‘He was waiting for her, wasn’t he?’ Fisher asked. ‘When she got in?’ He looked like he was going to be sick. ‘I always thought he was a bit of a dick, but fucking hell.’
Cormac stepped forward, picked up a photo. It was of Maude and Jack, taken when they were children.
‘Reilly.’
Cormac turned. It was Brian Murphy, looking, if anything, more officious than ever. It was the first time Cormac had ever seen him out of uniform, but the navy slacks and jumper were as close as he could have gotten to Garda uniform in civvies.
‘I’ll need the gun.’ He held out a hand, and Cormac gave it over. ‘Fisher will bring you to the station. I want a full statement, straight away.’
Cormac nodded, and turned towards the door. He’d killed a fellow officer. But Danny would have killed him if he hadn’t. He saw again the gun in Danny’s hand as it turned towards him. Saw Aisling’s face as she fell.
‘The photograph,’ Murphy said from behind him.
Cormac looked down at the photograph he still held, and Murphy’s gaze followed. Murphy held his hand out for it. ‘Let’s keep it to the facts, Reilly. Your statement. No theories.’
Cormac met and held his gaze. How much had Murphy known? ‘Yes sir. Just the facts.’ There were more than enough of those, after all.
Friday 5 April 2013
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
They kept Aisling in hospital for four nights. Mary was with her a lot. David Murray came every day. She didn’t want to talk, but they seemed to understand that. She slept. She wasn’t medicated, but it felt like it. Sleep reached up and enveloped her, dragged her into a welcoming darkness from which she emerged, muggy and disoriented, just long enough to eat and use the bathroom, before falling again. Mary said it was healthy, her body doing what it needed to do to heal after everything she had been through. She was a good friend. Better than Aisling deserved. It seemed that Mary and Declan had broken up – that had been going on too over the past few weeks, though Aisling had been oblivious. Mary was going to move out of the student house, and she and Aisling were going to rent a new place together. Somewhere new and modern, with no memories attached. Maude had come to see her too, but Aisling had kept her eyes closed, feigning sleep, until Maude left. She hadn’t been ready for that conversation. But when Aisling emerged from the hospital on shaky legs, seeing Maude was the first thing she wanted to do. She sent her a message, got an immediate reply. Maude was having lunch, but she’d be happy to meet, whenever Aisling wanted.
She found her at the café in Salthill. Maude, sitting at a table with a tall dark-haired man Aisling didn’t recognise. There was a woman with them, a little tired-looking, but the baby she held in her lap was an obvious explanation for that. The debris of a good meal lay on the table. The baby held a chunk of apple in one hand, and gnawed at it with gummy enthusiasm, while the adults watched, enthralled.
‘Maude.’
They all looked up at her voice.
Maude’s smile was warm with genuine welcome, genuine concern. She seemed softer somehow. ‘Aisling, are you okay? Sit down, will you join us? Tom, move over one.’
‘No. Thanks, Maude. I’ve been lying down so much, what I really need is a bit of fresh air. Would you come outside with me for a minute? If I’m not disturbing you?’
They walked the prom together, silent for the first few minutes. It was a sunny, blustery day, the water a bright reflection of the blue sky.
‘I’m so sorry, Aisling, for what happened. I never wanted you to be at risk. I should have thought.’
Aisling shook her head. ‘Not your fault, Maude. There’s no way you could have known.’
There was a long pause.
‘If you’d like to talk about it, I’d like to listen, but please don’t feel . . .’
‘I had a miscarriage,’ Aisling cut her off. She stopped, turned to face Maude. ‘Maybe because of the trauma of everything, but I . . . wasn’t going to . . . You should know that I was going to . . .’ She couldn’t finish the sentence, and Maude reached out and held her arm.
‘Stop, Aisling. You don’t owe me an explanation. You don’t owe me anything.’ There was endless compassion in her eyes.
Aisling wanted to weep then, but she didn’t. She had had enough of tears. She looked away and they walked again for a time.
