Little Bird: a serial killer thriller

by Sharon Dempsey

  She pondered his words; it sounded so cynical, to think that a peace process could have given rise to an undercurrent of unfulfilled anger and violence. ‘So, are you saying all the suicides you hear about on the news, the senseless violence we see on the streets, and the girls’ murders are all directly linked to the troubles?’

  ‘Who’s to say for sure? In years from now, they will look at the stats and some professor will publish a research a paper, and we will know for certain – that Belfast was a torch paper waiting to go up, all over again. Until then, we are rummaging in the dark trying to find sense and reason where there is none,’ he sighed.

  Anna thought of the threads, all failing to be tied up neatly. Experience had taught her that police work is largely the gathering of information, shifting through the fragments to find the connections and to painstakingly sew it all together into a tapestry of evidence. She thought of Robert Brogan and their theory. How could she tell Declan where the case was leading them? It would break him into a million pieces. She had a sense that he was holding it all together to see the case through to the end. To see the murderer caught; thereafter, she didn’t know what would happen to him. Some tragedies are too painful to live with.

  He sighed, ‘We can’t risk another girl’s life. I’d give anything for this to be just another case. Someone else’s daughter. I’d be shocked and concerned, angry at the senselessness and the savagery, and I’d do anything to catch the bastard. I only wish to God, it hadn’t been my girl.’ Anna placed her head on his chest and held him tight.

  32

  The next couple of days were hazy. She slept a lot. Fitful, feverish sleeps, from which she woke uncomfortable and dry mouthed. It was like waking with a hangover without the fun. She’d dreamt a lot too, waking sometimes with a sickening guilt all intertwined with thoughts of Camille and Declan. She dreamt of trying to save Camille only to realise that it was Declan she was rushing to save.

  By day three, she realised she needed distraction and when the call came from Martin in Keoghill, inviting her to meet a member of her birth family, she gladly agreed. Showering made her feel better. Her shoulder was still sore so dressing had been hard. She cursed the painkillers for not working quickly enough and threw back another to help her through the drive to Portaferry. A strong coffee would hopefully keep her alert.

  The journey allowed Anna time to think and she tried to prepare herself for the meeting. After all this time to actually meet her mother would be pretty momentous. She thought of herself as a young girl, how if she had been pregnant, Camille would have swaddled her in love and support. To keep the baby or to have an abortion, Anna was certain that either way, her parents would have been there for her, without hesitation. The scenery passed her by without much notice.

  An hour later, anxiety and nervousness made her stomach quake, as Martin led her into a dark passageway, cramped and narrow with boxes, discarded pieces of old oil lamps, an old long forgotten typewriter and a mantle clock. It all looked precarious, as if it could all crash over at the slightest touch. Light came from a door at the end of the corridor and there, sat on a wooden chair, in what looked like a make shift kitchen was the woman she was so anxious to meet. Martin cleared his throat, ‘Anna this is Maura.’ Anna looked confused; she hoped he was taking her to meet Kathleen.

  The woman stood to greet them, hesitant and unsure of herself, so that Anna felt she had to make the first move and speak. ‘Hello, I thought I was meeting Kathleen.’

  The woman examined Anna’s features as if looking for some sort of hallmark of family. Proof.

  ‘I’m your aunt, so I am. Sure you are, you’re the spit of the Maguire’s, my mother’s side of the family.’

  Anna gave her a quick awkward hug and noted that she was exactly the same height and similar in build to herself – compact and lean.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me.’

  ‘We knew you’d show your face, sooner or later.’

  ‘I’ll leave youse to it,’ Martin said. ‘There’s a kettle and some tea bags if youse want a cup of tea. Help yourselves.’ He headed back to the shop.

  Anna looked at the woman in front of her, searching for her own proof of ownership. The faded brown eyes and the over bleached hair didn’t have anything of the familiar about it. But the build, the size and the shape were replicated in her shoulders and her neat waist.

  ‘So, tell me about yourself. I take it you travelled over from across the water?’

  ‘I’m here on secondment with the PSNI. I’m staying in Belfast.’

