She’s trembling, drawing her arms in close to herself. Trying to take up as little room as possible behind the interview table.
‘Audrey, I’m going to leave this here for you. It’s tea. Maybe let it cool a little. I also grabbed this from the vending machine. It’s my favourite, but not everyone likes Turkish Delight. I have at least one of these a day now.’ I laugh lightly, but there is no doubt this is a hellish situation she’s found herself in and I need to get to the bottom of it.
Mulligan says that Audrey is refusing to speak at all today. But there’s a lot I need her to explain because talking to May at the nursing home, something finally clicked for me. Between that and the autopsy report that landed for Eddie Jones an hour ago, I am pretty confident I know what happened inside Apartment 2D at the Bayview the night before last.
A dour, curly-haired solicitor sits next to Audrey. He smiles, with effort. His client is wearing jeans and a black hoodie, scruffy trainers, her hair tucked behind her ears. She’s examining her fingers, eyes down, fiddling with her nails.
‘Audrey?’ I repeat gently. Silence. I give her a couple of seconds. ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’
A tiny shake of the head. She’s wringing her hands over and over. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick.
I sigh dramatically as I flop into the chair. The solicitor eyes me warily.
‘I’m thirty-eight weeks today,’ I tell them, truthfully, trying to infuse casualness into the room so she might be encouraged to talk. ‘Fully cooked, as they say. Head’s well down, hospital bag packed, but 100 per cent emotionally unprepared.’
Audrey still hasn’t looked at me. I adjust my tone. This isn’t a social call.
‘I know Inspector Mulligan says you didn’t want to talk at all today, Mrs Jones. And I understand it’s a particularly tough time for you with your daughter in hospital and your recent bereavement, but I want to speak to you about something important this morning.’
She squeezes her hands together even tighter. I let the quiet fill up the room. After a few moments, she speaks.
‘What is it that you want? I’ve confessed, haven’t I?’
The question isn’t in any way confrontational. It’s said in a small, dazed voice, uncertain.
‘I want to talk to you about your daughter. About Tori.’
She glances up. ‘The thing is, Audrey, I know that you love your daughter. And I know you wouldn’t start a fire while Tori was in the apartment, and certainly not when you weren’t there to protect her.’ Sudden tears glitter in her eyes. Her right hand moves to her mouth, covering it as if she’s afraid of what she might say. ‘We both know you wouldn’t put Tori in that kind of danger.’ I pull my chair in closer.
Nothing.
I lean close to her. She smells of stale clothes and coffee. A night in the station will do that. She seems so diminished as a person; I really feel for her.
‘Did he hurt you, Audrey?’
She flinches. Her chest moves up and down more rapidly. The other hand comes up to her face. She steeples her hands over her mouth and nose and finally raises her eyes. But still, Audrey stays silent.
The solicitor turns sharply to look at his client. Then to glare at me. A warning perhaps – don’t push it.
‘Audrey,’ I tap the file that Mulligan has collated, ‘we’ve spoken to many of your neighbours, and they’ve given us a picture of what your home life was really like. That’s why someone got in touch with Garda Barrows, wasn’t it? Your colleague from the post office. When they started noticing the texts telling you to come straight home, the drive-bys to check up on you, the constant calls… the disgusting names he’d call you.’
She pulls her hoodie sleeves down over her hands, her back hunches. She’s curling inwards. My own heart is hammering in my chest. It was the secondary school student on work experience in the post office that first went to the police – to Barrows, a family friend who lived near her parents. She didn’t know what else to do. She did exactly the right thing.
A tear slides down Audrey Jones’s cheek. I look down and continue, tracing the grain in the wooden table with my index finger, contemplating my next words very carefully.
‘We spoke to your husband’s boss, Audrey. We know that Eddie had been fired for drinking on the job in the weeks before. The tox results are in too. He had most likely been drinking all afternoon. There was no way he was waking up to that smoke alarm. And you didn’t dare open the door to Barrows all those times he called at the door. He was so worried about you that he kept coming back – even when he wasn’t on duty.’
Audrey says something but her voice is too fragile for me to make out what’s she saying.
‘He was kind,’ I think she said.
‘Did Eddie hurt you?’ I ask again, and my mouth is dusty suddenly. A swell in my own throat. I need to hear her say it. Her right hand, still under the sleeves of the hoodie twists the fingers of her left over and over. It’s almost hypnotic.
‘Audrey?’
‘Not always,’ she eventually whispers, her lips dry and cracked.
‘He loved me,’ she says softly, desperately. I’ve seen this so many times. The urge to take responsibility for what was happening when the person who was supposed to love them most had tried to steal their power.
‘But there’s more to it now, isn’t there?’ I steady my own shaking hand. ‘Was Tori scared, Audrey? Scared for you?’ Tears run down the woman’s cheeks, and she wipes them on her sleeves leaving tiny snail trails. The solicitor’s faux-cheerful face is now scrunched in barely concealed horror. ‘Audrey, did he hurt Tori?’
How much can a person take? I think of the innocent life floating within and take a deep breath. And I imagine what I might say, if my walls were thinner, if I opened my own emotional drawbridge the tiniest crack.
I know what it’s like, I’d say, if I was brave enough.
I’ve been hit before too, I wish I could tell her.
Frank broke two of my ribs. He split my lip, kicked me. These are the devastating words I’ve never dared admit. They remain lodged in my throat as I watch Audrey Jones struggle to contain her emotion across the table in front of me.
You see, it’s easy to say it happened on the job when you are a cop turning up injured at a hospital. It’s easy to pretend to be tough when you are anything but. I place a hand against my rib, protectively. Audrey’s tears continue to fall. Silence lies thick across the room.
He hurts me. I want to say to her. If I could. But I don’t. I’ve never told anyone this. Not even Sammy.
He says he loves me, and I am prepared to put up with anything to hold onto that love. I blink back my own tears and clear my throat.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I say out loud, my words heavy with emotion. The solicitor shifts uncomfortably in his chair.
I feel so worthless that it feels like suitable punishment.
I’m holding on because being hurt physically isn’t as bad as the emotional abandonment I know I’ll suffer if he leaves.
I’m so terribly afraid of what comes next.
‘It wasn’t you who set the fire, was it, Audrey?’ I shake my own tears away. But she hasn’t noticed. She’s staring into the distance, her mouth a tight line. ‘Audrey?’
Even her solicitor seems to be holding his breath. Through the window, the traffic rumbles on outside, the beep of a reversing delivery truck in the lane, the whoop of a teen trying to impress his mates.
‘It was Tori who started the fire, wasn’t it? Tori who almost died trying to protect you. Trying to protect her mother…’ My voice breaks as I speak because this is way too close to home.
She finally nods.
I rub a shaking hand over my eyes, down my face, drag it down my skin, over my mouth.
But I’m angry too. For her and for me.
Because Audrey put that poor kid in a position that almost killed her.
She felt as if there was absolutely no way out. And right now, so do I.