birth father, his name unknown to me. Did Deirdre and I have the same father? There was an age gap of six and a bit years between us. It was unlikely that we did, but not impossible. And I thought about family, and blood, and what that might mean, the thoughts I had spent my life avoiding.
Yet something had shifted for me when I’d met Sean Carney. I hadn’t sent him away, hadn’t dismissed him. He had led me to Deirdre, to my sister. And she had suffered and died, and that was wrong, about as wrong as anything could be.
I kept walking, tracing and retracing my way among the dead. Time passed and the short grey day dwindled into dusk. I left as the gatekeeper was locking up for the evening.
‘You cut it fine, love,’ he said. ‘Are you not afraid of ghosts?’
He was a squat tank of a man in a tight fleece jacket, a bobble hat and all-white trainers that glowed like fresh snow in the half-light.
‘Depends on the ghost,’ I said.
On the road outside it came to me that, from what I had seen of the Carneys and of how they had loved her, Deirdre had had a good childhood. And that she would have grown up to have a life, and whether that would have been good or bad, it would have been hers to do with as she wanted, were it not for what had happened to her, either at the hands of Jeremy Gill, or someone else. I couldn’t do anything about her life: that was over.
But maybe I could do something about her death.
7
Night had fallen by the time I reached the Carney house again. Ann opened the door before I had a chance to ring the bell.
‘I wondered if you’d come back,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you did. I’m sorry for earlier,’ she added. ‘We were wrong to dump all that on you.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Still,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t right. But when Sean gets an idea in his head, he can’t let it go. I went along with it for the sake of peace, but I shouldn’t have. He’s not here, by the way. I sent him down to the pub to watch the soccer match. It was either that, or kill him.’
I laughed.
‘I’m not joking,’ Ann said.
But, for the first time since we’d met, she was smiling and, for those few seconds, I glimpsed who she had been before.
‘Will I make more tea? Or maybe wine? I’m sure there’s a bottle somewhere.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No thanks. A glass of water would be good, though.’
I followed her into the kitchen. A square pine table with four matching chairs took up one corner. In the other, an old television kept watch over two well-worn armchairs. This was where they spent most of the
ir time, I realised, the place they tried to keep going. The front room, with all the photographs, was where they went when the trying got too hard.
Ann was at the sink, letting the tap run, filling a glass, handing it to me. I drank it off quickly and gave it back. She filled it again.
‘Come,’ she said.
We sat quietly together at the table and I sipped at my water and it felt like I didn’t have to say or do anything.
‘Is there anything you’d like to ask?’ Ann said after a while. ‘About the adoption or Deirdre growing up, what she was like? I have the family albums in the top of that high cupboard over there. It would be no bother to take them down and—’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll take you up on that offer some day. I think I have as much as I can handle for now.’
Ann nodded.
‘You need time,’ she said.
‘Time doesn’t always heal, in my experience,’ I said.
‘Nor mine,’ she said.
‘Especially where a wrong’s been done.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘People talk about closure. Whatever it means, we never got it. We were left with so many unanswered questions. And now this Jeremy Gill thing that Sean has dreamt up. He’s been looking for an excuse to contact you for months. Gill’s visit for the festival gave it to him.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
Ann looked at me.
‘You don’t?’ she asked. ‘Well, you wouldn’t, but Finn, I know him. Whatever he says, this is a lot less about Jeremy Gill and a lot more about Sean wanting to meet you, wanting to have a link to Deirdre to—’
‘I thought it was because he wanted to warn people about the danger,’ I said.
‘It’s that too,’ Ann said. ‘And he has some notion as well that because you’re a solicitor you’ll find some legal way of punishing Gill. If it was Gill. But so what. Whether it’s him or someone else, they got away with it, and there’s nothing we can do.’
‘The thing is,’ I said. ‘Maybe there is.’
‘Look,’ I went on. ‘If Sean’s hunch is right, Gill deserves to pay for what he did. There’s no chance of bringing a criminal prosecution. As you know, the DPP is the person who decides whether or not somebody should be charged. Here, because the main witness, Deirdre, is deceased, no prosecution is possible.’
‘So that’s it, then,’ Ann said. ‘Same as what the guards told Sean.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There is another possibility. You could pursue a civil case; in other words, a claim for damages for the loss you’ve suffered, though any case would be extremely difficult for all sorts of reasons. But there’s a lower standard of proof in a civil case. It’s called “the balance of probabilities”, rather than “reasonable doubt”, as it would be in a criminal case. That helps.
‘Even so, it would be nearly impossible to bring it home,’ I continued. ‘To succeed we’d need evidence – a lot more than Deirdre’s mention of the Academy in her note.’
‘I don’t know,’ Ann said.
‘It wouldn’t be easy. We’d have a huge hill to climb in proving the link between Gill and Deirdre’s death – proving that he caused it, I mean. It’s not that expensive to issue proceedings, though costs climb very quickly. To start, we’d need to have a stateable case.’
‘I’m not sure I’d be interested in taking any case, when most likely it’s hopeless,’ she said. ‘Anyway Deirdre never wanted the law involved. And I don’t know how this turned into a case against Jeremy Gill. I don’t know how it turned into a case at all.’
