The Ruin

by Dervla McTiernan

  Cormac turned to Jack’s discharge report from the hospital. He skimmed through the description of Jack’s injuries. The last page had the treating doctor’s recommendations for follow up treatment, which included counselling as well as a special diet to address nutritional deficiencies. Cormac was about to give up on the file when he saw that the hospital had kept track of Jack’s visitors. Hospital protocol at the time? Perhaps just for children unaccompanied by a parent. The list was short – only two names. His own, and that of a Tom Collins. Cormac had come each of the four days that Jack was in hospital. Tom, whoever he was, had come twice; early on the first morning after Jack’s admission, and again on the last day before he was discharged. The records were detailed – arrival and departure times were noted.

  Cormac sat back in his chair, and thought. Tom Collins had reached the hospital before 9 a.m. the morning after Jack’s admission. If Maude had been telling the truth that night, she had called only the police, after she had found her mother dead. Which meant that Cormac had been the only person in the world, other than the children, who knew about Hilaria Blake’s death until they’d reached the hospital and Cormac had called it in to the station. And that had been late evening. So how had this Tom Collins known he would find five-year-old Jack Blake in Castlebar General Hospital at 9 a.m. the following morning?

  Cormac stood and walked to the coffee station, rescued a teaspoon from the sink, made himself a coffee. Could be Collins was a friend of the family, with a connection to the gardaí? If that was the case he’d have heard the story fairly quickly. But that didn’t feel right. If someone like that, someone with connections, had had a relationship with the family, surely something would have been done about the children. Cormac tried to think of other circumstances that could have led to such an immediate visit, and they all seemed a stretch. It wasn’t much but it was an inconsistency and it was something to work with while he was waiting on the social worker file. He spooned sugar into his cup, looked around for biscuits to raid. Nothing. He was getting hungry.

  He took his coffee back to his desk, closed the paper file, logged in to PULSE and typed in a basic search – Tom Collins, Kilmore. He didn’t expect to get a hit and was surprised when the system kicked out a long list of results. He scanned them quickly. He hadn’t limited his search in any way, and the system had found a series of criminal cases where the defending solicitor was a man named Thomas Collins, with addresses in Kilmore and Galway. The entries didn’t give a date of birth. Cormac turned to Google, which gave him very little information. Thomas Collins, it seemed, was a relatively private person. No public Facebook profile for him. A little poking about led to a short profile piece in an industry magazine – apparently Thomas had been chair of the Free Legal Advice Centre in Galway two years before. He was quoted in the piece as saying that he himself had grown up in less than affluent circumstances – he’d been in and out of foster homes as a child, he said – and that he was a firm believer in giving back. The piece had a little sidebar which listed the schools and university he had attended, as well as his age. Thomas Collins was thirty-five, the same age as Maude Blake. He’d also attended Kilmore Secondary School. It seemed more likely than not, then, that Tom Collins had been a friend of Maude’s. Had she called him that night? Asked him to visit Jack?

  As Cormac stared at his computer screen, lost in thought, Rodgers heaved himself into the chair to his left and opened a family-sized packet of cheese and onion Taytos. That was enough. Cormac stood, grabbed his coat, and left. An interview with Tom Collins would have to be his start.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The practice – Collins, Barber and Associates – was on Abbeygate Street, right in the middle of the city and a short walk from the courthouse. Cormac walked there from Mill Street, and had no difficulty finding the place. The offices were on the first floor, directly above a café that advertised toasted cheese and ham sandwiches with coffee for ten euro, on a blackboard placed on the path. His stomach growled. Maybe on the way back out if he got what he came for. The door opened directly onto an uneven staircase that looked circa 1900 and probably needed some structural work. The steps were canted oddly, and creaked alarmingly when Cormac climbed them two at a time. They led to a small reception area, a pleasant sort of place, despite the general shabbiness. The reception desk had seen better days and there was a musty smell that might have been coming from an open filing cabinet that ran from floor to ceiling and covered the entire wall behind the reception desk. The mustiness was almost masked by the smell of coffee from the café downstairs, and every surface in the small room was exceptionally neat.

