‘In a minute, pet.’
‘Now, Nana.’
She switched the television back on and keyed in the code she knew by heart, the most used code on the remote. When the pink pig began to squeal, Louis nestled contentedly against her chest. She inhaled the freshness of his hair. Katie looked after him so well. She wondered if her daughter looked after herself. She needed to work or go to college, but she’d slipped into an easy way of living and Lottie was too caught up in work and Boyd’s illness to discuss anything. Live and let live had become her motto. But Sean worried her.
‘What’s bothering you? Tell me, Sean.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I promised.’
‘I’m your mother. You can tell me anything.’
‘And you’ll tell Boyd and he’ll tell Kirby and then the whole of Ragmullin will be gossiping about the cop’s son. You know how it works, Mam.’
‘That’s unfair. Boyd doesn’t gossip.’ Maybe she should ask Boyd to try find out what was bothering him.
‘Forget it. I’m fine.’
Still he did not move. She knew he really did want to talk.
‘Is everything okay at school?’
‘Duh. Nothing’s ever okay at school.’
‘It’s almost the summer break.’
‘It’s not school.’
Silence reigned between mother and son, while Louis giggled at the antics of the pink cartoon character.
‘I was talking to Ruby’s mother today,’ Lottie said. ‘She—’
‘I knew it!’ Sean shouted. ‘I just knew it.’ He jumped up, and Louis startled. Lottie held him tightly.
‘Jesus, Sean, you scared Louis.’
‘Jesus, Jesus,’ the little boy parroted with delight, knowing he was saying something he shouldn’t.
‘Look, Louis, Peppa is in a muddy puddle,’ Lottie said.
‘Muddy puddle,’ squealed the child.
‘Sean. Sit down.’
He slumped back into the chair and put his feet on the coffee table, crossing his ankles. Lottie grimaced but didn’t comment on the act of defiance.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. It’s obvious you’ve said enough already,’ Sean moaned.
‘Sean Parker, I have no idea what’s got into you. Have you had a falling-out with Ruby?’
‘Her mother, more like. What did you say to her?’
‘I called there today, but it was to do with work. She mentioned you’d been there with Ruby yesterday. That’s all.’
‘Well, you said something, because she practically accused me of telling you things I shouldn’t, but I have no idea what she was talking about.’
Lottie smoothed Louis’ hair against his scalp, trying to recall her conversation with Marianne.
‘I said nothing about you, Sean. Nothing.’
‘Why were you there then?’
‘It was connected with a case I’m working on. It’s absolutely nothing to do with you.’
‘Peppa!’ Louis said.
She noticed the ad break was on, so she scrolled up to the plus-one channel. Peppa lit up the screen again and Louis quietened down.
‘What case?’ Sean said, removing his feet from the table. Interested now.
‘I can’t tell you anything about it.’
‘But how would Ruby’s mother be able to help you? She’s just a writer.’
‘It was nothing to do with that.’ Then it dawned on Lottie. ‘What exactly did she say to you?’
‘I was so shocked, I’m not sure exactly. But it was as if I’d told you something she didn’t want known.’
‘I would never betray your confidence. You have to believe me.’ Lottie stood with her grandson in her arms. ‘Time for bed, Louis.’
‘More Peppa.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Mam, what’s the case you’re working?’ Sean said.
‘I have a number of cases on the go at the moment.’
‘I’ll put Louis to bed for you if you tell me.’
Her bones were tired from the long day and she had to be up early. She kissed Louis on the head and handed him to Sean.
‘Okay. Get him off to sleep and I’ll tell you some of it. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
Lottie wondered just how much she could tell him, but maybe he could give her an insight into Ruby’s family. She needed to find out more about them. Quickly.
*
Twenty years earlier
It was when he told me his version of the truth that I lashed out at him. My father. The first blow with the hammer knocked him clean off his feet. I hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. I only wanted to shut him up. His words were like knives through my soul. He said he was speaking the truth. I knew it was all lies. I’d lived my life on an increasing mountain of lies until I could no longer remember the original truth.
