Second Sight

by Aoife Clifford

  My nightie is bunched up around my waist, my underwear completely exposed. I stand slightly and edge the material back down, hoping he doesn’t notice. I don’t want him to have a single thought about what’s underneath.

  Luke sits back down in front of me, arms folded.

  He must think you are on his side.

  ‘Do you want something to eat or a cup of tea?’ I ask, like he has been invited in as my guest. ‘Glass of wine?’

  ‘No. I’m good.’ There is the smell of stale sweat to him but the scent of violence is receding. ‘You know, we haven’t spoken a word to each other since that time on the beach.’ Leaning forward, he looks me straight in the eye.

  His pupils are dark black pools and suddenly I am back there, swimming naked in the ocean, way out of my depth, trying to get as far away from the people on the beach, the witnesses to my humiliation. The temperature melts through my drunken haze until my limbs throb with coldness. Blood becomes slush in my veins. I am past the waves but the swell is rough. Blearily I tread water and turn back towards shore. The fire on the beach seems far away and getting further, until suddenly Luke is beside me, naked too. I launch myself at him like I’m trying to ride a wave. The kiss is inevitable, teeth crashing into each other, designed to show the world that I care nothing for Tony Bayless. Luke hauls me back in, holds me through the breakers and we fall onto the beach, all over each other. A bright light flickers on us and the reality of the situation comes crashing in as I see the look on Amy’s face. I push Luke off me and am splutteringly sick.

  Blinking hard, back in the present, I can still see the boy from that night in the man in front of me. The boy with a reputation for volatility but who had always been kind to me. How he ran and got my clothes, brought me back to the fire so I could get warm, stood up for me when Amy yelled, walked me back to town, took me to his house so I could sleep off the alcohol in his bed and then woke me at sunrise so I could sneak home without my dad noticing. All that and I never spoke to him again. Not even a phone call to say thank you because I was so ashamed.

  I pull myself together because, if I go to pieces now, who knows what could happen.

  ‘What did you want to talk about?’ I ask.

  ‘People are calling me a murderer. I never meant for him to die.’

  He pauses, waiting for my reaction.

  ‘Good,’ I say, because right now I will say anything. ‘That means you had no mens rea.’

  ‘See, you’re a lawyer. I knew you’d understand.’ He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘I ran up to talk to him and he punched me, said I’d fucked up because of that woman. If the police got involved that was the end of it. No payment, nothing. I know I was angry but he was on a permanent hair trigger. He once went after a guy in The Royal with a pool cue. Tony pulled him away before he killed the bloke. Why’s no-one talking about that? I tried to push him off me and he fell. He hit me first.’

  Jumbled images of the fight come into my head. I saw a fist, a punch, and then Paul fell. Have I confused who struck that first blow? Had I already taken sides because of what had happened earlier? Pat’s words come back unbidden – to lie like an eyewitness. Paul might not be quite the hero I thought but still, he’s not the one who broke into my house and tied me up.

  ‘You should tell all that to your lawyer,’ I say. ‘That’s exactly the information they will want.’

  He leans closer. His face is older than the rest of him, worn down and battle-scarred.

  ‘What if I give the police information? Tell them about the whole operation and plead guilty? They’d give me a reduced sentence, right? Maybe even suspended?’

  ‘What operation?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ The volume of his voice increases like someone’s playing with the dials on a stereo. ‘That’s valuable. I’ll only tell someone I can make a deal with.’

  Dad in my head says not to back down, to make Luke see I’m someone he should listen to.

  ‘You’ll need to give yourself up,’ I say. ‘You’ve got a good case but only if you give yourself up now.’

  He starts tapping the chair again.

  ‘What about the bones?’ he asks. ‘They’re saying I killed someone and left their bones at The Castle.’

  ‘No-one believes that.’ I’m scrambling to reassure him, but it’s a problem too far. My calm facade starts to slip and my body begins shaking. It must be delayed shock.

