by Laura Elliot
‘How can you be sure?’ she screamed. Her eyes glittered, tearless but feverish. ‘You weren’t there. It’s too soon to call it off.’
‘They combed every square inch of space. Do you understand what I’m saying…every square inch. If a needle had been missing, they would have found it.’
He held her arms, shook her into silence. ‘You’ve no idea what I’m going through. To stand by and watch…not to be able to search for my own child. I hoped as much as you did. But she was never there.’
She refused to heed his desperation. ‘You’re wrong. She’s there…here’s the proof.’ She showed him the psychic’s letter. ‘Don’t you see? A place of stone. Robert, she could be dead by now and we’re sitting here doing nothing. They have to keep searching.’
Robert crumpled the letter and flung it into the wastepaper basket. ‘Jesus Christ, Carla, how many times must I tell you? She wasn’t there. They would have heard her…seen her. It’s over. Accept it.’ She removed the letter and clutched it against her chest. Unable to watch her desperation, he walked to the sideboard and poured a large whiskey. His drinking had increased. Some nights he drank to the point of incomprehension, blurting out his anger, his frustration, his hatred of his desk job. She had had to listen to him rambling, watch his eyes redden, his face tautening with grief. Tonight, unable to watch, she left the room.
In the small hours when he came to bed, she pretended to be asleep. His arm reached across her hip, cradled her flat stomach. Soon his breathing had deepened and he turned over on his back. He began to snore. He never used to snore, or if he did she had slept too deeply to hear him. He had forgotten to switch off his bedside light. Anxious not to awaken him, she had left the bed and walked around to his side. She stared down on his face, chalky white, his expression slack, shadows like bruises under his eyes.
To be a detective and be unable to search for your own child. How long were they supposed to endure the waiting?
She had pulled a pair of trousers from the wardrobe. The waistband was loose and she notched the belt tighter. She dragged a jumper over her head, slipped on socks and boots, zipped a parka to her neck. Robert turned, heavy as a log, and uttered a low moan. She switched off the bedroom light but did not bother closing the door softly, knowing he would not awaken until morning.
She parked now beside the perimeter wall of the industrial estate. Yellow tape fluttering across the entrance gates was the only visible sign that the Gardaí had spent the day scouring the grounds. The gates were padlocked and too high to climb over. She walked along the side of the wall and stopped when she reached a narrow opening. A pitted bollard, bent sideways, was cemented into the centre, obviously placed there to obstruct cars. It would once have been used by workers as a short cut to the factories and warehouses. Few people went there now, and those who did came in secret; she shone her torch over syringes, condoms, empty beer bottles and cans.
Narrow roads stretched before her. Clumps of weeds moved, as if night creatures scurried within the foliage. The urge to run shivered through her. She walked past an open shed, once used for bicycles. The pungent smell of urine caught against her breath. Black circles marked the spots where dead fires had blazed, charred wood crunched under her feet. She imagined homeless men and women seeking warmth around the flames. The Garda search must have scared them away. In the waning moonlight she sank on her haunches and buried her face in her knees. Her daughter was not here, never was. Robert had been right all along. No wonder he had heaped scorn on the psychic’s letter. Mad psychic. Mad God, claiming omnipotence yet unable to grant her, the smallest sparrow, a simple request.
She rose and crashed her foot down on a piece of charred wood, stamped the fragments until they turned to ash. She walked away from the grey walls. Nothing there but ghosts.
A shuffling sound caused her to pause; slowly, frightened for the first time, she looked over her shoulder. The isolation of this abandoned place bore down on her. Her shadow moved…no, not her shadow, another person, a woman. She was falling. Straight and rigid as a plank, the woman fell forward and hit the pavement with such force that Carla expected it to vibrate. Nothing moved, except the woman’s long blonde hair as it flopped forward and covered her face. She was unconscious, her body frighteningly still.
