by Anna Sweeney
Redmond crumpled his takeaway cup in a bin, and crossed the edge of Bantry’s attractive main square to the police station. He squared his shoulders as he pushed open the door. Just inside, Trevor O’Kelleher was in conversation with the district superintendent.
‘I’ve ten lads down in Castletown already,’ said the inspector to his superior, ‘and I’ve others getting ready to join them. This caper could go on until nightfall.’
The young garda managed to catch O’Kelleher’s eye. He reckoned he was in with a chance.
‘Redmond, good man yourself,’ said O’Kelleher. ‘I’ve been looking around for someone to follow up a call that just came in.’
The inspector stepped away from the superintendent and spoke rapidly to Redmond. ‘It’s a bit of a nuisance, to be honest. Something about a dead animal on a roadside over in Beara, getting in the way of motorists. We’ll have to find out who dumped it and follow up on the legalities. I believe it’s somewhere near Adrigole, but you’ll get all the details over at reception.’
Redmond got caught in traffic in Glengarriff, a popular tourist town twelve miles west of Bantry and a gateway to the Beara peninsula, which stretched another thirty miles out into the Atlantic. A few coach buses had stopped to disgorge their passengers to the craft shops, and Redmond cursed as he waited. He would have been better off at home than searching for a dead sheep in the mountains. He was damned sure that Dublin-based gardai did not spend their time on such pursuits.
He smoothed down his hair and grimaced at his reflection in the rear-view mirror. He had always resented his baby-face looks, with the soft skin of a child – they made it so much harder for him to be taken seriously, he felt. Indeed, most people assumed that he had joined the gardai after leaving school or college, and had no idea he was already into his thirties, having worked in computing for several dreary years. His worry now was that he had made a mistake moving to Bantry, instead of applying for a city posting.
During his garda training, what he had loved most was the period of three months he spent in a suburban station in Dublin. Much of his time was taken up with routine jobs, but he also got a glimpse of a different and enormously exciting world: officers on tenterhooks as they played a deadly game of hide-and-seek with local drug gangs who were forever on the ready to execute anyone looking sideways at them, and garda camaraderie intensified in the glare of fear and danger. Redmond had often fantasised about that world since then, and how it would cater to his own addiction to a drug freely and legally available – adrenaline, the wonderful buzz brought on by constant stress and pressure.
But he knew that his innate caution meant he was not a natural candidate for such a life, and feared that jumping in at the deep end would expose his pathetic limitations. Meanwhile, Bantry station had advantages over most small-town postings. As a district headquarters staffed by about thirty officers, its brief went well beyond the humdrum. And the southwest coast of Ireland, notched as it was by innumerable remote inlets, was on the front line in the long war on illegal drugs. Boats laden with toxic packages made forays to shore, all part of a multibillion trade controlled from South America, Spain and Amsterdam. Sooner or later, Redmond would get the kind of investigative experience that would bolster his chances of getting his dream job in the future.
He told himself that he should make the most of his time in Bantry. The golf clubs he carried in the boot of the car were not going to get used, he realised that by now. But as he neared Adrigole village, he noticed a signpost to a sailing centre. He could call in on his way back – enrolling for a new activity had to be better than living in fear of his free time, and being superfit could earn him extra points with those who noticed such things.
His mobile phone beeped with a new text message and he stopped by the seashore to read it. It was from Sergeant Fitzmaurice, about a disturbance involving Dominic Scurlock at Cnoc Meala the night before. Redmond smiled as he texted back that he would be in Castletownbere in an hour or so. Once he had sorted out the roadside carcass, he could meet the sergeant and see the quayside protest as a bonus.
His satnav directed him to turn right towards the famous Healy Pass road that crossed the craggy middle of the peninsula. Houses and trees petered out a short distance inland. The sun went in, and soon he was surrounded by stony mountains and gathering clouds. His spirits sagged at the bleakness of the place – a nightmare vision of emptiness, he thought. His car seemed tiny and insignificant, like a beetle scuttling across the floor of a cave.
