Cormac thought back to the night he had taken the children from the house. He thought of the cold, the squalor, their pinched little faces. There had been no evidence of care there.
‘How long had Simon been helping the family?’
‘I really can’t recall, detective.’
‘What help exactly did he provide?’
‘It’s such a long time ago. And really, I can’t be sure I ever knew. Simon was very much his own man.’
‘I see. Can you recall which charities, exactly, Mr Schmidt was involved with?’
‘Something to do with children. Possibly a food drive?’ She yawned, making no attempt to cover her mouth. ‘Oh dear. I’m really feeling quite, quite tired. It seems you have worn me out, detective.’
He got no further after that. Her answers got vaguer, and started to wander into old memories that had little relevance to the Blakes. He felt sure that her sudden senility was an act, but equally didn’t know what else, if anything, he could hope to get from her. He also had a sudden and raging headache. She was lying about Simon Schmidt, that much was obvious. About his name at least, if not about more. Why? What was she hiding? He would need to find the man. Someone in the village might remember him, or at the school. A primary school teacher with a German-sounding surname should be remembered. Cormac stopped asking questions and let the silence sit while he took a moment to finish his notes. When he glanced up Domenica Keane’s eyes were half closed, as if she were drifting off to sleep. He closed his notebook and stood, speaking loudly.
‘I’ll say goodbye so, Miss Keane.’
She gave what he was sure was a faked start of surprise, putting a large hand to her chest.
‘Oh, detective, I was nearly asleep. I always have a nice little nap at this time of day. I’m sure you can see yourself out?’ She smiled her unpleasant smile, dragging her thin lips over teeth that were too big for her mouth. Cormac wondered what she had looked like when Maude and Jack knew her. He thought she would have been a frightening sight for a child.
The interview with Keane left a bad taste in Cormac’s mouth, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. He breathed in fresh air outside the house, and felt his headache ease. He had a two-hour drive back to Galway ahead of him. It would be after eight before he got back. He felt more confident after the Keane interview. There was a story here. He had a hold on this case now and he wasn’t going to let it go.
Keane knew something. Collins knew something. He’d worked with less in the past. The next step was to track down the German. What had really been going on between Hilaria, Keane and that mystery man? It sure as hell hadn’t been prayer. He felt more confident in Maude’s innocence. There was a bigger story here, and he meant to get to the bottom of it. Hannah Collins was not a reliable witness. And he’d been there that night himself, was the closest thing to a real witness there was, perhaps. There’d been no anger in Maude, no fear. She had just been sad, sad to the bone. Her disappearance added something to the picture, that was true, but Cormac was inclined to put that down to trauma, or, it occurred to him as he drove, her instinct to protect Jack. She’d wanted him adopted, hadn’t she? She had known that the chances were much smaller if she was in the picture. He thought of that sad smile he’d seen in the rear-view mirror all those years before, and a piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Why hadn’t he seen it then? Maybe he had, maybe it had occurred to him and he’d filed the idea away, and it had gotten buried under a thousand other ideas, other memories, over the years.
Cormac was driving into Oughterard when his phone rang. He flipped the phone to speaker, hit accept, and balanced the phone in his lap as he drove. Fisher’s voice came from the speakers, a little tinny but clear enough to be heard. His voice had the tone of a teenager handing in an assignment that had kept him from playing football all weekend – relieved that it was done, but knowing that it would never get him to the FA Cup. He’d found Timothy Lanigan.
‘He’s not teaching anymore,’ Fisher said. ‘He owns a bar at Strandhill, in Sligo. He came back to Ireland after his divorce. Must have given up teaching. He’s been in Strandhill for the past fifteen years, and before that worked at a bar in Dublin. No criminal record. Not even a speeding ticket.’
Cormac had news for Fisher as well. He had spoken to Matt the night before. ‘You said he divorced when, 1985? So he’s been back in Ireland for twenty-eight years? I want to know every address he lived at, every job he worked since he came back to this country.’
