She started to move away. He needed to hold her, needed her to trust him.
‘I was there, that night,’ he said.
She turned.
‘The night Hilaria Blake died. I was wet behind the ears, first week on the job. They weren’t expecting a body, there was some sort of mix-up. So they sent me.’
She was holding on to the back of the chair, her eyes fixed on his.
‘I found Maude, found Jack, in a house with no electricity, damp everywhere, the place basically rotting around them. Their mother was dead. I brought them to the hospital. I saw what had been done to Jack. I never forgot him, Aisling.’ And that, at least, was true. ‘I cared about Jack. I care about him now. If there’s something suspicious about his death, I’ll find out. But I need you to talk to me. If you hear something, know something, come and find me. I won’t let you down.’
Her eyes were still on his, weighing up his words, sifting them for truth. She gave him a single reluctant nod before walking away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Aisling’s hands were shaking as she walked away from the canteen. She pushed them deep into her pockets and lengthened her stride. She was working an A&E shift. The missed bleeps were from the surgical floor, which she wasn’t even covering. This would be the third time they’d bleeped her today, all for innocuous queries that should have been dealt with by whoever was on surgical rotation. But this was a burden of her own making, wasn’t it? She’d actively encouraged the nurses to seek her out, wanted them to trust her judgement and think her reliable. She’d wanted to be the one that consultants looked for on their service, because if they brought her in for a surgery they knew that she would double-check the consents, the blood tests. That she would follow up on every patient, stay through the night if necessary.
For the first time she felt that she might have created expectations that she couldn’t meet. Maybe Mary had been right. Maybe she had come back too early. Missing even a week meant that she had no context for half the patients on the wards. Surgeons seemed to forget, or not be aware, that she hadn’t been present for recent surgeries. And her memory wasn’t performing the way it should and always had. The neat little rows of numbers and connections she usually maintained in her head were a fragmented mess. Worst of all, and so terrifying that she couldn’t bring herself to think about it, was the shake in her hands.
Mary was working on charts when Aisling reached the A&E desk. Aisling went straight to the phone and dialled surgery. She was conscious of Mary watching her as she spoke to a surgical nurse. Cummins had called in. He wanted bloods on a patient for the morning rounds. They hadn’t been done and the patient wasn’t fasting. The patient didn’t want to fast. Could Aisling come? Yes, she would be there in five, if A&E could spare her. She hung up, turned to Mary, who had heard enough to get the gist.
‘I won’t be long,’ Aisling said. ‘You’ll beep me, if something comes in?’
‘What did the garda want?’ Mary asked. ‘Was it about Jack?’ Aisling didn’t need to ask how Mary knew about the meeting. Gossip was a welcome distraction and a popular pastime all over the hospital but particularly in A&E.
‘I don’t know,’ Aisling said.
Mary raised an eyebrow.
‘He said it was, but he was asking questions about Jack’s sister. He wanted to know what I knew about Maude, about their childhood. He all but asked me straight out if Maude was violent, if she had ever hurt Jack when they were kids.’
‘Jesus. What did you say?’
‘I told him the truth. That Jack loved Maude. There’s no reason to think she’d ever hurt him.’
‘That you know of at least,’ Mary said. ‘But he must have had a reason for asking.
‘Maybe,’ Aisling said. ‘But the gardaí have been pretty useless so far. I told you about the meeting, about the questions Maude asked. They didn’t have any answers. It wouldn’t exactly fill you with confidence.’ Aisling hesitated, then blurted the rest out. ‘Maude doesn’t believe Jack killed himself. She thinks he was murdered, and she doesn’t trust the gardaí. She wants to take things further. I was thinking we could go to the ombudsman.’ Aisling stopped talking when she realised Mary was looking at her with something like pity in her eyes.
‘What?’ Aisling asked.
Mary reached into her pocket, took out a folded piece of paper. She sat there looking at it for a moment, then handed it over slowly. ‘I wasn’t trying to pry,’ she said. ‘You dropped it. When you were rushing the other day, to meet Maude. I picked it up. Meant to file it for you. I couldn’t find the file, then I figured it out.’
