Where She Lies

by Michael Scanlon

  ‘Bit of advice,’ Beck said. ‘Fuck off.’

  The driver smirked now. ‘You want to say something? Promise we’ll run it exactly as you give it to us.’

  Beck walked back to the Focus, opened the passenger door and looked over at Claire, still standing beside the SUV.

  ‘Come on,’ he called.

  * * *

  They were almost at the station when he spoke again. ‘Drive past and pull in.’

  Reporters were on the street outside the station along with a couple of TV news crews. Beck turned his head and sat low in his seat as they drove by. He took a deep breath and slammed an open fist onto the dashboard in frustration. Claire jumped.

  ‘Jesus, that’s not going to help anything,’ she said.

  ‘All missing persons cases,’ he said, ‘over the last fifty or so years have been uploaded to Pulse nationally, did you know that? Accompanied by photographs. Have a look. It has to be in there somewhere.’

  ‘And where will you be?’

  Beck thought about that. ‘The Hibernian. I’ll book a room for a couple of nights.’

  ‘You can stay with us, it’s no trouble.’

  ‘Thanks, I appreciate that, really, but The Hibernian should be fine.’

  ‘Well, if you have a problem, let me know.’

  ‘I will,’ and, after a pause, ‘who’s the oldest guard you can think of who served in Cross Beg and is still around? Know anyone?’

  Claire didn’t have to think about it for long. ‘Jim Molyneaux. He was a sergeant here for donkey’s years. He’s in St Brendan’s Nursing Home now, on Bridge Walk.’

  ‘Change of plan. Can you drop me there instead?’

  Claire didn’t ask any questions, just swung the wheel and pulled out again from the kerb.

  Seventy-Six

  The nurse with the name tag ‘Jacinta’ who Beck had stopped in the foyer to ask where he could find Jim Molyneaux was in a hurry. ‘Day room,’ she replied, slowing down but not stopping. ‘By the window.’

  A female resident was at the front door Beck had just come through, fumbling with the handle, mumbling to herself. Beck knew that to exit, a second handle higher up had to be pulled at the same time. She looked at Beck. ‘Can you open this? I need to collect the children, you see. Himself will be home soon and I’ve nothing ready.’ She looked about, then back to the door, then back to Beck. ‘Who are you? Seamus, is it, the coal man?’ Finally she looked at the door again, before shuffling slowly away along a corridor.

  Beck thought of his dreams. Would the lines between his reality and his dreams one day merge so that his life became a living nightmare? Would he have the courage to seek escape, to end it, before that happened? Many said they would, but yet they drifted on, and drifted over, until it was too late and they were lost.

  The day room was large and bright, residents sitting about on high-back armchairs, some watching a loud television in a corner, others looking at newspapers and magazines, and some just looking at their hands. Only one was sitting by the bay window looking out on to the road and across it to the river.

  He turned the moment Beck walked into the room.

  It was immediately evident in Jim Molyneaux’s eyes that there was no problem with merging realities here. His body, however, was ravaged by age, the skin puckered and creased like old leather, the back slumped, even if there was still a full head of white hair on top of it. As Beck approached, he smiled, the smile of someone emerging from the woods and seeing his first human in days.

  ‘Sergeant Molyneaux?’ Beck asked.

  ‘I haven’t been called that in a long, long time.’

  If Beck had closed his eyes, he would not have placed the voice into such a feeble body. It was strong, with the cheerful sing-along rhythm of the southern counties. He was dressed in blue pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt. It was warm in the day room.

  ‘You look like a cop,’ Molyneaux added.

  ‘Inspector Finnegan Beck,’ said Beck, offering his hand.

  They shook and Beck pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘Inspectors, the bane of my life.’ Molyneaux’s face crumpled into an exaggerated frown.

  ‘Maybe you could help me with something?’ Beck asked.

  ‘And maybe you could help me with something, too. Go and get my wheelchair from my room. Number seven’ – he nodded his head – ‘just down there. Take me out for a bit. Can you do that? I’ll need a coat, too.’ He lowered his voice. ‘In the top drawer by the bed, at the back, there’s a packet of fags and a lighter. Now, good lad, can you look after all that?’

