Ask No Questions

by Claire Allan

  ‘Speak up!’ his da yelled and he had repeated himself, but louder this time.

  When his da had stormed out of the room and out of the house afterwards, Declan had cried until he was sick.

  He has carried the weight of that all of his life, he thinks as he sprints up Westway. He doesn’t want to carry any more guilt. Whatever happens at the country park, with Ingrid and his da and Niall, the one thing Declan knows is that he has to make sure of it that no one else is hurt.

  As the wind pushes against him, doing its best to slow him down, he thinks of how he saw his da and one of his cronies – that fucking bastard Murray – walking back down the street later that night. The night Kelly died. They walked each side of a solemn and broken-looking Niall. He’d heard them come in the front door. He’d asked Niall if he was okay when he had come to bed, but Niall hadn’t replied. His brother had just climbed into bed.

  The next day, when the news broke that Kelly was missing, Niall didn’t even flinch. He remembers that, how his brother just took another bite of toast under the gaze of their da, who sat at the breakfast table with a mug of coffee in hand.

  When he’d found out about the bracelet, he’d been too scared to ask Niall about it. He had never dreamed, even after everything that happened, that Niall could’ve been involved. He couldn’t bear to think of his brother that way.

  But everything in Niall changed then.

  Declan pushes on, through the car park, where he sees both Ingrid’s and his da’s car – but both are empty. Ingrid and Niall, and presumably his da, are somewhere in the country park.

  He runs down the path, occasionally sliding, the rain running down his face in thick rivulets. He’ll head for their den first, maybe. Or the riverbank. He doesn’t know which. He feels sick to the very pit of his stomach, there’s a stitch in his side and his lungs are burning. He can’t remember the last time he ran anywhere and his legs are begging him to slow down.

  But he messed this up so much once before and he doesn’t want to, he can’t, mess it up again.

  Over the din of the wind, and his own laboured breathing as he pushes his body on, he hears shouting. It’s a man’s voice. He runs towards it, rounding a clearing just in time to see Niall pull his father away from a figure. It’s Ingrid, prone on the ground, face down. She isn’t moving.

  ‘Help me!’ Niall shouts, and Declan runs towards his brother and his da. He helps Niall restrain their father until he stops fighting.

  Subdued, Frankie Heaney falls to his knees, his two sons either side of him, restraining his arms.

  Declan is aware, vaguely, of Niall calling for help, asking for police and an ambulance. Aware of his father snarling and making threats – but for now, at least, Frankie Heaney is powerless to do anything more than shout and foam at the mouth.

  But Declan isn’t really taking any of that in. He is just fixated on Ingrid, who hasn’t moved. Who is lying so still. He wonders if the colour will leach from her body in the same way it did with Kelly. He closes his eyes to try to block out the sight of Ingrid in front of him, but he knows it won’t help. She will be burned into his brain in the same way Kelly is.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Ingrid

  My chest feels like it is in a vice. My neck aches, the muscles across my shoulders burn. I am wet and cold, and my hands are shredded from the stones and grit on the ground as I tried to fight my way free. One of my fingernails is missing – torn from my nail bed during the course of my fight.

  The skin on my face feels as if it has been grated and I have already realised I’m bleeding from several deep cuts.

  I have wet myself. I can feel the coldness of my own urine soaking through my jeans. My voice is little more than a whisper, my throat swollen and sore.

  But I am alive.

  A paramedic has wrapped me in a warm blanket, which hasn’t managed to stop my shivering yet, and has attached an oxygen mask to my face. I have so many questions I need to ask, but I’m too broken for now.

  All I know is that when I came to, it was with the paramedic calling my name. I had blinked, looking all around me, trying to make sense of where I was and with whom and what the hell had just happened.

  I can see Declan now, his face as white as a ghost. He is talking to a uniformed police officer. There is no sign of Niall or Frankie, although my head is ringing as a mixture of voices clash around me. It’s possible they are here somewhere. It is possible Frankie Heaney is still a free man.

  A murderer, and a free man.

