‘You waited until Danny left before you had another baby,’ Fisher said. His eyes were on James McIntyre, focused, understanding.
James turned to face him, nodded slowly. ‘I couldn’t have brought a baby into this house while Danny was here. Anne didn’t understand. She desperately wanted another, but in time she accepted it and she put all of her energy into Danny. When he left to join the guards, Anne was only thirty-four. It wasn’t too late for us.’
‘How did Danny feel about Lorna?’ Fisher asked.
James snorted. ‘He played it perfectly. Came home with a little soft teddy for her. Laughed and teased his mother a bit, about this late baby. About what we got up to, as soon as he left the house. By then he could be very charming. He waited for Anne to leave the room, then right in front of me he reached out and pinched Lorna’s little toe so hard, just held it between his finger and thumb and right in front of me he pressed and pressed, as she screamed, until I shoved him away.’
James buried his face in his hands and stayed there for a long moment, until Carrie began to think he wouldn’t say anymore. When he raised his head again, he was crying.
‘He hated her. Anne refuses to see it, but that’s the truth of it. He was a grown man, and she was only a little baby, but he hated her from the moment she was born. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice when he spoke to her. I never left her alone with him, never once. I told the school he was not to be allowed to collect her or see her there, and as soon as she was old enough I explained to her that she wasn’t allowed to see him. I kept her safe for eighteen years, but he got her in the end.’ And he started to weep, great wracking, raw sobs, his pain too much to hold in. Carrie let him cry, bowing her head in the face of his grief, but unable to leave. And eventually, slowly, he came back to himself.
‘Why did he kill her, do you think?’ Carrie asked softly.
James shook his head. ‘Maybe just because he hated her. Or maybe it amused him to hurt his mother so deeply. That was always a game of his. It would be easy to say it was all because he was angry that Anne left him, because he resented Lorna for her happy childhood. I can’t say for sure that wasn’t the case, but you’re asking me what I think. And I think Danny never felt that strongly about anyone, even Anne. He was just a wrong one from the beginning.’
Carrie wondered about that, wondered where Danny had gone after Bessborough, what had happened to him there. Maybe Danny was a product of his childhood.
‘Can you tell us about the rape?’ she asked.
James took a breath, then let it slowly out. He was aging here in this room, right in front of them. ‘Lorna went out with friends to a nightclub. It’s a country sort of place, not somewhere she could get into too much trouble, we thought. But she caught the eye of that man Kavanagh, and he put something in her drink, and her friends just left her there. She came home the next morning, and she barely knew where she was but she knew what had happened to her.’
‘She went to the police.’
‘She did. Her mother and I didn’t want her to.’
Yes. When Lorna came in to report the rape, she had come alone. Some of what Carrie felt must have shown in her face, because James grew defensive.
‘How many rape cases result in convictions? If she brought the thing to court they would pull her apart, destroy her, and she’d still have to deal with those men walking down the streets of her own village.’
‘And Danny?’
‘He wasn’t happy. Said that Lorna had embarrassed him in front of his colleagues. He said she should have come to him if she had a problem and he would sort it out in his own way.’
‘Why did she withdraw the charges?’ Fisher asked.
James swallowed. ‘They took photographs. She got an anonymous email with a link to a pornography site, where they’d put up one of the photographs. There was no message, no threat, but it was clear all the same what they were telling her. If she went ahead with the case more of those photographs would have ended up on the internet. She couldn’t bear that, and she didn’t believe anymore that the case would result in a conviction.’
Carrie had known it, known that Lorna had lost confidence in her, hadn’t believed that she could get the job done, but it hurt to hear it said all the same. Lorna had never told her why she wouldn’t proceed with the case. She’d called and left a message and after that refused to talk about it.
‘But that was what Danny wanted,’ Fisher said. ‘He never wanted her to press charges.’
‘Meaning he should have left her alone after that? She should have been safe?’ James said.