  Beck nodded. ‘I can look after all that.’

  Molyneaux’s room was clean, functional, sterile. A bottle of blackcurrant squash sat on the bed tray, but no other signs were evident that anyone occupied this space. An overcoat and a couple of shirts hung in the wardrobe, some socks and underwear on the shelves. Beck took the overcoat, found the pack of cigarettes as instructed and returned to the day room. He helped the old sergeant with his coat and placed the cigarettes and lighter into a pocket. They left, Beck pushing the wheelchair across the road outside and along the path by the riverbank. They stopped at a bench and Beck sat down. They lit up, and Molyneaux coughed once and spat onto the ground.

  ‘Apologies, my wife detested my spitting.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘It is a disgusting habit, especially if you have to watch it. Not the same when you do it yourself… like a lot of things, I suppose.’

  Beck inhaled. ‘You have family?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe.’

  Beck looked surprised, said nothing.

  ‘My wife died five years ago,’ Molyneaux explained. ‘That’s when I came here. Frank, our son, died at nineteen in a car accident. I have a brother in New York. I don’t care much about him. So you see, it’s gone full circle. I’m back where I started. On my own. But that’s not why you’re here, is it? To talk about any family I possibly might or might not have?’

  ‘I came here to ask you something. A body was found at a beach, a place called Haven Cove…’

  ‘I know the place,’ Molyneaux said.

  ‘… a skeleton, actually. Looks like it’d been there a long time, maybe thirty years.’

  Molyneaux was quiet, staring at the river, holding his cigarette between two fingers, resting his thumb against his chin. He was listening.

  ‘A male,’ Beck continued. ‘Young, tall, remnants of a brown tweed jacket on his torso, some hair still preserved, black and curly, the way it was described.’

  Molyneaux took a long draw on his cigarette, and when he spoke, the words tumbled out with the thick stream of smoke. ‘Young Jimmy Reidy. Has to be.’

  It took Beck a moment to realise he was standing there with his mouth open.

  * * *

  Sergeant Molyneaux was driving the area patrol car, a Chrysler Avenger, up Main Street on that wet and stormy night; in the passenger seat beside him was Garda Patrick Donnelly, a gruff Leitrim man who spoke only if he absolutely had to. They were returning to the station, looking forward to taking off their heavy greatcoats and drinking steaming mugs of tea and, if the telephone didn’t ring, getting some shut-eye.

  It was the middle of the night shift, November 1984. The song of the moment, I Feel For You by Chaka Khan.

  The windscreen wipers juddered across the glass, partially clearing away the rain, Molyneaux concentrating on the road ahead. Suddenly, Donnelly shouted ‘Stop’, and before the car had come to a halt he was out and running into an alley. Molyneaux cut the engine and was about to follow, but Donnelly shouted over his shoulder for him to stay where he was. The sounds of dustbin lids overturning followed, and a prolonged and loud ‘Aaaggghhh’. Then Donnelly emerged with two young fellas in headlocks. ‘Look what I found,’ he said, like a farmer having just trapped two rats in his feed store.

  Donnelly told Molyneaux that he’d been looking out the window when he’d seen a flicker of light from inside the alley, enough for him
to make out Reidy in the flame of a match setting fire to some newspapers and trying to push these through what turned out to be a smashed window at the back of a newsagent’s.

  Donnelly threw the prisoners into the rear of the Avenger and sat in between them, a rare smile on his face, passed the time on the way back to the station playing ‘slap-a-boo’; each time he shouted ‘slap’, the prisoner had to respond with ‘boo’, immediately. If he didn’t, and even if he did, Donnelly would slap him viciously around the head. And the prisoner wasn’t allowed to protect himself. That was against the rules. If he did, Molyneaux would hit him twice as hard. And Molyneaux remembered Donnelly kept telling Reidy he looked like a white black man with his big afro hair. The rest of the shift Donnelly spent going in and out of their cell, making them crawl about on their hands and knees, barking like dogs, as he shouted out commands like ‘Sit’ and ‘Give me the paw’, kicking them throughout. No one worried about leaving marks on prisoners back then. You could do that sort of thing, he told Beck when he caught that look on his face; in fact, it was expected, by both prisoners and commanding officers.