  My head thumps and my eyes feel so heavy. I just desperately want to go to sleep. The doors to the ambulance are closed and we start to move. I can no longer fight my need to close my eyes.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Declan

  For the last twenty-five years of his life, Declan has believed the most horrific untruth about his brother. It has coloured every single interaction with him. Everything about the boy that he once saw as a part of himself.

  It has made him angry and unsure of the world. It has made him unable to trust anyone. It has destroyed him. He has been eaten up by a secret he thought he was keeping. Broken by the guilt of knowing an innocent man was in jail. Terrified that at any moment the truth would come out and his mother would break under the horror of it. Angry that his brother seemed to be able to carry on with his life as normal.

  He contemplates all of this as he sits in an interview room in Strand Road Police Station. He knows his brother is in another room. His father elsewhere. DI Bradley is sitting opposite him, having brought him a cup of coffee and a sandwich, which is stale.

  ‘I’m sorry about the food,’ DI Bradley says. ‘There’s not much on offer today.’

  Declan just shrugs. He sips at the coffee, but he can’t bring himself even to try to eat the sandwich. He’s afraid it will get stuck in his throat.

  ‘Are the clothes okay?’ DI Bradley asks.

  Declan nods. The grey prison-issue tracksuit they’ve given him is a bit big but clean, warm and dry. His own clothes were soaked through.

  They talk through what happened at the reservoir and Declan tries to remember every little detail. But it all happened so fast. He didn’t even think, he just did what he needed to do.

  ‘And you went to the reservoir because you thought Ingrid was in danger?’

  He nods again.

  ‘I’m afraid you need to say the words,’ DI Bradley says, nodding towards the tape recorder.

  Declan apologises. Answers again. ‘I thought … I thought that Niall had killed Kelly. And he’d been covering it up all these years. When my ma told me they’s gone to the country park together, I panicked. I knew I had to get to them. All the threats she’d had. I thought he must be behind them or something.’

  ‘And why did you think he killed Kelly?’

  Declan reaches into the pocket of the baggy tracksuit bottoms, retrieves the bracelet he’d fished out of his wet clothes while changing. ‘This was Kelly’s,’ he says. ‘Niall had it. All those years ago. He’d run away that night because Da was roaring and shouting and threatening to beat the living daylights out of him.’

  ‘Why was that?’ DI Bradley asks.

  ‘Because Niall used one of his shirts for his Halloween costume. He’d cut a ragged edge on it to make it look like Frankenstein’s shirt. We didn’t think Da would mind. He never wore that shirt any more anyway.’

  ‘But he did mind,’ DI Bradley says.

  ‘He humiliated Niall. And all Da’s pals were there, drinking and carrying on. And Da was roaring and shouting at Niall. I don’t blame him for running away. I didn’t see him again until an hour or more later, when I saw Da and a couple of his mates walking down the street.

  ‘Niall looked as if he’d seen a ghost. He came in and went up to bed and I asked him, because we shared a room, you know, I asked him what had happened. He told me to “Mind my own fucking business,” and then he wouldn’t speak about it.

  ‘But I found the bracelet the next d
ay. I didn’t know whose it was. I didn’t know it was Kelly’s until later and then all of it made sense then, you see. That he’d done it. He’d killed her and Da was covering it up for him.’

  ‘And why did you never come to the police with this information?’ DI Bradley asks. ‘I understand at the time that you were just a child yourself, but over the years? You could’ve come to us at any time.’

  Declan shakes his head. ‘It would’ve killed my mother. And Jamesy Harte was in prison. I was scared I’d get into bigger trouble for not telling. Then, well, then I just learned to live with it.’

  DI Bradley shifts in his seat, sips from his own coffee cup. ‘And the version of events Niall told us today. Do you think they’re plausible at all?’

  Niall, it seems, has told police that yes, Kelly Doherty had been on her way home when she saw he was upset. She followed him to the country park, even though he kept telling her to go home. She was there when Frankie had turned up, shouting the odds and threatening to take his belt off to Niall. Kelly was crying and shouted that she was going to go and get a grown-up, but Frankie was so enraged that he screamed at Kelly to go home then pushed her.