  The receptionist was a young guy in his early twenties. He had an earpiece in one ear and was typing furiously. He gave Cormac a tortured-looking nod, which Cormac took to mean he had been seen and would be dealt with in a moment. After another full minute of furious typing, the receptionist let out a sigh and looked up.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘The rewind button is broken so if I don’t get it all down first time I have to listen to it all again from the beginning.’ He spoke with a strong Cork accent.

  ‘Right,’ said Cormac, bemused. ‘Is Thomas Collins available? I’m Detective Sergeant Reilly. I’d appreciate a few minutes of his time.’

  The young man picked up the phone and pressed a button. ‘Tom? There’s a DS here for you.’ He paused. ‘Well, yeah. First go. But I have to go through now and fix the typos.’ He hung up and smiled at Cormac. ‘He’ll be with you in five,’ he said.

  Cormac had barely sat down when an office door opened and a tall man in a shirt and tie walked towards him, a coffee cup in one hand, and holding out the other hand to be shaken.

  ‘Detective?’ he asked. At Cormac’s nod, he gestured to a door just off the reception area. ‘I haven’t much time unfortunately. Case conference in fifteen minutes. But perhaps we can be brief?’ He waited for Cormac to open the door, which led to a meeting room, and then followed him in.

  The room felt cluttered, the table too big for it, and the chairs not quite fitting comfortably. Collins shut the door behind him, but neither man sat, which left them both standing awkwardly in the uncomfortably small space.

  ‘I’d like to speak with you about your friend, Maude Blake.’

  Collins’s expression, until then a mask of professional civility, registered surprise. ‘What? Maude? Is she okay?’

  ‘You’re still in touch?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘I thought this was about a case . . .’ He let his voice trail off. ‘Never mind.’ He pulled out a chair, and gestured to Cormac to sit. ‘Take a seat, detective.’

  Cormac sat. The conference table was an antique, and not very practical. It was too low for comfort and one of the table legs was directly in front of the seat he had taken.

  ‘You’re still in touch with Maude?’ Cormac asked again.

  ‘From time to time,’ Collins said. ‘An occasional email.’

  ‘Recently?’

  Collins had recovered his composure. ‘I called her a week or so ago to let her know that her brother, Jack, had died. I couldn’t reach her, so I sent an email. I haven’t heard from her since, so I don’t know whether or not she got my message.’

  As Collins spoke, Cormac reached into his pocket and took out a notebook. He turned to a blank page and started taking notes, Collins watching him all the while.

  ‘So you knew Jack Blake?’ Cormac asked, the question delivered as casually as possible, not looking up from his notebook.

  ‘I knew him as a child,’ said Collins. ‘I haven’t kept in touch.’

  ‘But you knew he had passed away?’

  Collins shrugged. ‘It was reported in the newspapers. The Galway Advertiser ran a feature on the front page, if I recall correctly. We’ve had a spate of suicides by young men recently, more than one in the river.’

  ‘And you were sure, just from the name in the paper, that it wasn’t another Jack Blake? Sure enough to call his sister?’

  Collins rais
ed one eyebrow. ‘Not from around here then, detective?’ he asked. His tone was gently chiding. ‘Galway may be a city of eighty thousand, but everyone knows everyone. I wasn’t in touch with Jack, but I had a vague idea of where he was living, and I knew that he was in a relationship. A friend of a friend knows his girlfriend.’

  Cormac nodded, and resumed taking notes, slowly and methodically. It was an old habit when interviewing witnesses. Most people felt a certain anxiety during the silence. Sometimes they felt compelled to fill it. Collins didn’t, but Cormac hadn’t really expected it of him. A defence lawyer with his kind of experience would certainly be more self-controlled.

  ‘So you haven’t seen Maude then? Recently?’ Cormac asked.

  Collins shook his head. ‘She’s back in Ireland? She got my message?’