Aisling unfolded the paper. It was a test result. Her test result. The one she’d submitted under a false name.
‘It’s none of my business, I know,’ Mary said, looking away from Aisling and down the corridor to where a cleaner was pushing a low-humming floor polisher, the machine gliding from side to side in a steady arc.
‘No. It really isn’t.’ Aisling paused.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘No.’ Definitely not. But she didn’t move.
‘Aisling, you can tell me to fuck off if you want to,’ Mary said. ‘I’m not going to be offended, and we can pretend we never had this conversation if that’s what you want. But, I’m just listening to you talk about this mad theory Maude has come up with, and I’m watching you working like a dog and honestly, it seems to me that you’re looking every direction but where you should be looking. I get it, of course I get it. You’re in an impossible position, but Jesus, you have a lot to lose. Anyway, I just thought I’d offer, in case you need someone to talk to about your options.’ Mary lowered her head to her charts again, as if wanting to give Aisling privacy to consider her offer.
‘What sort of person kills their dead boyfriend’s baby?’ The words were out before she had a chance to recall them, and when Mary looked up her expression was so kind that Aisling couldn’t bear it, had to look away.
‘Is that what you really think?’ Mary asked. ‘That an abortion would be killing Jack’s baby?’
Aisling shook her head, her lips compressed.
‘You’re what, no more than six, seven weeks?’
‘You know as well as I do,’ Aisling said, with a gesture towards the test result.
Mary took a slow breath in. ‘At seven weeks, you know that that foetus has a long way to go before it becomes a baby.’
‘I know that,’ said Aisling, her voice low, but cracking with suppressed anger, fear and frustration. ‘I keep telling myself that it’s nothing more than a little scrap of raw material. Smaller than a coffee bean. But that’s not helping me.’ She glanced around. This was not the place to have this conversation. ‘Even if it’s just a bundle of cells, it’s more than nothing, right? It’s the last bit of Jack left in the world. If I leave it alone, just do nothing, then that thing, that little bit of potential, it’ll grow to be Jack’s baby, won’t it? So if I have an abortion, how is that not the same thing?’ The words were muddled, her thinking confused, but it was still the closest she’d come to articulating how she had been feeling for the past two weeks.
‘You’re calling it Jack’s baby,’ Mary said. ‘Not yours. Not yours and Jack’s.’
Aisling said nothing, and Mary chewed her bottom lip. There was a little smear of make-up on her collar. She was wearing more than usual, and she looked tired under the heavy layer of foundation.
‘If Jack was alive, would you be going ahead with this pregnancy?’
The answer – a clear, unhesitating No – was in Aisling’s head before she had a chance to consciously consider the question. No way would she be considering having a baby if Jack was still with her. She’d had a moment, a wobble, on the night before he died, but that was to be expected, wasn’t it? Normal, to try to consider all of the options. It did not mean that she wanted to be a mother. Even though they hadn’t had a chance to work it out, she thought he would have supported that decision, in the end. And if he hadn’t? Would
she have risked their relationship rather than have a baby now, at twenty-five, before she’d realised even one of her ambitions?
Mary read the answer in her face. ‘Aisling, this is your decision, but for God’s sake, don’t have a baby out of some sort of misplaced survivor’s guilt.’ She placed a pointed index finger right in the middle of the chart Aisling had been working on. ‘You’ll lose this,’ Mary said, and she sounded angry, had raised her voice. ‘You’ll lose everything you’ve worked for. So you’ll have to choose another path.’ She paused, took her finger back from the chart, and continued in a softer voice. ‘You could try for GP, although they won’t be thrilled about being your second choice. If you show you’re committed, you’ll get in, and in a year or two you’ll be out of the hospital and in a practice, seeing thirty patients a day, most of whom aren’t really sick. They just want someone who’ll listen to them for a while, and you’ll be able to give them exactly twelve and a half minutes, because you’ll need the last two and half minutes of the fifteen-minute appointment to complete the paperwork.’
