Too Close For Comfort

by Niamh O'Connor

  ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ Conor called from his room.

  ‘About a hundred thousand euro,’ Liz said under her breath. She’d collected Conor from school on the way home from Mervyn’s Meats in a taxi, shaken to the core by the incident on the bus, and not taking any chances with his safety now her husband had turned into some kind of predator. She’d told Conor she was collecting him early because of their trip to the circus. She’d been expecting a barrage of questions, but when they hadn’t come she’d suspected it was because he was glad to get out of football training. She’d have cancelled the circus trip in the blink of an eye if Conor hadn’t been Conor. But a promise was a promise and, trivial as it might seem to an outsider who didn’t understand his condition, she wouldn’t let him down.

  Pulling open her wardrobe, Liz started to root through Derek’s pockets. How was she going to explain all of this to her son? She’d never lied to him, and wouldn’t, but how could she tell him the truth? That by some incredible coincidence, at a time when they shouldn’t have been able to meet their basic bills, they’d come into an unexpected windfall; that his father, the man she thought she knew better than anyone, was a stranger to her.

  Finding nothing in Derek’s clothing, she moved to the dresser and rifled through the socks and underpants. The bedside locker was next: she upended each of the three drawers on to the bed. The only thing worthy of further inspection was a box of Durex, which turned out to be unopened; a book of chequebook stubs, which showed no unusual payments in or out; and Derek’s passport, which she noted was out of date.

  Liz moved to the window and pulled the cord of the blind. She could see right down the side of Amanda’s house to the garda crime-scene tape still fluttering out the front.

  Her gaze veered to Derek’s home office, a Portakabin bordering both their gardens. It still bore the sign ‘Derek’s Building Services – Extensions, Renovations, Attic Conversions’ from the days when he’d needed somewhere to run the administrative side of his business. It was still his bolthole. Realizing that he probably spent more time in the home office than he did in the house, she rushed downstairs, not needing to grab the key by the back door, because the gardaí had been out there too, less than half an hour ago. Hurrying across the flagstones set in the grass, she fumbled with the Chubb lock to open it, and let herself in. Inside, she started to tear apart the room, which contained a desk, fan, filing cabinet, phone and Derek’s tools. She didn’t even know what she was looking for, just that when she saw it, she’d know.

  Ten minutes later, Liz sat back on her hunkers and covered her face. The place looked like a bomb had hit it, but there was absolutely no clue here, either, as to what was going on. The hem of her trouser leg snagged on a loose floorboard, and as she tugged it free, it lifted a little. Liz looked around for a screwdriver, then sat back and pried the board loose, pulling up another and then another. Underneath she found an incised square in the black plastic sheeting. The screwdriver dropped from her hand when she peeled it back and saw what was underneath.

  It took a second to realize that the wailing sound was coming from her. Leaning forwards, she pulled out the items hidden in there: a crumpled, pleated navy skirt covered in a blue mildew, a V-neck jumper, a navy gingham blouse and a single brown shoe with a distinctive ankle strap. It was Ellen’s uniform, and one of the shoes she’d been wearing the day she’d vanished. The other had been found twenty years earlier in the mountains.

  She tried to stand, but her knees felt as if they were going to buckle. Her hands shook. That was it then, she told herself, the end of any niggling doubts. There wasn’t going to be a rational explanation. Derek was someone who hurt women. It was all true, her worst fear: he’d murdered her only sister in cold blood, and in so doing, he might just as well have killed her parents. Her mother had died three months after her father, of a broken heart as far as Liz was concerned. Liz didn’t think anything could be worse than Ellen disappearing, but that was before the man that Conor called Dad became the country’s most notorious killer.

  21

  LIZ WAS TRYING to stop hyperventilating by fanning air at herself with her hand when Conor pressed his face up to the fogged Portakabin window, and then opened the door. Ignoring the trashed interior and the hair stuck to his mother’s face with snot and tears, he calmly said, ‘Mum, there’s someone at the door for you.’

  Liz went into a blind panic. She bundled Ellen’s uniform into a drawer in Derek’s desk, and then dived towards his array of tools to arm herself.

