Saint Michael’s in Dun Laoghaire was the hospital to which Robbie had been taken after the accident. Often when he found himself there, in the course of his work, Martin Aitken had a mental image that was hard to explain. He would see himself moving through the gleaming corridors with the broken body of his son in his arms. It had not happened the way he remembered it; in fact, his son’s remains had been brought to the hospital in an ambulance. There was little doubt about it: he had died immediately the car hit him. Cranial contusions and massive fracturing. That’s what the forms had said. Pronounced dead on arrival at Saint Michael’s Hospital. But in Aitken’s imagination, and whenever he dreamed about it, the scene was always the same: Robbie would be fearfully crying, trembling in trauma, and he himself would be climbing endless staircases, calling out for help, with his son in his arms.
‘I won’t leave you, Scout. Don’t worry. Daddy’s here.’
It was not as if he had never said those words. But by the time he had got to say them, it was already too late. He remembered now, as he stood waiting for the lift to the public wards, how the call had come to the station on that sweltering afternoon, 8 August 1988. He’d been in the middle of an interrogation when Hughie Tynan had burst in and said there was a caller on the phone who needed him urgently.
At first Aitken had been unable to believe it. He had thought the man on the line was some evil practical joker, some thug he had once put away trying to wreak his sick revenge. He had hung up immediately, searched out the hospital’s number in the phone book and rung it. But the same man had answered. He was the priest whose job it was to do these things. ‘I’m sorry, Detective,’ he’d said, in his studied, gentle voice. ‘But it isn’t a joke, I’m afraid Robbie’s dead.’
He had no memory whatsoever of the next twenty minutes. And his recollection of the whole day was patchy. It seemed to come in flashes of disconnected pictures, as though an album of photographs had been thrown in the air by a child and shuffled back together in too much of a hurry. Valerie in the kitchen holding on to the edge of the sink. The race out to Dun Laoghaire in the back of a squad car. The stark whiteness of the morgue. The noxious reek of formalin. A nun calling Julie in from a hockey pitch to tell her that her brother was dead. A bloodstained folded towel beneath his son’s head, the sight of the weary-looking chaplain putting on the purple stole and the two mortuary attendants taking off their paper hats to pray.
Valerie seemed to derive some kind of peace from the knowledge that Robbie’s death had been instant. But for Aitken that was the worst of all the terrible things about it. Simply put, it didn’t make sense. It mocked the laws of nature, it seemed grotesque and obscene that a spirit so loud and obstreperous could be stilled in such a way, so suddenly, so utterly, without even a chance to prepare yourself for missing it. They didn’t make shrouds to fit a nine-year-old boy, the undertaker had whispered, with an expression on his face that looked strangely like fear. Perhaps you’d like to buy him something yourselves? Or maybe he had a favourite garment?
Aitken remembered being in the funeral parlour two days later, his son’s waxen face in the coffin, small pale hands folded across his Manchester United shirt, a photograph of the Ireland football team removed from his bedroom wall and tucked into the pocket of his shorts. Julie and Claire had been weeping in their Uncle Johnny’s arms. As Valerie bent to kiss her son goodbye she too had broken down in gulping tears. Aitken had gone to her then and tried to hold her, but for almost half an hour she had refused to let go of Robbie’s hands. The sight of her doing that was like having a spear driven through him. It was the worst thing he had ever seen.
Even the undertaker looked close to tears that day. But Aitken had not been able to cry. It was too soon to do that, the whole morning had felt artificial, like something watched on a screen or through a lens, a set of unreal events that had nothing to do with him. He remembered the requiem mass, the gifts being brought up at the offertory, a soccer ball, a skateboard, the bread and the wine. He recalled the Police Commissioner and the Deputy Minister for Justice filing by to shake his hand, their faces ashen and taut. Even as they were doing that, some part of him was wondering why they were there. The line of silent, frightened-looking boys outside the church, all in Scouts’ uniforms and saluting as the small coffin was led past and put into the hearse, one of them gnawing his lip and visibly trembling with the effort of trying not to cry. Until the two Scout leaders had moved forward to place the wreaths done out to read OUR FRIEND in the back of the hearse. And then that boy too had raised his hands to his face and begun to shake with silent tears. They looked so fragile and young to Aitken, so milky-faced and skinny. Who would have dreamed that the one among them who would die too early would be Robbie?
