When they reached Katie’s house she saw the next-door curtain twitching again, and Jenny Tierney peering out, and she gave her a little finger-wave.
‘Nosey neighbour,’ she told Alan, as she opened the door. ‘She’s sound out, pure helpful, I’ll give her that. She feeds Barney and takes him for walks when I’m late back from work. But she does like to keep herself abreast of everything that’s going on, like.’
They went inside. Katie had left the oven on low while they were out and there was a herby smell of lasagne in the hallway.
‘I’m starved,’ said Alan, following her into the kitchen. ‘I’ve eaten nothing at all since breakfast and that was only toast.’
‘Would you like another beer?’ she asked him. ‘Then I can show you where you’ll be sleeping.’
She refilled his glass with Murphy’s and poured herself another vodka, and then she took him into the spare room, which had once been the nursery. She had redecorated it less than three months ago, so it no longer looked like the room in which her little Seamus had died in his cot. There was a new double bed and the walls had been painted cream, with four framed samplers hanging on them.
Alan read one of the samplers and said, ‘Here, I like this, Three things there are that can never come back... the arrow shot forth on its destined track... the appointed hour that could not wait... and the warning word that was spoken too late. How true is that.’
In spite of herself, in spite of the room looking so different now, Katie couldn’t help thinking of the morning she had walked in and found Seamus lying chilly and wet-lipped and as white as wax, with his small blue teddy bear lying close to him, smiling.
Alan frowned at her. ‘Have I said something I shouldn’t?’
‘No, not at all,’ she told him. She opened the fitted wardrobe and said, ‘Here, look, there’s a dressing gown here you can use.’
It was John’s black silk Japanese dressing gown with a picture of a flying crane on the back, a tsuru. She had bought it for him because cranes always mate for life and the Japanese regard them as a symbol of fidelity. Alan said, ‘Thanks,’ and laid it on the bed. It was rather James Bond-ish, and Katie could see that he was tempted to make a comment, maybe even a joke, but he resisted the temptation.
*
They ate lasagne and salad at the kitchen table and talked more about Bobby Quilty and how they could incriminate him. Even if they couldn’t find anybody who was brave enough to stand up and testify against him in open court, Alan thought that he might be able to bribe one of his gang to pass him enough material evidence to sustain a charge against him.
‘I doubt if we’ll ever be able to get him for incitement to murder, but false imprisonment... I think we might have a reasonable chance there. He’s holding Kyna and John in his own house, after all.’
‘So long as we can prove that it’s his house.’
‘Well, yes, there’s that. But I know some solicitors in Belfast who may be able to help us untangle who the deeds really belong to. Wellings and McCormack, on Victoria Street. They used to be some of my Lesser Bastards and I have quite a lot of background on them, so I’m pretty sure they’ll oblige.’
After they had eaten they went into the living room for a nightcap and talked about their families and their different lives in law enforcement. Barney came and sat close to Katie and put his head in her lap so that she could stroke his ears for him. Katie found Alan very easy company, much easier than her late husband, Paul, had been. As economic times in Ireland had grown harder, Paul had frequently been involved in less than legitimate dealings in the building trade and he had never felt he could tell her the whole truth about what he was up to. Alan was easier than John, too. John had always been so jealous – not just of other men who found Katie attractive and came on to her, but of her career. She had made it clear to him that An Garda Siochána was her vocation and she couldn’t give it up to follow him to America, or anywhere, and that had made him deeply resentful.
‘Have I misunderstood something here?’ John had shouted at her once, in the middle of an argument. ‘You belong to me, don’t you? Or don’t you?’
‘Apart from Jesus, there’s only one other person I belong to,’ Katie had retorted. ‘That’s myself.’
