She can’t contact him. Not yet. How would it look, for the husband of a missing woman to have a mistress? Everyone would assume the worst. They’d say this was his fault. Natalie would be the wronged woman, the heartbroken wife.
Maybe that’s exactly what Natalie had been counting on happening when she left. Maybe her plan had been to draw Jennifer out, into the spotlight. To expose her. To expose the affair.
Well, she isn’t going to fall for it.
And anyway, she has to stay away now, after that debacle at the house earlier. What was that neighbour even doing, face up against her bedroom window, staring into someone else’s back garden? Nosy cow. And after all of it, Mike hadn’t even been in.
Jennifer scrolls back up to the top of the page, to the reporter’s by-line. Audrey Coughlan. A woman, then. She feels a tinge of jealously that’s only made worse by the thumbnail picture. The reporter looks younger than Jennifer, and attractive. And she’s met Mike.
Actually—
She taps the screen with two fingers, zooming in.
Is that the woman she saw going into Mike’s house?
Jennifer had fled when she’d seen the nosy neighbour, but returned later, checking to see if Mike had come home since. His car was in the driveway, so she went for it. If anyone asked, she was just going to say that she was a friend of Natalie’s. But when she got to the gate, she’d seen there was another car there too. A fucking Garda car. Either something had happened with Natalie or Mrs Bitch Next Door had gone and called the bloody police. Jennifer had just about managed to execute an abort, stopping and making a face as if she’d zoned out and approached the wrong house, in case anyone was watching, before turning swiftly on her heel and continuing down the road. When she was far enough away, she’d turned back to see if anyone had come out of the house. No one had, but someone was going into it: a woman.
This reporter, Jennifer realises now.
Audrey.
The jealously flares up into a hot, burning streak. This woman, who doesn’t know Mike at all, was able to waltz inside his house and speak to him. Sit close with him. Be with him.
It’s just not fair.
Jennifer’s free hand clenches into a fist until she can feel the sharp tips of her manicured nails digging into her palm.
It’s irrational, this feeling. She knows that, she isn’t stupid. But that doesn’t mean she can turn it off like a switch.
And this Audrey, she doesn’t seem particularly nice, does she? There’s a snide tone to the article, when you think about it. Mr Kerr says he learned of them … Mr Kerr said he believed … He didn’t want to ‘embarrass’ her. What the hell are those quotation marks about?
Jennifer scrolls down to the LEAVE A COMMENT button.
Mike would be absolutely horrified if he ever found out about this, but he needn’t ever know. He won’t – Jennifer already has a user account on ThePaper.ie; her username is a string of random numbers and her profile picture is of a middle-aged man with a ruddy red face and a shaved head. She types:
So let me get this straight. This self-obsessed self-styled ‘influencer’ (WTAF?) told her posse of idiotic sycophants that she was leaving, but not her own husband? Why are we even bothering to look for this bitch? And who wrote this ‘article’? A child? Go back to school. You clearly need more of it. It’s not like your looks are going to pay the bills, love, that’s for sure.
She reads over it once, then clicks SUBMIT.
The action works like the opening of a vent. The anger loses its pressure, then begins to disperse.
She feels better. Calmer.
She can think clearly again.
The Paper claims comments are moderated, but in Jennifer’s experience there are, at best, random checks. She’s seen all sorts of vitriol on there, from run-of-the-mill whataboutery to hate speech. She’s confident no one will intercept her comment before it goes live on the site. She hopes the reporter sees it. That girl could do with being taken down a notch.
Especially when she can’t even get the basic facts right.
The Paper understands that Ms O’Connor did not inform her husband, family or friends of her plans.
But Natalie did inform her husband.
She left him a note.
Three months in and Seanie still wasn’t used to the silence.
