She clicked on the mass of red around Galway; the map zoomed in and the red splodge resolved into hundreds of red dots. There were larger circles around their home, Jack’s work, his gym, their local pub – places where Jack spent a lot of time. It took her another few minutes of poking about to figure out that the information could be searched by date. Feeling uneasy, she typed in the date, the last day she had seen Jack alive – 16 March 2013 – and Jack’s last day opened up before her.
Not just the places he’d been but the routes he taken – the red dots were now linked by thin blue lines. She could hover over a dot or line and the app told her what time Jack left a location, a swoop of the cursor across the screen and she could see what time he arrived at his destination. Jesus. His whole life was in this thing. Everywhere they had been together, everywhere he had been when they were apart, all recorded on some Google database in Dublin. Had he known? That he was effectively carrying a personal tracking device in his pocket? Aisling looked at her own phone, at her laptop. She used a different email provider, but she had Google Maps and for all she knew it recorded her movements in just the same way. And she’d probably agreed to it, clicking to accept every time there was a terms update, never ever reading the fine print.
It was messed up, but she was grateful for it. Someday when she was ready she could sit down and go through the Timeline. It was a record of Jack’s life, or at least some of it, and it seemed right that there should be at least this trace of him left behind. For now though, she needed to put grief aside and think.
Jack’s last day. She knew as soon as she saw the Timeline that Jack had not been meeting anyone. According to Google, Jack and his phone had left the house just after ten o’clock, not long after she’d fallen asleep. He’d driven to Salthill, where he parked outside a deli they liked, then drove on exactly seventeen minutes later. He drove out of Galway, past Headford – an hour and twenty minutes north in fact, to Castlebar, then north again, to Lough Mask.
Which was where Jack went when he needed to think. There were hiking trails that snaked through forest and mountainside, tough hikes and technical climbs. If Jack had something on his mind that was where he went to work it out, and almost always alone. He’d brought Aisling once, but it was challenging terrain, and after that they’d chosen easier, shorter hikes when they went together. If Jack had been meeting someone they would have met in Galway, in a coffee shop, or Jack would have brought them home.
No, Jack had gone to Lough Mask to think about the pregnancy. He’d gone there because he was upset, and worried, and he needed to think. The possibility of suicide suggested itself again and Aisling shoved it away. She looked instead at Timeline.
Jack had arrived at the trail head at noon. He’d started the hike, but the record of his movements cut off twenty minutes later, on the trail. Aisling sat up straighter, stared at the screen. Clicked again but nothing changed. Jack’s trace ended at Lough Mask, right on the quarry trail. That was weird. Either his battery had died, or Jack had turned his phone off. The latter didn’t seem likely – she’d never known him to do it, even in the cinema he just muted the thing. And Jack plugged his phone in every night. It should have been fully charged when he set off that morning. Aisling stared at the screen for another moment, then pushed it away. She sat back on the couch again, took a drink. Did it matter? He hadn’t gone to Lough Mask to meet anyone, that was the point.
Aisling put down her glass and walked quickly around the room. Then she leaned two hands and her forehead against the mantelpiece and rested for a long moment. This was head-wrecking. Who did she think she was fooling? She was not an investigator. She looked back at the table, at Maude’s laptop, her photographs, her boarding card, her notes about Jack’s death. What did it all add up to, in the end? Aisling resisted an urge to lift one side of the coffee table with her foot – for a second she could almost see the whole thing tipping, the computer and documents sliding to the floor, the wine bottle toppling and spilling. If she did it, she would leave the lot there.
She didn’t know what to do. There were so many questions. Aisling sat again, picked up her phone. She stared at the number for a long time, thinking it all through, before she dialled.
Aggie’s voice was hushed, but not sleepy. ‘Aisling? Are you all right? Hold on.’ A muffled sound, as Aggie left what was probably her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. ‘Sorry dear, Brendan’s sleeping. Are you all right?’
‘I’m sorry to call you so late, Aggie. I’m fine. Just. Maude won’t be able to visit this weekend.’
Silence for a moment. ‘Oh?’
Aisling took a breath. ‘She’s been arrested. The guards think she killed her mother. Back in ninety-three.’
Aisling closed her eyes as she listened to Aggie breathe out, a sudden shocked exhalation. Oh God. This wasn’t the way to tell her. She could almost see the colour drain from Aggie’s face.
The other end of the phone was quiet. ‘Aggie? Aggie, are you all right?’
‘That poor girl,’ Aggie said. ‘That poor, poor girl.’ There was deep pity in her voice, but no surprise.
‘Aggie. You knew, didn’t you?’
Aggie didn’t speak for a long time, so long that it began to seem like she wouldn’t speak again.
‘Tell me,’ Aisling said.
Aggie’s voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away. ‘We couldn’t have children of our own, me and Brendan. We never knew why. It was just the way it was. We fostered children instead. So many children. Some of them we had for just a few days, a weekend maybe, some for months and months. And some came back again and again.’
Aisling heard the creaking of a door opening and closing. She imagined Aggie going to the kitchen, finding her chair near the warmth of the Aga, seeking comfort.
