Eleven hours later, the vibration of my phone jolts me awake. Darkness swirls outside the bedroom window and for a moment I’m completely disorientated – the tangle of sleep pulling me back down. Then I hear Clarke’s clear voice in my ear. I recognise the outline of the wardrobe by the door, my brother’s old bed floating above my head. Only empty space where that little hand no longer dangled down seeking mine.
‘DS Fields,’ he’s saying apologetically, but there’s a quickness to his voice too – the unmistaken edge of urgency. ‘I tried to get you last night.’
I attempt a groggy apology, but he’s talking too fast. I’m trying to find my clothes in the gloom. I flick the nearest light switch on and the overhead bulb illuminates, harsh yellow against the whispery dawn.
‘Audrey Jones has confessed to deliberately starting the fire that killed her husband,’ he tells me, and I almost hit my head on the wooden post above as I jump up from the bunk.
Half an hour later, I’m outside the guesthouse, it’s still dark. I watch Clarke striding up and down making calls, his silhouette outlined against the light from the front streetlights. His chin is illuminated blue as he speaks steadily into the phone, absorbed in conversation, focused. My head, on the other hand, is a jumble of cobwebs. I shiver and fold my arms tighter around myself, even though the car heater is up full blast. It feels as if we’re taking one step forward, two steps back. There is something about this place – a piercing sadness I no longer want to be part of. I’d crept out of Roe’s, trying not to wake her, remembering at the last moment to throw the box of photos into the trunk of my car. I plan to show Sammy – to go through them together, and to keep some of the clothes for the baby.
Clarke waves when he sees me and strides towards where I’m pulled in, examining his phone as he sits heavily into the passenger seat. The dense air that surrounds me disperses a little with his presence in the jeep – it lightens immediately, dilutes – like adding water to oil.
‘You okay?’ Clarke looks at me, concerned. I swat his words away, exasperated, as if they are flies in the air.
‘Talk to me,’ I command. I see he is wearing a new jacket which he must have picked up yesterday. I feel a jolt of something, guilt maybe. I’m still wrapped in his.
‘I got a call from Mulligan last night late. He said he’d been trying to get you…’ Clarke looks at me carefully. ‘He said that Audrey came into the station last night. She broke down and confessed that she started the fire on purpose.’
‘But why?’
Clarke shrugs. ‘I guess we’ll find out later. She’s resting now, but the next interview is scheduled for eleven.’
I check the car’s digital clock. 7:45. Shards of weak daylight are beginning to crack through the blackness above.
‘I’ve been going through the statements from that night of the Wills’s fire, though,’ Clarke continues. ‘And Gerald Barrows was the officer that led that entire investigation. He wasn’t just first on the scene. He signed off on everything. Including the documentation to release the baby’s death certificate. Including not forensically examining the house for the child’s remains.’
I widen my eyes.
‘Why didn’t we know this? What about Mulligan?’
‘It was in the original case file that I managed to get, but there were documents that weren’t digitalised. They were missing.’ Documents don’t go missing. Documents are misplaced for a reason. The tingling feeling returns. ‘Something else too, Detective.’ Clarke taps the scruffy file. ‘This woman we are due to see this morning. May O’Regan?’
I look at him blankly. My head is still fuzzy after the much-needed sleep.
‘She’s the older lady who was in the Wills’s house back when the fire started, that the reporter Cynthia was speaking about,’ Clarke says patiently. ‘We’re due to see her this morning at the nursing home.’
I nod slowly, trying to get my head back in the game. I can’t have my personal stuff getting in the way of the investigation. I can’t be that person.
Clarke is still talking.
‘In her statement, this witness May says that Nancy had a huge fight with someone before she left for work that night – the night of the fire.’
We both know that a fight means an emotional reaction which means passion, resentment, fear, anger.
‘Does she know who with?’
‘Hugh. She said the argument was between Nancy and her then husband Hugh.’
I start to remember from Cynthia’s article. I’d read about the elderly woman, a neighbour who was there when the fire started. The fire report had also included a statement from her. I take it from Clarke’s hand and scan it quickly. She’d dozed off apparently. The report also said that the fire could have been smouldering upstairs for some time, those tiny fibres of the plug slowly simmering until they finally took off.
We need to speak to May about what else she might have noticed about that night six years ago.
