Stone Heart

by Des Ekin

  ‘She’s a visitor. Visitor for Paul,’ said Larry, making rapid gestures at Tara.

  ‘Yes, okay. Just knock on the door when you want to come out.’

  The door leading to the secure unit was made of reinforced glass. A simple catch opened it from the outside. There was no similar catch inside. The lock closed behind them with a solid clunk of steel on steel.

  They walked into a large communal-activity room with well-worn brown leather seating ranged around the edges. In the middle were other leather chairs and a three-seater sofa. High on the wall, a battered television set was showing a daytime chat show.

  In the room there must have been around twenty people, Tara estimated, with others lounging or sleeping in bedrooms nearby. Many of the patients in the TV room weren’t using the seats at all. They were sprawled on the floor, seated or lying, with vacant expressions on their faces.

  Some of them were arguing vehemently, but their voices were directed at no one in particular. An overweight woman in her forties was explaining, at the top of her voice, intimate details about her sex life. In another corner, a pretty teenage girl, blonde and painfully thin, wept uncontrollably.

  ‘Whoops, look out, look out,’ warned Larry.

  A woman was bearing down on them. She was wearing a grey tracksuit and she was walking fast towards Tara with a thunderous expression on her face. Tara tensed for a second until she realised that the woman was not looking at her, but through her. She moved out of the way and the woman walked past, speed-walking around and around the perimeter of the room.

  ‘This way,’ said Larry. He led her into one of the bedrooms. It contained four neat beds, each with its own steel locker. Through a steel-mesh grille on the window she could see the grey perimeter wall of the hospital and, above it, the flat brown and green boglands that stretched for miles around.

  ‘Paul,’ prattled Larry, full of nervous energy, ‘this is Tara. She’s looking for Manus Kennedy. You remember Manus, you were his mate, the two of you talked a lot, didn’t you? I said that if anyone knew where Manus was, you would. Am I right?’

  ‘Shut up, Larry.’

  The figure lying on the bed was tall, aged about twenty-five, with close-cropped hair dyed cherry red in a neo-punk style. Thin, fair eyebrows overlined his staring pale eyes. He looked ill at ease in his brown bathrobe and striped flannelette pyjamas. Tara guessed that his normal garb would be a shiny shell-tracksuit and Nike trainers.

  But the clothes weren’t important. If Tara had been the manageress of a pub or a nightclub, she would have turned him away from her door, not because of his clothes but because of his eyes. This man was trouble. ‘You don’t look at their clothes or their size – you look at their eyes,’ her friend Ciarán, the security guard, had advised her once. ‘The secret is not to invite trouble in. Then you won’t have to put it out.’

  Tara walked over to the bed. ‘Hi. I’m Tara. I hope you can help me.’

  ‘Depends. If you’re a banner, you can piss off.’

  He was using the old-fashioned term for a woman police officer, a Bean Garda. The title had long since been dropped for reasons of gender equality, but it lived on in the streets of Dublin.

  ‘No, I’m not police. I’m a family friend.’

  ‘Right.’

  He pronounced it ‘roi’. Inner-city Dublin.

  Paul stared at her suspiciously. ‘Orange?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  He yawned and helped himself to a mandarin from a bowl on top of his locker. ‘Manus was a mate of mine, okay. So what?’

  He stuffed the peeled mandarin, whole, into his mouth. Tara noted the use of the past tense.

  ‘When he got out of this place, I got out at the same time, roi’? We shared the sheltered flat here in town, roi’?’ The words were mumbled through a churning mass of orange pulp.

  ‘And then Manus left to go to America.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘No. That’s what he told everyone he was doing, roi’? He wanted to get them all off his back. Manus couldn’t afford to go to bleedin’ Borrisokane, never mind Boston.’

  Tara felt her pulse quicken. ‘So, where did he go?’

  ‘We both left this kip together. We squatted in a gaff in Bernietown.’

  Bernietown. Shorthand for Bernadette Towers, a low-rise flats complex in the south inner city of Dublin. It was an area of high unemployment and social deprivation of near-Third World standards; its name had become a byword for violent crime and drug dealing.