He could imagine the mountain valley as a location for a horror film, devoid of humans and over run by monsters tearing up the landscape, wrenching bare purple-grey stones out of the depths of the earth and hurling them all over the hills.
‘Be careful! We were afraid to go down.’
Three or four people stood at an old stone bridge over a wide stream, their cars parked nearby. The road continued up to the mountain pass high above them.
As he approached, Redmond realised that the dead animal was not at the side of the road. It was lying on rough grass by the stream, wrapped in a black plastic bag. The air was filled with the squawking of gulls, but several other birds were tearing at the bag itself. Redmond knew little about nature but thought they could be rooks or hooded crows. They pulled at the plastic with their powerful beaks, all the while beating their wings to keep the gulls away from their booty.
‘We’ll have to phone the police.’ One of the watching group pulled out his mobile as he said it. ‘I don’t believe that’s a dead sheep or a dog down there.’
Redmond understood instantly. The awful contents of the bag were being revealed as the birds tore it to ribbons.
He called out to the other people that he was a garda, as he ran to his car and pulled out the golf clubs from the boot. After handing them around, he jumped over a low wall by the roadside and down the steep slope to the bank of the stream. He waved his own club at the birds to scare them off.
He had no idea whether the birds would attack him. But they had to be driven away and the scene secured. Another man was trying urgently to get through to the Garda station. Whoever had made the original call had not understood or explained the situation.
The birds backed off gradually. One of them scraped Redmond’s head with its claws but he ignored the pain. He was fighting off the nausea that assailed him as soon as he looked properly at the heap on the ground.
One leg was splayed sideways. A shoe was falling off at the ankle and the skin was exposed above a piece of ragged sock. The birds had torn into the flesh, pulling away at the trouser leg to get at their prey. In another half an hour they would have destroyed the body.
Redmond finally allowed his eyes to focus on the most awful sight of all. A bloodied hand was turned up to the sky, as if begging for mercy.
SIX
Saturday 19 September, 1.15 p.m.
The place was dark. A basement, maybe, or an underground den. Windowless and dark, apart from a faint light far above Nessa’s head. There were steps spiralling up towards the light.
She was surprised she could make out her own hand in the darkness. She opened her palm and saw a drop of blood at its centre. The blood was a bright red colour.
She felt a knot in her stomach, a tight knot of fear. The staircase was steep and her feet were tired, so very tired. She tried to trudge up the steps but she was afraid every minute of slipping down into the blackness.
She suddenly realised that she was not alone. It was the smell she recognised, that sickly smell of stale alcohol and sweaty skin. She could not see Dominic but she knew he was there.
Then she heard a laugh. Jack Talbot was chuckling over a newspaper article he thrust out in front of her.
It was his laugh that made Nessa realise she was dreaming. She was trapped in a nightmare, down in the depths of her own mind. The laugh began to change and now she heard Dominic’s self-pitying tones. His face followed her into the cold light of awakening.
She lay rigidly still, h
oping the tight lump in her stomach would ease. She wished she could turn to her husband’s comforting touch, but a chilly emptiness had taken his place.
The room was dark but Nessa remembered that several hours of daylight had already passed. She had been up earlier to serve breakfast to the guests, to deal with their bills as they checked out, to nod at their concerned farewells. It seemed to her now that someone else had been acting her part all morning. She had slept so little during the night that arranging eggs on plates had been a trial of endurance. Just as well that her son Ronan was still at his friend’s house, or she would have had to put on a false smile for him too.
She was glad too that she had drifted off when she finally made it back to bed. An hour of dozing uneasily allowed her to escape Dominic’s lingering smell for a time, before he caught up with her in her dreams. She had stood in the shower for a long time earlier but felt she could not wash him off her. Her skin prickled under the duvet as his image loomed over her again, eyes bulging and belly pushing against her as he got ready to rape her.