Fisher nodded dumbly.
‘We sent her to Dublin to keep her away from him. He wasn’t happy that she’d withdrawn the charges. He was furious. He said she’d made it worse. Made him look ineffectual, because any failure of the police would be seen by the village as his personal failure.’
Fisher made no attempt to hide his incomprehension, his revulsion, and James turned back to Carrie. ‘That’s what he said.’
And Carrie wondered if that’s what this had all been about. A childhood trauma. Some sort of festering sibling jealousy. Or maybe Danny had seen an opportunity to advance his career. The Kavanagh drug bust worked so well for him, maybe he’d decided to go again with Lorna’s murder. Would he have tried to make the Barton arrest himself, if things hadn’t become so complicated? If Jack hadn’t seen him that morning. If Reilly hadn’t been there in the background, asking questions and getting closer. It seemed to Carrie that killing Jack had thrown his whole plan out. He’d had to hide Lorna’s disappearance for a week, to try to make sure that no one connected the two deaths. The longer Lorna spent in the water the harder it would be for the pathologist to determine her time of death. But despite his efforts at obfuscation, Carrie had suspected him from the beginning. Lorna had told her just enough. And so she’d been on him from the start, pushing for the missing person’s case to be taken seriously, pushing for search parties and posters and a full investigation. All that pressure had had its effect on Danny. Had it pushed him over the edge? Was that why he had taken the enormous risk with Aisling Conroy? Carrie forced that thought away. She wasn’t to blame for Danny’s actions, for who he was. How many people were now blaming themselves, questioning every step they had taken, when really the fault lay only with him? She refused to be one of them.
Monday 15 April 2013
EPILOGUE
On Monday morning, Cormac drove back to Kilmore. On Friday he’d had a call from O’Halloran, to tell him the internal affairs investigation was closed. He was to return to active duty. He’d hung up the phone without saying a word. The investigation had been closed without a single question asked about how Danny had gotten away with the Kavanagh set up, how he’d gotten his hands on the drugs. It was a cover up, and Cormac wanted no part of it.
He’d thought briefly about going to the papers but there was too much he didn’t know, and as going public would mean losing his job, too much he would have had to leave undone. Twenty years before, he’d walked away from the Blake case, and it had come back to haunt him. He was older now, and wiser, and there were some things he was unwilling to let go. Charging Domenica Keane for her abuse of the children, or for her deliberate introduction of Simon Schiller into their lives, would be extremely difficult. They’d never be able to prove intent when it came to Schiller. For the abuse, they had the medical records for both children, and Maude’s statement, if she could be induced to give it formally. But Keane’s lawyer would argue that the twenty-year delay in prosecution was prejudicial, and that was an argument he would likely win. Case law was against them. The High Court had thrown out simple assault cases where prosecution had been delayed by less than three years. But Cormac wasn’t giving up. In the Blake–Keane case there might be something they could do. Maude and Jack had been children when the abuse occurred, and in a position of dependence on Keane. Reporting the assaults hadn’t been an option. And there might be something in the new legisl
ation he could use – new offences for child abuse or procuring a child for sexual exploitation. Cormac had a meeting scheduled with a friend at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and he had a list of questions he wanted to ask.
In the meantime he was going to interview Keane again. She was sitting, spiderlike, in her house in Kilmore, thinking herself immune from consequence. He wanted to rattle her confidence, unsettle her. At the very least it might give the old bitch a few sleepless nights, at best it might provoke her into making a mistake.
But he pulled up outside the house to a flurry of activity. There was an ambulance in the drive, a local squad car, and a car he recognised as Caoimhe O’Neill’s. Caoimhe and two uniforms were standing outside the front door. As Cormac approached, paramedics rolled a gurney from the house. There was a body on the gurney, and a sheet had been drawn up over its head. Cormac kept walking towards Caoimhe.
‘What happened?’ Cormac asked. He flashed his badge at one of the uniforms, who showed signs of becoming officious.