  ‘She’s back in Galway. I don’t know if she got your message.’ Then, turning a new page in his notebook, ‘Did you know Jack well?’

  ‘As I told you, detective, I knew Jack only as a child, and knew a little about him through friends.’ Collins’s tone was cool but betrayed no irritation at the repeated question. ‘What is this about?’

  Cormac looked up from his notebook, his expression bland. ‘A death in suspicious circumstances, Mr Collins. We would be remiss if we did not investigate before the inquest. In case there is any suggestion that it was something other than a suicide.’ After his initial surprise, Collins had become difficult to read. He didn’t react to Cormac’s statement, but Cormac had to assume he was too smart to accept it at face value.

  ‘Jack Blake was adopted, Mr Collins, you were aware?’

  Collins nodded.

  Cormac made a show of consulting his notebook. ‘His mother died when he was five, as I understand it, and other than his sister, he had no family. There has been a suggestion, too, that his mother may have been neglectful of Jack and his sister. Perhaps even physically abusive. Do you know anything about that?’

  Collins laughed, but the sound was constrained, not natural. ‘I know that Hilaria Blake was very beautiful, and very damaged, when she moved to Kilmore. She had a problem with the drink even then, but things accelerated, very fast, once they moved into that house. She was a terrible mother.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Neglectful. She got lost in her own pain. Had nothing left for her children.’

  ‘She was violent?’

  A hesitation. ‘To the children? No.’ Tom shook his head.

  ‘She didn’t hit them?’

  ‘No.’ Simple. Firm.

  Would Tom have known about the abuse? Perhaps Maude had wanted to protect her mother, keep it a secret.

  ‘But she was neglectful?’

  ‘In the last couple of years she stopped pretending to provide any kind of care at all. Maude did everything.’

  ‘What about Family Services? They weren’t involved?’

  ‘Depends on what you mean by involved. They might have kept a file open, but by the time Maude and I were close they had stopped visiting. No care visits, no case reviews. They abandoned the family entirely.’

  Cormac said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.

  Collins sighed. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table and looked directly at Cormac. He spoke deliberately. ‘As I’ve said, in the early years it wasn’t as bad. But in the last year or so before Hilaria’s death, Maude stopped feeling like she could leave Jack alone with her mother. She walked him to school in the morning, and she was waiting at the gate when school finished. Maude fed him, washed him, read to him. You know she was only ten when he was born?’

  Cormac shook his head, meaning, he supposed, that of course he knew but he hadn’t really considered it.

  Collins continued. ‘I suppose Hilaria was able to manage to some degree when Jack was a baby, but by the time he was three Maude started missing school. The following year – Maude would have been fourteen – she barely went at all. The day she turned fifteen she stopped coming entirely. By then she had a job working for a neighbour, doing a bit of cleaning, gardening, that sort of thing. She was paid next to nothing but she needed the money to feed herself and Jack. As I said, her mother had pretty much given up any pretence of trying during those last couple of years.’

  Cormac put his notebook down. ‘Look, there were social workers available. If it was that obvious to everyone that Maude and Jack were neglected, why didn’t they step in?’

  Collins leaned back. ‘You’d have to ask them. I was too young to know better at the time. To know that something should have been done. We none of us had reason to respect or trust the authorities at that stage of our lives.’

  Cormac thought about asking about the magazine piece, the foster homes, but he didn’t want to lose the train of his questioning. He was already straying off track. He opened his mouth to ask another question but the door opened and the receptionist stuck his head in.

  ‘Broderick’s running late,’ he said. ‘Will be another fifteen at least.’ Without waiting for acknowledgement he disappeared again and shut the door.

  ‘He has an unconventional manner, your assistant.’ Cormac couldn’t quite hold back the comment, but Collins was unruffled.

  ‘He’s an apprentice. Has a first-class law degree from Trinity. Not sure if he’ll make it as a lawyer, to tell you the truth. Too honest.’ The look Collins gave Cormac told him that he knew that Cormac hadn’t told him the truth, that he knew that Cormac was playing a game, and that unlike his apprentice, Collins knew the rules of this game and could play it as hard as anyone. Cormac liked him for it, despite himself. Defence lawyers were generally not his favourite people.

