Margaret turned on the taps and water spat into the bath. The pipes rumbled and gurgled. Steam rose, misting the windows and the mirrors. She drew her finger down and across the glass, drawing trees and flowers, dogs and cats, stick figures of women and children, houses with curling tails of smoke coming out of chimneys. Then abruptly she wiped them all away with the flat of her palm. She dropped her dressing gown to the floor and lowered herself into the water.
In the old days scalding hot baths were used as treatment for the bad and the deluded. The elemental powers of heat and water brought together as a purgative. Another way to drive out the devils.
She remembered. A row of baths in a huge tiled room. Light flooding in through lunettes in the ceiling. Shackles hanging from the walls. The slim dark man, his hand heavy and proprietorial on the small of her back, looked at her over his half-glasses. ‘Of course we don’t use them these days,’ he said. Dr Ian MacDonald, Medical Director, Bethany Lunatic Asylum, Kowhai Creek, North Island, New Zealand, 18 December 1975. Midsummer. Her first day at the hospital. She had decided she would walk the two miles from the small town. It might take her mind off Mary, nearly five months old, her face scarlet, phlegm and tears covering her cheeks, cries turning to screams as Margaret handed her over to the next-door neighbour.
‘Don’t worry, dearie. She’ll be right as rain. As soon as you’re gone. Wave bye-bye now to your mum. There’s a good little girl.’ And the screams retreating behind the faded front door.
The narrow road climbed steeply. The cracked and rutted footpath ended after a quarter of a mile. Sticky clay embankments closed in on both sides. The surface of the road turned to dust and rubble. There was silence apart from the crunch of her shoes on the stones, and her breath, coming in gasps as the road got steeper. A car passed, hooting. Sweat dripped down between her breasts. Her hair was hot and heavy on the nape of her neck. When she reached the top of the hill she paused to catch her breath and look back. Red corrugated-iron roofs sprawled haphazardly along a winding riverbank. Grey-green fields spread in every direction, sprinkled with sheep, like sugar frosting on the top of a cake. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, insistent. Below, she noticed the tiny figure of a man on a horse approaching the large flock. As he got closer the individual specks of white came together, coalesced, became one huge irregular shape, moving and flowing like milk spilt on a linoleum floor. Another car passed. Curious faces pressed against the windows. A hand gestured. Two fingers upright. She tasted bile in her mouth.
A high barbed-wire fence ran along the road for as far as she could see. Then a gate, open, with a long drive curving in front of her. On either side were lawns and flower beds. She was reminded suddenly of the flowers in the park in Dun Laoghaire on a hot summer’s afternoon. Hybrid roses with huge red blooms, red-hot pokers, Calla lilies, bedding geraniums in lurid pinks, and gladioli, sheaves of them, white, yellow, orange, standing to attention in the hot sun. Ahead of her, a man in dungarees pushed a creaking lawnmower. A group of men were on their knees, weeding. Their movements were slow and uncoordinated. As she walked by one of them shouted, a garbled collection of syllables strung randomly together.
Past the men was the house. Four storeys, wooden, painted dark green. A fairy-tale turret topped it off. She walked up sagging steps onto the wide veranda. The woodwork was trellised and ornate. She stepped out of the sun into darkness. Her footsteps echoed on polished wooden floors. The smell of Jeyes Fluid tickled her nostrils and eyes. The sweat on her back was suddenly cold. Dr MacDonald took her by the elbow as he escorted her past large rooms where silhouettes sat still, heads bowed, or stood rigid in corners. Nurses bustled like flocks of seagulls, chattering, laughing. Upstairs the rows of beds were pristine, ordered, sheets and blankets precisely folded. Men and women in corridors pushed mops and brooms. Their clothes hung off them like damp washing on a line. Their feet shuffled in felt slippers.
She sat in the doctor’s large office. The matron, Miss Blackman, wielded the shining silver teapot, and offered slices of jam sponge.
‘This is a place of confinement.’ Dr MacDonald stressed each syllable equally. His Scottish accent was clipped and precise. Miss Blackman nodded in agreement. ‘Control is our watchword.’
‘Not cure?’
‘Cure?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Miss Blackman, how many years have you worked in this hospital?’
‘Let me see now, Doctor. It must be twenty-five, maybe thirty.’
‘And how many of your patients would you say have left here cured?’
Miss Blackman smiled. She placed her manicured fingertips together and rested her cherry lips gently on them. Then she spoke. ‘I’m afraid, dear Dr MacDonald, that they don’t usually leave.’
The water had gone cold. Margaret hauled herself up out of the bath and wrapped herself in a towel. She dried quickly and dressed. She ran down the stairs and out into the garden. She sat on the wooden bench and turned her face up to the sun. She wanted to keep her eyes open and let the brilliance cauterize her irises, burn out the pictures that played over and over again. She would need, she knew, to find her own way to do it. To replace the pain with another emotion. She would reach that point she knew, soon, but not yet.
12
‘So. Tell me about Mary.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything and anything.’
‘Why?’