  Luke notices. ‘Are you OK?’ he asks. ‘Do you want a blanket?’

  ‘Would you mind if I put some clothes on?’

  He hesitates and then nods.

  I stand up quickly before he can change his mind. Heading into the hallway, he is only a step or so behind me because he’s still worried that I might run. The door’s locked anyway. I’m trapped.

  Walking into my room, I see the unmade bed and instantly feel vulnerable.

  ‘Can you turn around and close your eyes?’ I ask.

  He just stares blankly.

  ‘I’ll get dressed in the wardrobe then.’ Panic is starting to overwhelm me. I just need a few moments without him watching me.

  A wash of red across his face. ‘Jesus, Eliza,’ he says. ‘It’s OK. I’d never do anything like that.’

  It’s the first time he’s used my name. Dad would say that was a good sign.

  ‘I just want to get dressed.’

  ‘Promise not to go out the window?’

  ‘We’re three storeys up.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s right,’ but he walks over to check it all the same. He’s getting twitchy again. ‘I’ll wait for you out in the hallway. Five minutes.’

  This is better than I had hoped for.

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’

  He shuts the door behind him.

  I could barricade myself in here, use the bed to block the door and refuse to come out, but it’s like I can’t move. All my energy is still focused on him. There is a deep sigh, and then a kind of slipping sound like he’s sliding down the wall and now sitting on the floor outside my door.

  ‘Eliza,’ he calls out. There’s almost a plaintive quality to his voice, like he wants to be reassured he isn’t alone.

  ‘Yes.’ I force myself to rip off my nightie and put on a bra.

  There’s a long delay before he speaks again, as though there’s something about the door between us that is giving him space as well.

  ‘Did you really mean it about the bones? That they won’t blame me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘They are Grace Hedland’s bones.’

  There, I’ve said it aloud.

  That surprises him, I can hear it in his voice. ‘Grace who ran away?’

  ‘Her jewellery was found nearby.’

  I open up my drawer to get a warm top and find my iPad in there. I hide my tech stuff when I go away for a few days and I hadn’t had a chance to take it out again.

  ‘Doesn’t mean it’s her body,’ he says, a note of doubt creeping in like he’s worried I’m lying to him.

  I need to keep him occupied while I work out what to do next.

  ‘It’s definitely her necklace. I recognised it. I just don’t understand what Grace was doing at The Castle.’ My voice is detached from the rest of me, which is completely focused on the iPad. I stare like it’s a mirage and then carefully pick it up. Please let the battery not be flat.

  It’s only on sleep mode so quietly I click the button.

  2.28 am, 10% charge.

  ‘She was at the paddock party,’ says Luke. ‘Dave Deasey saw her there, and that’s only a ten- to fifteen-minute walk away.

  ‘How did she get all the way to the paddock party from the beach?’ The answer is obvious but I’m buying time.

  Slide to unlock.

  Enter passcode.

  My mind is blank. I have absolutely no idea what it is.

  ‘Must have been Tony,’ says Luke. ‘He left the beach about the same time and that’s where he was going.’

  It’s th
e four digits of my birthday, terrible as far as security goes, but thankfully obvious enough to remember in a crisis. As I press the numbers, there is the slightest click. The volume is up at maximum and I almost drop the iPad in my haste to turn it down.

  ‘I guess,’ I say, trying to keep my brain divided in two. ‘But the police had a witness who said she left Kinsale that night on a train.’

  ‘No way,’ says Luke. His voice is so sure that it distracts me. ‘The trains were cancelled . . .’

  I press on the messages icon and the list of recent messages comes up. Gavin’s sad-face emoji is down the bottom of the screen. All of a sudden my fingers stop moving and start shaking. I take a deep breath and focus on what Luke is saying.

  ‘. . . was out all the next day with the emergency services helping get fallen trees off the tracks. Dad made me do it as punishment.’