  ‘And where did he go from there?’

  Paul was peeling another mandarin. ‘Nowhere. The bastard’s still there. And he can rot in that kip for the rest of his life, far as I care.’

  ‘So you’re not exactly mates, any more?’ Tara had to tread carefully.

  Paul spat out a stream of invective confirming her conclusion.

  ‘If you’re planning to bust him, go ahead and tell him I sent you,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do to that little shit, it wouldn’t be nothin’ compared to what I’d do to him. If I could get my hands on him.’

  ‘Why should I want to bust him?’

  Paul shrugged. He yawned again. Either the conversation was making him very bored indeed, or his medication was kicking in.

  ‘Were you dealing drugs there?’

  ‘Nothing to say.’

  The stock response of the career criminal to any police question.

  ‘Where was Manus living in Bernietown?’ she persisted. ‘Which address?’

  ‘Nothing to say.’

  He turned on his side, away from her, and put on the headphones of his walkman. The interview was obviously over.

  ‘And if you’re gonna nail him, remember to tell him I sent you,’ he shouted after her as she left. ‘That’s Paul Lawless. L-a-w-l-e-s-s. Roi’?’

  ‘Thanks. Goodbye.’

  ‘Recognise the name? Tara? Do you recognise him?’ Larry was still on a manic high as they walked back down the corridor.

  Tara was only half-listening to him as she tried to assess this dramatic new information. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said vaguely, her thoughts elsewhere.

  ‘You know. You know. The guy who was on the front page of all the papers last month.’

  Tara stopped in mid-stride. It was as though someone had socked her, hard, in the solar plexus. She recognised him now, all right. The grainy black-and-white newspaper photos of a young man, anorak raised over his head, being led from a courthouse after having been charged with a gruesome series of attacks on elderly women living alone in rural areas.

  ‘That was Paul Lawless?’ She felt sick at the thought that she’d been alone in a room with a man capable of inflicting such horrors upon other human beings.

  Larry was pleased at her reaction. ‘Yes. Yes. That was him. That was him, all right. The same man. Nice fella, Paul. But you wouldn’t want to take him home to meet your granny. What do you think, Tara? What do you think?’

  She tried to filter out his non-stop monologue and concentrate. What had the detective said?

  We haven’t the slightest shred of evidence that Manus was even in the country…

  Now all that had changed. The evidence she needed hung tantalisingly within her reach.

  The male nurse at the entrance to the door of St Sebastian’s secure unit hardly glanced up as they knocked on the glass door.

  He reached under his desk. A buzzer sounded, an electronic lock clicked open, and they were back in the main body of the hospital.

  Down the public stairway, they walked unchallenged past a reception desk where all visitors to the secure unit were vetted on the way up. Larry was nudging her and smiling smugly.

  ‘Now,’ he said as they reached the bottom floor, ‘I’ve got to go. People to see, things to do.’ His eyes shone with an unnaturally bright gleam. ‘You won’t forget your side of the bargain?’

  He looked at her eagerly, like a puppy.

  ‘I won’t forget,’ Tara promised.

  ‘Two dolls. Barbie, Sindy. Wit
h love from daddy. Separately wrapped.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Appreciate.’ He smiled again, touched her arm in farewell, and walked off with a jerky, over-fast gait. He looked like a dancer caught in a nightclub strobe-light.

  Tara stood still for a minute, taking deep breaths and trying to disentangle him from her nerves.

  It had started raining, hard. It was thundering on the roof and a gully outside was choking with water.

  She’d have to drive to the nearest shopping centre and get the dolls, before she forgot. A Barbie and a Sindy, he’d said. She glanced at the sheet of paper on which he’d written his address and the names of the little girls. Cathy and Julie. He didn’t say which doll was for which. She supposed it didn’t matter.

  She began walking down the corridor towards the main exit, trying to understand why something was making her feel uneasy.

  What harm could there be in sending dolls to two little children?

