The Killer in Me

by Olivia Kiernan

  “I’ve been reading up on it. The Hennessys. It’s a broken kid that’d do that to his parents.” He glares through the car window at McDonagh. “It’s cases like these ones that make me yearn for the needle.”

  I look up the street. Already there are neighbors at the window, a couple of lads on bikes circling between the parked cars.

  “Justice will do for me,” I reply.

  The cloud shifts, draws closed over the sun. I put out the cigarette with my heel, pull my coat closed, button up against the breeze.

  Baz gives the roof of the garda car a slap and the officer starts up. “I’ll phone you,” he says, and walks back to his own vehicle. He checks the hubs, gives the tires a gentle kick, then gets in. He starts the engine, pulls out onto the street, lifts one finger from the steering wheel in good-bye, then heads back to the city center.

  Beyond the McDonagh house, the lads on the bikes are on their phones, their eyes trained on the business end of the road. When they hang up, they turn away, stand up from saddles, and push off up the hill out of sight.

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER BAZ LEAVES, I walk toward the promenade, cross over the wooden bridge that leads to Bull Island, a long, narrow island running parallel to the coast. The wind runs off-land, against my back, my hair thrashing in stringy strands over my face as I move across the damp wooden slats. A car rumbles up behind me; I stand to the side and let it pass. It moves on toward the small nest of white buildings, buried in the stiff grasses, on the other side of the bridge.

  I look back across the coast, inhale the salty air.

  Clontarf beach has filled with walkers and children but the tide is turning. Already, water is creeping in over the strand, collecting in silver ridges and pools between the dark mounds of seaweed. Along the promenade, a thin black spaniel clears the seawall, barks sharp warnings at a flock of seagulls. They rise into the air in a squawking scatter of madness. The dog hunts back up the lip of the bay, head bobbing and low, body stretched out, a tiny black target in the distance. My eyes lift, rove over the familiar outline of the Poolbeg Stacks, then the low line of Dublin city in the distance. Finally, I let my gaze drift over the Clontarf coastline and then on, inland before settling on the upward curve of the street toward my family home on Conquer Hill.

  Seventeen years past and Bríd Hennessy would have walked these streets, not knowing the grisly end that waited for her . . . or maybe she did. The wind stills and I can almost feel the heat of that day on my skin. I imagine I see her, heading out, away from her home toward mine. Looking for help.

  She pushes the thick nest of her hair behind her ears. It immediately bounces back, curls cling to her damp forehead. She’s carrying a shopping bag, a prop. There are no groceries in it, only her wallet, which is fat with money-off coupons. She tells herself she must remember to pick up milk on her return home or John will ask questions.

  Her throat does that squeezing thing, a mixture of anxiety and fear. A feeling of dread chasing her every step. She’s had it for months now. Like Indiana Jones in that tunnel, a great round ball of catastrophe rolling after her. She has to keep moving. She has to try. She thinks of how she left Cara alone in her room, only the thin pine of the door between her and her father’s aimless anger. Seán sullen and quiet in front of the TV in their living room. John hazy-eyed with drink in his battered recliner. Both of them watching the match but not watching it.

  Lately, when Bríd passed by the door and they were like this it felt like they were both listening. Like dogs. One ear cocked, keeping track of breathing changes, sniffing out shifts in mood. Seán, tall and skinny, his elastic muscles coiled tight down his arms. John, belligerent, sending out waves of fury, like a grenade without a pin.

  She pushes on down the street, against the surprising scorch of the Irish sun, bald and hot on the back of her neck. Her dress a tangle around her legs; her feet swollen in her sandals. At the bottom of Conquer Hill, she pauses to catch her breath, her hand going to her chest, her heart a rapid thump under her fingers.

  When had she become so fat? So unfit? Before she was married she’d walked everywhere. For miles! People used to comment on it all the time: Seen you pounding the roads again, fair play to you, Bríd. Fit as a fiddle. But after Cara she’d let everything slip. Her working hours, her mind, her body. She’d become an expert at avoiding herself in the hope that everyone else would avoid her too. Don’t look too closely. That had been the plan. Maybe a bad one.

