Local Whispers

by C K Williams

  05:30

  I can’t sleep. Keep tossing and turning. The smell of disinfectant is strong. My mind is whirring.

  06:15

  There are noises outside. Footsteps in the corridor.

  Shuffling.

  I’m frightened.

  06:30

  It was just the nurse preparing breakfast. Potato bread. I smile at my plate. God, I’ve become paranoid. No surprise, though.

  After breakfast, I lie down to try and catch a couple more hours of sleep.

  06:44

  My brain cannot seem to calm. As if a voice was whispering to me. As if I’d forgotten something, only I can’t remember what.

  I need to go home and sleep in a proper bed.

  07:59

  It’s dawn by the time I make it home.

  They wouldn’t let me see Kate. Or Daniel. Then the doctor on duty told me she recommended I stay another night. I told her that all I wanted was to sleep in a room that didn’t smell of disinfectant, and that I was very grateful for their pains.

  The doctor sighed. It had been a long night shift for her, too. She let me go.

  Now I’m at Kate’s house. I’ll go and see her in a couple of hours. For now, I open the front door. For now, I step over the threshold. For now, I stand in the hall and breathe.

  Just breathe.

  Slowly, I take off my shoes. Then I make my way into the bedroom. The window, still broken. I walk to the closet and take out a fresh set of clothes. Piece by piece, I put myself back together: underwear, undershirt, sock, sock, trousers, T-shirt, sweater, cardigan. Then I take the bloody clothes from last night and put them into the washing machine. You’re safe, I tell myself.

  Then why are my fingers shaking?

  There is something gnawing at the back of my head. As if the thin branches of the rowan tree have reached through the walls, growing straight into the house and through my skin and skull into my brain.

  A legacy. That’s what the Detective Inspector said. It felt as if the murderer wanted to leave a legacy. That is how I felt about it, too. I felt like this had been the work of someone who had something to say.

  I sink back onto my heels in front of the washing machine and press my forehead against the smooth glass of its window.

  And there is one thing I don’t yet understand.

  Who was the man with the rifle at Kate’s house? Was it William O’Rawe? Did he have his sister Tessa steal notes from Daniel’s desk to deliver them as threatening letters to us? First he kills the woman he impregnated, the moment he learns of the abortion, a crime of passion. And then he goes and mounts such a well-planned, coldly executed scheme of intimidation against Kate? Carefully collects threatening Bible quotations? The campaign against Kate was so deliberate. The murder seemed so spontaneous.

  I rise to my feet. It is so quiet in the house. Dawn is spilling into the night. The light is turning grey. Everything is disappearing into white. White snow on the ground, a white sky above, the pale outline of trees as insubstantial as the fabric of a dream.

  The hairs at the back of my neck are standing up.

  Was it William O’Rawe I saw out there in the night? Was it a man of sixty years who ran from me that night, ran away and out onto the moor?

  A noise.

  It came from the sitting room.

  I stand and I wait and I listen.

  All I hear is the rumbling of the washing machine.

  I move towards the sitting room. Past the back door.

  Something rustles under my feet.

  I look down.

  It is a letter.

  There is that whisper at the back of my head. It’s the voice of truth, telling us that I am not quite there yet. Not quite. Whispering that I have not quite found out yet. Not yet.

  Whispering that I am about to.

  Why did they take Kate and Daniel from the rectory, but not me? If they didn’t care about me, then who did? Who cared enough to throw a brick through our window, threatening the foreigner who was staying at Kate’s house?

  Who left this letter?

  And whose breath is it that I can hear on the other side of the wall?

  I push open the door to the sitting room.

  There is someone sitting in the old armchair, their back turned to me. A curl of smoke is emerging from the chair.

  “That is a beautiful tree outside. Did you know that there are more yew trees in Britain than in any other country? They are particularly numerous in England, of course.”

