Those We Left Behind

by Stuart Neville

  ‘What did Thomas say?’ Flanagan asked.

  But she already knew the answer to that question.

  3

  CUNNINGHAM WALKED ACROSS the open ground towards Phil Lewis. Lewis waited with his hands in the pockets of his corduroy trousers. He wore a shirt and tie beneath a V-neck sweater. He looked like he worked in just about any public sector job, that smart but slightly frayed look all but the highest paid civil servants tended to have.

  Except for the heavy bunch of keys chained to his belt.

  Buildings clustered around them, flat roofs, high walls and fences, enclosed yards. Behind the main complex stood a trio of greenhouses set in their own gardens.

  Young men looked up from their digging and planting to watch her. Some looked closer than others, let their gaze linger beyond casual glances. Many of the boys were unnaturally bulky; a fervent gym culture thrived among the inmates, passing their hours of tedium lifting weights. A dangerous combination: the petulant immaturity of young offenders and the physical strength of grown men. Cunningham ignored the burning sensation their attention left on the skin beneath her clothing. She tightened her grip on the folder under her arm, the ever-present cigarette craving drying the back of her throat.

  Lewis extended his hand as she approached. His fingers were soft and cool on hers. He didn’t look at the visitor’s tag she wore clipped to her jacket. They had met many times before.

  ‘He’s in the Offender Management Unit,’ Lewis said.

  She followed him towards the blue two-storey prefab building.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked.

  ‘Quiet,’ Lewis said. ‘He’s always quiet. He’s a decent enough young fella, considering.’

  Considering.

  Jesus, Cunningham thought. Considering he’d killed a human being.

  ‘Is he using?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not that we know of. Thomas, his brother, kept him out of the way of all that. Kept him clean.’

  ‘Not even cannabis?’ She couldn’t mask the surprise in her voice. Lock up a young man for hours upon days upon weeks, pen him in with dozens of other boys, all as bored as him. There were only so many ways to pass the time.

  ‘Not even a bit of blow,’ Lewis said. ‘There was a worry he might start once Thomas left us, but he didn’t. Or if he did, he kept it well hidden.’

  ‘When did he last see his brother?’

  Lewis paused at the door, pursed his lips as he thought.

  ‘Maybe a fortnight ago. He was getting fidgety ’cause he hadn’t seen Thomas for a few weeks. They had an hour together, and Ciaran settled down after that. He always does. You’ll want to make sure they see each other as soon as possible. Thomas always seems to put Ciaran back on track. You ready?’

  Lewis hit four digits on the keypad. The red light turned to green. He pushed the door inward, held it for her, followed her inside.

  The corridor’s low ceiling made it feel like a tunnel, the fluorescent lighting bleaching the life from everything it touched.

  ‘This way,’ Lewis said.

  He led her to another door, another keypad.

  A rectangular window set into the wood, segmented by wire mesh. Two figures at a table, one broad and round-shouldered, the other thin like a blade. Both sat with their hands folded on the wood. Neither spoke.

  The larger man looked up when Lewis knocked the glass. Cunningham recognised him as Joel Gilpin, a senior prison officer who’d worked the Maze and Maghaberry before coming to the Young Offenders Centre.

  Lewis tapped in the same four digits and entered the room. Cunningham followed and closed the door behind her, stayed there as Lewis approached the table. The lock whirred and clicked as it sealed them in.

  Lewis placed the fingertips of one hand on the table, some clandestine signal that the life of the young man in front of him had now changed. ‘Ciaran, this is Paula Cunningham, your probation officer.’

  The young man looked up from the tabletop. His eyes met hers for no more than a moment. Long enough to send a crackle from the back of her skull to the base of her spine. She shivered as she exhaled.

  ‘Hello, Ciaran.’

  The tip of his tongue appeared from between his lips, wet them, retreated.

  ‘Hello,’ he said in a voice so small Cunningham couldn’t be sure if she’d heard it at all.

  He wore a T-shirt with some meaningless logo splashed across the chest, cheap jeans and a light hooded cardigan. The kind of clothes you’d buy in a supermarket or a chain store, with made-up brand names that any teenager would refuse to wear. A holdall lay in the corner.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ she asked.

