Julie

In eighteen years of a relationship, you have a lot of ups and downs and collect a lot of memories. Prior to meeting Nina Carter, if you’d asked me to balance the accounts, I would have told you that I’d had plenty of good times with Harry, for all the bad.

We laughed. We laughed a lot. Harry could be hilarious. We bounced off each other in just the right way. And we fit. We both enjoyed life. We wanted to live it with each other at the heart of it all. They say love at first sight is a myth, but we knew differently. That night, so many years ago, when he called out to me at that ball – that was it. The beginning of a deep, passionate, addictive love.

It was that love that made the things Harry did hurt so badly.

But our marriage was a fraud. Now I know what my husband was capable of.

I’m in absolute turmoil as I step into the plain black dress, place the black pillbox hat on top of my hair and prepare for Harry’s funeral.

I have to go, of course. Even though I want to stay at home and pull the duvet over my head, just wait the day out.

I think if I could concentrate on one emotion, if I could just feel angry, then I could manage the next few hours. But I can’t get a handle on what I’m feeling. I’m so confused.

For all that I hate my husband, I’m in shock that he’s dead.

I want to feel that raw, violent rage that would overcome me when I suspected he’d been with another woman. That fury that made me want to kill him.

Instead, there’s just numbness. And sorrow.

I’m not sad that the Harry I know the truth of is dead. I’m grieving for the Harry I thought he was. I’m grieving for myself and my marriage.

How did it go so wrong?

Yes, a little bit of me has always known that the problems in our marriage weren’t all one-sided.

I remember the first and only time I fell pregnant, at the end of 2006. God knows – really, only He knows – how I became pregnant in that year, at precisely the same time I had upped my alcohol intake by about 100 per cent. We had been trying for ten years with not so much as a hint of a baby and there I was, up the duff, without even the expensive assistance of IVF.

And then, much less inexplicably, I miscarried.

Harry found me on the floor of our kitchen after discovering the bloody mess in our bed and bathroom. I was choking on sobs, drowning my sorrows with vodka straight from the bottle.

Harry wanted children more than me. He could have screamed at me and smashed that bottle in my face. I would have welcomed it, anything to stop the pain I felt, knowing I’d caused the loss, even if I hadn’t realized I was pregnant at the time. But he didn’t react with righteous anger. Instead, he fell to his knees and hugged me tightly.

‘I’m so sorry, baby,’ he said, crying hard.

And when I continued to drink like a fish, right up until that night, he still didn’t lay the blame for the loss of our baby at my door.

Yes, I could point to Harry and say he was the reason I drank, but that would be far too simplistic, and a terrible cop-out on my part.

I could have left Harry. I chose to stay, and I chose to drink.

But how could a man who’d been that sympathetic, that caring, on the day I miscarried be the same man who could rape a young woman?

I knew my husband so well I could hear him in my head explaining away what happened, the blurred lines.

I was having sex with her, Julie, and she started crying out of nowhere. I was pissed out of my head. I’d no idea what the problem was. Maybe she’d a boyfriend or something and regretted it. I tried to cheer her up afterwards. I had to pay her so she’d go away. I was protecting us.

But Harry could justify anything to get what he wanted. He always had.

I slip on a piece of jewellery that I haven’t worn in years. The sapphire bracelet. For so long, it reminded me of that horrible night in Lough Derg and that prick Richard. I want to wear it and feel that anger and pain. And yet, looking at it now, I’m suddenly walloped in the head with the memory of our wedding day. A happier time.

I pull it off my wrist in a panic, gasping as it clinks on to the dressing table, discarded.

The funeral will be huge. I knew that when I held his hand as he lay dying, the second bleed in his head the final blow. I didn’t want to touch him, but there was some part of me that clicked into appropriate-behaviour mode, if only for the doctors’ benefit. Or maybe I wanted, in those last couple of moments, to remember the good times and how much I had loved him.

The life ebbed from his body as soon as I agreed they could turn off the machines that had kept him breathing. Part of me wanted to keep the life support going, to avoid the oncoming spectacle. I knew it would entail having to deal with hundreds of people who called themselves our friends but really never knew the first thing about us.

My mother comes into the room and finds me sitting at the dressing table, unable to stand up. She walks me over to the end of the bed and sits beside me, placing her bony arm around my shoulders.

‘I am so proud of how you’re handling all of this, pet,’ she says, her cheek against mine. ‘Today is going to be tough, but you’ll get through it. We will be standing beside you the whole time. You don’t need to speak to anybody. It’s only close family and friends allowed back here afterwards.’

She can always read my mind.

