Julie

I had no idea what the Central Mental Hospital would look like until I was in it. If you’d asked me, I’d have come up with a description of some outdated Victorian building with iron grilles on the windows. I’d have pictured long grey corridors, manly-looking nurses in starched uniforms and patients in straitjackets. Pretty much whatever I’d read about psychiatric institutions in the classics or seen in movies.

Not this place. I’d never have imagined this place, with its pastel colours and modern, open rooms, the glass instead of bars, the friendly staff and the illusion that you can just walk in and out whenever the mood takes you.

It will be Christmas in a month and the place is already decorated with artificial trees and tinsel. Papier-mâché stars hang from the ceiling. It startles me. I haven’t thought about a single normal thing since the attack. I haven’t shopped. I haven’t watched television. I certainly haven’t thought about getting a tree or buying a gift.

Maybe after today I should try to do something small. A first step. Go and buy a coffee and a magazine, that sort of thing. Get something for Mam and Dad and Helen to say thank you.

The doctor in charge of Carney’s care speaks to me first. He insists on getting me a cup of weak tea. Then he explains that his patient has been making good progress in coming to terms with what happened in my home that night but still doesn’t know why it happened. Carney is racked with guilt, apparently, and that’s why he’s agreed to meet me. He’s grateful for the opportunity, in fact, to be able to apologize in person.

I nod along at all the relevant spots, appearing outwardly calm, if a little distressed.

Inwardly, I’m trying to keep a lid on the turmoil I feel.

I have no doubt that JP Carney knows exactly why he did what he did that night. To still be putting me through this is just cruel and unusual.

I almost didn’t come this morning, thinking I couldn’t bear to meet him. The last time that man saw me I was sitting on my chair, gawping redundantly while he battered my husband to death.

Sometimes I don’t know what I’m angrier at – his lies and how people are lapping them up, or how I reacted to his onslaught.

‘We’ve set up one of the counsellors’ rooms for you,’ the doctor says. ‘An orderly will sit in the corner, but he’s only there for your safety. He won’t be listening in on your conversation. He’ll have earphones in. This meeting is for you and Mr Carney. As you both agreed you wanted it like this, we will respect your privacy. We take reconciliation very seriously.’

He hesitates.

‘I know you have suffered a grievous loss at the hands of my patient, Mrs McNamara. I hope you attain some small degree of comfort from meeting JP and seeing how sorry he is. We have found that this type of one-to-one is extremely beneficial for victims and their relatives, as well as for the perpetrators. Normally, it’s after more time has passed. It’s a testament to your strength of character that you wish to have this conversation now. And if you want to talk to me afterwards, I would be more than happy to oblige. But – and I imagine somebody has explained this to you already – please know that there is no point in looking for answers or reasoning. The type of psychosis that came upon JP on the night in question is one of the many inexplicable workings of the human brain. There is no logic to it. It’s one of those things that we will never understand. He is being punished, even though he is in here and not in jail. Both through his incarceration with us but also because he has to live with knowing what he did, even if his crime was out of character.’

‘I know,’ I say, biting my tongue.

He brings me to the room and makes sure I’m sitting comfortably while he goes off to fetch Carney. It’s a basic space. Two armchairs are inclined towards each other, a table bearing a bouquet of flowers and a box of tissues between them. There’s a lamp in the corner throwing out soft lighting. It’s warm and comfortable, a safe place to relax and open up.

There’s a chair by the door, and an orderly has already taken up residence. He smiles at me politely then puts his hands on his knees and stares into the distance. I turn from him and observe the painting on the wall. It’s impressionist in style – twinkling stars in a clear sky, a bench in a park filled with a pair of lovers holding hands.

The door opens and then he’s there, in the chair facing me.

Carney.

He seems so young, his dark eyes wide and full of fear. I see them fleetingly when he sits down, then he casts them back to the ground, unable to meet my own.

He’s grown a beard since I saw him first, a tight-cut, dark mass of hair that makes him look even more handsome, accentuating rather than hiding his strong jawline.

