‘I never thought I’d have him back under this roof,’ Mum says.
The coroner has agreed to release Joe’s remains to her. He is satisfied there is no further physical evidence to be gathered from his body, and that we can go ahead and lay him to rest.
Well, I say we. There was no way they were letting his remains come back to his home at Aberfoyle Crescent and certainly not to any of us ‘suspects’.
My mother, on the other hand, with the help of a canny solicitor, has come to an arrangement that her home would be suitable for him to be brought back to.
My mother is beside herself with emotion that he will be back in what was our family home. It does nothing to make me believe she doesn’t still love him. That she never stopped loving him.
We can’t all escape the overall feeling that everything is off-kilter, though. Yes, we will be able to bury him, and that will provide a small amount of relief, but a cloud hangs over us all. Nothing is really resolved. They will be watching us all intently as we grieve. Looking for clues. For some reason, they don’t seem to be picking up on my hints about Heidi. As usual she seems to be able to win people around with her little-girl-lost act. But I’m not buying it and I’ll make sure no one else does, either.
‘Can we keep the house private, Mum?’ I ask. It will be bad enough to have the police hovering.
‘Lots of people will want to say their goodbyes to your father,’ she says.
It’s virtually unheard of for houses to remain closed to visitors during a wake. She’s right, of course people will want to traipse in and out, pay their respects, offer a quick prayer by the coffin side and then sit with us and drink their tea while eating curling sandwiches.
‘Lots more will want to gawk,’ I say. ‘People are talking, Mum. They know something is up. Don’t you think they’ll all just want a nosy at us? They’ll be trying to figure out whodunnit.’
The expression sounds more flippant than I intended and my mother baulks.
‘There’s no need to be so crass. Your father is dead, Ciara. Murdered, if the police are right.’
She says the word ‘murdered’ in a whisper. None of us can really believe we are even saying these words or thinking this way.
‘Well, that’s more reason not to have all and sundry walking in through the door, then. There’ll be people who didn’t even know him or care about him wanting in. They can gawk at the funeral if they want, but give us this at least.’
‘He deserved a better send-off than this …’
Mum looks bereft. I’ve never understood how she remained so fond of him for all these years. I remain convinced that if he had asked her if they could try again she would have jumped at the very thought. Her continued loyalty to him is something that I have to admit I struggle to understand. Then again, she doesn’t know everything. That angers me. Her unyielding loyalty to him.
‘What he doesn’t deserve is people wanting to make him nothing more than a news story and what I don’t need is people eyeing me up, trying to work out if I’m responsible for putting him in the ground in the first place!’
My voice is high-pitched. Screechier than normal. I can see Mum recoil further and further as the volume of my voice increases.
‘Ciara, please,’ she says, her voice small, lacking in its usual authoritative tone. ‘Please just stop. I don’t want to have this conversation.’
‘Don’t you?’ I ask her. ‘Don’t you want to have this conversation instead of dancing around it all? We’re all walking on eggshells. You’ve not even asked me if I did it, Mum. Don’t you want to know if it was me? If I was the one who put the pillow over his head and pressed down until he stopped breathing?’
I feel the sharp sting of her hand across my cheek before I even register what is happening. My mother has never once, in all her life, lifted her hand to me. She never smacked me as a child. Even as a teenager when I was a little bitch and probably deserved a good slap, she would let me rage until I was spent, and then we would sit down and talk together.
The shock of feeling her strike me winds me. I gasp, stare at her, while I bring my own hand to my injured cheek, feel the heat of it rise.
I can see my mother’s gaze, steely and strong. She doesn’t look shocked that she hit me. She certainly doesn’t look sorry.
‘Ciara McKee, I never want to hear you talk that like again, do you understand?’
I stare and she steps closer to me, dropping her voice lower. It’s more menacing than her screaming at me could ever be.
‘I said, do you understand?’
I nod, willing the tears that sprung to my eyes to stay where they are and not to betray me by falling.
‘I don’t need to ask you if you did it because I know you, Ciara. You are my child and I know you could never have done something like that. You’re not capable of it, and even if you are too stubborn to admit it, I know you loved your father just as he loved you. Now, I want you to pull yourself together and help us all get through the next two days. We’ll do it your way. Closed house. Now let that be an end to this stupid conversation.’
She turned on her heel and walked away before I could say anything else. Before I could tell her that she was wrong. I did not love my father. It wasn’t something I was simply too stubborn to admit. I hated him.
And I did have bad bones in my body – a badness I’d maybe inherited from him. Or maybe, just maybe, it was more that I had a sense of justice. You couldn’t mess up people’s lives without any consequences. That was not how the world worked. Everyone had to learn that lesson, no matter how painful.
‘You’re awful pale-looking,’ Kathleen says.
We are sheltered together on the back porch of my mother’s house. I’m sucking on my e-cig but it’s still not quite hitting the mark. I remind myself it’s better than nothing.
Kathleen has ‘tapped’ a sneaky cigarette from Pauline, who swore she didn’t smoke but always has a box in her bag ‘for emergencies’. My aunt is clearly not an experienced smoker – she splutters and coughs as she tries to inhale the warm smoke.
‘Out of practice,’ she says when she’s got her breath back. ‘But it’s either this or a double vodka.’
I am shocked. With her new sensible appearance, her conservative take on life and the rosary beads she had pulled from her bag and insisted were to be placed in my father’s hands when the coffin was opened, I didn’t see her as the double-vodka type. I don’t even see her as the single-vodka type, if I am honest.
Her hand is shaking ever so slightly as she lifts the lit cigarette to her lips one more time and inhales again, exhaling more naturally this time.
‘It’s all too much at times, isn’t it?’ she asks, looking out at the small patch of lawn that makes up my mother’s garden.
‘It is,’ I agree, asking for a drag of her ‘proper’ cigarette, enjoying the hit of the warm smoke at the back of my throat. ‘I’m nervous. Of seeing him again, you know. Is that silly?’
‘Is that what has you so shaken up?’
I nod. I’ll not tell her about the set-to I’ve just have with my mother, even though the sting of her hand still burns at my cheek.
‘Among other things,’ I say wryly.
‘Do you think they have any evidence?’ Kathleen asks. ‘I mean, you see these shows now on the TV and they always catch the killer. There’ll be a hair, or a fingerprint, or a drop of blood or something …’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. I’m trying not to think about it much. I’m still hoping they’ll come back and say they made a mistake.’
‘Do you think they will?’ Her eyebrows raise. ‘I thought it was all pretty conclusive at this stage. They wouldn’t release his body if there was any question.’
Her expression sags again as she speaks. Almost as if she allowed hope to flicker in for the briefest of seconds before the reality of where we are sets back in.
I suck on my e-cig before sending a billow of fragrant steam into the air.
‘I don’t get the impression they are minded to drop the investigation any time soon,’ I say.
She sniffs at the air, drops the half-smoked cigarette to the ground and grinds it out with the heel of her shoe.
‘What if they can’t pin it on anyone? What do you think they’ll do? Will it be worse if we don’t ever really know what happened?’
She looks sad. Lost. Dad was her only sibling. She has him on some out-of-reach pedestal and while I’d love to knock it out from under him and tell her the truth, not even I would be that cruel.
‘I don’t know,’ I say with a shrug.
I can’t think straight any more. I’m exhausted with thinking. I’m exhausted by it all.
My mother’s voice from the kitchen, announcing that she needs us to discuss a floral tribute, disturbs us. I take one last drag from Kathleen’s cigarette before handing it back to her.
‘I suppose we should get on with this,’ I tell her.