I had to shut him up.
The others came into the room then. Horror streaked across their faces when they saw what I had done.
‘You’ve only gone and killed him!’ the woman shrieked through her drug-fuelled haze.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t shut up.’
‘What are we going to do?’
Her husband was quiet. Stoned, most likely. He took the hammer from my hand and brought it down with force onto the face of the man I’d called my father for fourteen years. Bone shattered and blood spurted. He was dead now.
‘He deserved it,’ I said. I wasn’t really sure if that was true or not, but it was the truth I would believe from now on.
‘I’ll never get the blood out of the curtains,’ the woman complained.
‘Fetch me the sharpest knife from the kitchen,’ her husband told her.
‘What for?’
‘I need to cut him up. We can’t just leave him here.’
‘Jesus Christ. He was your friend,’ she said. ‘We have to call the guards.’
‘There will be no guards coming into this house. No guards.’ His voice was steelier than I’d ever heard. Violent, almost. I’d never known him to be violent, this man who was my father’s friend, but I knew he’d been drinking and doing drugs. I’d seen the traces of cocaine in the bathroom when I brushed my teeth in the mornings. And here he was, with a bloody hammer in his hand, looking for a sharp knife, and my father dead at his feet.
It had to be the drugs, I thought as he took the carving knife from her and sliced it across my father’s neck.
‘The hammer almost decapitated him,’ he said.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘You killed him, and I have to get rid of the body.’
‘I didn’t kill him. You did.’ But I was hoping I had killed him. He was part of my life of lies.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ the man said, and I noticed his speech slurring. ‘He’s dead now. Put your arms across his chest and I’ll work on the neck.’
‘I’ll be covered in blood,’ I protested.
‘You already are, you dimwit. Hold tight.’
I did as I was told. As he sliced, blood sluiced onto the floor, and I wondered how it was ever going to wash out, and where we were going to put the body pieces. So, I asked him.
‘We’ll cut him up small. Flush some down the toilet and the rest we’ll freeze until we figure out what to do with them.’
‘That’s barbaric,’ the woman said.
‘No more damage can be done to the child. This man was a bad egg and now he has to answer to a higher court for his actions.’
For a man high on drugs and alcohol, he was thinking too clearly. I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking at all, not at that time. I did what I was told, and I was relieved. After all, the one person who knew my secret was dead. I did not pause to think that there were now three of us with an even bigger secret.
It wasn’t long after when I attacked again. Maybe a month after my father’s death.
I never liked their daughter. She was five years younger than me, and if truth be to
ld, she was an imbecile. Always asking why and what about absolutely everything. Never shut the fuck up. Always in the house. Never at school. Home-schooled, the woman had said through a pall of cannabis smoke.
I was minding my own business when I heard the door creak behind me as the girl tried to sneak into the room. With her croaking voice she told me she’d seen me kill him. What was I to do? I picked up the poker from the fireplace with its horrible tiger tiles and hit her. I caught her in the middle of the forehead and she fell at my feet. I wasn’t sure if she was dead, so I got down on my knees and strangled the nine years of life out of her.
When the woman found us, I passed her death off as an accident.
‘We were messing, and she fell,’ I said. She didn’t see the marks of my fingers like a necklace around her neck. She only saw her dead daughter.
‘Dear God in heaven. My poor pet.’ She cradled the girl’s bashed skull. ‘What have you done? You evil, evil child.’
That was another thing that annoyed me. Repetition. She was always repeating herself. I put it down to a lack of education, which led to her having little vocabulary. Her husband had left home shortly after freezing parts of my father’s body and flushing other parts down the toilet. I couldn’t stand the way he looked at me afterwards. I was glad he had left, but I admired the way he dealt with the body. That experience would help me now as I looked at the girl, dead in the junkie woman’s arms.
‘I’ll get a knife,’ I said.
‘What?’ she wailed. ‘Call an ambulance.’