Carla ran towards her and knelt, lifted the woman’s wrist and felt her pulse. The woman moaned softly but otherwise showed no other sign of life. Using all her strength to push her over, Carla placed her hands underneath her chest and managed to turn her sideways. The body was heavy, a dead weight, but the face, now in profile, was male. In the light from her torch, Carla noticed stubble on his chin. He was dressed in an anorak and jeans, trainers that had once been white. His forehead was bleeding. Blood matted the front of his hair. He collapsed over on his back and opened his eyes. The pupils were dilated, his eyes rolling in their sockets until only the whites were visible. He was young, early twenties, his face hard and angular.
‘Don’t…’ He shielded his gaze from the torch. ‘Don’t shine your fucking light…’ His voice was hoarse, as if he had not used it for a long time.
‘You need help.’ She fought back the urge to walk away. ‘I’m going to find a phone and call an ambulance.’
He touched his forehead then stared at the blood on his hand. When he tried to stand, she reached out to support him but he brought them both to the ground. He was unconscious again as she pushed him off her and scrambled to her feet. Madness, this was utter madness. She ran towards the bollards and squeezed through, reached her car and drove to Finglas village.
She found a phone kiosk and dialled 999. Briefly, she gave a description of the location. This was the time to leave, to return to her bed before Robert awoke and discovered she was missing. She drove to the end of the main street then turned back, driven by an impulse to see him safe. He was still lying in the same position. The ambulance team arrived shortly afterwards. She hurried to the main entrance and directed the paramedics to him. The driver of the ambulance was a woman. She seemed far too young and small to be in charge of such a large ambulance but there was no doubting her authority as she took details from Carla.
‘Your name?’ she asked once the man was strapped into the ambulance. Her tone was informal, her gaze inquisitive.
‘Does my name matter?’ asked Carla.
The young woman nodded. ‘I need to fill in the details.’ She glanced closer at Carla then looked beyond her to the perimeter wall.
‘I recognise you.’ Her expression carried a wealth of understanding. ‘You should not be here.’
‘You drove me to the Valley View clinic…’
‘Yes, I did.’ The driver closed the doors. ‘Will you go home now, Carla?’
‘Yes.’ Carla walked towards her car. She waited until the blue light flickered and disappeared.
Dawn was edging the horizon when she returned home. Robert was still sleeping. In the bathroom she opened the medicine cabinet and took out the bottle of sleeping pills. She held a pill in her hand, placed it on her tongue, filled a glass with water. A stranger was reflected back at her from the mirror. Once before, the same reflection had stared back at her, younger then by ten years, glassy-eyed, hollowed out. Ten years…She tried hard not to think about it but the memory was alive and tearing her apart; an eye for an eye, a child for a child.
Chapter Fifteen
Susanne
One year later
You are one year old today. ‘Where does time go?’ said Miriam. ‘My little cabbage is growing up.’
I worked so hard to make your first birthday a success. I’d bought you the prettiest pink dress and a matching hair band with a little butterfly attached. You immediately pulled it off, and did so each time I replaced it. Such will power, your face red, your bottom lip the size of a plum. David insisted that the hair band was hurting you. He lifted you from your high chair and tossed you in the air. You shrieked when he caught you and he tossed you again. It’s your favourite game. I warned
him you’d throw up, which of course you did, all over the lace and appliqué. He carried you upstairs under his arm and changed you into a pair of dungarees and a T-shirt. You ended up looking like a boy, bold and triumphant.
I didn’t know most of the people who came. David’s friends, most of them, with their children.
‘Now is your chance to meet new people,’ he’d said when we were drawing up the guest list. ‘Maoltrán may seem like a one-horse town to you but there’s lots of clubs to join. It will help you to cope with your postnatal depression.’
I hated the way he said that…postnatal depression…as if the very idea made him irritable.
Some of the others I know. Phyllis and Lily, her mother Kathleen O’Sullivan, Corrine’s mother, and, needless to say, Imelda Morris was invited and came back from Dublin for the occasion. Joey sent you a birthday card. Corrine has evidently softened her attitude from a distance. She sends us regular photographs and video tapes of their son. Joey now wears a baseball cap and swings an ice hockey stick. He signed your birthday card with his name and a line of kisses.
