by Claire Askew
Moira said nothing, but let Birch watch as her face crumpled, and tears came once again.
‘Amy was right,’ she said, quietly. She covered her eyes with her hand, and began to rock back and forth – not sobbing, but shuddering, silently, as though being shaken by angry, invisible hands.
DI Birch’s voice was gentle when she spoke again.
‘Why didn’t you tell us, Moira? All those days you were at Fettes, at the station. Why didn’t you tell me? Or Anjan – you could have told Anjan.’
Moira spluttered, but she was nodding.
‘I could have told Anjan,’ she said. ‘I could have told him; he seemed trustworthy. But you know . . . it’s silly, but I kept thinking about these crime TV shows, where the lawyers are always slippery. They seem plausible but they’re slippery. So in the end I said nothing.’
‘Moira.’ There was the edge of a smile in Birch’s voice. ‘Those TV shows get it so wrong – so wrong, trust me. Anjan is the most straight-up bloke I know.’
After another period of quiet, Birch went on.
‘And you know . . . you would have been providing information about a crime committed by somebody else, not by you. I know from talking to Amy that you’ve been struggling with this, but you have to understand. You are not Ryan. It wasn’t you who did this. You could have told us just about anything, and you wouldn’t have been punished – you, personally, are just a very valuable witness.’
Moira looked up at Birch.
‘You are not Ryan,’ Birch said again. ‘Plus, this investigation is basically over. Between taking you to see Lockley, and now this, I’ve fairly ballsed it up. So it’s likely that whatever you know will make absolutely no difference whatsoever, not now. Why don’t you just tell me?’
You’re lying to me, Moira thought. But Lockley had been right: keeping things secret was hard. It did just make everything worse. Once again, Moira straightened up. She took a long breath in, and then let it slowly out again.
‘It was the night before . . . the shooting,’ she said. DI Birch leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and lacing her fingers together. She looked, Moira thought, like a prize-fighter, waiting in her corner for a big fight to start. Moira closed her eyes, and told herself she was talking to no one – just Ryan’s quiet room. Just empty air.
‘I’d been up in the town,’ she said. ‘I was supposed to be working on my essay at the library for the OU degree I’m doing. Was doing. But . . . I don’t know, it was like something was off. I just didn’t want to, so instead I spent the day just really . . . well, walking around the Old Town. With hindsight, I’ve wondered if I had some sort of – this sounds silly, but – some sort of psychic sense, that something bad was coming. That I should spend one last day being outside, just enjoying life. Anyway. For some reason that day I was thinking about Ryan a lot. I was thinking about how moody he’d been lately, how he’d come in from college and just go straight up to his room and not come out again, not even to eat meals. How little I’d seen of him. It was worrying me. I knew it was my fault. After his father – after Jackie died, I sort of tunnelled down into my own little cocoon of grief, and didn’t come out for perhaps eighteen months. I neglected Ryan during that time – I ignored him. I was so focused on myself, my hurt. I felt like I was rebuilding myself, slowly, by being still and just looking inwards. I’d assumed he’d been doing the same, but now I think he must have needed me, during that time, and I let him down. I’d begun to feel so guilty, these past – well, for a few months now. But because of that guilt I hadn’t been doing much about it, hadn’t really said anything to him. But that day I started to think that it had gone on long enough, and I needed to speak to him.’
Moira took another long breath. Her eyes were still closed.
‘Then there was this boy,’ she went on. ‘That afternoon, something made me want to walk to the Royal. That is, the old Royal, the hospital – or where the old Royal used to be. I worked there, you know, as a young woman, before I met Jackie. I was a staff nurse. Anyway, for some reason I decided to go and look at it, see what they’re doing with the new buildings there. And . . . there was an accident. A young man was hurt. He . . . got impaled on something.’
Birch spoke, making Moira jump.
‘I remember that,’ Birch said. ‘Jesus, it just goes to show. That day, I’d heard about that accident and was praying that it wouldn’t come across my desk. Then, the next day – well, you know.’
