Swirling grey clouds weave their way slowly across the sky when I step out the back door of Currolough station after speaking to Audrey Jones. I’ve four missed calls from Clarke.
‘Ally?’ He sounds like he’s been running, like he can’t get the words out fast enough. ‘Nancy’s at her old burnt-out house. I’m on my way there.’
‘Wait, what?’
I’m still so discombobulated after my conversation with Audrey that it’s hard to pull myself back into the moment, back to Nancy.
Clarke continues patiently.
‘Gerald Barrows called me. He said that Nancy rang him at Haycote Manor, completely hysterical. She begged him to bring Dexter to her at the old house on Eastbourne Road.’
I’m already running myself, manoeuvring my bump through the cars in the small police vehicle car park behind Currolough station.
‘Barrows is obviously not planning to show up,’ Clarke confirms.
‘I’ll meet you there, Casey.’
I clamber into the Discovery and tap the details into Google Maps. It directs me towards Eastbourne coast road. Time wise, I’ll definitely get there well before Clarke.
Lake Lagan is three kilometres wide and about fifteen long – it’s a huge daisy-shaped circle, stretching from Drumlish to BallinÓg, where the tip of it dips near the seashore, and folds back on itself towards Currolough. There’s no place that escapes those long ribbony inlets that slurp hungrily from its muddy banks. Nancy’s old house is still visible from the road, Roe confirmed – far in the distance – an eerie tourist attraction at the end of a long grassy lane that slopes towards the water.
My phone beeps beside me as I drive quickly towards the house. It’s a text from Frank. He usually calls. Texts mean he can’t talk. Overcome with a surge of something venomous, perhaps as a result of having just faced another person who’d asked for love and got hurt instead, I veer clumsily onto the grassy verge in front of some farmer’s gate and pull on the hand brake. I jab the phone icon, but it cuts off after two rings. Disconnected.
He’s cut me off.
‘Don’t get me started,’ I murmur, braver because of the distance between us. I press the green button again, with a determination fuelled mostly from frustration. I know I’m that woman, and I don’t deserve sympathy. Believe me, all of this makes me hate myself more than I already do. But it is time for decisions to be made.
Sammy would call this self-sabotage. And while I spent years squandering any chance of happiness, along comes a baby. A real-life human child that needs me. Things have to be different now. It’s time to make some grown-up decisions. But confronting Frank means being abandoned again. My biggest fear. That’s probably why I’ve clung to Frank like this baby is clinging to me – trusting that the person on the other end of this thin tether will do right by them.
I should have learnt from my mother that that silvery bond can be used against you – looped around you tightly. Weaponised.
I call Frank’s phone again and again, buoyed by the surge of bravery, before my battery beeps mournfully back at me. I leave messages – some emphasising the need to discuss the investigation urgently, others poisonously personal.
I realise that I don’t have time for this shit any more. I throw my phone onto the passenger seat and pull out onto the road once more.
I hate myself. The baby kicks and kicks and kicks.
When I’m finally close to the pathetic peaks of Nancy’s old house, crouched low at the end of one field, I steer the Discovery to the right, down the narrow track towards it. The air through my open window is sharp with the scent of damp foliage. As I get closer, I see that the charred house is roofless. Branches, dark against the day, sway and reach from it as if trying to claw their way out. The upstairs windows foam with hawthorn-shaped shadows. Shards of burnt beams jut awkwardly. This is the broken bones of the former Wills’s home. This is the place baby Liam supposedly died.
I think of a line from a song I once heard.
Home is the place with the light in the window.
Right now, only darkness prevails. The downstairs windows are boarded up with graffitied plywood. The chimney remains intact – looming from the bulk of the house, sooty black and stoic. I drive on for another minute and take an awkward, overgrown turn towards an entrance that leads to the derelict house. The lake, further on, glints metallic against the early afternoon sky. I ease the vehicle down towards it, the briars tickling the sides as I crunch slowly forward. I’m only a few metres from the house when I see the car. A blue Mazda – the car Tim said Nancy had been driving. It’s parked behind a cluster of thick leylandii, concealed from the road. My heartbeat quickens. Gerald had been truthful, after all. I consider waiting for Clarke’s arrival, or the backup he called, but I am anxious to make sure Nancy is safe. They’ll be ten minutes behind me.
Fiddling in the boot of the Discovery, I find a torch and zip up my jacket. Mud immediately covers my flat boots as I squelch through the deep puddles that pockmark what might once have been the front lawn. An old boiler has been discarded to one side, boards of blackened steel and wood are scattered by the front door, punctuated by straggly weeds.
This is the scene of a terrible story.
I picture that night – imagine the roar of heat, the panic, the trauma of a home in flames, a family in tatters. I can almost see the plumes of smoke floating out over the lake that Christmas.
‘Nancy,’ I call out.
I hear the feathery beat of wings before I see the birds. They rise in fright, soaring in one scattered flurry past the charred beams and away out into the day.