‘JP, this is Julie. Julie, JP.’

The doctor introduces us like it’s the first time we’ve met.

‘I’ll leave you to it, so,’ he says, hesitantly. I can tell, for all his good intentions, professional curiosity is killing him. Maybe he has his own doubts about JP. He leaves, anyway. The orderly replaces his earphones. It’s almost like being alone.

We sit there in silence for a few minutes. I thought I would know what to say but, now he’s actually sitting there, I’m lost for words. Looking at him forces me to relive that night, and even though I know I’m safe, I’m hoping I don’t wet myself again.

He speaks first.

‘I’m so sorry about your husband,’ he says, still staring at the ground.

It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice.

He’s soft-spoken. Baritone, and with a twang of northside Dublin, but not aggressive.

You’d never guess what he’s capable of.

I flinch. I can’t respond immediately.

Is he testing me? I wonder.

Wanting to know what I know, questioning why I’m here?

Well, I won’t play games.

I lean close, but not close enough to alarm the attendant at the door.

‘No,’ I say. ‘No, you’re not. Why did you do it?’

He lifts his face now and studies me. His expression hasn’t changed. It’s still the sad haunted-soul look. It’s only in his eyes that I can see the truth.

His pupils are darker. Black. Like there’s evil behind them that only seeps in when he wants you to see it.

‘I don’t know, Julie. May I call you that? The doctors say—’

‘Don’t call me anything,’ I interrupt. ‘I don’t want to hear my name on your lips. And I don’t want to hear what the doctors say.’

His expression changes slightly now, a hint of … what is that? Is he amused? Is it because I’m not afraid of him?

‘Whatever you want,’ he says. ‘You’re the victim.’

He pauses. He’s made a decision about how he’s going to act.

‘I was happy to meet you so I can tell you how sorry I am. I’ll always have what happened on my conscience. Even when they let me out, which the doctor says could be as soon as in a few years, if I go through the treatment process okay. Imagine that. To do something so awful and be allowed back out on the streets, still a relatively young man. It’s shocking, isn’t it? And yet your husband is gone and you have to live with what you saw for the rest of your life – you have to live with the knowledge that you sat there and watched as I beat your husband to death and did absolutely nothing. It must be terrible. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to witness such a thing. I’m so sorry.’

It’s like being punched in the gut. It’s an effort to keep breathing.

I close my eyes and see white dots dancing. And in the dots there’s Carney, smashing Harry’s body with the golf club over and over.

I take hold of the sides of the chair to steady myself and open my eyes.

He’s smiling.

The bastard is smiling.

‘Do you think,’ he says, ‘that a tiny part of you wanted him to suffer? Is that why you didn’t leap to his defence, Julie? Had he hurt you so bad that you were happy for him to die? Had he done something so bad that you thought, He deserves this?’

I can feel a panic attack building. This is an admission that he knows what Harry did, but I can’t respond to it because he’s tapped into something so private, so utterly terrifying, that I want to cry. I start to shake my head, and then I am shaking it properly, and then the words come. Weak at first but then stronger. I can’t live with the idea that I wanted Harry to suffer. I won’t live with it. For all the things he did to me in the past, we had some good years at the end. I didn’t know the real truth about Nina Carter on the night of the attack. I hadn’t yet heard what she had to say. But even knowing it, I wouldn’t have wished Harry dead. Divorced, yes. But not beaten to death. My deepest fears about my own motivation that night are just that – fear. Irrational, and not real. Not the truth.

‘No,’ I croak. ‘I – I was … I was frightened. I was scared. But I didn’t want to see my husband hurt. Not then. How dare you say that? You knew nothing about us.’

He shrugs.

‘Fair enough. Whatever you need to tell yourself.’

He’s so smug, so glib.

‘Why don’t we talk about Charlene Andrews?’ I say, my voice even.

His face flushes but then settles, that slightly amused and innocent look descending once more.