  The woman laughed. ‘Well that’s a good one. Wait till they hear that.’

  Anna didn’t know how to take her. It certainly wasn’t what she expected.

  ‘Well what did you come for? What do you want to know?’ her tone was defensive.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I just wanted to meet my biological mother. See if there was any connection. It sounds stupid now.’

  ‘No, not stupid. We all said it would happen one day. Did you have a good home and a good up bringing?’

  ‘Yes. I’m lucky I suppose but there was always that sense of wanting to know where I came from and what my birth family were like.’

  ‘I’m sure you did but it’s not like a soap. These things are never as clear cut as you think.’

  Anna sat back on the chair and sighed. All the tension, the anxiety and the up build had made her feel wrung out. And now she wasn’t even getting to meet her mother.

  ‘Why didn’t she come?’

  ‘As I said these things are complicated. You can’t just waltz in and think it’ll be all happy families.’

  ‘I never thought it would be easy, but do you not think she owes me a conversation at least?’

  Maura reached forward, and in almost a hiss, said, ‘We don’t owe you anything missy, so you can get that into your head straight away.’ The quiet aggression took Anna by surprise. The words had been spoken quietly but there was mistaking her tone.

  ‘Does Kathleen not want to meet me?’

  ‘What Kathleen wants isn’t at issue here. You’re coming back is like raking over old scabs. Sometimes the past is best left long buried.’

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, but surely you can agree that I deserve to meet my birth mother.’

  Anna couldn’t believe that after all this time she was face-to-face with a blood relative. Yet she wasn’t surprised that she was being met with open hostility. She thought she might be seen as an unwanted intrusion. The antagonism was in the snarl of her expression, the hands twisting at her coat, the eyes narrowed in suspicion, as if Anna was there to claim some part of them.

  ‘I’ve come this far, surely Kathleen would like to at least meet me once? I’m not asking for a relationship. I had a great mother and I’m not looking for another. All I want is to know a bit about my background.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. Kathleen had you and put you in a safe place to be adopted and by the looks of you, you’ve done all right.’

  ‘I know what it was like back then for unmarried girls, that they were ostracised and treated badly, but that wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘What would you know coming here with your fancy clothes and your designer handbag? Let me guess, Mummy and Daddy lived in a nice detached house with lovely dinner parties and trips to the library and the zoo,’ she sneered, looking Anna up and down as if she despised her.

  ‘Holidays aboard to France or maybe it was a nice part of Spain or Italy for the culture. You went to a good school, got yourself a first-rate education, on to university, student parties and posh boyfriends. Well missy, life wasn’t quite like that for us growing up, so don’t come in here telling me you understand what Kathleen or any of us went through.’

  Anna was taken aback. ‘You aren’t being fair. I didn’t mean to suggest that I understand, just that I’m not naïve; I know Kathleen probably had it hard to find herself pregnant. I don’t even know how old she was,’ she sighed. ‘If I can’t understand t
hen why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘It isn’t my story to tell. It’s down to Kathleen. I’ll speak to her and get back to you. If she wants to meet you, or for me to tell you how it was, then so be it, but if you ask me, some stories are best left untold.’

  33

  Memory was a treacherous beast. After the car bomb shards of information pierced through the fog of disbelief and horror. Now, he was experiencing the same functional amnesia. He could gather partial visual images of the wedding day: seeing Lara walk down the stairs of their family home, looking beautiful in her wedding dress, his gasp at the wonder of how his daughter had grown from a child to this sophisticated young woman. The ride to the church in the car and the heavy weight pressing on his chest, of wanting to say the right thing, to let her know that if it should all fall apart, she could always come home, but biting the words back because she would interpret it as another dig at Rory. He had promised Izzy that going forward from the wedding day he would set aside all his doubts about Lara’s choice and accept Rory into their family. What choice did he have really?