  His narrow shoulders rose and fell in a timid shrug. He brought his thumb to his mouth, teeth working the nail. Cunningham noted the stubs of keratin at the tip of each finger, the red raw skin.

  Lewis remained standing, his back against the wall, while she took the seat opposite and placed the file on the table. She sat still, let the silence thicken, waiting for him to glance up at her once more.

  When he did, she asked, ‘Has everything been explained to you? About what’s going to happen?’

  Ciaran nodded.

  ‘Good,’ she said, offering a firm smile when he gave her another fleeting look. ‘As soon as I’ve signed the forms, I’ll take you to my car, and I’ll drive you to the hostel. Okay?’

  Ciaran nodded.

  ‘I’m told you’ve had two stays in the hostel.’

  She waited, listened to him breathe.

  ‘Ciaran, I said you’ve had two stays in the hostel. Is that right?’

  He shifted in his seat, understood she expected a response. He nodded.

  ‘How did you like it?’

  ‘S’okay,’ he said.

  ‘Good. So you’ve met Tom Wheatley, the manager there. You know their rules. What they expect of you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Shall we go?’

  4

  CIARAN WANTS TO walk behind her, to follow, but she won’t allow it. When he slows his pace, she does too. Mr Lewis and Mr Gilpin stay back, their footsteps echoing on the shiny floors. Ciaran feels them there, like shadows trailing from his heels.

  Once the probation woman has given her visitor’s card back to the front desk, once they’re outside in the cool air, once Mr Lewis and Mr Gilpin have been left behind, she stops walking.

  Ciaran stops too, shifting the bag’s weight on his shoulder. He can’t look at her as she turns to him. He turns his head away, shy, wishing Thomas was here to tell him how to be.

  Thomas always knows how to be. What to say. What to do.

  ‘Ciaran,’ she says, ‘I’m not going to lead you to my car. You are going to walk with me to my car. Beside me. All right?’

  Ciaran’s stomach feels weird, like wriggly worms are eating him from inside. He looks back to the door he’s only just walked through. He wants to go back to where he knows how things work. But he can’t.

  He feels all shaky frightened. Thomas would tell him to grow up, not to be a scaredy-cat, a cowardy-custard.

  Thomas isn’t scared of anything. But Thomas isn’t here to keep the scared away.

  ‘All right?’ the woman asks.

  Ciaran swallows, feels the pressure like little balloons in his ears, thinks of later on. Thinks of his brother. ‘All right,’ he says.

  She nods. ‘Come on, then.’

  She walks. He keeps pace with her, his gaze on the tarmac as they cross the car park. From the corner of his eye, he studies her. She isn’t tall, but she walks as if she is. She walks like she practises it, like how she walks matters a lot.

  The breeze is strange on his skin. And the light. Ciaran can feel the light, as if he could split apart the colours, his skin knowing one from another. He is outside in the world, and he doesn’t know how to feel.

  They approach a small car. The badge says Nissan. He can’t tell which model. He doesn’t know anything about cars. Thomas does. Thomas likes cars. T
homas has bought one. He told Ciaran two weeks ago. He promised to take Ciaran for a spin.

  ‘To the seaside?’ Ciaran had asked, hope bursting in him.

  ‘Maybe,’ Thomas had said, and Ciaran had gone all dizzy and floaty behind his eyes.

  The probation woman digs in her handbag, cursing under her breath, until she finds a key. She presses a button. The car makes a mechanical clunk. She opens the boot, and he drops his bag inside.

  ‘Get in,’ she says, pointing to the passenger door.

  Ciaran does as he’s told. He almost always does. He’s a good lad. All the guards say so. The dashboard presses against his knees. The car smells clean, but litter has been stuffed into the pockets and cubbyholes.

  The woman lowers herself into the driver’s seat.

  An important question occurs to Ciaran. ‘What do I call you?’ he asks.

  ‘My name,’ she says. ‘Paula.’

  ‘All right.’