  He hadn’t meant to kill her. He was drunk, didn’t realise his own strength. Didn’t know she would fall and strike her head so violently on a rock that she would smash her skull.

  Niall expected Frankie to get help. He’d left his ten-year-old son sitting in the dark as the life drained from Kelly Heaney’s body to get help. So Niall couldn’t understand why, when he came back with a friend, the two men just stood looking at Kelly. He begged them to call an ambulance, but Frankie had grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him violently. He shouted that she was dead and he was fucked if he was going to take the blame for it.

  Niall had sat, snivelling on the ground, while Frankie Heaney and his friend had rolled Kelly’s body into the reservoir and pushed it out into the deeper water. He’d watched her float at first, her dress billowing around her, and then she had sunk out of his sight and he was told never to mention it again. In fact, Frankie had told him if he so much as breathed a word of what had happened, he could be made to disappear just as easily.

  ‘You say you saw your da walking back down the street with Niall later that night?’

  ‘Aye, I did,’ Declan says.

  ‘And there was another man with him?’

  Declan nods. There was. A smug shite just like his brother, who had made a successful life for himself despite everything.

  He stops for a moment, realises he has to reframe how he thinks of Niall from now on.

  ‘Declan? For the recording?’ DI Bradley says, pulling him away from his thoughts. ‘Do you know the name of this man?’

  Declan thinks of the scene again, Niall being marched down the street, his da on one side, Ryan Murray on the other. He doesn’t hesitate in naming him.

  ‘He was just a reporter then, no big shakes. But he liked to think he was somebody. Connected, you know. There were a lot of them. Hangers-on. Trying to stay on the right side of the big Frankie Heaney.’

  His voice is laced with bitterness and he doesn’t care. His da has destroyed more lives than he dares to imagine.

  ‘There were others that night, too,’ he continues, listing the names of those he can remember. ‘They mightn’t have been at the reservoir, but they were there. Out with my da.’

  ‘Was Jamesy Harte there that night?’ DI Bradley asks.

  Declan shakes his head. No, Jamesy wasn’t there. Jamesy didn’t mix with those people. Jamesy kept himself to himself. A heavy sense of sadness floods through Declan’s body and he feels himself sag under the weight of it. Tears spring to his eyes. He’s just so tired of all of it.

  ‘Jamesy had nothing to do with any of it,’ he says. ‘He wouldn’t have hurt a fly.’

  ‘You do know you’re not under arrest here,’ DI Bradley says. ‘We’re just trying to piece together what happened. Today, and back then. When Kelly Doherty died. What you’re telling us, it’s very helpful. Are you okay to continue? Can we get you another coffee?’

  Declan nods. Asks for five minutes to have a smoke and to settle himself. It’s still raining when he stands outside sucking the probably poisonous smoke from his counterfeit cigarette into his lungs.

  He stubs his cigarette out, goes back inside and takes his seat.

  ‘All I can tell you about today,’ he begins, ‘is that it was Niall who was trying to pull my da away from Ingrid when I reached them. Niall was shouting at him that he wouldn’t let him do it again. He wouldn’t be scared of him any more. He said too many people had been hurt. It had to stop.’

  DI Bradley takes notes, nods reassuringly at him.

  ‘That’s really helpful, Declan. Thank you,’ he says before nodding to a female detective in the room and standing up to leave, saying he will be back shortly.

  ‘How’s Ingrid?’ Declan asks his retreating form, unable to get the image of her prone on the ground from his mind.

  ‘She’ll be fine, I’m told,’ DI Bradley says with a small smile. ‘She’ll feel like she’s been hit by a truck for a while, but she’ll be back to herself soon enough. That one has nine lives.’

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Ingrid

  Thursday, 31 October 2019

  My curtains are open and from my sofa I watch the bright lights and sparkle of the fireworks illuminate the sky. It’s loud but there’s a comfort to it. To the noise and the life and the fun below. To all of the families walking along the quay in costume, enjoying the festivities. All those people who don’t feel scared. Who don’t have a need to be worried.

