Forget Me Not

by Claire Allan

  Then she was silent. Still.

  And I could hear the sirens approaching.

  Chapter Two

  Rachel

  I saw the news on Twitter first: ‘Body of woman found on Derry outskirts.’ It linked to a short article in the Derry Journal saying little more than the headline. Police were at the scene. The Coney Road, from Culmore Point onwards, was closed until further notice. There would be more on this story as it broke.

  I felt a shiver run through me. Was it a hit and run, maybe? Oh, God, I hoped it wasn’t a paramilitary attack. No one wanted a return to those days.

  No matter the reason, someone would be getting bad news. I shuddered. This woman – she could be a mother, a sister, a friend. Some poor family was about to have their whole world turned upside down.

  It was just another reminder that life was short – too bloody short – and as clichéd as it sounds, we don’t know what lies around the corner for any of us. If I’d known this time last year what the following twelve months would bring I might have run away or hidden under my duvet and refused to come out.

  I would have wanted to hit pause, but of course I couldn’t. The world kept turning anyway – even though I felt mine had ended with the death of my mother – sixty-five. No age at all. Breast cancer.

  I hated that when I talked about her to new people now, the conversation always seemed to wind its way round to how she died. Like it defined her. That final, stupid, too-short battle. Surely everything else she’d done in her life should have mattered more?

  I slid my phone back into my bag and along with it I buried my emotions for now. I had to get in front of a classroom of thirty demob-happy youngsters and keep them focused.

  At lunchtime, in the staffroom, I pulled my phone from my bag again. Switched it on and looked at it. No substantial updates from the Derry Journal except a photo from the scene – dark hedgerows, bright sunshine. In the distance, beyond the bright yellow, almost festive police tape, there was an ambulance and what looked like the top of one of those white forensic police tents.

  Local political representatives were expressing their ‘shock and sadness’, all of them saying it was important not to jump to conclusions until the police had more information. All the police had said so far was that the road would remain closed for some time and that they were appealing for witnesses in relation to the ‘fatality’.

  ‘We’re appealing for anyone who travelled along the Coney Road on the evening of 5 June or the early hours of 6 June who may have seen any unusual activity to come forward and speak to police.’

  I clicked out of the link, tried to join in the chat around the table. The looming end of term meant it wasn’t just the pupils who were feeling giddy at the thought of the long summer break. Still, this news story had brought a sombre feel to the classroom.

  ‘It’s awful,’ I heard Mr McCallion, one of the geography teachers, say. ‘I heard, from someone who knows these things, that it looks like a murder. A particularly gruesome one at that.’

  ‘What?’ Ms Doherty, our young, quirky, opinionated art teacher chimed in. ‘Like, is there any kind of a murder that isn’t gruesome? The two tend to go hand in hand,’ she said with a roll of her eyes and a smile that showed she was amused at her own wit.

  ‘I don’t think us gossiping about it is very appropriate,’ I snapped.

  I couldn’t help it. The feeling that some poor woman had lost her life shouldn’t be the subject of staffroom banter. Maybe my own grief had made me raw to it all. Ms Doherty said nothing, but the look she gave me spoke a thousand words. She thought I was a killjoy, a fuddy-duddy. Someone bereft of ‘craic’. She hadn’t known me before my mother died. Before I’d been changed, utterly.

  My phone beeped again with a text message from one of my oldest friends, Julie:

  Have you heard anything from Clare? She didn’t go into work today. I called round her flat but there was no answer and her phone is off. You know, it’s not like her – and there’s been that woman found …

  Julie was always prone to drama and tended to jump directly to the worst possible conclusion about everything, but this time a nagging, sickening feeling started to wash over me. Julie, Clare and I had remained the very best of friends after we’d left school. While I’d trained to teach English, they’d both joined the Civil Service and worked for the Pensions Department on Duke Street. They didn’t do anything without the other knowing.

