by Tim Buckley
“What happened?” she said, picking up the sandwiches and the half-empty paper cups.
“I didn’t see the bike,” I groaned, “I backed into it and the whole lot went flying. What’s the blasted thing doing there, anyway? It’s never bloody parked there.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said, “it’s my fault. I was coming back up from the vines and I thought I’d check the post box. I just left it there. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head.
“It’s not your fault,” I said, with a rueful smile, “there’s no excuse not to see the bloody thing. It’s big enough, God knows!”
“Come on,” she said, “let’s get you changed and I’ll make some coffee. The sandwiches are still OK, yeah?”
I nodded and went upstairs to get washed up and change my clothes. It was while I was standing in the shower that the niggle started in my head, almost undetectable at first, but slowly building into a full-blown itch.
When I came down, Emily had put the sandwiches on some plates and was pouring the coffee.
“Anything on the wires?” I asked, like I did every day.
She shook her head, like every day.
“Thanks,” I said, taking a mug from her and sitting up at the breakfast bar.
We had lunch in silence but the niggle in my head kept burrowing away so that I was getting more and more irritated by it but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was that was bothering me. I clearly couldn’t manage more than one task so I stopped eating and put down my coffee.
“There’s something bugging me, Em,” I said, not even sure how to frame the question for which my head was scrabbling for an answer. “That night, when Carly dropped me off, it was pitch dark and I had to use the light on my phone to see. I’d had a few beers and while I was looking for it – my phone, I mean – I walked into the quad bike, just like I did now. It was parked down beside your car. But…” I went back over the events of that night, events that I’d been over so many times, events that I remembered so well. “But when you came up from the fields, you came in through the French windows? The quad bike was parked by the stoop, wasn’t it?”
My head was spinning and I couldn’t figure out why this was bothering me so much or why I even thought it was important. Then the cloud passed over and the shadow crossed Emily’s face. And it hit me like a train that she was lying. She had lied about that night. I felt dizzy and winded and a little bit sick.
I stared at her, I couldn’t speak. I didn’t have to. Emily knew what had crystallised in my head, she swallowed but said nothing either.
“Did someone move it? Did someone take it… and put it back…?” I shook my head again; that made no sense. Why would someone take it and put it back? And how could someone take it without Emily hearing from the house? “Did you hear someone take it? But why didn’t you say? Or did… did you go back out, Em? Did you take the quad bike back out?” I was piecing it together as I spoke. “Did you… did you leave Cara in the house?”
She paused then nodded almost imperceptibly, her eyes wide. I tried to process the revelation, tried to craft in my head what it changed, why it was important.
Tears streamed down her face.
“I’m sorry, Wilde, I’m so sorry. It was the storm, I had to—”
I put up my hand to stop her, her words were stabbing my head. When I spoke again, it was a whisper.
“When you came back, was she here? When you came back to the house?”
I was acting out the sequence of events in my head, watching Emily coming back up to the house that night, parking the quad bike, going to the front door… The front door… And then the train came back and hit me again.
“Wait… how did you get back in? Your key… it’s not working? So how did you get back into the house? You couldn’t… you…” I shook my head, mouth open, brow creased with the enormity of it all. “You… you didn’t lock the door? You left Cara in the house and you didn’t lock the door? That’s how she got out. That’s why they didn’t have to break in… that’s how they got in.”
She buried her face in her hands, sobbing in great gulps.
“Emily, was she here when you got back?”
She didn’t answer and so I asked her again.
“Emily,” I shouted now, “answer me! Was she here when you got back?!”
“I don’t know, Wilde,” she said, so quietly I could hardly hear her. “I think so…”
“What? What did you say?!”
“I think so. I looked in from the door but I didn’t want to wake her. It was dark, I can’t… I can’t be sure. I just didn’t want to wake her…”
I went to the front door, knocking over the stool as I went.
“Where are you going, Wilde?” she screamed. “Stop, come back!”
She ran to me and tried to hold me back but I pushed her away.
“Wilde! No! Stop!”
But I was gone. I fired up the jeep and roared away.
20
My uncle, whenever he was asked what the weather was like, would reply, “We don’t have weather, we only have shades of miserable.” The weather in Ireland never ventured close to the extremes – it was never so hot that you could fry an egg on a stone, never so cold that you could go skating on the canal, never a hurricane nor ever a drought. The weather always occupied the middle ground – just above what could kill you, just below what might make you smile.
That winter in Dublin was particularly miserable. It was the end of November and Emily came home one evening in tears.
“I’ve had it, Wilde,” she shouted, ramming what remained of her mangled umbrella into the bin, “I’ve had it with this city and this weather and these people…!”
Her hair was like a crazed Medusa, her coat and jeans were sodden and her make-up was smeared. She looked like she’d been mugged, or in a fight.
“Jesus, Em, are you all right?” I got up and risked putting my arms around her, trying to smooth down the angry hair. “What happened?”
