A NOISE WOKE me at seven. The smell of burning turf invaded my nostrils. I opened my eyes. I was on the couch again. But this time I felt refreshed, if a little stiff. I stretched and sat up. The room was cozy, the fire crackling, its flickering orange flame the only light in the room with the curtains still drawn. Someone had taken the duvet from my bed and placed it over me. They’d also removed my shoes and placed them neatly by the couch. Molloy. I realized he must have only just left – that’s what must have woken me. I threw off the duvet, ran to the window, and pulled the curtain aside just in time to see car taillights pulling away from the curb. I watched as the car drove off in the direction of Glendara, closed the curtains, and glanced around the room. The wine bottle and glasses were gone. The woolen throw from the couch was folded up neatly on the armchair by the fire.
I picked it up. We had talked long into the night, exhaustion finally overtaking me when Molloy, despite his skepticism, had gone into the kitchen to make me a camomile tea to help me sleep. I remembered his last words to me before he left the room.
“Guilt is a hard thing to live with, Ben. It can eat away at you like a cancer if you bury it.”
It was all the confirmation I needed that he hadn’t judged me in the way I had feared he would. I must have been asleep when he came back.
The papers I’d had Kelly sign the afternoon before were still on my desk where I’d left them, along with the planning file from the County Council offices. I was about to pick them up when Leah buzzed me.
“Phyllis is on the phone for you. Have you got a sec?”
I held the handset away from my ear. Phyllis’ voice has a tendency to rise when she is excited. Dispensing with any preliminaries, she launched straight in.
“Bloody hell. I’m going to have to let the guards know about Bourke’s big donation now, aren’t I? Now that he’s gone and got himself arrested.”
“Yes. I think you should.”
“And I suppose it means we’ll have to kiss good-bye to that nice wee injection of funds?”
“Probably.”
“I could pretend I didn’t know who it was from. It was supposed to be anonymous, after all.”
“Phyllis.” My tone was firm.
I heard a heavy sigh down the phone. “Bugger. We could do an awful lot of good with it.”
“I know. When did you get it, by the way?” I asked.
“Tuesday. The day before we came in to see you. The envelope was posted in the door of the shop. I thought it was too good to be true.”
“It’s the right thing to do, Phyllis.”
“Ah sure, I know. It doesn’t make it any easier though.”
I paused for a second. “Can I ask you something? Nothing to do with Mick Bourke?”
“Shoot.” I could tell her interest was piqued.
“I met Claire in the pub last night. She wasn’t in great shape. And I remembered Tony said something after the wake, something about Eithne giving Claire pills.”
“Did he now?”
“I was wondering if you knew anything about it.”
Phyllis lowered her tone; perhaps there was someone in the shop. “By the look of her, I’d say Claire’s been taking benzodiazepines, those damn antianxiety drugs, for a while.”
It made sense: the mood swings, the waxy skin, the glassy eyes.
“I know the signs,” Phyllis went on. “I had a friend who got hooked on them a long time ago. They’re certainly not doing her any good, but I can’t imagine Eithne giving them to her unless they were prescribed. She wouldn’t risk her license.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Although if she is giving Claire drugs, one thing’s for sure: big brother won’t like it.”
Snow was falling again. I stood at the window watching the flakes waft gently past, thinking about last night. Molloy was right about guilt. It eats you up from the inside, and if you let it take hold, it can destroy you. I wondered how much guilt had played a part in what had happened to the Devitts. Jack Devitt’s guilt after the death of his friends was something that he had found impossible to live with, but Danny had been carrying guilt of some kind, too, I was sure of it. He was haunted by something he had done, or not done. Wrapping Stephen McFerry’s bones in a blanket and placing a pillow underneath the skull. Disappearing for weeks after Conor left. Selling the farm and handing the money to his mother. All were actions that reeked of guilt. But what had he felt so guilty about?
I looked at the calendar. Thursday. Something was happening this morning. What was it? All the days were merging into each other. Then it hit me. Today was the day they were reburying Stephen McFerry’s remains. I hurtled downstairs.