  ‘Stay here,’ she warned Conor, holding a nail gun and a lump hammer.

  Pacing down the hall, she thanked her lucky stars for the first time in her life that Conor had closed the front door after answering it, which was the logical thing to do, if not the socially acceptable one. Peering through the spy-hole, Liz realized it was only her neighbour, Frieda, standing there, holding a bottle of white wine in one hand and a lasagne dish in the other. Pulling open a drawer in the hall table, Liz transferred the tools into it and shoved it closed.

  She opened the door slowly, leaving enough of a chink to allow her to stand sideways in the gap. Based on the smell, she presumed a stick of garlic bread was what was wrapped in foil under her neighbour’s arm.

  ‘I was thinking you could probably do with a glass of this after the day you’ve had,’ Frieda said, holding the bottle up.

  She was dressed in a North Face fleece-lined windbreaker, and Rock & Republic jeans, with a pair of Dubarry deck shoes. Her hair always looked like it had been blow-dried in a salon.

  ‘I appreciate the gesture, but it’s a really bad time right now,’ Liz said, scanning the street over her shoulder.

  Frieda put a hand up. ‘Look, insensitive as this may sound, I’m going to say it anyway. We need to make sure something like this doesn’t stick. You know … put people off buying here, I mean. I don’t want to sound mercenary, but Charles has been offered a job in Berlin. We’re going to try and put our house on the market soon. No offence, but nobody’s going to want to live in the kind of place where women get murdered, let alone next to someone with any kind of question mark hanging over them. Charles said we should get our stories straight—’ Frieda pulled a face for Liz to fill in the gaps. When Liz didn’t react she said, ‘Charles was talking to Amanda on Friday. She told him that Derek had assaulted her. The gardaí called earlier asking if I’d seen anything. I didn’t say a word. Yet.’

  Liz opened the door wide. ‘Come in.’

  She followed as Frieda headed for the kitchen.

  ‘How’s Derek, anyway?’ Frieda chirped, not waiting for an answer. ‘I presume he’s OK because, and I hope you don’t mind, I rang the hospital and they said he’d gone home. Is he here? I didn’t see him come in.’

  She didn’t seem to be expecting an answer as she pulled open the oven door and slid the dish in, studying the knobs before turning up the heat. Frieda had ripped out an identical kitchen in her own house, to fit in a mock-Aga and one of those American stainless-steel double-fronted fridge/freezers that dispensed freezing water and ice cubes. Liz knew, because she’d called once when her post was delivered to the wrong house. Frieda had said she’d have made coffee, but she didn’t know how to operate the ‘mother ship’ – a state-of-the-art cappuccino and espresso maker her husband, Charles, had got her for her birthday.

  Liz went to the tap and turned it on, running her hands under it, but resisting the urge to splash her face.

  Frieda was busy clattering in the cutlery drawer. ‘Anyway, I thought you needed this more than I did.’

  ‘Why?’ Liz asked, sorry it sounded so defensive.

  ‘You seemed to take what happened to Amanda really hard in the shop today, and then to have to deal with Derek’s crash on top of everything …’ She stopped talking to stare. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ Liz said, walking over and pulling out a corkscrew.

  ‘Why? What’s the matter? You look a bit funny. Have you
been crying? Your face has gone all red.’

  Liz nodded and used the pointy tip to rip the plastic seal on the bottle, unfurling it and twisting the corkscrew in the top.

  ‘It’s just such a shock,’ she said, attempting to pull herself together, and looking out into the garden through the set of French doors at Amanda’s house opposite. She sighed. Conor was still in the Portakabin. He’d wait there indefinitely if she didn’t tell him it was OK to come out.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Frieda said, her eyes narrowing. ‘I mean, she was one of my clients.’

  ‘Just hang on a second,’ Liz said, opening the back door and running down to the Portakabin to tell Conor it was OK, he could leave. He bolted out and back into the house, and was thundering up the stairs when Liz got back inside. Frieda looked like she expected an explanation, but Liz didn’t give her one. ‘You were saying that Amanda was one of your clients …’ she prompted.