‘Well.’ McLoughlin paused. The sun was hot on the back of his neck. He loosened his tie and opened his top button. ‘So far the only piece of concrete knowledge we have about this case is that a twenty-year-old girl called Mary Mitchell is dead.’
‘Not dead.’ Margaret took off her dark glasses and looked at him. ‘Not dead. Murdered.’
McLoughlin had arrived in Monkstown at five-fifteen. He had spent the morning in the station at Swan’s Nest. His team had been assembled. Twenty men in all. He had gone down through the list of jobs to be done. Joe Fisher was the book man. It was up to him to keep a note of who was assigned to what. The usual routine. They wouldn’t have the pathologist’s report until late tonight or maybe first thing tomorrow morning. But he didn’t expect there’d be much in it. Seemed pretty obvious how she died. Her injuries looked consistent with rape, both vaginal and anal, and violent assault. It was probably the beating around the head that actually killed her. Anyway, it didn’t seem as if they were looking for a murder weapon as such, other than a pair of fists, although they would want the knife that caused the nasty cuts around her nipples. But first things first. Where had she gone when she left the bar and who had she met? He sent Finney to re-interview the people who had last seen her, and to see what he could find from all the CCTV cameras in the George’s Street– Dame Street area. The other lads were given the questions, questionnaires, knocking on doors, all the humdrum, boring, tedious, can’t-see-the-wood-for-the-trees legwork that constitutes the bulk of policing.
That just left the mother. He had phoned ahead to say he was coming. To ask if it would be convenient. She was cold, precise. She told him not to come before five o’clock. ‘The hospice nurse visits in the afternoon.’ That was fine. It would give him time to go back and have another look at the canal, at the place where Mary had been found.
He drove west out through the traffic, which clogged the main street of what had once been just a pretty little Georgian village on a bend in the Liffey. He remembered how pleased his mother had been when he was posted to Swan’s Nest. An easy life, she had predicted. Nothing but the odd drunk farmer and a bit of sheep-stealing. Not for long. The city had spread out and engulfed the acres of lush farmland. Now it was a suburb. A drab, cold, featureless suburb where lawlessness flourished.
He had driven down the steep hill from the bridge at Hazel Hatch and parked his car where the road ended, just in front of the metal barrier that prevented anything other than bicycles, children’s prams or buggies or pedestrians proceeding down the narrow path beside the water’s edge. Ahead he could see, hanging lim
ply in the still air, the yellow crime-scene tape. A uniformed guard leaned against a tree. The whole area on either side of the canal had been searched thoroughly, but they had found nothing. No footprints in the hard, dark earth, nothing in the dusty grass, no tracks, no trails, no spoors to follow.
He bent down under the plastic cordon, saluting the guard on duty. He walked along beside the water, the sun hot on his back, until he came to the spot where Mary’s body had been found. She had lodged in the branches of a submerged ash tree. It wouldn’t have been visible in the dark, and although the body, wrapped in black plastic sacks, sealed with bands of grey sticky tape, had been weighed down with concrete blocks tied around the neck and the waist, somehow the whole thing had stuck. There was a moon that night, on the wane, heading towards its third quarter, but it would still have been very dark out here, away from the bloom of the street lights. He, whoever he was, must have had a job getting her body up the narrow path from the car. He would have stood with his bundle, and flung her out as far as he could. Not easy to do, with a dead weight. Maybe he had something with him. A plank, an oar, to push her away. Whatever. Maybe he began to panic, to lose control. He heard the splash, couldn’t see exactly where she was, didn’t want to make too much noise. Didn’t want to waken any of the people sleeping in the three or four barges tied up along the bank. McLoughlin stopped to inspect them. They weren’t his cup of tea. Too top-heavy, bits added on here and there. Floating caravans, really. None of the grace and style of the classic sea boats he loved.
He turned away and walked back towards his car. He used to come out here blackberrying when he was a kid. He and his sister. Under strict instructions not to eat all the fruit. It’s for jam, not for you, his mother would say, grabbing him by the ears and forcing him to stick out his tongue to be inspected for the tell-tale purple stains. Too soon for blackberries now. The berries were hard, just beginning to redden on the prickled stems. I’ll come back in a month or so, when this is all over, he thought.
‘When will this be all over?’ she asked.
McLoughlin shrugged. ‘It’s hard to tell. We could get lucky. It could be a few days, a week, or . . .’ He stopped and picked up the jug of lemonade on the table. ‘May I?’
She nodded. They were sitting in the garden behind the house, the sun still hot on the stone terrace. The house was in a perfect position, right in front of the sea. There were only about ten others on the little road. Early Victorian, he reckoned. Deceptively large. He had driven past them slowly, looking for a name written in faded white paint on the gate post. Inis Arcáin. Sherkin Island. The island of the sea pigs. Called, he guessed, after the beautiful little place just off Baltimore in West Cork.
He had rung the doorbell a number of times when he first arrived. The old woman had answered. He hadn’t met her before. He held out his hand and introduced himself. She was very small and thin, her hand a loose bundle of bones in his. She was dressed even on this hot day in an Aran cardigan, buttoned up to her wrinkled neck, and a pair of thick tweed trousers.