Aisling felt cold and hot at the same time. A clammy nausea gripped her stomach. ‘I know all this. I know all of this.’
‘Well.’ Mary fell silent, looked back at her paperwork.
‘You did it,’ Aisling said. ‘You left surgery for general medicine. You can’t feel that way about it.’
‘I don’t, not exactly.’ Mary grimaced, looked up at Aisling with a return of her frustration. ‘The truth is that I don’t I have what you have, Aisling. Jesus, you’re . . . you never give up. Do you remember, when we were interns, and we both worked that awful week? Everyone had flu but us, if felt like, and we worked something like a hundred and twenty hours?’
Aisling nodded slowly, though she didn’t remember, exactly. There had been a lot of long weeks. Everything sort of ran into everything else when you worked that hard, on that little sleep.
‘We left together that Saturday morning, walked out of the place and went for breakfast across the road. I went home afterwards and I slept until Monday morning, basically. Only got up to eat and use the loo.’
Aisling nodded.
Mary shook her head. ‘That Monday was the deadline for the Wylie Medal. Which you won. Jack told me later that you wrote your essay that weekend. You stayed up all night Sunday to finish it. But we worked on Monday morning and you came in and did a fourteen-hour shift with me as if it was nothing. The Wylie Medal is awarded by the fucking Association of Anaesthetists, for Christ’s sake. You wanted to be a surgeon.’
‘There was prize money,’ Aisling said, folding her arms across her chest.
Mary snorted, rolled her eyes. Aisling had to fight the urge to just walk away.
‘You always win. Not just the medal. You won the Henry Hutch twice. You’re what, second, third, in the country right now? How do you do that?’
Aisling wanted to say that second or third wasn’t first. Wasn’t winning. It was on the tip of her tongue. ‘There’s no secret Mary. I just work bloody hard.’
‘I work hard,’ Mary snapped back. ‘Harder than almost anyone. But you’re fucking superhuman.’ She looked back down at her paperwork, face flushed. Was she embarrassed? Or just angry? The conversation had spiralled from its starting point. Whatever Mary had set out to say, it wasn’t this. How long had she been feeling like this? It was too much to deal with, on top of everything else. No one would blame Aisling if she told her to fuck off, if she just walked away right now. But Mary was a friend, a real friend. Aisling thought about that hand on her shoulder at the cemetery, when she’d needed it most.
‘My mother used to apologise to my teachers,’ Aisling said.
‘What?’
‘At the start of every year, she would come to my school to meet the teachers and apologise for me. I’m very sorry about Aisling. I’m afraid she has very little ability, though I’m sure she does her best. She started doing that when I was eight.’
Mary looked back at her, fascinated, horrified.
‘It didn’t really matter what my teachers said. If they said something positive about me my mother would cock her head to one side and smile in a grateful sort of a way. Then afterwards she would explain to me that my teachers were being kind, and they only did that for the kids who couldn’t hack it.’ Aisling paused.
‘But that’s crazy.’
Aisling shrugged. ‘I think she believed it. She felt the same way about herself, you know? I suppose now I would label it, maybe low self-esteem and transference. But at the time I just accepted it. For a long time I accepted everything she said. But eventually I noticed that she was that way only about me, and she was that way no matter how well I did at anything. I won a prize once at school, just this little art competition thing, and she tried to convince me that they gave it to me out of pity. After that I started to get angry.’
‘I’ll bet you did,’ said Mary.
‘I started working harder. I worked my ass off, to be honest. I was absolutely determined that my mother would finally see I was good enough. The day my leaving cert results came in my mother had this puzzled look on her face. She said congratulations. Then that night, after I went to bed, I heard her ask my dad if there could have been some sort of mix up, if maybe they should do the right thing and let the exam board know.’
Mary laughed, a horrified gasp of laughter that escaped and was bitten back. But the laugh was good, it loosened something in Aisling, and she smiled back.