‘Nancy,’ I call again, louder this time. There’s no way I’ll get into the front door – it’s nailed shut with boards, the windows too. Around the side of the house, there’s evidence that a family once lived here – a metal swing-set, with one seat dangling down, the chain rusted away. An old paddling pool is overflowing with a murky concoction of leaves and mildew. A tricycle sits miserably motionless on the back patio steps. The baby jabs twice in quick succession and I stop to cling to the lumpy exterior walls to catch my breath a moment.
‘Breathe, Ally,’ I hiss through my teeth, my right hand massaging my side. Most women are planning baby showers and shopping for cradles at this point. Here I am in a field in the middle of nowhere, with a full bladder and shit on my shoes.
‘Nancy,’ I shout again, but it’s half-hearted. My energy is depleting. I should have eaten. So much for trying to do the right thing – I haven’t had anything since the soup at Roe’s last night.
A sudden noise – a low thump from inside the house – drives me on. Perhaps Nancy is lying injured? I glance over my shoulder and consider my options, but I know I’ll have to go on in ahead.
The back garden of the house is extremely long and sloped. A torn trampoline lies at the end of it, a swirl of thorny bushes. The back door is also boarded up, but on one corner the nails have come loose, or been pulled loose. There’s a gap large enough for someone like Nancy to squeeze through. Taking a deep breath, I clamp the torch under my arm and fold myself as small as I possibly can, manoeuvring my body around my bump to protect it. I hunker forward slowly, the splintered wooden edges scraping the skin on my back painfully as I squeeze my bulk through.
Once inside, the nausea hits. I spend a moment leaning forward, breathing deeply, my eyes watering as I try to visualise the feeling away. The atmosphere has changed dramatically. Inside this place, it’s dark and dank. The brisk freshness from outside replaced with a heaviness, a sombreness that mixes with the burnt air. Shards of glass crunch underfoot as I spin slowly to get my bearings in the dim light. This must be the kitchen – I shine my torch across the remains of it. There’s a stainless-steel sink under the window and empty, partly painted gaps along one wall where white goods once lay. Long stolen by now I imagine. Scrambling forward, I make my way through the doorframe ahead of me into a hallway. It smells musty too, like cat urine. Or perhaps that belongs to the squatters, who may also be responsible for the smashed beer bottles, sheets of cardboard and scattered garments that line the floor. The torch beam is thin, but it catches on something – a once-bright child’s drawing stuck clumsily to a wall. It’s crumpled and water damaged but seems to have escaped the blaze and the subsequent neglect. It’s a picture of a woman and a man and a little boy holding their hands. It must have belonged to Joey. Its simplicity is heartbreaking. ‘ME’ is written in childish scrawl and a big arrow above the little boy’s head. An X is drawn over something else beside them. I consider taking it with me – somebody would surely treasure such a precious thing. But as I move the torch over the rest of the wall – there are more pictures, paintings mostly of wobbly rainbows and spidery sunshines, an almost-burnt photo of a man and what seems to be a child on a beach, and one drawing, a page full of dark squiggles that the light pauses on. A dreamcatcher is tacked awkwardly beside the items. I realise this is a shrine to what they once were. There’s a scuffling above me, the scrape of broken glass shifting across floorboards, and I turn, walking carefully through the debris towards what’s left of the stairs.
‘Nancy,’ I call out again gently. ‘I know you’re here. I saw your car outside.’
No sound. But I know that someone is definitely there.
The structure ahead of me looks precarious. Still, I think, the sooner I get Nancy safely home, the sooner we can move forward with this case. Maybe now we understand that Barrows isn’t responsible for the Bayview fire, there will be something less sinister at play about a tragedy that took place in this house. We’ll still have to get a formal statement from Audrey Jones adjusting her confession and interview her daughter about her involvement, but the guilt that it has taken a twelve-year-old to do something so drastic to end her father’s reign of terror on the household will be a lot to take. I saw that in Audrey’s eyes as I left the room when her solicitor asked for some time alone with his client.
I place a muddy heel on the first step of the gnarled wood of the stairs and say a quick prayer. It holds solid. If Nancy has come up here this way, then it must be stronger than it looks. My left foot follows, and I pull myself up, relying heavily on a large beam that must have, years before, fallen from upstairs and landed by the broken spine of the stairs. I reach the return of the stairs in one piece, but the wood groans and splinters under my weight. Idiot, I chide myself. Why am I putting the baby at risk like this? Icarus Fields strikes again. It’s like I just can’t help myself. And as I’m reminding myself that standing on the edge of everything isn’t just about me any more, I see a quick movement above my head – a flash of something in one of the rooms, and then it’s gone again.
Ignoring the missing steps, I take an awkward leap for the top step, sliding up onto the landing above. Not graceful exactly, but pretty damn close. The hot sting of blood on my elbow is the result. Twisting the torch from the pocket of my puffer jacket, I illuminate the upstairs of Nancy Wills’s house, mostly cast in shadows from the boarded-up windows. Thin shards of daylight light it up in places. Back at the HQ at Precinct 12, Detective Cummins says you can feel tragedy, sense it… like a smell. It chokes you, he says, pulls you into it. And I always roll my eyes when he says that to a room of wide-eyed rookie detectives. I’ve done plenty of death calls, a plethora of tragedy throughout my career, and I’ve always been too busy finding out the truth behind things to even think about the stench of the walls.