‘What will you do?’ Aisling asked.
‘I’m going to stay,’ Maude said. She glanced back towards the café. ‘I have a family after all, it seems.’
Aisling nodded. She wanted to be pleased. If Maude was staying they could meet from time to time, get to know each other in a normal way. But Maude was on bail. The trial was still going ahead, though Danny McIntyre had been the one pushing for it, surely, and he was dead. She wanted to ask Maude if she had done it, if she had really killed her mother, but couldn’t bring herself to say the words.
‘And you?’ Maude asked.
Aisling felt the corners of her mouth lift, an involuntary movement. ‘I got a place. I heard yesterday. A training place. Paediatric surgery.’
‘I’m glad for you.’
‘I wanted to tell you too that I’m sorry, for the things I said to you. I’m sure you had good reason to leave Ireland. And I’m so very sorry that you never got to see Jack again.’
‘I had reasons. They seemed like good ones to me then. Maybe there was another way, if I’d been a different kind of person. But I thought it was all down to me, you see?’
Aisling nodded, though she didn’t really understand. ‘What’s happening with the police?’ she asked instead. It was the closest she could get to the question she really needed to ask.
Maude took a seat at one of the benches facing the sea, and gestured for Aisling to join her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s all up in the air. My lawyer – Tom – he says it might be too difficult for the police to move forward now, with everything that’s happened.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Aisling. And she realised that that was the truth. Whatever had happened in the past, she would be happy to let it stay there.
‘I did see Jack again, you know,’ said Maude.
‘What?’
‘I got to Galway on Thursday of the week that Jack died. The place where I lived had been sold. I didn’t have it in me to build another life for myself. I didn’t even know if I wanted to try. So I came home. I wanted to see Jack, at least once, then decide. I found out where he worked, and waited outside for him. I watched him come out with his friends.’
‘Why didn’t you talk to him?’ Aisling asked.
Maude shook her head. ‘I left him so that he would have a chance at happiness. Leaving him, and staying away . . . it nearly broke me. When I saw him he looked so happy, so perfect. I suppose I was afraid. That if I came back into his life it might bring back memories that he was better off without.’
‘And when he died?’
‘I waited for him again the following Monday, and didn’t see him. Tried again on Tuesday. I wondered if maybe he’d gone on holiday. Then on Wednesday I saw it in the paper and I fell apart. Locked myself in my hotel room. Didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. I might have stayed there except that the newspaper article wouldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t accept that Jack had killed himself. If he had, it would have meant that he was never really free. That it followed him all those years, that everything I did . . . that it was all for nothing.’
‘So you pulled yourself together so you could fight for Jack.’
‘I don’t know if it was for Jack, really. It was for myself. I needed it all to have been for something.’
‘It was for something, Maude. Jack was so good. He cared for me. Protected me. Loved me. Made me feel worth loving.’ There were tears in her eyes but she wanted to get the words out. ‘He was such a special person. And that was thanks to you. You gave him love and he gave it to other people. Not just me. Lots of people. So I don’t want you to feel that Jack’s life was wasted. That everything was for nothing. I’m different bec
ause of him. Better. And I wanted to thank you.’ Her words stumbled to a close, and she took a deep breath.
‘I’ll always miss him, Maude. Always remember him.’
Maude blinked back tears as she looked out towards the water. She thought of the little boy she had left behind twenty years before, and wished hard for a moment that she could have every year back. ‘I will too, Aisling. Always.’ And she let it go.
Thursday 11 April 2013
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
It was a 1950s bungalow, built to the side of a country road. Outside the air was fresh and clean, and birds sang. The occasional passing car did not so much disturb the silence as punctuate it.
