So when Gerry suggested she take a rest, it seemed logical to base herself near them, not close enough to hear what they were saying, but near enough to take a sneaky glance at the faces, figure out who was who.
Gerry had even brought a blanket. He was SuperDad today. It seemed there was nothing he hadn’t thought of. A bottle of water. A hat for Róisín. Suncream. The baby was getting cranky now, overstimulated. She reached out of the pram, whining for her mother. But Gerry had a better idea. You get some rest, he told her. We’ll keep walking. She’ll drift off in the buggy. We’ll be back soon. The nurse had mentioned to him that it was time for Róisín to learn how to fall asleep without Yvonne. Why not start now?
It was nice not to have to think. So Yvonne didn’t bother. She lay down on the blanket, zipped up her cardigan and closed her eyes as the clouds rolled back and a shaft of sun, real summer sun blazed down on her. Warmth. Peace. It was beautiful. A toddler kicked a ball towards her and ran over to reclaim it. His mother came near, rescued it and apologised. No matter. Not a problem. She closed her eyes. The chatter of the Netmammies was rising now, drifting towards her on a heat wave. She couldn’t pick out words. But the murmuring was soothing.
Really, they were making the whole thing far too easy. It wasn’t enough to advertise their little gathering on the internet, right there in public so that anyone could read it, they had to position themselves by the front gate of the park, positively inviting attention.
It would be rude not to take a closer look.
Meet in a public place. That was one of the main rules of the internet, wasn’t it? Meet in a public place. Safety in numbers.
What they didn’t realise was that the numbers gave him safety too.
No one noticed one extra person in the crowd.
The one with the messy hair, piled up on top of her head had to be Meredith. Someone probably told her once she looked like the TV star. She didn’t. She was far fatter for a start. And the thin bleached-blonde sitting on the edge of the gathering who was feeding her child a packet of crisps had to be TAKETHATFAN. The others looked at the snack like it was poison. They preferred to fill their kids full of dried fruit, pebbles of pure sugar that just happened to have Organic written on the recycled cardboard box.
God, they were so predictable! He had only been walking among them for a couple of months but already he knew everything about them. Their lives. Their hopes. And their complaints.
They never stopped complaining. Which helped him to do what he had to.
‘Hi!! You sit over there … oh what a gorgeous baby. Maybe in the shade? Yeah, I have that changing bag too. Mad, the price of it but sooo worth it. I didn’t tell himself of course!!!’
Their public voices were the same as the ones they used online. Too jolly, too enthusiastic. They pretended to want to hear what the others had to say, but really they were only biding their time before they could come back in with a louder and conflicting opinion. Sweetened with a giggle. Or a LOL.
‘Suncream is so expensive, isn’t it? My lad can only tolerate the organic brands. Will you get away at all this year? Just not the same with the children, of course. All that dashing around.’
They did so love to whinge.
FarmersWife had whinged, struggled and then begged for her life in the end. For her children, she kept saying, in a frantic effort to change his mind. Bullshit. If she was that concerned about them, then she wouldn’t have spent so much time complaining. If she loved her life that much then maybe she wouldn’t have had so much time to be nosy, and to interfere in what he was doing. She brought it on herself, and she realised it, at the end.
MyBabba hadn’t been so vocal. She’d kicked out at him though, which made killing her easier. It wasn’t right, to kick a man like that. Had he planned her death? He wasn’t sure. It had just kind of … happened. And had worked out for the best in the end.
And there would be a number three. He knew that now.
Here in the park, a pair of sunglasses allowed him to observe for as long as he wanted. And online, they didn’t suspect a thing.
They were getting noisier now. Look at me; listen to me, my views are important. I am important.
No, you’re not.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
‘Do you think he’ll be smaller than he looks on the TV? They say they usually look smaller. Do you watch it? My dad thinks he’s AMAZING, he’s always going on about him. My mum hates him, she goes to bed rather than watch him, but my dad is always coming out with Eamonn Teevan said this that and the other. God, he’d go mad if he thought I was going to meet him.’
