Lying in Wait

by Liz Nugent

  I would retrieve the hat later.

  Laurence joined us in the drawing room. I was trying to keep things breezy to distract him from his father’s shaken demeanour. ‘So who’s this Helen?’ I said, but Andrew hushed me and turned up the volume on the TV. The news was on. It wasn’t the top headline, but maybe the third or fourth item.

  ‘Concerns are growing for the whereabouts of a 22-year-old Dublin woman who went missing eleven days ago. Annie Doyle has not been seen since the evening of Friday the 14th of November, at her home on Hanbury Street in Dublin’s inner city.’

  There was a grainy photograph of the girl. Dark, thin, lots of make-up, clad in a denim jacket, grinning at someone behind the photographer with a beer glass in her hand. She was caught unawares, it seemed, the deformed top lip revealing crooked front teeth. I glanced over at Andrew. He was staring intensely at the television.

  ‘That must be the woman they were asking you about earlier, Dad.’

  ‘Shhhhh!’ Andrew said furiously.

  A Detective Sergeant O’Toole, leading the investigation, was speaking: ‘… a dark-coloured luxury vehicle was seen in the vicinity of the woman’s home in preceding weeks. We believe that the male driver was a regular visitor to Miss Doyle’s home. We are asking anyone who noticed anything suspicious to notify the gardaí immediately.’

  Then they moved on to another story about fuel shortages. Laurence was looking at Andrew, no doubt wondering why he was being so intense. I had to break the atmosphere. ‘I hope they catch whoever it was. That poor girl,’ I said.

  Neither Laurence nor Andrew said anything.

  ‘Who’d like a cup of tea?’

  Laurence shook his head, but Andrew was clutching the arms of his chair. I needed him to snap out of this trance.

  ‘Darling?’ I said a little sharply.

  ‘What? No,’ he barked. He was very pale. He noticed Laurence looking at him. He flinched a little, and then said, ‘So, who is Helen?’

  ‘She’s my … my girlfriend.’

  ‘Girlfriend!’ I whooped, delighted to have the chance to break the tension in the room. ‘Did you meet her at the cinema that night? When you went to see Herbie with your friends?’

  Because of what happened, I’d never really asked him about that night, but I should have been suspicious that he was going out with ‘friends’. He found deception difficult, like his father, and now the truth came spilling out.

  ‘I didn’t go to the cinema with friends. I went to Helen’s house. She asked me over. We ate pizza and watched The Dukes of Hazzard, and that’s all I’m telling you.’ He looked to Andrew for a response. ‘Dad?’

  ‘That’s great, Laurence, great.’

  There was clearly more to Laurence’s date than he was prepared to tell us. I was unsettled by this. I recalled the washing machine going that night. Laurence and I did not, as a rule, keep secrets from each other. Not until now. But I had to take control as Andrew left the room again without a word. I took Laurence’s hands in mine.

  ‘Laurence, do not interrupt me now. I don’t know what you got up to with this Helen, and I don’t want to know, but you lied to your father and me. You came home with a sprained ankle and gave us a cock and bull story about where you were going, and I don’t know what you were doing in the laundry room that night, I’m not even going to ask. Your father gave you two pounds to enjoy yourself at the cinema, so I’ll have that back, thank you. We are an honest family and we do not tell lies to each other. Is that clear?’

  Although none of us mentioned the dead girl again at home, her name, Annie Doyle, was impossible to avoid in the two days after that first news report. Her photograph was on the second page of Andrew’s Irish Times the next day, the same photo with the crooked-toothed deformed smile. She had last been seen that Friday afternoon, entering her home. There were unconfirmed sightings of her around the inner city that morning, and the guards appealed to anyone who might have come into contact with her that day.

  A photograph and an interview with her parents appeared in the newspapers the day after that. I studied the photograph. A detective stood behind the remaining three members of the family. You could tell straight away that they were poor. Annie’s father’s face was strained with pain, and his eyes were glassy with exhaustion. He looked rough, unshaven and stocky. His wife was unremarkable. There was another daughter with them in the photo, with her head down and her face hidden behind a mane of hair. Annie’s mother was quoted as saying that she was a good girl really, a very intelligent girl, she said, very bubbly and popular growing up. They appealed to the public to look out for her. They just wanted Annie to come home. Reading it, I couldn’t feel the mother’s anguish. I tried, but I couldn’t imagine it. I wondered what Annie’s father would say if he knew what his darling daughter had been up to. He might actually be relieved to discover that she was dead. And yet I was more sympathetic to him than his wife. The press report went on to detail what Annie had been wearing when she was last seen: a herringbone coat, purple boots and a silver-plated identity bracelet. Unremarkable, cheap stuff that half the young girls in the country might be wearing. They noted that her red hair was dyed black.