  ‘Are you sure that was the same year?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’ He’s even more confident now. ‘He saw you leaving our house. Wanted to go round and tell your dad but Mum talked him out of it. I was grounded instead. That’s why I never got to see you before you left for boarding school.’

  Any other time that information would have made me feel bad but not tonight. My fingers are clumsy and autocorrect makes me almost cry, but after deleting several times, I have: Luke Tyrell in my flat. Hostage. Has a gun.

  Is that what’s going on here?

  If I say ‘hostage’, then it’s going to be a big response. If this was a message from an ordinary member of the public, it would be sent to the local station and a divvy van would come by to investigate. But I’m a police witness and a cop’s kid. Luke is on the state’s most wanted list. It will be the Critical Response Unit at least, if not Special Operations. You don’t fuck around with stuff like this.

  My hands feel clammy.

  ‘So you’re saying that Grace couldn’t have left by train that night.’ My brain grasps that this is important too and I slowly try to process the implications of what he’s saying.

  ‘No,’ says Luke. ‘Didn’t get the track cleared until late New Year’s Day.’

  Do I press send? I think of all the things that could go wrong. This is an apartment block, which adds to the risk. A stray police bullet could kill a bystander or the person they are meant to be rescuing, and the chances of Luke surviving are slim. Even after what’s happened tonight I don’t want that on my conscience. I wait for Dad’s voice to tell me what to do but he stays silent.

  ‘But if she didn’t catch a train,’ I say, stating the obvious, ‘how do we know she left town?’

  If I send this message the situation is out of my hands, which isn’t good. Getting control is always the first thing to do with a new case. Then it hits me. I might not have my father’s skills but I understand about negotiation and giving people legal advice they don’t want to hear.

  Hiding the iPad under the bed, I open the door quietly and look at him. Luke is sitting on the floor, his head resting back against the wall.

  ‘They are Grace’s bones,’ he says, and it is the curious emphasis on ‘are’ that tells me a piece of the puzzle has suddenly slipped into place for him. He’s now more certain of it than I am.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  I can see the hunter and the hunted in him.

  ‘That’s something valuable, that I can use,’ he says.

  ‘Luke, you need to hand yourself in,’ I say, but he is caught up with his own thoughts.

  The teenager I knew has been replaced by someone much more damaged and dangerous. His eyes narrow like he’s assessing options, planning logistics.

  ‘I know someone who’ll want to listen to me now,’ he says so quietly it could be to himself, as if he’s forgotten I’m even there. ‘Someone who will help me if they want to keep that quiet.’

  A siren wails nearby and we both freeze.

  ‘That’s only a fire engine,’ I say. ‘There’s a station around the corner. Another one will leave in a couple of minutes.’ But he’s spooked and stands up, pulling my keys out of his pocket.

  ‘Open the door and see if the coast is clear.’

  I unlock it and take a few steps outside, almost expecting spotlights to come on and men with guns telling me to put my hands up. The night is a dirty grey, impossible to tell friend from foe but there’s no-one out here.

  ‘Give me a head start before you call the cops,’ he says, an acknowledgment of the limits of our friendship. The truce declared on account of our shared history is now over. He slips past me, blending into the night. I watch as he disappears, noting which direction he is heading and then count to a hundred – I don’t know why – before running inside to phone the police.

  20

  ‘I’m going to take a mouth swab.’ There is a grim smile on an otherwise amiable face.

  They’ve taken me to the main city police station. It is busy for so early in the morning but I’ve been given priority, or rather, anything to do with Luke Tyrell has.

  Her gloved hands hold my chin firmly in place. I try not to flinch at the slithering stickiness of the latex, the clinical scent of disinfectant, but she notices.

  ‘Only take a minute and then we’ll get you something to drink.’

  She presses the swab stick against the inside of my right cheek in a circular motion then, running it across the gums, moves it to the other side.

  I have a flash of Cadee brushing my father’s teeth but I shove the memory away.