  Why send them? Perhaps she should deliver them personally.

  She tried to make her mind function amid the thunder of the rain on the roof.

  If only there were someone she could ask, someone who could give her advice. It certainly wouldn’t be Dr Westwood.

  Come on, Tara. You’re overreacting. Let’s get out of here, buy the dolls, and get it over with.

  No, hold on a minute. Think…

  At that moment she passed the hospital chapel. The door was open. Inside a tall figure in black was rearranging chairs in preparation for evening Mass.

  Before she knew it, she was standing behind him. ‘Father…?’

  ‘Yes. What is it?’ His eyes were tired but friendly.

  She introduced herself. ‘I just wanted to ask your advice.’

  ‘Of course. Sit down.’

  ‘It’s silly. I probably shouldn’t be taking up your time.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  She said nothing about her visit to Paul Lawless in the secure unit, but she told him of her promise to send the two dolls to Larry’s daughters. ‘I just wanted to get a second opinion, Father. It’s not against the rules, is it? There couldn’t be any harm in doing it, could there? It would keep him happy. Keep them happy. Wouldn’t it?’

  She realised, with irritation, that she had unconsciously adopted Larry’s turbocharged speech patterns.

  ‘Which patient, did you say?’

  She described him.

  He sat down heavily. ‘Ms Ross…may I call you Tara? Okay. Let me tell you about Larry. He was a bright kid. He started work at fifteen, sweeping floors in a big foreign-owned factory. By last year he was a foreman. He was earning a good wage and a fortune in overtime. He worked all the hours that God sent to buy his family a decent lifestyle.’

  He gazed over at the flickering electric candles by the altar, as though searching for the answer to some deep and fundamental question.

  ‘Then they took a decision in Chicago or Düsseldorf, God knows where, that the factory had to close. It was one of their most profitable factories, but it had to close because the men in the suits, the men who balanced the books at headquarters, said it had to close.

  ‘Suddenly Larry found himself sitting at home all day, staring at the walls of his kitchen and wondering what had gone wrong. He was only thirty-eight, but he was already too old to get another job and he was up to his neck in debt.’

  Tara had to fight a sudden and irrational urge to stand up and run away. She didn’t want to hear the end of this story.

  ‘So one afternoon, when his wife was out at the shops, Larry wrote a suicide note,’ the priest continued calmly. ‘Then he hugged his two little daughters and told them a bedtime story. He brought out a bottle of sleeping tablets and said they were special sweeties and they all had to share them because the world was too bad to live in any more.

  ‘The doctors pumped out his stomach. He survived. The two little girls died.’

  He gave a weary shrug. ‘Larry is aware that they’re dead, but his mind can’t cope with it. That’s one of the reasons why he’s here. He has blocked the whole episode out of his consciousness. As far as he’s concerned, the two girls are still waiting for their father to get better and come home.’

  Tara felt nauseous. She said nothing.

  ‘His wife is still living at that address. If you had sent those parcels, she would have opened them.’

  He rose and patted her shoulder kindly.

  ‘The way you’re feeling now,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t be in a better place.’

  He walked off quietly, leaving her sitting alone in the false flicker of synthetic candlelight.

  Twenty minutes later, Tara walked out past the reception desk towards the main door.

  The weather was still filthy, she noticed. And she had a long drive ahead of her…

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She stopped. A tall figure was standing in her path, blocking her way.

  ‘I’m William,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you could do me a great service and post this letter.’

  She nodded, took the letter, and hurried past him.

  ‘I’m afraid it has no stamp.’

  ‘That’s okay. I’ll buy one.’

  She didn’t stop hurrying until she reached her car. Then she brought out the letter she’d taken from him earlier.

  They were exactly the same. The envelopes were unsealed. They were obviously empty. And they were both addressed to William himself, care of Inismaul Mental Hospital.

  Tara cranked the engine. Thank goodness, it started despite the rain. Then she sat for a long while, settling her nerves, thinking about her limited options.

