It feels like falling. A tumbling into darkness, down to the ocean floor. I drift in and out, surfacing only to feel the blow again, the memory of his violence rearing up and crashing over me like a wave, sending me to the bottom of the sea. I’m not sure how long I spend down there, but, when I wake, it’s with a dizzying sense of dislocation, the certain feeling that something is wrong. My bones hurt and there’s a tug deep inside me – the painful pull of muscles retracting. Through the darkness, I feel fingers flickering over me, plucking ineffectually at my clothes, someone’s breath hot against my face.
‘Get up,’ the voice says. ‘You must get up.’
The room is lit by an overhead light – a swinging bulb that hurts my eyes when I look at it. But then a face comes into view: Verona’s eyes are wild as she leans over me.
‘Get up,’ she says again, urgency in her voice.
My heart is beating quickly now. Alive with panic, I haul myself up, stare frantically around the room – at the bedclothes that have fallen to the floor, the closed door, the empty bassinet. The breath catches in my throat.
The mounting anguish I have felt over the past couple of days rises to a peak of terror as Verona’s words shake me. ‘He’s taken her,’ she says. ‘She’s gone.’
We hammer on the door, both of us shouting, screaming. I pull at the door handle, shaking and rattling the wood in the frame with a rising frustration.
‘It’s no use – it’s locked fast,’ Verona says.
‘The window.’
She tries it, but it’s been nailed shut. She bangs and shakes it in the frame. Outside, night has fallen, a cold wind whipping against the glass, rain lashing the pavements below. Distant sounds of traffic on the main road reach us but no voices; with the weather threatening to tip over into a storm, the street is deserted. No one hears us. No one comes.
‘If he hurts her,’ I begin, but Verona snaps back quickly: ‘That’s not going to happen.’
She elbows the window hard and a snaking crack appears in the glass, but, when she strikes it again, the glass holds.
The room is almost bare, stripped back – there’s not even a chair or a plant pot to hurl at it. The bassinet is made of flimsy plastic wicker, the walls are void of pictures and mirrors, even the tray has been removed. The bed and the heavy bureau are the only solid pieces of furniture.
My eyes fall on the bureau.
I pull the top drawer out, dump the clothes on to the bed. The wood is old and porous with woodworm, but it has heft, which is what’s required. Verona takes it from me – despite the fractious energy brought about by my panic, the effort of lifting the drawer has left me weak and shaking. It’s as if my muscles have wasted.
She swings it once against the window and the crack lengthens across the pane. A second swing breaks it, a third pops the glass from the frame. A cold wind gusts through the room, and Verona leans from the window, her hands on the jagged edges of the frame, opens her mouth and bawls.
It seems to take forever, and Verona is almost hoarse when a light goes on in the house opposite, the pale oval of a face appearing in the window. Verona gestures madly, and moments later a man’s voice reaches up to us from behind the fence of the garden down below.
‘Are you all right up there?’ he asks.
‘Call the guards! Quickly!’ Verona yells, panic sounding in her voice.
The man turns, and we hear him on the phone, the raised intonation – a jittery excitement in his voice – and I feel the panic of my own prayers running through me in a continuous stream: Please keep her safe, please keep her safe …
Verona turns and looks back at me, and I realize that I am groaning. There’s a pain deep inside me that feels like a sharp emptiness, as if my innards have been scoured with the blade of a metal tool. I just want my baby back – a wanting so great it consumes me.
The minutes stretch, the wait agonizing.
‘Hang on,’ Verona tells me, her face puckering with concern. ‘It won’t be long now.’
Eventually, they come.
Blue lights flashing in the distance, the screech of brakes, the loud crack and splinter of wood as the front door crashes open, footsteps thundering on the stairs, and then, at last, the door is open and we are free.
The silence that has gripped this house for all the long hours of our captivity is shattered, and the noise that fills it feels overwhelming: the clamour of voices, the sudden static from police radios, uniformed officers moving quickly through the rooms, boots pounding over the floorboards, and up and down the stairs. Initial statements are taken – our accounts laced with panic – and then one of the guards steps out on to the landing and I can hear the urgency in his voice as he speaks quickly into his radio.
More cars arrive, more voices, the rooms downstairs filling with movement, activity.
I feel slightly delirious as a female guard puts a mug of warm tea into my hands, tells me: ‘Get that into you, love. It’ll help with the shock.’ Someone else has put a blanket around my shoulders. Through the open door of the bedroom, I can feel the sharp draught coming up the stairs and see the flash of blue lights reflected on the landing wall. And then a man appears in the doorway, tall and stocky, a brown leather jacket open to reveal a grey shirt, the buttons straining over his belly. He nods to the guard who’s with us and then flashes his badge. ‘Detective Inspector Derek Trimble. This is Garda Lisa Hanley.’ She’s small and thin with an angular face and dirty-blonde hair scraped back into a ponytail.