What made Alan so relaxing to talk to was that he had served as a police inspector, so she didn’t have to explain to him the stresses of the job, nor the antagonism she had faced from so many of her male colleagues when she was promoted over their heads. Alan understood police procedure and what they could do in the name of the law and what they couldn’t. He also knew what corners were cut, and what rules were bent, and what evidence was fabricated, and how, and why. After talking to him for nearly four hours, and asking him scores of questions, Katie felt confident that if anybody could help her to put Bobby Quilty out of business, and rescue Kyna and John, then Alan could.
Maybe he was telling the truth about why he had been forced to resign from the PSNI and Bobby Quilty had set him up. On the other hand, maybe he had been involved in the drug-dealing. She had no way of knowing for certain, but whatever he had done in the past, she needed him now.
Just after midnight, Alan went to take a shower while Katie watched television with the sound turned down. He came into the living room, his grey hair still wet and sticking up, wrapped in John’s dressing gown.
‘I’ll say goodnight, then,’ he told her. ‘And thanks a million for putting me up.’
Katie stood up and he came over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. He no longer smelled of black pepper and cinnamon but her own peach shower gel.
‘We’ll save your John and your Kyna,’ he added, and gave her a reassuring smile. ‘Sleep well and I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll make you my famous Ulster egg-in-a-cup if you fancy that for breakfast. Do you have breadcrumbs?’
*
It took her a long time to fall off to sleep. The wind had risen even more and she could hear her rotary clothes line rattling in the yard outside. She couldn’t stop herself from thinking about John, and what Kyna had meant about his feet being bolted to the bed, and about Kyna, too, because she still hadn’t fully recovered from her gunshot wound. It had badly torn her small intestine and she had needed more than seventy centimetres cut out of it.
Three things there are that can never come back, she thought, but the words on that sampler didn’t make her feel any less responsible for what had happened. John and Kyna were being held because of her, and she couldn’t turn back the clock.
When she slept, she dreamed that she was in her father’s house in Monkstown, across the river. It was a large, green-painted Victorian house with a garden that had long since become tangled and choked with weeds. Inside the house it was gloomy and cold and empty, and there was no sign of her father anywhere. The fire had died in the grate and was nothing but a heap of ashes.
She had opened the front door and was about to leave when she heard whispering upstairs, like someone saying a novena. She went to the bottom of the staircase and looked up. The first-floor landing was in darkness and she was filled with dread at what she might find if she went up there. But the whispering went on and on and she knew that she couldn’t go until she found out who was praying.
‘Da?’ she called out. ‘Da, is that you?’
There was no answer, only the whispering, so reluctantly she began to climb the stairs. For every step she went up, it seemed as if two more appeared ahead of her in its place, so it felt as if it took her hours to reach the landing. The doors to all of the bedrooms were closed, except for one, and she thought she glimpsed somebody in white moving around inside. The whispering had stopped and now she could hear only rattling, faint but persistent.
‘Da?’ she said, although she wasn’t sure that she had said it out loud.
She seemed to glide across the landing and through the open bedroom door. The bedroom was dimly lit with a silvery luminescence, as if everything in it were radioactive. Beside the window stood a nun, dressed in w
hite, her face hidden by her cowl. She was praying, and it was her rosary beads that were making the rattling sound.
In the middle of the room were two single beds, side by side, and on each bed a body was lying, covered with a white sheet. Katie didn’t have to go over and lift up the sheets to know who they were. Her chest tightened in panic and she tried to turn round and leave the room. Every time she turned round, however, she found that she was still facing the same way and that she couldn’t find the door.
She circled round and round, but the door was always behind her and the two bodies were always there in front of her. The nun came sliding towards her, her rosary still rattling, and Katie knew that she was going to take away the sheets and show her who was lying underneath. She didn’t want to see them. She didn’t want proof that they were dead.
‘Three things there are that can never come back,’ the nun whispered and reached out to tug the first sheet away.
Katie screamed, and turned around again, and this time the open door appeared in front of her. Before she could reach it, however, the nun caught her around the ankles and wound her scapular around them, over and over, so that she was powerless to move her legs.