‘An ambulance is of no use to her now. She’s dead. We’ll just cut her up and put her in the freezer. Actually, you might need to buy another freezer.’
Her eyes flared and her nostrils ran with thick white mucus. God, but I hated her. Ignoring her cries, I went to the kitchen and selected the longest and sharpest knife from the butcher’s block. Then, through the window, I saw the axe sticking out of a pile of logs in the back garden. Perfect.
In the living room, she cowered, holding the dead child.
‘Don’t worry. I don’t intend to hurt you. But listen to me carefully. If you don’t keep your mouth shut and do exactly as I say, I will slice your nephew’s head off. I know about Jeff, even though you haven’t allowed him to visit since we arrived. You don’t want his blood on your hands, do you? You can tell anyone who asks that your daughter is gone to live with your husband. End of story.’
She began to shake and shiver, and I kneeled down beside her and lifted her chin with the tip of the knife. ‘Do you understand me?’
She didn’t reply. She just nodded and let her child fall from her grasp to the floor. I picked up the axe and began my grim task.
Sixty-Three
Thursday
Lottie woke to a grey morning, no light streaming through the gap in the curtains. There was a mug of coffee turning cold on her bedside cabinet, and Katie was standing in the doorway.
‘Morning, sweetheart,’ Lottie said. ‘All okay?’
‘I have to talk to you.’
Patting the bed, she scooted over to the middle and waited while Katie sat down.
‘This will be hard for you to swallow,’ Katie said.
‘I can drink any kind of coffee first thing in the morning.’
‘Don’t try to be funny. This is serious.’
‘I’ve a strong constitution, so try me.’ She sipped the coffee, wishing it was hotter, dreading whatever her daughter had to say.
‘If it’s something to do with the shit your work throws up, you’re strong, but when it comes to us, your family, I think you’re a pussy cat.’
Laughing, Lottie spluttered the coffee out over the white sheet. ‘Oh feck.’
‘I’ll throw it in the wash when you’re at work.’
She placed the mug back on the cabinet. This was going to be some serious shit. ‘What is it, Katie?’
‘I don’t want to go back to college. Wait a minute before you object. I know you’re hell-bent on me extending my education, but it’s been too long, and I can’t ever see myself back studying.’
‘You will have to get a job. I’m stretched as it is.’
‘That’s the thing. I don’t want to work here. There are only shit jobs in bars and I don’t want to do that. I’m not like Chloe.’
Katie was her firstborn and Adam had spoiled her rotten. That sense of entitlement had stretched into womanhood. She was almost twenty-two and had never worked anywhere. Getting pregnant at nineteen had put paid to her studies, and once she’d had Louis, she’d not returned to college. What was she going to do with her life? Lottie tensed and her mouth dried up. She knew.
‘No, Katie. I don’t want you to emigrate to America. Please don’t do that to me.’
‘But Mam, Tom has a job lined up for me in his company, a place to stay, a nanny. It sounds perfect.’
‘No,’ Lottie repeated. She jumped out of bed on the far side, pulled on a hoodie and stood at the window with her back to her daughter. ‘It won’t work out. It’s too far away. I’ll never see you or Louis. Please, don’t go.’ She turned around. ‘You don’t have a green card or whatever it’s called.’
‘Uncle Leo said he’ll help out with the visa.’
Lottie’s resolve not to get angry snapped. ‘He isn’t your uncle. You don’t know him. I don’t know him. He waltzes into our lives after a … a hundred years, thinking he can fix the world. Well, he can’t.’
Katie stood, picked up the mug and headed for the door. ‘Mam, I have to try it out at least.’
‘What about us? What about Chloe and Sean?’
‘Listen, Mam, it’s my life. I have to do what’s best for me and Louis. Ragmullin is a hole. I’m not spending my life here. Tom has offered me an opportunity and I’m taking it.’
Lottie rushed to her, held her by her elbows, the coffee spilling onto the floor as the girl tried to steady the mug. But she didn’t care. She didn’t want to lose her daughter or her little grandson.
