CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘You look – better.’
It was, Claire realized, a peace-offering. It was a lie too. She didn’t need to look into a mirror to know that she’d have been in better shape if she’d been dragged through the proverbial hedge backwards, but that was all the more reason, perhaps, to appreciate her husband’s words. She hadn’t made it home from the office till after eight o’clock, a reasonable enough time given the amount of work she’d had to do, but still many hours after she had originally planned to be back. However, Matt, who had been putting Anna’s pyjamas on when Claire came through the door had simply given her a kiss on the cheek and told her he’d join her for dinner after the baby had fallen asleep.
Pleasantly surprised, and unwilling to rock the boat, Claire returned the kiss tentatively.
‘Thanks. Do you want me to put her up?’
Matt looked down at Anna, whose small head was nuzzled into his shoulder, her eyelids already drooping.
‘Nah, I’ll do it. There’s pizza in the freezer, stick it on, will you? I’ll be down in ten.’
Claire dropped a feather-light kiss on her daughter’s soft hair and nodded at her husband gratefully. Matt was clearly willing to move on from the row or, at the very least, put it on hold for a while. Given the amount of crap that was floating around in her head, anything that freed up a few brain cells was fine by her. As her husband carried her daughter upstairs she rifled through the freezer, selected a pizza, put the oven on to heat and poured herself a glass of wine.
*
A bull in a china shop. It was a dreadful cliché, but the phrase had been lodged in her brain ever since she’d sat in on the interview with Marc Gilmore some hours before.
‘Where’s my fucking daughter?’
Two detectives had collected Leah’s father from the airport, whisked him through the VIP area to help him avoid long passport delays and, more importantly, the journalists who’d gathered outside, wanting his reaction to the ongoing situation. Their courtesy hadn’t softened him, though, and by the time he’d been ushered into the interview room he’d been so close to boiling point he hadn’t even been able to sit down.
‘Who the fuck is in charge here anyway?’
He was bloody lucky, Claire thought, as she unwrapped the pizza and stuck it in the oven, before refilling her wine glass and carrying it into the sitting room, that it had been Quigley, not Byrne, who was sitting on the other side of the table. There were plenty of senior guards who wouldn’t have taken being spoken to like that, no matter what personal pain the witness was in. But Quigley hadn’t commented, merely gestured towards the empty chair on the other side of the table.
‘Where’s my fucking daughter?’
Gilmore had marched past Quigley’s outstretched hand, strode to the end of the room and then, when he saw the space was too small for him to pace around, simply stood in front of them, moving from foot to foot as if he could speed up the investigation simply through his own momentum.
‘This bloody cop shop is crawling with officers – what the fuck are they doing standing around? Shouldn’t they be out there looking for her? Isn’t one of you people going to answer me?’
Ignoring ‘you people’, Quigley had pointed towards the empty chair again.
‘If you could just take a seat, Mr Gilmore, I’ll bring you up to speed on the investigation myself.’
‘I don’t want to fucking sit! I want you to find my daughter!’
‘And if you’ll just sit down, we’ll tell you all we know.’
For a moment the two men had stared at each other, but this was Quigley’s room, his space, and Gilmore was the first to blink. Slowly, moving for the first time like the sixty something man he was, he walked back to the table, placed one hand on the top, then lowered himself into the chair, a small sigh escaping as he sat down. Quigley was right to be patient, Claire thought. The man must have gone through hell, having to fly back from China weighed down by news of his daughter’s disappearance. Landing in Heathrow, no doubt hoping against hope that there would be good news, and then, when there wasn’t, having to wait for yet another plane to take him home. Every minute of that horrendous journey was written on the man’s grey and drawn face, against which the broken veins on his nose and cheeks stood out sharply. Claire had never met Marc Gilmore before, but she’d read plenty of stories about him over the past twenty-four hours, and most of the articles had been accompanied by photographs of a tall man, the type her mother would have called ‘distinguished’, with a mane of white hair swept back from his face and narrow clear blue eyes. Today, however, the eyes were bloodshot, the skin around them dark, and Marc Gilmore’s hair looked thinner than it had in photographs and was uncombed, revealing a bald spot on the back of his head.
As soon as the man was settled in the chair, Quigley spoke again.
‘I know this must be difficult for you, Mr Gilmore—’
‘Hold on a second, I know you!’
The super paused as Gilmore stared more closely at him, then exhaled, sending a blast of sour breath and perspiration across the table.
‘Quigley, isn’t it? I sat beside you at a charity do a couple of years ago. One of your lads was up for an award. Jesus, man, help me out here, will you? You’re a father yourself. You have to help me find her.’
Claire felt a flicker of irritation. That was Ireland for you, a country where men like Marc Gilmore, no matter how tarnished their reputation, were never more than one degree of separation away from the person in power they needed to speak to. Not that it was going to help him this time. She knew the super well enough to believe that he’d put the same effort into finding Leah Gilmore no matter who her father was, but it pissed her off that Gilmore would think he had some sort of pull. And, indeed, having ‘placed’ the other man Gilmore was already starting to look more relaxed.
