THE HOSPITAL IS in Barrowmore, just up the hill from Deirdre’s house. We walk down a bland gray corridor, through harsh smells of disinfectant. The morning sun throws exact white squares on the floor.
“I hate hospitals,” I tell Adam.
“Me too,” he says. “They make me think of being six and having my tonsils taken out. I ate quite implausible quantities of raspberry ripple ice cream. But I still hated it.”
The corridor passes the children’s ward. There’s a rain forest mural, a box of well-worn toys. Sylvie walks close to the wall, trailing her finger across the painted animals.
“Adam! Grace!”
Brian is hurrying down the passage toward us. We’d hoped to meet him earlier, but we’re later than we’d planned, as breakfast was slow this morning, with no sign of Brigid.
Brian’s smile lights up his face.
“You’re okay, Grace? You’ve recovered, you and Sylvie?”
“Yes, we’re fine,” I tell him.
“I’ve just been to talk to Gemma,” he says, “to bring her up to date. She’s got a bit of a bruised look, but they’re really pleased with her progress.”
I grasp his wrist.
“And you’ve got Marcus? Please, please, tell us you’ve caught him.”
“I’m sorry, Grace.” He screws up his mouth, as though he has a bitter taste. “Marcus seems to have got away. We warned the airports, of course, but we think he’s left the country.”
“No.” I can’t bear the injustice of this.
Sylvie tugs at my hand. “Grace. Can we go now?”
“Very soon, sweetheart. Perhaps you could play for a bit?”
She goes to look in the toy box, but reluctantly.
“So tell us,” I say to Brian. “Tell us what you’ve found out.”
A woman is wheeled toward us on a stretcher. She’s on a drip, and her face is stretched and gray. Brian waits for her to pass. Curiosity gnaws at me.
Brian turns toward us. “No answers yet,” he tells us. “But we’re working on it. The forensic accountants are coming down from Dublin. They’ll be trying to trace the movement of money between his accounts.”
“Oh,” I say.
It’s not what I was expecting, this talk of banks and accountants.
“We won’t know the full story for quite some time,” says Brian. “But there was plainly a lot that Marcus wanted to hide.”
“How can you tell that?” I ask him.
“He left before he’d destroyed all his paperwork,” Brian tells me. “I guess you interrupted him—he probably thought that someone might come looking for you. We found some documents at the house. There’s a lot of stuff to work through, but we do know already that Marcus has several offshore accounts and there’s far too much money in them.”
I think of Marcus’s perfect manners, his patrician air. It’s still so hard to make sense of.
“It seems likely that the gallery and the shop were just a front—that he used them for money laundering,” says Brian.
I picture the stylish shop with the vanilla scalloped blinds. Nothing is as I’d thought it was.
“Alice was a clever woman. Good with figures,” he says. “Perhaps she’d asked a question that concerned him. Maybe something she said in all innocence. But perhaps he thought that in time she might start to suspect him. That could have been why he killed her.”
“And Jessica happened to be there, and that wasn’t part of the plan?” I say.
“Could be. That poor, poor kid,” he says.
All the “if only’s” whisper in the air around us. If only she hadn’t had a cold, if only she’d gone to the sleepover. It’s always so troubling, this randomness of what happens: how devastation can creep up on you in such a casual way.
“With Gemma,” he says, “it was nearly another dreadful case of bad timing. We’ve been going through her movements. On Monday she went to see Marcus. She told him she’d decided to come and see us, to tell us about her memory of the night her mother died. Just at the point that he found that we were going to search the quarry—”
He stops as Sylvie comes over. She pulls at my sleeve.
“Now, Grace.”
She’s purposeful, frowning. Her mouth has a tight, set look.
But I’m desperate to hear Brian out.
“Sweetheart, we’ll only be a minute.”
I lead her back to the toys. Outside, the scream of an ambulance siren rips the morning apart.
“Gemma doesn’t remember what happened yesterday morning,” says Brian. “There were traces of Rohypnol in her system. It seems that Marcus drugged her to give himself time to get out.”
“But why?” I say. “Why didn’t Marcus kill Gemma? It’s not like he has any scruples about murder. So why did he just drug her and leave her like that?”
Brian’s face darkens.
“We’ve interviewed people again—the original people we talked to. There’s someone in the village—Polly O’Connor. Polly was Alice’s best friend. And yesterday Polly told me things that she hadn’t told me before. She said the rumor was true—that Marcus and Alice were lovers.”
I can hear the outrage in his voice, and I wonder why he finds this shocking—something as familiar, as banal, as an affair.
“Now, Gordon was off on the road a lot. And Alice and Gordon—well, to be frank, they didn’t have much of a sex life. I’m only telling you what Polly O’Connor told me . . .”
I suddenly see where this is going, and everything in me recoils.
Brian’s throat moves as he swallows. “And Alice believed that Marcus was the father of the twins.”
Nobody moves.
“You see, maybe Marcus knew,” says Brian. “Maybe Alice had told him. He’d already killed one of his daughters. Maybe even Marcus couldn’t stomach killing his other child.”
“But—for God’s sake,” I say, “he had a relationship with Gemma . . .”
Brian shrugs.
“Gemma was always a risk,” he says, “a bit of a loose cannon. There was always the possibility that she might remember something and incriminate him. Maybe seducing her was his way of keeping control . . .”
“There’s something I don’t understand in all this,” says Adam then. “How come he knew it was over? That you were searching the quarry?”
“Tell me,” says Brian, “where were you when I rang you to tell you about the search?”
“Just in the lounge at St. Vincent’s,” I tell him.
“Was Brigid anywhere near?”
I remember Brigid coming to fetch our tray. How she knocked the milk jug over, how she seemed annoyed by her clumsiness.
“Yes, she was, as it happens.”
“Brigid’s left the country too. It was Brigid who gave him his alibi the day of the murders,” he says.
I think of our conversations with her, of the way that she’d encouraged us to confide, of how she’d hinted that Gordon was the murderer. I feel a surge of nausea.
Brian shakes his head a little. “I really admired him, you know? I thought he was so impressive.” There’s something troubled and inchoate in his voice.
“That’s how it looked,” I tell him.
“To be honest, he seemed to be everything that I’d have liked to be. The house, the business—everything I’d have aspired toward, if only life had been different . . .” He moves one long hand pensively over his face. “Well, that’s the latest installment. I’ll see you folks around, no doubt.”
I put my hand on his arm. “You won’t be seeing us, Brian. We fly back to London today.”
“Well, look, I’ve got your numbers. I’ll let you know what happens.”
He shakes hands with Adam. To my surprise, he hugs me.
“The best of luck with the little one,” he says.
He waves in Sylvie’s direction and goes off down the corridor.
I go to kneel by Sylvie, take her face in my hands.
“Sylvie, there’s something I need to tell you. The police are looking for Marcus, but they haven’t been able to find him yet. He’s gone to another country. He’s a long, long way from here . . .”
Her face is white and strained. Perhaps she’s scared that he could come and find her.
“They’ll catch him and put him in prison,” I tell her, trying to reassure her. “I know they will—that in the end they’ll catch him.”
But I’ve misread the cause of her anxiety. She stands up, grabs my hand.
“I want to go now. I want to go and see her. Can we go now, Grace?”