Good Lord. Philip Flynn indicated left and wondered if Garda Siobhan O’Doheny came with a volume button. He didn’t need her to shut up entirely. Just tone it down a bit.
Following the signs for the quays, he glanced down at the speed and brought the car back down to the edge of the limit. They were travelling in an unmarked car and there was no need to draw undue attention to themselves. Not that he’d speed anyway, even if they were in a squad car. He hated that, seeing lads driving along the hard shoulder or with their mobile phones sewn to their ears just because there was no one out there to stop them. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair on other drivers who were doing the right thing. Philip Flynn was a great believer in fairness.
In the passenger seat, O’Doheny was still yammering away.
‘Unless we end up picking him up, of course. Imagine! That’d be huge, if he had something to do with it. But that’s hardly likely, is it? Remind me again why we’re going out to talk to him? Because he, like, knew her or something?’
It was a good question and Flynn used a particularly difficult junction as an excuse not to answer it. The fact of the matter was, the idea to call out to Ireland 24 and interview Eamonn Teevan had been Boyle’s, and Boyle’s alone. It had been in Flynn’s diary for days and had remained there when she was taken off active duty. Technically, he should have run it past Byrne now that he was the lead officer on the case. But Byrne hadn’t asked and Flynn had decided not to tell him.
The night she disappeared, Miriam Twohy had told her parents she was meeting up with old school friends. It now looked likely that she had been lying. Miriam Twohy hadn’t kept in touch with friends from school, and didn’t seem to have made any in the workplace either. Her time in UCD seemed to have been the busiest of her life, and Boyle had a bit of a bee in her bonnet about the people Miriam had known there. Flynn didn’t totally understand it, but he respected the sergeant and it wasn’t like they were falling down with people to interview anyway. In fact, since the whole apartment fiasco, they were back in the square behind one and at a loss where to go next. So if Boyle wanted him to take a day trip to visit Ireland’s newest and biggest television star, then he was willing to give it a go.
O’Doheny was still talking.
‘… used to listen to him on the radio all the time, but he’s way better on television. Like yer man Jeremy Kyle, only better. More intelligent. He’s very good-looking as well …’
Flynn sighed. Most of the lads in the station would give a day’s pay to be stuck in a traffic jam with O’Doheny, whom he’d once heard described as a blonde Angelina Jolie with a bit more meat on her bones. But she wasn’t his type and her chatter was, not to put too fine a point on it, starting to drive him insane. At last, the turn off. She’d have to stop talking now.
‘It doesn’t look like a television station, does it? I was expecting something way bigger. There’s no cameras or anything. Didn’t you think there’d be cameras?’
Or possibly not. O’Doheny was still babbling as they drove into an industrial estate in the city’s docklands. They followed a sign marked Ireland 24, waved on by a bored-looking security man in his dusty booth to a sign saying ‘Visitor Parking’. She was still talking as Flynn lined the car up neatly between two white lines and displayed his visitor’s badge prominently on the windscreen. He had to admit, though, she had a point. The place could have been any old o
ffice really. The only thing that distinguished it was a van parked outside the main reception door, which had a dish on top that looked like a bigger version of ones you’d stick on your house at home. But the lad standing outside it, with the fag stuck between his thumb and forefinger, didn’t look glamorous at all.
O’Doheny finally fell silent as they walked through the double doors that led to the reception area. And almost immediately, the atmosphere changed. The place felt like an upmarket lawyers’ office, or a doctor’s waiting area. A consultant, not a GP. The space was large and airy, a couple of grey couches arranged around a water fountain at one end and a large leather reception desk at the other. Photographs lined the walls, most of them featuring Eamonn Teevan smiling broadly beside politicians, artists and TV stars. Flynn could sense O’Doheny’s eagerness to walk over and take a closer look, but she restrained herself, remaining silent and straight-backed as they walked towards the desk, which was presided over by a glamorous brunette who looked like she should be on television herself.
