‘Don’t call Mum a bitch,’ Ciaran says.
‘But that’s what she was.’
Ciaran slaps him again. This time he leaves a glaring red mark beneath Thomas’s eye. Thomas blinks three times. Steadies himself.
‘She promised she’d come back for me,’ Ciaran says, fresh tears erupting.
‘Me too. But she went and killed herself with the drugs, so that was that.’
‘In the cell. She said she’d come back for me if I talked to her.’
Thomas takes a step back. ‘Flanagan?’
‘She said she’d come back. She said she’d take me to the seaside.’
Ciaran cries so hard it blinds him. He brings his hands to his face, hides behind them. Arms slip around him. The familiar embrace. Thomas’s lips at his ears.
‘They’ll always let you down,’ Thomas says.
‘But she promised.’
Thomas takes Ciaran’s hands away from his face, wipes the tears from Ciaran’s cheeks. ‘Do you want to go and see her?’ he asks, his voice very soft.
‘We can’t,’ Ciaran says.
Thomas pulls Ciaran close again. ‘Course we can. Remember I told you? I know where she lives. Do you want to go and see her? Do you? Do you want to do that?’
Ciaran lets his body go soft, sinks into his brother’s arms.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
51
CUNNINGHAM CURSED AS she drove past her house, a Mini parked in her space.
Not that it was really her space, owning a house didn’t mean you owned the road in front of it too, but generally the neighbours in the terrace of small homes stuck to the principle of respecting everyone else’s few feet of tarmac.
‘Fuck it,’ she said, and pulled in three doors down. She didn’t know the people who lived in this house, but there was usually a red Mondeo parked outside. It wasn’t quite mid-afternoon, so they wouldn’t be back for a good three hours. Once the Mini moved, she would come out and shift her Nissan back to where it belonged.
She locked the car and walked back to her gate. As she opened it, she made the hundredth mental note to herself to paint over the rust. It clanked shut, and she awaited the usual clamour of barking from inside the house.
No barking.
Cunningham paused and listened. No, nothing.
Worry, quiet but insistent, in her gut. She walked to her door, rummaging in her bag for her key. Still no barking. No silhouette through the frosted glass, charging up, batting at the door with its paws.
As Cunningham opened the door, the worry grew from a whisper to a frightened voice inside her. ‘Angus,’ she called. ‘Angus?’
She pushed the door closed behind her, listening all the time. She stayed still and quiet, afraid to go any further into her own house.
A movement of cool air distracted her.
The clack-clack of the train on the Bangor line. Louder and clearer than it should be. The way it would sound if the sliding patio door leading from the kitchen to the yard lay open.
‘Shit,’ she said.
Cunningham walked along the hall, slow, one hand on the wall, until she reached the living room door. She saw the books first, scattered on the floor. Some of them with pages ripped out. And CDs, DVDs, the few photographs she kept, now behind the broken glass of their frames. She stepped across the threshold and saw the television lying face down where it had been tipped from its stand. A wet stain on the wall: the almost full wine glass she’d left on the coffee table last night.
Nothing stolen. Simply destruction for its own sake.
The shakes started then, wave upon wave. Feeling another breeze, she looked through to the kitchen, saw the patio door open, the lock twisted away from the frame. The tiled floor covered with broken glass and crockery.
‘Angus?’
Perhaps he had run away. The door was open, he could have fled. But the gate beyond remained closed. Whoever had broken in and done this had scaled the back wall.
‘Oh God, Angus.’
Upstairs, under her bed. That’s where he always went when he was scared. Thunder, fireworks, her own angry outbursts. He always took refuge under the bed.
Cunningham returned to the hall and went to the bottom of the stairs. She called the dog’s name once more, listened, then climbed towards the silence.
At the top, the bathroom door opened onto the same devastation. The mirror over the hand basin had been shattered. All of her small and personal things strewn and poured across the floor, puddles of shampoo and shower gel, tampons and cotton wool balls mired in them.