  She starts the engine, and the radio shouts all blaring loud before she reaches for the volume control.

  Ciaran looks out of the passenger window, back towards the buildings he has left for the last time. He supposes he should feel something more, something big, as they drive away. Happiness, excitement, anything. But he doesn’t. Even as the car cuts along the tree-lined driveway towards the main gates, and all he can see is wood and the leaves going brown and yellow and orange, even then he feels nothing.

  The gate to the main road comes into view.

  And the men with cameras.

  Paula says, ‘Shit.’

  She slows the car to a stop.

  Ciaran winds his fingers together in his lap. He sees the men gathering on the other side of the gateway, huddled in groups, chatting. Some of them smoking cigarettes. He remembers seeing men like them years ago, through the windows of the police van.

  They notice the car. Just a few at first, but soon they’re all crowding towards the opening, pushing and shoving. Ciaran thinks of piglets fighting over their mother’s teats. He wants to laugh, but he holds it in.

  ‘It was supposed to be kept quiet,’ Paula says. ‘Someone must have tipped them off. They weren’t here when I came in. You can cover your face if you want. Maybe put your hood up.’

  He raises the cardigan’s hood and drops his gaze to his hands.

  The car moves off. The men swarm as it pauses in the gateway. Camera lenses clatter on the glass. Lightning fills the car. Ciaran gathers the fabric of the hood around his face, the flash-flash-flashing cutting through the weave.

  Paula sounds the horn, inches the car forward, curses the photographers.

  One of the men shouts Ciaran’s name. Asks if he has anything to say to the family of David Rolston.

  That laugh is still pushing to escape him, making his lips all stretchy, swelling up inside his chest. He pinches the hood together to cover his mouth.

  The car lurches forward onto the road. Paula accelerates hard, jerks the steering wheel, straightens their course.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she says.

  Ciaran says nothing. He fears if he opens his mouth the laughter will spill out of him, and she will think bad things about him. When the urge dissolves in his throat, he pulls the hood back and watches the road ahead.

  Within a few minutes, they have passed through the avenues and crescents of semi-detached houses that Mr Lewis had called the Four Winds. That name put a picture in Ciaran’s head, of walls of air rushing through the streets, going north, south, east and west. It made this cluster of houses sound like somewhere strange and far away when really they were just ordinary homes for ordinary people. That had been a month ago, the last time Ciaran had been allowed to stay a night at the hostel. Mr Lewis had told him he could take a walk to the shops nearby if he wanted. Ciaran hadn’t dared.

  The car halts at the junction with the big road with all its lanes of rush-rush noisy traffic. Ciaran looks up at the signs to see what the big road is called. He’s not sure he understands what they say. They say A55 and Outer Ring. Which is it? Both? He doesn’t like this junction, the cars coming from every direction, moving like bullets. A lorry rumbles past, and Ciaran feels the force of it through the soles of his shoes, through the carpet, and the car’s metalwork. He feels the displaced air rock the Nissan on its wheels. He wonders what it would feel like if the lorry hit them. The bang, the impact, the glass flying, he and Paula shaken inside the car like those dotty-red crawly ladybirds he’d trapped in a jar when he was little. Thomas had taken them from him, had shaken them hard to see if they would die.

  He swallows and closes his eyes.

  The car moves, the engine note rising in pitch.

  When Ciaran opens his eyes again, they have crossed the junction. The big shopping centre passes on their right, the hostel on the corner to their left.

  ‘After we get you checked in,’ Paula says, ‘we’ll take a walk over. You can buy some things.’

  ‘What things?’

  She shrugs as she flicks the indicator on to turn left. ‘I don’t know. What do you need?’

  Ciaran thinks about it as they round the corner and she pulls the car up to the gate.

  Two photographers point cameras from the footpath. They approach the car. Another man watches from across the road, a notepad and pen in his hands. The gate opens, and Paula drives through. She watches the men in her rear-view mirror.

  Ciaran struggles to find a want for anything at all. But he will try very hard to think of something.

