After my mother died, I’d wrapped myself in layer after layer, and trembled underneath them.
‘I want someone who can find out what my son was doing.’ Moira’s breath strained as though she, and her words, moved forward in spasms. ‘Who were these people he sat up half the night playing that game with? What did they do to him?’
‘Didn’t the police follow that trail?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Moira said dismissively. She smiled. ‘It’s all right. Sandra. God knows, I’ve spent enough time working myself up to this. I have cousins called Mahoney. Did you—?’ She bit her lip without finishing her question, but I realised that my Irish surname was the reason she’d picked it from the phone book. ‘How about I make some tea?’
I smiled back encouragingly. ‘While you’re making it, I’ll copy this.’
Moira left me alone in her son’s room and I copied the castle scene, not quite sure why I was being so careful, since I intended asking her if I could take the computer home, so that my partner, Ivan Semyonov, could go through the hard drive.
I closed the image file. All that remained was the single icon Niall had chosen to leave on the screen. The white tower.
Moira didn’t return, and I found my own way back to the front of the house.
I didn’t have to hesitate over where to sit because there were only two unmatching chairs squatting in front of a television set. The room reminded me more than anything of a flat my girlfriend Lois and I had rented when we’d first moved out of home. Fully furnished, the newspaper ad had said, and you couldn’t complain, Lois had pointed out, because it wasn’t actually missing any of the essentials. Two plates and coffee mugs, two forks and spoons. Two beds with identically sagging mattresses, and these unwholesome, vinyl-covered chairs.
I chose the one facing away from the door.
Moira appeared, weighted down with clothes, carrying a tea tray. She told me she’d been home alone when the police had come to inform her of Niall’s death. Her husband, Bernard, had already left for work. There’d been two of them, a woman in uniform and a detective in a dark grey suit. They’d stood there and words had come out of their mouths and after the first few her mind had shut down.
‘It’s still like that.’
The policewoman had sat with Moira while the man phoned Bernard at work, and he’d gone to identify Niall’s body.
‘I’ve been unable to focus. Remember even simple things.’
‘Have you seen a counsellor?’
She nodded indifferently.
I asked her for a photograph of Niall, and an address book, notebook, something with his friends’ phone numbers, then watched the back of her head as she left the room. Her hair was uncombed, uncared for, an ingrown nest. She came back carrying a medium-sized envelope between her thumb and forefinger.
‘It was taken on Niall’s birthday.’
‘What about the phone numbers?’
Moira cleared her throat. ‘You see, Bernard and I think Niall must have destroyed everything, you know in preparation—’
‘What about bank or cheque books? Financial statements?’
‘We closed Niall’s account. The bank gave us a final statement.’
‘Could I see it please?’
Moira looked as though she was about to ask me why. She left the room again, and came back with a single folded sheet of paper. I sensed she didn’t want me looking at the photo, even at her son’s last bank statement, in front of her. I put the statement in the envelope, saying, ‘I’ll return them next time I see you.’
‘Niall was very tidy,’ she told me, hesitating, then with more determination: ‘I never had to nag him. He was always neat. And quiet. He hardly spoke to us those last few weeks. We hardly saw him. He’d come home from work, go into his room. He didn’t even want to eat with us. Bernard said he was angry with me. With us. For prying. For trying to control his life. Bernard said we should leave him alone, not pester him, that we had to let him go. Well, Niall had made that clear to us himself—very clear that he was only coming back home for a few weeks, till he found somewhere else to live. Bernard said we should make sure he understood that he was welcome at home, but not put any pressure on him to stay.’
‘Where had your son been living?’
‘With Natalie. His girlfriend Natalie.’
‘They broke up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was Niall upset?’
‘Well, yes, but it was his decision. He left her.’
‘And that night?’
‘He came home. Well, before that, he phoned me from work to tell me he was meeting a friend for a drink. I wasn’t to keep dinner for him. I was so grateful that he’d phoned, so pleased. You see, half the time he didn’t come home, but I’d cook dinner anyway, cook something he liked. He’d turn up at ten o’clock or later, and head straight to his room. And he didn’t go to bed either. I’d see his light on. He sat there playing that game. I don’t know when he slept.’
‘That night?’ I repeated.
‘Oh yes. Well, he phoned from work. He sounded different. He even called me Mum. Usually he didn’t call me anything. I said that was fine. I tried not to gush. I said I’d see him later.’