  The stick is pulled out and she holds it up. There is a coloured strand on the tip, the thinnest of threads. A quick look of satisfaction and she turns away to bag it. A bed sheet has become evidence. Science will verify my story. They don’t just want to rely on my word, my memory.

  To lie like an eyewitness.

  Photos are taken of my wrists and my head where Luke banged it into the wall. I undress and my clothes are put into paper evidence bags, which are sealed with tape. When I explain about wearing something different when he broke in, how my nightie is on the bedroom floor, she tells me not to worry, that there are police at my apartment now. I think about them looking at the broken glass and dusting for fingerprints.

  I never want to go back there again.

  ‘All done,’ she says encouragingly. ‘You can get dressed.’ She hands me a T-shirt, sweatshirt and tracksuit pants.

  I’m taken to the good interview room. There’s one in every station, it’s where they deliver bad news to unsuspecting families and conduct the first-round interviews. Dad called them the ‘you-are-not-about-to-be-arrested’ rooms. This one is nicer than most. The chairs haven’t been worn in and there’s a coffee machine with pods sitting next to it, which must be a recent addition. When I was a kid, Dad’s kettle went missing every few months.

  Exhaustion hits and all I want to do is curl up on the couch snail-like and sleep but the door opens and two detectives enter. The woman introduces herself and her male colleague, but I don’t quite catch their names. She sits down next to me while he heads over to the machine and turns it on.

  ‘Coffee?’ she asks.

  I nod.

  ‘Black with one?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It’s the way your dad drinks it,’ she tells me. ‘You’re Mick Carmody’s daughter, right?’

  I nod again.

  She’s about my age with a warm smile, a kind face. Her hair is tied back in a messy kind of ponytail that was probably neat at the start of her shift. Her eyes have dark rings under them and her skin is a little grey. It’s the face of a police officer who’s been working lots of overtime and not getting paid for it. She must be one of the leads on the Luke Tyrell case.

  ‘I used to work in Family Violence. Met your dad at a conference once and then worked with him on a few cases. I kept asking if he wanted to transfer and come up north to us for a bit. How is Mick these days?’

  My brain is slow, still trying to process the last few hours. I stare at her for too long before saying, ‘Since th
e accident?’

  She’s puzzled and when I explain badly what happened to him, she shakes her head in disbelief and tells me she’s just come back from maternity leave. I don’t say anything about what Alan Sharp told me.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says. ‘He’s one of the best.’ The other cop comes over with my coffee, which I leave untouched on the table.

  We start talking about tonight and she tells me they think Luke broke into the apartment next door, whose owners are on holidays, went out onto their balcony and then climbed across to mine. I think back to the noises I heard and wonder if that fits.

  ‘How did he find out where you lived?’ she asks.

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to say ‘Cadee’ but the image of her caring for Dad comes back into my head unbidden, the way she spoke to him gently, how she had combed his hair. If I was her, perhaps I’d have done the same. It’s enough that I’m telling them about Luke.

  I shrug.

  ‘And Tyrell demanded you change your evidence about his attack?’

  I take a while before answering. ‘No,’ I say. ‘He wanted to explain that I had got it wrong. That Paul Keenan had been the aggressor and not the other way round.’

  The male detective sits up a bit straighter. Neutral face, he’s assessing me now, calculating, wondering if this might be a problem.

  ‘It happened so quickly and I was inside my car, turning around in my seat.’

  It is the start of an excuse, the beginning of a retraction, and the female detective throws a sideways glance at her partner and puts on a ‘don’t panic’ face. I’m not sure if it’s for him or me.

  ‘We’ll get him,’ she says. ‘There’s a full-scale hunt right now. He won’t have got far. I’m sorry about what happened to you tonight but we will protect you. There’s no reason to feel intimidated into changing your testimony.’

  I’m feeling a lot of things right now but being scared of Luke Tyrell isn’t one of them. He isn’t interested in me anymore, he’s got a different plan. I try to explain that to her.