Problems with Girls (DI Sloane Book 2)

by Kelly Creighton

  After I rang off, I saw Hewitt looking at me. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I have to go; my mother has died,’ I said matter-of-factly.

  Hewitt went to give me a hug but remembered about my shoulder and patted me gently on the good arm. She gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘What do you need from me, Harry?’

  ‘We need to let Chloe’s family know the outcome, and Mary’s …’

  ‘And the Rosses and the McClellands,’ said Hewitt. ‘Yes, yes. I’ve got Higgins for that donkey work. Don’t worry about that now. Just go, hen.’

  Epilogue

  Today feels like a beach day, same as yesterday.

  I don my black vest and a thin cardigan, a silk skirt I have never had the occasion to wear, silver tights, boots and look at myself in my full-length mirrors and I think, who knew this would be that occasion?

  Paul comes and puts on his black tie while the babysitter – a nineteen-year-old neighbour of ours who is studying something to do with Early Childhood – insists she doesn’t mind that the boys are cranky, and that she’s already had chickenpox.

  She says she’ll bathe the twins later in baking soda if they get too itchy but I know I don’t own any. I’m not a baking soda kind of woman.

  Then Paul and I leave to go and burn my mother’s body. Fuck!

  The whole day Sylvia avoids me, and at the ceremony Addam performs his religious speech that only he believes in. I think, Mother would not have wanted this, she was not a believer.

  I think of Chloe’s funeral and how it was geared solely for her and not a God, and how better it was for it. And the bright colours! Then Addam gives his sales pitch, his come to God moment, and I am mega pissed off when he makes this about recruitment; about, if you don’t believe, then good luck to you out there …

  Personally, I can’t believe there is anything after this. I would like to.

  Addam is shaky, and yes, it is his own mother’s funeral service he is delivering, but that would not falter my brother.

  He is very used to death. Each day he spends time with the dead or the dying.

  If you didn’t know Addam you’d think he is drunk, slurring his words and suddenly I know it. Each of us are fifty-fifty after all. It is the reason we are here, releasing our mother: Addam has Huntington’s.

  I look at Sylvia, who is watching him with a genuine concern. This is why she has had no time for my boys. She has been dealing with this all along. Fuck again!

  I try to get Charly’s eye but she is wiping her eyes and I can tell she is not taking anything else in. Poor Charlotte, she was the closest of us all to Mother, and it is her birthday today, last day of May. Mine is tomorrow. A new month.

  Coral tells me she knows about Addam with one look. She is always trying to get us to take the test; she has and knows she is on the safe side of the fence.

  Brooks is here, under escort. He has been allowed compassionate leave from prison to attend.

  ‘How are you, Brooks?’ I ask him as we line up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Brooks says, ‘that’s what I am. I never got to say goodbye to her.’

  ‘It robbed us all of a goodbye,’ I said, because Mother was in a limbo for years but we had always been told we would see a decline before she would pass, and she had not gone that way. Just ‘fine’ one minute and gone the next.

  Old neighbours, colleagues and distant cousins of Mother’s go along our family line-up to shake our hands and attempt to hug us, whether we are up for it or not.

  Even my ex-mother-in-law, Yvonne Lucie, appears. And I have to accept her sympathy until I can slip off to the bar.

  Paul comes over and hands me a coffee. I have a habit now of looking for horse medication floating on the top.

  ‘I’m grand with the wine,’ I say.

  ‘We’re going on a holiday once this is over,’ he says.

  ‘We’re just back from one.’

  ‘You look like you need another one.’

  ‘The tan is fading …’ I look at the back of my hand and spill Merlot on the bar.

  ‘You’ve been shot, Harry, and your mother has died and you’re still running around like a blue-arsed fly. We haven’t had any time as a family. You’ve hardly seen the boys since you went back to work.’

  I have the first five grand from Dom Moore at home, I keep it in the safe. I want to buy Paul a Boxster. He shouldn’t have to make so many sacrifices. It’s not fair on him.

  Father sits with some of the old brigade. When he dies he’ll have half of the RUC around him, whoever is still knocking about by then. My mother, a woman and a judge, warranted less respect, but more fear. Though only from anyone who knew her outside of the family. She took things more in her stride than I do.