Everyone made a fuss of you. Lily Lyons hobbled across the floor and said, ‘Joy’s got the look of the Dowlings, right enough.’
‘Same eyes as Joey,’ said Kathleen O’Sullivan.
But you look nothing like Joey O’Sullivan. You look like me. Except, of course, for your eyes. They’re too dark for your pale complexion and flaxen hair.
Phyllis bought you an enormous doll’s house. Far too extravagant, I wanted to tell her, but I hid my annoyance. She boasted again about your birth. I could see that the women were tiring of her story. Fifteen minutes of fame, said Andy Warhol. Phyllis will feed off it for ever.
Miriam looked around the house and said, as she always does, that she hardly recognised it. I reminded her that nothing had changed since her last visit, nothing major, and tried not to sound defensive.
I carried in your birthday cake. We sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and everything was going well until someone turned on the television. The evening news came on. The first anniversary of Isobel Gardner’s disappearance. Everyone in the room turned to watch, even David.
Carla Kelly sat beside her husband. I couldn’t believe I was watching the same woman. Almost impossible to believe she ever strolled down a catwalk. Gaunt and grim, nothing to her face except bone. And her husband looked just as haunted. A wall exists between them now, invisible to most but obvious to anyone like myself who understands body language. They never touched or exchanged a glance until she broke down at the end of her statement. Glassy tears rolled down her cheeks. He gripped her hand then, a whiteknuckle grasp against the green baize tablecloth.
Their solicitor held up an artist’s impression of what Isobel Gardner should look like at one year of age. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. ‘One year and two days,’ he stressed. ‘Two days was all they shared with their child before she was taken from them.’
No one looked in your direction as you dipped your finger into the icing on your cake, sucked it, grinned with pleasure at the taste. I held you close to my chest. You must have felt the palpitations, thumping like a bird’s wings against glass. And the pain in my chest, across my shoulders, the dizzy, swooning sensation, as if everything was slipping beyond my grasp.
I understand the symptoms now. It’s anxiety, not a heart attack. I’m glad I discussed it with Dr Williamson. My symptoms had become too serious to ignore. When I visited her surgery last week, she’d checked my heart and my blood pressure.
‘It’s nothing to do with your heart,’ she’d said. ‘What you’ve just described are the classic symptoms of a panic attack.’
She shook her head when I asked if I’d imagined my symptoms. ‘Panic attacks can occur out of the blue for no discernible reason,’ she said. ‘But they can also have a deep underlying cause.’ She asked if I was anxious, distressed. I assured her that everything was fine but she wrote a name and phone number on a prescription pad and tore off the page.
‘This woman is an excellent counsellor,’ she said, and handed the page to me. ‘Give her a call if you think there is an underlying cause for your anxiety.’
Anxiety. It was so obvious. I tracked back to the moment the first attack occurred. I had been driving home from Dublin and you were strapped in the car seat. We’d spent the weekend with my father and Tessa, and I was anxious to get away from the city before the peak-hour evening traffic. I was driving along the quays when the pain had clamped my chest. I braked at the red lights. I’d wanted to run from the suffocating atmosphere in the car but your face was framed in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t run away. But that was what I wanted to do, abandon you in the traffic and run into a mist too dense to ever find me. The traffic lights changed and I’d moved forward. I struggled to control my terror. And I did. I managed to get you home safely. But the attacks continued and, when Dr Williamson gave her diagnosis, I understood.
The Liffey had been flowing on a high tide that day and cranes were visible beyond a high hoarding. Posters fluttered on the hoarding; rock bands and theatre advertisements. But one poster stood out from the others. A poster of a baby, one day old. A stolen child – an image almost bleached from existence.
Anxiety. I’ve got the pills. But they just deaden me. I still know what I have done.
Chapter Sixteen
Carla
Once again, the journalists were ranged before them. And the photographers…click…click…click.
Initially, the questions were predictable.
‘How do you feel on the anniversary of your daughter’s disappearance?’
‘Do you think Isobel is still in Ireland?’