‘What do you want, Quigley? More officers? I have a contact in the minister’s office. Just say the word and—’
‘I can assure you, Mr Gilmore, we are doing all we can.’
Fair play to Quigley, Claire thought. He wasn’t going to fall for Gilmore’s bullshit but her boss was clearly struggling to keep his patience.
‘Leah is an absolute priority and the best thing you can do to help her now is answer some questions.’
Once Gilmore saw that his bluster wouldn’t get him anywhere, he resigned himself to doing just that. Quickly, he confirmed everything that his ex-wife had told them about their daughter and then, although more reluctantly, also confirmed that he had instigated the deal with Eileen Delaney that had left her and her son homeless.
‘I’m not happy about how things ended up but it was a business transaction. There was nothing malicious about it,’ he said, while fiddling with a signet ring on his right hand. His tone, of sadness mixed with a slight air of defensiveness, sounded almost rehearsed, and Claire wondered how many times he’d answered similar questions in recent years. In fact, it was only when they came to the topic of the party in his apartment and Alan Delaney’s disappearance that Gilmore became visibly flustered.
‘Why do you want to go back over all that again?’ he asked Quigley, as his colour rose. ‘I understand you need to know about my relationship with Eileen Delaney. She’s clearly done what she did out of some sort of wish for revenge, but why go back over that old ground again? The poor lad killed himself and my daughter was devastated. I really don’t see—’
‘With respect, Mr Gilmore, that’s for us to worry about.’
Quigley’s tone gave Gilmore no wriggle room and slowly, punctuating his sentences with reminders of how long ago the events had taken place, he began to give them some basic details.
‘To be honest with you, Superintendent . . .’
He was careful to use Quigley’s title this time, Claire noticed with interest.
‘. . . I’m a bit hazy on the
details, and I told the officers the same thing at the time. I’d been in meetings all day and only arrived home around eight. Leah had asked me if she could have friends around and I said fine. I’d had a busy week and didn’t feel like amusing her, I just wanted to drink a few glasses of wine and catch up on the football. So I pretty much locked myself into my room and left them to it.’
‘So you knew Leah was having a party?’
‘Well, party . . .’ The man shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘A few friends around was more like it. It can be hard for the young ones to find somewhere to go. The clubs don’t like letting them in when they’re under eighteen and, actually, I’d rather Leah was under my roof than out doing God knows what, God knows where.’
Claire kept her voice casual. ‘So you knew they were drinking alcohol?’
Gilmore glanced at her, but directed his answer to her boss. ‘Well, I did, yes. You’re a father, Superintendent. You know what teenagers are like. As I said, I’d rather they were doing what they were doing where I could keep an eye on them.’
‘But you weren’t keeping an eye on them, were you?’
Again, Gilmore refused to meet Claire’s eyes. After a moment, and knowing from her boss’s silence that he was happy for her to take the lead, Claire continued: ‘Did you meet Alan Delaney at all?’
Gilmore sighed and met her gaze for the first time.
‘No. I told you, I was in the bedroom the whole time. I didn’t want to – what is it they say? – cramp Leah’s style. She knew she could get me if there was a problem.’
‘Do you know why he was there in the first place? Were he and Leah friends? Had she invited him?’
The question had been troubling Claire ever since the interview at Heather Gilmore’s home. Leah’s mother hadn’t mentioned how the boy had ended up in Fernwood, so it would be interesting to see her father’s take on it.
Gilmore thought for a moment, then shook his head.
‘Do you know, I honestly don’t. Some internet thing – that’s how it works, isn’t it? Someone knows someone who knows someone, and they say there’s a party on. I just thought it was a coincidence. Sad, but not unusual. To be honest with you, Superintendent,’ he turned his head away from Claire again, ‘when we found out what had happened, my focus was on my daughter. She was devastated, utterly devastated, that a boy could have left our home and done such an awful thing. She was so upset, she wouldn’t eat, and she wouldn’t come out of her room. For a time I was worried she’d do something foolish herself. I—’
His voice broke as he apparently remembered that his little girl was now in far greater danger than he could have imagined back then. He swallowed several times.
‘So, no, I didn’t ask her too many questions about Delaney, about how she knew him. I didn’t – I couldn’t—’ Without warning his head dipped and he began to cry, noisy childlike sobs. Claire fetched him a glass of water, and after a moment he was able to continue, but couldn’t tell them much more. Gilmore had had no contact with Eileen Delaney since his business failed, he told them, and had no clue who ‘Richard’ might be. Delaney hadn’t been married when they’d last met, and he didn’t know anything about a partner or a close friend.
*
‘Is that ready?’
Matt came into the room and Claire blinked, the glass empty in her hand.
‘Sure. I’ll bring it in.’