  ‘Right, I did her colours. She was autumnal.’ She walked in front of Liz and made a frame of her fingers and thumbs while studying her face. ‘I’m thinking you’re spring, but it’s only a guess. I’d need to do a proper consultation. Amanda asked me to organize a couple of those bags the charities leave on the doorsteps for her, too. She wanted to go through what I’d picked to throw out before signing it off. It’s part of the service. A client gets their wardrobe cleared out by me, and feels good about it because they’ve donated to charity. I only take what I can tell hasn’t been worn for years, or is out of fashion. People are such hoarders. You wouldn’t believe how hard some people find it to part with ancient clothes. Nobody’s giving away anything at the moment, but that’s a different story.’ She paused. ‘I still have her stuff,’ she said, raising her eyebrows.

  Liz broke down.

  Frieda put her hands on her shoulders. ‘I didn’t realize you and she were close.’

  Liz pressed her hands against her face, which was bathed in sweat. She felt so overwhelmed, like she had nobody to turn to any more. The only person she had ever really opened up to was Derek, but after everything that had happened she desperately needed to talk to someone. ‘I barely knew her. It’s Derek. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  Frieda stepped back. ‘Why?’

  Liz hesitated. She didn’t know or trust Frieda, but the words just blurted out, ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone …’ Frieda exclaimed.

  Liz slumped into a chair, thinking, ‘God forgive me, that might be better.’ She was starting to feel as much a stranger to herself as Derek had become to her.

  ‘What do you mean? The hospital said he was fine when I rang,’ Frieda followed Liz’s gaze to Amanda’s house and back. ‘Oh. You mean that gone.’

  Liz shifted her weight to the other foot and then back. ‘I need to talk to him. We’ve come into all this money. I don’t know where it’s come from.’

  Frieda turned away, sloshed out the wine into a pair of hastily organized mugs, and handed Liz one, knocking hers back. She drained it, then topped up her glass and drank that, too, keeping her eyes trained on Liz, who barely sipped hers.

  ‘There’s something …’ Frieda said, looking uncertainly at Liz. ‘You’d have to keep it between us … Charles would kill me if he knew I was talking about it.’ After a pause she blurted, ‘Only, we were being blackmailed by someone about some bother Charles had in the bank over some dodgy mortgages. We paid the blackmailer the money in the end. It was small change compared to what we could have lost. It’s just, I found a letter in Amanda’s clothes that she’d forgotten to send, you see. She was having an affair. She’d written to her boyfriend’s wife telling her everything. Why would she do that unless she was being blackmailed, too? So then today I started wondering, if, because of Derek’s past—’

  The doorbell rang before Frieda had a chance to finish.

  22

  JO HELD UP her ID as Sexton put the flat of his hand on Derek Carpenter’s door to make sure that it wasn’t closed in their faces. They hadn’t been able to access Nuns Cross by car as it was one of those gated communities, and Sexton was fit to be tied. A council worker, sitting in the back of a waterworks van parked beside the Nuns Cross landscaped green, had ignored his calls for advice and help over access. The man had kept sipping slowly from a flask, and gone back to his newspaper. After three minutes Jo had thrown in the towel and told Sexton to park up, telling him to arrange for the gates to be decommissioned for the duration of the investigation.

  ‘I’m Chief Superintendent Jo Birmingham and this is Detective Inspector Gavin Sexton,’ she told the frightened-looking woman who answered the door of Number 29, who Jo recognized from old newspaper photographs as Liz Carpenter, though she’d aged more rapidly than Jo had expected. ‘We’re investigating the murder of your neighbour, and we’d like to have a word.’

  ‘Derek’s not here,’ Liz said breathlessly.

  Her eyes looked puffy, and her skin blotchy. The tip of her nose was red, and she was talking high in her throat.

  ‘Your colleagues have turned my house over already, looking for him today,’ she went on. ‘They’re not long gone. I told them I didn’t know where he was. He had a bang to the head. He’s not himself. I haven’t been able to get in touch with him myself.’