She turned her face into her pillow as if that would get rid of him. She could not make sense of what had happened. Her friends would have described her as tough, determined, indeed bolshie at times, and she had always assumed that she could rely on those traits to get her out of trouble, even while she valued her softer side in her own mind. She should have been able to throw Dominic out of the house instead of standing there under his malign spell, immobilized and weak, at his mercy as he twirled the glinting knife in front of her.
And then Fergus Malden came into the room. He looked bewildered but his arrival was enough to make Dominic beat a retreat to the garden. Nessa shouted at Fergus to shut the French windows, after which they rushed around the house in a frenzy of locking doors and windows. It was only when Fergus told her that Dominic’s dark blue BMW was no longer outside that she attempted an explanation. By then, neighbours had also arrived and the evening became another blur of phone calls and half-conversations.
As far as she understood, a garda from Castletownbere caught up with Dominic somewhere between Adrigole and Glengarriff, about an hour after he fled the house. He was breathalysed but she was unsure of what happened after that. In the morning, however, she got a message from Bantry to say that Maureen was being transferred to Cork’s Regional Hospital for a brain scan, and that her husband was making his way to the city too.
Nessa lay hunched in the darkness, wishing she could obliterate every impression left by Dominic. She knew she should get up and distract herself, but even when she heard her phone ring, she stayed under the bedclothes. Her limbs felt heavy and useless, as if she had been flattened by a falling boulder.
Just as the ringing stopped, she sat up in fright and grabbed the phone. It could be Patrick trying to get through. She had tried over and over to contact him the night before, but all she got were the same shrill beeps in her ears.
It was not Patrick’s name on the screen, however, but Caitlín O’Donovan’s. Her friend had phoned earlier in the morning, to reassure her that she would stay a few nights at Cnoc Meala once the guests had gone, if that would help. Nessa decided to wait a while to phone her back this time, until she had doused herself in the shower and swallowed a cup of tea. She would also have to find a few phone numbers for Patrick’s cousins in Malawi, to get a message to him. He must have arrived by now, even if every airport en route was on strike. She wanted so much to hear his quiet voice, telling her he would be home soon.
Then they would have to make a decision about Dominic. As Sergeant Fitzmaurice had explained, the gardai could not investigate his actions without an official complaint from her. They would certainly keep an eye on Dominic, but could not bring him in without his consent unless she made a statement, which the sergeant encouraged her to consider. The problem was the dilemma this would involve: how would it play in the local media, for a start, if she stood up in court and swore that one of her guests had assaulted her, but was not believed by the jury? What marks had she to show for the terror she felt as Dominic breathed into her face? Suppose Jack Talbot decided to take a sniggering pleasure in her distress?
Caitlín mentioned to her earlier that Jack had an article about Cnoc Meala in the morning’s paper. It’s a ridiculous scribble, she said, and I wouldn’t wipe my dog’s backside with it, so I was in two minds whether to say a word about it at all. But I’ve opened my big mouth now and maybe forewarned is forearmed.
Caitlín tried to retreat from the subject then, but Nessa made her say what Jack’s headline was. On a normal day, they might have laughed out loud about it. ‘Hubby awol as hols awry’ was his paper’s poetic effort for the day, and as Caitlín read out the piece to her, Nessa realised that the journalist still knew nothing about Dominic’s accusation against Oscar. All he had was a minor tale of a holiday mishap sauced up with some innuendo, and printed in a corner of an inside page. Nessa felt more relieved than angry as she listened to Caitlín, but she was afraid that Talbot would pounce if he sniffed another opportunity.
She slid down the pillow and pulled the duvet over her. The guests had departed after breakfast, but her rosy idea of a restful weekend had disappeared too. Another ten minutes, she told herself, and she would do her best to trudge up those steep steps out of the darkness.