Ann was right. The impetus was coming from me. And if Sean’s main reason for contacting me had been to find an excuse for him to have a link with Deirdre, why did I have to do anything? Any action would, in all likelihood, never get to trial. Gill had enough money to employ an army of lawyers who could tie us up in forensic knots for years to come. But Deirdre Carney was my sister. And she hadn’t died of cancer, or in an accident. Someone was to blame.
Still, I couldn’t run an investigation, or issue proceedings, without the Carneys. As her parents, they had the necessary legal and moral standing. I was sure Sean would support my efforts. It was Ann I had to convince. I felt myself managing her, knew how it would go. I’d release information in pieces, and guide – manipulate – her towards the decision I wanted. A part of me squirmed at what I was doing; another part, the part I liked less, didn’t care.
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘I want you to know that I agree with you. On the face of it, we have little or no chance with this case, legally speaking. But I want to try to find evidence, if it’s there, against Jeremy Gill. It’s possible that Deirdre was pointing a finger at him with her note, and with the timing of her death in the aftermath of his award nomination. The way I’m thinking is that there have been some civil cases taken in the States by the surviving relatives of people who have committed suicide. It’s that kind of action I have in mind. To do that we’d need to show that Deirdre and Gill met, that they had been alone together, at the very least. After that, we’d need as much as we could get. We’d have to find witnesses. And we’d have to show that the deterioration in Deirdre’s mental condition started at that time and continued, so that her death was directly linked to the event. I’d have to look at the coroner’s report and we’d need psychiatric expertise and reports and––’
Ann interrupted, shaking her head.
‘There’s a big difference between being alone with someone and rape.’
‘You’re sure that’s what it was?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure. But to prove it now? I don’t know how you could.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We’d need to find something fairly big on Gill to get anywhere. But if we can find that, or a combination of things, we could threaten to take a civil case. Once proceedings are issued, the allegations against him would become public. He won’t want that. Bear in mind that his main area of operation is the States. A lawsuit like this isn’t common our side of the Atlantic, but it’s better known over there. If it got picked up on by social media or news outlets – and it would – Gill would be damaged. Badly damaged. That’s why I think that, if there’s any truth to the allegations at all, he’ll want to settle with us.’
‘Settle?’ Ann spat out the word. ‘You mean pay money? Money couldn’t replace Deirdre. If there was a case, it would have to be about justice.’
‘I know. It’s not about money. But money’s the only way to get to him. I explained already about the DPP and why the criminal courts’ route is closed to us. What I’m saying is that if we want to hit him where it hurts, we have to hit his reputation – and his pocket.’
‘You can’t just go around making accusations against powerful people like Gill.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not how it would be. I’d be careful. Nobody would know about my personal connection to the case. And we would only issue proceedings when – if – we had the evidence. Which we might never have. Or we might find out that somebody else was responsible. We’d have to be prepared for that to happen.’
‘I see what you’re saying,’ Ann said. ‘Though it’s not what I expected from you. After what you found out today, I expected you to be …’
‘Looking through the photos?’ I asked.
‘I suppose,’ she said.
‘Not my style,’ I said. ‘I wish it was. I might be more well adjusted.’
‘You’re all right, girl,’ Ann said. ‘Don’t run yourself down.’
The sudden kindness unmoored me. For a moment, all I wanted was to find a dark place and sleep for a week.
The moment passed.
‘Ann, this is what I know how to do. It’s all I know. In my job, I look for cause and fault and blame, for the thread that runs through things. I mightn’t find every answer, but I’ll find some, I’m sure I will.’
‘I kept a lot of it from Sean,’ Ann said. ‘How much she’d changed, and it’s all a muddle in my head what happened, so long ago, on
ly yesterday too it seems like …’
‘I know you say it’s all a muddle,’ I said. ‘But it’s my role to sort through it for you.’
After a long silence, while the tap dripped and the ancient fridge groaned, Ann spoke.
‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll go with it,’ she said. ‘For a while, anyway. See what progress you make. But I want to make one thing clear before we start. We’re not taking any stupid risks. Sean might sell the house to fund a case, but I won’t. Does that sound selfish? Maybe it is. But we have to live somewhere, if you’d call it living. The guilt never goes, Finn. I keep thinking, even still, that I could have stopped it if I’d done something, if I’d known what was in her head, if I’d picked up on the signals. Don’t say anything, none of the stuff about it not being my fault. It’s what people say, and I’m worn out from hearing it, from telling it to myself and not believing. Makes no difference.’
‘Tell me what you remember,’ I said. ‘No matter how silly or insignificant it seems.’
‘I’ll try,’ Ann said. ‘Well, somehow, she got involved in the Film Festival, during her Transition Year at school, doing what exactly I’m not sure but it was short films coming out our ears for a long time, I can tell you. It was arranged by her art teacher at the time, Mr O’Donnell, Colm is his first name but he was always Mister in this house. The week of the festival she was off school and was in at the festival all the time. She had a couple of pals that she was close to, Jessica Murphy and Aifric Sheehan. And there were a few boys she was friendly with too, Joey O’Connor was one of them. I don’t have addresses for all her friends, though I have Jessica’s. And there could be more of them, maybe, from other schools.
‘I saw very little of Deirdre during the week of the festival – she was gone in the morning and back in the evenings exhausted, with nothing to report about what she had been up to for the day. I put it down to the teenage thing, kind of let her off to spread her wings a bit. She told me that everything was none of my business and that she was grown up and well able to take care of herself …’
Darkest Truth Page 5