‘I know, Dec, I just got tied up with things.’
‘Nothing new there.’
She wanted to snap back at him, but there was no point. It would only end up the way all their arguments had ended up over the past six months, right back at the beginning. Ever since he missed out on that promotion, it was as if everything that went wrong was her fault. Although all the extra hours she was putting in with her new responsibilities heading up the project team hadn’t helped.
‘I was worried about you both, that’s all.’
A look of disbelief crossed his face as he picked up the remote control. ‘Well no need, we’re here now.’
She tried to make light of it. ‘I guess I’m the only one going hungry, so.’
‘I have some chips.’ Charlie shook his Happy Meal box.
‘At least someone loves me.’ Kate attempted a laugh, but when she looked across at Declan, he had already stopped listening.
‘Come on, buster, it’s late, time to get ready for bed.’
‘Ah, Mom, but—’
‘No buts, Charlie. Look, Dad’s watching his boring programme.’ Again Declan ignored her. ‘While you’re getting into your pyjamas, you can tell me all about your day, and I promise to read you the longest story.’
‘How long a story?’ He squinted his face tight.
She smiled back. ‘Really long.’
‘How long is really long?’
‘Until you’re asleep.’
‘Promise?’
‘Of course. Come on, up you get. Last one to the bathroom is a slowcoach.’
≈
When Charlie was in his pyjamas, with his face cleaned and teeth brushed, he picked up the biggest book he could find for her to read.
‘Mom, I beat Daddy running from the top of the street.’
‘Did you? I wish I’d seen that.’
‘Why didn’t you come to the cinema, Mom? Gutsy was brilliant. He’s the bravest Smurf ever.’
‘I’m sure he was brilliant – but he’s not as brilliant as you.’
‘Dad says you’re always busy.’
‘Does he now?’
‘It’s Mikey’s birthday next week. He’ll be five, and I’ll be still four. It’s not fair.’
‘You’ll be five soon enough.’ Kate looked at the size of the weighty storybook he had picked out for bedtime and smiled, pulling the covers up and giving him a big hug before getting started. No matter how tired she was, she always enjoyed their special time alone at night.
It never took Charlie long to fall asleep. After he dozed off, instead of leaving the room, Kate stayed back awhile to watch him sleep, his mouth slightly ajar as the pillow soaked up his dribbles. His jet-black hair, even darker than hers, stuck up like tiny spikes on his head. Charlie had his father’s eyes, sea-green. When he was born, they had thought his eyes would be deep blue, like Kate’s, but they’d changed. She placed her hand gently on his forehead, loving the softness of his skin. She tried to hold on to the moment, thinking only of her and Charlie, but instead her mind drifted to Caroline’s parents. What sort of nightmare must they be living through? It was too awful to contemplate something like that ever happening to her beautiful Charlie. As for her and Declan, she couldn’t help but wonder if Charlie was the only reason they were still together.
She moved Charlie’s favourite teddy in close and pulled the duvet up tighter underneath his chin. One last look, then she knew it was time to go down to the living room and be with Declan. She sighed, before switching off Charlie’s bedside lamp and walking out into the hallway. She eased his bedroom door over, leaving a slight gap, so that he wouldn’t be in complete darkness if he woke during the night.
In the living room, Declan already looked like part of the furniture, slouched on the couch wearing one of his favourite old T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms, the television still on.
‘He’s asleep then?’
‘Yeah, out for the count.’ Still Declan didn’t look at her. It was as if she was invisible. When did they stop making an effort to look well for each other? When was the last time they had sex? Not remembering wasn’t a good sign. One of them needed to make an effort.
‘How was work, Dec?’
His expression told her it wasn’t the best choice of conversation. ‘The same as always.’
He turned back to the television screen, ramping up the volume.
≈
By midnight, Kate couldn’t stay awake any longer.
‘I’m going to bed, Dec.’
‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
Kate doubted it.
