by Claire Allan
wrong track altogether,’ I said.
‘I’m not saying that’s what happened, of course,’ DC King
says. ‘Although it would be understandable if someone wants
to help someone end their life rather than see them suffer.
Could he have asked any of the others?’
‘I can’t speak for what happened between my father and
anyone else. But I’ll state again, it’s my firm belief that he didn’t want to die.’
Detective Constable King nods, pushes a stray lock of her
hair behind her ear and readjusts herself on her seat before
looking back at me.
‘After you left your father in his room that time, you didn’t
go back to see him at all?’
I shake my head again. ‘No. I went downstairs. Watched a
little TV with Stella and Auntie Kathleen. Stella went out to
run some errands and Kathleen and I sat and chatted in the
living room.’
She nods and DC Black scribbles furiously on his A4 pad of
paper.
‘Did you notice anyone else go to see your father?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘We were all in and out all the time.’
‘Had you told the others he was going to sleep?’
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Had I? I didn’t remember.
‘I don’t know. We were all so tired and stressed. Things had
been tense.’
She raises one perfectly arched eyebrow. DC Black stops
writing for just a moment and looks up, too.
‘How’s that?’ she says.
I’m getting tired now. Out of my depth. I’ve had enough.
‘There’s a complicated family dynamic here,’ I say, trying to
choose my words very carefully. ‘And of course, knowing my
father was dying was hard on us all.’
‘What do you mean by complicated family dynamic?’ she
asks.
‘Aren’t all families complicated?’ I say. ‘It’s been a long day
and a long evening.’ I can feel my lip start to tremble and I’m
embarrassed to find that I’m on the brink of tears.
‘Take your time,’ DC King soothes and I roughly brush away
a tear that has shamed me by running down my face.
‘Look, Heidi is the daughter of the woman he left my mother
for. He raised Heidi after her mother died. I was still just a
teenager. Things were difficult. Heidi and I never saw eye to
eye and we still don’t. She was a very troubled child well into
her teenage years. You know, mental health problems and the
like.
‘My father did his best to do right by her – at the expense
of his relationship with me at times – but she never seemed to
view him with anything other than utter disdain. But that
doesn’t mean she’d have done anything . . .’ I said, knowing full
well that it meant she was more than capable of it all the same.
‘Of course it doesn’t,’ DC King says. ‘How did she appear
on the night of your father’s death?’
‘Tense,’ I say. ‘But we all were. We were all walking on eggshells.
Just the night before she had told us she wanted to sell this
house as soon as possible. It goes to her, you see. It was her
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mother’s and although my father was allowed to live here until he died, or formed a new family, it was always going to go to
Heidi.
‘It seemed very distasteful to have that conversation with him
dying upstairs, but that’s Heidi, you see. Cold at times. And she
has just become a mother and by all accounts the house she’s
living in now isn’t big enough for a growing family . . .’
‘I imagine that conversation made you angry?’ DC King
asked.
‘Well yes, of course it did. It was callous. But my anger was
with Heidi and certainly not with my father. I mean, there’s
no telling what she’s capable of . . . not that I’m saying it was
her, of course,’ I say, even though I want the blame to be shifted squarely onto her shoulders. It might just teach her to be more
sensitive to other people and their feelings.
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Chapter Thirty-Six
Heidi
Now
I’ve escaped the house for a while and am pushing Lily in her
pram along the quay and back again even though it is freezing
and my face has started to go numb with the cold.
I needed to get away from the house. It’s been just over two
days since the police dropped the bombshell on us and we’ve
spent hours talking to different officers. Going through the
same details over and over again. They’ve been professional with
us, nice even. But I can sense DI Bradley getting frustrated.
They’re no closer to finding any answers. None of us are, but
I can’t help but feel that they are all looking in my direction.
They’ve kept asking me about my relationship with him.
How had we got along? Had there been tension between us?
They say things must be stressful for me, with a small baby and
now losing my father. I don’t correct them that I have never
considered him my father, in any sense of the word.
They’ve asked me repeatedly about the house. Did I really
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have plans to sell it as soon as possible? They’ve asked about my mental health, any medication I’m on. But I’m not on
medication just now. I’ve not been on medication for seven or
eight years. I’ve been coping on my own. Doing well. And
when I was sick, I directed all my self-loathing towards myself
and only myself. I’ve never hurt anyone. I wouldn’t.
