‘You are probably wondering what our Jamesie has to do with you, but I’ll come to that. I just want you to know what it was like and how it all happened, like.’
Anna sipped at the weak tea. The fire settled in the hearth, burning low, while rain began to fall softy outside.
‘The seventies and early eighties were brutal times. The likes of you, living across the water, and being so young, wouldn’t know what it was like to have our streets patrolled by soldiers. Never mind that wee boys acting as hard men, ruled our communities. Wee boys who grew up to have access to guns and too much power. It seemed that one day they’d be out playing with a make shift go-kart, and before the week was out they’d been fingered to come in and talk to one of the big men. Flattered, to be asked to do a message, they felt important and in the know. But they soon found themselves delivering bullets and throwing petrol bombs.’
‘They knew how to work them, bring them into the fold and brainwash them into thinking their way was the only way. And if anyone stepped out of line, they answered to the same boys they’d looked up to sitting in a darkened back room in a pub. They just had to say the word and then they were summoned up to some piece of wasteland to get a bullet in the back of their knees. Rough justice dealt out by a pack of power mad, self-appointed crime lords. Fear and power are a heady combination. They got off on it.’
She paused to poke the embers of the fire, placing a log on it to keep it going. The rain had turned to sleet and the afternoon light was ebbing away.
‘Our Jamesie was seen as a bit of a mouth piece. They wanted him to front their campaign, to speak to the papers and the television crews. They sent reporters from all over to film the civil rights marches. For once, our wee shit-hole of a town was on the big map, and as far as Jamesie was concerned, all we had to do was to speak out and be heard while the spotlight was on us. He thought if the rest of the world saw the conditions we lived in, heard the injustices of the voting system and knew that Catholics were being downtrodden then they would have to intervene and fix it.’
‘My mother always said he was a dreamer. If his head isn’t in a book it’s in the clouds,’ she’d say.
‘God, my tea’s stone cold, do you want a top up?’ Before Anna could respond, she poured more tea into her cup from the pottery style teapot. ‘Well Jamesie wasn’t one to bow down to anyone, so when the big men came around demanding that he stuck to their script, our Jamesie told them where to go. He wasn’t interested in playing by their sectarian rules. He was out to speak up for anyone treated badly by the system. Even though it looked plain as day that Catholics were put upon, he didn’t have a bigoted bone in his body, and saw it as a working-class struggle. He was peace loving. He had no time for guns and bombs, and even though Bloody Sunday made many a young fella join up, he knew violence wasn’t the solution.’
‘So anyways, I was fourteen when all this was going on. We’d been burnt out of our house, forced to move back to the Markets where my mother had come from. I was at an age when the boys start to notice you. I’d hair down to my waist and a great wee figure. Me and Rosie Curran, she was my friend, would go out walking the streets knowing full well we were turning heads.’
‘Trouble was, I caught the attention of the wrong one. One of the fellas our Jamesie had talked back to, over the civil rights marches, took a shine to me. Sean was his name. Sean Healy. He’d a reputation as being a bit of bad fella. Course I knew very little of this then. Alls I knew is that the best-looking fella from the road had asked for me to meet him. Never mind that he was nineteen and I’s only a slip of a girl. You nearly got a crick in your neck looking up at him, he was that tall. Even in heels I barely reached his shoulder. He had eyes that smoldered, burnt right through you, they did.’
‘Before I knew it, he was buying me presents, perfume, a wee silver necklace. Turned my head, so he did. Then within three months I was pregnant with you. Scared out of my wits. Thought it was the end of the world. Little did I know it was to get worse.’
Anna could scarcely breath. Her shoulder ached from the long drive, and she felt like the room was closing in on her. As if ghosts from a past she didn’t know she shared, were standing nearby, listening.
Kathleen took a sip of her tea and went on, ‘Word got out that Sean had been seen getting out of an unmarked police car. He was being watched, in case he had turned informer.’
‘He told me he had been lifted and asked for information but hadn’t gave them anything. They’d pictures of me and him and said they would charge him with being with a minor if he didn’t bring them something – names, times, places.’
‘You couldn’t understand the fear of being caught like that. If his own ones thought he was passing on information, he would have been taken away and shot without a second thought. It was only a matter of time.’
‘So, he tells me he has to go away for a while over to England or maybe America, he didn’t know. Lay low until it all dies down. Course little did I know in order to get out of the country, he had to give the peelers something to go on. So what did the bastard do but tell them our Jamesie was involved. Told them that he had moved guns for the Ra back in November, and that they could find the stash in blocked up walls of the place Jamesie worked.’
‘They came and dragged Jamesie from his bed in the wee small hours of a December night. Beat him badly, my ma and da begging for mercy, the wee uns all howling and me clutching at my belly, barely three months gone and somehow knowing deep down that this was my doing, that Sean was behind it.’
‘We never saw Jamesie again. He was found hung in his cell two weeks after they lifted him.’