  I wasn’t brave enough to go out in it, but I’m okay where I am, on my sofa with a blanket over my knee and a cup of hot chocolate in my hands. I’m still bruised and sore after Sunday’s ordeal. My throat still aches every time I swallow. My cuts still sting in the shower.

  I’m still shell-shocked, if truth be told.

  But I know that I’ll be okay.

  I still can’t quite believe that what started as a piece on the anniversary of a murder turned into something that has sent shock waves through the city, through the country even. Layer after layer of corruption and lies and the worst that people can be have been uncovered. And poor Liam Doherty, his life destroyed all over again.

  It’s hard to make sense of something that is so very senseless. An argument between a father and son. A father with a brutal temper who hurt a little girl but who never meant to kill her. But what he did, this big man who is really just a pathetic coward at heart, was unthinkable. Sinking her body into the water. Threatening his son to keep quiet. Framing an innocent man – a man who had done nothing wrong except be a little different. Spending twenty-five years covering his tracks and making sure no one ever found out. Even if that meant making sure Jamesy Harte was dead. Even if it meant setting his heavies on me.

  And Ryan? The man I had once respected, the man I had let into my bed? He’d helped. He’d told them I’d be alone in the office the night of the first attack. He’d told them where I lived. It scares me that when they came to my flat that day, they wouldn’t have had any idea if I was there or not. What would they have done if I’d been home? I feel sick at the thought.

  When I think of Liam Doherty – what they’d done to him. Would they have done that to me?

  Out of all of this, the attack on Liam is probably what will stay with me. It’s what had made no sense. Why him? Why a grieving father?

  No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get my head around it. That is until DS King had arrived to talk to me and had filled me in. She told me that Liam Doherty had admitted he had known, almost from the start, that Jamesy Harte’s conviction was based on a series of lies. That Frankie Heaney and his cohorts – and yes, that included a young reporter called Ryan Murray – had conspired to make sure there was no way Harte would escape conviction.

  They’d arrived at the Doherty house when it was still reverberating with grief and shock and had remove
d some of Kelly’s belongings to plant in Jamesy’s house. They’d told Liam to tell the police that Jamesy had been inappropriate with his daughter. ‘Obsessed with her.’

  They’d told Liam, who was broken and struggling to find the strength to exist, that they had no doubt Jamesy had done it. That he was a dangerous man. A pervert. They’d planted horrific images in his mind and left them to fester. They’d told this father, living through his worst nightmare, that if he didn’t agree to helping them plant evidence, Jamesy would get away with it. He might even kill again.

  But over the years Liam’s doubts had grown. He’d found himself in a hell of his own making, guilt nagging at him that it was because of him that Jamesy had his freedom snatched from him.

  He’d seen Frankie Heaney, still thinking he was the big man, walking about laughing and joking without a care in the world.

  When Councillor Duffy had arrived at the Doherty house at my behest and told them it was time for them to speak to the press – and for Liam to say what a monster he thought Jamesy was – well, Liam had just broken down. He’d refused to do the interview. Bernie thought he was just grieving, but the truth was he was no longer able to lie. He couldn’t look himself in the mirror knowing what he’d done.

  He couldn’t look himself in the mirror without knowing who had really killed his daughter.

  There was something in Frankie Heaney’s demeanour, though. For all his bravado, he couldn’t look Liam in the eye.

  When Frankie had heard Liam had been at The Chronicle office, drunk and shouting the odds about wanting to ‘do the right thing’ now, he’d decided it wouldn’t do any harm to send a warning. He insists things were never meant to get violent but refuses to tell the police the names of the attackers.

  ‘They were only supposed to scare him a bit,’ Frankie told DS King.

  Guilt that I had unknowingly been a part of it, that I had pushed the Dohertys to talk, now lived in me. As did my guilt about telling Ryan where Jamesy was living, thinking I was just a reporter confiding to her editor and not feeding information directly to the enemy.