The Killing House

by Claire McGowan

  ‘Wallace!’ Blood was running down between Dunne’s fingers. He needed the hospital too. ‘We have to get out of here!’

  Feet running up to the door. Shouts. ‘Police. Stand down!’

  Wallace gripped his gun. He was the Ghost, after all, wasn’t he? He’d got out of worse situations. ‘Let them come,’ he said.

  As the door burst open and the armed support officers flooded in, and bullets flew over her head, shouts and running feet and chaos, Paula bent down to Bob. ‘Bob. Bob, please. They’re here now. Hang on!’

  He lifted his hand to her face, and she saw how much effort it cost to do even that. She could barely hear the words that escaped him: ‘Find her.’ Then his hand fell back down, a dead weight, and he was gone.

  Chapter Forty-One

  They buried Bob on the kind of summer day that feels like winter, a chill breeze blowing off the mountains and through the thin jackets of the mourners in the country churchyard. He would lie beside his son Ian, the other grave softened at the edges already by grass. Paula had murmured some pointless words to Linda Hamilton, who stood by the twin graves, rigid and tearless in a black dress. She knew she would not see the woman much, if ever again. How could she, when she’d always feel responsible for Bob’s death? Her instruction to Saoirse had brought him running, piecing together the bits of the puzzle, trying to rescue her. If it wasn’t for Corry working out that Mrs Wallace’s nursing home fees had been paid from a dummy account set up by Tom Dunne, Paula might not have made it out alive either. She thought of his last words: Find her. Already her mind was moving on, thinking of a way to get back to London as soon as possible.

  She looked around her at the mourners. Her father and Pat, yet another funeral for them to attend. She was glad he and Bob had the chance to speak at least, before Bob died. It wasn’t the forgiveness he deserved, but she sensed he would not have wanted that anyway. That he had never been able to forgive himself either. There was Saoirse holding hands with Dave, safe, thank God, her baby’s heart still beating strong. Alive. Paula could not have stood it otherwise. Maggie she’d left with a babysitter, not knowing how she would explain that Mr Bob was gone. For a moment, when the armed team had stormed the hut, she’d not been sure she’d ever see the child again. That she might die there, in a hail of bullets. As it was, even the Ghost hadn’t been able to get out of this one, although he hadn’t been captured without seriously injuring several officers. But she had got out, and so had Mairead. No one else had died that day. Only Bob.

  She blinked away tears, looking around her again. There were Avril and Gerard, back early from honeymoon, Avril crying softly into a hankie. Fiacra, on his own this time, his curls plastered flat. Corry and Tozier, in sober black suits, a foot of space between them. Guy had sent flowers, but had not been able to make it over – Tess had gone into labour the night before. Paula would send something, when the time was right. A card, a small present of some kind. Linda was stooping now to throw flowers into the grave. It would soon be sealed over, and the process of forgetting Bob would carry on. If she could have spoken to him one last time, she would have said that none of it was his fault. That people do what they think best at the time, and they can’t do any more than that. That she knew he’d only ever tried to protect her mother. That her mother, too, had not meant for any of this to happen. That they could not go back, so they had to make the best of what they’d been left with.

  As the mourners began to file out of the churchyard, she saw someone standing near the edge of the small group. Black trousers, a trench coat. Aisling Wallace.

  ‘It was good of you to come.’

  ‘I thought one of us should.’ Mairead and Carly had gone to ground again, reunited, hiding out somewhere so secret that even Paula didn’t know where it was. She wondered would Carly be told in time who her father was, and taken to visit his grave. She wondered if she might go herself, now she knew he’d helped to save her mother.

  ‘How is she?’

  Aisling set her shoulders against the breeze. ‘I don’t know. Not sure I’ll ever see her again, to be honest. It’s why she came back, you know. To find out what happened to Emer. She was still her daughter, even after everything.’

  And Aisling had colluded in Emer’s death, helped to bury her. Paula had always been sure that girl must have been placed in the earth by someone who’d cared for her.