‘What do you want to say to the person or persons who took her?’
‘Are you going to model again?’
Josh Baker stood up and fixed Robert with his hard, speculative stare. ‘Is it true that the Gardaí suspect a criminal involvement in your daughter’s disappearance?’
‘What exactly are you implying?’ Robert asked. Carla sensed his tension, his withdrawal. His elbow remained rigid on the table.
‘Was your daughter’s disappearance linked to the drug seizure at Dublin Port that took place the day she was born?’ Josh asked. ‘Is it possible that through your undercover work with the Drugs Unit, her disappearance is an act of revenge?’
Criminals…drug traffickers…revenge…For an instant Carla was unable to catch her breath.
‘There is absolutely no evidence that there was any criminal involvement in my daughter’s disappearance.’ Robert sounded stern and certain. He refused to answer any further questions and Leo, shepherding them from the table, almost lifted Carla from her seat. In the anteroom Robert collapsed into a chair. She sat opposite him and gripped his hand. His skin was cold and clammy, his eyes bloodshot from the shock. To be considered responsible for Isobel’s disappearance. She understood the emotions whirling inside him. She experienced the same rush of guilt every time a journalist asked her about the Anticipation promotion.
Over the following week, the tabloids and broadsheets ran with variations of the story. Journalists listed the gangland figures who, allegedly, could have ordered the revenge kidnapping or worse. One tabloid ran a headline – ‘Dad-to-be Drinks in Anticipation’ – and published a photograph of Robert, his arm around Sharon Boyle, celebrating the drug seizure on the night of Isobel’s birth. They held their glasses towards the camera, smiling broadly, two half-smoked cigarettes resting on an overflowing ashtray in front of them.
The photograph had been cropped, Robert insisted. He pointed to his other arm, truncated from the crop, and insisted it was around Gavin’s shoulder or Victor’s or Jimmy’s; he was at a party with friends, and had only the vaguest memory of who was sitting beside him.
‘Who gives a fuck…’ He sounded too weary to care. ‘They’re my mates. We were celebrating.’
‘Some mates!’ The image of Robert and Sharon Boyle laughing and drinking together while she was suffering
labour pains ran like a wire through Carla’s brain. She picked up the newspaper and tore it into shreds. ‘Find out which of your mates gave that photograph to the papers. But I doubt if you’ll succeed. They can’t even find your own daughter.’
He watched her fling the pieces to the floor. ‘Don’t ever speak to me like that again.’ His anger, tightly suppressed, was visible only in his eyes. ‘I’ve enough on my mind without having to endure your petty jealousy.’
‘I’m not jealous. Not of her—’
‘Then what?’ he snapped. ‘Is it because I’m the centre of media attention for a change?’
Something inside her shrivelled. It could have been her heart or something less tangible, the knowledge that they were stepping into new, dangerous territory where forgiveness could soon become impossible.
‘What exactly do you mean?’ Her voice was shrill, accusing. ‘Do you believe I enjoy the notoriety…that I seek it out for my own satisfaction rather than from a desperate need to find Isobel? If that’s what you mean, then say it. Say it straight to my face, Robert.’
‘I’m sorry…sorry. I didn’t mean it.’ He rubbed his hands over his cheeks and swayed forward. ‘Forget what I said…please forget it. How can anyone enjoy what we’re going through? But you’re able to handle it…you’re used to it.’
Her voice, when she was able to speak, was hoarse. ‘I hate them…the whole fucking circus feeding off us. But if it means keeping Isobel’s name out there, I’ll endure it. And you’re right. I am jealous. Jealous to my bones of the woman who stole our child. She’s out there somewhere and she’s getting further and further away from us with all this nonsense about gangsters. We need to step up the campaign—’
‘What campaign?’ He shook his hands in frustration. ‘It’s over, Carla. We have to move on with our lives. You talk about jealousy. Have you any idea how I feel about Edward Carter? “The Spur.”’ She flinched back from his mocking tone. ‘What is it with you and him? I hear the remarks, the speculation—’