When her mobile rang, it was almost a relief. She grabbed it on the second ring, and was surprised to hear O’Connor’s voice. Even over the noise of the television, Declan raised his eyebrows at the loudness of the inspector’s voice.
‘O’Connor, calm down, what’s happened?’
‘Another Category 1, that’s what’s happened. Thirteen-year-old girl, Amelia Spain, hasn’t returned home. Her mobile was pinged by the guys at HQ, last time it was active was a call from her mother about two hours ago, when she was with friends. Turns out she has a second mobile on a separate network for her close pals. Boyfriend texted her at 8.15 p.m. We picked the signal up at the Military Road, Kate. Looks like you might have called this one wrong by a mile.’
‘But she’s still only missing, you could still find her.’
‘She isn’t up at Military Road for any good fucking reason, Kate. He’s taken her, I know it.’ There was a fury in his voice that she hadn’t heard before. O’Connor hung up the phone before she got a chance to say anything else.
For once, she was pleased Declan kept his silence. She needed to think. Her professional pride was hurt. Damn O’Connor for hanging up on her. Egotistical shit – but what if he was right? What if she had called this one wrong? She walked into the kitchen, automatically flicking on the kettle, even though she had no intention of using it.
Picking up her mobile, she rang O’Connor back. She expected it to go to his voicemail and was surprised when he answered.
‘O’Connor, if it turns out bad and you do find Amelia Spain up there, I know why he moved quickly.’
He held his silence. She heard him sighing, then speaking. ‘Kate, you better have something good to tell me.’
‘He’d already groomed her, maybe even disregarded her.’ Another silence. Kate continued. ‘For whatever reason he moved on, but the finding of Caroline’s body must have spooked him. If I’m right, Amelia may turn out to be the one who got away who became a complication he needed to get rid of.’
‘Jesus Christ, Kate, we’re talking serial killer territory here.’
‘And I want to be part of finding him.’
Declan entered the kitchen, catching her last words, muttering under his breath, ‘Saint Kate, wants to save the world.’ His sarcasm was not lost on her, but O’Connor was her focus now.
‘Kate, you know what the force feels about using outsiders. And you’ve fucked up on this already, don’t forget.’
She wanted to scream at him but instead she held back, although the angry tone in her voice was undeniable. ‘I don’t give a damn, O’Connor, officially or unofficially I can help you. I want to be involved.’
Ellie
WHEN DARKNESS COMES, I FIND SOME PEACE LISTENING to the sounds of the familiar – the creaking of beds in the other rooms, the rattling gutter that has needed to be repaired since the storms last winter. Even the sound of my own breath as my face burrows into the pillow has become a form of practised regularity. How long have I felt security in predictability?
When the lights outside the door go out, I know I will suffer a long night. Since meeting Dr Ebbs earlier, my mind has been rattled – but I had felt rattled even before I saw him. Maybe it is yet another aspect to my life of nothingness, how I can sense even the slightest shifts in mood. I did well enough today, shielding it from the others, those lonely women who share my time in here. Some of my fellow patro
ns have come and gone a long time back, some more like visitors to a mad house than anything else. I guess for them, those who stay only a short while, their real place in life is outside of here. Others, like me, have been here so long we have drifted into the soul of this Godforsaken place. In here, you get used to sharing your thoughts with just yourself. It feeds into the madness of it all.
I haven’t decided if I am going to write anything. In fact, the very thought of it sends chills through me, as if someone has opened a door and a gale is blowing through it. It bashes the door of memory back and forth, and the very thought of it causes a banging inside my head. What does he mean by ‘the beginning’? Beginning of what? Of when I started to feel crazy or of when I stopped caring?
I think back to the affair, as if it might provide a beginning of sorts. It was so long ago – can I really remember it as it was then?