Unable to find the pizza wheel she placed the food on a dinner plate, sawed at it with a kitchen knife and carried it back into the living room. Her husband, who was pouring wine for himself, raised his eyebrows when he saw the unevenly hacked slices but said nothing. As they waited for the food to cool, Claire refilled her glass, then looked directly at him.
‘Do you want to talk? About this morning? And yesterday?’
Her husband drained his drink in one gulp and sank back into the sofa.
‘I don’t know, Claire.’
He looked worn out, not much more rested than Marc Gilmore had been. Her husband had been far from unaffected by the week’s events, Claire realized, and she felt a stab of love for him as he continued, ‘I haven’t been able to think about it, not properly anyway. I just can’t process what happened. I get panicked if I even try to go there. Every time I looked at Anna today, all I could think of was what might have happened if things had gone wrong. What would have happened to her, or to you, or both of you. And to be honest with you, Claire, a big part of me just wants to tell you to give it all up. Leave that shaggin’ job and, I don’t know, work in Tesco or something. A library. Somewhere safe, where nothing bad will ever happen to you again.’
‘But!’
Claire’s sense of injustice began to rise. This was her job he was talking about. This was what she was trained to do, and it was what she loved. Her voice rose as she fought to explain herself. ‘What happened yesterday might have happened whether I was a guard or not, Matt. I was there anyway. I was visiting the doctor. It was a good thing I was a guard, actually, because—’
Her husband raised his hand and looked at her.
‘Claire. Let me finish. I know all that and I know what you’re going to say and I don’t want to fight about it, okay? In an ideal world I don’t want things like that to happen to you ever again and I’m damn sure I don’t want them to happen to our daughter. But I know how highly you value your job. So am I going to ask you to give it up? No.’
He reached over and touched her hand lightly before continuing.
‘This is how you operate, love. Your head is full of this case now and you’re not going to be able to think about anything else until this girl is found.’
Claire had a million things to say and was, quite frankly, pissed off at his patronising tone, but she remained silent, not wanting to provoke another row. She took a quick look over Matt’s shoulder to where the clock on the DVD player was now reading 10:10. Inspector Byrne had done an interview on the news earlier, but she’d missed it and was hoping to catch it on the late headlines. Or on the player, after Matt was asleep.
‘So what do you think?’
She started.
Her husband had finished speaking and was looking at her with exasperation.
‘I said what do you think? We park things, till this case is finished, and then we talk? Is that okay? Can you promise me that, Claire?’
‘Sure.’
It was the best solution, Claire reckoned, for the moment. Another bullet dodged anyway. Before she’d left the office that evening, Superintendent Quigley had called her aside and, sounding as if he were reading directly from the human resources handbook, had told her he wanted her to attend counselling sessions to help her deal with the after-effects of what had happened in the surgery. She had managed to fob him off with a promise that she’d do so after Leah Gilmore was found, and now it looked as if Matt were offering her a similar deal. Yeah, maybe afterwards, when everything was sorted out, she’d have a sit-down and go through things in her own head, talk to someone even, if she felt she needed to. And she would definitely talk things through with Matt then. But right now, and until Leah was found, she had to be a police officer. She couldn’t be a victim – she didn’t have time.
She reached over and touched her husband’s face lightly.
‘Thank you for being so understanding.’
He grabbed her hand and held it against his cheek.
‘That’s okay. But afterwards, we’ll talk, yeah?’
Claire nodded, afraid to say any more in case he changed his mind, then took her hand away and smiled at him.
‘Are you hungry?’
Matt looked down at the sawn-up pizza, now sporting a layer of congealed cheese, and grimaced.
‘I think I’ll pass.’
Claire grinned.
‘I don’t blame ya. Tell you what, you go on up to bed – you look shattered. I’m just going to have
a quick bite and I’ll be straight up after you.’
Her husband drank the rest of his wine, then paused, another thought occurring to him.
‘I never even asked you, how did you get on at the doctor’s, anyway?’
Claire froze. She had hoped that her visit to the GP had been pushed from his mind. Her husband saw the look on her face and rose to his feet.
‘I’m guessing we’ll leave that one until afterwards too, yeah?’
‘Yeah, Matt, I’d really appreciate it.’
As soon as her husband had left the room, Claire switched on the TV, zipping through the channels until she found the main evening news. But as the concerned face of Inspector David Byrne filled the screen the mobile phone in her pocket began to peal and she grabbed it, anxious to answer it before it woke her baby or, more to the point, before her husband realized she was still on duty. When she heard Inspector Byrne’s voice in her ear she looked back at the screen, exhaustion leading to confusion that he could be in two places at the same time. But his opening sentence blew away the tiredness. Eileen Delaney was showing signs of improvement and doctors felt that, if she remained stable overnight, she’d be well enough to be interviewed in the morning. Superintendent Quigley – Byrne tried and failed to keep the note of resentment out of his voice – felt Claire was the best person for the job, given her involvement in the case and that she’d spoken to the Gilmore parents already. Could she be at the hospital by 7 a.m.? Philip Flynn would meet her there.
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