‘Some of those children had been through hell by the time they got to us, Aisling. And eventually, every time, we sent them back to it. You’ll never know what that was like. To hold a child in your arms, to soothe his pain, to heal his injuries, to show him what love is, maybe for the first time in his little life, only to have him taken away, and sent back to what brought him to you in the first place.’
‘But you kept going,’ Aisling said.
‘Brendan wanted to stop. It was breaking my heart. It was breaking both of us. But all I could think was that there’d be a child somewhere, in some terrible place, and a social worker deciding that she’d have to leave him there, because there was nowhere better to go. We did stop, for a while, but I had such nightmares.’ Her voice was drifting away, getting lost in the memories.
‘What happened with Jack?’
‘There was a boy before Jack. His name was Tom. He came to us for a few months, when his mother was admitted to hospital. But before us, he had been to other places. I found him one day, in the bathroom, scrubbing himself raw. He didn’t tell me what happened, not then anyway.’
Aisling waited.
‘Two years later Tom came to our door. He was back with his family, things were going better for them. Tom told me that there was a little boy in danger. That what had happened to Tom would happen to this child, unless I was willing to step in and take him.’
‘Jack.’
‘Yes, that was Jack. I said I would do whatever I could, pressed Tom to give me names, let me call the guards, call in social workers straight away. But Tom wouldn’t say anything more. He told me I needed to wait two more days, and he would be back. And he did come back. Two mornings later he showed up at the back door, and told me that Jack was at the hospital. That he needed me.’
‘Tom came to you before Hilaria died.’
‘Yes.’
Aisling turned it all over in her head. This meant Maude was guilty. She’d known her mother was going to die, known that Jack would need a home, had worked with Tom to make sure he had one. Christ almighty. It was so cold, so planned. What sort of person could do that?
‘You never told anyone,’ Aisling said.
‘It was
weeks before I figured it out. I didn’t know about the heroin, not in the beginning. By the time I realised what must have happened, I had Jack. I was afraid I would lose him.’
Aisling made reassuring noises, but the truth was that she didn’t understand. None of this made sense to her. It was like she had strayed into a nightmare, where no one and nothing was as it seemed. Jack, lovely Jack, dead by suicide, or murdered because of some secret life he had never shared with her? And Aggie, lovely, motherly Aggie, hiding secrets of her own. She must have pulled every string she had to get Jack fostered with her, to adopt him.
Aggie was still talking. ‘When Jack was seven we applied to adopt him. We didn’t change his surname though. He was a Blake, and he stayed a Blake. That was for Maude, in case she ever came back.’
Aisling got off the phone as quickly as she could, promised Aggie whatever she wanted to hear. She didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to hear her talking about Maude the murderer, with that note of what in her voice . . . Empathy? Gratitude? As soon as she hung up she started to gather everything up, to repack Maude’s backpack, to shut her own computer down. It was Friday night. She would go to work the next day after all. She’d been scheduled for an early shift. She would do that, then do the handover with Cummins on Sunday evening, since that was all arranged. Then take some time off, try to get her head straight. On Monday she would go to the police, bring them Maude’s boarding card and her laptop, and ask them if they would review Jack’s call and message history. This was – it always had been – a matter for the gardaí, and she had other things to worry about. She was finished playing detective.
When the room was tidy she found Jack’s jumper where she had left it on the back of the couch, and pulled it on. She sat and thought about the future she was fighting to hold on to. A future that suddenly seemed leached of colour, of warmth, of humanity. It was the story of her life. She strove for perfection, and the closer she got the emptier she felt. Aisling had never felt more alone, less worthy, than she did in that moment. She laid her aching, tired head down on the arm of the couch, curled into a ball, and cried.
Saturday 30 March 2013
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘I’ve lost control of the thing completely,’ Cormac said. He was lying in bed, his arms folded behind his head on the pillow, so he could watch Emma as she moved around the room. She was wrapped in a towel, her hair still wet from the shower.
‘And she’s been arrested, this woman?’
Cormac nodded. Emma took a pair of knickers from her underwear drawer and pulled them on under her towel. She dropped the towel to put on a bra, then pulled a grey T-shirt over her head. It was old and well loved, and it moulded itself to her soft curves in a way that made him want to pull her down into the bed beside him and restart what they had just finished. She flipped her hair forwards and wrapped her towel around it, twisting it so that it formed a neat turban, then came and sat on the bed facing him, tucking her bare legs back under the covers.
‘Do you think she did it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Her grey eyes were assessing. ‘I think you do know, Corm.’
He grimaced, closed his eyes. ‘She may have. Her mother was abusive. Maude loved her little brother; she could have done it to protect him. But the abuse had been going on for years. And the mother was on her way out. According to the postmortem she didn’t have more than a few months, maybe six at the outside. End-stage liver disease. Maude would have known. So why do it then? Why take the risk? I can’t see it.’
Emma had pushed her feet up against his thigh – they were cold and he reached down to rub some warmth into them.