  ‘There was one thing I was wondering about, Aisling,’ she said, careful not to look at the woman. The wind whipped around them as they stood by the grave; so much for the Irish summer.

  Aisling had her hands in the pocket of her trench coat. How did a woman who’d lived on a farm for twenty years dress so well? ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The night Emer died . . . Sean strangled her, you said.’

  ‘To keep her quiet. She’d have told Paddy, he’d have shot us both.’

  ‘It was just strange about the pendant. It was mine, you know. I wondered how she got it. It was tangled in her hair, as if it had just been put on her.’

  Aisling was very still. Looking at Paula through the fall of her own dark hair.

  ‘I just wondered, that was all. If that wouldn’t be a good time to strangle someone, when you had your hands on their neck, putting a necklace on them. When they didn’t expect it. And she was in her nightie, as if she was going to bed. Would she have let Sean Conlon get that close to her, stand behind her? And that jumper she had on, the socks – someone dressed her in those, maybe. They didn’t want her to be cold in the grave.’

  There was a long silence. She was aware of the other woman, the strength it had taken to defy her brother, a killer, at just seventeen, and run across the country. The woman who, as a teenager, had saved her mother’s life. ‘It’s hard to explain what she was like,’ Aisling said finally. ‘She was . . . wild. Even Mammy was scared of her. The way she was. Like an animal.’

  ‘That must have been hard for you. You weren’t much older.’

  ‘No.’ She gave nothing away. ‘It was hard for all of us. Mammy, Mairead – it wasn’t easy, living out there. A godforsaken place.’

  Paula shot her a quick side-look then turned her eyes back to the headstone, Bob’s name freshly chiselled. ‘I suppose we’ll never know what happened.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Aisling neutrally. She hunched her shoulders up against the breeze. ‘I’m sorry about him. He seemed a good man. And I hope you find your mother. If you do . . . tell her I was OK. I don’t regret it.’

  Paula watched her walk away, thinking that Aisling had also been given her family back, her brother and sister and niece, if they could salvage the remains of a family from the wreckage. Maybe that was something they’d been able to do for each other.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  London, 2014

  So this was the place, then. After so many years of wondering where her mother was. In a bog, buried in a lonely field, or bricked into a wall somewhere. Instead she had been here, in this unremarkable terraced house on the outer edges of the Northern Line.

  The letter from Paddy Wallace had come a few weeks after Bob’s death, while he waited in prison for his trial. Just a formality. He was going to be locked up for the rest of his life. Tom Dunne, too, was going to be in prison for several years. He and Mairead were the only other ones who’d heard Wallace say Paula’s mother was still alive, and she didn’t think either of them would be talking. She’d managed to keep it from Corry, too, who definitely suspected something. He wouldn’t say, she insisted. He wouldn’t say if he knew where she was. For now, Margaret Maguire would remain missing, officially declared dead.

  A line of buzzers showed the house was divided into several flats – her mother, if she was still here, was not living the high life. Edward was dead, of course. Had she married him, or was she married again even? Could you do that if your husband was still alive? If you’d been declared legally dead? Paula stood
on the other side of the road, hiding behind a parked car. The street was suburban, bland, children’s bikes propped up outside houses, wheely bins in front gardens, cheap cars lining the road. She watched the door opposite. It was a bland day too, nothing remarkable. Warmish, but overcast. The English schools hadn’t broken up yet, had they? Maybe that was what made it so quiet. She’d left Maggie at day care, and slipped out of the office. With Guy still off on paternity leave, no one really cared what she did. His baby boy, Peter Brooking, was doing well. Soon, she would call to see him. She would bring a gift and say the right things and not tell Guy about Maggie once again. Not for another while at least. Maybe ever.

  So here she was. The address Paddy Wallace had sent her in his letter. Why? An apology, of sorts? A surrender in the war he’d kept fighting long after everyone else? Or a way to show her – look, I found her. I’ll be watching, even from prison. There were other men out there, shadowy figures he’d worked with. But she couldn’t think about that.