‘Did you?’
‘That’s the terrible thing. He did come home. It was seven, shortly after seven. Bernard and I were in the living room. We don’t have central heating or anything. We only heat one room in the evenings. Niall didn’t come in. He went straight to his room. I wanted to go after him, but Bernard said no—if he wanted to say hello to us, or get something to eat, he would. I should leave him alone. So I didn’t go. I just sat there, even though I felt it wasn’t right. And after about half an hour, I heard his footsteps in the corridor, and then the front door. He went out, and—and that was it. I never saw him again.’
I put out my hand. Moira let me take hers and I patted it awkwardly.
‘I’ll have to talk to Natalie. And to the friend Niall met that night. Who was it?’
‘Eamonn. Niall worked with him at the hospital.’
‘Could you make me a list? Friends, work colleagues, anybody your son talked about or saw, anyone you remember phoning him here in those last few weeks.’
Moira looked puzzled and I sighed inwardly. She didn’t realise that, for me, any investigative work meant going over the traces bit by bit, turning over every stone. Most of my work, since Ivan and I set up our consultancy, had involved standard white collar crime. It hadn’t been difficult. Most people who commit crimes using computers also commit elementary errors. But this was different. We weren’t talking about cheating an ATM, or skimming a few thousand bucks from social security.
We agreed that I would find out what I could about the MUD, and that Moira would pay my standard hourly rate. I said goodbye and left, tucking the envelope into my shoulder bag.
. . .
As soon as I’d driven round the corner, I pulled up and ripped it open.
Niall Howley had been a nice-looking young man, small and neatly made. He faced the camera with his shoulders back and arms relaxed by his sides. I turned over the photograph. On the back was the date, 9/1/1997, and underneath it ‘24 today’. As a birthday snapshot, it had nothing of the strain of an adult son posing for his parents, performing a ritual years ago outgrown. The Howley’s garden, where I presumed the shot was taken, was in full summer leaf. Niall’s last birthday, though his mother could not possibly have known it then.
Moira. The name had a pleasant ring to my ear. Had Niall called his mother by her first name?
I’ve sometimes wondered, watching my son Peter with his friends, or running across the high school oval with his dog, whether anyone would ever pick him for mine. Peter has his father’s brown hair and eyes. His nose and chin, all the cast of his face and body are his father’s. Studying Niall’s photograph, I wondered the same about him and his mother. Moira was middle-aged, burdened with sorrow, but even imagining a younger Moira, shoulders back, looking briskly a
t the world, it was hard to see what features she had shared with her son.
I started up the car again, remembering the dry ice of her hand, her lumpy body and stiff yet pleading words, the whole so tense and brittle that the lightest kiss of wind might bring it to the ground.
My first investigation involving a death. But instead of dwelling on this, my thoughts, as I negotiated the afternoon traffic on Northbourne Avenue, returned to my own family, Peter and my baby daughter Katya, and the business Katya’s father, Ivan, and I were trying to run.
Ivan and I had had great hopes when we’d started. We’d moved his computers and fax machine into my house while my ex-husband, Derek, and I were working out our divorce. Peter lived with me most of the time, spending Wednesday nights and part of every weekend with his dad. It was during the year Derek had been away that I’d met Ivan, who was—what? Lover, business partner, the father of my daughter.
We’d had cases and we’d solved them. A few public service fiddles. Enough to keep us from chucking it in. I’m not knocking the fraud stuff. That and Ivan’s stints as a techie at the Australian National University had paid our bills. Ivan’s six month contract with the ANU was the most job security either of us had enjoyed in quite a while.
Then there was Katya, our woolly-headed baby. There’s an irony in having borne two children who physically owe a great deal to their different fathers, and practically nothing to me. Getting pregnant had been an accident. When I’d found out, Ivan and I had both been against going ahead with it. Peter had desperately wanted a baby brother or sister when he was younger, but had grown used to being an only child. Unhappy in my marriage to Derek, I hadn’t wanted a second child and, in my mid-thirties, was determined to make a career for myself.
But the night before I was due to keep my appointment for a termination, I announced to Ivan that I’d changed my mind. He fought me tooth and nail for forty-eight hours, then gave in with bad grace. Now he was in love with Katya as I’d never seen him in love with anyone before.
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The Trojan Dog Page 30