  ‘We’ve lost an amazing woman,’ I say to Paul, a bit drunk, almost tearful. ‘Why has no one said that, why has no one said how shite it was that she lived those final years like that, how it was cruel, for her and for us?’

  ‘You just said it,’ he replies.

  I walk over to my father who turns his face away as the old boys’ club tell stories and laugh and guffaw. ‘Daddy, why are you avoiding me?’ I ask him but he doesn’t reply.

  ‘Do you know Lizzie, the woman who shot me? She says she knows you, said she worked in Bethany Nursing Home at one stage.’

  ‘How do I know? They come and go,’ he says.

  I breathe a sigh of relief. Lizzie made me think there was something between them, but that was Lizzie’s talent, making connections where there aren’t any.

  She had stalked Martin Walsh, she had fallen for him. Lizzie had been pushed away by Martin. Then she stood to lose Justin, the only man who didn’t push her back.

  And that was just because she had shit on him; knew too much about his love of knives.

  Some relationships can never end peacefully.

  Even her relationship with Chloe had not been as close as she’d made out either. Chloe was afraid of her, and afraid to push her away.

  Lizzie had recommended Martin to Chloe solely as a way to hear about him. In the end, he had to take a restraining order out on Lizzie. He never even knew they were friends until Lizzie was charged with her murder, and all the others.

  ‘People falling for their therapist is very common. People are vulnerable, and here’s someone who finally cares,’ as Rebecca Walsh once told me.

  *

  Outside I call after Father one more time but he is away, walking toward his car.

  ‘Look at me,’ says Paul.

  ‘What?’ I ask him.

  Paul moves to the other side of me and stands there and says, ‘Just look here, Harry, at me.’

  But I turn and look over the road, where a car pulls up, a Skoda, and Greg and the Chief Super from Musgrave Serious Crime Suite both get out and speak to Father. Then Musgrave goes to get cuffs but Greg shakes his head.

  ‘What the hell?’ I try to run over and Paul grabs my arm and I wince with the pain in my shoulder.

  ‘Let’s relieve the babysitter,’ he says.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I ask. I watch as they put Father in the back of the car.

  ‘I’m sorry; they wouldn’t wait any longer,’ says Paul.

  Then they are gone.

  ‘I don’t know an easy way to say it,’ Paul says. ‘Charles stole anaesthetic from the hospital.’

  I am confused, waiting for them to return, having realised their mistake. It is his wife’s funeral, for God’s sake.

  ‘That day your dad called into the hospital to speak with me,’ says Paul, ‘he was caught on camera. He’d been asking me how much would be too much, would kill a big man with a strong constitution. I thought he was being weird, or a bit senile. I didn’t want to worry you.’

  The service car does not return. My father has killed my mother, he has put her out of her misery, and I understand now that this was what all his letters and false claims were about. He has wanted a conversation with me about permission; for me to say that it is okay,
that I agree it is time to let her go.

  He had tried to call me that Friday afternoon before and I had ignored his call. Maybe he was wanting to talk it through with me. Or ask me to do it.

  Then he took it into his own hands.

  Father has ended a life that ended long ago and given the rest of us our own lives back, even at the cost of his freedom. And in this moment, watching him turn a corner and be gone, I love that man more than I have ever done before.

  It is the man standing in front of me I don’t love. This ‘good’ man. My father’s traitor. He won’t get a penny of my sons’ money.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe much gratitude to Ards and North Down Borough Council. It was during a residency funded by ANDBC to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre that this book took hold.

  Thank you to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for recent funding of other projects.

  Thank you to my family for their support.

  About the author

  Kelly Creighton facilitates creative writing classes for community groups and schools. Her published books include: The Sleeping Season (DI Sloane Book 1), The Bones of It, Bank Holiday Hurricane and Three Primes. Her work is widely anthologised and has been noted in many poetry and short fiction prizes. She co-edited Underneath the Tree: an anthology of Twelve Christmas Stories from writers in Northern Ireland. In 2014, she founded The Incubator literary journal, showcasing the contemporary Irish short story. Kelly was the recipient of a 2017/18 ACES Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She lives with her family in Newtownards, County Down.

  kellycreighton.com

  @KellyCreighto16

  ‘Creighton has a poet’s eye for imagery and a novelist’s understanding of the value of a good plot.’