‘Katie, is this about Boyd? About me and him getting married? If it is, I’ll … I’ll talk to him. We can put it off. Honestly. I want to keep our family together. That’s what your dad would want me to do.’
Katie wrestled free. ‘No, Mam. It has nothing to do with Boyd. Dad would want you to be happy. He’d want me to be happy. And right now, I’m not happy here.’
‘Think of Sean and Chloe. Your granny. They all love you. I love you.’
‘Mam, I want to do this. Please let me go without making me feel guilty.’
She marched out of the bedroom, her head held high, her back straight, her hair somehow gleaming in the dull morning light. She was determined and pig-headed, as headstrong as Lottie herself.
Lottie burst into tears and sank to the floor, hugging her knees to her chest like a child. Her daughter had been through so much. She deserved to make a new life for herself and her son, but at what cost?
‘Stop being selfish,’ she admonished herself, standing up and wiping her tears on the coffee-stained sheet. She grabbed a towel and walked to the shower. Just before she switched it on, her phone rang on the bed.
Dropping the towel on the floor, she retrieved the phone and checked the caller ID. Grace Boyd. With trembling fingers, she answered the call.
Sixty-Four
Jack wasn’t hungry. He left the bowl on the table, Weetabix congealing on the rim, and pulled back the patio doors, walking out around the back of the house. The sky had not yet awoken fully. It was grey and dull, and a few drops of rain hit his bare arms. Blackbirds huddled on the branches of the trees as if they knew something he didn’t. Probably a storm on the horizon. He didn’t care one way or the other. He walked round to the front and stood looking out over the canal. He saw the two gardaí keeping watch in the squad car. He wanted his drone back. Then he realised he would no longer have Gavin to fly it with, and he felt the sadness all over again.
Sitting on the damp grass, he felt around in his trouser pocket. It was there. He knew he shoul
d have told the detective about it last night. Maybe he could tell that FLO woman, but she seemed cross and moody. Or maybe he could give it to one of the guards in the car. He got up and walked towards the vehicle.
‘Jack? What are you doing out there? Your breakfast is on the table. Come inside this instant and finish it. It’s nearly time for school.’
His mother’s voice melted his resolve. He shoved the USB stick back in his pocket and followed her into the house.
Breakfast was a flash point in her house, and Ruby was determined that this shite could not go on any longer. Her mother had appeared downstairs this morning without make-up; the yellow and purple bruises on her face made her look like a Picasso painting.
The two slices of toast popped up, and she jumped. Grabbing them, she set about buttering them noisily.
‘I’ll do you some eggs,’ Marianne said. ‘You like eggs. Protein for a growing girl.’
‘Don’t put on an act around me, Mum. I don’t need it. I know what’s going on in this house and sooner or later you have to kick him out.’
‘Shh. Your dad is outside sorting out the bins. I hope you didn’t put anything in the wrong one, or there’ll be hell to pay.’
The back door opened and shut. Ruby felt the large kitchen shrink in on top of her. Kevin stood brandishing two empty plastic Coke bottles.
‘How many times do I have to tell you, you have to crush the bottles and leave the lids off. This is ridiculous. Does no one in this house listen to me any more? And I told you not to buy plastic!’
Ruby chewed her toast and Marianne stood with the coffee pot in her hand, her mouth zipped shut. This morning she knew silence was the best form of defence.
‘And another thing,’ Kevin ranted, ‘I’ve told you a thousand times, I’m in charge of the bins. I don’t need you messing up my routine. In future, leave them to me. Because you know what? I’m the only one around here who does things right.’
‘Is that what you think?’
Ruby had the words out of her mouth before she realised it. She heard the empty bottles bounce on the floor and the thump on her shoulder knocked the toast from her hand. She jumped up, sending the chair flying, and squared up to her father. She found that she was maybe half an inch taller than him, and that gave her a false sense of confidence.
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