“Have I an hour free, Leah?”
She nodded. “All your morning appointments have cancelled, as a matter of fact. The snow.”
I was about to head out of the door when something else occurred to me. I raced back up the stairs and took a file out of the filing cabinet. I opened it, found what I was looking for, made a note, and put it back.
I decided to park at Whitewater Church and take the pathway to the graveyard, over the old stile. The guards had left it the way it was; the wooden piece slid out easily, and I climbed over. I emerged from the trees to a strangely eerie sight. The graveyard was silent, buried again under a muffling blanket of white. Five people stood at the grave: the local priest, Stephen McFerry’s father, two gravediggers, and Hal. I was glad to see that Hal was involved, that he wasn’t being blamed for what had happened, despite Phyllis’ fears. I remained back a little, aware that I stood out like a sore thumb in the empty graveyard. When the religious formalities were completed, I approached Mr. McFerry. He was unshaven and obviously distressed. I shook his hand.
“I’m sorry. I was passing and thought I’d express my condolences.”
“Aye, thanks. It’s not a recent death though. My son died six years ago.”
“I know. I heard what happened.”
He kicked the soil under his feet, the soil that had been freshly dug. The snow rested like flakes of sea salt on top.
“I’m staying put this time until it’s all done. I want to see my lad safely in the ground, with clay on top. Proper. Safe. Not like the last time.”
He clicked his teeth and stood there with his arms crossed as he watched the gravediggers do their job.
“Left him lying there in his coffin in an open grave, they did. They were supposed to cover it that night.”
I remembered leaving the graveyard on the day of Danny Devitt’s burial, his coffin in the ground, but uncovered. To be done overnight, too, I guessed – it must be normal practice. I stood beside the boy’s father, hands clasped in front of me like a second sentry, ensuring everything was done properly, this time.
I read the date of death on the gravestone – June 14, 2007. Six and a half years ago. My suspicions were correct. The date I had taken from the file before leaving the office was June 15, 2007. It was the date on the draft affidavit I had started to put together for Lisa Crane, the last day she had seen Conor Devitt, the day before their planned wedding. Conor Devitt had gone missing on his wedding day, June 16, 2007. If Stephen McFerry had died on June 14, taking into account two days for a wake, it was highly likely that he had been lying in his coffin in an open grave on that very day. I hadn’t figured out what it meant yet, but there had to be a connection.
I drove back to the office and ran straight upstairs. Sitting at my desk, I turned on the computer and opened the website for back issues of the Derry Journal. I soon found the edition from the day after Stephen McFerry’s accident. The death notice was there, together with the funeral details. I was right. Stephen McFerry had been buried at 11 a.m. on the morning of June 16, 2007; the same day that Conor Devitt had been due to get married, the day he had disappeared.
At five o’clock my mobile rang. It was Maeve.
“Fancy something quick to eat in the Oak before you go home? I’m on call and I won’t get a chance later. Spring has finally hit. I’m going to be up to my elbows in calvings all night.”
The thought of food was appealing and I didn’t much feel like cooking. But unfortunately for Maeve, her phone rang as soon as her food arrived. I watched her stomp out of the pub with her lunch in a takeaway carton on her way to a calving in Malin Head.
I was finishing my own meal with only a newspaper for company, when the door of the pub opened again and Lisa Crane walked in. She strode up to the bar, high-heeled boots clacking on the wooden floor, her blond hair tied in a high ponytail. I heard her ask for a bottle of red wine to take away. As Tony went looking for a brown paper bag to put it in, she leaned on the bar and cast her eyes around the room. She spotted me, nodded, and when she had paid, came over.
Beneath the war paint she looked wretched. I suspected the bottle in her hand wasn’t the first one she had consumed over the past couple of days.
“I must settle up with you for that thing I was in about.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t do very much and …” I stopped.
“And you won’t be now, you were about to say.”
I smiled apologetically. “Something like that.”
“Why don’t you come up to the house now and I’ll give you a cheque.”