May O’Regan lives at Tudor Lawns Nursing Facility – an hour and a half’s drive north of Currolough. The weather is miserably damp, the sky emerging a dirty-morning grey as we slosh through the glistening roads, past depressing housing estates and treeless fields. There is the underbelly of any pretty part of a country – the side of the rundown youth centres and half-built houses, the sprawling superstores and tarmacked car parks that make up the ugly engine tourists don’t want to see. As a child I’d always been fascinated by the range of it all. Of life – how beauty has its counterbalance. For every stunning sunset, there was a maggoty dead bird in the field behind our house. For every mesmerising murmuration, there was a wounded fox that shrieked all night long. The lesson I learnt growing up was that behind every pretty veil, life is as gruesome as it is lovely. It’s heartbreaking and ugly, vast and beautiful. I guess to experience all of that is what it means to truly live. The flipside of this place is no different. I watch an older lady push a trolly full of black plastic bags across a road and sigh.
Nurse Clarke is back on duty. ‘You get on okay with your family?’
‘Yeah,’ I dismiss his question. ‘Just wondering why Gerald didn’t tell us he was overseeing the whole investigation? What reason does he have for lying, or even omitting that?’ I indicate left, towards an old sign announcing Tudor Lawns. The large stone gate posts give an aura of grandeur, but as we pull up in front of Tudor Lawns, it’s clear that’s where any nod towards grandiosity ends. The building itself is surrounded by a long, ugly prefab with crumbling concrete steps. Not a lawn or English rose in sight. Disconcertingly, the information signs as we approach show only two directions – an arrow towards the morgue and the health centre car park itself. I’ve been to hospitals and nursing homes before, but never like this. Even Clarke is uncharacteristically quiet.
‘Imagine this being the last place you spend your days,’ he remarks, craning to get a better view through the windscreen now that we’ve parked, saying aloud what I’ve been thinking since we drove through the gates. What a depressing hellhole.
‘I’m sure people here are well cared for. That’s probably more important than waterfalls and flowers.’ I try to be pragmatic.
‘Is it, though?’ Clarke muses.
He pulls up the collar of his new dark green coat and we walk towards the ramped entrance. Him striding – me waddling next to him, wrapped in the quilted jacket I’ve barely taken off. My downy oversized shield.
Frank still hasn’t called me back and I’m done chasing him. I have a case to get sorted.
Inside the reception, someone has placed a vase with fake tulips on the welcome counter. The place reeks of artificial lemon industrial cleaner and air freshener. A calendar with a positive saying of the day stands cheerfully to one side of the cheap reception desk: Your mind is a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers, or you can grow weeds.
It’s hard to imagine any sort of cultivation takes place here, I think, as a woman with glasses on a chain around her neck tells us to follow her towards a common area where a number of residents sit around reading or watching the television. A re-run of Murder She Wrote drones in the background. Carers bustle around the room. In one corner is a large table with a stiff polka dot table covering. Some residents sit chatting, holding their Styrofoam cups between slow, bony fingers. An older woman in an armchair, wearing sheepskin slippers dozes into her chest. In another corner, there’s an early morning game of bridge going on. To one side, the room branches out into a conservatory where a nurse is helping another elderly resident manoeuvre an electric wheelchair. A few have younger relatives sitting with them. Some talk, heads bent close. Others sit quietly, simply holding hands – the physical act of just touching enough, perhaps. A bored child scatters jigsaw pieces across the tiles. All have the same haunted look in their eyes. Or maybe I’m just projecting.
This room has its own unique smell – potato soup and bleach. Even the garish posters announcing activities like charades or Thursday night book club can’t sugar-coat the inescapable reality of a place like this.
The end of days.
I don’t care what anyone says, nobody aspires to this. My father only lived until he was sixty-five – a sudden heart attack saved him from living out his days this very way. By then we’d lost touch. In fact, I’d only heard about his death weeks later.
The woman we are following from reception crouches down beside a glamorous-looking lady in a chair at the back of the room. May O’Regan, I presume. She has candy-floss hair and a woollen jumper. Her hands, folded in her lap, are jittery as she raises them to greet us. Her face lights up. She’s been expecting us.
We are told that one of the social workers will sit in on the meeting alongside May O’Regan. We’ve been warned discreetly that she has Parkinson’s, which means that memory lapses are quite frequent. May gets up with the assistance of a nurse and grasps for her walker. I feel bad having disturbed her and I say so straight away, but she assures us we are the highlight of her week. We are shown into a small private room labelled Art Therapy, with a couch, a piano and a few easels dotted around the room.
‘Beautiful pictures,’ Clarke says, looking around at the artwork spread out across the room. A large boat sailing into the distance, an owl in a tree and a dark squiggle of something sinister that reminds me of Nancy’s homemade dreamcatchers. ‘Do you paint, Ms O’Regan?’ He turns to address her. May is wearing small tear-drop earrings and a stain of pink lipstick that has leached into the parched lines of her thin lips. She lowers herself slowly, delicately, into the chair the social worker has pulled out for her. She’s bony-old, fragile, as if she may break.