Moira’s face creased.
‘So you don’t know – was the boy okay, or not?’
Birch’s eyes flicked up.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes, he was fine, apparently. I mean, as fine as you can be after an accident like that. There’s going to be a big legal stink about it, though, I think. Anjan’s firm are representing the guy.’
Birch looked panicked, for a moment.
‘At least, I think that’s been announced. Maybe keep that to yourself, Moira, sorry. But yes – the boy’s fine. He’s fine.’
Moira could tell by the look on Birch’s face that this was something of a platitude, designed to get her to keep talking. Well, all right, she thought, and closed her eyes again.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘That boy . . . seeing that, it really shook me up. He was about Ryan’s age, and – well, it was like he made up my mind for me. I decided I had to go home and have a talk with Ryan, that night. Whatever was going on with him needed to stop. I was worried he’d been badly affected by his dad’s death and then my reaction to it. Now, of course, I know he must have been . . . oh God. Planning. Planning to kill people.’
She heard DI Birch shift her weight: a squeak in the fake leather of the computer chair.
‘What did you say to him that night, Moira?’
There was a silence. Moira screwed up her face. If only I could remember properly, she thought.
Ryan had come in from college: Moira listened to the familiar scatter-click of his key in the front door, the front door’s slam, and then the fast, heavy tread as he made his way up the stairs.
‘Sweetheart?’
He would have been able to hear her. She was in the kitchen, her hands immersed in grimy water at the kitchen sink. Ryan’s room was directly overhead: she heard the familiar thud as he dumped his backpack in the middle of the floor. She waited until the water in the sink stilled: there was a pan that the dishwasher just wasn’t cleaning right. She had greasy gunk under her nails, from scraping it off. Ryan had made no reply.
She found herself climbing the stairs quietly, as though she didn’t want him to hear her approach. She wondered why. What was she afraid of? On the landing, she paused outside her son’s bedroom door – closed of course – and listened to the muted staccato beat of a first-person shooter, playing out on the other side.
Good, she thought, he doesn’t have headphones in. He can hear me.
‘Ryan?’ she said. She sort of called it, the way someone might shout up a ladder to a man on a high roof. No answer.
‘You’re going to come down and eat with me tonight, Ryan.’
Moira stood on the landing, thinking for about the thousandth time what a weak spot it was in this house: so gloomy with its absence of windows. Jackie had talked about having a skylight put in but never had. I’ll never do that now, she realised.
No answer came from her son’s room: no sound of acknowledgement, but also no dissent. The food isn’t even cooked yet, Moira thought. There’s time.
‘Did you hear me, Ryan?’ she said, and this time, there was an almost immediate response: a muffled ‘Yes’. Just that – ‘Yes.’ Flat, but certain.
Moira smiled. She rattled back down the stairs, into the hall’s well of light, and back into the kitchen to ready herself.
She’d expected to have to call him, but just as she bent to pull the roasted veg from the oven, she found he was standing over her – the shock of his height, which she’d never quite got used to. He’s all limbs, she thought, as she straightened up, smiling. He
had shoulders like a crow: hooked in as though to minimise his ranginess, but the effect was more like drawing a black line around it, making it sharper.
‘What’s cooking?’ he asked, standing there. He made no move to help her, but she flicked away that little irritation. He was here – she’d asked him, and he’d come.
‘Pasta,’ Moira said. ‘With chicken and roast veg. I’m back on my health kick.’
Ryan rolled his eyes.
‘If you deign to eat with me more often’ – she’d said it teasingly, sarcasm sweetening her voice – ‘then I’ll be more inclined to cook steak and chips, okay?’
He’d smiled then, and Moira had smiled back. Sometimes, when Ryan smiled, she could feel herself falling backwards through a kind of vortex, into the past where Jackie was still alive and Ryan was maybe eleven or so, rushing out to the shed to work on some invention he’d dreamed up. She could see that little eleven-year-old when he smiled – could see him now.