  I circle the armchair. When I finally see who is sitting in it, I find that it is someone who has never been on any of our lists. It isn’t Patrick Walsh, it isn’t Sean O’Doherty, it isn’t Tessa Adams or Florence or Daniel.

  Instead, I’m looking at Elizabeth Adams.

  08:14

  Elizabeth Adams is wearing her Sunday clothes. An emerald skirt and jacket and hat, sheer black tights, practical black shoes. She looks a little like I imagine the Queen dresses for church. Except that I have never seen the Queen smoke.

  She smiles faintly but doesn’t look at me. She is staring out the kitchen window at the broad boughs of the yew tree.

  “Did you know that there are almost one thousand ancient yews in England and Wales? They are older than five hundred years. Some may be as old as two thousand years, or even five thousand.” She looks out with a gentle expression, pulling in another gentle drag. “You have an excellent view of it from this armchair.”

  She seems not at all perturbed by my presence.

  “Ms Adams, what are you doing here?” I ask. “Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?”

  She tilts her head at me. “Of course I know who you are, Mr Loose.”

  She is the first to pronounce my last name correctly. I have little time to appreciate it. Her eyes are so sharp. This is not the look of a woman in shock. Her gaze is as clear as her voice. She looks at the letter in my hand.

  “I see you have found my latest missive,” she says, sounding quite pleased with herself.

  I look at the letter, as if her words will begin to make more sense if I find I am holding something different.

  “You are awfully quiet, Mr Loose,” she continues, turning back to look at the yew tree. “It became more and more difficult to bring these little letters here. That Detective Sergeant started catching onto me. She came back yesterday to question me herself. She even found some of the notes that I had taken from the garbage that Tessa brings home with her on her cleaning days.” Elizabeth Adams points outside, into the direction of the drive. “A shame, because it was so convenient. My house is just on the other side of the woods, as I am sure you are aware. All of this used to be my family’s property. It was really just a quick evening stroll. Quite exciting, I have to say.”

  It takes me a moment to realise that I’m shaking my head. Elizabeth Adams must have spotted it. “Oh, you don’t believe me, do you? Why is that, Mr Loose? Do you also believe that the elderly aren’t capable of holding a rifle? Of professing their opinions? Or that they shouldn’t be allowed to?” Her smile slowly vanishes. “I will have you know, Mr Loose, that the elderly are still alive, no matter how inconvenient to the young. I’m not dead yet. And I have no intention to relinquish my say over the matters of the country I love before I’ve been buried.”

  “Mrs Adams,” I say. “Are you telling me that it was you who has been threatening Kate? That it was you, standing outside her house with a rifle, shattering her window with a brick?”

  She does not reply directly, instead returning to her enigmatic smile. “You cannot be ignored when you are holding a rifle, Mr Loose. Isn’t that right?”

  Elizabeth Adams looks out of the window again. To the view of the tree. “That tree,” she goes on, “is part of our heritage.” She stands up, straightens her skirt, then slowly walks away. I follow her through the kitchen and into the hall, then out of the front door. She is making for the tree. I follow her.

  Standing in the cold and the snow, Elizabet
h Adams puts one of her wrinkled hands onto the wrinkled bark of the tree. She holds on. “This tree will endure. It will stand here until the end of time, when all of us have long been forgotten. So will the yew in the graveyard. It will outlive us all.”

  “Mrs Adams,” I repeat. “Was it you who sent those threatening letters to Kate?”

  “Yes,” she says, hand still on the bark. It’s cold out, so cold. The air is grey and thick and silent. The light is pale. Fear is threading its way up my skin, crawling across my spine. The rowan tree and its thin, thin branches, winding their way back towards my lungs.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because she thought she was above the laws of this country,” Elizabeth Adams says. “She thought she could do what she wanted and not fear punishment. But no one is above the law. The world may think differently, but we do not want the world’s barbarity here.”

  “You found out about the abortion,” I say.

  “Kate O’Leary helped murder my grandchild,” Elizabeth Adams says. “She took away my legacy.”