James McIntyre opened the door to Carrie, and led her to the living room, Fisher trailing behind. The house was much too warm. They passed a hall table, on which sat an old dial-up telephone, still plugged into the wall, and framed family photographs. There was one of Danny, young and uniformed and fresh out of Templemore. The others were all of Lorna. As a baby, pink and smiling. A little girl, standing with a new bike. And older, bright and pretty, teeth in braces, long hair loose, the smile of a girl who is well loved and knows it.
The living room was small and awkwardly proportioned. There was a faded green couch, a little too large for the room, a single armchair, and someone had placed a kitchen chair so that the couch and the chairs formed a circle. It might have been welcoming, that room, if it wasn’t for the oppressive heat, and the grieving, dead-eyed woman who waited for them there.
Anne McIntyre sat at one end of the couch, and James sat at the other. Anne’s face was raw from crying, and she scrubbed her hands together over and over again. Carrie resisted the urge to reach out and stop her. The tidiness, the neatness and pride with which everything had been arranged, all of it together with the heat made Carrie feel claustrophobic. Fisher shifted uncomfortably on his seat. He had looked in every direction but at Anne McIntyre since they had come into the room.
‘I don’t understand,’ Anne said, not for the first time. ‘You’re telling us that Aengus Barton has been released. But he killed her. He killed our Lorna. Her body was found on his land. Her blood was on his clothes. You told us that.’
‘Mr Barton was released because other evidence came to light. I’m so sorry, but Danny confessed to killing Lorna. He was responsible for her death.’ The McIntyres knew this. They’d been told two days before by the family liaison officer assigned to them.
‘He didn’t do that. My boy would never hurt anyone. You must be mad. You’re saying that he murdered his own sister.’ Anne’s lips were so dry that they were cracked and painful looking. Her grey hair was loose around her shoulders, and her eyes were red rimmed and wild.
‘I’m very sorry, Mrs McIntyre,’ Carrie said again. ‘But you know Danny admitted what he did. He told a witness that he placed Lorna’s body in the quarry, that he put the bloody clothes in Mr Barton’s wardrobe.’ Danny had told Aisling Conroy almost everything. He had killed Lorna sometime on the night of the fifteenth of March, had brought her body to the woods beside the quarry, to a spot where he could observe the Barton house. He’d waited for Barton to leave before dumping Lorna’s body in the water, then entered the house to plant the trace evidence.
‘That’s just one person’s word,’ Anne said. ‘You didn’t hear Danny say those things.’
‘Someone came across Danny after he had killed Lorna and placed her body in the quarry. Danny murdered that person also, to try to avoid detection. I’m sorry. I know this is very hard.’
Anne looked down at the newspapers that lay on the coffee table, at the lurid headlines. At the photograph of her son in uniform that took up half the front page. ‘You killed him,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘He was murdered by one of his own, by a man he should have been able to trust.’
‘Sergeant Reilly had no choice. He shot Danny only to save the life of a witness.’
‘This says he’s been suspended,’ Anne gestured sharply at the papers. ‘He wouldn’t have been suspended unless he did something wrong.’
Carrie looked at James McIntyre. His eyes had been focused on the carpet since they all sat down. He hadn’t looked up once during the interview that followed. Didn’t reach out to his wife as her distress grew. He didn’t react now either, his head hung so low that Carrie couldn’t read the expression on his face.
‘That is standard procedure for an officer-involved shooting,’ Carrie said. ‘Sergeant Reilly is on administrative leave, on full pay, until the investigation into Danny’s death is completed, but it’s my expectation that he will shortly return to active duty.’
Anne stood. ‘If you’re right, if that man goes back to duty . . . if he’s never charged for Danny’s death, then . . . This is all a cover-up, isn’t it? What did he find out, our Danny, that you killed him for?’ She spat the words out.
‘Stop it.’ James spoke softly, so softly that his single utterance might have gone unheard, but Anne reacted as if a gun had just gone off in the room. She turned to look at him, almost staggering in her haste.
‘Stop it, Anne.’