  He places his bag on the single bed. The room is white and shiny clean, apart from the smears of grey above the heater and the little blue patches on the walls where someone had put up posters with that sticky stuff that isn’t Plasticine and taken them down again.

  ‘What do you think?’ Paula asks. ‘Will it do?’

  She leans against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest.

  ‘It’s not the room I stayed in before,’ he says.

  ‘Probably someone else is in it. Is that a problem?’

  Ciaran considers. He liked the room he had before. It was an odd shape. But this one will do. He says no, it isn’t a problem.

  ‘So you know the rules,’ Paula says. ‘Back here by nine every night. No alcohol. No drugs. They can search the room at any time. No visitors.’

  No visitors? He feels those worms in his stomach again, wriggling, chewing on his insides. ‘What about my brother?’ he asks.

  ‘You can see him whenever you like,’ she says. ‘But not here.’

  ‘Can I call him? Can I see him today?’

  ‘Whenever you like. You can call him from the payphone downstairs. But why don’t we take a walk first? We can go shopping.’

  Ciaran looks towards the window. He sees the blocky buildings of the shopping centre across the road, the cars streaming in and out.

  ‘What about those men? The photographers?’

  ‘They’ve got what they wanted. They’ll be gone by now.’

  ‘But I don’t need to buy anything.’

  Paula smiles. She has very clean teeth. ‘A cup of tea, then. There’s a café at the Marks & Spencer’s. You could get a sandwich if you’re hungry. Did you have any lunch?’

  His stomach growls, the worms chased away by her words.

  5

  FLANAGAN EXPECTED DCI Thompson to be hostile. Instead, he appeared defeated.

  She and DS Ballantine travelled to Ladas Drive station in east Belfast and found Thompson waiting in the canteen, nursing a cup of tea in the furthest corner, well away from eavesdroppers. Flanagan fetched a coffee from the counter and placed it on the table alongside the file full of Thompson’s unfinished business. Ballantine declined a cup.

  DS Ballantine was a tall woman, Flanagan guessed late twenties, blonde hair, with an athletic build. Earnest and eager as Flanagan had been in her younger days, and just as full of ambition. She’d been told to take notes and keep her mouth shut, and had her pen ready as soon as she sat down.

 
; ‘I’m not out of here for a month yet,’ Thompson said, ‘and they’ve put me out of my office already. I’m having to share a desk with a bloody media officer. How the hell they think I’m going to be any good to anybody sitting there, I don’t know.’

  Flanagan offered him as cheery a smile as she could muster. ‘Well, you’ve got your retirement to look forward to.’

  A little more colour drained from Thompson’s grey face and his eyes grew distant.

  ‘Have you anything planned?’ she asked.

  ‘Mostly staying out of the wife’s way,’ he said. ‘Apart from that, a big long stretch of nothing. What are you, forty, forty-two?’

  Flanagan cleared her throat, smiled, and said, ‘That’s a personal question. But I’ll be forty-six in a couple of months.’

  ‘How far into your contract are you?’

  ‘Almost eighteen years. But I’m not really counting.’

  ‘So you’ve got twelve years still to serve,’ Thompson said. ‘Like a prison term, isn’t it? A fucking life sentence. Murderers get less, for Christ’s sake. No chance of an early release for us unless you get shot or get your bloody legs blown off in some booby trap. And what about you?’

  Ballantine seemed startled that a question had been sent in her direction. She blinked and looked to Flanagan.

  ‘What, you need permission to answer a question?’ Thompson asked. ‘So DCI Flanagan’s as hard as they say?’

  ‘I’m five years in,’ Ballantine said.

  ‘I see. Still fresh, then. Don’t worry, you’ll have the shit kicked out of you soon enough.’

  Ballantine turned her gaze down to the blank page of her notebook, her face taking on a faint red glow of embarrassment.

  Thompson turned his attention back to Flanagan. ‘You were on the Devine brothers case, weren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Flanagan said.

  ‘I hear he’s up for release. Makes you wonder why you bother, doesn’t it? Wee bastard like that, hardly inside long enough to get his coat off, and now they’re turning him loose. If it was up to me, scum like him and his brother would never see the light of day again.’