‘Probably carbon monoxide poisoning sir,’ the uniform said. ‘Accidental death, unless you’re here to tell us otherwise.’
‘It was that shitty old heater,’ Caoimhe said, wringing her hands. ‘I warned her ten times. The bloody thing was recalled about fifteen years ago. But she wouldn’t listen.’
Cormac turned and watched the paramedics load the gurney into the ambulance.
‘You found her?’ Cormac asked.
‘I haven’t been here for two days,’ Caoimhe said. ‘I had a day’s holiday yesterday, and none of the other girls would see her. If I’d been here, maybe it wouldn’t have been too late.’
Christ. ‘She didn’t deserve your care, Caoimhe, and she doesn’t deserve your regrets.’ He walked away, back to his car. He had nothing else to say.
‘What did she do?’ Caoimhe called after him, but Cormac shook his head, got into his car, and drove away.
He didn’t drive far. It took him a few minutes to find the driveway – he wasn’t sure which direction it was from the Keane house. But he found it in the end, drove the car up as far as the drive was passable, then got out and walked the rest of the way. The house had been derelict twenty years before, and it was rotting now. The roof had collapsed inwards. The front door was missing, and the doorway gaped, dark and threatening. He was glad to see the place in ruins. Glad that no young Celtic Tiger couple had come here with their dreams and their temporary money, to turn the place around and give it new timbers, new sheen. This house deserved to die.
Maude had killed her mother. Hilaria had been dying, certainly, and perhaps it had been an act of euthanasia as much as it was an act of defence. Would Maude now go to prison when Domenica Keane, the root of it all, escaped what she would have hated most – exposure, and public ruin? He couldn’t do it. He’d sat on his knowledge of Maude’s motive since Danny had died, had fallen one way, then another every day since. But now he was sure. He would tell no one. Fuck. Fuck. Cormac picked up the remains of a slate roof tile that had fallen to the ground, and threw it as hard as he could against the house, where it shattered. Fuck.
He drove to Galway. Drove straight home. Carrie O’Halloran’s car was parked in his street. As he pulled in, she got out and walked towards him.
‘You didn’t come in to the station,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Thought you’d like to know. Murphy’s made the call. Charges against Maude Blake are to be dropped. Insufficient evidence.’
Cormac let out a breath. ‘He doesn’t want to take the chance that all the Danny shit will come out at trial.’
‘Maybe.’ Carrie nodded. ‘Or maybe he just agrees with you that there was no case to begin with.’ She looked away, towards the canal. ‘It’s good the charges have been dropped. The case would never have gone anywhere. Our time is better spent elsewhere.’
Her expression was set, closed. How much did she know? And how much would she tell him? When he spoke, he did so slowly, deliberately. ‘I think Brian Murphy knew about Danny. Knew, at the very least, that he’d set up Kavanagh. Knew about the drugs. Maybe even about Lorna.’
Carrie said nothing for a long time, so long that he began to think she wouldn’t respond at all.
‘He put you on the Maude Blake case,’ she said at last, her voice quiet. ‘If he knew as much as you think he did, then he had to have known that would put you on a collision course with Rodgers. That you would ask questions that would lead you to Danny.’
‘What are you saying, that he wanted me to stop him?’
Carrie shrugged. ‘I’m just suggesting that it might not be as black and white as you think it is.’
She turned her eyes to his and they were hooded, opaque. He couldn’t read her.
‘We’ve a good team,’ she said. ‘You’ve not seen the best of it.’
‘Right,’ said Cormac. Maybe.
As they spoke a squad car pulled up and double-parked. Fisher jumped out of the driver’s seat.
‘How ya,’ he said. Both detectives stared back at him.