He was different to Joe, that was for sure. Even though they were brothers, they had nothing in common, either with each other or how they were with me. When Joe looked at me, it was almost as if he was apologising for being there – but Andrew wasn’t like that. He looked me straight in the eye, as if no one else existed. When I think about it now, a part of me wonders if he was the only man I’ve ever loved. Afterwards, just like the others, he didn’t believe me. I held no grudge. Afterwards, I held nothing.
My pregnancy had not been planned; it wasn’t something I had even thought about. In the beginning, I wasn’t even going to tell Joe. It happened at the end of my first year at college, and it certainly wasn’t the news my mother had expected.
Going to college was something that hadn’t been within her reach. She was so proud of me. As things turned out, her dying before Amy’s death was a blessing. At least she didn’t have to face that final heartbreak. If my father had been alive, things might have been different. He was always the one I was closest to and he taught me everything, from how to fish to how to fire his hunting gun. I remember my mother being cross when I told her about the gun. I couldn’t have been more than eleven when I shot at my first hare. Funny the things you remember years after.
Joe had wanted to marry me when he heard about the baby. And what had I wanted? I look back at that young woman and I see a head filled with silly notions. I took the easy choice I guess, there’s a laugh. Ignorance, I’ve learned, fashions its own crosses.
At the beginning, the pregnancy made me feel trapped, I remember that. Up until then everything had been fine with Joe. Expecting a baby changed the agenda completely. If anything, I felt like a mouse caught in a maze that had no exits, only dead ends. Of course, it wasn’t as if I had to marry him. My mother would have understood; I know that now. But it was never about her understanding. It was about disappointment, about feeling that I had let her down.
I never finished college, but I suppose by then I was happily married, or so my mother thought. In those early days of pregnancy, I should have known that I didn’t love Joe. If I had loved him, I wouldn’t have felt so trapped.
When Joe and I were first married, it was like playing a game of happy families. It made Joe happy, the idea that we were going to have a child, and he became even more attentive than before. He was kind and funny – all the things that made Joe who he was. I suppose they all got exaggerated, hyped, tricking us both into believing the world would be a better place because of the baby.
I closed my eyes to all the danger signs; I didn’t want to see them. And then there was the biggest one of all, the one that I only recognised later. It was the way Joe never held too high an opinion of himself, the way he’d put himself down. It wasn’t obvious at first. He hid it well with others and, to an extent, with me. He used his exterior good humour and bravado to overcompensate for his low self-esteem. I understood later, though too late, how this made him hold such an exalted opinion of me. My stupidity and Joe’s delusion tricked us both. Two blind mice … see how they run …
SAC (Special Area of Conservation)
Saturday, 8 October 2011, 7.30 a.m.
DRIVING OUT OF RATHMINES, KATE’S MIND WAS churning with questions about the case. She needed to find out who Caroline Devine was, the kind of person she had been, and if Amelia Spain turned out to be the next victim, what links there were, if any, between the two girls. Understanding the victim, or victims, would give her a better grasp of how each of them would have behaved given a particular set of circumstances.
If they came across as confident but somewhat distant, the perpetrator may have taken their behaviour as an insult and been angered by it. In both cases, the girls were on the brink of adulthood; many of their values would not yet have been fully formed. Adolescence was a time when things changed, when what had gone before was not always indicative of what would follow. If she was right and Caroline hadn’t been chosen at random, the girl could have inadvertently encouraged her abductor. There had to be a reason why she’d been taken. If Kate could work out what that reason was, it would give her a clearer picture of the killer.
Heading up the mountain road, she thought again about the argument she’d had with Declan the previous night about looking after Charlie on Saturday. He’d agreed in the end to mind Charlie – something he never usually minded doing – but she knew that wasn’t the real reason for his anger. ‘We all have choices,’ he had told her. But in her mind right now the death of a young girl and the possible killing of another took precedence. Kate thought of Charlie. She had checked in on him before she’d left. He had been deep in sleep, one hand resting on his pillow, the other clenched across his chest.