‘Maybe she didn’t know, didn’t realise. She was very young, after all. And I’m not sure I would recognise end-stage liver disease. So, a teenager? Used to her mother being sick?’ Emma shrugged. ‘Maybe she’d had enough, just lost it after years of abuse. Isn’t that what happens, sometimes?’
Cormac was shaking his head slowly. ‘She was fifteen years old. She would have had to source heroin, needle, everything. Then learn how to inject it, all of which would have taken planning, premeditation. This wasn’t a situation where someone finally lost it and retaliated.’
‘And Danny thinks he knows where she got the heroin.’
Cormac couldn’t prevent his face from stiffening, and Emma, watching him, said, ‘Do you really think he would do that? Solicit someone to give false evidence, I mean?’
‘Jesus, I don’t know, Em. I’m beginning to think I don’t know Danny at all. And everything about this case has been off from the beginning. The fact that this investigation was prioritised, when there was nothing new to go on at the time. There wasn’t a cop in the station who didn’t know the case was intended to put pressure on Maude Blake, to get her off our backs about her brother’s suicide. Which makes no sense. And then suddenly Danny’s up to his knees in my case, bringing me a junkie mother’s statement, and Murphy’s singing his praises like he just caught Osama bin Laden.’ Cormac snorted.
‘I suppose it’s just as well we never met them for dinner then,’ Emma said, and curled her toes around his leg, smiling slightly, probably trying to cheer him up. He forced a smile in return and she abandoned her spot at the end of the bed, climbing back under the covers and laying her head on his chest. She took one of his hands in hers, slid her fingers through his and squeezed, as if engaging in a gentle game of mercy. ‘What’s in it for him though?’ she asked.
‘Maybe he thinks he’ll get another promotion if he keeps the boss happy.’
‘But then what’s in it for the boss? What does it matter if she asks questions about her brother’s suicide? I don’t understand why that’s a big deal.’
Cormac was beginning to think it was a very big deal. Something was going on here. Something much bigger than garda embarrassment over a shoddy investigation. He just couldn’t see the connection, not yet.
‘Danny’s sister is missing. She’s been gone for two weeks, and they’ve only just started searching for her.’
‘What? Why? I mean, why the delay?’
He shook his head. ‘Her aunt reported her missing, her parents said no, that she was probably with friends.’
‘What does Danny say?’
‘He thought it was nothing, initially. He’s realised now I think that there really is a problem. I haven’t spoken to him since Thursday. I tried to call, yesterday, last night, but no answer.’
Emma was quiet for a moment. ‘Do you regret coming back?’ she asked softly.
He squeezed her hand, then brought it to his lips in a quick kiss. ‘Same bullshit, different location,’ he said, his tone lighter. They were both quiet, listening to the rain outside. It was early Saturday morning. Cormac wasn’t sure if there was much point in going in to the station, with Murphy in Dublin until Tuesday, and the case effectively out of his hands. He’d spend the day with Emma, think about how to handle Murphy when he saw him. How could he respond to that rumour, if that was the root of the trouble? Pull a Maude on it and look for CCTV footage from the hotel? A hotel like the Radisson might have cameras in the hallways, would certainly have them in the lobby. He’d need to send someone else to get it though; once he put his hands on that evidence it would be tainted. Christ, if Murphy was taking the rumour seriously, things could get messy very quickly. He’d have to get out in front. He needed his job. Needed to be in Galway. Mostly because this was where Emma would be for at least the next couple of years, but partly because he’d never failed at anything, and he didn’t want to start here.
Cormac tried to put the job out of his mind. He’d send Fisher for the security footage when he came in from Strandhill. Get him to log it into evidence. Beyond that there was no point in obsessing about the station all weekend. If the weather improved Emma would want to go for a walk on the prom, which would be freezing but packed with people taking their morning stroll to the crash of the grey Atlantic waves. They’d get lunch somewhere warm and busy, and c
ome home afterwards with the newspapers to sit in front of the fire for the rest of the day. Cormac kissed Emma, then pushed himself out of bed and headed for the shower, moving like an old man. He knew he had what he wanted, that he should be happy, but at best he’d just screwed up his first case in a new job, and at worst half the Galway police force were corrupt as fuck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Tom left Galway at 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, and got to the Mountjoy security gate by ten. Visiting hours were 10 to 12, and he’d had a booking before the Maude situation had blown up, before he’d known about Hannah’s statement.
The Dóchas Centre was a special-purpose block built within the confines of Mountjoy Prison, and it was operating at one hundred and forty per cent capacity. Rooms intended for single occupants had been fitted out with pairs of bunk beds and were occupied by up to five. Thirty per cent of the inmates were on methadone replacement. It was medium security, but some of the inmates should have been in solitary. It was not the place for a child.
Hannah was already waiting for him, seated at a table with Saoirse asleep in her arms. The room was like a particularly soulless university canteen, without the buffet, furnished with formica tables and plastic chairs. It filled up slowly, families taking their places around tables. A little girl with an anxious expression on her face was drawn into a hug, where she started to cry. Tom looked away. Visits were only half an hour, a pitiful period of time for children to catch up with a mother they got to see only once a week.
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