The Sleeping Season

by Kelly Creighton

  ‘Poor River,’ I said. Now it was there for us to see that Zara was having difficulty loving him. ‘So that’s what the books are for.’

  ‘Books can’t help you in that respect,’ said Linskey.

  ‘But a website can?’

  ‘Maybe she had postnatal depression.’

  ‘I don’t know … this search was last year. He would have been three.’

  There was all the perfect mum stuff too: star charts, how-tos, researching the ideal nursery, going on Netmums to ask advice and complain about Olivia Sands, the leader at Strandtown Preschool, when River fell from the climbing frame there.

  I had the perfect mother: glamorous – she knew colour like no one else – successful, allowed us kids their freedom. That’s how I knew Zara wasn’t it. And another thing, I found it repulsive when people cared too much what other people thought.

  I fetched a glass of water and looked out at the station car park. The Chief was coming in from a meeting. He locked his car, the headlights of oncoming cars sidling under the car parked beside his, light sliding out from the shadows. It was almost as if he could feel my eyes on him. He looked at the window and quickly walked inside. Higgins wasn’t far behind him.

  ‘I think you owe me an apology,’ Higgins said so Chief Dunne could hear.

  ‘What in the world for?’ I asked.

  The Chief went into his office, disinterested.

  ‘For claiming that I didn’t speak to that woman when I did,’ said Higgins.

  ‘Unwittingly,’ I said. ‘You spoke to Lila Smith unwittingly.’

  ‘I spoke to her. You can’t claim I didn’t.’

  ‘Okay, Higgins.’

  ‘I’m waiting for it. Where’s that apology you have for me?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait a bit longer.’

  ‘No, Sloane, I want you to acknowledge that you and Linskey were harassing me for not talking to her, when I did.’

  ‘That was a coincidence, Liam,’ said Linskey, her eyes still on the screen.

  ‘Liam?’ asked Higgins.

  ‘Liam Gallagher.’

  ‘No, Alan White, you mean. White was the drummer,’ I said.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘Too late now,’ he said. ‘Anyway, some cases hinge on coincidence. It’s the universe solving the puzzle.’

  ‘Well, we’ll tell that to Zara and Shane shall we, that we’ll just let the universe find their boy?’

  ‘This is different,’ he said. ‘Obviously it is, but most things sort themselves out, I find, if you don’t get yourself het up. Worrying is a waste of energy.’

  ‘You’re paid to waste energy,’ I snapped.

  ‘Nothing is ever a waste,’ said Linskey. She hated to think of anything as a time wasted, even her twenty-year marriage. At least she got two kids from it. ‘Look out the window and tell me what you see, Higgins,’ she said.

  ‘Fujitsu?’

  ‘Beside it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The JobCentre.’ She winked at him.

  ‘Okay, do you see what’s beside it?’

  ‘What?’ asked Linskey. She leaned on her desk and looked out. ‘Nice!’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Funeral directors,’ she said. ‘What the fuck, Higgins!’

  ‘Don’t put words in my mouth,’ he said.

  ‘Stop it, children, please,’ I said.

  Linskey called me over. ‘Harry, this should interest you. Someone’s been doing their own investigation.’

  There it was on the screen: detective Sloane, detective inspector Harriet Sloane belfast.

  ‘She’s onto you,’ Linskey said and laughed.

  Dunne walked in. ‘Sloane, Linskey – so we have it back from the coroner’s that Raymond’s death was not a heart attack as suspected. We need to wait for toxicology now.’ He turned his attention to Higgins. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be assisting Simon?’

  Higgins gave me a salute as he left the room.

  ‘He loves himself,’ said Linskey. ‘Thank God you didn’t tell him what Lila Smith said about him being good-looking.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Dunne asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Chief, take a look at this,’ said Linskey.

  I felt myself redden when my face appeared on the screen. It was an article about a crackdown on drugs that I’d headed earlier in the year. There I was with my greens on, just for photo purposes, being quoted that I had no children of my own but I was adamant that other people’s children would not be dragged into drugs, that dealers were a blight on our society.

