BRIGID KNOCKS AT our bedroom door.
“Deirdre Walker to see you!” she says brightly.
I feel a quick surge of gratitude. This is a gift, a stroke of good fortune. Now I can persuade her to let Sylvie and Gemma meet.
I call for Adam, and Sylvie comes downstairs with us. I’m determined not to let her out of my sight. Deirdre is waiting in the lounge. I settle Sylvie in front of cartoons on the television, then go to say hello to Deirdre and introduce her to Adam.
But Deirdre doesn’t smile or greet me. Her face is white and frayed.
“I wanted to tell you how angry I am. After what you promised.” Her voice is harsh with accusation. “You spoke to her, didn’t you, Grace? You went and spoke to Gemma. After everything I told you.”
She has the air of a woman who isn’t used to confrontation, who has steeled herself to do this.
“But we didn’t speak to Gemma. You have to believe me,” I tell her.
“I know you did,” she says.
We stand there for a moment. Her brittle anger seems all wrong in this homely, decorous place, with its faded peony cushions and the juddery tick of the clock.
“This is what happened,” I tell her. “We did see Gemma, we saw her on the sand. Sylvie had run after her, she must have seen her from the window. I was chasing after Sylvie, for a while I couldn’t catch up, but Sylvie didn’t reach Gemma. Sylvie called out, but Gemma didn’t answer. I certainly didn’t approach her. I promised you I wouldn’t, and I didn’t.”
She’s studying my face.
“That’s really true, what you just said?”
“Yes. I promise,” I say.
She sits quite suddenly then, collapsing on one of the chairs, as though without her anger she has nothing to sustain her.
“I’m sorry I blamed you,” she says.
She sits there, crumpled, defeated. She rubs her hand over her face.
Adam sits beside her.
“We could have some coffee,” he tells her.
“Yes. Thank you.”
Brigid brings a tray of coffee. Deirdre takes a cup, clasps it so tight in her fingers you can see the pale bones through the skin.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you when you came to see me, Grace. Gemma’s been quite unhappy—just for the last week or two. She told me she’s been having dreams about her mother and sister.” She puts down her cup without taking a sip. “Then last night she had a nightmare. She was so upset when she woke, she was crying at breakfast this morning. That’s why I was sure you’d spoken to her.”
“Have you told her about us?” says Adam.
“I haven’t said a thing,” she says. “But maybe she’s heard about you. People could have been talking—the kids at her college, perhaps.”
“If it’s our fault she’s unhappy, I’m really sorry,” I say.
She inclines her head, accepting this.
“There’s this thought she keeps going back to,” she says then. “This memory she has. Well, I don’t know if it’s a memory. Something that’s just resurfacing.”
There’s a quick moth flutter of feeling in the corner of my mind, a thrill of apprehension.
“It’s about the afternoon before they disappeared,” she tells us. “Gemma remembers her mother going to answer the phone. She thinks she said, Okay, I’ll be there for seven. She says her mother sounded happy. Like she was meeting someone she knew, not going off to die . . . She can remember her mother in the hallway, looking in the mirror, putting her lipstick on. Pressing her lips together to spread the lipstick evenly. She says her mother was humming to herself.”
I glance at Adam. He has a vigilant, intent look.
“Has she ever told anyone this? The gardai—Brian Ennis?” he says.
“Not at the time,” says Deirdre. “She was only nine when it happened. She was in a state of shock—she was almost mute for a while. She’d only talk to me or her dad. So no, she didn’t mention it then. She was so confused, I think it was all a blur to her.”
“But since then?” says Adam.
“No, I don’t think so,” says Deirdre. “It’s only in the last couple of weeks that it’s really begun to obsess her. She certainly hasn’t been to see the gardai. The thing is, half the time she doesn’t believe it herself. She says, ‘Deirdre, what do you think? D’you think I’m making it up? Can you invent memories?’”
“Is that what you think?” asks Adam. “That she’s inventing it?”
“I’m really not sure.” She gives a slight self-deprecating shrug, as though she’s not used to being asked for her opinion. “But I do know this—that Gemma would give anything for proof it wasn’t suicide. That’s the thing she can’t bear, even now—that her mother chose to abandon her and took her sister with her.”