They sat opposite each other. For a while, Moira watched her son wolf down the food she’d made, in huge bites. It had always alarmed her, the way men ate: like they were in a rush to fill themselves with fuel for whatever the next thing was that they needed to do. Jackie had been like that, too – full of energy and ravenous.
‘It’s good?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ Ryan said, his mouth half full. He peeked up at her from under his dark, sawn-off hair. ‘For health food, I guess it’s okay.’
This was the moment, Moira realised. Quick, before he finishes up.
‘I haven’t seen much of you, lately,’ she said. She tried not to sound pleading, and thought she’d done all right. ‘You’ve been busy, I guess? With college?’
Ryan’s eyes darted back down to his food.
‘I guess,’ he echoed.
‘I . . . haven’t really asked you much about your course lately,’ Moira said. ‘I’m sorry about that, sweetheart. What are you working on at the moment?’
She watched him swirl linguine onto his fork.
‘Just stuff,’ he said – the response she’d been so certain was coming that she could have chimed in with him exactly as he spoke.
‘Practical stuff?’ Tone it down, Moira, she thought. She sounded just a little too sunny. ‘Or are you writing essays, or something?’
Ryan had looked up at her again, then – actually lifted his face and made eye contact, his jaw working on the food.
‘No offence, Mum,’ he said, ‘but you don’t exactly know much about engineering. You always space out when I talk about my course stuff.’
Moira felt her face colour. He’s right, she thought.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know I haven’t been very attentive lately. But I think I’m finally getting back on my feet, you know? After Dad – I think I might finally be back to normal.’
Ryan said nothing. He lifted another forkful of food.
‘How about you?’ Moira tried. ‘How are you doing, these days . . . post-Dad, I mean?’
She waited for an answer, but none came. As he chewed, her son breathed out hard through his nose.
‘You seem . . .’ Moira clawed for the words. She had to get this right, or he’d clam up entirely. ‘Not yourself, right now. Are you doing okay? Can I do anything?’
Something was happening in her son’s eyes. She watched him choosing what to say to her.
‘Okay, Mum,’ he said. ‘Hypothetical. Imagine you and Dad, when you first met.’
Moira blinked in surprise, but said, ‘All right.’
Ryan looked down at the table.
‘When you first met Dad,’ he said, his voice gappy and faltering, ‘did you like him?’
Moira smiled. She was surprised by the question, but it kicked up a memory so vivid that she found herself easily sucked into this hypothetical scenario of her son’s.
‘I thought he was pretty gallus,’ she replied, laughing. ‘You know how your dad was – such swagger. But yes, I couldn’t help but like him. That was part of why I liked him.’
Her son’s face fell. She’d said the wrong thing.
‘I don’t have that,’ he said, quietly. ‘Do I? I don’t have swagger.’
‘Oh honey,’ Moira said. Ryan had stopped eating. He was bouncing his fork between his thumb and the side of his forefinger, as though it were a drumstick. ‘Tell me what this is about. What’s bothering you?’
Moira stopped. Her throat felt dry, and she was fighting tears once again. She didn’t know if she could go on, but she also knew it was too late to go back.
‘It’s okay, Moira,’ DI Birch said. ‘You’re doing great.’
Moira opened her eyes and threw a grateful look at Birch. Then she closed them again.
‘He said it was private; it was none of my business – that sort of sulky teenage boy stuff. I said, “I assume it’s not a college-work thing?” And he laughed a sort of strange laugh. There was just something about his manner that made me feel uneasy. He had this look in his eye that I’ve only ever seen a couple of times before, when he was younger. There was this one time – he was about fifteen then, I think, and already tall – he got into an argument with his father. Jackie could be . . . well, pedantic about things. And Ryan was stubborn, perhaps even more stubborn than your average teenage boy. So this argument, I can’t even remember what it was about now, it escalated, and it escalated, and then I saw this awful dark look come across Ryan’s face. And then . . . then he hit his father. Just once. But he hit him hard. Felled him, right onto the carpet in that living room. Jackie and I were just stunned. I’ve never forgotten that look, and he was wearing it again, that night, talking about swagger.’