‘She’s in the garden. You can go round by the side gate.’
Margaret was sitting on a wooden chair on the terrace. Her eyes were closed, her head leaning back, her face turned towards the sun. He stood for a moment looking at her. Today with no makeup, her hair pulled back in a knot, she looked younger, sweeter. He wanted, suddenly, to kiss the small hollow in the centre of her collarbone, visible now where her shirt was unbuttoned. She opened her eyes. He felt his face go red. Caught in the act, he thought.
He sat down in the seat facing her, the wooden table between them. He drank the lemonade. Bitter-sweet.
‘Why did you go to New Zealand?’ he asked.
‘I thought you wanted to talk about Mary.’
‘Well, the two are related, are they not?’
‘Are they?’
Oh dear, he thought.
‘Look, Dr Mitchell, I know this is very difficult and painful for you.’
‘Do you? How do you know? Has this ever happened to you?’
He moved his chair slightly, the wooden legs grating on the stone flags.
‘Dr Mitchell, I am a policeman. For the past twenty-five years I have been investigating the practice of violent crime. You are not, I’m sorry to say, the first mother whose only daughter has died in a horrible and brutal way. And I’m equally sorry to say that you will not be the last. I am, I’m afraid, only trying to do my job. As efficiently and successfully as I can.’ He paused and leaned towards her. ‘Do I make myself clear?’
She nodded. ‘Clear as day, Inspector.’
‘Good. Now. As I was saying. Why did you go to New Zealand?’
She stood up and walked away from the table. She sat down on the small wall that bounded the terrace.
‘I had been planning to go there with my husband but he was killed in a car crash, a couple of months before we were due to leave. Anyway, after a bit of thought I decided that I might as well go by myself. I had a job waiting.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Twenty years or so ago.’
‘Before Mary was born?’
‘No. Just after. But my husband died before her birth.’
‘And his name was?’ He opened his notebook.
‘David Mitchell, but,’ she held up her hand, ‘all this happened in London. It was a long time ago.’
He looked at her. ‘So let’s get this straight. You were living in London. You had got married and you and your husband were going to New Zealand together. Then he died, and you went by yourself after the baby was born. Is that it?’
She nodded.
‘You didn’t want to come back here to your family?’
‘Look,’ she stood up again, ‘I’ve told you what happened. What is this? Am I a suspect?’
‘What?’
‘A suspect.’
He laid his pen on the table. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, it’s fairly common practice, isn’t it? In cases like this for the police to assume that those closest to the victim are most likely to have had something to do with the crime. Isn’t that so?’
He nodded, slowly.
‘And in fact,’ she stood over him, her face pale, her eyes red, ‘even as we speak I imagine that one of your underlings is faxing the New Zealand police about me. Isn’t that so? So why you’re bothering to ask me these questions is beyond my comprehension.’
He shrugged his shoulders, feeling damp patches spreading across the back of his shirt.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Inspector, but as you will soon know, if you don’t already, I worked in an institution for the criminally insane for a number of years, and I understand that combination of passion and proximity. It’s lethal.’
He smiled at the way she put it. He must remember it for his next lecture in Templemore.
‘And as you pore over the pile of stuff from the Auckland police, you and your fellow officers will be saying, “We know she’s a widow, but does she have a boyfriend, a lover? Someone who’s been working up to doing this. Does she know about it? Has she turned a blind eye to it so far? Maybe she’s jealous of the girl. Maybe they’re both in love with the same guy? Is that it? Good old-fashioned jealousy. So let’s poke around, see what dirt we can dredge up on the mother. Make our job as easy as possible.” Isn’t that the way, Inspector?’
He took out a packet of cigars. Half coronas. He lit one, the blue smoke hanging between them. It was quiet in the garden, except for the constant thrum of the traffic on the road above, and the clanging and rattling every few minutes as the DART rushed by. She had turned away from him. She was hunched over, her arms wrapped around her shoulders. He could see the individual vertebrae of her spine through the thin material of her white shirt. He felt intense pity for her. But pity was the wrong emotion at a time like this.
‘Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell.’ The name trickled out of his mouth with the smoke. ‘I loved Gone With the Wind. It was my favourite book for years.�
��
‘Christ almighty.’ She turned on him, her voice harsh. ‘Why aren’t you out there looking for that bastard who destroyed my daughter, instead of sitting here with me? What do I know? I know nothing about this. I’ve never gone through this before. I’ve never felt pain like this before. I don’t know what to say or do. Except that I know, my reason tells me, what kind of person we’re dealing with. I’ve seen them all. I’ve interviewed them, sat in their cells and shared their dirty little secrets, their disgusting fantasies. I’ve heard them lie and cheat, twist the doctors and the courts. Offer up their own abuse as some kind of excuse. Exploit the generosity of jurors. And I’ve seen their victims. The little girls who will never be able to love and be loved, the old women who will never leave their houses again, the countless pathetic creatures who sit with their faces to the wall, rigid, inert, lifeless with fear.’
Mary, Mary Page 5
