Clare was finally laid to rest on a blisteringly hot Wednesday morning. We all felt not only a sense of relief at finally being able to bring her to her final resting place, but also an overwhelming sense of sadness at the unfairness of it all. We knew our grief was only really beginning. We knew it would never really make sense.
Some names scrawled on the back of a random photograph was all it took for Aaron O’Loughlin to choose his victims.
An associate of Aaron’s from Wales, where he’d moved after leaving Derry, had sold his story to Ingrid Devlin. He said Aaron had become obsessed with the idea of ‘making things right’ and rebuilding bridges with his mother. But he’d also talked incessantly about justice. About the need for people to be made accountable for their actions. He’d said he’d do what the police didn’t have the guts to.
It wasn’t of importance to him that none of us had any real connection with Laura’s suicide. He had to be angry with someone, the trauma counsellor who’d been appointed to me had said at my first session.
It didn’t really matter though, did it? No amount of soul-searching or navel-gazing would bring Clare back. She was gone. Her coffin was proof of that. Paul had helped to carry it from the church and I’d felt sick imagining that he could so easily have been carrying my coffin.
Ingrid was there at the back of the church. A suitably sombre expression on her face. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. It had been she who’d been driving the blue car that had scared me senseless just before it had all happened. She’d looked for an interview with me, which I’d politely declined. She’d never hear my side of the story.
Paul and Beth had held my hands tight as Clare was lowered into the ground. Poor Mrs Taylor was buckled with grief. Ronan had to hold her up while Mr Taylor held his composure, just. He was broken. Utterly destroyed. I struggled to be able to look him in the eye. I felt the weight of Clare’s death like a stone around my neck. It could have been me. I could have been in the grave beside her. It was only fate or luck or something that I wasn’t.
Julie didn’t even make it to the funeral. She was still in County Down. Brendan had said she was struggling to cope. She was struggling to come to terms with the fact that she, too, had been taken in by Aaron, who’d pretended to be a father. Pretended to have children at the same school as her own children. That had scared her – how close he’d come to her own children. Just as it scared me. Could he have hurt Molly and Beth, or would he have stopped after he killed me, or Julie? I suppose we’ll never know.
As the crowds were dispersing, Ronan invited us back to the Taylors’ house for tea and sandwiches, but I was tired. I wanted to be at home. I wanted to escape the pervading sense of grief. I wanted to heal with my family around me.
As Paul pushed me back towards the car, I saw the woman with red hair pushing Elizabeth through the cemetery gates in a wheelchair. We didn’t stop to chat – we were too far apart – but I lifted my hand and gave her a small wave. She nodded in acknowledgement and then returned to staring straight in front of her.
Clare Taylor hadn’t been the only person laid to rest that day.
A fresh mound of dirt lay on top of the grave with a grey granite stone bearing the names of my beloved husband and daughter. Soon, Aaron’s name would be etched into the same stone in silver.
‘He’s at peace now,’ Cliona said and God, I hoped he was.
I hoped both he and Laura were. I hoped that if there was an afterlife, a greater being overseeing it all, they’d acknowledge Aaron’s troubles. They’d understand that I was still a mother who still loved her son. Who hoped to see him again one day.
There were only a couple of wreaths on his grave. It was sad that this was all his life amounted to. One of them was from my sister and her family. Another was from me, a simple display of white roses and lilies.
But the cornflower blue between them caught my eye and my heart started to thump.
‘Can you bring me closer?’ I asked Cliona.
‘Of course.’
I saw it clearly then. A simple display of wild forget-me-nots, their stems wrapped in black ribbon. A familiar white card pinned to them.
‘Can you reach that card for me?’ I asked Cliona and she did.
She opened the envelope for me, my own hands shaking and still weak from my stroke, and handed it over.
‘Can you read it okay?’ she asked.
I looked down at the words. In blue ink:
A chill ran through me and I glanced around, suddenly feeling as if someone was watching us. I thought of all the times I’d felt as if I was being watched before. All the times I’d caught a shadow of something and dismissed it as nothing more than my overactive imagination.
The times I now knew were Aaron watching me. Too afraid to come and talk. If only he’d approached me. Maybe I could have got through to him. No one else had needed to die.
But the day was still. No one was there. The only shadows were from the leaves on the trees, the shade from the gravestones.
I shivered.