‘Let me go!’ she screamed. ‘Let me go!’ – so loudly that she woke herself up.
She wasn’t in her father’s house at all. She was in her own bed, hot and tearful, and all twisted up in her duvet. Her pillow had dropped on to the floor and her patchwork bedcover had slipped halfway off. The rattling of rosary beads was her clothes line, rattling in the wind.
She heard a tentative knocking at her bedroom door.
Alan said, ‘Katie? Katie, what’s wrong? Are you all right in there?’
‘I’m fine,’ she called back. ‘I had a bad dream, that’s all. You can come in, if you like.’
She reached over and switched on the bedside lamp. Alan came in, wearing John’s dressing gown, tightly belted at the waist.
‘Boys a dear! The way you were screaming there, that must have been one bad dream and a half. I thought some intruder had broken into the house and you were being murdered – serious.’
Katie dried her tears on the duvet cover and then picked up her pillow and straightened the bedcover. ‘I had a dream about John and Kyna. Both of them were dead.’
Alan sat down on the side of the bed and took hold of her hand between both of his. ‘I can understand you feeling guilty, Katie – but them being taken like that, it’s Bobby Quilty’s doing, not yours.’
‘But he wouldn’t have taken them, would he, if it hadn’t been for me?’
‘Oh, so you’re blaming yourself for being some kind of a jinx, are you?’
‘Why shouldn’t I? It’s true.’
Alan shook his head. ‘From what you’ve told me, you and John only got together in the first place because you saved him from having his throat cut. And whatever you say, Kyna’s a cop, and cops know the risks of what they’ve chosen to do. If anything, Katie, it’s you who’re keeping them alive right now.’
Katie said nothing. Alan lifted one hand and brushed her damp red hair away from her forehead.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It was a nightmare, that’s all. I’ve had worse ones myself, especially during the Troubles. One night I dreamed that the Provos had planted a bomb in my car and my legs were blown off. Can I fetch you anything? Maybe a drop of tea?’
‘No thanks, Alan. I’m grand altogether. I just need some sleep.’
He stood up and said, ‘Okay, then. But if you have any more dreams like that, just scream before you wake up and I’ll chase them away for you, so I will.’
He was halfway to the door when Katie said, ‘Stay.’
He stopped, but he didn’t turn around. Katie pulled back the duvet and said, ‘Stay. Alan. Please. I really need somebody to hug me.’
Now Alan turned. It was difficult to read the expression on his face. It was questioning, but interested, his eyebrows slightly lifted, and there was a sparkle in his eyes, too.
‘Do you think it’s a good idea?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t need to apply to the District Court for a warrant, do I?’ said Katie. ‘I just want you to hold me and help me get to sleep.’
She had no idea what this might lead to. Nothing at all, probably. But she simply didn’t want to switch off the light and lie there alone for the rest of the night, afraid to go to sleep.
Alan hesitated a split second longer and she was almost tempted to tell him to forget it. But then he came back, and she shifted herself over to give him more room, and he climbed into bed with her. They lay there, face to face, looking into each other’s eyes.
‘This wasn’t what I expected, when I got on the train this morning,’ said Alan.
‘Me neither,’ said Katie. She touched his cheek, where silver prickles of stubble were beginning to grow. There was something about him that made her feel secure and protected. He hadn’t spent all evening challenging her or teasing her, like so many men did. He hadn’t even flirted with her. He was handsome, too, but in a mature, confident way, as if he didn’t need to keep checking himself in the nearest reflective surface to make sure that he still looked the berries.
‘I have to tell you that I find you very attractive, Katie,’ he told her. ‘A fellow could put to sea in those green eyes of yours, and sail away, and never come back.’
‘I thought you were a peeler, not a poet,’ she teased him.
Alan jostled himself into a more comfortable position and then put his arms around her.
‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit sweaty,’ she said.