‘Music was more my thing,’ she says wistfully, glancing towards the piano. She pushes her hands back on her lap self-consciously and I feel a surge of pity. ‘Before… I mean,’ she says and looks so sad that I want to take her hands in my own. Then I think of my own mother’s hands, so elegant. Like a piano player’s, father used to always say, but she’d never got the chance to play. Funny how I can remember them so perfectly – every sinew, every flaw. I used to tell people that I met in my teens and at Garda training college about my concert pianist mother. How silly, I think now. How devastatingly sad.
‘May I?’ Clarke indicates towards the piano stool and for one horrible moment I think he’s going to start playing something. It wouldn’t surprise me – hours of lessons probably featured daily at his posh castle school. But he takes a seat instead and pulls out his notebook. I pull out the complete file – the fire report including May O’Regan’s statement. I glance at the social worker who signals that it’s okay to start the interview. It’s 9:15 a.m. and my stomach rumbles.
‘Detective Casey here and I are investigating the house fire a few years back. Nancy Wills’s house. I hope you don’t mind us asking you some questions, Ms O’Regan?’
May nods earnestly, her thin halo of fluff bobbing in time.
‘Ms O’Regan, you were babysitting the night of the fire, just before Christmas that year, isn’t that right?’ I look up and smile politely. Every fibre of my being wants to run out of this room – away from the pathetic paintings, the silent piano, her shakily applied make-up.
‘I was,’ she says, self-importantly. ‘I often babysat for Nancy Wills. I tried to help as much as I could back then.’ She glances at Clarke, who nods encouragingly at her. ‘You look like my son, Sean,’ May says to him suddenly, a flicker of sadness spreading across the thin skin underneath her watery eyes.
He looks embarrassed, but then pulls the piano stool closer. She reaches for his hand, and I look away, towards the door. The overt display of such fallibility is way too much for me. I focus on a purple mountain landscape someone has painted instead.
In fairness to Clarke, he handles it well. He pats her hand reassuringly.
‘I’m sure Sean would be very impressed with how much you are helping us with the investigation,’ he says, confidently.
She keeps hold of his hand. He remains tethered to her, like a good fake son.
I need to get this over with and get the hell out of here.
‘Ms O’Regan. In your statement you say that Nancy had an argument that night.’
She nods again.
‘Yes, she was crying on the phone.’ May is more animated now.
I glance at Clarke.
‘It says here that you heard Nancy and Hugh arguing downstairs when you were changing the baby’s nappy upstairs. Was it at the house or was it on the phone?’
‘Well, they always fought. It was a turbulent marriage. He had to put up with a lot, as you probably know. But the big fight between them was the same night that she was crying on the phone. Two separate arguments. I said that, didn’t I?’ May looks confused for a moment.
‘You said to me yesterday when I rang that Nancy had an argument with Hugh. That he left slamming the door.’ Clarke reads back over his notes, flipping the pages carefully and examining his neat handwritten words.
‘Could it have been Hugh on the phone?’ I ask.
‘No, no definitely not.’ May shakes her head. ‘Hugh was in the garden with Joey when Nancy was crying on the phone. It was just before he left the house. Strange child that one… Caught him playing with matches, and him barely six years old. I never knew what was going on in that head of his.’
I look up sharply. Then pause a moment to let myself think. ‘That night, you saw Joey with matches?’
‘No, no… before. He seemed a bit… off. Not like my Sean when he was little. My son was very smart. But that kid was probably messed up because of what Nancy did.’
I notice May’s hands have stopped shaking. She seems less frail all of a sudden too.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I don’t want to judge…’
She was clearly dying to let us know what she really thought of Nancy. Years of pent-up gossip perhaps. The room is stuffy – the soupy dinner smell overpowering. I feel a wave of heat and shake off the puffer jacket. I reach for the glass of tap water someone left out for me.
‘Tell us, May. We need to know what happened that night. Nancy is convinced someone took her child.’
‘The whole town knew about her,’ May is saying, shrugging. I picture those busybodies in Currolough when I was a child whispering about my mother. What’s wrong with her? The not-so-discreet tap to the temple. The silent mouthing over our heads that they thought we couldn’t see.
I’m losing patience and the heat is overwhelming. I remember what Sammy has told me time and time again about trying to control my emotions. I attempt a deep breath. The owl picture stares back at me from the wall, and I feel a wave of nausea.