  Jo had a nose for lies, and believed her, or wanted to. ‘Do you want to report him as a missing person?’

  ‘No.’

  Jo’s eyes widened. She’d answered too quickly and too emphatically. On second thoughts, she was hiding something.

  ‘Not yet,’ Liz added quickly.

  Jo tilted her head. ‘Can we come in?’

  ‘Why?’

  And now Liz Carpenter was overly defensive, which suggested to Jo she was afraid of something. She needed to establish what Liz was scared of, or who. ‘To talk more comfortably, that’s all.’

  A slack-jawed woman with an expensive haircut appeared over Liz’s shoulder. ‘I’ll see you later, Liz,’ the woman said, attempting to sidestep past Jo, muttering, ‘I’m just a neighbour.’

  Sexton blocked her path as Jo pulled out her notebook. Liz’s neighbour’s eyes bulged.

  Snapping the elastic off, Jo licked a finger to flick through the pages. ‘What’s your name and address?’

  ‘Me?’ the woman objected. ‘Why? I saw nothing.’

  Jo studied her face. Belligerence was weird from a neighbour in the circumstances – a woman on the next road had been murdered! ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘McLoughlin … Frieda. I live across the street, in number thirty-one,’ she blurted. ‘But I barely knew Amanda.’

  Jo caught the way she glanced at Liz when she said the last line. Jo had found the page she was looking for, but Sexton nudged her to indicate Darth Vader leaning over the banister at the top of the stairs. A thin boy with a close-cropped haircut took the mask off.

  ‘Mum, when are we going to the circus? Dad said he’d be back. So where is he? He never breaks his promises. Is he dead?’

  Liz looked horrified, and moved towards Conor, leaving the door ajar.

  Jo stepped in, pretending to be more interested in Frieda, but keeping an ear cocked for Liz’s answer to her son.

  ‘I need you to come down to the station later,’ Jo told Frieda, scribbling Foxy’s name on one of the cards she’d had printed with her new title. ‘Ring this sergeant to set up a time.’

  ‘But …’ Frieda blurted, one hand attaching itself to her chest. ‘What about? Why? I’ve done nothing. This is harassment.’

  Jo wanted to see Liz’s reaction to this statement, but she’d gone from motioning the kid to go back to his room to clipping up to the top of the stairs, where she rubbed the palms of his hands roughly. Rory wouldn’t have let Jo touch him when he was that age. Any contact with Mum would have been ‘icky’. The boy looked pre-pubescent, but Jo would have expected him to be younger because of the fact that he was still dressing up. The kid’s fingers looked double-jointed, and he was bending his hands at the wrists at a peculiar
angle. He was grimacing. Special needs, Jo thought, feeling a wave of sympathy for Liz. She’d had more than her fair share of crosses to carry.

  ‘Something belonging to you has been found in Amanda Wells’s car,’ Jo told Frieda, who lurched towards the notebook, craning her neck to read Jo’s notes.

  ‘What? What’s my name doing in there? Am I a suspect? This is unbelievable.’

  Liz came back down the stairs as the boy headed off towards a bedroom.

  Jo sighed. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, neither of you seems particularly concerned with the fact that a woman was murdered so close to home. Neither of you has asked me how the investigation is going. Anyone would think, from the way the pair of you are acting, that you’d simply been greatly inconvenienced by Amanda Wells’s death.’

  Frieda snapped the card from her and headed out.

  Liz shook both hands in frustration. ‘I knew Amanda to see. Our conversations consisted of, “Nice day, isn’t it? … Garden’s looking nice … Pity about the rain.” I’m not going to pretend I’m cut up over it when I’m not. I’ve enough on my plate.’

  ‘Dealing with Derek?’ Jo asked.

  Liz sighed heavily and turned for her kitchen. Jo raised her eyebrows at Sexton and followed as he closed the front door gently. Dialling Derek’s as she walked, Jo held her own phone away from her ear to listen. A phone trilled to life. Liz snatched it off the kitchen table and glanced from it to Jo, who disconnected the call.