Darkhouse

by Alex Barclay

  ‘What do you think?’ said Anna, putting her hand on his arm. He pulled it away and shook his head at her. ‘I was just saying we could have some of the kids over at the weekend to help them…’ Joe made a face that said no. He hadn’t looked her in the eye since that morning. The Irish had an expression for when something was unpleasant or grating: ‘going through you’. Everything Anna did or said was going through him. He was allowing her by his side today for the benefit of Shaun…and maybe the neighbours, if he was being honest. And maybe to spite John Miller. Images of Miller and Anna flashed into his mind again. He wondered whether he should care that it all happened almost twenty years ago, but he knew that the love he had for Anna made him care. He shivered. He could feel her looking up at him. His head ached. The pain down both jaws felt mechanical, a constant, driving beat. He continued staring ahead.

  Martha Lawson sat before the coffin of her only child as the plaintive chant rose and fell in the crowded funeral home.

  ‘Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with Thee, blessed art Thou…’ Elderly women ground rosary beads through their fingers, their heads bowed, their prayers confident. Groups of confused teenagers in grey school uniforms muttered the parts they knew, strangely comforted by the ritual, but wondering if any of it really worked. Every now and then their eyes wandered up to the oak coffin at the front of the room, closed in depressing finality. These were children used to an open coffin, grasping the hands of the dead, kissing the cold marble foreheads of grandparents or elderly relatives. Never a sixteen-year-old.

  Martha Lawson leaned awkwardly against her sister, Jean, the life sucked from her face, her eyes dark and blank. She was a devout Catholic, considering every word of the rosary she was saying, because she believed – in God, in prayer, in human goodness. No killer would strip her of her faith. But she didn’t understand. She didn’t know why she was sitting here for the second time in eight years, chief mourner again, first losing her husband to cancer and now her daughter to a murderer. She stared at the coffin, unable to accept that Katie’s brutalised body lay inside. Her little baby, the lid shut on her beautiful girl. When the prayers ended, everyone moved onto the street where a hearse was waiting to take the coffin the short drive to the church.

  Fr Flynn, the elderly parish priest, swept through the service. His words were hollow and weary, delivered too often. He hadn’t learned that with each funeral came fresh grief and sorrow. People began to shift in their seats. Martha was thinking about the following day, when her cousin, Michael, was flying in from Rome to deliver mass. He always found the right words.

  For an hour after the short service, a steady stream of sympathisers moved up the aisle towards Martha. ‘Sorry for your troubles,’ they muttered, shaking her hand, working their way along the short row.

  Tall wooden stakes burned in a line on the grass outside the lighthouse. Brendan, the photographer employed by Vogue, stood in front of them holding out a light meter. Shaun muttered something and kept walking into the house. Joe looked at Anna.

  ‘There was nothing I could do,’ she said. ‘He was hired weeks ago.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Joe.

  ‘I’ll be down there for the evening,’ she said.

  The sun shone the next morning through the icy cold, offering nothing more than a talking point for awkward mourners. They moved into the small stone church at the edge of the village, filling it, then crowding into the side aisles. The bell rang, the congregation stood and Fr Michael appeared with two altar boys walking behind him. He tapped the microphone.

  ‘Please be seated.’ He looked up, then spoke softly. ‘When Katie was three years old, I taught her two words from a Reader’s Digest list. One was empathy and the other was encourage. The next day I asked her what was the word for when you understood what is happening to someone else. She looked up at me and frowned. She couldn’t remember. I said nothing. I simply waited, no hints. Then she reached out her little hand and gave me a smack on the arm and said, “Encourage me, Michael!”

  ‘Today, in the face of this terribly tragedy, yes, we can empathise with the family and friends of Katie Lawson. But more importantly, we can encourage. We can encourage people in their faith to be strong for each other, to be strong for Katie. It’s what she would want. I know that the songs chosen here today by her boyfriend, Shaun and by her school friends, are positive songs, songs of hope and support and, as I said, encouragement.’ He nodded to the small group on the balcony and Katie’s tearful replacement whose shaking voice struggled through her first solo.