Cunningham allowed herself only a moment to take it in before moving to her bedroom. There, on the sill between the carpeted landing and the laminate wood floor of her room, she took one sharp breath.
Amongst the ruin, the scattered clothes, the torn sheets and exploded pillows, a pool of deep red spreading from beneath the bed.
‘Oh no,’ she said.
Cunningham stepped into the room, picked her way through the debris. She saw the thick-shafted screwdriver, its blade speckled with red. Her hand went to her mouth, her vision blurred by tears.
‘Oh Jesus no,’ she said and took small, slow steps to the bedside.
From beneath the bed, a bubbling exhalation ending in a high whine.
Cunningham dropped to her hands and knees, ignored the splashing of the blood, peered underneath. There, in the shadow, Angus lying on his side, his chest rising and falling with each shallow breath, his tongue lolling in pinkish-red sputum.
She reached under, scrabbling for him, got hold of his legs and pulled. Another whine at the pain it caused him. She gathered him in her arms, her feet slipping on the blood as she fought to get herself upright.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You’re going to be all right.’
Cunningham didn’t care about the open patio door as she ran to her car, the dog’s blood soaking her clothes.
52
FATIGUE HAD CAUGHT up with Flanagan as she drove home from the funeral. Thirty-six hours without sleep had weighed down her mind, like sand drifts behind her eyes. She had wound down the car’s windows as she merged onto the motorway, let the rush of air wash over her, keeping the urge to sleep at bay.
The house felt more than empty when she let herself in by the back door. A quietness deeper than silence. The home she had renovated with her husband stood at the end of a country lane outside Moira, far enough from the M1 that the rumble of traffic seldom drifted over the fields. It had taken more than a year to get used to the stillness and dark out here. Both she and Alistair were townies – she from Banbridge, he from Dungannon – and they had been used to the constant intrusion of cars and street lights.
Now she relished the quiet. That dead-of-night emptiness as if the world held its breath. She still didn’t like the darkness, but she had stowed that irrational fear away, put a wall around it. When she drove home from work each evening she felt the grubbiness of the job wear away, like dirt washed from beneath her fingernails.
Flanagan dropped her house and car keys on the kitchen table and contemplated fixing herself a gin and tonic. She checked her wristwatch and saw it had only just gone two, though it felt much later. Alistair would be home with the kids by four-thirty. The time between would be better spent catching up on some sleep, so she forgot about the drink and made her way upstairs.
The bedroom overlooked the back garden, a plain lawn with Alistair’s best efforts at gardening spread around it. Poorly tended shrubs, a flower bed that never seemed to be free of weeds, and a patch for herbs that produced nothing of any real use. Every year, Alistair tried anew to raise the garden from the level of barely presentable to something more impressive, and every year he failed.
She pulled the blind, shutting out the view and the sunlight, and threw her jacket onto the chair by the bed. Kneeling down, she opened the wardrobe to reveal the safe bolted to its floor. She unclipped her holster and placed it and the Glock 17 inside, locked the safe door, an
d closed the wardrobe.
When she kicked off her shoes and flopped onto the bed, her limbs felt suddenly sore and heavy, as if she had run a marathon that morning instead of standing at the back of a draughty church. She rolled onto her side, closed her eyes, and tried not to think of Penny and Ronnie Walker or how they died.
Sleep took Flanagan within minutes, and she dreamed she held the pillow over Penny’s face and whispered to her, shush, don’t worry, it’ll be over soon . . .
The chime and buzz of her mobile phone pulled her from the warm void, a tumbling, rolling sensation as she rejoined the world. She squinted at the time on the phone’s screen. A little over ninety minutes had slipped away. The display said Paula Cunningham.
Flanagan blinked the last of the sleep from her eyes, cleared her throat, and brought the phone to her ear. ‘Paula,’ she said.
‘He broke into my house,’ Cunningham said.
‘What?’
‘I came home and found the place smashed up. Stuff thrown everywhere, things broken, drawers emptied.’
‘You said, “he”. Who do you mean?’