Anna sensed the pain of Kathleen’s story. It was a world so far removed from her childhood of warmth and safety, love and security. Yet this is what she had come from. These were her people.
The light outside had faded away to an indigo darkness, illuminated only by snowfall. Kathleen got up to pull the curtains and switch on a lamp that sat on a small table at the side of the fire.
‘That’s a bad night out there. You better watch driving back to Belfast in that weather.’
‘But what happened next? What did you do about the baby? About me?’
‘Another day child, I’m passed myself with emotion. I feel like a wrung-out dishcloth.’
Anna tried to hide her disappointment. To have come so close to knowing the full story, but she could see Kathleen was worn out.
‘I can come again? Next week maybe?’ Anna asked, not even trying to hide the pleading in her voice.
‘I’ll call you. See if I’m up to it. I haven’t been too well. Heart trouble. I had stents put in a while back but the doctor says they need to take me in again see what going on,’ she spoke as if she was frightened, of what may lay ahead. Anna thought of Camille and the long days spent in hospital wards. The waiting. The uncertainty.
They said their goodbyes and Anna faced the bleak drive home, her head full of the intimidation, terror and trepidation of the late seventies in Belfast. Questions burning in her mind and her biological family and thinking of the spectre of Sean Healy, and what happened to him when he left Belfast and Kathleen behind.
She called up Thomas’ number on her phone.
Her voice was wavering with pent up emotion, ‘Tell me we’ve had a break. Anything at this point would do.’ She needed cop talk to ease the pain she felt, pain for Kathleen, Jamesie and herself.
He made notes as he worked. Taking measurements: length, breadth, recording the thickness of the muzzle and the limbs. His journal was full of such projects, carefully recorded over the cream pages. How he would love to have such a record of the girls but it was too risky. He wouldn’t give them anything so tangible to use against him should they get close.
The fox was laid out on the bench, primed and ready. Using calipers and a sharp knife he began the skinning process. He worked the blade under the skin, continuing to cut on up to the first rib being careful not to slice the flesh retaining the bowels. The sk
in of the fox was thin so he needed to be careful to not allow the knife to slip through. He sliced the ears off exposing two lumps of gristle beside the hole and set them aside for later. He rubbed the beast down with preservative making sure to reach all the crevices.
He worked through the evening with the fox taking care when removing the pelt and ensuring it was well, dried and prepared. The head had been skinned, the brains and eyes scooped out and the skull poisoned to prevent growth of any nasty unwanted bacteria. Finally, the legs had been drilled for the wiring and the rods to be inserted and he was now choosing the eyeglasses. Then all else was done, with a deft hand he had sutured the skin back in place. It would make a beautiful piece when it was finished. The dark orange pelt was soft to the touch and the ears sat alert as if it was listening carefully, ready to pounce.
How he longed to have a better facility, a workplace purposely designed. The old barn had been sufficient up until now, but really, he needed better refrigeration, metal shelving, a good work surface for skinning and place to hang hides that wouldn’t risk stretching. A place to create his final masterpiece.
35
Five days’ recuperation had been Anna’s limit. By day four she was itching to be back at the station, whether her injuries were better on not. Thomas filled her in on what had been going on in her absence. Another punishment shooting in North Belfast, a fifteen-year-old boy taken up an alleyway to have his knee caps blown off. His girlfriend had been at the scene. There was a feeling of frustration and anger that the cycles of old were replaying like a record that just wouldn’t come to an end.
The night before, she had had to deal with Declan’s insistence that they weren’t doing enough.
‘What was he saying to her to make her cry?’ he asked, the urgency and stress showing in his face.
He was frantic, his eyes imploring her to look at the screen. They were looking at video footage from the wedding. ‘Look, she is pulling at his arm as he tries to walk off. It has to mean something, doesn’t it?’
‘Please, Declan, calm down,’ Anna said. ‘They had an altercation, we already know about this. Finnegan claims Esme had too much to drink and he told her off. Told her to behave as it was a family wedding, not a night out with her friends.’
‘That doesn’t add up. Esme had a few drinks but she wasn’t doing anything to draw attention to herself. Izzy or I would have noticed. And Rory wouldn’t be telling her off, that wouldn’t be his way. He’d be more likely to have a word with Lara and tell her to step in and talk to her sister.’
He rewound the video again.
‘Can’t we isolate the sound, hear what they are saying?’
‘No, it was a long shot, but we’ve already tried. The tech guys said the microphone wouldn’t have picked up their voices. There was music playing and one hundred and twenty odd people mulling around.’
She could sense that Declan was feeling the tightening grip of frustration.
‘I’ve seen Esme and Rory interact hundreds of times and never once considered that anything could be going on. Now, I’m not so sure. Why else would they be quarreling at the wedding? Had Esme threatened to tell Lara what Rory was really like? Had that been why she had been killed? Had Rory been the one to take her life? To squeeze her last breath from her body and leave her on that damp mossy ground?’
Anna took his hand, ‘Declan, I know this is over-powering. You are desperate to get answers, but you have to trust me. We are on this. Let us do our job.’