  Back to Claremoon Harbour, to admit defeat in her search for Manus Kennedy? Or onwards to Dublin, to hunt for a violent psycho in the grim concrete jungle of Bernadette Towers?

  There really wasn’t a choice.

  She turned her wheels towards the capital.

  Chapter Twelve

  DRESSED IN an old black leather jacket and faded blue jeans, Tara stood on the Dublin quays and looked down the River Liffey towards the sea. It was another cold summer morning, with the fine rain drifting almost horizontally along the river from the flatlands to the west.

  Her bones ached. She had spent an uncomfortable night sleeping on a lumpy sofabed in the living-room of Jean Murphy’s riverside flat. Jean was a former colleague who had reduced herself to near-poverty by buying a prime waterfront apartment at a price which, only a few years beforehand, would have purchased a five-bedroom mansion in the stockbroker belt. She was delighted to have got it so cheaply. Had she waited another six months, she assured Tara, its price would have been fifty per cent higher. Now she had a thirty-year mortgage, an overdraft, no social life and a smile of complacency that was hard to take.

  Tara had been grateful for Jean’s offer of accommodation – it saved her a fortune in hotel charges – but it had come at a price. Several of her former colleagues had joined them for a bottle of wine and a pizza. They’d all sympathised with her current predicament, but the conversation had rapidly and tactfully switched to the Dublin property boom. They had all made tens of thousands of pounds in paper profits, and they pointed out, none too subtly, that Tara would have done the same had she stayed in the capital instead of getting out at exactly the wrong time and decamping to the sticks.

  And, naturally, there had been the pointed references to her former boyfriend, Chris Calder: his recent move to a £750,000 Georgian home in Ranelagh, his legal triumphs, his elevation by a magazine to the status of Ireland’s Most Eligible Bachelor.

  Tara sighed and checked her watch. Nine-thirty am Good. She was exactly on time for her appointment at the Four Courts.

  She was about to cross the quays to the stately eighteenth-century building when she heard a peep from a motor horn. Not a blast. Just a tiny, polite beep.

  She turned around, saw his face, and experienced that sudden lurch that comes when you’re transported back to an earlier incarnation, to a time when a face you’v
e almost forgotten was the most important thing in your world. He was sitting there in his blue Daimler, waving at her, his face lit up by that famous Chris Calder smile. It was as though nothing had changed in two years, as though they’d just met as usual for lunch in La Stampa or the Ayumi-Ya and an afternoon of shopping in Grafton Street.

  He beckoned her over and opened the passenger door. The inside of the Daimler smelled of old leather, fine tailoring and just the slightest hint of his Armani aftershave. Chris Calder had the sort of face that always looked freshly-shaven.

  ‘Tara.’ He smiled again as he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘How have you been?’

  ‘Fine, Chris. I was just on my way to the Law Library to see you.’

  He nodded. The motion disturbed his perfectly-coiffed hair, and he automatically raised a hand to pat it back into place. She noticed that the hands were as soft and white as a surgeon’s and his fingernails, as always, were precisely manicured.

  ‘Yes, the clerk told me he’d made an appointment for you. I was just on my way in, too.’ He grinned broadly, as though their chance meeting was the highlight of his morning. ‘But, hey, let’s just sit and chew the fat a moment first. What have you been up to?’

  ‘Oh, lots.’ She tried to sound upbeat. ‘I run my own Internet newspaper in County Clare, and it’s a big success and it’s all…very exciting.’

  She realised he wasn’t really paying attention. He was looking into her eyes and smiling nostalgically. ‘How long’s it been, Tara?’

  She looked uncomfortable. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since we last saw each other, of course. What do you think I meant?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Two years, maybe.’

  Two years, two months, and fifteen days, to be exact.

  ‘My, my, my. Is it really that long? Still, at least we can look back and laugh about it all now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tara didn’t laugh.

  She stared out of the rain-streaked car window, trying not to think of the torturous days and nights that followed their break-up. The endless zombie-like days and the tear-stained nights, dragging on like a blunt execution before she finally took the decision to leave Dublin behind and return to Claremoon Harbour.