Her Name Was Rose

by Claire Allan

  Our baby. My baby. I was shocked by the strength of maternal love I felt for him. The strength of feeling that I needed to protect him. I needed to make his life happy. Somewhere between pushing him into the world and holding him in my arms for the first time – my life had come into sharp focus.

  This boy – this baby. He was the love of my life. No one else could be. He was all that mattered. Not the big house. Not the fancy car. Not the successful husband. Not the increasingly tiring battle to try and make Cian happy – to make him love me again the way he used to. The battle to make him feel less disgusted with me.

  Because that’s what I saw when I looked in his eyes. Disgust. Or something like it. Something that told me I was less than he was. I had my place and I had no doubt – none – that he loved me in his own way but it wasn’t a love I wanted a part of. It could be cruel.

  Maybe this baby would change that? This gorgeous, innocent creature that was half me and half him. Maybe it would soothe whatever had gone wrong between us.

  He had cried when he held him for the first time. Kissed his head. Cooed at the midwife, asking her was he not the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. He had told me I was a clever girl. That he loved me. That I amazed him. He had kissed me, my forehead, and his tears had dropped onto my cheek and I – flushed from the exertion of labour and childbirth – had to fight the urge to push him away. I felt myself start to shake, my lungs fighting as they gasped for air.

  ‘This happens sometimes,’ the midwife had said, soothingly, as my panic turned into me retching and emptying whatever stale water had been lying in my stomach into a kidney bowl. ‘The body goes into shock.’

  She took the gas and air from me, attached some oxygen, gave me an antiemetic, which left me woozy, but so desperately wanting to hold my baby – needing to hold my baby – but not being able to.

  I watched Cian walk around the room with him and my gut instinct screamed that I wanted him to give that baby to me. My baby. My protectiveness overwhelmed me.

  When the midwife left and just the three of us remained, Cian sat down beside me and he cried again – rocking back and forward, holding Jack as if he was the most fragile thing in the world. He apologised over and over for his behaviour over the last few months. He told me he knew he had been wrong. He knew he had hurt me. He knew he needed help.

  ‘I’ll get it, Rose. For you and for Jack. I’ll change. Please believe me that I’ll change. Give me the chance to do it. For us, for him.’

  He nodded to my baby – our baby – and I knew he deserved the chance to try. Didn’t he? Every baby deserved a father and he seemed so contrite. This could be the wake-up call we had been waiting for. He had more than me to lose now.

  And he could change – I knew that, believed it deep inside. After all, he hadn’t always been difficult to live with. He hadn’t always been so angry. He had loved me once – desperately and passionately. There was something there to make me fall so deeply in love with him so fast. I had to believe he could be that man I met that day in the library again. The Cian who made me laugh. The Cian who kissed my freckles. Who told me I was his everything.

  ‘Jack deserves for us to keep trying, doesn’t he?’ he said. ‘We can come through this. Our imperfections will make us more perfect in the long run, Rose. He’s all that matters now. This baby. Jack. We have to put him first – do what we need to do for him.’

  He was right – I needed to put Jack first. I needed to give him the chance to have the father I knew Cian could be.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Emily

  My flat felt less like home that afternoon. It felt cold, too quiet. Lonely. Not that it hadn’t been lonely before – but it felt more so now.

  Everything had changed in the last twenty-four hours. Changed utterly – isn’t that how the saying goes? Even though the towel I had used to dry my hair the night before was still lying, damp, on the bedroom floor. Even though my make-up was still scattered around my dressing table, my work uniform discarded over the back of my chair. Even though the alarm clock in my room was still set twenty minutes too fast – a habit I started at university and had never got out of. Even though my fridge still had just half a pint of milk, two eggs and some ham – which had curled a little at the side. Even though the curtains in the living room were still pulled closed, everything felt out of sync. As if it didn’t quite fit any more. This was no longer the only place I felt at home. There was somewhere else – and someone else who would become a home to me.