‘Which one of you is the mother?’ he asks, and I tell him I am, my voice emerging in a croak.
‘Grand so. Verona? Would you mind going with Garda Hanley here and answering a few questions for her?’
Verona shoots me a glance loaded with concern, and Trimble sees it. ‘Just to get a few details. It won’t take long.’
Verona reaches out and squeezes my wrist, then gets to her feet and follows the female officer out of the room.
Trimble’s jacket creaks as he sits down on the bed. There’s a distance of a few feet between us, but I can still catch the muskiness of his aftershave mingling with other smells: coffee, cigarettes – an avuncular smell.
His voice softens. ‘How’re you doing there, Faye?’ His kindness and concern almost have me falling into his arms.
‘You have to find her,’ I say. ‘My baby – you have to find her.’
‘All right,’ he tells me, calm, assured, but with a gravity to his voice. ‘We’ve put out a call to despatch, we’re setting up roadblocks, and we’ve cars out looking for them now.’
‘You’ve got to find her,’ I say again, a tremble in my voice.
‘We’ve issued a description,’ he tells me, then nods to his colleague out in the hall. ‘Garda Hanley spoke to Michael – she was here earlier today. We know who he is, what he looks like. We’ve got eyes on the roads now, checking for him. We’ll find him.’
I can see across the hall to where Verona stands with her arms crossed, murmuring her answers to the questions put to her. Just behind her, the bathroom door lies open, and I watch as Garda Hanley peers inside.
DI Trimble adjusts his weight on the bed next to me, his leather jacket creaking.
‘How long have you been here, Faye?’ he asks. He has small eyes that are set close together, pock marks on his cheeks and along his jaw. His nose is bulbous and darker than the rest of his face. A drinker’s nose.
‘A couple of days, I think. Everything has been such a blur. There was a board up over the window – we couldn’t tell what time of the day or night it was.’ I think furiously, trying to remember. ‘The 31st of December was my due date. I was at home in the afternoon, asleep, when Michael came to the house. He said there’d been an accident, that Ed was hurt.’
‘Ed?’
‘My husband. Michael said he’d take me to him. But then he brought me back here, and I realized it was all lies. Just a way to trap me here.’
‘But why would he do that?’
For a fleeting moment, his air of avuncular bonhomie is clouded by a tightening of his features, his eyes sharpening in their gaze.
‘Because he’s sick, disturbed,’ I tell him, taken by a new urgency. ‘My husband, Ed – I think Michael did something to him. I think he hurt him.’
‘All right, slow down –’
‘No, you don’t understand! Michael is dangerous! He wanted Ed out of the way, and when he never came home –’
‘Hang on, just slow down and start at the beginning.’
His look is steady, even a little stern.
And so I retrace the last couple of days, starting with the moment I awoke to a pounding on my door. It is so strange, describing that moment, because it feels so distant. I can hardly imagine returning to my bedroom, my home, the life I had lived. Everything has changed. I explain how Michael tricked me into coming here, how he trapped me and then Verona in the house, but, when I reach the part about the birth, I have to stop, too traumatized to relive it.
Behind him, in the hall, I catch a glimpse of the other officer hunkered down on the bathroom floor. When she straightens up, I see her holding up a bag and sealing it – evidence, I think.
‘When did you last speak to your husband?’ Trimble asks, drawing my attention back into the room.
‘It was that morning, before he went off for a cycle. Later that day, he sent me a photograph from up above Enniskerry – a view of Dublin Bay from the mountains. That was the last time I heard from him.’
‘Have you tried calling him?’
I shake my head. ‘I couldn’t. I left my phone at home, and Michael broke Verona’s.’
He takes out his own phone and I call out Ed’s number. He puts the phone to his ear and listens, then shakes his head.
‘Right. Just give me a moment, pet,’ he says kindly, then gets up and lumbers out of the room.
I can see him, just beyond the doorway, exchanging words with Garda Hanley. She frowns and shakes her head, then offers DI Trimble the file she’s been carrying under her arm. They speak some more, and she makes a hurried phone call; and there’s urgency in it now as he opens the file, flicks through it, and then his eyes rise and meet mine.
My heart is beating hard in my chest now. When Trimble steps back into the room, I say: ‘Your colleague in the hall … You said she came to see Michael earlier today. Why?’
He frowns slightly. ‘Michael had broken some of the conditions of his release.’
‘His release?’ My voice shakes.