They’ve asked if Joe asked me to help him die. If I thought
someone might have helped him to end his life. I snort. While
there was breath in his body, Joe McKee would have wanted
to suck up whatever attention and sympathy he could muster.
He wouldn’t have willingly skipped out on his grand finale.
Alex has gone to work today to ‘finish some urgent paper-
work’ and he couldn’t wait to leave the house this morning.
He’ll be back as soon as he can, he says, but I have a feeling I
won’t see him for hours and as he’s my only ally in the house,
being without him there is too difficult.
After another round of questioning this morning, I’d called
him and told him how I felt as if the walls were closing in on
me. He said I was being paranoid. But I can hear something
in his voice. Worry, or suspicion, maybe.
People stop talking when I walk into the room. I know what
that means. I know who they are talking about.
I’m afraid to kick off. Afraid to fight my corner. Afraid to
show any sort of strong emotion in case it feeds the narrative
that I’m unhinged. What had been a stressful situation to begin
with had now become almost unbearable.
So I’d rather face the cold than go home, even though it’s
thre
atening to rain and I should have worn a heavier coat.
Keeping moving helps, you see. I focus on what I see, smell
and hear. Keep mindful of the exact moment I’m in and ignore
the bigger picture because I fear it will overwhelm me if I let
it.
When my hands are so cold they start to turn blue, I push
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Lily’s pram into a nearby coffee shop and order a large latte. I catch my reflection in the window. I look old and haggard.
Unkempt, with the dressing still on my hand. My other hand
bruised and grazed from my run-in with the peeler. Dark circles
under my eyes. No make-up, not that it could perform the
miracle I need it to if I’m to look more human.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ the waitress asks as she puts
the coffee down in front of me.
I shake my head, lift the cup, immediately using the heat
from it to warm my hands. I could almost cry from this small
feeling of physical comfort.
I just have to get through the next few days and weeks, I
tell myself. I just have to believe in myself. I know I didn’t hurt anyone. I know I’m innocent. I have to believe that will be
enough to get me through this.
I feel a heaviness in the pit of my stomach. I look at my
coffee. I don’t think I’ve the stomach to drink it any more. My
sense of freedom is slipping away.
Suddenly, I have to leave the café, even though I’ve just
arrived. It feels, like so much in life, just too small. Much, much too claustrophobic. The scarf around my neck feels too tight.
My coat too hot. The chatter of people around me too noisy.
I feel as if they are looking at me. Talking about me. And us.
Gossiping. The thing with living in Derry is that while it’s a
city, it still retains that small-town mentality. Everyone knows
everyone else’s business. Ironic really, given that no one stepped in when my life was falling apart after my mother died.
But they will all be talking. The rumour mill will be in full
flow. Someone will have heard something and passed it on, and
the Chinese whispers will have spread. He’s not home yet.
Something must be up. Did someone hurt him? I always thought that girl of his looked like a bad sort! Do you remember the time . . .
I push the pram out of the shop, out onto the quay again,
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without making eye contact with anyone. I hear their voices anyway, as I walk as fast as I can, the rain thumping down now
– thick, icy drops. I try to focus on my senses. What I see, smell and hear again. But it’s all too much.
I want to scream at everyone to just shut up. I keep my head
down trying to block out the noise, but it just seems to be
getting louder and louder. It comes as a huge shock to me then
when I look up and see that save for a few cars driving past,
the street is empty.
I pause as tears roll down my cheeks, mixing with the rain-
drops. I pause and focus on the real noises around me. Try to
slow my breathing.
Then my phone rings.
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Chapter Thirty-Seven
Ciara
Now
‘I never thought I’d have him back under this roof,’ Mum says.
The coroner has agreed to release Joe’s remains to her. He
is satisfied there is no further physical evidence to be gathered
from his body, and that we can go ahead and lay him to rest.
Well, I say we. There was no way they were letting his remains
come back to his home at Aberfoyle Crescent and certainly
not to any of us ‘suspects’.
My mother, on the other hand, with the help of a canny
solicitor, has come to an arrangement that her home would be
suitable for him to be brought back to.
My mother is beside herself with emotion that he will be
back in what was our family home. It does nothing to make
me believe she doesn’t still love him. That she never stopped
loving him.