  I immediately tried calling Clare myself, I don’t know why. I hoped for some sort of rational and reasonable explanation as to why she wouldn’t have got Julie’s call. When it went straight to answer service, I wondered who else I could call to try to find her. It would be a bit hysterical to call the hospital, wouldn’t it? I mean, she was a grown woman. She could be anywhere. She might be with her parents. Out with another friend. She’d been seeing someone lately, someone she’d admitted to developing deep feelings for. She could be lying in post-coital bliss in his bed right now, being decadent and loved-up for once in her up-to-now sensible life. I almost envied her, if she was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been post-coital anything, never mind blissed-out.

  I was about to call Julie back, when my phone rang and her name popped up on the screen. I answered, said hello, expected her to tell me Clare had just rolled into work, hungover but happy.

  I hadn’t expected the breathless, sobbing, gasping, almost screaming cry of my friend.

  ‘It’s her, Rachel. It’s Clare. She’s dead.’

  Chapter Three

  Elizabeth

  I was sitting in front of the kitchen range, shaking. I winced at the sweetness of the tea I’d been given for the shock.

  I had just been too late. Even if I’d got to her an hour before, it would probably still have been too late to save her. She shouldn’t really have survived for as long as she did – her wounds were so severe.

  ‘Mrs O’Loughlin, if we can just go over your statement one more time,’ the kindly-faced police officer said to me.

  He’d been lovely. So gentle in his manner. So sorry for what I’d been through, even though I wasn’t the victim here. Not at all.

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve anything more to tell you,’ I said, placing the cup on the kitchen table, the shake in my hand more pronounced than it normally was. ‘I can’t think of anything more.’

  My brain was trying to process the trauma. I knew that. In my younger years I’d worked as a theatre nurse. Cared for many survivors of catastrophic traumas – the de facto warzone that Derry had been during the Troubles meant I saw more than most. Heard more than most. Lost limbs, blast wounds, burns, gunshots, a child who couldn’t be saved, whose body was broken beyond repair by the impact of a car bomb.

  Images were coming at me now. Fast. Horrific. I shook my head to try to get rid of them, but they didn’t go. They wouldn’t go and now I had these flashes of that woman, her orange T-shirt and linen trousers – blood-soaked, mud-soaked, wet through. Her eyes, flickering, closed. That wound, jagged, vicious, intentional. The soft warmth of her last breath on my cheek. How gentle it had been for someone who was taken from the world so violently.

  ‘And you saw no traces of anyone else along the road? No cars passed as you were out walking?’

  I shook my head. It had been so quiet. Blissfully quiet.

  ‘It’s a quiet road at the best of times, especially at that hour of the morning,’ I told him as one of his colleagues offered to refill my teacup.

  ‘I imagine,’ he said. ‘And she just said those two words? “Warn them”? Nothing more at all?’

  ‘Well, my hearing isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but no, DI Bradley, she didn’t say anything else. I don’t think she had the strength. The poor girl. Do they know who she is yet? Who she belongs to? Her poor, poor family.’

  ‘I believe they think they’ve identified her,’ he said, his soft blue eyes sad. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t give you any further information until she’s been formally identified by a
family member. You know how it is.’

  I nodded. I did, indeed, know how it is, and how it was. I’d stood with family members myself as they’d identified bodies of their loved ones. A matter of procedure. A formality that sometimes felt unspeakably cruel.

  ‘And you’ve never seen this woman before?’

  I shook my head, rubbed my arm to try to ease the aching muscles. ‘I don’t often get out and about, apart from walking Izzy there. My health isn’t what it used to be. And I don’t tend to bump into too many people when I’m around these roads and fields.’

  The handsome DI Bradley nodded again, closed his notebook and sat back in his chair.

  ‘Mrs O’Loughlin, I appreciate this has been exceptionally traumatic for you, but we really appreciate your time and the information you’ve been able to give us. Have you any family members who can call over and sit with you? You’ve had quite a shock.’

  ‘My son-in-law will be visiting later. He always comes on a Wednesday with my grandchildren. Makes sure I’ve everything I need.’