Fisher’s silence spoke for him.
‘There was another murder,’ Cormac said. ‘In 1983. A fifteen-year-old student at the school – St. Whatever’s Catholic Academy. Lanigan was her soccer coach. She disappeared after practice one day; her body was found two days later. She’d been raped and strangled. Lanigan was interviewed, but his wife alibied him and he was never a serious suspect. Girl’s boyfriend was charged – she’d been planning to dump him. Boy spent a few months in jail before blood tests came back and exonerated him.’
‘Jesus. They got DNA?’ Fisher’s tone had changed completely.
‘They have the samples,’ Cormac said. ‘They didn’t test for DNA in those days. But if we can get a sample they’ll test it now.’
‘Will I start the warrant application? I can do it now, have it ready for you in the morning.’
‘No warrant,’ Cormac said. ‘You issue Lanigan with a warrant and he’ll disappear. Irish passport, he’ll jump on a cheap flight to France and have the whole of Europe to hide in.’
A moment’s silence on the phone. ‘Covert DNA?’ Fisher asked.
‘That’s the plan,’ said Cormac. ‘Find out what you can about his movements, but do it without scaring him off. Get us something to work with and we’ll go up there this weekend.’ Cormac made a silent apology to Emma, but knew she’d understand.
Fisher agreed, and thanked him. He was smart enough to know that Cormac didn’t need to bring him along for the ride, that a case like this, if they could break it, could make his career. He was probably also conscious that his lack of enthusiasm for the earlier work hadn’t been difficult to read. Fisher was all right. He was ambitious, but that was okay if it showed itself in the right way – hard bloody work and good instincts for making a case.
‘Oh, and Fisher? Run a search for me, will you? Simon Schmidt. Had an address somewhere near Kilmore in the 1990s. Text me if you find anything.’
‘Will do.’
Cormac was about to hang up when Fisher spoke again. His voice was indistinct, and with the noise of the car and the shitty phone speakers, Cormac almost missed it.
Until Fisher said it again. ‘They’ve brought her in for questioning. Maude Blake. Thought you should know.’ Then he hung up, leaving Cormac with an hour’s drive ahead and a burning anger that he could do nothing to express. He changed the radio to a station playing hard rock, and turned the music up.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Aisling sat on a bench in the hospital locker room, pulling on her boots. Her shift was over, and she was due to meet Maude in an hour, a prospect she was dreading. She hadn’t seen her since Monday, hadn’t called her to pass on Aggie’s invitation, hadn’t even called the police to ask about Jack’s phone. She had managed to get a copy of the postmortem report, through a friend who had made it clear he thought reading it would be (a) weird, and (b) a very bad idea. And she had called a friend who worked in a London hospital and asked her to send her some mifepristone and misoprostol through the post. It was a huge ask. Though abortion was legal in the UK, posting pills to a patient you hadn’t seen was not. But Claire hadn’t hesitated. The drugs weren’t monitored as carefully as drugs commonly abused, like opiates or tranquilisers, and she’d managed to lift some extras without being noticed.
They’d arrived that morning, those innocent-looking white tablets, and now they were burning a hole in the bottom of her bag. Aisling didn’t know yet what she was going to do, but she was going to make a decision this weekend, one way or
the other. She wasn’t going to sleepwalk into nine weeks, then onwards until the foetus really was a baby and it was too late.
Aisling reached the Quays bar and started to push her way through the crowd. It was busy, but it wasn’t heaving yet, though it would be in an hour or so. She made her way to the bar and ordered a Coke, carried it with her as she scanned the place for Maude. She found her at one of the small tables on the narrow mezzanine floor that overlooked the bar.
Maude had a notebook open on the table and was writing something. She had a glass of wine beside her, which she’d made some progress on. She looked up as Aisling approached, and smiled, pushing out the other chair so Aisling could sit.
Defensiveness made Aisling abrupt. ‘I looked into the postmortem results.’
‘You got the report?’