  He understood what his brain was doing. It was shutting out that which he couldn’t bear to recall. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for focused attention and rational thought was impaired because of the high stress, fear and horror of what he had endured. Every now and then, he would remind himself that it was Esme who had faced the sheer terror, not him, but then the idea of what she endured only served to make him feel worse. In her final moments, it was likely that her prefrontal cortex had shut down, effectively drowned in stress chemicals. She would have literally been frozen in fear, with little ability to fight for her life.

  The worse had happened and his brain could barely cope with it. Just when he needed to be rational and clear thinking, he found that his thoughts were sporadic, firing off in a hundred different directions, trying to grasp on to the truth, but feeling it evade him, slipping away like a handful of dry sand. At times he felt shut down, unresponsive and passive. Then the fog would lift, rise up like the mist at dawn, and for a short while he could be active, making some sort of headway, working with Anna to form theories and seek a path towards finding the bastard.

  Rather than spend another night tossing and turning in bed he decided to watch the wedding DVD. It must have been the tenth time he had done it. It was helping him piece together the day, to create a timeline of who was where and at what time. He knew the police were doing the same thing. Anna had told him that they were clocking every frame for the time period Esme had been likely to have left the venue and met her fate. Declan was looking for something else. What that was he couldn’t say. Glimpses of his daughter laughing, dancing, sitting at the top table to the left of the best man, lifting her champagne glass for the toasts. All of the scenes were played out in front of him as if he was watching a drama of someone else’s life.

  He could see himself, the brand-new suit, made to measure, sitting in his wheel chair, making conversation and preparing to make his speech. He watched himself pull at his shirt collar, nervous and anxious to get the speeches over with, knowing that there was a weighty expectation for him to strike the right balance between humorous and moving. That he should give Lara some sort of wisdom about married life, to reminisce about her as a girl, to talk about her faults – nice, funny things like the time she had taken up cooking and nearly poisoned them all by putting lavender in the casserole instead of rosemary.

  He continued watching: the first dance, an Elton John cover by Ellie Goulding, the cutting of the cake, the wedding band playing the crowd pleaser songs like Galway Girl and The Gambler. It was almost 1.15 a.m. and he was about to call it a night when he noticed something in the background of the television screen. The camera was focusing on Lara, the bride surrounded by her girl-friends as they danced to Ed Sheeran, but in the background Declan could see Esme. She was upset. He froze the frame trying to catch the exact expression on her face. There was no doubt she was crying. She was reaching for someone off camera, her arm outstretched. Frame by frame, Declan watched and then he saw him.

  34

  Anna was on the road back to Portaferry and was trying to focus on the case but her head was swamped with thoughts about her birth mother. The press was full of stories of the Magdalene laundries, homes for unmarried mothers who were forced to hand their babies over to the Catholic church who, in some cases, sold the children on to wealthy Catholic families aboard. Families they knew would protect the church with their silence and continue to contribute financially. Jimmy and Camille weren’t Catholics, so how Anna had ended up being placed with them she had no idea. As far as the paperwork was concerned, Jimmy had said, they had acquired Anna through the regular channels. Social workers and home reports all being part of the deal. Beyond knowing they had been matched with a healthy baby girl, Jimmy and Camille had been told no more, nor did they care. As far as they were concerned, Anna was theirs and her life began the day they were handed her.

  This country is fucking crazy Anna thought, squinting against the low November sun.

  It was definitely cold enough for snow. The forecasters had been predicting flurries in the high ground and Anna had noticed a white cloak of frost lying on the Black Mountain hills overlooking Belfast. Now, driving to Portaferry for the third time, she noticed the beauty of the coastline, which was verdant and woody, looking out over a bleak slate coloured sea. The gales had whipped in the previous day and Anna could see branches and debris littering the roads. She passed the small Portaferry castle, little more than a tower house.

  She was heading to Kathleen’s house.

  The call from Maura had been short and direct. ‘She will meet you as a one off. You are to go to her house. Don’t expect too much and if she says the conversation is over, then accept it – leave and move on. She wants no follow up visits, and no on-going contact.’ Anna had no choice but to agree to the terms.