  And now she couldn’t remember who she was. She found herself doubting simple things about herself. How do I take my tea? I’m not sure. One sugar? None? Did it matter? She dressed blindly, looked blindly, and felt blindly. Life had eclipsed her thoroughly. Only two emotions took turns in her: fear and relief. And the relief had almost trickled to a stop.

  She keeps moving, makes herself walk fast up the hill. Now that she’s nearly there, she needs to keep her nerve. She checks her hand where she’s scribbled the address. She’d got it from the phonebook. The woman, Mrs. Sheehan, seemed nice. Like she would help. Bríd didn’t know where else to go. She knew the woman worked in social care. She helped kids. Like hers, right? She’d take them, wouldn’t she? And the husband, he was a guard. Couldn’t go far wrong there.

  Things were coming to a head. She could feel it. Her son, he was a man now. Only fifteen, but tall and strong. Sometimes Bríd saw a look in his eye when he watched his father. A dark look. Like he was biding his time. What would happen when he eventually struck back? She pressed her lips together, felt the bite of teeth at the back of her mouth. It wasn’t fair on him. Christ, it wasn’t fair on any of them. She thought of the bag she had hidden away, packed and ready for the right time. But she couldn’t go until she knew her two babies would be safe. She couldn’t take them with her, not yet. John wasn’t one to let a possession slip away. She’d no doubt he’d come after her. And she couldn’t have her children with her when he did.

  She stops at the small garden gate. A crown of iron swirls decorates the top. She puts her hand on it, pushes the gate inwards, and walks up the short garden path.

  I take a sharp breath and pull myself away from Bríd Hennessy’s hot face on a hot day, a huge sadness moored in my chest. The wind cuts over my shoulder, spins out over the misty grays of the sea toward the East Wall, where beneath the dark waters, Clontarf Island lies drowned and dead. Its single residence long ripped from its body, picked up and thrown against the mainland like a discarded toy.

  I retrace my steps back over the wooden bridge and find a bench facing the sea. I sit, tucking my coat beneath me to protect my trousers from the damp rungs of the seat. The wind is at my back but over the horizon there are patches of blue beginning to show again in the sky. Pulling my bag onto my knee, I locate my headphones, put them in my ears, and search through the interview clips on my phone.

  Seán Hennessy smiles into the camera. His eyes hold that faraway look. He runs his hand over the short shave of his fair hair.

  “When I turned fifteen, I decided to let my hair grow. Kurt Cobain. He was a god to me. His music, his words, his look. I wanted to be him. My hair, it grew quickly, straggly bands of blond. The trend then was all about saying you were deeper than image. Which is ironic, you know. You think you’re rebelling but really you’re conforming.

  “I worked so fucking hard on that hair. My girlfriend, she loved it. Fancied herself my Courtney, bleached her hair, wore it in those layered spikes, deep red lipstick, the works. She was fierce, a roar like a lion if you pressed the wrong buttons and a purr like a cat if you played her right. All the lads wanted a piece of her but she only had eyes for me.”

  He pauses; the pads of his fingers rest on his mouth, a smile drifting at the corners in remembrance. The hand drops and he goes on:

  “I felt lucky, you know. With her, I could forget the hassle at home. When she looked at me, there was no scorn in her eyes, no distrust or pity. I was young
er than her, only over a year, and at the time it didn’t seem to matter. I knew she loved me as much as I did her.

  “The fourth day after my parents were murdered, my lawyer came to see me. He didn’t look like the lawyers I’d seen on TV. This guy, his shirt was so thin I could see the curling sprawl of his chest hair, almost down to his navel. His jacket, open loose at his sides, was worn and shiny at the cuffs.

  “He sat down and I saw him seeing me: a boy, the cuts on my face, my eye half-shut, my lip, sliced right through from the beating I’d taken the day before. He looked for a minute like he might ask me about my injuries, what had happened, but he didn’t. Just took a notepad out of his suitcase and a pen, set them on the table in front of him.