‘You weren’t answering your phone,’ he said, unembarrassed. ‘I wanted to let you know. Murphy made a call to the lab and got the DNA fast-tracked. It came back positive. A match with the sample taken from the body in America. Lanigan’s definitely our man. I’ve a warrant here.’ He gestured with a thumb towards the car. ‘Thought you might like to come along for the ride.’
Cheeky fucker. ‘Murphy fast-tracked it?’
A nod.
Cormac looked towards the little house. The lights were off. Emma was at work. ‘Get in the car,’ said Cormac. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’
Fisher climbed back into the squad car, cheery and unfazed.
‘He’s one of the better ones,’ said Carrie, nodding towards the car where Fisher waited.
‘I’m not letting it go, Carrie,’ Cormac said.
‘I know,’ she said again.
They looked at each other for a long tense moment. Then she nodded, and walked away.
Cormac got in the car beside Fisher. ‘Feel like arresting a murderous fucker who thought he’d gotten away with it?’
‘Always,’ Fisher said.
‘Right,’ said Cormac. He reclined the passenger seat a little, closed his eyes. ‘You’re driving,’ he said. ‘Wake me when we get there.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thank you so much for reading The Rúin. Maude, Aisling and Cormac feel so very real to me, and I hope they came to mean something to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Rúín . . . or on any other books you’ve read this year that you’ve loved (always looking for good book recommendations!). You can find me on Twitter @ dervlamctiernan, or on my Facebook page DervlaMcTiernan. You can also sign up for my newsletter on my website, www.dervlamctiernan.com, for news, book chat, and information on the next book in the series (coming March 2019!).
I hope very much that you enjoyed The Rúin. If you did and if you have a little time, I would be so grateful if you could leave a short review online.
Thanks again for reading.
*
A confession: I cheated, just a tiny bit, in the writing of this book. Last year, when I was writing the umpteenth draft, I researched methods by which Aisling could have traced Jack’s phone. I had some rules about the solution I was looking for – it had to be something she could do without recourse to some sort of spy-ware, and without access to an overly convenient friend at the phone company. I also didn’t want the solution to require Jack to have pre-installed something on his phone, which meant Find-My-iPhone or something similar was out. I wanted something that would work for someone as clueless about technology as I am, starting with nothing in hand.
Then I stumbled onto Google Timeline. I use Google maps, and I have a Gmail account, both of which I access through my phone. I didn’t know it (I’m sure I would have if I had read the fine print) but because I had both apps on my phone, Google had been tracking everywhere I went, and
had been recording that data at least since 2015. I looked up my Timeline and found a record of everywhere I had been, and how long I had been there, the routes I had taken, everything, without my knowing it and without me having to download or install anything more unusual than Google maps and Gmail (both apps have over one billion users worldwide and I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who didn’t have both).
A perfect solution. Perfect. All Aisling would need is Jack’s Google password, and all that information was sitting there waiting for her. Only one problem. Timeline wasn’t introduced until 2015, and the book is set in March 2013. I looked for other solutions, I really did. But nothing was as elegant, as perfect, as simple and dramatic as that perfectly plotted and timed route, sitting in Jack’s Google account.
So I cheated. Sorry sorry. But it is fiction, after all. (Sorry.)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you Mum and Dad. Impossible to capture in a few words all you have done for me. I love you both very much. Thank you to my siblings, Conor, Fíona, Cormac, Fearghal, Odharnait and Aoibhinn – for reading the early drafts and for your encouragement and support. Love you guys. Thank you to Kevin Shinners, Rob Moore, and Lorraine Lewis for the early reads.
Thank you to my agents, Tara Wynne, Sheila Crowley and Faye Bender for brilliant agenting and for being such a joy to work with. Thank you to my editors, Anna Valdinger, Nicola Robinson, Lucy Dauman and Laura Tisdel, for having such faith in me, and for your editorial genius. Thank you too to Jaki Arthur, Kimberley Allsopp, Sarah Barrett, Theresa Anns and Shannon Kelly. You’ve been so generous, so supportive, and so much fun to work with.
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