  That reminded me that that bread was still proving in the airing cupboard and the bananas were still overripe in the bowl. I didn’t have the energy left in me to make banana bread any more. The children would have to make do with fresh bread and jam. It had been good enough for their mother when she was little.

  He handed me a card with his details. Told me to call him if I could think of anything else. Any detail at all.

  ‘If there’s any way we can be a support to you then please get in touch. We’ll have someone from victim support get in touch to talk to you about your experience, help you through the trauma.’

  ‘Detective Bradley, victim support have no need to be wasting their limited resources on me. I’m tougher than I look, you know!’

  He smiled. ‘Well, I imagine you are, especially with all the help you’ve given to people in the past, but we all need a little help from time to time,’ he said.

  I didn’t argue. There was little point. But I knew I wouldn’t talk to anyone from victim support. I’d just file the horror of this morning’s find with all the other horrors in my mind. They were my cross to carry.

  Chapter Four

  Rachel

  I moved through the early afternoon in a haze. I considered crying off to the head but what good would that have done? I’d just have ended up sitting and thinking about the unthinkable. Not that staying in my classroom stopped that. As much as I tried to focus on my work, I couldn’t. It was stupid of me to ever think that I could have.

  My friend was dead. Someone I’d known for thirty years, from the first day we’d sat together on the newly polished floor of the assembly hall in St Catherine’s College, our too-big green pinafores and coats swamping us as we nervously waited to be divided into our form groups.

  We’d clicked over a mutual dislike of geography and Kylie Minogue, and we’d stayed friends since. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets, but we were there for each other through everything life threw at us. When Julie had postnatal depression, when Clare’s marriage had crumbled just days before her third wedding anniversary and when I’d fallen to pieces after the death of my mother. The girls had held me up, literally at one stage, as grief took the legs out from under me and I’d fainted. They’d welcomed the steady stream of mourners to our home, directed them to where my mother’s body lay so that they could pay their respects and then offered a cup of tea afterwards. They’d made sure everything ran smoothly, while I’d sat, ashen-faced and bowed with grief, by the side of the coffin, unwilling to move – struggling to let go of my beloved mother.

  How could it be that Clare was gone now? That her body had been found by the side of a road? The police weren’t saying murder yet and I hoped, perhaps naively, that it wasn’t murder. That it was an accident. Although I couldn’t think of any possible excuse for her being on that road, alone in the early hours of the morning.

  I didn’t know how she’d died. Didn’t know when she’d died. All manner of horrors kept dancing through my head until I couldn’t hold in my pain and my fear any more. I simply lifted my bag, left my Year 12s open-mouthed and walked out of the classroom midway through a discussion on the book Of Mice and Men.

  I walked to the head’s office, my legs shaking – the grief hitting me from the ground upwards, weakening me, diminishing me.

  ‘You’ll have to send someone to deal with my Year 12s,’ I muttered. ‘I’ve got to go home. I’ve had bad news.’

  Sheila, my deputy head, looked me up and down. ‘Are you okay, Rachel?’

  I didn’t trust myself to speak. I didn’t want to say the words. It was so completely, utterly, surreal. You never expect to have to say those words to anyone. Those are words for TV shows and movies, not for school offices on sunny June days as the school secretary eats an ice cream and talks about her forthcoming holiday.

  I just shook my head as a surge of something powerful, painful and overwhelming rose up inside me. She was dead. My friend. I’d be sitting by her coffin next. And if Mr McCallion was right, it was a ‘gruesome murder’.

  The shock rose up inside me until I had to run from the room to the staff toilets and throw up until I could barely breathe.

  I was aware of someone, Sheila most probably, behind me. I was embarrassed she’d hear me retching, sobbing and trying not to scream. She sat down beside me, put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me into a hug. It should have been awkward. It certainly wasn’t professional. But it was just what I needed in that moment. It gave me time to find my breath again, to slow the shaking.