‘Thomas Devine,’ Cunningham said. Flanagan heard the tremor in her voice, knew she barely had control of herself. ‘He did it. He tried to kill Angus.’
‘Who’s Angus?’ Flanagan asked.
‘My dog,’ Cunningham said. ‘Thomas Devine broke into my house and tried to kill my dog. I took him straight to the vet. It was a screwdriver into his side. It punctured his lung. The vet had to drain the chest cavity and reinflate the lung. He’s lost so much blood. The vet doesn’t know if he’ll survive. That bastard did this.’
Flanagan eased herself upright, lowered her feet to the floor. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m okay,’ Cunningham said. ‘I’m shaking all over, but I’m fine.’
‘I can come over if you want.’
‘No. Thank you, but no. But can you lift Thomas? Question him?’
‘You don’t know for sure it was him.’
‘Yes I do,’ Cunningham said. ‘And you know it too.’
‘All right, maybe he left some physical evidence this time. Something that will put him away.’
‘There was blood on the handle of the screwdriver. I saw it. There were fingerprints on that.’
‘Okay,’ Flanagan said. ‘That’s something. What did the responding unit say?’
Silence.
Flanagan asked, ‘When you called the police to the house, what did they say?’
‘I didn’t,’ Cunningham said, her voice suddenly small and far away. ‘I called you.’
Flanagan sighed and covered her eyes.
‘I needed to get Angus treated before anything else,’ Cunningham continued. ‘You’re the only one who’ll take this seriously. You know who we’re dealing with. So I called you.’
‘All right,’ Flanagan said. ‘Get off the line and dial the non-emergency number right now. Just get a car to your house as quickly as you can. I can’t help you any more with this. I’m off the case.’
‘I know. Your boss told me this morning. He talked my boss into not revoking Ciaran’s licence.’
‘I thought he might,’ Flanagan said. ‘Now get off the phone. Call the police.’
‘Okay,’ Cunningham said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Look after yourself,’ Flanagan said.
A tone sounded in her ear and the line died.
‘Shit,’ Flanagan said to the empty room.
The idea of a gin and tonic resurfaced, even shinier than before. Half an hour to an hour before Alistair and the kids get home. Time to make the drink, maybe take it out to the garden, decompress a little.
Flanagan nodded as she made the decision. She got to her feet, eased into her slippers, and crossed to the window to open the blind. She blinked against the glaring sunlight then went to the stairs. They creaked under her weight as she descended. Tiredness still dragged at her mind, but she’d had enough sleep to get her through until tonight. Maybe she would check the fridge and the cupboards, cook something nice for Alistair and the kids. She seldom got the chance, Alistair mostly took that responsibility, and it’d help her unwind. Something with lots of preparation, something that required lots of pots bubbling and the oven humming, something to focus her mind on other than her work.
A smile found its way to Flanagan’s lips as she opened the kitchen door.
She froze in the doorway.
Ciaran Devine stood on the other side of the table. His brother Thomas rummaged through the fridge. He turned to smile at her.
‘Got anything to eat?’ Thomas asked.
53
CIARAN STANDS STILL, as if his feet are locked to the floor. He stares at her. Thomas says something, but Ciaran can’t hear. Tiny golden flecks of dust move through the light from the windows.
‘You promised you’d come back for me,’ he says.
Serena looks at him, fear and confusion on her face.
Then she turns and runs.
Thomas says something.
Ciaran watches her go for the stairs.
Thomas says something.
Ciaran turns to him. ‘What?’
‘Go after her.’
Ciaran runs. He’s fast, always has been. He covers the distance between the kitchen and the stairs in seconds. Serena is stumbling at the top when he mounts the bottom step. He takes them three at a time as one of her slippers bounces past him. She disappears into a bedroom. He catches the door before it slams shut. She’s diving for the wardrobe.
‘Stop,’ he says.
She doesn’t. She opens the wardrobe, reaches for something on its floor. Something that beeps when she presses the buttons. A safe. He grabs her, pulls her away.