The gatekeeper’s rings jangled as she tapped on her computer keyboard, making a big show of not noticing them until they were right beside her. Then she leafed through a large appointments book while murmuring darkly about ‘squeezing them in’. Squeeze, me arse. Flynn knew he could flash his card at any moment and insist on an immediate meeting. But just as he was about to yield to temptation, she sighed and pressed a button under her desk. A door to the left slid open.
‘Go on through,’ she ordered, in an accent that owed more to LA than Dublin.
‘Mary will meet you on the other side.’
‘This is more like it.’
Flynn ignored O’Doheny’s whisper but admitted to himself that, again, she had a point. The far side of the doors led them to yet another world, this time far closer to the atmosphere he’d been expecting. A large overhead sign proclaimed they were in the ‘newsroom’, but he’d have guessed that anyway given the noise blaring from five competing television screens, the number of people, all of whom seemed to be talking at full volume and the frantic clatter of fingers on computer keyboards.
A small, bleached-blonde woman approached them and smiled vaguely at Flynn.
‘You wanted a word with Eamonn?’
Within seconds, they were being ushered to a glass cubicle at the other end of the room. The young woman, Mary, Flynn assumed, closed the door and nodded at the man sitting behind a brown laminate desk which was overflowing with newspapers, coffee cups, two mobile phones, several chargers and any number of pens.
Eamonn Teevan was smaller than he looked on TV. And harder, somehow. He’d been on the phone when they arrived and looked like he was trying very hard not to argue with someone, the words ‘with respect’ forming most of his end of the conversation. He gestured to them to sit down and Mary brushed a pile of newspapers from the nearest chairs onto the floor.
But as the phone conversation drew to a close, Flynn could see the man on the other side of the desk swallow his irritation. Within seconds, he had morphed into Eamonn Teevan the TV star, drawing his hands through his short, perfectly cut hair and unleashing a full hundred-watt smile.
‘Detectives! Good to meet you both! How may I help you?’
Fair play to O’Doheny, she didn’t flinch, didn’t give any indication that she was in the presence of anyone other than the usual muppets they got to interview. If anything, it was Flynn himself who was slightly thrown by the dramatic change in tone and it took him a moment to get his thoughts together and explain the reason for their visit.
Teevan linked his hands behind his head, flopped back in his chair and balanced his feet on the edge of the desk in one smooth movement. Flynn suppressed the urge to give him a swift shove in the solar plexus and instead rearranged his features into as stern a look as possible before tuning into Teevan’s fluid, accentless drawl.
‘Look, I remember the name, but that’s all. Black hair, hadn’t she? I think she dated a guy I knew, O’Doherty. Well, when I say I knew him, we were all in the same drama society. It’s not like we hung out all the time. I don’t know if I ever had a conversation with her. I mean, I saw the news story when she died, obviously, but it took me a while to make the connection.’
‘You didn’t go to the funeral?’
O’Doheny’s cool stare was a match for Teevan’s and the presenter stared at her in surprise.
‘Christ, no!’
‘Can I ask why not?’
O’Doheny began to take neat notes in the notebook she’d balanced on her knee.
Teevan raised his eyebrows.
‘I just didn’t know her well enough, that’s the truth of it! And I figured, well the last thing her family would have wanted was … Well, you know yourself.’
He glanced at Flynn in a manner clearly designed to be matey, or to convey the awkwardness of being a celebrity at an Irish funeral Mass. Flynn cleared his throat.
‘So, what can you remember about her? Anything at all would be helpful.’
Teevan removed his feet from the table, bringing them back down onto the floor with a bang. Flynn jumped, but didn’t say anything. The journalist’s voice remained smooth, but there was a hard edge to it this time and he punctuated his observations with frequent glances at his watch.