‘I’d like to say I got over it then, but I didn’t really. For a long, long time after that I was still trying to prove something. Things got better after I met Jack, but by then . . . I don’t know. Maybe working that hard is a habit now. Or maybe I am still trying to please her. Christ, that’s pathetic.’
‘You’re the furthest thing from pathetic I know,’ Mary said, her tone warm and firm. ‘And the truth is it’s not just hard work that’s gotten you here. I know you’ve got talent. In spades. You’re going to make an incredible surgeon. You’re going to save a lot of lives.’ She stopped, stumbling over her last words, and silence fell between them. Aisling wanted to say something but nothing came out. The two women regarded each other for a long moment.
‘Just be sure you make a plan, Aisling. A plan for the next step, and the next one, and then the one after that, okay? And remember that you’ve got a friend here if you need one.’ Mary squeezed Aisling’s shoulder in what was becoming a familiar gesture, then hopped lightly from the desk and walked away down the corridor.
Aisling stood still. A plan. She needed to make a plan. The pager beeped again.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cormac made his way back to the station, irritated that he’d brought the car and had to sit in traffic instead of walking. He hadn’t made much progress on the case, but for the first time thought that there was progress to be made. Collins was definitely hiding something. And he was loyal to Maude, or at least wanted Cormac to think so. He needed to think through what that might mean. Cormac’s stomach growled as he parked outside the station and he checked his watch. It was nearly three, and he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The few pints he’d had the night before had left him with a heavy head, and he’d been drinking coffee all day. Food was definitely in order. He took a detour to the fourth floor and the somewhat limited canteen.
The place was usually deserted at this time of day because the hot food finished at two, but when Cormac entered in search of a sandwich, he found Anthony Healy occupying one corner table, a file spread out in front of him, two empty coffee cups at his elbow. Cormac ignored him, walked to the fridge and examined the meagre pickings. Egg salad. Beetroot salad. Who the fuck ate beetroot salad? He took a limp ham sandwich – a sliver of processed meat stuck between two thin white slices of bread. Ireland had come a long way over the past ten years, but the food revolution had not broached the garda canteen.
‘Reilly.’
Cormac took his time pressing buttons on the coffee machine before turning to Heal
y as his cup filled.
‘How long do you think you’ll last, down here?’
Cormac said nothing, waited.
‘Come on. No bullshit. This lot don’t know their arse from their elbow. What are you doing here? Is it really all about a woman? That’s a bit out of character, isn’t it?’
Cormac added a leisurely two spoons of sugar to his coffee, stirred. ‘Is it?’ he said.
Healy laughed as if Cormac had made a joke. ‘Seriously man, isn’t it a bit slow for you? You’ve been here what, a month? Two? Are you really going to stick it?’
‘I haven’t noticed much difference. Same bullshit. Same politics.’ Cormac paused. ‘But you’d know the place better than me. Task force seems to like Galway. Third visit in three years, isn’t it? Is it the weather that brings you back?’ The rain was lashing against the windows in one of those sudden violent flurries that added variety to the otherwise near-constant drizzle.
Healy laughed again, shook his head. ‘I’d tell you Cormac,’ he said, ‘but then I’d have to shoot you.’ He patted the gun at his side.
Cormac raised an eyebrow, nodded in the direction of the gun. ‘Careful with that, Anthony. Are you sure you remember which is the dangerous end?’
Healy shook his head, still smiling. ‘We can’t all be heroes, can we Reilly?’
Cormac had turned for the door when Healy spoke again.
‘You’re very friendly with Danny McIntyre. Knew him before you transferred?’
Cormac turned back and stared Healy down. This whole conversation had been an inept attempt to warm Cormac up. And when that showed no signs of working, Healy’d just blurted out what was really on his mind. What was it about Danny that had Healy going? That he wasn’t one of Healy’s little minions? That he had a degree of independence and a mind of his own? Surely Healy was capable of keeping one temporary assignee under control. No, Danny had to have seen something, and Healy was worried that he might have talked.
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