She pushed me away and slumped down onto the sofa, pounding her forehead with the ball of her hand.
“Nothing happened,” she screamed, “that’s the point. Nothing ever happens. Every day I go to work in that blasted place and every day is the same. Nothing ever happens. Then when I left, the wind turned my umbrella inside out crossing O’Connell Bridge and a bus ran through a pool of water and sprayed me with that filthy, oily sheet.”
In her Hiberno-French accent, her obscenities always made me smile, but this was not the time.
“And then – my God! – while I was trying to wipe the filth off my coat, a kid tried to take my purse out of my bag! The little mongrel actually tried to rob me!”
I knew her well enough to avoid too much sympathy, it tended only to get me into trouble. So I sat down on the arm of the sofa, braved the hair one more time and waited for the storm to pass. Gradually, her shoulders stopped shaking, her breathing slowed and she calmed down. Finally, she groaned and looked up at me, biting her lip. The start of a guilty grin was playing on her lips.
“And – oh, this is awful, Wilde – the little monster deserved it, but it’s awful: I tried to grab him but I only got his jacket and he wriggled out of it and ran away. So I threw it into the river. My God, I’m a horrible person, aren’t I?”
I knew better than to answer. That kid messed with the wrong Gorgon.
21
The police, of course, wanted to talk to Emily again and this time there was little of the sympathy they’d shown before. They asked her to come down to the police station in Clovelly and put her in what looked like an interrogation room. There were no soothing words, no gentle reassurances from the detectives who had been so kind before. There was a sense, not unreasonably I suppose, that at the very least Emily had wasted valuable time and Cara might be in greater danger for that. At worst, though nobody sai
d it to us, the suspicion that she might have been involved in some way hung in the air like a family secret.
I drove her into town and, since they wouldn’t let me sit in this time, I went down to The Pantry to get a coffee. Carter said he’d call me when they wanted to talk to me. His tone had changed with me, too, and even if it was just in my head, I felt like a co-accused. I wanted to tell him to just fuck off, but there was no good to come of antagonising him or pissing him off even more.
The fury that I felt when Emily’s lies emerged had abated a little bit. I’d driven like a madman to the lighthouse that day and sat in the jeep, staring down at the ocean below. There was no work going on, the workers were waiting for materials and I’d been slow to get the deals sorted with the suppliers. I think they – and maybe Nathan, too – felt that it was all grinding to an inevitable halt and some of them had gone looking for other work. I couldn’t really blame them.
I went over and over in my head what Emily had told me and tried to reconstruct the story of that evening based on her new version of events. Above all, I tried to see what it changed, and what we should have been doing differently since then. I tried to work out how it changed what we should do now but, for the life of me, I couldn’t see that it made a fundamental difference to anything. We knew that either someone had got in or Cara had somehow got out. That hadn’t changed, now we just knew how. Or at least I did. It did mean, I admitted to myself, that Cara getting out on her own was more plausible than when we thought the house was secured, but the fact remained that there were two possible answers to what happened that night – either she walked out on her own or she was taken by someone who got into the house. Those were still, surely, the only possible explanations and the basis, therefore, for the search? All that had changed was that we knew now how it might have happened.
But I knew, too, that Emily’s deception would open up a whole other line of enquiry – that she was somehow responsible for what had happened, that she did it. As angry as I was, I refused to even acknowledge that, but if the police started going down that road, I knew that Emily’s relationship with Cara might look odd under any kind of deep scrutiny. The people who knew her, on however superficial a level, would surely say that she was not as committed or doting a mother as others they knew. And it was true, to an extent, that she didn’t show the same maternal obsession as some. But I knew that Emily loved Cara and I knew without a doubt that she would never hurt her. I had to be unflinchingly and obviously on her side through whatever would unfold, and that started now.
And so I went home and took her down to the police station to tell them what had really happened that night.
I didn’t really want to sit in the café around other people, so I took the coffee out and went down to the beach. There weren’t many people about but Clovelly never empties completely so there were still a few stragglers wandering about or sitting on the sand. Sitting on the sand, chatting with their friends, or maybe just sitting, quietly, thinking. Thinking about what to have for dinner tonight and whether to go to the supermarket and is there enough petrol in the car to get to work tomorrow or should they fill it now and save time in the morning? Or maybe worrying about something. About that lump they felt in the shower this morning, or about the kids and their nasty attitude the past few weeks or about money or about love or about being alone. Maybe they looked at me, wandering along with a coffee and envied me my carelessness, that I could pass a working day so idly without any of their troubles. Or maybe they could see it in my face, the hurt of it. Maybe they looked at me and took comfort in the fact that it could be worse, they could have been afflicted with whatever it was that weighed so heavily on me. Because sympathy is really just guilty relief and maybe gratitude for taking on that pain on behalf of the rest of us.
I hadn’t got far when my phone rang. It was Carter, asking me to come back to the station. When I got there, he was waiting for me in the front office.