  She clutched it tight, the scrap of lined paper frayed and sweaty in her hand. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t just march up to the door and ring the bell. Hi, Mum, it’s me. Guess you’re not dead after all? And how would she be able to control the anger, the years of suffering and waiting her mother had put her through? The lines of pain written onto her father’s face. Her own failed relationships, the pills she’d swallowed at eighteen, every mistake she’d ever made. Could it all be traced back? If her mother hadn’t gone missing on that ordinary October day, would Paula’s life have been different? Or did she only have herself to blame for her bad choices?

  She forced her feet to cross the street. One, two, three, four steps. Up the path, noting where it was overgrown with weeds. A rental, by the looks of it. There were four doorbells. She stared at the lowest one for some time, before realising that the people inside would likely notice if she stood there much longer. And that wasn’t how she wanted to announce herself. She leaned on it. Nothing at first. She felt relief, maybe. If there was nobody home, she wouldn’t have to go through with it. Then the sound of feet on stairs, and the door was wrenched open before Paula had time to prepare herself.

  A girl stood there, about twenty or so, the same age as Carly Jones, with a sheet of red hair rippling down her back. She wore a checked shirt and skinny jeans, and had headphones looped around her neck. ‘Yeah?’ A London accent.

  ‘I . . .’ Words died in Paula’s throat. She was doing the maths in her head. ‘Um . . . who are you?’

  It was rude, just blurting it out, and the girl frowned. ‘I’m Aisling,’ she said. Then she turned and hollered over her shoulder. ‘Mummmm. Some woman’s here.’ And before Paula could move or speak or do anything except stand there, open-mouthed, the girl had gone pounding back up the stairs, and someone else was coming in from the kitchen, wiping their hands on a dish towel, in shadow moving into the light, and then she saw who it was.

  Margaret

  2014

  Aisling was at the door, talking to someone. A hawker of some kind or a Jehovah’s Witness, they got them a lot round this way. Or someone worse? Aisling had never learned to be as cautious as Margaret would have liked. For her, the fear had never quite gone away, although things had been quiet since Edward died. The current flat was even further out of London. She wondered why she even clung on there, when she could have moved anywhere. Maybe because it was the last place Edward had been. Maybe because it was Aisling’s home, and she didn’t want her daughter to have to keep running, looking over her shoulder. It was eight years since Edward had gone and no one had come after them in that time. Maybe they thought she was dead at that farm. Her thoughts turned to it often, the teenage girl who’d given her back her life, who she’d named her daughter after. It was the least she could do when without that other Aisling the child would have died with her in that barn, buried in the claggy soil, a forgotten grave with no name. She hoped the girl had made it away safe. Sometimes she even prayed, though why or who to, she didn’t know.

  Her own Aisling was still talking. Margaret set the dish she was drying on the rack, feeling the draft sweep in from the road, the air stale and dusty.

  ‘Muuumm,’ her daughter was calling. She went out, flicking the dish towel over her shoulder, mouth open to say something about shutting the door, or chase whoever it was away, muttering a warning about not opening the door to strangers. Had she forgotten the rules in the years since her father died?

  And then she saw.

  The woman in the door was instantly recognisable. How could she not be, when it was like looking at her thirty-something self? She’d been not much older when she’d had to run. The woman wore jeans and brown leather sandals, her nails unpainted, her red hair in a messy braid over one shoulder. Blazer, T-shirt. No make-up. Margaret took her in, and saw the stranger do the same to her. Her motherly clothes, hands reddened from the dishes, hair frizzy in the heat.

  ‘Hi,’ said the woman, and the Ballyterrin accent clashed on Margaret’s ears. So long since she’d heard it. She was aware of Aisling standing on the stairs, puzzled, and of how alike the two were. Of course they were alike. There was nothing surprising there.

  ‘Oh,’ said Margaret. Her hands clenched, rising up despite herself to touch the young woman’s face. ‘It’s you.’