  As dawn broke and thoughts were turning to home, Donnelly finally rang their parents. Damages were paid to the newsagent’s and that was the end of it. The end of it for that particular night, that was. But in another way, it was only the beginning.

  ‘They kept us busy,’ Molyneaux said. ‘Two little bastards, they were.’

  It couldn’t be proven, of course, that they were responsible for what followed: the spate of small unexplained fires, the broken shop windows, the dead animals hanging from lamp posts, cats mostly, but also a small dog once or twice, sometimes with its throat slit, sometimes a limb missing, sometimes a head. There was no CCTV back then, nor any willingness to divert scarce resources into a full-scale investigation. As long as no one was being killed or injured, it was ignored.

  But Molyneaux wasn’t so sure that was the case, that no one was being killed. He thought they might be, but in ways that didn’t raise suspicion.

  ‘I don’t need to remind you,’ he said to Beck, ‘that suicide was a taboo subject back then.’

  And it was. For years the church forbade the burial of victims in consecrated ground. A collective shame built up around it, and suicides were rarely – very rarely – recorded accurately. Unless it was absolutely necessary, could not be classified as anything else, well, then and only then did it go down for what it was: suicide. And yet, even against that criterion, it was impossible to ignore. Suicides were on the rise in Cross Beg, suicide by drowning that was, because there were no others.

  Molyneaux said he was suspicious about it all. But Beck wondered if that was only because it was after the fact.

  But then it stopped.

  Everything.

  The unexplained fires, the broken windows, the dead animals hanging from lamp posts. And the suicides. And something else. Reidy and his pal had disappeared. Just like that, too. They were reported missing, but not much effort was put into finding them. The belief was that they had scarpered off to London or America. It happened a lot back then. And good riddance, if that was the case. Because no one really cared.

  * * *

  Molyneaux wrapped his collar tightly around his neck. He suddenly looked pale and tired. ‘I’d like to go back in now.’

  ‘Of course,’ Beck said. ‘One more thing. What about their parents?’

  ‘Reidy was the son of a teacher. Respectable family. Another reason why no one wanted to bother them, the parents that is. And that tweed jacket you mentioned, I don’t think I ever saw him wearing anything else, always seemed to have it on, winter or summer. Perhaps he had more than one, I don’t know.’

  ‘You didn’t say much about the other fella,’ Beck said. ‘Who was he?’

  Molyneaux fell silent, but after a moment continued, his voice rising. ‘I saved the best till last. Oh yes, the other fella, ah, the other fella, that’s a good one. He didn’t have a father. Not an easy thing for his mother back then to stay in a small town like this when she was up the duff. But stay she did. So people had plenty to gossip about, and started putting two and two together, especially as the kid grew up and the resemblance became clear.’

  ‘Resemblance to who?’

  Molyneaux gave a throaty laugh. ‘To the local priest. A young curate, they say he was the dad. His name was Father Matthew Clifford. Right enough, the woman had worked in the presbytery for a time, as a housekeeper, so there was plenty of fuel for gossip there. She left abruptly, around about the same time Father Clifford was sent off on the missions. That’s what got people thinking. Botswana, they say, or was it the Congo?’ The throaty laugh once more. ‘You couldn’t get much further than either of those places, now could you?’

  Beck stood, gripping the handles of the wheelchair. ‘The young fella. Was he named after his father?’

  ‘Of course not. He was given his mother’s name, Farmer. Benedict Farmer, it’s a religious thing.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Beck muttered.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Beck began pushing the wheelchair. ‘And his mother? What was her name?’

  ‘Angela. Good-looking woman, too. There was a history there, though.’

  ‘History?’

  ‘Ya, the nerves they call it. Mental illness. I know she was in and out of the psych ward at times. There was one occasion we had to go to her house, where she was holding Benedict out the top-floor window, dangling him by the legs. We sectioned her for that for a while. A social worker was involved with the case. I’ll tell you something interesting, will I?’