“Thanks for coming down, Mr Wilde,” he said, showing me into Willis’s office. “I just have a couple of things I want to get clear.”
I sat down and he took out a notepad through which he flicked impatiently until he got to what he was looking for.
“So, this…” he wafted a hand as though Emily’s lie was hanging in the air between us. “This changes things a bit, a lot actually.”
He waited for me to respond but there was nothing to say.
“Why do think she lied, Mr Wilde?”
“Because she feels guilty, obviously. She knows she shouldn’t have left Cara alone in the house, even for a short time, and she feels guilty, ashamed even.”
“Has she done it before?”
“No.”
“No or you don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“No. Cara is usually out with me.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t usually leave her with Emily?”
“No. Emily spends a lot of time working on the vines, it’s not a place for Cara to be.”
“So Emily doesn’t spend much time alone with Cara? Isn’t that a bit odd?”
I shrugged.
“It’s just the way our life is, it’s easier for me to manage Cara, when I’m working in the house or at the lighthouse.”
“She told us that her front-door key wasn’t working – did you know that?”
I nodded.
“It’s been buggered for a while, for ages, we keep meaning to get it fixed but… you know how it is.”
“So how does she usually manage? To get into the house, I mean?”
“We just leave the front door open, or the French windows at the back of the house. It might be naïve, but there’s never anybody out our way and, to be honest, we don’t have a lot to take even if somebody wanted to break in.”
“Do you usually leave Cara alone in the house, with the doors open?”
“Of course not,” I snapped, then bit my tongue.
“So it was unusual? When you went out that night, you wouldn’t have expected Emily to leave her on her own?”
“No.”
“And when did you find out?”
“Not until today.”
“I see. And tell me, how was Emily’s relationship with Cara, do you think?”
“It was fine, absolutely fine.”
“Fine, eh? Must have been hard though, having a baby so far from home, with no family around to help?”
“We managed, it’s been fine.”
“Big decision, though? To start a family in a new country, with the all the work you guys had on your hands? With the vineyard and the lighthouse, I mean? Brave, some might say?”
“We didn’t plan it that way, these things just happen, sometimes.”
The words were out of my mouth before I could drag them back.
“So Emily didn’t want a baby?”
I finally lost my temper and leaned forward across the desk, pointing an angry finger at him.
“Look, Detective, I know what you’re getting at and you’re wrong, OK? You’re way off base and you’re wasting time that you should be spending looking for my little girl!”
He put up his hands to calm me down.
“Easy, Mr Wilde,” he said, “take it easy. We have to look at every possibility and, at the end of the day, Emily lied to us. She lied to us even though she knew it would hamper our investigation. I would be remiss if I didn’t look into that.”
“No,” I shook my head, “it hasn’t hampered your investigation at all. It changes nothing. It just gives you a convenient answer, it would solve your case nice and handy and you’d love that. I’ll tell you what’s really hampering your investigation, shall I? What’s hampering your investigation is spending time in here talking to me instead of out there looking for her!”
I thumped the desk and stood up, knocking over the chair as I di
d.
“Are we done? I’d like to see my wife.”
He closed his notebook very deliberately and put the cap back on his pen.
“OK, Mr Wilde, we’re done. For now.”
He stood up and looked at me, shaking his head.
“Fair play to you, Mr Wilde, for supporting her like this. I’m not sure I could, if my wife had left one of my kids on their own, to be taken from their own bed. I don’t think I could ever find it in myself to forgive something like that…”
***
It was the following afternoon before we could break the seal on the conversation that we had to have. We barely spoke all the way home and we avoided each other for the rest of the day. Emily went to bed early and I stayed up late into the night until I was sure she would be asleep and I could sneak into the bed without having to talk. Maybe she was still awake, I don’t know, but she didn’t stir and I just went to sleep. The following morning, when I woke, she was gone already, a little note on my night-stand telling me she was gone to work on the vines. The house was deathly quiet, the only sound from outside was the urgent bleating of one of the babydolls.
Emily didn’t come up to the house for coffee and I didn’t bring lunch down to her, so I didn’t see her again until that evening. I was sitting at the bar in the kitchen, reading the paper, when she came down from the shower. She sat down beside me and took my hand in hers.
“There’s no way for me to tell you how sorry I am, Wilde,” she said, almost in a whisper and looking down at the floor. “I know you must hate me. If you want me to go, just tell me and I’ll go.”
I was too tired to shout at her, too beaten down by everything to get angry. Angry wasn’t going to be any use, was it? It wouldn’t even make me feel better. And I didn’t want her to go.
“What were you thinking, Emily?” I said, eventually.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I had to go back down because the—”
“No!” I cut her off. “I couldn’t give a flying shite if the vineyard was on fire or the sheep had fallen into a hole or… anything! I don’t care! I just want to know what made you think it was OK to leave our baby in the house, on her own, unlocked and open to the world?”