  “William told you that Alice’s child was his.”

  She smiles benevolently. “He told me. He came to me after he’d done it. Manslaughter, of course. A crime of passion. I wonder how harshly a jury would have judged him.” Elizabeth’s expression darkens for a moment. “Alice Walsh asked him to come over, out of the blue. He was so worried, he left work straightaway. Her parents weren’t there. She didn’t want them to know. And there she told him she had murdered his child, without even consulting him, sitting on the bed where the sheets still carried the remnants of the blood that was proof of her crime. She told him, ‘because she thought it was right he should know’, now that the deed had already been done. Him, who had wanted children all his life.”

  Then she shakes her head. Looks me in the eye, holding my attention as if we were in court and she was imprinting something essential upon the jury. “He did not mean to kill her when he attacked her at first. It was clearly a crime of passion. He was distraught when he discovered she was dead. So distraught that he turned to me. It was me who cut up her body. Just like her foetus would have been cut up, when abortions still worked a little differently than they do today.” She spreads her hands. “I was inspired by a case I once presided over as a judge, where a young man had left a woman behind in much the same state. Her name was Emily Ryan. He left her like this, and so did I leave Alice Walsh.” Again she smiles at the yew tree. Gently. “If I could not leave this world a grandchild, I would leave it a message. I would leave it justice.”

  I stare at her. “Then it was you,” I say. “The judge who presided over the Ryan case was you.”

  “Oh, you know about it?” There, that smile. It is proud. “I wanted to make sure to let everyone know that this is what you had coming when you killed your own child. Or when you helped kill a child. So that they would stop and think before they did anything like that. Those women. That was to be my legacy.”

  Elizabeth Adams reaches for something. Something has been hidden against the trunk of the dead tree, on the side that is turned away from the house.

  It is an old pistol.

  I raise both hands. “Mrs Adams…”

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” she says, chuckling at my expression, her eyes still hazy. “Isn’t it wonderful how, the moment you pick up a pistol, you matter again? I gave Kate O’Leary fair warning. I gave fair warning to the both of you. I asked you to leave, Mr Loose. You did not.”

  “Mrs Adams, what good could it do to—”

  “Do you know how many yew trees grow in Germany?” She lifts the pistol gently. “Four. A total of four.” Her old arms are shaking, but at this distance, her aim will not have to be precise.

  Both hands still lifted, I feel the branches of the rowan tree shoot through my lungs, my heart, wind their way thick and sharp through my body, cutting open all my sinews, my veins, my arteries. She won’t hesitate. Not the woman who cut Alice Walsh to pieces. And there are a million things I haven’t done yet. A million things. I haven’t seen Kate again. I haven’t apologised to Daniel. I haven’t lived the life I saw ahead of me.

  Elizabeth Adams cocks her pistol. She is still smiling that smile. This is how she can control me.

  And in one second, in two, in three

  She will kill me

  She will end me

  For all of a moment, she will control everyone who does not behave the way they ought to. The foreigner, the young woman who defied her, the doctor. For all of a moment, she will be in control of the world that has spun away from her.

  “I gave you fair warning, Mr Loose,” she says. “I told you to go home.”

  But I am at home when I’m with her, I want to say. I don’t want to look at Elizabeth Adams as I take my last breath. I would rather be thinking of Kate. Of Daniel.

  But then something catches my attention.

  Over Elizabeth Adams’s shoulder.

  A silhouette.

  Coming out of the grey insubstantial dawn. The fog has hidden their presence until they are so close that they can almost touch us.

  They are holding a proper gun.

  I know who it is.

  Detective Inspector Adam Kwiatkowski has his gun raised.

  “Do not shoot, Mrs Adams,” he calls out. “Put down your weapon.” His voice is so sharp it could cut the yew tree in half where we stand. Behind him, I see more officers emerge from the fog, led by Detective Sergeant Olivia Cahill.