  Fr Michael spoke again. ‘We are united here today for many reasons: in our love for Katie, in our support of Martha and the Lawson family, Shaun, in our faith, in hope, but also because not one of us can understand why this happened. How a sixteen-year-old girl who was full of life, who had so much to give, indeed, who gave so much to everyone, could be taken away from us so suddenly. What hatred would lie in someone’s heart to make them commit such an act of cruelty and violence?’ He stopped.

  The only sound to be heard through the silence was the journalists at the back, scribbling on spiral notebooks.

  ‘We may never know,’ he continued. Several people looked instinctively towards Frank Deegan and Richie Bates. ‘But what we do know is that we can’t let hatred take hold of our hearts. Because hatred will make us suffer. Our hearts should be love, filled with goodness as Katie’s heart was.’

  Joe was the tallest of the pallbearers, stooped now to accommodate the five other men, arms over shoulders to carry the light coffin. The crowd, led by Martha, shuffled behind them. They moved through the cemetery, forced to stand along the borders of other graves, all eyes drawn to the two foot wide, six foot deep trench and the coffin that lay beside it.

  Shaun found himself standing closest to the grave. He couldn’t connect the person he loved to what was happening at that moment. It suddenly struck him that her body was now in that box. She was physically inches away from him, but she was dead and in a box. He wondered what she looked like; did she fill it or was she tiny and lost in the satin pleats? He started to sob uncontrollably.

  Anyone who managed to hold it together at the mass broke down in the stark reality of a coffin being lowered irretrievably into the ground and a boy’s shaking hand as he tossed a single white rose onto the polished lid.

  After the burial, most of the mourners moved to the Lawson house. Neighbours had been preparing food and drinks since early morning. Anna was passing through the hall when she saw John Miller slip away from the long queue for the bathroom and push his way into the back garden. She was disgusted at what he was about to do, but at least she was the only one who saw him leave. When he came out from behind the shed, she was waiting for him.

  ‘What’s going on with you, John?’ she spat. ‘What have you done with your life?’

  ‘Jesus, I was just taking a piss,’ he said, smiling around at no-one.

  His fly was undone. She nodded at it, fuming. He winked at her.

  ‘You need help,’ she said. He looked like he was about to say something, but he turned and walked away, weaving a crooked path back to the house.

  Richie and Frank were huddled in a corner of the hallway, cups of tea and sandwiches in their hands.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ said Joe, ‘but—’

  ‘We’re not interested at this stage,’ said Frank, without looking up.

  Joe was taken aback. ‘But—’

  ‘No, give us a laugh,’ said Richie. ‘What’s your latest theory?’

  Joe stood in front of them with his map and felt pathetic. But he knew he was right about this.

  ‘He’s got his map,’ said Richie.

  ‘Look,’ said Joe. ‘Let me get this over with.’

  When Joe finished his theory about Mae Miller, Richie spoke:

  ‘How do you know none of the other neighbours heard anything?’

  ‘Because I asked them,’ said Joe, knowing where this was going.

  ‘S
tay out of it!’ snapped Richie, raising then quickly lowering his voice. ‘What’s to say Katie didn’t visit the graveyard, then walk back on her usual route past Mae Miller’s and oh – what was that again – end up buried in your back fucking garden?’

  Frank winced.

  ‘That forest is like public land, you son of a bitch,’ said Joe. ‘And what you’re saying about where she went just does not make sense. And you know it, you stubborn little shit.’

  Richie was fuming. Frank stepped in. ‘Well, whatever happened,’ he said, calmly, ‘she went past the Grants’ and Mae Miller heard a scream.’

  Joe shook his head and walked away.

  Frank turned to Richie. ‘You need to relax.’

  ‘What do you mean, relax?’

  ‘You’re as defensive as…as I don’t know what. That’s not the right way to carry on in a job like this. I’ll be gone next year and I don’t want things stirred up around the village in my last few months.’