He was used to waking up in a one-bed apartment overlooking St John’s Road, one of the main arteries into Dublin City’s centre, to a cacophony of car horns, rumbling HGVs and whining motorbikes executing impatient overtaking. Noise that started before the sun was up. On the other side of the traffic, train tracks from the south and west terminated in Heuston Station, depositing thousands of commuters on to its platforms five days a week. The trains themselves were a constant low hum, their brakes an occasional screech, the commuters attracting the bells of the tram and the rumble of double-decker buses on which they’d continue their journeys. The apartment building was adjacent to a large chain hotel whose delivery trucks started arriving before dawn and continued coming in waves throughout the morning, each one making a beep-beep-beep noise as it reversed into the loading bay. The people in the unit next door liked to wake up to talk-radio turned up loud, the shared wall happy to let the voices through but not the words, which, somehow, was worse.
This was not that. This was nothing at all.
It woke Seanie up, this lack of noise. Eyes wide open no later than seven every morning and sometimes as early as five thirty or six. His theory was that he slept better during the night without the interruption of sirens and the like – with no interruptions at all – so he needed less of it. Quality over quantity.
That’s what he was telling himself, anyway.
Imelda’s sleep was unaffected, so whenever Seanie woke early he didn’t move, he just lay there in the dark. In Shanamore it really was dark, the nearest street-light being at least thirty metres away and around a bend in the road. He would lie there and listen to her breathing, thinking about the day ahead and what he might do to keep her from realising that he’d finally realised that moving here was mistake.
Too. Because she’d realised it already.
She hadn’t actually said it to him, but she didn’t need to. Since they moved here, Imelda had developed two different settings: the woman who woke up beside him on a Monday morning and the woman who woke up beside him at weekends. On a Monday she had somewhere to go and she had to be there by a certain time, but that wasn’t it. It wasn’t just that. Her eyes were bright. She moved differently. She smiled more. She was excited.
Excited to leave him.
‘Not you,’ she’d corrected him once, when he was so wounded by her enthusiasm to drive hundreds of miles away from him and stay there for the next five days that he’d let it get the better of him, and said something. ‘This place.’
He’d said, ‘This place is me.’
A deep sigh. ‘You knew this was how it was going to be.’
‘You said you’d transfer.’
‘I will. I can’t yet.’
‘Can’t or won’t?’
‘Oh Seanie, for God’s sake.’ Imelda only ever used his name when she was exasperated by him. ‘This was your idea.’
He’d been stationed in Store Street when he got wind of it: Shanamore, Co. Cork, population 941, needed a guard. Cutbacks had closed its one-man station three years ago, forcing the lads across the bay in Ballycotton to hold the fort. But the local TDs must have got an earful about it on the doorsteps in the run-up to the last general election, because miraculously the money was there again. The higher-ups liked the idea of appointing someone young and fresh-faced to the post, someone who’d get involved in the local community, someone happy to leave the city’s bright lights behind. What attracted Seanie was the fact that the posting came with a house whose weekly rent was what they were currently spending on a takeaway and a bottle of wine of a Friday night.
At home that night that was the detail he’d led with. They’d been saving for a depo
sit but they both knew it’d be four or five years before they could afford to buy, and even then it might not be anywhere near the city, let alone in the areas they liked. Living in Shanamore, he told Imelda, would get them where they wanted to go, and quicker. They might even manage to save something on top of the deposit.
What he didn’t say too much about, to Imelda or to his superiors, was that he knew Shanamore well. A friend of his grandmother’s had had a house down there and when he and his siblings were young, they’d got to use it in the summer months. For three or four weeks each year, one week at a time, his mother would pile him and his brother and sister into the car, pick up his grandmother at her gate and drive an hour and a half west from Waterford to a tiny, three-room cottage on an acre by the beach. It had only one bedroom. The children slept in sleeping bags on the living-room floor while the adults shared the double bed. There was never any hot water and only static on the crappy portable TV, but they spent so little time inside the cottage, it didn’t matter.