  Molyneaux paused.

  ‘Go on,’ Beck said, softly.

  ‘Imelda Butler. That was her name. The one who’s been murdered.’

  Beck imagined a piece of jigsaw clicking into place.

  ‘It is her, isn’t it?’ Molyneaux asked.

  ‘I can’t say,’ Beck replied. ‘Not at this time. You know the drill.’

  ‘If it’s her immediate family you’re worried about,’ the old sergeant said, ‘I can save you time. She doesn’t have any. A crabby auld spinster was what she was. And the young fella hated her. He was cute enough not to do anything about it. She was a State employee, after all. We were told to keep an eye on her. But if it was him... which, of course, it can’t be. Because he’s dead. Has to be. Fellas like him are like white phosphorus, cause mayhem but burn out quick.’

  ‘Yes,’ Beck said. ‘But if it was him?’

  ‘Well, he’d be pretty fucking mad by now, wouldn’t he? All that pent-up anger and hatred. He’d do quite a job on her, I’d say... But there’s no one with that name in the town, is there? I check sometimes. Old habits die hard. Anyway, back to my story. Angela got married in the end. To a local man, name Willie Kelly, worked in Shreever’s Builders’ Providers, long gone now. They had a daughter, Margaret. Not sure what happened to her. Think she went to America. Willie himself died of a heart attack – he was only forty-seven years old. You know, I never thought Reidy was the evil one. He was more a follower. It was Farmer who was the real bad egg. And did you know?’

  ‘Did I know?’

  ‘That he’s back. Not Farmer. Like I said, I think he must be long dead. But himself, Father Clifford, the boy’s dad, suitably atoned for his sins after his years on the missions in Africa. Nobody remembers him now of course, except old codgers like me, hanging onto life with both feet in the grave, so he probably thinks it’s all forgotten.’

  ‘I met him,’ Beck said. ‘I met Father Clifford.’

  ‘He was only a young fella back then, when he got her pregnant. So he’s not as old as you’d think. It’s like when you meet a schoolteacher from when you were a kid. You expect them to be ancient. But they’re not, because they weren’t much older than you were to begin with. Same thing here. He’s not even sixty, I’d say, not old for a priest at all. Comes in here every Sunday.’ The throaty laugh. ‘Maybe you should talk to him.’

  �
�Maybe I should,’ Beck said, stopping at the zebra crossing.

  ‘And Angela, is she still alive?’

  ‘Nah, she’s been dead a few years now. You’d never guess?’

  Beck started to cross the road.

  ‘You mean…’

  ‘Yes, drowned in the river, poor woman.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘They say she fell in, of course.’

  And then it came, the throaty laugh again.

  Seventy-Seven

  Beck was still thinking about what Molyneaux had said when he approached the reception desk in The Hibernian Hotel and enquired with the man standing behind it about a room for the night. Beck recognised him too as being the barman from the other evening when he’d been drinking here with Gumbell. But Beck was too absorbed in his own thoughts to fully notice that he wasn’t responding, that he was merely standing there, looking at him; gaping at him was the term. When he heard him say ‘Just a minute’, and saw him disappear through a door into a back office, Beck was pulled back into the present, his mind focusing on the matter at hand. Then he re-emerged, along with an older, bespectacled man, dressed in a knitted sweater and chinos which Beck deemed too casual for a member of general staff. He surmised this man to be either the owner or manager. Beck also noted the thick gold watch on his wrist.

  ‘Hello,’ the man said, but there was no smile. ‘Maurice Tynan. I’m the owner of The Hibernian. You were looking for accommodation, I believe.’

  ‘There’s a problem,’ Beck said, but it wasn’t put as a question.

  The man fidgeted with a pen held between his fingers. ‘To be honest…’ he began.

  Which always annoyed Beck, because it meant that anything else was not honest.

  ‘Yes,’ Beck said. ‘To be honest, what?’

  ‘There’s no need for tones.’

  Beck knew it would suit him if he had a tone, to blame him for what he guessed was to come.

  ‘You were saying,’ Beck said. ‘About being honest.’