  ‘I’m not being rude, but yeah, you’ll be gone. I’ll still be here. My career is my life and I don’t want any unsolveds marking it. The Lucchesis are fucking blow-ins. That man or his son – or both of them – look dodgy as fuck from where I’m standing.’

  ‘Where you’re standing, Richie, is at a funeral. Remember that and get a grip on yourself.’ He took a sip out of his tea. ‘If Joe Lucchesi is “dodgy” as you say, we still have to go about our job properly. And I’ll tell you one thing, I’d rather have an unsolved case than a wrongful conviction on my conscience. This is an investigation out of Waterford, anyway. Your future career is not going to be based on whether or not—’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Listen to me. You don’t listen. What matters in the long run is how you handle yourself and other people. You need to be patient. You can’t bully and push your way through. Remember, just by the job you’re doing, you’re starting off on the wrong foot with most people. There isn’t as much respect as there was in my day. When I was training in Templemore, one of the detectives said “If you walk down the street putting tickets on every car as you go, the whole town thinks you’re a bastard. If you walk down the street and don’t put a ticket on any car, the whole town thinks you’re a bastard.”’

  ‘So we’re bastards,’ said Richie. ‘End of story.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s up to us to try and make people see we’re not.’

  ‘Could you be bothered, though?’

  ‘I have been bothered and I’m proud of that,’ said Frank.

  Anna crept down the stairs into Shaun’s bedroom. He lay on the bed in oversized jeans and a baseball shirt, his feet hanging over the end. He was asleep, his cheek red from the heat. His arm was stretched out on the pillow in the same pose she’d seen ever since he was a child. He was still a child, she thought. Tears slid down her cheeks. Shaun’s eyes opened slowly and he rolled onto his back. Anna saw it all happen in his face, that dreadful awakening when all the world seems so right and in seconds is all so wrong. His face fell. He sat up against the headboard, drew his knees to his chest and wept. Anna’s heart lurched. She walked over to the bed, sat beside him and pulled him into her arms. He broke down, every sob cutting through her. She rocked him back and forth, but said nothing. There was nothing she could say. A beautiful sixteen-year-old girl doesn’t belong in heaven, there was no happy release, there was no joyous, spiritual lesson to learn from this.

  ‘I love you,’ she simply whispered into his damp hair. ‘We love you, sweetheart.’

  After a while, the sobbing slowed down and he said, ‘I don’t get it. I don’t get it. Why would…? Why would anyone? She’s so perfect, she—’ He wept again and for two hours Anna held him in her arms, stroking his hair, until he finally drifted off again and she lay his head gently onto the pillow.

  She went into her bedroom and broke down herself as she pulled off her shirt, wet from his tears.

  It was almost midnight and Danaher’s was still packed with people who had been there since the funeral or who had followed on after Martha’s house.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Ray as Joe left his bar stool for the outdoor toilet. It was only when he stood up that he felt the impact of the alcohol on his empty stomach. All he’d had that day was one sour milkshake he’d made himself in the morning, six painkillers, two LV8s and three pints.

  The stall with the door was taken, so he walked into the other one, unzipping his fly, waiting for his body to relax. He rocked gently on his heels.

  ‘Guess I bagged the private one,’ he heard from the next stall.

  ‘I guess you did,’ said Joe, still waiting for something to happen.

  ‘You know, you could always…’

  Joe prepared, as you do with a stranger, to laugh politely at whatever gag was about to be made.

  ‘…wait and come in here if you need to pinch one off. I’ll keep the seat warm.’

  Joe felt trapped into following through on the polite laugh. His lower body was following through on nothing.

  Then silence. He could hear scratching against the wood of the stall door. Then, ‘You’re not havin’ much luck in there, are you?’ The voice sounded closer, like it was coming from higher up the thin partition wall and muffled, like the cheek was pressed against it. Joe froze. Then he heard the door beside him creak open, scraping against the cement floor.

  ‘Top o’ the morning to you,’ came the voice.

  Back in the bar, Ray heard the start-up screech and boom of Danaher’s tannoy system.

  ‘Could the owner of car registration number 92W 16573, please get out in that car park and get the damn thing out of the way,’ said Ed.