  It had felt like a wrench to leave Cian when he had come home from the police station. I could see he was tired – drained by what he had heard. He had stalked in, his tie loosened, his shirt sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up to his elbows. He had walked straight to Jack, who was lost in an episode of Bing, and had pulled him onto his knee and sobbed into his hair. The poor child had looked stricken – scared by the outpouring of emotion from his father – and had burst into a flood of tears, kicking and flailing to get away from his father, which only served to put Cian into worse form.

  ‘Jack,’ he bawled. ‘Sit still, for Christ’s sake.’ The child just wailed harder, slipping from Cian’s knee and toddling to where I stood, wrapping himself around my legs. I lifted him, jiggled him up and down while all the time looking at Cian, trying to judge if he would divert his anger and frustration in my direction.

  ‘Ssh, baby,’ I soothed. ‘Daddy just wants a cuddle from his best boy. He isn’t cross with you, not one bit.’

  Jack peeked out at his daddy, sniffing and hiccuping as I continued to jiggle him.

  ‘I’m not cross, baby. Not with you, never with you.’ Cian stood up and walked to where I stood and put his arms out for his son, who, if a little reluctantly, reached over and jumped into his father’s arms. ‘Why don’t you show me what you and Emily have been doing while I’ve been out?’ He put Jack down, and knelt beside him, their two heads bowed together over the building blocks. Once Jack was happily playing with his toys Cian looked to me, his face still tense, and said it had been worse than he thought it could be.

  ‘They think I paid Kevin McDaid to kill Rose. And then they think I killed him too.’

  ‘What? How? Are they charging you?’ I asked, my eyes wide, my heart thumping, or breaking, or something I didn’t understand.

  He shook his head. ‘No. Or at least not yet, they said. That Bradley one was so bloody smug about it. They don’t have evidence, my solicitor said – not enough to charge me anyway but that doesn’t stop them putting the pressure on. But they asked me about money. They say they want to see my financial records. They say they have evidence money was paid into Kevin McDaid’s bank account.’

  Ingrid Devlin had told me the same – that money was involved somewhere in the equation but I had dismissed what she said as another of her lies. Now it was all sickeningly real – except that none of it made sense.

  ‘But this is madness. What motive would you have for killing Rose? For the love of God, you adored that woman. Everyone with a set of eyes in their head could see that.’

  ‘That’s what I said to them. It makes me sick to the very pit of my stomach that they think I could have hurt her. That they think I would have paid some messed up little shite like McDaid to kill her? I never would have. I only ever wanted the very best for Rose. I gave her everything – the house, the car, the clothes, the jewellery. She wanted for nothing. I gave her the world and I’d have given her the moon and stars too if I could have.’ He shook his head and walked to the kitchen area where he put on the kettle. ‘You know what, Emily? You’re right – sometimes people just want to believe the worst of you, no matter what evidence they have in front of them to the contrary. The police are taking the lazy approach. It’s often the husband or partner therefore it must be the husband in this case. The detectives in my books could do a better job, and they’re bloody fictional.’

  ‘And McDaid? How? How would you be involved?’

  Cian shook his head. ‘I’ve n
o idea,’ he said, turning to take two cups out of the cupboard, dropping tea bags into them. ‘All I know is that I didn’t pay that man any money. I wouldn’t have pissed on him if he was on fire.’

  He looked so utterly forlorn that I walked over and hugged him. I felt the weight of his head rest on top of mine, and then a soft kiss on my hair. ‘I thought I had been through the worst of this nightmare,’ he said. ‘But it looks like it’s only just beginning.’

  ‘You can get through all this,’ I said pulling back to look in his eyes. ‘I’m here to help you. And Ingrid Devlin will get your story out there for anyone who is prepared to listen. The greatest form of defence is attack – keep calm and let people know the real you.’