“There’s no need. Seriously. The fee will be minimal.”
She looked down at my plate. “You’re finished your food, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Come on then,” she said, a pleading note entering her voice. “You can have a glass of this with me.” She lifted the paper bag. “Alan’s out at the driving range. It’ll save me drinking on my own.”
“Okay. I’ll come up for half an hour. I don’t need a cheque though. There’s nothing owing.”
“All the more reason to let me get you a drink.”
She gave me directions to her house, and I paid the bill and followed her up.
Lisa and Alan Crane’s house was hard to miss. I’d noticed it before, about two miles out of town, but I hadn’t known who owned it. I wondered if this was the house she’d built with Conor or if it was a new one. Whichever it was, it wasn’t to my taste, for all its show-house faux-Tudor grandeur. Light flooded the tarmacadam driveway as soon as I drove in, coming from a movement-sensitive imitation street lamp to the right of the front door. The house was huge – six bedrooms at least, I guessed – built off the back of either Celtic Tiger carpentry or plumbing.
It was red brick, and for some reason the color of the door had been carefully chosen to match the brick exactly, which made it look as if it were completely bricked in, that once you crossed the threshold you would be locked in there forever. Luckily, Lisa had left the red front door slightly ajar. On the doorstep, I called her name.
“Come on through. I’m in the kitchen fighting with a corkscrew.”
I followed the voice through a vast entrance hallway dominated by a huge pair of chandeliers. The kitchen was a substantial space, with a dining table big enough for ten, and an island. Lisa was standing at the island, extracting the cork from a bottle.
“Looks like you’re winning,” I said.
“Huh?” she said.
“Your battle with the corkscrew.”
“Oh right.”
She poured two enormous glasses of wine and perched on one of the stools. I joined her.
“So I guess I can’t get him declared dead now that he’s back?” she said, clinking her glass against mine and giving me a half-smile before taking a large gulp from her glass.
“I guess not.”
“Bastard,” she said.
“Has he been to see you since he came back?”
“Would you believe I haven’t even clapped eyes on him? I must be the only one in town who hasn’t.”
“Seriously?”
She took another gulp of her wine. It occurred to me that her glass would be empty before I had even started on mine if she kept this up. “Want some crisps or something?”
“No, thanks.”
“Bastard,” she said again.
“Maybe he’s afraid to face you,” I suggested, taking a sip from my own glass.
She gave me a look that would have turned the wine to vinegar if what we were drinking hadn’t been pretty close already, so I tried a different tack.
“I got the impression when you came to see me that you didn’t really think he was dead. Was I wrong?”
She sighed. “I couldn’t be sure and that’s the truth. I know things weren’t great between us, but it just didn’t seem like him to run off like that. Conor always took care of me. Even before we started going out, he treated me like a little sister. I was Danny’s friend first, in secondary school. But then Conor kind of took over. It was as if he sought me out.” She smiled sadly. “I was flattered.”
Yes. I knew what that felt like.
“He made a big thing of the fact that we’d both had to grow up without fathers. Said I needed minding. Then a few years after I left school, we started going out, and for a long time, it was good. But after we got engaged, he changed.”
When she frowned, the tiny lines around her mouth became more obvious, as if she’d been a smoker. She took another drink, set the glass back down on the island, and gazed into it.
“He became obsessed with making money. Money had never been a big thing for him before that, he just worked hard. I was stupid enough to think it was the prospect of getting married. He was thinking of going out on his own, and I supported him in that. He wasn’t getting on with Bourke. Said he was dodgy, that he was getting up to some things he didn’t agree with.” She paused. “Looks like he was right about Bourke anyway.”
“God yes, your break-in,” I said. “I hope you were insured.”
She nodded, casting her eyes around the room. “All new stuff. I’m just glad Danny’s not being blamed anymore. Although I hear Bourke’s been released on bail. I hope to God Alan doesn’t get hold of him.” She looked towards the door with a slightly panicked expression, as if the thought of her husband returning unsettled her.
She switched her gaze back to me. “Where was I?”