Aisling nodded. Maude looked as if she expected her to pull the report out of her pocket and hand it over. That wasn’t going to happen. Reading it had been difficult enough for her; she wasn’t going to inflict those photographs, that horribly specific language, on Jack’s sister. ‘Through a friend. He broke the rules to get me a copy. We can’t tell anyone we’ve seen it until it’s formally released.’
‘What does it say?’ Maude asked. She leaned forward across the table, so eager.
‘He had a basilar skull fracture. Very severe. It probably would have killed him. But he had aspirated a small amount of water, so the official cause of death is drowning.’
‘Okay.’ Maude swallowed, paused. Her pen hovered above her notebook.
‘It doesn’t give us any answers, Maude. The fracture could have happened as he entered the water. He could have hit his head on the bridge supports on the way down, or on a rock submerged under the water.’
‘What do you think happened?’ Maude asked.
‘I don’t know. The fracture was very low, at the base of his skull. I’ve seen that sort of injury once before, that time it was a golf club to the back of the head. Someone could have hit Jack, could have knocked him unconscious, then dumped his body into the river.’ The image of Jack, tumbling into the freezing black water, came to her, and she pushed it resolutely away. ‘But equally, he could have fallen into the water somehow, hit his head on the way down. There’s no way to know for sure what happened, at least from the postmortem.’
Aisling looked at the hand she’d placed on top of the table and clenched it into a fist. Surgeons had steady hands.
‘You’re just tired,’ Maude said. She had noticed. ‘That’s all. It will pass.’
Aisling nodded.
‘Did you get his messages?’
‘No.’ She didn’t admit that she’d never asked for them – the way Maude was looking at her, so eager, so intense, made that admission impossible. But there’d been no time.
‘Damn.’ Maude said. She paused. ‘It’s a pity the postmortem isn’t clear, but I think we have enough to go on. I think we need to start escalating things. Make a bit of a splash. Go to the press. Get some attention. I’ve already made a few phone calls. Can you do an interview? Tomorrow?’ She caught the expression on Aisling’s face. ‘It doesn’t have to be tomorrow.’
‘You’ve been speaking with journalists?’
‘We need to put pressure on the police. Media coverage will do that. They won’t be able to brush off a journalist in the same way they can with you or me. This way we might get somewhere.’
‘What did you tell them? About me? About Jack? Jesus, Maude.’ The exhaustion and nausea Aisling had felt earlier in the day burst over her again in a roll of feverish heat.
‘I haven’t said much yet. Just enough to get them interested.’
‘I don’t want this. I don’t want to do any interviews. I don’t want to talk to journalists.’
‘Okay.’ Some of the animation dropped from Maude’s face, and caution took its place. ‘I can talk to them. You don’t have to be involved if you don’t want to be.’
Aisling shook her head. Christ, it was getting loud in here. ‘Look, I think we’re out of our depth here. I understand. I mean, I get why you want to keep asking questions. But we should bring this stuff to the police. Should trust them to do their job.’
The caution on Maude’s face changed to something harder. Something like dislike. She stared down at her open notebook, covered in her own handwriting. Slowly, she started to gather up the papers.
Aisling put out an impulsive hand to stop her. ‘Wait,’ she said, but when Maude looked up she found she had nothing to say.
‘I don’t know what makes you think you can trust the police,’ Maude said. ‘They’ve made it very clear that they have no interest in investigating Jack’s death.’
‘You don’t know that,’ said Aisling. ‘Just because they aren’t talking to you, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing anything.’ Her words rang hollow. Hadn’t she told that detective she thought he was full of shit? She didn’t even know whose side she was on. And she hadn’t told Maude yet about that conversation, about the questions he had asked.
Maude pulled her notebook out from underneath Aisling’s outstretched hand. She pushed it into the backpack resting at her feet under the table, then straightened.
‘You want to bury your head in the sand, pretend that none of this is happening. Something rotten, something stinking and fetid, has found its way into your life, but you think if you don’t look too closely at it, if you turn your other cheek just so, it won’t really affect you. It’s already taken Jack. You say you loved him, but you’re not willing to take the smallest risk to find out who murdered him.’