‘You know, Mam, Harry really was a bloody bastard,’ I say, and she squeezes my hand. ‘And yet these bloody happy memories keep going around and around my head, like a tape stuck on loop. Do you remember our wedding day? When he lifted me over the threshold and everybody cheered? I was so happy. How come I’m thinking about that and not about all the times I wanted to kill him, all the times he hurt me?’

‘Oh, Julie, love. I know Harry was no angel and that you had your troubles, but what else would you be thinking about on a day like this? What’s done is done. What good would it do, to think about the bad? That sort of thing makes you bitter. Marriage is hard, but death is final. You need to remember all the happy times and let yourself and Harry be at peace with one another.’

I know this is why Mam came up and not Helen. My sister, given an opening, wouldn’t be able to resist telling me Harry was a complete bloody wanker, I’m right to think so, and I should feel angry. They must have decided among themselves downstairs to send up the diplomatic corps.

‘I don’t want to remember all the happy times,’ I sob. I might have wanted to before the meeting with Nina Carter. I could have forgiven everything in death. I could have held on to the image of him in the courtyard of Trinity College – that young man, so handsome, so full of fun and ambition.

Instead, every time I think of my husband now, I’ll be thinking about how I was waiting for him to wake up so I could tell him we were finished – that I knew what he’d done to Nina Carter. I’ll be imagining that scene she described, him pumping away on top of her as she cried her eyes out.

I want to spit on his coffin, not walk behind it.

‘That detective is downstairs,’ Mam says after a few minutes. ‘She wants you to know she’ll be at the funeral, but doesn’t want the Garda presence to be obvious. It’s not the day for it. Will you have a word with her before we go?’

‘Sure,’ I say, not really caring. Just for now, JP Carney is not to the fore in my mind.

DS Moody coming up the stairs is like the arrival of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. The surface of the glass of water my mother has left on the dressing table starts to ripple as she stomps along the landing and bangs on my door like the Stasi police have arrived to cart me off. And this is her in compassionate mode.

‘Two sets of stairs,’ she pants, coming in and plonking herself down on the bed beside me. I nearly take flight. She’s such a welcome distraction with her unintentional hilarity, I feel like kissing her. She is real. She’s what normal looks like, not the sick, twisted reality Harry and I had.

‘No wonder you’re such a skinny Minnie,’ she says. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Julie.’

It’s a marvel how she can move between sentiments with such ease.

I shrug.

‘He was already gone. I thought he was dead, that night. When they said he’d survived, I knew it was only a matter of time. Nobody can come through that and live to tell the tale.’

I shudder.

She sighs.

‘I suppose you’re right. This does change things, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we’ve moved from attempted manslaughter to either actual manslaughter or murder. It puts pressure on my bosses. Now’s the time, Julie. If there’s anything of relevance that you haven’t told me about Harry, you should tell me now. He’s dead. There’s no point in trying to hide anything any more, if there ever was. Look, I’m not having a go.’

She never ceases to surprise me. Most coppers just wouldn’t give a fuck at this stage, but she’s still gnawing away, like a dog with a bone. She knows – she just knows – that Carney did this on purpose. And she knows I’m keeping something from her.

DS Moody doesn’t let my silence put her off. She changes tack in the face of it.

‘Julie, I realize today is a very sad day for you. But I think we both agree that we want to catch Carney out. I need you to do something for me at the funeral.’

‘I’m just not sure it’s important any more.’ I sigh. ‘Why does it matter if he did it on purpose or not? Harry is dead, either way. He’s dead.’

‘I know that, chicken,’ she says, and her voice is softer than I’ve heard it before. She’s full of sympathy I don’t deserve.

‘And I know that right now it’s very hard to think of anything other than burying the man you loved. But in a few days, in a few weeks, your thoughts are going to turn back to JP Carney and you are going to feel angry again. He stole your husband from you. And you’ll want him to pay. You’ll want proper justice, not whatever charade he’s set up for himself. Why did he do this? Why did he hand himself in? What’s the point of it all?’

I swallow.

‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ I snap irritably. It’s like the shoe is on the other foot. She needs to see Carney caught out more than I do. ‘Today of all days.’

She nods slowly, ashamed.

‘Sometimes my job is not pleasant, Julie, but I only want to help you and get justice for Harry. I just want you to look at the people who turn up for the funeral. See how they act around you. If Carney was hired by one of your husband’s former colleagues, one of two things will happen. The person who ordered his death will stay away from the church and that absence will be notable. Or they’ll attend, but they’ll act off. You know these people better than we do. Look for anybody behaving strangely or out of character, or somebody turning up you wouldn’t expect. Do you think you could do that for me?’

I nod half-heartedly.

I’d laugh if it wasn’t so bloody tragic.