It was in the weeks after the funeral that the true grief had come. He would wake up in its grip, try to shake it off, but it would follow him around all day like a black, ragged dog. He had been secretly amazed at how Valerie managed to go on, seeing a strength in her he’d never suspected, moved to the core of his heart by her quietly heroic resolution simply to continue. Meals were cooked, clothes were cleaned; Julie was driven to dance class on Wednesdays. Valerie seemed to want to act as though nothing had changed. Though the attempt to do that had made him love her more, it had also begun to separate them; before Robbie’s death he had felt he knew everything about her; now she was drawing on some part of herself that he simply could not touch. In truth, at least sometimes, he even resented it.
There were things about her now that he could not explain. He noticed that since Robbie died she laughed more often, with a wild gaiety that often unnerved him. One afternoon about two months after the funeral they had all gone for a drive to the Glendalough lakes. Claire had started in Trinity by then, had borrowed a camera from a college friend. Every photograph taken of Valerie that day showed her laughing. He couldn’t understand it. How could she laugh?
It was only after the girls had gone to bed that she would allow herself to stop pretending. She and Aitken would sit in the living room together, watching the television, smoking, sometimes drinking wine, but saying hardly anything. If an advert came on which featured a child she would silently look away to reach for a cigarette or pour another glass. One night a feature film opened with a scene of a young boy being pursued by a car. She turned away as sharply as if something had stung her.
The feeling between them came to seem to Aiken like that between two hostages on the eve of their execution. Often he would wonder what she was thinking about, but whenever he tried to ask she would simply change the subject. Before long she had become almost unreachably silent; it was as though a carapace had formed around her. Only one evening, during an item on the TV news about a boy from a troubled part of Belfast who had won an award for singing, he had looked over and noticed that she was bitterly crying. When he’d tried to comfort her she had jumped up and run from the room.
Loss seeped into the house like a faint smell of winter. The smallest of things brought the pain into sharp focus. Having to cancel his appointment with the orthodontist. Writing a note to the milkman to say they needed one less pint every day. Explaining to the dapper little traveller man who called once a year to sweep the chimneys what had happened – why ‘the nipper’, as he’d always called Robbie, wasn’t there any more. Two months after the funeral Aitken would still find the dog sitting hopefully by the door, waiting for its owner to get home from school.
In time his absence became so sharp that it began to feel to Aitken like a presence. He would find himself in Robbie’s room late at night, looking through his copybooks, holding his clothes. Taking out his books one by one and searching the shelves behind, as though some clue might be hidden there that could somehow explain what had happened. He would feel the shame of the invader as the room gave up its childish secrets. Four cigarettes in the toe of a soccer boot. A page torn out of a Cosmopolitan showing a winsome Japanese model in a skimpy lace bra. A pyjama shirt stuffed under the wardrobe with a melted chocolate biscuit still in the breast pocket. Sometimes he would sit in the room until dawn, until he would hear Valerie or one of the girls stir in bed or get up to use the bathroom. And then he would slip quickly out of the house and drive into work. Mornings in particular were difficult to bear. He couldn’t be around his family in the mornings any more.
He would wonder as he drove the streets of the city, stalking terrorists and shadowing informants, if it were possible for a scar to form around a memory. Could you encase what had happened in such a way that Robbie could be recollected still, without the act of remembrance involving such merciless pain? His men, his superiors seemed to change. Even the criminals would fall silent when he walked into the room. People stopped looking at him directly.