What they did do was run. Around the garden, down the beach, into the sea. One summer a four-man tent materialised and the kids slept in that, in the garden. The hedges that marked the cottage’s boundary line were full of blackberries, which they picked and ate despite being warned not to without washing them first. They made friends with the family next door who had children of similar ages. They made more friends in the caravan park, from one-weekend wonders to children who stayed there all summer long. A World Cup meant endless games of football; an Olympic year meant races and throwing sticks; tennis rackets always seemed to appear around the same time each summer. Sometimes their father came with them instead of Nan, and one time Nan and Mam drove them down and then Mam went back home by herself ‘for a break’ while they tried – and failed – to picture their mother existing back in their house without them running around her feet.
As they grew into teens, they started hanging out in the pub next to the hotel, drinking cans of Coke and playing pool. They gathered on the beach to drink beer. The boys found private places, little spots tucked between beach boulders or shielded by dunes, and girls who could be convinced to go there with them. Eventually Nan couldn’t cope with being cooped up in a tiny house with three teenagers and the three teenagers started moaning about having to leave their friends at home, and Seanie’s parents realised that they could afford holidays abroad if only the two of them went. So they did, leaving the kids at home and appointing Seanie Chief Babysitter to Cathal, younger by one year and impervious to authority, and Aoife, younger by three, who mostly stayed locked upstairs in her bedroom.
Now there he was, ten years later, selling Shanamore to Imelda like it was the greatest place in the world. Living by the sea, he said. Fresh air. The quiet idyll of the countryside. They’d spend less but live more.
He was particularly proud of that last line. He was almost certain he’d swiped it from a supermarket ad.
But Imelda wasn’t sold. She’d miss the buzz of the Big Smoke, she said. She worked in the IFSC and joked about feeling panicked at the thought of no Starbucks or Deliveroo, but they both knew it wasn’t entirely a joke. They moved in a large group of friends and every weekend came with a hectic itinerary. Music festivals. Food festivals. Beer gardens and outdoor cinemas and supper clubs. Some new cocktail club or market or food truck. If not that, then a wedding or stag do.
The truth was, Seanie was exhausted by it all. He’d happily have skipped most of these things and he thought maybe they should, considering the cost. When a shift clashed with some outing or festival, he’d moan to Imelda but be secretly glad. Besides, for him, the buzz of the big city meant drugs and disorder and assault. He’d spent too much time taking statements from college students outside fast food restaurants in the early hours of Sunday morning, their faces still smeared with grease and slack with too much booze. He’d seen a friend from Templemore get cut in the face with a broken bottle feet from the Spire in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. He was ready for a quieter life.
He reminded Imelda that Dublin was only a three-hour drive from Shanamore and that there were plenty of spare bedrooms they could bag for an evening if they wanted to stay up there for a night.
He wore her down.
They’d moved here at the end of July when the skies were blue and the air was warm. Imelda was from Clare and had never been to Shanamore; her childhood beaches were the pristine white sands of the Atlantic Coast. Seanie had recalled the Front Strand’s seaweed and stones and worried. But when she first caught sight of it – a panorama of shimmering sea revealed as they rounded a bend in the road in from Midleton – she’d whispered, ‘Wow’ and he’d started to breathe again, silently thanking the weather for cooperating.
That day, Front Strand was filled with cars and people, and the happy cries of children carried on the wind. They stopped to get celebratory ice creams and Seanie pointed out the cottage where he’d stayed as a kid. Buttery yellow fields of rapeseed made every mile between there and Shanamore Village postcard perfect.
When Imelda saw the café sign outside The Kiln, she’d said, ‘Oh, thank God,’ but by then she was grinning. They both were. Stuck on red at Shanamore’s only set of traffic lights she’d leaned over and kissed him and said, ‘This is a good idea,’ and he’d thought that yes, it was a good idea, a bloody brilliant one, and everything was going to work out okay. It felt as if they’d moved their lives into a permanent summer, like every day now was going to feel like a holiday.