She’s silent for a moment. The clock ticks, and we wait for her.
“I read this thing about suicide once,” she says then. “Something in a magazine. That losing someone to suicide is more than a bereavement . . . It’s the most terrible way for someone to die—for those who are left behind.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I try to tell her—your mother didn’t leave you, she left life. But she still feels so abandoned. She so desperately wants there to be some other explanation.”
“Yes,” I say. “Of course she would.”
“I’d better go, then.” She pulls her cardigan close around her, as though it could protect her. “I shouldn’t have blamed you,” she says.
We say goodbye at the door.
I turn to Adam. “She seemed to be saying she thought that Gemma was making it up. That memory of her mother.”
“Yes,” he says.
“So what do you think?”
“She could be right. You can see why Gemma might do that, how it might fulfill a need for her. Believe me, I can understand that. Wanting to find a different story, a different explanation—something that doesn’t hurt quite as much.”
I know that Jake is in his mind: there’s such a raw look on his face. I would like to put my arms around him.
“So, yes,” he goes on, “it makes total psychological sense . . . But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” he says.
We sit for a while in silence.
“You know Brigid’s hit-man theory?” I say then. “That Gordon found out about Alice and Marcus and paid a hit man to kill her? What Gemma said could fit with that.”
“Yes, it could,” he says.
“Perhaps we should tell the gardai?”
“We could. But it wouldn’t have much value as evidence after all this time. Not when she didn’t talk about it when it happened—”
The sudden ring of his phone makes me flinch. I have a tense, brittle feeling.
“Brian,” he mouths at me.
I’m expecting him to tell Brian about the things that Deirdre said, but he just listens. I can’t work out what Brian is saying.
“Absolutely,” says Adam then. “Well, that’s brilliant news.” He ends the call and turns to me. His eyes are shiny with triumph.” They’re going to search the quarry,” he says.
I have a sense of shock. That this is happening. That we have made it happen.
“Brian went to look at it. He found that path I found. I’m impressed he took Sylvie so seriously,” says Adam.
There’s a sudden click of stilettoes—Brigid coming to fetch our tray. She fixes us with her glinting, curious gaze.
“Good news, I imagine?”
“Yes, excellent, thank you,” says Adam.
I wonder how much of our conversation she heard.
She reaches out to take the tray and catches the milk jug with the side of her hand. It wobbles and spills.
“So stupid of me.”
Her lips are tight, she’s cross with herself, though the milk is all caught in the tray.
“It really doesn’t matter,” I tell her.
“It matters to me, Grace. I hate being clumsy,” she says.
That night, I can’t sleep. I hear the familiar sounds from Adam’s bedroom—the surge of the shower, and then his voice on the phone, talking to Tessa presumably. The phone call ends, there’s the click of the switch on his bedside lamp, then silence. I wish he was moving about still. I feel safer hearing him there.
In the end, I pull my coat on over the T-shirt I sleep in and take a bottle of Jameson’s from the minibar—it’s just a miniature bottle, I don’t bother to find a glass—and I go out onto the balcony.
I sit there, the village stilled around me, above me the sky with its pale seed of stars, spread out before me the glimmering black of the sea. The only human illumination comes from the lamps on the jetty, which rim the little lapping waves with lines of orange light. There’s a faint cold track of moonlight over the water. I see that the moon has waned since the night we broke down in the bog, when it was so bright and round, rising over the mountain—its waning a reminder that our time here has almost gone. I count it off on my fingers. In two days we’ll be flying home. I’m ambushed by a sudden longing for London, for its streets and buses and smells of smoke; for the London night, which is always lit and busy, not dense and hidden and full of secrets like the Irish dark.
A shiver of wind from the sea stirs the fringe on the parasol. I wonder what they will find in the quarry, and feel again that surge of emotion, the mix of excitement and dread. I notice my teeth are chattering, that the cold has got into my clothes. I wrap my coat tight around me. Out of nowhere, I think of something Lavinia once said to me—the thing the old priest had told her. It’s not the dead we should be afraid of, but the living . . . Her voice is in my head, nicotine-stained, nostalgic, as though she were here beside me.
It’s the living we should fear.