  Epilogue

  Three months later

  ‘Where the hell are you taking me, Maguire? I thought we’d be seeing some sights. Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, that kind of jazz. Not the outer ring road.’

  ‘Shh, will you. She’s asleep.’ Paula and Aidan both turned to look at Maggie in the back, passed out in her car seat, the motion of driving working like a charm. She’d been wild with excitement at a day trip with Daddy, ice creams and lunch in a café and a visit to Hamleys, and now she’d crossed over into exhaustion, thankfully without passing through tears and tantrums on the way. Paula had been wary ever since Aidan had come back into their lives, getting out of prison when Paddy Wallace was convicted for killing Sean Conlon that night, partly on evidence from Dunne, who was hoping for a lighter sentence.

  Paula’s first instinct, of course, had been to run. She hadn’t been sure what kind of Aidan would be coming home after all that time in prison. The darkness in him had been fed – could he still be Daddy, who read stories in funny voices and dressed up to make Maggie laugh? What kind of damage would it do to the little girl, all the confusion and upset? So Paula had thought it best to take Maggie back to London and carry on with her job, letting Aidan visit when he felt able. Once again, she’d left Pat and PJ to pick up the pieces. She’d left Saoirse to recover from her ordeal, although the baby was fine, thank God; it was all fine and she was due in four months and the danger time was over. If it ever could be truly over. If there was ever such a thing as safety. Gradually, they’d worked up to visits with Aidan. First in a hotel, then staying with them in the flat. Maggie had taken it in her stride, as if she’d known all along her daddy would come back to her. And now here they were, the three of them in a rented Fiat Punto on the outskirts of the city, a drab and dusty suburb with nothing to distinguish it at all.

  ‘Seriously, though, where are we?’ He looked round at the nondescript street she’d parked the car on. ‘I don’t think much of your tour guiding, Maguire.’

  Maguire. The simple joy of hearing him say her name again, in his light, teasing tone. To be back within touching distance, to be able to pick up his hand or swat him when he made a joke or tell him to scoop up Maggie before she wandered into the road looking at a dog or something. Things she’d taken for granted before she’d lost them. She told herself she never would again, but life didn’t work like that. Probably soon they’d be back to their daily routine – Aidan had some freelancing lined up for an investigative website – her at work, Maggie going to school soon. Life carrying on. She couldn’t wait for it. A normal life. A normal family. Not much to ask for.

>   She turned to him. ‘You love your mammy, right?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Yeah, course.’

  ‘If I said there was something that you couldn’t tell her, I mean not ever, would you be able to do that?’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘You have to decide first. You can never say a word about it to your mammy, not a single word. It’d destroy her if you did. And Dad. So think about it before you answer.’

  He squinted. ‘Is it something important? To you, I mean?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘And I could never breathe a word about it.’

  ‘Not one word. I’m deadly serious.’

  ‘Well, then, sure I can. There’s plenty I’ve never told my mammy, believe me, Maguire. Starting with what you and I used to get up to in the front room when she was out making the tea.’

  She didn’t join in his wicked smile. He’d been almost feverishly playful all day, grabbing fun and freedom with both hands. He too might crash like Maggie if it all got too much for him. ‘Promise me, Aidan. Before we go any further.’

  ‘I promise. This is all very mysterious, Maguire.’

  She thought about it for a moment. Aidan had lied to her before. He was not perfect. But then, she was still lying to Guy Brooking about her daughter’s paternity. And perhaps she wouldn’t be able to keep this secret forever, maybe it would come out sometime. But she had to at least try.

  She turned the engine off. Maggie was still asleep. Maybe she should have left her at home, waited another day for this particular introduction. But it didn’t seem fair. Not when everyone had already waited so long. And if she had learned anything from Bob – never to be thought of without a stab to the heart – it was that you couldn’t be sure you’d always have more time with the people you loved. She unbuckled her seat belt, glancing across the road to the number 41. ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Get Maggie out. There’s somebody you both need to meet.’