It’s after three thirty by the time I drop Clarke back to Sunny Hill Bed and Breakfast. I send Frank a quick text on his work phone telling him we’ll have to stay down for another night or two at the very least, and that we’ll possibly need to move forward with a court-ordered DNA test. Interesting developments. I explain. Free now if you want to call. I immediately regret sending it. Surely, he should have called by now anyway. The first physical pages from the original fire report have finally been sent to Ken Mulligan at Currolough. He was in the process of emailing them to us, one painstaking page at a time.
My phone beeps. My stomach flips.
It’s Frank.
Ok, will speak to Terry in legal. Sorry about earlier.
Me and baby miss you, I text quickly back. He sees it but immediately goes offline. This definitely warrants a long discussion with Sammy. It’s too hard not to blur the personal with the professional. Meshing the two clearly isn’t healthy.
With a pain in the pit of my stomach, I leave Clarke to set up interviews with Nancy’s ex-husband, Hugh Wills, and Tori Jones, the little girl from the Bayview apartments. The answers we’re seeking most likely lie somewhere in the links between both tragedies.
Gerald told us pointedly, almost resentfully, when we were leaving Haycote Manor, to focus on Hugh Wills’s side of things, but it was hard to tell if he was trying to distract us or to help us.
Sighing heavily, I reverse the car out of the driveway of the small guesthouse. There are a million things I’d prefer to do right now rather than climb back into my Discovery this evening and point it towards Lake Lagan.
I think back to the dizzy spell I had had leaving Haycote Manor, after Gerald Barrows had closed the front door. Everything had started edging on black as I’d looked up at the window, at the moving curtain. I told Clarke I was fine but he insisted on driving and, suddenly, I didn’t have the energy to fight against all his fussing, so I tossed him the keys and agreed to stop along the way back to eat something. The sauce from the service-station Caesar salad was gloopy and artificial, but I took the package from him gratefully and ate it under his watchful eye as he drove us back to the guesthouse.
‘Why’d you leave law?’ I asked conversationally between bites of stringy romaine. ‘Wasn’t for the money, anyway.’ I laughed, flipping the vanity mirror and fishing for a green bit trapped in my tooth. Clarke drove slowly, carefully. Another car overtook us. I noticed him glancing over at me, concern written across his face. I waved him off. ‘I’m fine now,’ I assured him gruffly. ‘Probably just needed to eat something.’ I wasn’t about to let my rookie see me so vulnerable, so I ignored the light-headedness and shifted myself up a little higher in the passenger seat.
‘Do you really want to know why I left law?’ He sounded surprised, his upper-class accent lifting at the end of his sentence, the perfect t’s emphasised at the end of each word. His hair was unusually fine and shiny for a man. From the side profile his Adam’s apple was pronounced, like a teenager’s, and his eyelashes were spiky compared to the smooth skin of his cheeks.
‘Sure.’ I scraped the bottom of the plastic bowl with my wooden fork, leaving streak marks in the dregs of dressing.
‘I was disillusioned at the lack of power I found I wielded, even as a lawyer.’ He glanced over, flashing his dimples. ‘That, and the justice system let me down.’
He said it lightly – but I could tell it was anything but.
‘Were you in trouble or something?’ No way could Clarke Casey have had conflict with the law. Impossible – this was the man that apologised for stooping to tie his own shoelaces the other day because we were late.
‘My wife was,’ he said quietly, and rolled down his window. The air in the car was sucked out somehow.
‘I didn’t know you’re married,’ I said. ‘I mean, I presumed…’
‘Never presume anything,’ he teased, wagging his finger mockingly, reminding me of the mantra I’d been pushing down his neck for the past few weeks. ‘I was married,’ he added, a little sadly, and then there was silence. It was clear that conversation was over – I could almost hear the line being drawn below that particular exchange.
‘The system pisses me off sometimes too,’ I said instead, and pulled something small out of my leather bag, displaying it to Clarke.
Clarke actually gasped. And I tried not to laugh.
‘You didn’t. Oh my gosh.’ He shook his head.
‘Don’t worry, Saint Clarke, it’s for our eyes only.’ I smiled. Snapping Dexter’s gumshield box closed, I stuffed it back into my bag. ‘The results will be just for us, and it’s obviously not admissible in any court. But I had to know.’
How could I not? It had been lying there beside the sports bags labelled Dexter T Barrows as I’d grabbed my coat when we were leaving Gerald’s house. My methods are not always orthodox, Clarke would have known that if he’d worked with me long enough. By my logic, this was potentially a child kidnap case. If I was right, I knew Barrows could spend years tying us in knots in court, especially if his solicitor was good. At least this way, we’d know if we were sniffing down the right rabbit hole. I’d send it express to my buddy Billy in tech who owed me a favour or two. Off the record. He’d get the results in super-quick time. Gerald’s biology would have to be on the central database from when he signed on initially as a cop.