‘Yes. He was released from detention a year ago but he was mandated to attend monthly meetings with a psychiatrist, which he has failed to do.’ He sees the doubt in my eyes, and adds: ‘You said it yourself – he’s not well, disturbed.’
‘What did he do?’ I ask. ‘To be put away like that?’
‘He assaulted an elderly man. His stepfather.’
‘Badly?’
‘Bad enough. Put him in hospital for a spell.’
Something ugly has entered the space between us. The room is suddenly too clammy, too small.
My mind scrabbles over all this information.
‘He wouldn’t hurt the baby,’ I say, quietly insistent. ‘Whatever else he might do, I know he couldn’t bring himself to do that.’ Even as I say the words, I know it’s not true. The injured stepfather, the librarian he attacked all those years ago – this history of violence creeps into the room with us, rubbing against the walls. Trimble’s scepticism fills the silence. And then I remember how Michael had turned on me, how his blow had sent me crashing backwards – the suddenness of his aggression, his fury.
‘He had some crazy idea that he could steal us,’ I tell him, ‘me and the baby. That he could steal us and make us a family of his own.’
Tremble exhales. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘he does appear to feel a special affinity with you and the child.’ I can tell he’s saying this to be kind. Underneath these words, his doubt remains. ‘How long has it been since he left with her?’
‘I don’t know. A couple of hours. Maybe more. I was asleep, you see. I didn’t wake. She didn’t cry out –’
‘All right, that’s okay,’ he says gently. My voice has risen on a fresh arc of panic. ‘And have you any idea where he might have gone?’
‘No. I don’t know. I can’t think.’
‘Any place he might regularly visit – a friend, perhaps? A family member.’
‘There’s his mother’s house in Wexford. But I can’t think he’d go there. They didn’t get along.’
‘In the past, might there have been somewhere special to him – somewhere he’d consider a safe place?’
‘This was always his safe place. This house.’
‘Try to think, Faye. If there’s anywhere that might come to mind.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. We really didn’t know each other very well – not any more.’
‘We found his van parked out the back,’ Trimble tells me. ‘Does he have access to any other vehicle?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘It’s likely he’s on foot so. But I’m taking it that he hasn’t just taken her out for a stroll around the neighbourhood to give you a bit of a break,’ he says drily. He nods to the door, the padlock hanging off it.
‘She’ll be hungry,’ I tell him. ‘It’s been hours since she’s fed. And it’s so cold outside. I don’t even know if he’s wrapped her in a blanket.’
A rush of sudden pain makes me lean forward. My breasts ache, swollen with milk.
He puts his arm around me, and I feel the firmness of his grip trying to hold me together.
‘You need to see a doctor, pet,’ he tells me. ‘You’re burning up.’
But I shake my head furiously. ‘I can’t. Not until I have her back. Not until I know she’s safe.’
At the door, Garda Hanley appears, cold-eyed. She signals to Trimble, and once again he leaves the room. She speaks to him, her voice low, and he nods and brings a hand to his forehead, rubs it thoughtfully. When he comes back to me, his manner is grave and I steel myself for what’s coming.
‘A cyclist was found early yesterday, in the woods out past Enniskerry,’ he tells me solemnly. ‘He was taken to Vincent’s. No ID on him, but we think there’s a possibility he might be your husband.’
‘Is he alive?’ I ask, my throat made tight, constricted by the words, by the awful possibility.
‘Yes,’ Trimble says, but his frown semaphores the seriousness of his condition.
‘How bad is he?’
‘It’s serious. He’s unconscious, but that’s about all I can tell you.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘All in good time –’
‘I want to see my husband!’
‘You’ll need some medical assistance yourself first.’ And, just as he says it, there’s a commotion on the stairs, a flash of bright yellow on the landing, the high-vis jackets of the paramedics; one of them comes into the room, while the other turns into the bathroom to tend to Verona.
‘Faye?’ the paramedic, a man with a long kindly face, says, as he puts down his bag and hunkers down in front of me. ‘My name’s Ian. I’m going to examine you – is that okay?’
‘Yes.’
Ian turns to Trimble and asks him to wait in the hall.
‘One last thing,’ Trimble says to me before he leaves. ‘Cast your mind back and if there’s anything you can remember – a place he might have mentioned he liked going, somewhere he felt safe, or somewhere that might have held a certain meaning for him. Somewhere nostalgic, somewhere special.’
‘Let’s give us some room to do my job, eh?’ Ian says.
And, just as Trimble turns to go, a thought occurs to me. The blurred memory of a conversation. It’s nothing more than a hunch, a fragment of intuition, and yet it pulls at me now with such power that there’s a note of urgency in my voice as I call: ‘Inspector?’
He looks back at me.
‘I think I know where he might have gone.’