  “He said: Seán, I’m not the guards; you can tell me everything. You must tell me everything that happened. The truth. So I can advise you and help you. You understand?

  “‘Yes, sir,’ I said. Ready.

  “Take me through it. Start from the morning of the thirteenth of August. Sunday.

  “I tell him. Tell him how me and my girlfriend had met up and gone to the cinema, how we’d smoked a spliff round the back of the castle. Then went back to her house, got drunk on cider. I told him that we were together. I told him we fell asleep on top of the covers listening to Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ on repeat. The next day, we did more of the same. We went downstairs in the late afternoon. Her parents were away. We made sandwiches. Didn’t get dressed for most of the day. We stayed holed up in her room, having sex, drinking, smoking, laughing. Being young, you know.”

  He swallows. His face darkens. “It was coming up on four by the time I decided I should show my face at home. I was walking up the road, the heat so fierce the tarmacadam was bubbling underfoot. And I saw the cars. Neighbors were out on the lawns. No one stopped me. No one held me back. I could hear voices in the garden. There was a bad feeling around the joint. A hushed kind of panic, like a grand shock had thrown my home into some kind of time warp. Frozen, like.

  “I bent under the tape, walked in a kind of daze, a stupid curiosity, round the side of the house. Saw them there on the lawn, me ma, my sister. And him. Me da like a broken king slumped against the back wall. Too late, an officer saw me. I felt like an apparition, like I’d somehow walked through time to a preventable future and I could fade back again were someone to only pinch my arm.” He takes a wedge of flesh from his forearm between thumb and finger, gives it a hard squeeze.

  “As I spoke, the lawyer, I watched the changes in his expression, which at first seemed open, the easy ear of the law ready to listen. His pen moved frantically across his legal pad, keeping pace with me, but as I went on, there were little things that I noticed. His eyes met mine less and less. His mouth began to twitch on occasion, a sigh, barely there. Eventually, the movement of his pen slowed. Then stopped. Stopped taking notes. He placed his pen down, gentle as a baby.

  “You need to tell me the truth, Seán, or I can’t help you.

  “I am, I said. That is the truth. My girlfriend, if you talk to her, she’ll tell you. I wasn’t even at home.

  “She denies that you were with her at all. She says—he flipped through the pages of his notebook—you are infatuated with her and that she’s never been with you. Would never be with you.

  “And it was like an exorcism, like someone had come along and waved over me some unholy benediction. Sucked the last living ember of hope right from my body. I finally got it. I was alone. A lone tree out on a cold desert, the last leaf loosed from my body pulled away from me on a twist of air.

  “All those times we’d said to ourselves that the age gap didn’t matter. And it hadn’t to her and me. Truly. But the law, oh the law. Yes, it thought differently. She was seventeen; I was fifteen. Yes, it mattered a lot. Fear makes cowards. Even of lions.”

  * * *

  —

  MAM IS ALONE when I get to the house.

  “Your dad’s been dragged into town. New curtains,” she says in reference to Justin and Tanya’s new house. “Bit of telly and a cup of tea for me this afternoon.” She drops the kettle onto its stand and flicks it on.

  “That’s nice,” I say.

  Mam is laid-back, or at least likes to pretend she is. At seventy-two, age has not yet stooped her, her hair whitening now and helped along with a few highlights. She’s a trousers and V-neck kind of woman, soft well-soled shoes meant for being on your feet all day. A castoff from her work. Her favorite phrase: “Ah sure, what’ve we to worry about?” The tight twitch of her eye the only thing that suggests plenty. Years of working with troubled teens and traumatized children, navigating the suffocating whirlpool of social work left the words eternally on the tip of her tongue, as if someone had pulled a string at her back and out it came no matter the weight of despair. Even after Dad had his breakdown, even after he had to retire at fifty. Even after he tried to kill himself.

  An old friend used to say to me, “That phrase is the death of the Irish. Fucking inertia. There never seems to be a problem that can’t be whitewashed over with an old, Ah sure!”

  “Actually, I was hoping to chat with you,” I say.