  Kathleen’s house was part of a row of terraces, known locally as the ferrymen’s cottages. Anna parked the car in front of the houses and made her way to the yellow front door, number seven. The stone houses each had a small bay window downstairs and two small, rectangular windows upstairs, nestled beneath a blue slate roof. Her mother’s house had a front garden – a well-kept patch of lawn, with what looked like a freshly raked boarder punctuated with purple and pink heathers.

  As Anna approached the door it slowly opened and there she was, her birth mother. After all this time, the wondering, the imagining as a child daydreaming her to life, there she stood – real and alive. She was about Anna’s height, though Anna appeared taller in her high-heeled boots, with a similar build to Maura – the same slope of the shoulders, the neat waist and the soft swell of hips beneath a dark green wool skirt. There was familiarity in the grey of her eyes, the lashes curling upwards and the pinch of her mouth, drawn into a tight line.

  ‘So here you are at last,’ she said, ‘You better come in then.’ There was no hug or kiss by way of greeting. Anna followed her into a tiny hallway where she took off her coat and hung it over the bannister.

  ‘Through here.’

  They went into a small living room, furnished with a small two-seater sofa, covered with a crocheted blanket in colours of teal and purples. An open fire flickered in the stone hearth.

  ‘Sit down and I’ll get you a cup of tea. Or would you prefer coffee?’

  ‘Tea will be fine, thanks. Milk no sugar.’

  While Kathleen busied herself in the kitchen with the kettle, Anna looked around the neat little room. The house looked out towards the lough. The view from the net curtained window was dramatic on such a windswept day. The fireplace mantle held a clock and a couple of tall brass candlesticks, no photographs or trinkets to hint at the person living there. A small television set was nestled in the corner of the room next to a neat pile of newspapers and magazines.

  ‘Here you are. Help yourself to a scone.’ She set a tray of tea things down on a low footstool and handed Anna a cup. The cre
am and jam scones and bite sized tea cakes suggested she had gone to trouble.

  ‘Maura was right, you have a look of the Maguires about you.’

  ‘Your mother was a Maguire, isn’t that right?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Yes, she was Ellen Maguire from the Markets area. A good woman who reared nine children when times were hard.’ They both sipped at their tea. Kathleen took a drag on an electronic cigarette, puffing out the vapour.

  ‘So, you grew up in Wales then? Your accent has a lovely ring to it.’

  ‘Yes, in Cardiff but I went to university in Bristol.’

  Kathleen raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I read Politics and Criminology, before joining the police when I graduated,’ she continued, rambling because she was nervous.

  ‘Maura said you were working with the police over here for a while.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m on secondment for six months.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you don’t want to be sitting here making conversation all day. I’ll tell you what you’re after.’ Kathleen sat her cup down on the low tea tray, clasped her hands together and took a deep breath.

  ‘We were living through bad times in those days. You can’t even begin to imagine what it was like growing up back then. We’d no money, none of us had, so that wasn’t an issue; you just got on with it and accepted your lot. We knew no different. Jobs were scarce for Catholic men, good paying jobs and apprenticeships for the shipyard and Shorts went to the Protestants and we were left to sup the rest. The jobs no one in their right mind would want. Still my father worked hard and we got by.’

  ‘By the late sixties things were changing. People got fed up being told they were second class citizens, if you were on a housing waiting list you automatically went to the back of the queue if you were a Catholic. You could hardly blame the young lads, agitated, standing on street corners seeing no way out. Plenty of them had reason enough to join up, my brother Jamesie was no different. He liked his history books and before long he was reading up on what was going on beyond this wee country of ours. He knew everything there was to know about the blacks in America and their fight for rights and the early civil rights movement here. Half the time my father would say what have the blacks got to do with us and our Jamesie would launch into one of his speeches. He could see plain as day that what was happening in America needed to happen on the streets of Belfast. Before long he was part of a group organising rallies and marching down the Botanic Avenue into the town. It was all about equal rights, socialist slogans, nothing sectarian. He ended up getting himself a good job working as a trainee paralegal. Not many round our way had jobs like that. He didn’t have a law degree but he was well read and worked hard. He could’ve gone far.’ She paused putting the electronic cigarette to her lips again.