  I cringed when I read it. It had been written by some peckish journalist that the press office had sent my way. He’d casually asked me if I had kids, like that had anything to do with anything, then kept in my reply when I’d asked him not to. I also thought about my addict brother Brooks reading it. Was he the blight on our society? Was it any surprise he stayed in England, away from his ex-RUC Chief dad and DI sister, with a judge for a mother, a social worker sister, a minister brother, and Charlotte, our earth-mother sister who was probably the angriest of us all with our eldest brother.

  ‘That’s how Zara knew you have no kids,’ Linskey said. Dunne was reading it over her shoulder. ‘And get this – she looked this one up four times.’ Linskey clicked a link.

  There was my family, minus Brooks and Father, doing a charity relay marathon for the Huntington’s Disease Association. It was before Timothy was born; after his birth, our family charity changed to the Buddy Bear Trust.

  ‘You’ve got yourself quite the little superfan here,’ the Chief said, breaking into a rare smile. ‘Give me a shout if there’s any more news. Right, enough surfing the web. Get back to work.’

  ‘Yes, Chief,’ I said. I sat at my computer and did my own search: zara reede Belfast.

  And there she was: ‘Mother Leaves Boy on Train’.

  Chapter 30

  When Jason and I got married, we lived in an apartment and we saved. What we were saving for I was never quite sure.

  Jason’s father was an architect too, and together with Alex, Jason’s brother, the Lucie men had designed and built a place on the corner of Bawnmore Road and Osborne Gardens off the Lisburn Road. Alex and his wife Verity lived there. It was cream and red brick, and the windows were mere slits. Next door, an old house hidden by trees, like most in the avenue, had an apple tree that would drop its fruit onto their patio. We used to go round there for barbecues.

  One time we gathered in the kitchen because it was getting chilly outside. We were in front of the TV that was anchored to the wall. Alex stood behind Verity, I remember, his hands on the puddle of her belly. Their new baby was in a Moses basket on the dining table, somewhere under all that netting.

  Jason was watching him. He was mesmerised by him, even by the crying, those soft squawks that surely weren’t stressful to its own doting parents. I know that was what he was thinking. But that cry stung my ears. Their toddler had run around excitedly outside, the yammer of him, like a tractor starting up. When he wasn’t ticking over, he was stringing words into sentences that were truly Shakespearean. Jason, like all men, pretended he’d have all the time in the world for children. But with men, work always overrides childcare. As far as I was concerned, women are the same. I certainly wasn’t prepared to shut work down for the formative years, like my mother had to.

  I examined the TV screen, not sure what I was supposed to be looking at.

  ‘Is it an iceberg?’ I asked.

  Verity smiled at me. ‘Old Arctic ice,’ she said.

  Jason walked over and draped his arm over my shoulder so the four of us were standing in two teams, watching the ice go. ‘Twenty-seven years of ice,’ he said, ‘melting in seconds.’

  ‘What a waste,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the wonder of nature,’ Verity said, lifting the letter that had been resting on the counter, then stepping back into Alex’s arms.r />
  She gave the letter to me, keeping her eyes fixed on the screen. I held it up to the light. Alex had ended up frying everything in the kitchen when the gas ran out on the barbecue, and grease from the counter made transparent clouds and comets on the words on the paper.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got the planning permission,’ I said, running my eyes over the letter. ‘What are you going to do with this house? Sell it?’

  Lucie and Sons Architects were going to design a new home for them, a home for a growing family. Now they wanted more room – playrooms, a games room, a boys’ room for a snooker table. Jason had showed me the designs when it was only a pipe dream.

  ‘Um, I have some news too,’ said Jason.

  I turned to look at him, those pale lips, that white, white skin. The moon comes up the same colour as his skin. Verity turned too. I saw excitement doctor her face. The thing about being in your late twenties and married was that whenever either of you said you had news, you had to quickly follow up by stating we’re not pregnant.