“Conor going out on his own?”
“Oh aye. He seemed to be working all hours, trying to get new work. At first I was pleased – as I said, I thought that he was doing it for us. And then I started to wonder if maybe he was doing it to try to spend time away from me.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He stopped talking to me, too. He was never the most open fella in the world, but he closed up completely.” She cleared her throat. “He wanted to pitch for work on that new development at Whitewater Church – the big heritage centre they were planning up there.”
I looked up in surprise. “Oh yes? And did he?”
She said a little uncomfortably, “To be honest, I tried to put a stop to it.”
“Why was that?”
“I saw him with the wife of the man who was doing it and I didn’t like it.”
“Alison Kelly?”
“Yes, her. Conor came into the bank one day and she was there. It was just after we got engaged. I could see them talking in the doorway. There was something about her – I could tell immediately that she fancied him. Women can tell within seconds if another woman is a friend or an enemy, and they’re rarely wrong. And that bitch Alison Kelly was no friend of mine, I can tell you that much.”
I remembered Lisa’s reaction to Alison the night of Danny’s wake. Now it made sense. But if what Lisa said was true, why had Alison claimed that she hadn’t seen Conor since she was a child? Could Conor have been the man outside the Station Inn on Sunday night?
Lisa drained her glass. “I asked Conor about it, and he said I was imagining things, that she was a useful contact, and that she could persuade her husband to give him the job. But there was more to it than that, I’m sure of it. And if you’d seen the look on Conor’s face when Alison Kelly’s husband walked over to the two of them that day in the bank, you’d have thought the same.”
I leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
“The color drained from Conor’s face as if he had seen a ghost. It was weird. And then it kind of hardened. I’m telling you, the look that Conor gave Ray Kelly that day was not the look of someone wanting a job. It frightened me. He looked as if he wanted to kill him.” Lisa rubbed her eyes. “I think that was the beginning of the end for us. I had been so happy before, but after that I just knew …” Her voice trailed off.
“You knew what?” I asked.
“I knew I wasn’t his priority anymore.”
Lisa stared at the wall, her eyes glazing over, tears running down her face. She had obviously been drinking before I met her in the Oak, but it was as if this latest drink had pushed her over the edge. It didn’t stop her pouring herself another, but when she offered the bottle to me, I put my hand over my glass. My mind was racing. What was going on between Alison Kelly and Conor Devitt? And why had both Kellys lied about how well they knew Conor? Ray had claimed he had never met him.
“Did Conor go ahead and pitch for work at Whitewater Church, do you know? Even though you tried to put a stop to it?” I asked.
Lisa grabbed a tissue from a silver-plated box by the sink and mopped her face.
“I think so. He said he was going up there to have a look and see the plans before the wedding. I don’t know if he ever got there though.”
“Is that why you thought the bones might be his?”
“I didn’t know,” she repeated stubbornly.
“When exactly was he planning to go up there?”
“The night before, or even the morning of our wedding, maybe. I didn’t see him at all, the day of the wedding. We weren’t due to get married until three o’clock, and he didn’t stay with me the night before. He was at his mother’s.”
“Did you say this at the time?” My tone was sharper than I intended.
She looked at me blankly. “What?”
“Did you tell the guards that Conor was planning on going up to the church?”
She shrugged. “I told someone. It mightn’t have been the guards. But Danny checked up there when he couldn’t find him before the wedding and there was no sign of him.”
I took a second to digest this.
“Had Conor arranged to meet someone at the church, do you know?”
“I don’t think so. He said he just wanted to have a look. I didn’t think there was anything strange about it. He was always very attached to that place for some reason. And the planning notice was up on the gate.” She gave me an odd look. “Anyway, why are we talking about this? He’s back, isn’t he? What does it matter now?”
I didn’t know why exactly, but it did matter, I was sure of it.
“Imagine – I actually thought that it might be him up there when they found those bones. I thought it might be him, after all, that he might have fallen or something. I even began to feel guilty, for judging him wrongly.” Lisa laughed bitterly as she waved her empty glass about. “But I was right all along, wasn’t I? Nothing happened to him. He just ran away, didn’t he? The day of our fucking wedding.”