‘Jesus.’ He smiled. ‘Have I had that effect on you already?’
They stared at each other, so close that the tips of their noses were almost touching, and then he kissed her forehead, and her eyelids, and her cheeks, and then her lips. She kissed him back – little friendly pecks at first, with her eyes only half closed, but then deeper, and longer.
As she did so, she felt his penis rising under the thin silk of John’s dressing gown. That was when she stopped kissing him and touched his lips with her fingertip and said, ‘Now I must get some sleep. It’s going to be a long difficult day tomorrow and I don’t want to look beat out.’
She gave him one more kiss and then turned herself over, with her back to him, although she reached around and took hold of his wrist and placed his hand against her stomach, so that he was holding her very close. His erection was pressing hard against her bottom, but he made no move to lift her nightdress, and somehow she felt that there was an understanding between them. She took his stiffness as a compliment, that he was doing nothing to hide the fact that she aroused him, but was prepared to wait until she was ready. She was highly stressed, and exhausted, and she had asked him for comfort, and that was what he was giving her, comfort.
She fell asleep after only a few minutes, but she had no more nightmares. She was woken just after five by the hooting of a ship in the estuary and for a moment she thought that John was lying next to her. When she turned her head and saw that it was Alan, however, she felt a sense of both grief and relief. His eyes were closed, but she could see that his pupils were darting from side to side under his eyelids in REM sleep, so he must have been dreaming. Maybe he was dreaming of her, she thought. She snuggled herself in closer to him and took his left hand and cupped it over her breast.
Thirty-two
Celia rang the doorbell three times but nobody answered. The last time, she pressed it and kept it pressed for more than fifteen seconds. Still no answer.
She stood on tiptoe so that she could peer into the living-room windows, but there was no sign of Órla Doherty or either of the children.
That was very queer, because the children were on their summer holidays now, and it was only 8 a.m., which was very early for Órla to take them out anywhere. Even if she had taken them out, she would have been sure to have told Celia last week what her plans were. After Celia had finished cleaning the house they always sat down together for a cup of tea
and an intimate chat.
What was even queerer, both of the Dohertys’ cars were still parked in front of the house – Kevin’s Audi estate and Órla’s pale blue Ford Focus. Kevin always took his car to work, and if Órla had gone anywhere with the children she must have walked, unless a friend had picked them up.
Still, Celia had her own key so if the Dohertys were out she could at least make a start with the hoovering. Over five years she had been cleaning for them now, so she was almost part of the family.
She let herself in. The house was silent and Celia was immediately struck by the smell. It was only faint, but it was acrid, like the smell of spent fireworks, and the house had never smelled like that before. Maybe Kevin had been setting off some indoor fireworks to celebrate the beginning of the holidays.
She opened the cupboard under the stairs and reached inside for her floral housecoat. As she was lifting out the vacuum cleaner, though, she stopped and listened, and sniffed again, and looked around her. She wasn’t used to the house being so quiet because Órla always had the television on, regardless of whether it was Shortland Street or The Doctors or the RTÉ news. She had the strangest feeling, too, that something wasn’t quite right.
It was then that she saw the list pinned to the back of the front door. She went up to it and stared at it. It was Órla’s list of things to do – dry-cleaning to collect and birthday cards to buy and bills to be paid. But it was usually stuck on to the fridge, this list. It had always been stuck on the fridge. Why had she suddenly decided to pin it up here in the hallway?
She went into the living room. There was something strange in there, too. Two of the armchairs were side by side, on top of the rug, at an awkward angle so that people sitting in them would have been facing away from each other. Órla was always meticulous in the way she arranged the furniture, and she never placed the armchairs on top of the Ashanti rug.
Celia could see herself in the mirror over the fireplace, biting her thumbnail and thinking. She could carry on with her cleaning and leave when she had finished, but where had the Dohertys disappeared to? Órla hadn’t even left her a note to say when they might be back.
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