  ‘Harry, Alex has offered us first dibs if we want to buy this house,’ Jason said. He linked his index fingers under his chin, expecting me to be thrilled.

  ‘Oh, we’ll need to talk about it,’ I said, my heart beating faster. The skin on my face chilled, my frozen smile too heavy to hold up.

  Everyone was looking at me. I felt the weight of their frowns. I just knew Jason would start a whole thing on the short drive home. He would just expect me to bend and fit into his plans.

  What happened to the house we were designing, I asked later? The only thing I could say to appease him was that we might outgrow Alex’s house too, if we had kids. That would make him happy. But work was slack; he would start on plans. The thing was, I had a vision of an atrium, a big kitchen, a high-ceilinged drawing room like the house I had grown up in at Malone. That was the kind of space I wanted – height, space, room to grow, not big rooms meted out. I didn’t want to be meted out.

  When we married, I told Jason I didn’t want kids. He kept trying to change my mind, making sure I heard him read his nephew a story, hogging the newborn as if that would persuade me, reminding me that the prep schools were right on our doorstep at Osborne. I felt like I was already forgotten, melting away from Jason.

  Already gone.

  Chapter 31

  A year or so before River’s disappearance – two months after he turned three – he was left on the train coming back from Bangor. A woman, the only other passenger in the carriage, arrived at a deserted Bridge End with River’s hand in hers. Zara was not there waiting for him, so instead, the woman stayed on board and took him to Central Station where staff phoned the PSNI.

  It was Inspector Seymour who brought River to Strandtown Police Station until eventually Zara came and retrieved him.

  There were two news stories: the national story about the mother who got off the train and left the child there, eventually coming for him, tangled and threadbare; and the one in the local press, Zara’s version, which was very different.

  She said she got off the train at Sydenham and that River slipped her hand when the doors shut too fast. It had all happened before she could press the button to alert the driver. River was stuck on the train and Zara, on foot, ran to Bridge End. But, naturally, by the time she got there the train was long gone. She had no phone and there was nobody around. She was crying and walking along the carriageway when a man stopped his car; she explained what had happened. He gave her a lift to Central Station and said he would wait for her in the car park and bring her on to Great Victoria Street if needed.

  There was an accompanying photo of Zara with her arms wrapped around River, her big eyes like a child’s and River’s thumb nuzzled into the palm of a hand she had resting across his chest. He had on that coat, the green puffa. It was September.

  Linskey was still scouring Zara’s internet history.

  ‘Check her history from Monday, Diane,’ I said. ‘Did Zara look up if the coat had a hood like she said she did?’

  ‘No,’ said Linskey. ‘There’s been nothing searched regarding the coat.’

  *

  Shane had not been lying; someone had phoned him on the Sunday night. It was a number with a Monaghan area code. I dialled the number expecting a woman to answer, expecting Shane’s mother, Margaret McGuire. But there was no answer at all – no dialling tone, just a dead line.

  I asked a colleague to find out who the number was registered to and Linskey asked me to call out the number of the last person to have phoned Shane. She dialled it, spoke furtively, then with familiarity. When she hung up she turned to me: ‘That was Cahal Cleary.’

  Late afternoon, Detective Amy Campbell called me to her office. She had four screens running on her desk.

  ‘Before you say a word,’ she said. She held a chair out and I sat in it. She joined me, leaned forward and pressed pause. ‘A few things to tell you. We went to Donald’s place of work.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, my stomach rumbling; I was holding out for dinner.

  ‘The manager was there.’

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘The proper manager – Crispin Arthur. He was back.’

  ‘That’s right. Alice was the area manager.’

  ‘Crispin was able to give us a roster, and there were four other members of staff working on Monday.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They all claim they had nothing to do with Donald all day, so they couldn’t be sure.’

  I smiled at this.