Their mood that afternoon wasn’t even dampened by the absolute state of the house, a seventies bungalow with a mossy slate roof and about as much charm as a chemical toilet. The Office of Public Works had supposedly given the place a once-over prior to their arrival but it was hard to see where the improvements had been made. There was a shit-brown front door at one end, inset with frosted glass. Next to it were two large windows, hung with vertical blinds, the kind you’d see in a doctor’s office. The frames looked like they were rotting. A long, brown-green stain dripped down the pebble-dashed wall between the two windows, evidence that the gutter joint above it had come unsealed.
On the other end was another front door, painted navy blue. A Garda shield was mounted beside it and the newest part of the house was sitting in front: a small cement ramp and metal railing. An eyesore of an antenna rose up behind the house, two or maybe even three times its height, held in place by thick tension cables.
Still in the car, they’d turned and looked at each other.
‘I can turn around,’ Seanie had said.
Imelda had scoffed. ‘As if.’
‘I would.’
‘It’s free, Seanie. Practically, anyway. We’ll just keep telling ourselves that. And hey, at least you can’t complain about your commute.’
Now, in the darkness of their bedroom, she said, ‘Is it seven yet?’ Her voice was clear and alert. She’d been awake for a while.
Seanie patted his bedside table for his phone. He pressed a button on it, lighting the room with a weak blue glow.
‘Almost,’ he said. ‘Ten to.’
This was her first time waking up here on a Tuesday morning; there’d been a training day yesterday in Cork, so she’d been able to come home afterwards. But all that did was delay the wrenching Monday-morning routine for one more day.
‘I think the phone is ringing,’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘The other phone. Listen.’ When Seanie did, he heard the faint but unmistakable shrill on the other side of the wall. ‘You should go and check it out.’
Imelda pulled back the covers and he reached for her, touching her arm just as she swung her legs on to the floor, about to say, I’d rather stay here with you, but the faraway ringing ceased and his mobile began to vibrate angrily.
A Dublin number.
He sat up in the bed to answer it.
‘Sergeant Flynn?’
‘Yes,’ Seanie said. Then louder, clearer, ‘Yes?’
‘DS Steven O’Rei
lly, Blackrock. Sorry – I was going to leave a message.’ He could’ve done that on the station phone, Seanie thought. ‘You’re in Shanamore?’
‘I’m the only one who is.’
‘Good man, good man.’
‘What can I do for you, Sergeant?’
‘You’ve got a place down there. Shanamore Holiday Village or something? Can’t read my own bloody handwriting here. Does that ring a bell?’
‘Yeah,’ Seanie said. ‘Shanamore Cottages.’
But it did more than ring a bell. It sounded an alarm.
Because Andrew Gallagher managed those cottages.
Three months in and Seanie had finally got the call he’d been waiting for.
The beginning of it all, it was her.
The summer that stretched between the last day of primary school and the first day of secondary felt like the last of its kind in many ways. Andrew turned thirteen at the start of August but didn’t want a party, partly because he worried that he couldn’t round up enough kids to go to it and partly because he didn’t feel well, hadn’t felt well all summer in fact, but endlessly jittery and on edge, sometimes with a sharp pain that bisected his stomach and made breathing hurt.
He knew what was causing it. He sometimes felt like he might be many bad things but stupid wasn’t one of them. It was fear. He was afraid of making the transition from his one-room country school where a handful of children who couldn’t remember not knowing each other all sat within the teacher’s eyeline, all the time, to a gleaming labyrinth of corridors and classrooms and playing fields, filled with masses of strangers, some of whom lived in houses attached to other houses and some even in little apartments (the idea of a house that didn’t have doors out on to the ground … Andrew couldn’t imagine what living in such a thing must be like), and some of whom – the Sixth Years – were old enough to marry and vote and even drive.
The thought of moving among them was terrifying. Especially because he knew so little about how to do it and there was no one, really, that he could ask. He’d taken what little he’d gleaned from overheard conversations, TV shows, the time that girl had got the highest marks in all of Ireland in her Leaving Cert exam and the school was on the news, and spent interminable hours dwelling on it, extrapolating what he could, until he’d convinced himself that there were instructions about how to be and what to say and who to say it to, and that everybody else at the school would already have them.
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