DI Birch was nodding. Moira tried to picture her son’s face.
‘Ryan.’ The food on her own plate was cold. Moira had no stomach for it now; she wanted only to get to the bottom of whatever had come over her son. Anxiety bubbled in her gut. ‘Ryan, you know that if you’re in any kind of trouble, you really should tell me.’
That black look again – that, and Ryan gave a strange sort of half-smile. Hairs stood up on Moira’s arms.
‘What kind of trouble do you think I might be in?’
He was holding her gaze now. What if something’s really wrong? Moira thought. But she had to press on. She thought of the worst possible thing that she could imagine it might be – perhaps they could work backwards from there.
‘I’ve been worried,’ she said, ‘that you might be taking drugs.’
This was a lie, Moira realised. She hadn’t been worried about anything so specific. But now that it had dawned on her she felt gripped in the fear of that eventuality.
‘Have you heard,’ he said, surprise softening the hardness in his eyes, just slightly, ‘about what’s going on at college?’
Moira shook her head.
‘There is a drug thing.’ Ryan dropped his eyes once more, began to swirl the tines of his fork lazily around in the discarded pasta on his plate. ‘I’m not into it. But yeah, the college is full of drugs. I wondered if the word had started to get out.’
Moira felt the blood draining from her face.
‘This is the first I’ve heard of it,’ she said, ‘but – what are the staff doing?’
Her son made a snorting sound, short but loud.
‘Fuck all,’ he said. ‘That’s what.’
Ordinarily she’d have pulled him up on the language – and he knew that – but she didn’t want to stop him from talking.
‘What does this have to do with me and your dad?’ she asked. ‘Why did you ask me to think about him just then?’
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Ryan’s fork skriking across the glazed surface of the plate. Then, just when she thought he wasn’t going to speak again, Ryan looked back up at her.
‘Mum . . . you remember Abigail Hodgekiss, right?’
DI Birch had sat bolt upright.
‘I’m sorry.’ Moira passed a hand over her eyes. ‘I know I should have told you . . . I s
hould have told you that Ryan . . . that there’s a bit of a history, there. With Abigail. They were in high school together, you know.’
DI Birch stared at her.
‘Yes, I knew that, but – you’re saying there was something more significant than that?’
Moira’s face crumpled, like paper being palmed into a ball.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have told you. But I decided that . . . well, no one else ever knew, I don’t think. Not even Abigail, she never realised. I thought maybe it wasn’t important, or it was a coincidence that she was one of the . . . the women. The women killed.’ Moira was hiccupping sobs now. ‘And then . . . every time I didn’t mention it, it became harder. Harder to say, oh, actually . . .’ Moira let her head fall into her opened palms.
‘To say oh actually, what?’
The sharpness in DI Birch’s voice made Moira flick her face up again, the room swimming beyond her tears.
‘To say, oh, actually . . . Ryan was desperately in love with Abigail. All through high school, he had the most powerful crush on her.’
DI Birch’s mouth fell open.
‘She never had any idea,’ Moira said, her voice a thin squeak now. ‘She barely knew he existed.’
‘She still barely knows I exist.’ Ryan clattered the fork onto the side of the plate, and it glanced off onto the table, making a red smatter of sauce on Moira’s tablecloth.
Moira smiled. She knew she shouldn’t – she’d spent enough thirteen- and fourteen- and fifteen-year-old evenings with Ryan, cajoling him into thinking that Abigail would notice him eventually and even if she didn’t, there would be other girls – but she was relieved. Girl trouble, she thought. After all that, it’s only girl trouble.
‘In fact,’ Ryan said, ‘it’s worse. She knows I exist, but she hates me. And she has this fucking dumbass of a boyfriend.’
Again, Moira flinched at the language, but again, she decided to let it slide.
‘He’s a total asshole,’ Ryan was saying. ‘He’s right in the middle of all this drug stuff that’s going on and Abigail just loves him. Just like women always love asshole guys – even you, Mum! Even my own mother.’