  Cian had hugged me again and we drank our tea before he called a taxi to take me home. I wondered now, as I pottered around the flat, if Ingrid Devlin was there yet. Was he coping? I wished I could be there to support him, but I knew that wouldn’t look right. I had to put his needs first. It was such a shame Rose’s family weren’t behind him. They should be speaking up for the man their daughter loved. But Cian had told me things had been strained between him and his in-laws for a long time. Just like Owen had, Rose’s parents had thought their daughter could do much better than an aspiring writer. Of course, they had tried to build bridges when he became a success but Rose had told him she wasn’t going to forgive them that easily. They could take their snobbery and stick it, she had told him. She allowed them access to Jack, but, as Cian said, that was more to do with the goodness of her heart rather than as a result of anything they had done.

  Cian’s own parents both suffered with health woes, and had relocated to a small village in Cork. They only made the trip north when they absolutely had to. (The funeral of their daughter-in-law was not considered necessary travel – although they had sent a floral tribute and offered Cian and Jack a room to escape to for a while.)

  So Cian was essentially alone and my heart ached for him – as it did for my own loneliness.

  *

  The headline that Cian Grahame just wanted to be left to live in peace to grieve for his wife had been splashed all over the internet by early morning. A picture of him holding that same blasted picture of Rose that stared down from me from the wall in work had been shared widely over social media with click bait links urging people to click to find out ‘the haunting story not even this award-winning writer could make up’.

  I had clicked on the link – of course I had. Desperate to read what the article said.

  It was painful to read his story, and not just because of the sadness that was evident in every word, but also because it was so very clear she would always be a massive part of his life.

  Maybe sadness isn’t the right word though. Maybe jealousy was?

  On my walk to work I stopped to buy a hard copy of the paper – wanting to hold it in my hands, have it to keep. Of course, the story was the talk of the newsagent. An old woman with pursed lips and her arms folded over her ample bosom was talking about how it was ‘a sin that the wee baby was getting caught up in the middle of such a mess’.

  The newsagent was saying it was terrible that Cian was having his name dragged through the mud, just because he was someone who had done well for himself. This garnered a few nods. A harassed-looking mother, trying to placate a child in a buggy with a bag of crisps, said the police would be better fixed trying to catch the ‘real bad guys’ – like whoever it was that had burgled her house a few weeks ago, taking her Christmas money and leaving her seven-year-old so traumatised he had started wetting the bed.

  ‘He’s a handsome devil all the same,’ the large-bosomed woman exclaimed. ‘He won’t be short of female company to help him raise that wee boy.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d rather have his wife back,’ the newsagent said and they all nodded sagely, muttering that it was just terrible and awful and fierce.

  I just stood silently, taking it all in. I had felt a little smug when the old woman had commented on how handsome Cian was – thinking that I knew exactly how handsome he was. How his body was sculpted under the striped shirt and jeans he was wearing in that picture. How his arms were strong and toned and made me feel so very safe. How he looked his most handsome when he was falling asleep, his long lashes just like Jack’s, fluttering closed.

  As expected, when I got to work the majority of the staff were talking about the article, crowded in the staffroom over a copy of the paper.

  Tori read out a passage and they made the appropriate sympathetic noises. A few wiped away tears. ‘I never realised the police were giving him such a hard time,’ another said. ‘That’s so unfair.’

  The nods of agreement ran around the room while I stood, a small – hopefully discreet – smile on my face. While meeting Ingrid Devlin had brought my greatest fears into focus, it seemed it was a good thing after all. She had made Cian sound like more of a saint than Rose.

  Donna had scolded us for gossiping but had a good read of the article herself, turning to ask no one in particular: ‘So they really think he had something to do with Rose’s death? I wonder what evidence they have?’

  The article had been light on the details of any police claims about evidence, running only the official line that the investigations had been upgraded and police were following several lines of inquiry. It would be ‘inappropriate’ to comment further at this stage, a police spokesperson had said.

  I opened my mouth to comment on the money police had found in McDaid’s bank account but at the last minute caught myself. We had decided not to go public about our friendship for a reason – because we didn’t want to be judged and I was under no illusions that the person or people who would judge us most were those who worked in this building.

  ‘God knows,’ I muttered instead, ‘but they must have something if they made him go to the station.’