Then we’d arrived back at Currolough, pulling up outside Sunny Hill Guesthouse.
Clarke gives me a small wave as I drive away.
Though I’m feeling better after eating, calling in to Aunt Roe is the last thing I want to do. But it’s time to iron out the past. The next step will hopefully shape what my future looks like.
Shadows drift, and silvery-fine clouds press the sky downwards as I drive towards the lake after a trip to Currolough post office to send off the gumshield. I grew up admiring this lake’s soupy sheen – the backdrop to my wild Kerry childhood. I remember standing by the woods, Brendan, Sammy and I, squinting at the mountain-cloud reflections on the lake and trying to come up with shapes and stories about the things that coiled and lurked beneath. We had a rowboat we took out sometimes. Not far, just to the other side and back – over to the Denibulin – one of the hills tourists refer to as mountains that make up the five peaks that surround this desolation. Beyond the lake is even wilder, as the sea air hits, beige landscapes, bruise-coloured stones and scrubby orange weeds occupied only by the most sure-footed of sheep and bravest locals. Ours was the last house in the wood before the car park where boats launched in from the banks, a lopsided keel, as if heaving drunk as they splash-landed.
We conjured up sea-creatures so weird and wonderful they were almost real. Then, at night, we’d scare Brendan, reminding him in the darkness about the swishing tails, the serpents’ scales, the pull of their hundreds of tentacles as they dragged their prey slowly under. He’d reach for my hand in the dark – and fall asleep holding it.
I roll down the window and the damp evening air chills my cheeks. I allow myself to remember – to let a crack of light in through the careful walls I built. It wasn’t easy being from a family whose light once shone bright and then was slowly extinguished. That change in energy bonded us – Sammy, Brendan and me. It certainly toughened us up, knowing our home could flit from light to shadow like the surface of the lake as the clouds passed overhead. But maybe that was just how my character formed. Brendan was more likely to use his fists to vent his feelings. Sammy, the quietest of us all, sailed through school like the brown-speckled signets we watched grow into swans, those frantic legs never stopping to think, never stopping to absorb the hurtful things all children say about our mother’s unbrushed hair, our empty lunchboxes. We felt different. Even unloved sometimes, as she got worse. I always felt one beat out of step with everyone else when she went through her down days. It was made worse having her warmth and then losing it. The cold felt all the more acute. But it was other people’s parents that I still cannot forgive. ‘How’s your poor mother?’ Ms Peterson would say, when Father finally noticed there wasn’t much in the fridge during one of Mother’s bad weeks and sent us for milk. Emphasis on the poor. A pitiful tilt of her head.
We were helpless to do anything about it. Powerless against the beast that had dragged our own mother under and held her there, just beneath the surface, just beyond her will.
Just beyond us.
It’s an amazingly still evening. Lake Lagan masquerades as peaceful. But there’s a roar in its belly during the storms that curl in from the Atlantic. Even when there isn’t a hint of wind in the air, the hungry current and silty dips are always there – waiting, biding their time. This deceitful water: it took everything from me. It swallowed me whole.
I take the once-familiar turn into the woods for Roe’s house. A Forest Protection Area sign illuminates in my headlights and I bump further into the trees as the road narrows, trying to avoid the worst of the potholes. Roe has lived here alone since we left. Some people let tragedy dictate the rest of their lives; others want to pretend it never happened at all. Roe is one of those who lives her life as if her sister had never walked into the lake without looking back, twenty feet from her back door.
Roe had forgiven me for leaving the minute I could, but I’d never forgiven her for staying – for allowing that trauma to cling to me by her very desire to remain in that house. She was stoking the embers of a fire that should have burnt out twenty years ago. I know that even just seeing her face will bring everything back.
But I also know it’s time.
Steeling myself, I turn the Discovery into the drive of the small white house perched at the lake’s edge. Night has almost fallen when I step out onto the muddy driveway. Birds frantically call out, hawking a final desperate cry before day fades. I slam my car door, noticing the yellow light streaming from the back kitchen window.
It’s impossible not to look up – the trees all around here are tall and bare – like the sides of a telescope with the pinprick freckle of stars at the end. I hold out my hand to steady myself against the car roof, staring skywards still.
The memories are disorientating – all those nights lying on the old trampoline pointing out Orion’s Belt, the Plough, and my favourite constellation – Cassiopeia. I can almost feel Sammy’s cold bare arm next to mine, her flesh pressed against me, a comfort against those long ebony nights. Brendan would be on the other side, his fingers entwined in mine, pretending he was brave but anything but. He was ten and still wet the bed. A tough guy, the prankster, but still such a little boy underneath it all. Grow up, we’d tease. But he never did. I take a deep breath and try to stop the tears spilling down my cheeks. The side door opens hesitantly. And the bent silhouette of a woman leans out into the night.