And I don’t know if it’s the animalistic aroma, or the invasion of the outside in, or the overwhelming acrid taste in my mouth, but it’s the first time I understand a little of what Cummins means. This place reeks of tragedy. It weighs you down.
Easing open the burnt remains of a section of dehydrated wooden door, I catch my breath when I see what lies on the other side. The plywood window board has been pulled back slightly. The narrow gap lights the room from the back of the house. It casts the room in an eerie glow.
A noise behind me makes me whip around, my plait hitting my face gently. A large object moves through the air and crashes into the back of my head, knocking me over. Blackness threatens.
Don’t faint, I beg myself. Don’t faint, Ally. The pain hits seconds later – a concrete sting vibrating throughout my skull. It brings me back to the last time I was knocked onto my head. That same shocking crack.
Large shards of glass lie on the floor beside me. Drops of blood fall around me. The smell of it makes me gag and I try to pull myself up but there’s someone beside me. Nancy Wills has fallen to the floor with the exertion of the strike; she’s crouched on all fours. Her dark hair is loose, trailing on the floor in front of her, like a long black veil. She makes moaning noises as I crawl over to her, ash and saliva mixing my drag marks a sticky black, like tar.
She looks at me as if I’m an apparition. It wasn’t me she was expecting at all. Was it Barrows that particular weapon was meant for?
‘Are you hurt?’ I’m asking between heaves, praying there’s no permanent damage to my skull which now feels like half of it is missing. ‘Are you hurt, Nancy?’
She’s definitely in shock. Her eyes are fixed on the floor, her misshapen knuckles pale against the black of everything else. She’s murmuring something over and over.
‘Why did you take him?’ Her eyes come into focus briefly, and she looks at me, confused. She’s weeping. I see an almost-empty bottle of vodka on the floor beside her, and her strange state makes a little more sense. ‘Why did he take my baby?’ she slurs. ‘The cot was here. It was right here. Liam was here.’
Her words are garbled. I think of the shrine downstairs – of the desperate attempt to honour her broken family.
‘I let him go. This is all my fault.’
‘What happened, Nancy?’ I ask, but it’s like she doesn’t even register where she is. Again, more urgently I call her name, swallowing down the nausea and trying to stand.
‘I have nothing,’ she finally says robotically, her eyes still fixed on the charred floor, her back to me. ‘I have nothing left at all. Do you understand that? He’s taken it all from me.’
She turns suddenly, gripping my arm, her eyes are wild. ‘I did this,’ she whispers suddenly, swaying.
I pull away from her as Nancy continues crying, now shivering uncontrollably. I touch my own shaking hand to my head. It turns a sticky red.
I’m not sure I can drive, judging by how banged up I am. If she’d been sober, Nancy probably would have killed me, but her uncoordinated swipe means I’ve escaped lightly. If her plan was to knock out Barrows and take Dexter back, it would never have worked. But I have a feeling the only plan Nancy really had was to numb the pain of what she was going through again. Her incoherence is heartbreaking.
‘We have to get out of here, Nancy. Can you get up?’ I try to lift her – she’s robin-light, but my own bulk makes me weak. The effort leaves me dizzy. ‘I tried to do the right thing.’ She chokes back a sob. I try not to let my eyes linger on the twist of the skin that folds across her face as she speaks. ‘Come on,’ I command, dragging her arm a little. ‘We have to go. I have to call this in.’
I half-pull her towards the stairs, my breath coming in short sharp bursts. This has never happened to me before – this sheer overwhelm. But there is something about this house, something that makes me want to get out, to escape all of it.
Nancy goes first, gingerly stepping over the large chunks of void to reach the jagged fragments of stairs. Behind her, I focus on clinging to the beam that runs alongside, that way I figure if the steps crumble, I’ve got support. My vision has narrowed; everything is gloopy. Strange shadows dance sideways, and I take a deep breath to try and focus. I can’t let the darkness take over.
‘I loved him, you know,’ Nancy whispers as I grip her arm, trying not to faint. ‘I loved him so much.’ Her face crumples and the pain in her voice is far too familiar. I wonder if she’s talking about baby Liam or Gerald Barrows.
But as we hit the bend in the stairs, there’s a horrible cracking sound, ripping like splitting wood. The wooden beam under my hands is slippery with my blood. I scramble to wrap my arms around it, but my weight topples it slightly. It leans away from me. I hear the empty crack of the torch as it lands on the concrete floor beneath us. There’s nothing to grab hold of.
I cry out. I think I do. Disorientated, there’s a moment where we are suspended, freeze-framed.
Then, with that sickening slow-motion realisation of what’s happening, we both begin to fall.
The last thing I remember is cupping my belly as I topple sideways, then downwards, flailing as my body crashes into the charry blackness below.