‘The whole town knew what, Ms O’ Regan?’ I say with such obvious exasperation that I feel Clarke’s discomfort from across the room.
Tough.
These were the type of people that had pushed my mother too far over the years. And look what happened to her. I try not to think of the two overgrown graves on the hill the other side of the lake. The wet grey headstones, side by side. Twin slabs. I realise my hands are shaking too and I tuck them under my knees.
‘She was off galivanting with that man,’ May continues. ‘She was leaving Hugh. Leaving them all.’
‘What man?’
‘That Garda, whatever his name was, Barrows.’
‘Gerald Barrows?’ Clarke repeats the name slowly.
‘Yes, Barrows. She was carrying on with him. Hugh knew and turned a blind eye, as they say.’ She purses her lips – waits for our reaction.
‘Was he at the house that night?’
‘Hmmm… let me think.’ May glances up, her eyes narrow as she tries to think back to that night six years ago. ‘Hugh left after the argument with Nancy. He slammed that door hard. I remember Vee, the sister, dropped in with a gift later that night. A peace offering, she said. Then it was just me, Joey and the baby Liam. I had a glass of wine. Just the one. I’m sure that’s in the report too.’ She looks defensive for a moment. ‘Then the fire started, I called the emergency number.’
‘The statement says you were asleep in the living room.’ Clarke glances down at his notes and May looks flustered.
‘Yes, the living room. That’s what I said.’
I can feel Clarke’s eyes on me, but mine are on May’s.
‘And you didn’t go upstairs?’
‘Not after Nancy left. It was only a short time later the fire started.’
We lock eyes.
‘Tell me more about the fight between Nancy and Hugh before they went out,’ I say, still sitting on my hands.
Hugh was shouting. He was telling Nancy to go on back to Gerald. Go off back to him, he was saying. But you won’t take my sons. Over my dead body, May frowns at the memory.
‘I’m sorry. I feel so bad any of this happened while I was there. I mean, maybe if I hadn’t fallen asleep.’ She takes a breath. ‘You don’t think Hugh…’
‘Why didn’t you say any of this to the police?’ Clarke cuts her off gently, patting her hand once more. They’ve begun trembling again. Maybe that’s what happens with Parkinson’s – the tremor came and went.
‘I mean it was Gerald who was interviewing me at the time. What was I supposed to say?’ she whispers.
‘Do you want to continue, Ms O’Regan?’ the social worker interrupts, concerned perhaps at the toll the interview is starting to have on the older woman.
May nods, but her eyes are a distant blue now – the sharpness seems to have faded a little. She looks vulnerable, child-like.
‘Is Sean coming?’ she asks the social worker, a vacant look on her face.
‘Sean’s in New York, remember? He’s coming soon.’ She tucks May’s blanket in a little and smiles coldly at me. The matron told me earlier that none of May’s children have ever visited or are likely to. She’d fallen out with them years before. The nurse shook her head in disbelief when she told me that – the naked judgement of how little she thought of May’s adult children abandoning her to a place like this. But there are always fragments to every story that nobody understands – pieces of jagged moments that make no sense unless you make them fit into something that resembles a whole.
‘I’m sorry, May needs to rest now.’ The social worker begins to help May up. She is much weaker than before, her hands grasping for the silver support frame.
‘I wish it never happened,’ May says, more lucidly, as she shuffles out of the room – her eyes never leaving the piano as she goes. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this.’
Clarke and I stand watching the slump of May’s shoulders as she hobbles down the corridor inch by painstaking inch. The wobbly fuzz of white hair growing smaller and smaller until she disappears around the corner. I’m watching so intently that I jump when his phone buzzes. Clarke steps away to speak into it.
Could Hugh have taken baby Liam? If Hugh knew that Nancy was leaving him, did that mean he was capable of taking his baby elsewhere to punish his wife? It was entirely possible. But how did that connect to the boy Nancy saw in Drumlish – Dexter? My head aches. I need Frank to call me back.
Then Clarke is beside me, still talking on the phone as we start walking towards the nursing home exit, side by side, the top of my head in line with his shoulder.
‘When?’ he’s saying into his mobile phone, and there’s something in his voice that sounds like alarm. Something big has happened. In the courtyard of Tudor Lawns, through the window, I see someone has tried to plant a few bulbs. They’ve withered before they even got started. A barren garden with cracked plant pots.
Clarke and I step out into the pale chalky day. My eyes water with the effort of not throwing up. The smell of this place lingers on my skin.
‘It’s Tim,’ Clarke says, his eyes troubled, as we approach the Discovery. ‘Nancy’s missing.’