The words were a punch in the gut, a twisted knife in an open wound, but they woke Aisling up. Anger burned through the fog of grief that had dulled her since Jack’s death, and she welcomed it, fed it. She clenched her fists.
‘I did love him. We were partners. We shared a life. That’s what love is, Maude. It’s not a series of dramatic gestures. It’s not abandoning a five-year-old boy to strangers, then crashing back after his death spouting conspiracy theories.’
Maude shook her head. ‘I never abandoned Jack. I gave him up, for his own good. And it broke my heart.’
‘How could that be for his good? He’d just lost his mother. He loved you, Maude. How could his only sister abandoning him have made things better?’
‘You don’t understand. It was complicated. If I’d stayed . . .’
‘That’s bullshit,’ Aisling hissed. ‘It’s complicated is what people say when it’s not complicated at all. It’s what people say when they are only thinking about themselves but don’t want to look selfish.’
‘Jesus,’ Maude said. ‘Your arrogance. You think you know everything, and you know nothing.’
‘I know enough. I know that this bloody quest of yours is about you, not about Jack. You’re trying to redeem yourself. Trying to make up for all the years you wasted. Well, you can’t do that Maude. There’s no going back. And nothing you do, nothing I do, will change the fact that Jack is dead.’
Maude looked stricken. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Aisling felt a pang of regret.
‘I don’t know what you expect from me Maude.’ She’d meant it as an apology, but she was still angry and it came out like an accusation.
Maude shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t expect anything from you Aisling,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect anything from anyone. Maybe that’s the difference between us.’ She moved to stand, but as she did so someone placed a firm hand on her shoulder. A woman with spiky blonde hair and a serious expression on her face. She wasn’t alone, a man lurked over the woman’s left shoulder. Aisling didn’t need to look at the ID the woman held out to know they were police.
‘Maude Blake, I’m Detective Sergeant Hackett.’ She put the badge into her back pocket, not removing her hand from Maude’s shoulder. ‘You are under arrest for the murder of Hilaria Blake, on the night of the twenty-first of February, 1993. You are not obliged to say anything, but whatever you say will be taken d
own in writing and may be given in evidence.’
Maude had flinched when the detective took hold of her shoulder, and gave the ID held out to her only a cursory glance. Now her eyes held Aisling’s, pleading. Pleading, but for what? They were all four of them frozen for a moment in time. Maude, half-standing, Hackett’s hand still on her shoulder. The unnamed garda. And Aisling, still sitting at the table, her Coke untouched. Then movement started again, as if someone had pressed play on a video. Hackett reached down and took Maude’s handbag, which was slung on the back of her chair. As Hackett turned to hand it to the other garda, Maude turned too, taking a step towards them. She stumbled, recovered, and in that stumble her foot pushed her backpack under the table until it rested, heavy, against Aisling’s foot. Aisling stared but Maude didn’t look at her again. The gardaí walked her out of the pub, keeping her between them, tiny and vulnerable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Melanie Hackett was perfectly civil. Maude sat in the back of the garda car for the short drive to Mill Street, and shoved her hands between her knees to keep them from shaking. How much danger was she in? Her mother had been dead for twenty years and her death had never been looked at as anything other than an accidental overdose. Nobody kept secrets in the village in 1993. If they’d suspected murder back then, Tom would have heard and therefore so would she. Maude racked her brains, trying to think of something, any reason the gardaí would have to suddenly suspect her of this crime.
When they got to the interview room Hackett busied herself setting up the tapes, but the male police officer sat still as a snake in his chair, silently watching Maude. He was trying to intimidate her and he could fuck right off. Maude raised her chin and stared back into his eyes. Hackett pressed a switch and spoke for the benefit of the tape.
‘Maude Blake you have been arrested under Section 30 of the Offences against the State Act, 1939. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’
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