  Donna shook her head and made to fold the paper up just as Owen walked in and tore it from her hands. ‘Let me make this very clear,’ he said, turning to make sure we were all looking directly at him. ‘I do not want to see any of this rubbish in this office. I do not want it discussed. I do not want to find out that any of you are speaking to the papers, or chatting about this on social media, or coming up with your own twisted theories about what happened. If I find out that any of you speak to the press, you will be fired, with immediate effect. It would do you all well to remember this isn’t some stupid soap opera for your entertainment. Rose was our friend. Our loyalty to her goes above and beyond any loyalty that we should have for her husband. If the police are knocking on his door, I trust they have good reason to. I’m not going to pussyfoot around this any more – that man is not welcome in this building. Now, how about you all get yourselves to your work stations and get on with your jobs – which is, after all, what you are paid to do.’

  He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room again into his office, slamming the door with such a bang that a child in the waiting area starting to wail.

  ‘I’ll go and smooth that over – bring that poor pet an extra sticker or ten,’ Tori said, heading for reception while the rest of the staff rinsed teacups in awkward silence. As I walked to reception, I saw Donna knock tentatively on Owen’s door before going in.

  It was only a matter of seconds before Owen’s raised voice was heard over the surgery. ‘Just get on with your work, Donna. Do you have to be there, beside me, every time I look around? I can’t think. Let alone breathe with you in my face all the time.’

  I quickly switched on the radio to smother the noise of his ranting, but it was a bit too late. Donna was already making her way out of the office, her face blazing and her eyes wide as if she feared to blink lest she started to cry. I watched as she took a deep, shuddering breath, and turned back to the staff kitchen.

  ‘Can you manage here for a moment?’ I whispered to Tori, who had adopted the falsest of smiles and cheeriest of voices to assure our clients that everything was entirely normal and running as planned, while I ch
ased down the corridor towards the kitchen to soothe Donna. I was angry, I realised. Angry at Owen and how he had spoken to us and how he had spoken to Donna most of all. She had been bending over backwards these last few weeks to be as kind and supportive to him as she possibly could, even though, God knows, she had enough of her own worries to be dealing with. She didn’t need Owen acting like an overgrown, stroppy teen. Or worse, a huffy, manipulative, bossy grown-up. The kind of man Cian told me he was. The kind of man who could act in a truly loathsome manner if he didn’t get his own way.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Donna was emptying her locker – tossing pieces of paper into a waste paper bin, the rest of her belongings into a carrier bag. She stopped every few seconds to wipe tears from her face or to sniff loudly.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ she gulped between sobs. ‘I can’t put up with him talking to me like that any more. He can stick his job.’

  ‘Donna!’ I said. ‘Don’t let him get to you like that. He’s not worth it. He’s just upset about everything,’ I soothed, reaching into my pocket for a tissue and handing it to her. ‘It’s not something to be walking away from your job over. Not with children to feed and clothe.’

  ‘He’s not the only person allowed to be upset,’ she said, her chest heaving with sobs. ‘He doesn’t own grief, you know. He isn’t the only person caught up in this fucking mess. He’s no right to speak to any of us like that – least of all me.’ Her face was still blazing with embarrassment after such a public talking to. She roughly wiped her eyes and pushed a strand of her auburn hair that had come loose from her ponytail behind her ear and resumed packing her things.

  ‘There’s only so much a person can take,’ she sobbed. ‘I’ve tried to understand. I’ve done everything I could to be as good as she was. To make sure this place kept running smoothly. I’ve been the one who worked on when everyone else went home – even though I was going home to three boys who wouldn’t know how to boil a fucking egg never mind cook a dinner for themselves or for me. I was the one who made sure we didn’t miss appointments. That arranged the bloody flowers for her funeral. It was me! Everything I do has been for him. But what do I get in return? Shouted at – and I know you all heard. Jesus Christ, I’m surprised Rose didn’t wake from the dead with the commotion!’ she said, sniffing loudly. ‘Do you know how humiliating that is? They’ll all be talking and laughing. They’ll all think “Donna’s a laughing stock”. And the thing is, he won’t apologise for it. He’ll just carry on as always not thinking about what he does to people. I’ve had enough, Emily. I really have.’