For months they left his bedroom exactly as it was. And then Valerie started to give his things away: his bicycle, his books, his CDs and computer games. A friendly, smiling man from the Salvation Army arrived one afternoon to take all his toys away in a van. Shortly afterwards Valerie said they should redecorate the room and give the furniture to a charity. They had a violent quarrel about it. He told her he couldn’t understand why she would want to forget their son like that.
It was the only time she had ever struck him.
And it was around that time that something like madness had stalked into Martin Aitken’s life, slipping in silently, gently as a burglar. He began to have dreams of startling vividness, where he heard Robbie’s voice or laugh; once he woke up to see him standing by the bedroom window, the bright lace curtains blowing about him, his bloodied face tilted in that playfully challenging grin of his. ‘You didn’t help me, Daddy. I called and you never came.’ He sat up drenched with sweat and whispered his son’s name, only to have the image melt away and reveal itself as nothing more than an arrangement of clothes hung over a chair in the half-light.
He found he was drinking more. Before long he was drinking every night. And often after the bar had closed, he would take a bottle and drive to the stretch of dual carriageway where his son had been killed. There he would park and sit for a while, as though the uncomplicated act of simply being at the place could connect him in some secret way to what had happened. Those were the ash trees that were the last thing he saw. That was the house where the old lady had called the ambulance. For months the scene had remained unchanged: cellophane-wrapped bunches of chrysanthemums taped to the twisted lamppost against which his son’s body had been hammered. And then, in time, the flowers had been taken away; men from the council had put in a new lamppost. The scene had been restored to what it must have been on the August afternoon when his son had decided to take the short cut home from football practice, the walk to the crossroads towards which death was already roaring.
Sometimes, drunk, he would see a boy of Robbie’s age in the street and tell himself that was his son. Once, in the clutch of a violent hangover, he had even followed a boy halfway home through Dun Laoghaire, letting himself fantasise that there had been some awful mistake, that the lad was Robbie and that everything would be all right now. Other times a smell – old training shoes, the eucalyptus-scented lotion his son had used for his eczema, the bleachy reek of a hospital corridor – would bring Robbie back from the grave. His mocking mournful ghost would hover around Martin Aitken, like a fragment of a melody from a childhood summer, only played out of tune, in a minor key.
The hospital ward was hung with balloons and tinsel. In a curtained-off corner the woman from the bus station was still unconscious. A blue rubber nametag around her wrist had a paper slip inserted, reading ‘name + d.o.b. unknown’. An impatient Kerry nurse with pimpled skin told him the woman had been given ten milligrams of intravenous Valium and probably wouldn’t wake for at least a day. ‘And I bloody well envy her that much,’ she added, venomously. ‘I hate Christmas. With a passion.’
The woman had on a light green tissue-paper gown. Her nose and right cheek were slightly red, her left eyelid a little puffed up; one slender forearm was bound in a gauze bandage stained russet brown with blood. He sat by her bed and looked around the ward, waiting for something unusual to happen. An orderly in a paper hat was draping a string of tinsel across the window. A wilted poinsettia sat on top of a radiator, its tear-like petals drooping in the heat. By the bedside of an emaciated man in lurid pink pyjamas, two little girls were kicking each other’s shins while their harassed mother peered at the ceiling and looked like she was about to scream.
A Sikh doctor came in and did a double-take.
‘Season’s greetings,’ Aitken said. The doctor laughed and shook his hand. He was a stocky, muscular man who carried himself well, with clear, bright eyes and a neat moustache, a golden leaf-shaped pin in the knot of his burgundy tie.
‘Hopalong Aitken, the king of the West. What the hell has you among us today?’
‘Christmas Day shift.’ He shrugged. ‘Luck of the draw.’
‘Want to book in for a service now you’re here?’
‘Yeah, right. Just what I need.’
Doctor Ranjiv Singh ruefully pursed his lips, poked him in the belly with the edge of his clipboard. ‘What you need is to lose some of that upholstery, Inspector. You could wear that beergut as a kilt these days.’
‘I’m not fat, Ranj. There were never any fat people in my family.’
