‘Is that you, son?’ Declan hears his mother as he opens the door and walks in, immediately hit by a wave of heat and the smell of baking.
‘It is, Ma,’ he calls back, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the bottom of the bannister.
His mother will give out to him about leaving his coat there, but he’ll deal with that in his own way. He knows he can sweet talk her. He has always been able to do that.
‘Did you smell these scones baking or what?’ she calls, laughing. ‘I’ll stick the kettle on.’
‘I just need to look for something upstairs,’ he replies. ‘I shouldn’t be long.’
He climbs the stairs, goes straight to the room he used to share with his brother. The large mahogany wardrobe is still here, now storing clothes his mother won’t wear again but can’t bear to throw away. Her ‘fancy clothes’, she calls them. Outfits she’s worn to weddings, dances, celebrations. Her own wedding dress is folded in tissue paper in a box on a high shelf. Beside it, shoeboxes are filled with photos, memorabilia, old school reports, newspaper cuttings.
Declan starts to pull each box down and open them, quickly discarding those that don’t contain what he’s looking for. He hears his mother on the stairs and soon she’s by his side.
‘What on earth are you doing? I hope you’re going to clean all that up after yourself!’
‘I’m looking for something,’ he tells her, tearing open the lid of another shoebox, only to find it filled with old birthday cards.
He’s getting frustrated now. He can feel it well up inside him.
‘Well, what are you looking for? Maybe I can help you find it before you wreck this house of mine altogether!’
‘The time capsules,’ he says. ‘Remember, you made me and Niall do them before the new millennium.’
‘The ones you were disgusted to do because you were fifteen and thought you knew everything there was to know about everything?’ she says, raising one eyebrow.
‘Aye. Those ones,’ he says, probably a little too harshly. He sees the way she winces at his tone, feels immediately guilty. ‘Sorry, Ma. But it’s important.’
‘What on earth could be so important about them that you need to storm in here at just gone ten on a Sunday morning and start pulling my house apart?’
Declan bites back the urge to shout at her. God knows she has been shouted at enough in her life. Memories wash over him of a different time. A different kind of household, where angry voices were a regular feature.
‘It’s just something I remembered that I need. To prove a point to someone.’
She eyes him suspiciously.
‘Declan, you’ve not got yourself into some sort of mess, have you? Because I don’t know how much more of that I can take. You’ve been doing well, don’t be going down that road again. All that trouble …’
The worry lining her face makes him feel guilty for everything he has put her through, but she has to understand it’s not all of his own making. Things happened and things changed him. Things he has never been able to talk about, because if he did it would blow the whole family apart. He couldn’t be responsible for that.
‘I’m not in any bother, Ma,’ he tells her. ‘Honestly. It’s just something I want to get my hands on. You know, Ingrid being around here and all this talk of Kelly Doherty, it’s just made me remember some stuff, you know. From back then. Not bad stuff,’ he hastens to add. ‘But I want to look over a few things anyway.’
‘It’s a bad business. No good will come of it,’ she says. ‘And Jamesy Harte dead. Murdered, they say.’ She blesses herself. ‘So much heartbreak.’ She shakes her head. ‘Look, your da will be home from Mass after eleven, if he doesn’t stop to chat to some of his cronies. I’m sure he’ll help you look.’
‘I don’t need to be bothering him with this,’ Declan says, because the very last person he wants involved is his da.
Not, at least, until he is sure what he’s going to do. And he needs to see Niall first. Needs to confront him.
‘You know, I think I might have put them up in the attic. Beside the Christmas decorations. I don’t suppose it will be long before we’re taking those down. Your woman at the top of her street will have her tree up come Friday. It’s the same every year. As soon as Halloween is done and dusted, she goes full North Pole. I wouldn’t want to be paying her electricity bill.’
His ma laughs and he laughs with her, but he’s already thinking he needs to get up into the attic and have a look around.
‘Where’s the pole for pulling down that ladder?’ he asks her.
‘For the attic? I think it’s in the built-in wardrobes in my room. You don’t really want to be climbing up there, do you?’
He’s already heading to her bedroom and retrieving the pole with the hook on the end that he will use to haul the folding ladder down from the roof space.
‘Would you not just sit and have a cup of tea with me?’ she asks, and he hesitates.
He loves his ma. He really does. He loves her more than anyone in this world. She’s the only woman who has ever treated him with respect and never thought worse of him when he stumbled and wound up in trouble again.
‘I will, Ma. As soon as I’ve had a look up here. Why don’t you ask Niall to have a cup of tea with you? He’s still about, isn’t he? Is he watching one of those Sunday morning politics shows and pretending to be some big brainbox?’
‘No, he’s not here. He’s worse than you. Off out this morning all wrapped up. Said he had to go and take that Ingrid Devlin somewhere. He wanted to show her something. I said why couldn’t the wee girl wait ’til that storm had passed, and he laughed at me. The cheek of him. You know what he said to me? “I’m not made of sugar, Ma. I won’t melt.” He looked all delighted with himself.
‘You don’t think there’s something going between the two of them, because I’m not sure how I feel about that. I mean, what happened to poor Liam Doherty was bad enough – and wasn’t it off the back of that story she did for that paper she works for?’
Declan notices his ma’s tone has changed again. She is worried. She is twisting her hands.
‘Don’t be going up into that attic, son. Come and have a wee cup of tea with me. There’s treacle scone there. I know that’s your favourite.’
But he can’t. He has to get up into the attic now more than before. And then he has to track down Niall and find out where the hell he has taken Ingrid on a morning like this and he has to make sure he can get Ingrid to understand exactly what is going on.
‘I’ll get a cup of tea in a wee bit,’ he tells his ma, doing his best not to show her just how rattled he is. ‘Just let me look up here first. Sure, don’t I have the ladder down and all?’
She nods. ‘Okay, son,’ she says.
She is a meek woman, he knows that. She wouldn’t argue.
‘You would tell me if you were in trouble, wouldn’t you?’ she asks.
He reassures her he’s fine. If only she knew it isn’t him she should be worrying about.