We can escape the overall feeling that everything is off-kilter,
though. Yes, we will be able to bury him, and that will provide
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a small amount of relief, but a cloud hangs over us all. Nothing is really resolved. They will be watching us all intently as we
grieve. Looking for clues. For some reason, they don’t seem to
be picking up on my hints about Heidi. As usual she seems to
be able to win people around with her little-girl-lost act. But
I’m not buying it and I’ll make sure no one else does, either.
‘Can we keep the house private, Mum?’ I ask. It will be bad
enough to have the police hovering.
‘Lots of people will want to say their goodbyes to your father,’
she says.
It’s virtually unheard of for houses to remain closed to visi-
tors during a wake. She’s right, of course people will want to
traipse in and out, pay their respects, offer a quick prayer by
the coffin side and then sit with us and drink their tea while
eating curling sandwiches.
‘Lots more will want to gawk,’ I say. ‘People are talking, Mum.
They know something is up. Don’t you think they’ll all just
want a nosy at us? They’ll be trying to figure out whodunnit.’
The expression sounds more flippant than I intended and
my mother baulks.
‘There’s no need to be so crass. Your father is dead, Ciara.
Murdered, if the police are right.’
She says the word ‘murdered’ in a whisper. None of us can
really believe we are even saying these words or thinking this
way.
‘Well, that’s more reason not to have all and sundry walking
in through the door, then. There’ll be people who didn’t even
know him or care about him wanting in. They can gawk at
the funeral if they want, but give us this at least.’
‘He deserved a better send-off than this . . .’
Mum looks bereft. I’ve never understood how she remained
so fond of him for all these years. I remain convinced that if
he had asked her if they could try again she would have jumped
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at the very thought. Her continued loyalty to him is something that I have to admit I struggle to understand. Then again, she
doesn’t know everything. That angers me. Her unyielding loyalty
to him.
‘What he doesn’t deserve is people wanting to make him
nothing more than a news story and what I don’t need is people
eyeing me up trying to work out if I’m responsible for putting
him in the ground in the first place!’
My voice is high-pitched. Screechier than normal. I can see
Mum recoil further and further as the volume of my voice
increases.
‘Ciara, please,’ she says, her voice small, lacking in its usual
authoritative tone. ‘Please just st
op. I don’t want to have this
conversation.’
‘Don’t you?’ I ask her. ‘Don’t you want to have this conver-
sation instead of dancing around it all? We’re all walking on
eggshells. You’ve not even asked me if I did it, Mum. Don’t
you want to know if it was me? If I was the one who put the
pillow over his head and pressed down until he stopped
breathing?’
I feel the sharp sting of her hand across my cheek before I
even register what is happening. My mother has never once,
in all her life, lifted her hand to me. She never smacked me as
a child. Even as a teenager when I was a little bitch and prob-
ably deserved a good slap, she would let me rage until I was
spent, and then we would sit down and talk together.
The shock of feeling her strike me winds me. I gasp, stare at
her, while I bring my own hand to my injured cheek, feel the
heat of it rise.
I can see my mother’s gaze, steely and strong. She doesn’t
look shocked that she hit me. She certainly doesn’t look sorry.
‘Ciara McKee, I never want to hear you talk that like again,
do you understand?’
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I stare and she steps closer to me, drops her voice lower. It’s more menacing than her screaming at me could ever be.
‘I said, do you understand?’
I nod, willing the tears that sprung to my eyes to stay where
they are and not to betray me by falling.
‘I don’t need to ask you if you did it because I know you,
Ciara. You are my child and I know you could never have
done something like that. You’re not capable of it, and even
if you are too stubborn to admit it, I know you loved your
father just as he loved you. Now, I want you to pull yourself
together and help us all get through the next two days. We’ll
do it your way. Closed house. Now let that be an end to this
stupid conversation.’
She turned on her heel and walked away before I could say
anything else. Before I could tell her that she was wrong. I did
not love my father. It wasn’t something I was simply too stub-
born to admit. I hated him.
And I did have bad bones in my body – a badness I’d maybe
inherited from him. Or maybe, just maybe, it was more that I
had a sense of justice. You couldn’t mess up people’s lives without any consequences. That was not how the world worked.