‘There were never any psychos in the Bates family either, before little Norman came along. Look at yourself, man. You’re a heart attack waiting to happen.’
‘We’re all gonna die, Ranj. I think you better start gettin’ your head round that. Make your job a good bit easier.’
The doctor put his fingers on the woman’s wrist. ‘If you’re planning on doing any dying today, my friend, do it on someone else’s watch, OK?’
Aitken nodded at the woman in the bed. ‘Any gen on Sleeping Beauty here?’
Singh shook his head. ‘Barely woke up. Didn’t say a word.’
He took an electric thermometer from a breast pocket full of pens, held it to the woman’s ear. ‘Well, actually, she did say one word. In kind of a whisper.’ He clicked the thermometer and peered at the dial, scribbling something in his notebook.
‘So?’
Singh looked at him quizzically.
‘So are you going to tell me the word, Professor, or do I have to be clairvoyant now?’
‘Oh, sorry, Martin . . . Inishowen.’
‘Inishowen?’
‘That’s what she said. And for God’s sake put out that cigarette, Hopalong. You’re in a bloody hospital.’
‘Inishowen? As in County Donegal?’
‘I dunno.’ Singh shrugged. ‘You’re the mick.’
Aitken said nothing. A dirty yellow tennis ball came rolling along the floor. He picked it up and squeezed it with his fingertips, chucked it back to one of the little girls. She caught it and smiled before running away, her shoes sliding on the smooth, red floor. Singh put on a weary face and held out a paper cup. Aitken dropped his cigarette into it.
‘So Martin. You know this Inishowen?’
His son’s grave was at the foot of a rolling heathery hillside that looked down over Trawbreaga Bay. From the summit you could see Five Fingers beach; further to the south, the peak of Sliabh Sneachta. He was buried close to his maternal grandparents, not far from his grandmother’s own mother and father. Near the grave of a local man named Logue, a blacksmith, who died in Market Harborough, England. Across the way from one Peggy Duffy, who had been a servant all her life at Malin Hall. The field beyond the drystone wall had rabbits and sheep in it. In the summer the gorse on Soldiers Hill smelt sweet as coconut milk; in winter the aroma of turf drifted over from the cottages on the shore of Doagh Isle.
‘Martin? I was asking about Inishowen?’
‘It’s where Valerie’s folks are from. In Donegal.’
‘Where’s Donegal?’
‘Jesus Christ, you bloody foreigner. It’s way up in the north.’
‘Oh yeah? Nice place?’
‘Kind of hick, to be honest. You plug in a kettle and the streetlights dim.’
The doctor nodded as he felt the woman’s neck. He moved his probing fingertips to behind her ears, massaging her.
‘It’s mentioned in the stuff we found in her coat.’
‘What stuff’s that, Ranj?’
‘She had these . . . I don’t know . . . letters or something. In her pocket.’
‘Jayzus. Did she? I didn’t find anything on her.’
‘In a pocket inside her coat. Like down at the hem.’
‘Can I have a goo?’
‘Yeah, sure. Get them yourself. They’re in the locker over there.’
Aitken went to the bedside locker and opened a drawer. Inside was a sheaf of folded papers, tied in a length of thin red ribbon. They did seem to be letters – some typed on an old-fashioned typewriter, others in a minuscule, untidy scrawl that was almost illegible without his glasses. There was also a cutting from an old Donegal newspaper, with a headline about a baby abandoned on a boreen.
‘I’ll need to take these with me, Ranj.’
Singh was finishing taking her blood pressure. ‘I can’t allow that, Martin. They’re hers.’
‘She’s officially a missing person. They might give me a lead.’
He shook his head firmly. ‘No can do, Kimo Sabe. I can’t give you a patient’s private property.’
‘I can get a court order if you want.’
‘Listen, spare me the Starsky and Hutch routine, Mr Bigshot.’ He did a mocking chuckle. ‘Come back in a few days. If she’s still out cold you can have ’em then.’