  The Irish Times

  ‘Creighton [is] a writer to reckon with.’

  The Irish Examiner

  Also by Kelly Creighton

  The Bones Of It (2015)

  Thrown out of university, green-tea-drinking, meditation-loving Scott McAuley has no place to go but home: County Down, Northern Ireland. The only problem is, his father is there now too.

  Duke wasn’t around when Scott was growing up. He was in prison for stabbing two Catholic kids in an alley. But thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, big Duke is out now, reformed, a counsellor.

  Squeezed together into a small house, with too little work and too much time to think about what happened to Scott’s dead mother, the tension grows between these two men, who seem to have so little in common.

  Penning diary entries from prison, Scott recalls what happened that year. He writes about Jasmine, his girlfriend at university. He writes about Klaudia, back home in County Down, who he and Duke both admired. He weaves a tale of lies, rage and paranoia.

  Out now in paperback and eBook.

  Praise for The Bones of It

  ‘A brilliant crime debut, chilling, compulsive and beautifully written. A hugely impressive addition to the growing body of Irish crime fiction.’

  Brian McGilloway

  ‘Blackly comic in tone. A Bildungsroman that evolves into a slow-burning psychological exploration of the mind.’

  The Irish Times

  ‘… true discovered masterpiece of fiction. The Bones of It is not just a novel to read, it is a novel to experience.’

  San Diego Book Review

  ‘Scott’s is an authentic voice, and Creighton a writer to reckon with.’

  The Irish Examiner

  ‘This finely written thriller keeps the reader gripped and intrigued … a meaty, fascinating work of fiction.’

  CultureHub Magazine

  ‘Incredibly well written.’

  Sinead Crowley

  ————

  Bank Holiday Hurricane (2017)

  A woman picks up what is left of her life after her release from prison. A young couple are about to set off for Australia when a leaving party changes everyone’s fate. Lifelong friends keep deep secrets that could fracture each other’s lives. In Manchester, paths cross for two people who have not seen each other since the genocide in Rwanda.

  Bank Holiday Hurricane is a collection about dislocation, disenchantment and second chances, told through linked stories set in and around a Northern Irish town, and further afield.

  Out now in paperback at doirepress.com.

  Praise for Bank Holiday Hurricane

  ‘The 16 stories are by turns gritty and moving.’

  The Irish Times

  ‘Kelly Creighton’s collection floored me. Distinctive, powerful and filled, at times, with an electric high-wire tension, they contain a lyricism that comes at you sideways and will knock the wind right out of you.’

  Bernie McGill

  ‘Often dark and unsettling, excavating relationships that are in tatters, looking at patterns of behaviour that make for dysfunction and unhappiness … a wonderfully written collection about love, loss and cruelty.’

  The Irish Examiner

  ‘It’s a compelling collection that you will read quickly – and then want to immediately read again, to savour the language and to reconsider the lives laid bare before you.’

  Claire Savage

  ‘Kelly Creighton is a fearless writer with an impressive range. Sharp on impact these stories give voice to characters other writers shy away from.’

  Paul McVeigh

  ————

  The Sleeping Season (2020)

  Book 1 in the DI Sloane series

  Someone going missing is not an event in their life but an indicator of a problem.

  Detective Inspector Harriet Sloane is plagued by nightmares.

  Someone from her past watches from a distance.

  In East Belfast, four-year-old River vanishes from his room.

  Sloane must put her own demons to bed and find the boy.

  Before it’s too late.

  Out now in paperback and eBook.

  Praise for The Sleeping Season

  ‘The people, their places and everything they say is totally credible. Highly recommended.’

  Books Ireland

  ‘This is a novel of style and verve, that explores the darkness within relationships and the choices we make to protect those we love.’

  Sharon Dempsey

  ‘A breath of fresh air for the genre. The novel holds a spotlight to difficult societal issues. I’m already a fan of the series.’

  James Murphy

  ‘There is heart along the mystery and it is wrapped in a narrative that is both tight and lyrical.’

  Simon Maltman

  ‘What I loved most about The Sleeping Season is how much of a feminist anthem it is. I’ll definitely be anxiously waiting as each book releases.’

  Geek Herring