‘Sweet feck all, if you excuse the French. I probably saw her a few times in the student bar. She was dating O’Doherty who was a bit of a knob, as far as I can remember, and I’m not even sure if we ever had a conversation. Pretty young one, as far as I can remember. But that’s about the size of it. And now, unless you have anything else …?’
He raised his eyebrows.
Flynn hated being dismissed, but couldn’t think of anything else to say. Boyle was so sure that the victim’s college life was central to her murder. He missed her and wished she were there. He fell back on an old reliable.
‘If there’s anything you remember, anything at all …’
He reached into his pocket and put his card down on the table, then picked it up again and scribbled his mobile number on the back.
‘Sure.’
Teevan threw it on the desk without looking at it.
‘I’ll get Mary to show you out, yeah?’
Meeting over, he stood up and unleashed the full TV-star grin again.
‘Great to meet you, anyway!’ He shook Flynn’s hand and then grasped O’Doheny’s, holding it for a full seven seconds, staring into her eyes before letting go. She held his gaze coolly.
Flynn felt himself relax for the first time that day. The visit had been feck all use to them. But she wasn’t a bad cop, O’Doheny. Not bad at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Public or Private?
ShockedandScared!!
Hi ladies, just found out I’m up the duff! Shocked and scared just about covers it! Wasn’t planning this at all. Still wondering now what to do, do you all go private on your first babies? My big sis was private and it cost her a fortune but she said it’s the only way to go. Then my cousin said it’s a complete waste of money and that you mightn’t even get a private room. Seriously confused. Any help would be great!!
TAKETHATFAN
WENT PUBLIC ON ALL OF MINE ANYTHING ELSE IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF MONEY. YOU GET TO SEE THE SAME PEOPLE IT’S JUST A NICER WAITING ROOM.
LimerickLass
Have to STRONGLY disagree TTF. I went private and it was wonderful. My consultant was such a lovely man … such a nice bedside manner. I didn’t really ask any questions, just trusted him totally. He was there when they brought me in to be induced and he did the surgery himself when things got hairy and I had to have a section. He was with me every step of the way and then bollocked the nurses till I got a private room! Lovely man.
RedWineMine
Ehm, doesn’t sound that lovely! Bollocking nurses? For something you’re paying four grand for anyway? It’s a tough decision. Private is very dear but the public system is quite busy at the moment. How is your health? It can depend on whethe
r it’s a complicated pregnancy.
SofaBound
I’m public and quite happy with it. Had a bit of a scare earlier this week and I was taken in straight away and looked after. No complaints.
ShockedandScared
Thanks SofaBound! Hope you’re not SofaBound for long! Can I ask which hospital you are in?
No, you cannot. Claire put the iPhone down on her stomach. ‘What’s that, love?’
Matt stuck his head through the double doors, the smell of fresh pasta sauce wafting in after him.
‘Nothing!’
Claire gave a cheery smile. In fairness, he deserved it. He’d come home as promised at four, laden down with Tesco bags and was now cooking dinner, pausing only to tell her not to move a muscle. God bless him, he was trying his best. And when he’d asked her how she’d spent her day she hadn’t lied, exactly. Waved vaguely in the direction of the remote control and mentioned something about a nap. It was all true. She HAD drifted off during Murder She Wrote. She had only turned it on, however, after a twenty-five-minute Murder He Explained conversation with Flynn which had brought her up to speed with his trip to Ireland 24. There didn’t seem to have been much in it. But at least she felt she was still involved.
And after hanging up on Flynn, she’d found her finger wandering, once again to the Netmammy app. She felt like she was getting to know some of the women now. Crazy, really. But, earlier that evening, when she’d heaved herself up off the sofa – again – to go to the toilet, she found herself thinking of something witty one of them had said about all night widdling. And had laughed to herself in the downstairs loo. Luckily Matt hadn’t been around. He’d have thought she was insane for sure. But it was mad, how you got to know them. Or thought you did.
Can Anybody Help Me? Page 20