Aitken nodded and sat on the edge of the bed. He watched Singh part the woman’s eyelids and shine a pencil-torch into them, bending low to examine her closely.
‘So how’s that peg-leg treating you these days, Martin?’
‘It only bothers me when the weather’s cold.’
‘If you’d done your physiotherapy that wouldn’t have happened. But you know best. And always did.’
‘Yeah. Anyway. What’s wrong with my friend here?’
Singh stood up straight and looked at the woman, shaking his head in gentle exasperation. He put his large smooth hand on her forehead, tenderly moving a strand of moist hair. ‘Most probably just exhaustion, Martin. She’s a little underweight. Her pulse is on the button. Blood pressure normal enough in the circumstances.’
‘What circumstances would those be?’
‘Well . . . pressure. Stress of some kind. You see it a lot at this time of year.’
‘So it’s not the season to be jolly, after all?’
‘It’s called Einstein’s theory of relativity, my friend. Time goes a lot slower when you’re with your relatives.’
‘Nothing more than that, Ranj?’
He shrugged. ‘Pathology lab’s closed until Friday. I can’t give you the whole story till then. If there is a story.’
‘We’ve a witness says he thought she was American.’
‘It’s hard to tell that from a medical examination, Martin. Unfortunately they don’t have a third nipple.’
‘She had a rake of dollars in her pocket.’
‘Lucky her.’
‘Maybe she was planning to go.’
‘Or maybe she’d just arrived, Hopalong.’
‘Makes you say that?’
‘Well, it’s obvious even to an Irish fool she was out of the country recently.’
‘Oh yeah? How’s that so obvious?’
Singh winked, went to the locker and pulled out a plastic bag.
‘So, look, Kojak.’ He reached inside. ‘Know what these are?’
‘Yeah. Green socks.’
‘Not just socks, Hopalong. They’re the cheap socks they give you on a long-distance flight. Throwaway things.’ He put his hand inside one, his fingers forming a puppet-like mouth. ‘I mean, you don’t think anyone’d buy those, do you?’ He raised the hand-filled sock to his nose and pinched his nostrils with it – ‘Hello, Ranji, hello, you handsome thing’ – and gave a soft, stertorous moan of pleasure. ‘Feminine feet, Martin,’ he grinned. ‘The sexiest smell in the world.’
‘Jayzus, fair play, Ranj. Sherlock Holmes lives.’
He took the socks and tucked them into his pocket.
‘Give us a buzz on the mobile when she wakes up, OK?’
‘You want me to take a look at the leg now you’re here, Martin?’
‘No, it’s grand. I’m practically line dancing.’
‘Hard to do the mashed potato with a bullet in your femur. Unless you’re a stubborn Irish mick, of course.’
‘You’re charming, Ranj. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Sorry, Martin. I just need to get laid.’
‘Well, climb up a chicken’s arse and wait. OK?’
‘Ah, Daddy,’ came a laughing call from down the ward. ‘Daddy, don’t! It’s too embarrassing.’
A man in a wheelchair was holding a hairbrush to his mouth, curling his lip and pouting like Elvis, while his wife laughed in joyful mortification. The little girl with the tennis ball was tugging on the hem of his pyjama leg and pleading with him to stop.
‘Hey. Seriously. Are you OK, Martin?’
‘I’m delirious, Ranj. Why wouldn’t I be?’
The doctor laughed fondly and shook his head. ‘Get off the bloody stage, man. You look like a dog’s breakfast. If you want to talk, you know where I am.’
He picked up his stethoscope and put it around his neck.
‘Any time. I mean it, Martin. Come out to the house or something.’
‘I’d want to be bleedin desperate though, wouldn’t I? Before I’d talk to you.’
The doctor put his hands in his pockets and gave him a look. ‘Same old tough-guy Martin, right? A cowboy to the end.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment, Ranj. Coming from an Indian.’
The lift got stuck on the way down. He took out the letter he had stolen and began to try to read it. When the lift started to move again, he imagined it continuing down through the ground, all the way to Hell.