  ‘Hold on, I’m not finished yet,’ said Campbell. ‘So we pushed them – they hadn’t seen him at all? They all said they saw him clock on around ten a.m., then they saw him at the door with his coat on at lunchtime.’

  ‘And there’s no staffroom footage?’

  ‘That’s right. But for four members of staff, who all work in different departments, to have all seen Donald at the three exact same times seemed very suspicious.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Clock in, eight a.m. – tea break, ten a.m. – then lunch. Those are times their paths would cross, surely?’

  ‘Or, like you, they’re trying to bend the narrative to suit the end result.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Would you like to find out that you work with someone with a conviction for sexual crimes against children?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, there you have it. Neither did they.’

  ‘You seem to be assuming that they’re ganging up on him, maybe to get him sacked.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘He’s still our lead suspect at this point,’ I said.

  ‘I beg to differ.’ She pressed play; the time on all four screens said 19:00. ‘These have all been synchronised,’ she said. ‘There’s Donald, clearly visible in the warehouse.’

  ‘He worked a split shift?’

  ‘No, he didn’t work a split shift, remember?’

  At six p.m. on Monday, Linskey and I were at Donald’s house. I watched the scene again, him lifting a box onto a trolley. This wasn’t right. We were his alibi.

  ‘Harry, look at screen one,’ said Campbell. ‘You can see this lady on the till serving a customer. Now look. She’s in the warehouse, making her way to the staff room with her dinner in her hand. She says something to him and he laughs. Yet this woman claims she didn’t see him, didn’t speak to him, that he was gone by the time she came on for the one to nine shift.’

  ‘So you need to speak to her.’

  ‘Someone with a bit of video editing knowledge has framed Donald to get rid of him,’ she said. ‘One thing is very clear, there’s real hatred for the man and I wouldn’t want him going back there now after things have been said about him, especially by this Gary.’

  ‘Gary was hanging about when we were there too. Alice said he was the one who told her about the conviction. He’s the assistant manager. He was making out that Donald had abducted a child before.’

  ‘Yes, his name has a
lready cropped up,’ said Campbell. ‘We need to speak to Gary Pinnock. Seems like he might know who doctored these images.’

  ‘You’d think Markus would have spotted this,’ I said.

  ‘That’s why I went over it. Markus has a habit of just looking at the relevant timescale and not looking before or after it.’

  ‘But what about during the night, before Donald started work?’

  Campbell gave me a smile. ‘How can he prove he was at home in bed and not abducting a child? It’s not up to him to prove that he didn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you to prove that he did.’

  Chapter 32

  I called Father on the way to Charlotte’s. ‘How’s Mummy?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t go today,’ he said like he was proud of himself, as if Mother was something to be weaned off of.

  I knew he shouldn’t go every day, just as long as he did something better and didn’t mope about. The only thing that alleviated my guilt was knowing that he was visiting her.

  ‘I think you should go back to Monaghan,’ Father said. ‘Speak to Cleary again.’

  ‘We’re going to call him.’

  ‘Harry, listen to me, he’ll talk more freely in person.’

  Father couldn’t retire from the force completely and I suppose that was partly my fault – I told him too much; I called him every day. It gave him something to think about, but at times he tried to take over.

  ‘Cahal isn’t the problem,’ I said, but I didn’t want to get into the Donald situation, the possibility that there might be a network of perverts involved.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I think you’re missing a valuable person there.’

  ‘So when are you going to see Mummy?’ I asked to get him off the subject of work.

  ‘I’ll go soon,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I won’t get there this week what with this case,’ I said, sounding like he used to.

  ‘Don’t forget what matters, Harry,’ he said.

  ‘Finding River Reede matters, Daddy.’

  *

  It was nine p.m. when I pulled into Mount Eden Road off Malone and pulled up at the double-faced white home of my sister. I liked going to her place at that time, when there were no L-plate drivers slicing up the road. It was a street for learners. If you weren’t careful you’d get sandwiched between two of them, slowly perfecting their three-point turns and usually making many more points before they actually turned.