‘Who?’ he says.

I exhale. I know I’m not wrong. Not now.

‘Who was she to you? Your girlfriend? A relative?’

He says nothing, just stares at me.

‘I must be wrong,’ I say, taking charge of the game now. ‘Maybe she didn’t matter to you at all. Maybe she didn’t matter to anybody. Nobody seemed too worried about her death. I thought you might have been a boyfriend, but the reports about her never mentioned one. Unless you were, and her family didn’t consider you important enough.’

His eyes flash to the orderly and back again. We’re speaking in hushed tones and he’s got the earphones in, listening to a football match so loudly we can hear the crowd cheering. JP is having his own private battle. To keep up the game a little longer, dangling me like I’m a mouse, pretending he’s ignorant and blame free; or to let me know that he has his claws well and truly dug in.

He can’t wait. Or maybe this is what he’s been waiting for all along.

‘She was somebody,’ he says. ‘She was my sister. Charlie. I was hoping you’d bring her up. Now we can have a proper conversation.’

I close my eyes. Her brother. I’d read afterwards she had a brother. How did I not make the link? But he looks nothing like her – so dark to her fairness. And the name is different.

‘Is that what you said?’ I ask. ‘When you whispered to Harry at the end, did you say her name?’

‘Yes. I said, “This is for Charlie.” I hope he heard me, but who knows at that stage? I guess the last thing he was conscious of was you sitting on the couch watching him get battered.’

We stare at each other, eyes unblinking.

I drop my gaze first. He’s hurt me. And in his face I can see a reflection of my own grief – something stronger, in fact. And it isn’t pleasant.

‘I see.’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You see.’

We’re quiet again.

‘Why?’ I say. ‘Five years. It’s so long ago. Why?’

I mean, why now? Why did he wait? But he answers me as though I’ve asked why he couldn’t just let it go.

‘She was twenty-two. She’d have only been twenty-seven if she were alive today. It’s not something time heals. Five, ten, fifteen years, I’ll still feel the same. About her and the bastard who murdered her.’

I wince.

‘Why did you have to kill him?’ I ask, my voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘Why not report him? And why not me? Why did you do it in front of me but not kill me? You must have known I was in the car as well.’

JP lifts his hand and scratches at the beard on his chin, examining me as though I’m a student who’s asked a particularly fascinating question.

‘I knew you were in the car,’ he said. ‘And then I realized that you knew what he’d done. I don’t know why he drove into Charlie. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he was too frightened to come forward. He probably made his decisions out of fear. But you – you chose to stand by him, to support him. To help him cover it up. That’s why you had to be there when I went after him. And now you have to live with that. By the look of you, it was the worst thing I could have thought up for you.’

He flicks his eyes over my diminished frame, my sunken face.

‘There was no point going to the cops,’ he continues. ‘Look at what your husband got away with after bringing the country to its knees. What proof had I that he killed my sister? He sorted the car. You could have given him an alibi. He’d have got away with it, just like he got away with everything he did in his bank.’

I shake my head. It’s what I suspected, this exchange. But I’m still horrified. Appalled. All that time he waited and waited, and then, just when we imagined our lives were back on track, he struck.

A reckoning.

‘Harry never got over your … your sister,’ I say. ‘He went to her funeral. It was risky, but he went anyway. He had to. He lived with her death every day. We both did. But there was nothing we could do. She was gone.’

‘Responsibility,’ he says, eyes boring into mine. ‘He never took responsibility for what he’d done. Neither of you did. It might have been an accident, but he killed her and he should have come forward and admitted it. You should have made him.’

I feel my shoulders slump.

‘Ah,’ I say, as it hits me. ‘So that’s what this is about? This little act. The insanity plea. You’re not taking responsibility for what you did. But why hand yourself in at all? Why not run?’

‘Because you saw me. I wanted you to see me. If I’d run, you’d have described me and they’d have found me. If I’d denied it, it would have been the denial of a guilty man. It would have showed a level of planning that my temporary insanity wouldn’t allow, I’m afraid. This way, I’m guilty but i won’t be held responsible. Just like Harry.’