As she drove, she also thought of her own mother. It had been days since she had visited her at Sweetmount, something else for her to feel guilty about, and something else she would have to put to the back of her mind for now. She knew from the text she got from O’Connor earlier that Amelia still hadn’t returned home. Army helicopters would begin roaming the area from first light, and a full-scale search operation would soon be underway. One of her first starting points in this case would have to be the area where Caroline had been buried – the grave was the last connection to the killer.
≈
The road from Bohernabreena towards the Military Road had varying levels of steepness, the landscape opening out to a vastness of lush green fields and mountains capped with dense forests. Small cottages and larger homes dotted the road either side until Piperstown, where civilisation in the domestic sense ended and the barrage of police entourage began.
Kate pulled her car in tight to the side of the ditch; even from a distance she could see O’Connor’s agitation. Things were moving fast, faster than he would have wanted, but the look on his face said he had every intention of moving with it, and all around him better keep up or get the hell out of there.
‘O’Connor.’
‘Right, you’re in for now. Nolan was sceptical, but even he knows this thing is shaping up a whole lot differently from anything we’ve dealt with before.’
‘Any more from the phone signal?’
‘No. The battery’s probably down at this point. We’re concentrating the search where Caroline’s body was found, over to the left and all the way up to the Military Road.’
‘What about over there?’ Kate looked out to the barren landscape on the opposite side of the road.’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s an area of special conservation, runs for miles, nothing but flora and fauna.’
‘Kate, talk sense will you.’
‘The SAC is protected, which means no one is allowed to live, farm or even so much as turn a sod of turf on it. He isn’t stupid, O’Connor. The phone was a mistake, but if he took her up here, he wouldn’t go back to the same place and take a risk on some nosy sheep farmer spoiling his plans again. If he has taken her and buried her, the SAC makes sense.’
O’Connor gazed out on the landscape stretching as far as the eye could see, sighing. ‘That’s some amount of land, Kate.’
‘All the more reason he would pick i
t.’
Kate could tell O’Connor had his doubts, he was probably still thinking about the conversation they’d had about the timing of the next abduction and killing.
‘Listen, this guy is a planner. He didn’t abduct a young girl in broad daylight without thinking things through. If he has taken Amelia, it means, somehow, he is able to gain his victim’s trust. He will know you’ll look where Caroline was found. If he did see Amelia as a loose end needing to be tidied up, and so brought her out here, he’d bring her somewhere nobody would find her. Had it not been for the second phone, O’Connor, none of us would be standing here even asking this question.’
≈
The army aerial search continued, but it was the tracker dogs working the ground that picked up Amelia’s scent. The dogs led them to an area of raised soil, which answered their questions immediately. Even before it was confirmed that there was a body, both Kate and O’Connor knew to expect the worst. O’Connor pulled out his phone and called in Morrison. It was time for him to be involved.
Amelia’s body had been laid out in the same way as Caroline’s – hair plaited and tied with red ribbons, both hands joined at the front and the body positioned sideways and in the foetal position. This time her limbs had not been forced into position, probably unnecessary because of the speed with which he’d buried her. Morrison noted that the markings on her neck meant Amelia’s death was most probably caused by asphyxiation, just like Caroline. However, there had been no blows to the head, although the face was badly bruised.
‘Kate, what sort of mindless fucker is doing this?’
‘The kind who doesn’t think like you or me, O’Connor.’
‘Don’t give me any sympathetic psychological crap about fucked-up bastards.’
‘I’ve no intention of it,’ she retorted.
‘Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing, Kate, and from what you’ve already told me, he takes great care in getting the thing done exactly right.’
‘No argument on that score, but there are differences.’
‘The terrain, you’ve already covered that.’
‘I’ll want to see the other site first hand. Even if Amelia was a complication to be dealt with, both logic and intimacy played a role in how this man thought about his victims. There’s a lot more to this.’
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