It was no wonder, really, that breakfast time had been such an endurance. Soon after Caitlín’s phone call, Sal had arrived home. The night before, Nessa had made frantic efforts to phone her in case Dominic was still lurking in the vicinity when she and Darina returned from the party. But Sal did not answer in person, and instead, sent two brief texts. The first was probably meant to be reassuring: ‘Fine, got msg, no worries’. The second, dispatched after midnight, announced a change of plan: ‘Dar left way too early, gr8 buzz, best me stay here 2nite’.
Nessa waylaid her in the hall before she disappeared upstairs. She knew it was a bad time to have a row, but the words came out sharply all the same.
‘What do you think you were up to last night? First you promise to come home with Darina, then you pull a fast one and wait as late as possible before you tell me—’
‘It wasn’t my fault! I didn’t know Darina was going to do a Cinderella act and disappear just when things were warming up nicely.’
Nessa noticed the little smile her daughter allowed herself. ‘Darina is shyer than you are, Sal, so I hope you didn’t abandon her at the party? I assumed you’d both agree on a time to leave …’
‘And maybe we did agree, but Darina changed her mind – did that occur to you? I mean, just because she’s obsessed with her art and wants to do nothing else all weekend, you want me to be a party pooper.’ Sal gave another infuriating glimmer of a smile. ‘Besides which, if Dominic went loopy last night like you said in your messages, I thought you’d prefer me to stay away. So when you think about it, I was doing us all a favour.’
Nessa decided to give up on the argument until the family had the house to themselves. Fergus Malden was hovering to ask her something, her French guests wanted advice on the most scenic route to Gougane Barra, and the two sisters, Zoe and Stella, had just gone into the dining room. Already, Nessa could hear Zoe declaiming loudly that she was going to Castletownbere to join a protest against the owners of the abandoned Russian ship. She gritted her teeth as she approached their table with a choice of tea or coffee.
‘Did you hear the argument I had the other day about those poor sailors?’ Zoe turned from her sister to address Nessa. ‘I had an argument with Oscar Malden, on Tuesday or maybe Wednesday.’
Nessa smiled as best she could. Zoe was an energetic young woman with an inexhaustible supply of views on many subjects. Nessa liked her greatly at first, but by midweek she felt weary of her. The problem with Zoe was that she never tired of her own opinions.
‘I said it was scandalous to allow ships whose workers are treated like slaves into our ports. We should ban them, I said to Oscar – but guess what he said back to me?’
Nessa waited, aware of the glow of conviction in Zoe’s eyes. She was a community worker in Dublin’s inner city, and also seemed to be involved in other campaigns.
‘He said that if morality was the guiding force in world trade, we’d all be as penniless as the Russian crew. Do you not realise, he said smugly, that our happy lifestyle in Ireland depends on the sweat of millions of other people? Can you actually believe he joked about that?’
‘Oscar was trying to wind you up,’ said Stella. Her voice was very quiet and Nessa thought that she too might be weary of the rhetoric. She was as understated as Zoe was boisterous. The two were half-sisters and had first met only six months previously. Stella was adopted as a baby and grew up in England, and Zoe was the one to track her down when she learned about their mother’s first baby, born when she was single and facing the harsh condemnation that inevitably followed in that era. Not surprisingly, Zoe had a store of strong opinions on adoption issues too.
‘Really, we should leave Oscar be,’ Stella added more firmly. ‘We’re not likely to see him again, after all.’
But Zoe was not inclined to let go easily. She continued declaiming as Nessa made her escape to the kitchen. ‘I’m damned sure he didn’t get rich without hurting people along the way. But there he is up on a pedestal while the rest of us are supposed to bow our heads in admiration!’
Nessa closed the kitchen door, as if to shield herself against a winter’s gale. She felt a turmoil of shock, anger and shame welling up in her since Dominic’s assault and the events that preceded it. But at least she had managed to play things down among the guests. All she needed was for Zoe to denounce Dominic as well as Oscar from the rooftops of Castletownbere, and the world would conclude that Cnoc Meala was a place to avoid.