A single light bulb hanging from a wire from one of the rafters casts a soft glow around the attic. It’s freezing up here, Declan thinks, and he can hear the house creak and the slates rattle as the storm rages outside. He uses the light from his phone to see into the darker corners of the attic until he spots the old artificial Christmas tree surrounded by boxes of baubles and tinsel and tangled lights. Pushing those out of the way, he finds a large brown cardboard box, on which he sees ‘Boys’ stuff’ written in thick black marker in his mother’s handwriting.
He pulls the box forwards and picks at the end of the thick tape holding it closed until he gets enough purchase to pull it back. His mother has stored things methodically. There is a box of sports medals, garnered at every sports day and summer scheme the twins attended over the years. There are badges from the Boy Scouts, lovingly unpicked from uniforms the boys had long outgrown and stored in a Tupperware box. Photo albums stacked neatly on top of each other. A few football sticker books he had no idea she had kept. And nestled at the bottom, two shoeboxes, wrapped in brown paper and too much Sellotape, with his name on one, Niall’s on another.
On both, in block capitals, they had written ‘1999 Time Capsule. Do Not Open!’ Declan remembered how he’d hated putting it together. He’d rolled his eyes at his mother. He was fifteen. He was in his too cool for school stage, facing detention after detention, sneaky cigarettes out of his bedroom window. He thought it babyish, stupid to put together a time capsule. He’d done a half-hearted job. He knew that.
He could still remember what he threw in his. A copy of The Chronicle. His Oasis CD, which he’d outgrown and no longer listened to. Some badges he’d taken off his school bag, bearing names of bands he liked – or thought he should like. Nirvana, Radiohead, Stereophonics. The battered Casio watch that no longer worked and his old Tamagotchi that he had been religious about taking care of for six months before moving on to the next craze.
He knew Niall had made more of an effort with his, because Niall always made more of an effort with everything. He’d started to come out of his angry young man phase and instead had become an overachiever, much to his chagrin. Niall had written a letter to his future self, which Declan had rolled his eyes at. He’d put in a school report, his prefect badge, one of his old Action Men, a Liverpool FC key ring, and other bits and pieces.
As Declan tears open the brown paper around his brother’s box, he hopes he has remembered correctly. He hopes that there, among the items his brother could not give away but wanted to hide, he will find a small bracelet. Beads of brightly coloured plastic bound together on elastic. Worth nothing, but everything.
It was the reason Declan never believed Jamesy Harte was guilty. The reason he hated his brother, and hated himself even more. Because he’d been too scared, always, to confront Niall about it. To ask him what had happened. To tell his brother he hated him for bringing him to play at the den on the day they found Kelly. Because he’d realised that Niall had known where she was all along. He’d left her there. It broke him to think his brother was capable of such horror.
He could never be best friends with someone who had killed a person.
And how else would Niall have got the bracelet if he hadn’t been the one to kill her?
It was the day after she was found when everything had clicked into place for him. That was the day he realised what Niall had done. In that moment the bottom fell out of Declan’s world. Everything that he thought was true was destroyed.
He’d been watching TV. The police appealing for information. An image of the cheap, tacky plastic bracelet flashed on screen. A solemn voice intoned that it was believed Kelly was wearing the bracelet on the night she had gone missing, but it hadn’t been found on her body.
‘God love them, but it’s probably lying at the bottom of the reservoir,’ his mammy had said.
But Declan knew it wasn’t. He knew Niall had it. In his coat pocket. Declan had found it when he lifted his brother’s coat by accident the day after Halloween, slipping his hand into the pocket. He didn’t realise then, not yet, how important it was, or what it meant. Not until now, watching the TV.
He thought of the rage his brother was in on the night he ran off. The silent procession of his da, Niall and two of his friends back down the street an hour later.
His stomach lurched, right then, in front of the TV in his cosy living room, while he sat on the sofa beside his mammy. His brother upstairs.
That was when Declan realised monsters existed and sometimes they existed right beside you. Sometimes they looked just like you. And Declan knew he could never, ever tell anyone, because losing his brother would be like losing a part of himself.
But, it seems, he lost him anyway.
And now, now he has to open up and tell the truth. For him, for Jamesy, for Ingrid. He might be angry with her, disappointed with her, but a large part of him still wants her enough to do what he needs to do to protect her. No matter the consequences in his own family. He has covered for Niall for too long.