  ‘Jesus, you don’t have to eat the microphone,’ shouted Ray.

  ‘Shut up, you pup,’ said Ed into the microphone again. Ray got up, pulling his car keys out of his pocket.

  ‘And it’s your car,’ laughed Ed as Ray walked out the door.

  ‘Nice hair,’ said Ray to the man standing outside by his car. His hair was blond, short and spiked at the top, poker straight and long at the back.

  ‘This your car?’ said the man. ‘Then move it.’

  ‘Where’s the fire?’ said Ray, getting into his car. ‘And will your hairdresser be at the stake?’

  ‘Move your fuckin’ car,’ said the man, shifting from one foot to the other, his hands buried in his pockets, his head bowed.

  Ray reversed out of his spot, leaving the van in front of it free to move.

  ‘Whoa, we’re halfway the-ere, oh-oh, livin’ on a pray-er,’ Ray sang on his way back towards the bar.

  Suddenly a hand grabbed his shoulder from behind and spun him around. The two men hovered in front of each other, neither one committing. Ray took a step forward, but was pushed back hard. He made an awkward grab for the man’s jacket to steady himself, but it was too late. The man jumped into his van and sped out of the car park. Ray sat up, bewildered. Then something caught his eye. A small golden flash against the black tarmac.

  Joe was back at the bar with a fresh pint.

  ‘What happened to you?’ asked Joe when he saw Ray.

  ‘Some fucking wacko in the car park. American, of course. Total weirdo. Mullet, check shirt, skintight jeans, big boots. Good lookin’ guy, but definitely nuts. Gave me a few digs for slagging his hair…’

  ‘Not the hair slagging. No! No! Help!’ said Hugh, raising his hands in faux terror.

  ‘I thought I was great,’ said Ray. ‘Anyway, look what he left behind. A bit of gay jewellery.’ He threw something onto the bar. Joe looked down and in an instant his chest felt like it would explode. He couldn’t speak. Everything slowed down. This was something he couldn’t understand. He looked again. He tried to work out how this was happening. In seconds, several theories came and went in his mind, none of them right. He grabbed the tiny object and ran for the door, knowing he was too late. He stopped in the doorway under the bare porch bulb and held it up to the light. He saw the familiar outline, the gold and maroon, the wings, the feat
hers, the hawk in flight, its pointed beak holding the tiniest specks of green paint scratched from the single stall door.

  Joe rushed home and stood outside to catch his breath before he put his key in the door. The house was quiet. He went into the kitchen and saw Shaun sitting at the table, staring at the fridge through swollen eyes. A yellow taxi-cab magnet held a photo of him and Katie taken during the summer, his tanned face pressed up against her pale one. Their heads were tilted back and his face was screwed up trying to kiss her cheek. Joe walked over to him and put a hand gently on his shoulder. Shaun released the breath he had been holding in, got up and left the room.

  Joe went into the den, sat at the desk and picked up the phone, punching in Danny’s direct line. He hung up halfway through. He turned on the computer, clicked on Safari and the Google homepage filled the screen. He typed in three words: hawk, pin, flight. He got hits on the Wright Brothers and Kitty Hawk, Black Hawks and pilot pins. He tried again, going for the literal: maroon, gold, hawk, pin. He saw sites on spotted hawks, maroon orioles and gold buffalo pins. He went more generic with Texas, hawk, pin, but just got hits for wrestling.com, a lapel pin website and a Texas Hawk Watches site. He wasn’t going to go further than the first page, but he clicked again on a wildlife site by a man called Larry: larryloveswildlife.com. Larryneedstogetalife.com, thought Joe. Two colour photos gradually loaded onto the screen, the first showing four men who looked to be in their early fifties, wearing treepatterned camouflage gear with cameras and binoculars hanging around their necks. He read the caption.

  Me, Dick, Bobby and Jimmy, Nueces County, Texas where we spotted the first Golden Eagle of the season (yup, you read that right!)

  Good for you, thought Joe. He scrolled down to the second image, the same four men from the waist up.