“He didn’t run away with Alison Kelly though, did he?” I said. “She’s still here, with her husband.”
“Whatever, she’s a bitch anyway.”
Lisa leaned across the worktop to pour herself another glass of wine, then discovered that the bottle was empty. She clambered off the stool, swaying.
“I’ll go and get another bottle. I’m sure there’s a bottle of white out here somewhere.”
“No, please, not for me. I have to go.”
“Go on. It won’t kill you.”
“It might. I’m driving.”
Her eyes widened as if something had just dawned on her. “We have six bedrooms. You can stay the night.”
“No, thank you, honestly. I have to go.”
I stood up, collected my bag and keys, and pointed myself in the direction of the door.
Before I reached the hallway, the doorbell sounded, a loud church-like peal that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Beverly Hills mansion.
“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.
Lisa shook her head. A look of fear flickered across her face, and her eyes darted towards the door. She leaned precariously against the banisters.
“Do you want me to get it?”
She nodded.
I opened the door. Standing on the step was an unsmiling, unshaven Conor Devitt. He didn’t look too thrilled to see me. I heard Lisa emit a small sound behind me, like a tiny whimper of pain.
“Is this where Lisa McCauley lives?” Conor asked.
“Yes.”
Lisa didn’t move.
His mouth was fixed in a tight line. “Is she here?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to turn around and draw attention to her. But suddenly, she was beside me.
“Hello, Conor.” All sobered up, no trace of a slur. It’s incredible what a shock can do.
His face was expressionless. “Lisa,” he said.
“Long time no see.” Sober and sarcastic.
He ignored the tone. “Can I talk to you?”
She opened the door wide and pointed. “Go into the kitchen, it’s over there.” As he walked past us, she whispered to me, “Will you stay?”
“Are you sure you want me to?”
“As my solicitor? You can do that, can’t you?” she hissed anxiously.
“I suppose.”
She walked into the kitchen, and I followed her.
Conor was standing in the middle of the room. He glanced in my direction as I walked in behind Lisa, but showed absolutely no curiosity as to why I was there.
“What do you want to say to me, Conor?” Lisa squared up to him, her composure completely restored. I wondered how long it would last.
“I thought I owed you an apology,” he said.
Her face crumpled. “Oh well, that’s all right then. That makes it all grand, doesn’t it? That makes up for the past six and a half years.”
Conor didn’t react. His face remained set in the same expression he had been wearing on the doorstep.
“And I wanted to let you know that I’ll sign over the house to you,” he continued. “It’s yours.”
Lisa sank onto one of the stools. I stood behind her, feeling like an intruder, voyeuristic.
“Is that really all you have to say to me after all this time?”
“I presumed you would want that. You can sell it, or do whatever you like with it.”
Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “Seriously? That’s it?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what else I can do.” There was no trace of discomfort in his face.
“You always do the right thing, Conor, don’t you?” she said. “Always what’s expected of you. Except with me, of course.”
“I’m trying to, Lisa. You’re married now. I’m happy for you.”
As if on cue, I heard a key turn in the front door. Lisa’s face froze. She started to rub frantically at her eyes, which only served to make her eye makeup look even more panda-like.
Her husband strode into the kitchen. “Who owns the Mini parked in the driveway?”
“Alan.” Conor nodded at him, hands still in his pockets.
Alan paused for a second and then walked towards him, right hand outstretched. Conor shook it.
“Welcome back, sir.”
“Thanks.”
“We must get a pint.”
“Aye, sure.”
“I’ll give you a shout.”
There was a pause. The two men looked at each other. Then Conor turned and walked out of the room. Seconds later, I heard the front door close with a gentle click, followed by a loud clatter as Lisa’s stool fell against the island and she put out her hands to steady herself. Alan moved to place his arm around her. He looked pointedly at me.
“Thanks for getting her home safely. I think I can take it from here.”