I nearly choke at the devious ingenuity of his plan.

I have so many questions. So many things I want to know. How did he find out it was Harry? How did he find us? Had he been watching us all those years?

All of it so trivial and irrelevant in this moment.

What I really want to know right now is, why is he telling me the truth? What is his game now?

‘How do you know,’ I ask, ‘that I won’t just go to the Guards and tell them everything you’ve just said? I know you can deny it all, but now I know there’s a link, they can make the connection with evidence. You can’t have been that clever. You had to ask questions, you needed to find out information about our lives to bring you to us. And they’re bound to make the link to Charlie. Eventually.’

He shakes his head slowly, smiling at me.

‘Julie, Julie, Julie. How do you know that isn’t exactly what I want to happen? What I want you to do? What if I told you right now that you have a choice to make? You can choose to go to the Guards, but you probably won’t. You could have gone already. You’re stuck, and you know it. It can’t have taken you this long to figure out the attack was linked to Charlie. But if you tell the Guards what I’ve told you, then you’ll have to confess to keeping Harry’s secret for the last five years. He murdered somebody, and you told nobody. The truth about your precious husband will be out. And you’ll suffer. Charlie will finally get justice.’

‘What if I say I wasn’t in the car and didn’t know any of this? What if I claim you’re a fantasist and you’ve told me all this but it has nothing to do with Harry?’

‘If I’m a fantastist, that doesn’t change a thing. They’ll leave me here. I’m mad, aren’t I? But let’s say I tell the cops and you claim it’s all lies. Maybe they take me seriously and they reopen my sister’s case. But this time they’re looking at where you and Harry were the night she died. And then you claim you weren’t in the car. But they find out you were pissed and he dragged you out of a party. It will be hard for you to play the innocent. It will be easy for the Guards to establish that the pair of you didn’t stay in that hotel that night, and then it’s obvious he drove you home.

‘But I don’t want to do that, Julie. I want to see what you’ll do. It’s much better if it comes from you. If you want to see me punished, you will have to admit that Harry killed my sister and that you knew. Will you do it? Will you tell the truth? Or wait for DS Moody to bring it to you? I’ve great faith in her, but she might still fuck it up. She mightn’t find out about Charlie. And I’ll stay here and get out in a few years. And there’s something you should know. I don’t give a shit about what happens to me. This was only ever for her.’

Tears well in my eyes at how clever he’s been. He’s right, of course. I can’t relay this conversation to DS Moody unless I want to implicate myself. This is what he wanted all along. To have this conversation with me. To bring me to this point. And chances are, even if I try to get away with it, she’ll figure it out anyway.

Oh, that night. That awful night.

All along, I’ve had a terrible feeling that Carney was connected to that.

He’s looking at me with a self-satisfied, smug expression on his face, like he’s won all over again.

He says he wants me to do the right thing, but he must know I won’t. Otherwise I’d have done it already.

He’s smart.

But not as smart as he thinks he is.

I lean closer.

‘So you created a little trap,’ I say. ‘The person who killed your sister had to die, and the person who helped cover it up would be forced to live with another cover-up, unless the truth came out. In the absence of us telling the real story, you deemed that a just sentence?’

His brow furrows and he swallows.

The tears are gone and I sound confident. He’s wondering what’s come over me.

‘The thing is, JP,’ I say, ‘I think you fucked up. It should have been the other way round. Or you should have killed us both.’

‘What?’ he says, genuine confusion on his face now, mixed with panic; none of the cunning. The man is a mess. He is unstable, no matter how in control he thinks he is.

‘I told my husband to do it. I told him to kill your sister. It was to prove his love for me. I’m the reason she is dead, JP. You see, Harry always said he’d do anything for me.’

‘I don’t … I don’t understand. What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that Harry may have been driving that night, but I caused the crash. I killed your sister.’