  She gives me a warm smile but I see the tiny lift of her shoulders, up and rounding inwards. On the outside, Mam isn’t the warmest: She stiffens when hugged, her hand patting your back from the get-go, her face never quite able to hide an expression of relief when you release her. There’s always some small fear under her skin that stretches taut around her eyes, pulls her away when you get too close. But she’s clever, inquisitive, and one of the most quietly generous people I know. Charity events, fund-raisers, soup kitchens, shelters for the homeless, you name it, my mam has organized it. A one-woman show, desperately trying to scratch back gold points for humanity’s shittiness.

  She makes two mugs of tea, adds too much milk, and carries them both into the living room. I follow. Sit down on the sofa, the cushion lopsided on one side where Dad usually sits, newspaper spread out over the remainder of the seat. I balance my weight against the armrest and try to look comfortable. I want to know about Bríd Hennessy. Want to know what it was that brought her to our door all those years ago. Get a feel for the mother of the son. The mother of a killer.

  I start softly. “Tanya’s really busy with this case then, huh?”

  Mam lifts the mug from the coffee table. “She’s doing too much but sure, I know what it’s like. That kind of thing. Think you’ll change the world, then more comes. You know it too.”

  “True.” We sit for a while. I hedge around the questions in my head, wanting to find a way under the lid. I slide a cautious glance toward her. “Did you know Bríd Hennessy?”

  She makes a slow slurping noise at the milky tea but doesn’t balk at the change in subject. “Not much.”

  “But you’d have recognized her?”

  She gives me a testy look. She knows when she’s being interrogated. “I knew her from Mass really. Nothing more than that. She was younger than me, not my crowd.”

  I take another sip of lukewarm tea, look at her over the rim of the mug. “I’m sure I saw her here once.”

  The shoulders come up again; her eyes drop. She gives a shake of her head. Too quick. “I don’t think so, now, Frankie love.”

  “I was coming back from work. I don’t think it was long before . . . before it all happened.” I reach over, place the tea on the table. “She passed me on the path on the way out. I remember thinking it was strange. She barely looked at me. Just shoved past and went. I didn’t clock who she was until after.”

  Mam sighs, looks at me. It’s the first time she’s looked at me properly since I came through the door. Her eyes rove over my face, take in the changes. But she doesn’t remark on them.

  “There was always a detective in you, all right,” she says, then waits a moment before saying more. I can see her working down some emotion: guilt, fear, regret. “I
guess I would rather’ve forgotten the whole thing. When the murders happened, when I read about it in the papers I felt rotten. We were running an event through the church”—she throws me a tired smile—“for Crumlin. So we were lingering by the door after Mass a few weeks or so before it all happened. We were trying to get signatures to fund-raise and she went to move by. Her daughter was there, the little one, but she shooed her on, asked her to wait by the church gate. I thought she wanted to sign up, so I smiled and went to hand her the clipboard.

  “She shook her head and asked me, quiet, her lips barely moved a millimeter: Could she talk to me. And it was then I saw the bruise. She’d tried to hide it with makeup but she’d missed the edges.” Mam raises a hand to her face, lets it hover over her cheekbone. “It was yellowing already. I passed the clipboard to one of the other ladies and led her to the side.

  “And then she wouldn’t talk. I’d lost something in those moments, the fear had won out. I tried. Do you have something you want to talk to me about? I says. And her eyes darted about the place, her feet lifting one to the other as if something was about to snap her ankles. Mrs. Hennessy, right? She nodded but still nothing. Are you in trouble? It was as if there was a hand over her mouth. I could see the words wanting to work themselves out but they wouldn’t come. Tears began to gather in her eyes. Finally she pressed her lips together, shook her head, and left.”

  I wait. Mam lost in the past now. Bríd Hennessy’s back, summer dress flowing from hips, feet in thick sandals, the sun beating down on the tarmacadam of the church car park. Cara Hennessy, skinny and small, running along the church gate, a broken twig in her outstretched hand, hitting each of the iron railings as she went. Bríd calling to her. The twig thrown down and Cara Hennessy tucked into her mother’s side for the walk back to that house.