  Elizabeth Adams swallows. “This is my legacy,” she says.

  “Put down your weapon,” Detective Inspector Kwiatkowski says. “Now.”

  “I will have a legacy,” Elizabeth Adams insists. “This is what I leave behind.”

  “Step away from this man, Mrs Adams, and put down your weapon.”

  Elizabeth Adams sways.

  Sways.

  “It is a worthy legacy,” she says quietly.

  Then she lifts the pistol to her temple and pulls the trigger.

  09:12

  I’m back at the hospital. I tell the doctors what I need is to sleep for twenty-four hours and ask if there isn’t anything they could do to help with that.

  09:15

  They oblige me.

  Statement

  Detective Sergeant Olivia Cahill and Detective Inspector Adam Kwiatkowski interviewing Sean O’Doherty

  19 Main Street

  BT34 3dy

  We just meant to scare him. Of course we’d never have… What a ludicrous idea. That we would hang someone from a tree. It was meant to scare them. Seeing as you lot weren’t doing anything.

  What do you mean, as an officer of the law? That is exactly what I was trying to do. I was trying to uphold the law. There still is a law against abortion in this country.

  But you don’t care about this at all, do you? For you, it’s all over now, isn’t it? I had to keep us safe when you wouldn’t.

  What do you mean, did my past relationship with Kate O’Leary have anything to do with this? Do you think I was jealous? Jealous of Father Daniel? A priest who sleeps around? No, let me tell you. I had no reason to be jealous. I was just trying to protect Kate. I’d been trying to protect her from the start. We didn’t know she was going to be at the rectory.

  But she was so obstinate. Tried to tell me she didn’t want my protection.

  Fine, if she didn’t want it, she wasn’t going to get it.

  No, seriously, tell me, what exactly did I do wrong? What did she think, that I was good enough to fuck, but not good enough to be with her? That she could have a bit of sex with me and then disappear from my life?

  I don’t hate women. I love women.

  It isn’t me. It’s the women. They don’t seem to like me. I’m not picky. I’m not fussy. I look fine. I work out, I wear cologne, I’m getting my haircuts at a real hairdresser’s. And still.

  I’m alone.

  What? Am I not good enough for them?

  But yeah, anyway. That isn’t what we’re here t
o talk about. We just meant to scare him, is all. We wanted to make sure Daniel Reid knew that he wasn’t welcome anymore in Annacairn.

  No, not for a second did I think he’d murdered her. He isn’t the type, is he? All lanky like that.

  But this wasn’t about the murder. He lied to us. He encouraged Alice Walsh to break the law. And I knew you lot weren’t going to do anything about it. I knew that there wasn’t anything you could do. So I knew we had to scare him away. If we didn’t scare him away, he would stay. Because you wouldn’t be able to touch him. He’d stay and keep poisoning the minds of our children. And I’m responsible for this community. I have to keep them safe. Because no one else is going to do it, are they? Look at Stormont. A fucking joke, that. And nobody in Westminster thinks of us. It’s just the rich helping the rich.

  Who kept Daniel Reid and Kate O’Leary safe? What do you mean when you say that?

  Why do I get to decide who gets to stay safe and who doesn’t, you ask?

  I’ve lived there all my life. In Annacairn. My family’s lived there for ever.

  Who should decide if not me?

  Day 7

  Tuesday 8th January 2019

  Statement

  Detective Sergeant Olivia Cahill and Detective Inspector Adam Kwiatkowski interviewing Enda O’Reilly

  2 College Rd

  Glasheen

  Cork

  T12 ACP5

  I am so sorry. So, so sorry.

  For Beth and Liz.

  Alice. We called her Liz. In Cork, during the summer. She wanted a change. She wanted to be someone else, I think. Maybe she was becoming someone else, too.

  I watched the two of them, all summer, and I knew what was going on. I totally knew what my sister was thinking, anyway. It was painfully obvious. She’d never been so smitten with anyone.