  ‘That body,’ I told her. ‘The one found this morning? It’s a friend of mine. One of my oldest friends.’ I stumbled over my words. My tongue felt too big in my mouth. The sentences too alien. ‘People are saying it’s a murder, Sheila.’

  She hugged me a little closer, told me that of course I could go, but she wasn’t happy about letting me drive given that I’d had such a shock.

  ‘Do you want to call Paul?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to call my husband. I wanted, no, needed to go and see Julie. She was the only other person who could possibly understand.

  ‘I need to see my friend. Our friend. Julie. She works with Clare. Worked. I suppose. We all went to school together.’

  I knew I was rambling and talking too much, but I couldn’t seem to stop. Nor could I stop shaking. Once it had started, it became severe. Teeth chattering, legs jiggling. As if I had no control.

  ‘Maybe we should get you a cup of hot, sweet tea or pilfer a bottle of whisky from the summer fair tombola – for the shock,’ Sheila said.

  I shook my head. I knew she meant well, but I couldn’t stomach it and I just wanted to go. It was the adrenaline, I imagined. The shaking and the sickness and the pounding of my heart.

  ‘Well, let’s get you to your friend, then,’ she said and helped me to my feet. ‘I’m so, so sorry you’re going through this,’ she offered. ‘It’s awful.’

  I nodded because I didn’t know what to say, and despite the sickness and the pain in my chest, it still didn’t feel real. I didn’t know just how awful it was to become. Once I knew how she died, I knew it would only be worse. But for that moment I just kept thinking of my friend, hair tied back in a ponytail. Embracing life again in a way she hadn’t through her thirties. My friend smiling from her Facebook page. My friend who had the most contagious laugh in the world.

  My friend who was dead.

  Julie was perched on the edge of her sofa, her knees tight together, her body stiff with shock. She lit one cigarette off the end of another and continued smoking. Her hand shook as she brought the cigarette to her lips. Her eyes closed on the inhalation and as they did, a tear escaped, running down her already streaked face.

  She looked wretched. Old. I’d never looked at one of my old school pals and thought we looked our age before, but Julie did in that moment, in that room. Her usually neatly preened hair was messy, strands of copper escapin
g from her ponytail, frizzy and unkempt. Her make-up was mostly gone, washed away by her tears and the rough way she pulled the sleeve of her cardigan across her cheeks to dry her face. Her skin would be red and sore later, I thought, as if that would matter. As if that was important in the grand scheme of things.

  I’m not sure what I expected. Perhaps that we’d run into each other’s arms and cling on, sobbing like lost souls. That didn’t happen. Julie looked at me through glazed eyes and just shook her head while I sat down at the opposite end of the sofa, my adrenaline gone and a weariness washing over me.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea or coffee, or something stronger?’ Julie’s husband, Brendan, asked me.

  It had been him who’d let me in, who’d hugged me awkwardly at the door and who’d warned me that Julie was ‘in a bad way’.

  ‘I’m on the vodka,’ Julie spoke, her voice hoarse.

  I noticed the tall glass, half full of a clear liquid and ice cubes, on the floor by her feet.

  ‘I’ll stick with tea,’ I said, knowing I’d have to deal with the girls later.

  How would I tell them? Tell Molly her godmother was gone? I felt something in my stomach contract.

  ‘Probably the wise choice, I just … I just needed to block it out. Or something,’ Julie said. ‘Oh, Rachel, I can’t believe it. I can’t get my head around it.’

  ‘How much do you know?’ I asked her.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Ronan called me. He was in bits, Rachel. Could barely talk. He said the police had just called to their parents’ house, asked about distinctive marks, hair colour, clothes, that kind of thing. They’d found a bank card or something stuffed into her trouser pocket.’ Her voice broke as she spoke. ‘They’ve got to go for a formal identification. Can you imagine that?’

  A sliver of hope surged inside me. ‘So the body hasn’t been identified yet? They could be wrong, Julie. Someone could have stolen her card or something. It doesn’t mean it’s her.’