‘Listen to me Anna, you need to bring him in for questioning,’ he said.
‘Declan, please I know what I’m doing. We’ve already talked to him. Our inquiries are ongoing. That’s all I can say at this stage,’ she could hear how hallow her words sounded. ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve already crossed too many lines here. You shouldn’t be this involved in the investigation.’
‘Fuck’s sake, Anna this is my daughter we are talking about!’
Declan opened his eyes. Esme. She was always the first thought. The knowledge of her death lay lurking in his consciousness, never far from the surface and rarely silenced totally by sleep. But something had woken him, a dark dream, a fleeting thought in his sleep. Whatever it was, it now evaded him.
It was becoming easier to fall asleep at night – the couple of sleeping tablets helped - but increasingly, he was finding himself awake around 4.00 a.m. He needed to pee, but he couldn’t be bothered with the effort of getting into the chair. His hip ached and his shoulders hummed with pain. Low and deep but nearly always present. He doubted anyone realised he still experienced pain from his injuries. Pain clinic doctors didn’t offer much hope of it ever being fully resolved.
The house was still. Izzy had gone to bed around eleven. She had cooked supper for them both, and they had eaten in companionable silence. Neither wishing to talk about Esme. They had watched the local news, an ammunition haul in County Tyrone, a major drugs find in Coleraine and an item on organised dog fighting.
As they sat in the living room with the curtains drawn against the autumn night, watching the fire glowing in the hearth, he was almost tempted to ask about her insistence on going to work, the weekend spent at her sister Caroline’s, the self-assured way she carried herself, and the containment of her grief; all of it told him she had someone else to cry to. He was surplus to requirements.
All those years together, and he still couldn’t figure her out. He knew many considered her cold and distant. His mother had never thought much of her. She thought Izzy was too self-involved, too caught up in her career. He hated how she was always so quick to judge the way they had brought up the girls – relying on a series of child-minders and crèches in the early years. Declan used to defend Izzy, telling his mother that she was a great mother to his girls and why shouldn’t she have her career. But part of him had always hoped she would stay at home, write academic books and become the sort of wife his father would have thought was perfection, dinner on the table, the children freshly bathed and in their pajamas – something very far from their normality.
Later, when he’d come around from the shock of his injuries and was working hard at his rehabilitation, Izzy had been there for him, but he saw something die in her. He had often thought of what she had lost that day.
He checked his phone for the time. 4.17 a.m. He wondered if he would see Anna today. His emotions were all over the place. He knew he had no business getting involved with her, but felt helpless to resist. Being close to her was like having a stake in life again. To feel emotions and sensations he hadn’t allowed himself to feel for years. He also had to admit, being with her was like having a foothold in the investigation. Not that she gave too much away. He was aware of the risks she was taking in being involved with him. The cost could be her career and he had the feeling that without the job, like him, she’d be lost.
He sensed she was holding out on him. That there was something of significance she wasn’t telling him. It was in the way she had asked about the car bomb and the aftermath, how she had questioned him about old Nelson Brogan. Did he have any contact with Declan after he had left the force? Was there unfinished business? Questions that if a shrink had asked him, he’d shut them down. But he’d humoured her, kept her talking, hoping he’d find out what was behind the questions. Nelson Brogan, last he’d heard, was putting time in at a nursing home. He was hardly in a position to be out murdering.
Something funny was going on with Rory too. He couldn’t pretend the logs of calls between him and Esme had meant nothing. Yet he was frightened and didn’t want to acknowledge, even to himself, that Rory may have meant more to Esme than simply her sister’s husband. Property developers in this place were notoriously shifty. Belfast had so many back-room deals being done with repossessed property being hocked off to the bidder offering the biggest back hander. Could he see Rory being guilty of greasing some council officials palm? Yeah, he had to admit, in a heartbeat. But hurt Esme? He couldn’t be so sure, now that the he had time to process every
thing.
He thought of Esme’s plans. She’d talked about going to university and then moving to San Francisco for a year. Maybe work in marketing or the media after travelling for a bit. See the world. Big plans all laid out in front of her. When she was little, maybe seven or eight, she had loved Little Mermaid. He remembered her singing ‘Under the Sea’, so many times that he’d find himself humming it while at work. Then he’d smile to himself, as it would make him think of his little girl shimmering and sashaying in her mermaid costume while she sang along to the song.
At one point, she had wanted to be a vet, to tend to injured and sickly animals and set up an animal hospital and a dog-grooming business. Or had that been Lara? He hated that sometimes memories between the two girls became intertwined.
36
Anna would never get used to seeing a dead body. Some were more upsetting than others. Some were even mundane – the old woman found after a fall on her doorstep; some were gruesome – the carnage of a car accident, the stabbing up an alley way following a Friday night scuffle on Churchill Way, the drug over dose in a squat in Cathays, the child drowned in the Wharf. None were pleasant, but there were definite degrees of distress and disturbance.
Little Bird: a serial killer thriller Page 24