‘James,’ is all she said, her voice a broken whisper. He finally raised his eyes to her face and whatever she saw in them caused her to turn and leave the room. Fisher, Carrie and James sat in silence in the cloying heat, then James walked to the window, and a moment later a welcome blast of cold air released some of the tension in the room.
‘She has never been able to accept what Danny was,’ James said, as he returned to his place on the couch.
Carrie opened her mouth to ask a question and shut it again. He had a story he wanted to tell. Better to give him the space he needed to do that.
‘He’s not mine,’ James said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Danny was born in 1973. Anne was only sixteen. She had him in a Mother and Baby home, in Bessborough. She stayed there for six months, then she left to find work, and Danny went to an orphanage. It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t much more than a child. Her family didn’t want to know her. If she’d taken Danny with her she wouldn’t have been able to rent anywhere, wouldn’t have been able to get a job. She stayed as long as they would let her, and she refused to sign adoption papers because she was always going to go back and get him.’
‘I see,’ Carrie said. ‘When did she go back?’
‘I met Anne in London in 1982, we got married and she told me about Danny.’ James’s voice was gruff, his words cut off. Had Anne told him before or after the marriage, and would it have made any difference either way? Would they have moved back to Ireland if it hadn’t been for Danny? Ireland in the early eighties would have been a difficult place to get a job.
‘You came to get him once you were married.’
James shrugged. ‘He was always a difficult child, but we should have expected that. We did expect it. Those places . . . they were brutal. Well we’ve all heard about what went on in them, haven’t we? And he was only a baby.’
‘He found it difficult to adjust to living with you.’ It wasn’t quite a question.
‘He used to go out at night. He would get up and wander the fields, the village. I don’t know how long it went on, but Anne woke one night and found him gone. We were on the point of calling the police in when he walked back in the door, cool as a cucumber.’
‘Where had he been?’
‘He never told us. Just gave us some story about needing to see the night’s sky. Anne was terrified but she would have done anything for that child. She made him promise never to do it again, but I don’t think he ever stopped. And that was the least of it. You have to understand the way it was with him.’ James took a breath, leaned forward. He still looked exhausted but something was animating him, maybe the relief of telling a story too long kept to himself.
‘Danny stole from other children at school, just random stuff. School books, pencils, whatever. We talked to him, the school talked to him, he just didn’t care. Getting upset with Danny never worked
. The only thing that stopped him was threatening to take the T.V. away. That worked for about a month. Danny behaved himself or he lost T.V. time. Then one day Anne was making dinner in the kitchen and she heard a crash. She went running, thought he’d hurt himself. When she got to the living room she found he’d taken a hurley to the television. Destroyed it. Anne said he didn’t even look at her, just walked past her as if nothing had happened.’
‘That must have been very distressing for you.’
James snorted, shook his head. ‘I wasn’t even there. It was poor Anne who had to try to deal with it, and with what came after.’
‘He started stealing again?’ asked Fisher.
‘No. He never stole anything again after that day, as far as I know, but less than a week later he used that hurley on another kid’s head.’
Carrie said nothing, waited.
‘They were only ten, but the other kid was something else, just a natural athlete. I suppose he got a lot of attention for it, and Danny wouldn’t have liked that. Danny just walked up to this kid one day, after school, they weren’t even playing hurling or anything that day. Danny just walked up to him and cracked him across the head with it as hard as he could. The other boy had to get eight stitches.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘Danny was suspended for a month. The other family took their kid out of school, moved him to another one. We were lucky they didn’t sue us, but people didn’t, in those days. After that the other kids stayed away from Danny. The parents stayed away from us too.’
‘Did things ever get better?’
‘He would go through phases where things were almost normal, then something would happen and he would go backwards again. Stop eating, refuse to go to school. But as he grew older he learned how to imitate other people. How to pretend. Anne couldn’t see it. She was just happy that Danny was getting better. She thought he was recovering from the trauma of his childhood. But I could see the truth. He watched us, watched other kids, and he practised. He finished school, went on to join the guards.’
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