Serena slashes at him with her nails, scratches his forearm through his shirt. He raises his fist and she shrinks down, presses herself against the wall. She stares up at him, breathing hard.
‘You promised you’d come back for me,’ Ciaran says.
She shakes her head, her mouth opening and closing.
‘What’s in the safe?’ Thomas asks from behind him.
She shakes her head again.
‘What’s in it?’
‘Nothing,’ she says.
Thomas crouches down beside her. ‘You were in an awful hurry to get nothing.’
‘What do you want?’ she asks.
Thomas points to the safe. ‘Is that where you keep your gun?’
‘Please, just tell me what you want.’
‘I want you to unlock the safe, but don’t open the door. Then I want you to move away from it.’
‘There’s nothing in there,’ she says.
‘Open the safe.’
‘No.’
‘Open it or I’ll tell Ciaran to hurt you.’
She looks back up to Ciaran. ‘He won’t,’ she says.
‘Oh, he will,’ Thomas says. ‘He’ll hurt you. He’ll do whatever I tell him to do.’
‘He won’t,’ she says again. ‘Not me.’
‘Ciaran,’ Thomas says, and Ciaran knows what he has to do.
He kicks her hard beneath her ribs. Feels the give in her flesh, the expulsion of air.
She folds in on herself, curls into a ball, coughing and groaning.
Ciaran watches her, wants to take it back. He wishes he didn’t have to hurt her.
Thomas laughs. ‘Told you. Now open the safe.’
Serena gets to her hands and knees. ‘No, I won’t.’
‘Ciaran,’ Thomas says.
Ciaran doesn’t move.
Thomas says his name again, his voice harder.
Ciaran kicks her in the side, feels the flex of her ribs, almost feels the pain himself. Once more, she curls into a ball. Coughs, her face red, spit hanging from her lip.
He wants to crouch down, take her in his arms like she did for him, tell her he’s sorry, so sorry. But he can’t.
‘Open the safe,’ Thomas says.
She shakes her head.
Thomas reaches d
own, grabs her hair, lifts her face up to meet his. ‘Ciaran will beat you to death if he has to. And after that, we’ll wait for your husband and your children to come home, and then he’ll do them too.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘He’s not a killer. I know the truth. I know it was you killed Daniel Rolston and his father. You let your brother take the blame to save yourself. Now whatever you need to do, you go on and do it.’
A laugh starts in Thomas’s belly and works its way up to his mouth. ‘You know nothing,’ he says.
‘I know you,’ she says, the words forced between her teeth.
Thomas laughs harder, then goes very quiet. He watches her for a moment, then says, ‘Tell her, Ciaran.’
Ciaran doesn’t know what to say. His mouth is dry.
Thomas looks up at him. ‘Go on, tell her.’
Ciaran takes a step back, rubs his hands on his jeans, feels suddenly ashamed. Like when Thomas made him tell that girl in the park about playing with himself.
He hates Thomas. He loves Thomas.
He doesn’t know what to do.
Thomas’s face darkens. His voice softens. ‘Tell her.’
Ciaran’s legs are shaky. He sits on the edge of the bed. The whole world feels bigger and brighter, the air thicker, the light harsher than he can ever remember it being. He takes a breath. Then another.
‘I killed Mr Rolston,’ Ciaran says.
‘I don’t believe that,’ Serena says. ‘I never believed that. Don’t take the blame for him any more, Ciaran, please don’t.’
‘But I did kill him,’ Ciaran says. ‘I took the book thing, the iron cat, and I smashed him on the head. He stopped moving after the first couple of times, but I kept going.’
Ciaran remembers the feeling, the hard skull going soft as it collapsed under the force of the blows. The heat of the blood, on his hands and arms, and in his veins.
Serena shakes her head. ‘No, Ciaran.’
‘Tell her why,’ Thomas says.
‘Because Thomas told me to. He said Mr Rolston would hurt him again if I didn’t.’
‘There was never any proof of that,’ Serena says. ‘I don’t believe Mr Rolston ever touched your brother. Did you ever see him touch your brother?’
Those We Left Behind Page 22