  ‘Do you know if the Blakes had any other family in the area, or any that would come and visit?’

  Collins shook his head, took a careful sip of his coffee. ‘Not that I’m aware of. Maude had a father, some sort of artist or writer her mother had lived with for a time, I think in London, although I might have that wrong. Maude never met him. I don’t think anyone knew who Jack’s father was. Their grandparents on their mother’s side were dead. I never heard of any aunts or uncles.’

  ‘Any close family friends?’ Cormac asked.

  Collins twisted his lips in a semblance of a smile. ‘Not within the normal meaning of the word, no,’ he said.

  ‘By which you mean?’ Cormac asked, but Collins shook his head, sipped his coffee.

  After a long pause Collins said, ‘Hilaria didn’t have friends. She didn’t socialise. I don’t know what sent her over the edge. Certainly she had been abusing alcohol for years, but when she came to Kilmore she attacked drink with complete single-mindedness. Maude told me she hadn’t always been like that, but by the time I knew her . . .’ Collins paused, his lip curling in unconscious disgust. ‘By the last six months she rarely got out of bed. She looked like she was rotting there.’

  So he had seen her. Had been in the house. ‘If Hilaria Blake wasn’t capable of moving about, how did she continue to buy alcohol, collect her dole money? She must have been able to get about from time to time. At least every couple of weeks,’ Cormac said. He paused. ‘Unless Maude got it for her?’

  ‘Maude would never have bought alcohol for her,’ Collins said. ‘And Maude never got her hands on the dole money, at least not directly.’

  Cormac raised an eyebrow, and lifted his notebook in one hand, as if to refer Collins to everything that had been said so far. ‘Then who?’ he asked.

  Tom Collins was watching him carefully, weighing him up, it seemed, as he considered his answer. In the end, he tilted his head slightly to the left, and spoke. ‘You haven’t read the file, have you, detective?’ he asked.

  Cormac thought for a second he was referring to the police file, and the confusion must have shown in his eyes.

  ‘The social worker file,’ Collins said.

  Cormac hesitated, but decided there was no advantage in hiding the truth from Collins. ‘If you could tell me about it from your perspective, that would be helpful,’ he said.
/>
  ‘So you haven’t read it.’ There was no judgement in Collins’s voice. ‘You should, you know. You might gain a little understanding. Although you probably don’t need to read it to guess what had happened.’

  ‘It would be helpful if you could . . .’

  Collins cut him off. ‘Consider, detective. So far in this lovely story we have alcohol abuse, and apathetic social workers. There’s only one thing missing, isn’t there, to round out the classic Irish trinity?’ Collins sat back in his chair, knitting his fingers behind his head.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to enlighten me.’

  Collins spoke deliberately, enunciating each word slowly. ‘The Holy Catholic Church, detective, what else?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘A version of it. A cultish little offshoot led by a woman called Domenica Keane.’ Collins must have seen recognition in Cormac’s eyes. ‘Yes, the lovely Mrs Keane. I see you’ve heard of her.’

  Cormac searched his memory. The name was familiar but he couldn’t recall why.

  Collins helped him out. ‘She was a religious nut. Crazy about Catholicism. Or at least her version of it.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Cormac. ‘This woman, Keane, she looked after the children? Hilaria Blake?’

  ‘No,’ said Collins. ‘She didn’t look after the children, though Maude worked for her. Domenica had a small dairy farm. She hired casual farm labourers when she needed them, but she took Maude too.’

  From the reception area Cormac heard a sudden burst of noise. A deep bass voice, introducing himself in a tone of self-importance that carried through the wall, the assistant’s response, then conversation. Collins checked his watch.

  ‘That’s probably my postponed case conference,’ he said. ‘I can’t put it back. The barrister’s in court again after lunch.’

  ‘Mr Collins, are you suggesting that Mrs Keane supplied alcohol to Hilaria Blake?’