  I relaxed after that. A week later, more salacious reports about Annie Doyle hinted at an unfortunate history of institutionalization and shoplifting. They didn’t say it outright, but they implied that she was a prostitute. I was disgusted. Andrew swore he’d had no idea, but admitted she had agreed to the plan far more readily than he had expected.

  ‘I should have known, I should have guessed,’ he said.

  Still, fortunately for us, she was the kind of girl to put herself in the way of trouble and the last person the guards would link with a family like ours. They had nothing to go on except a vaguely similar car. They never came back with a search warrant. I had burned Daddy’s trilby in the fireplace the first chance I got. They would find nothing unless they literally went digging, and we gave them no reason to.

  The new flower bed in the back garden initially unsettled me. Naturally it brought up memories of my sister. But I find you can get used to anything eventually.

  Shortly before Christmas, Andrew and I went out to dinner together. I very rarely went on nights out, and they had been even less affordable since Paddy Carey, but I thought he needed a little treat. We had been through so much. Besides, I wanted to talk to him in a public place where he would not be able to overreact. I made sure the maître d’ found us a corner table where we could not be overheard.

  I waited until the main course before I broached the subject.

  ‘You love Laurence and me, don’t you, darling?’

  ‘What … yes … why are you asking me that? Of course I do.’

  ‘It’s just that … if anything should happen … if anything were to be discovered –’

  ‘Christ, Lydia.’ He dropped his cutlery.

  ‘I mean, it’s all fine, I’m sure we’re safe now. The fuss has died down. Nobody is looking for her any more, but just if …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I hope that you would think of Laurence.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘If they caught you, if, for some reason, they found evidence and could arrest you, and there was no way out of it, well, you could say you did it on your own.’

  He looked at me, open-mouthed, and I was glad I had chosen this quiet restaurant, because I knew that if we had been at home he would have shouted and thrown things around. I have always known how to manage my husband’s temper.

  ‘You see, darling, if Laurence lost both of us, in such awful circumstances, his life would be ruined. But if they got you, you could say that it was just a transaction gone wrong. A lovers’ tiff. You could tell them that she was trying to blackmail you, and that would be true! But I could say I didn’t know anything about it, and Laurence and I could go on afterwards and rebuild our lives. Isn’t that what you would want for us, darling?’

  His lower jaw quivered, and w
hen he eventually spoke he sounded, ironically, as if he were being strangled.

  ‘I was a fool to go along with your crazy plan. I did it because I loved you. I will do whatever you want. You get your own way, yet again. You always do. But don’t pretend you are doing this for Laurence.’

  Andrew never understood the strength of a mother’s love.

  5

  Laurence

  I hated the way they said ‘disappeared’, as if Annie Doyle had vanished into thin air when clearly something had happened to her, something bad. The idea of my father being involved in a woman’s ‘disappearance’ would have been absolutely preposterous before that day. He was a respectable guy and, reading between the lines of the Sunday World, she had been a junkie and a prostitute. He had never even had an affair – not that I was aware of, anyway. But he knew something about it. I was sure of that.

  First, he lied to the guard about having been home that night, and then he tried to tell me that he’d been in bed when I knew he was out, because his car wasn’t there when I got home. Mum went to bed early with one of her migraines and he must have sneaked out afterwards. That was suspicious enough, but when I read about the silver-plated identity bracelet in the newspaper, I was really alarmed. The report detailed things that Annie Doyle had been wearing when she disappeared.

  Two days before that, my mother had asked me to replace the hoover bag. She hated dirty work and it was always my father or I that did this chore. When I had removed the bag, something shiny was poking a tiny hole through it. I pulled it and a filthy, dust-covered string came out. When I blew off the dust, I could see a thin metallic chain attached to a narrow bar. The bar was inscribed with the name ‘Marnie’. The clasp was stained a deep red. There were no links at the other end of the bar – half of a bracelet, I guessed. I casually wondered who Marnie was, and put it in a kitchen drawer, assuming it belonged to my mother. I thought it might have been hoovered up by mistake, but I forgot to mention it to her.

  Now, having read the latest on Annie Doyle, I understood its significance and realized that Mum would never have worn such a bracelet. Mum wore only gold antique jewellery. A silver-plated bracelet would have been too modern and cheap for her. When I got Dad on his own in the kitchen, I showed him the bracelet that I’d found.

  ‘I found this in the hoover. It’s not Mum’s, is it?’

  ‘Give it to me.’ It was an order. ‘It’s just some rubbish.’

  He threw it into the bin and promptly left the room without any explanation. I fished it out of the potato peelings and the pieces of fat cut from the previous night’s meat. When I had rinsed it under the tap, I wrapped it in tissue and put it in my pocket. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I knew it was evidence of something. I dreaded to think what, but it seemed important that I should hang on to it.

  And then, a few days later, I was coming home from school when I noticed a squad car pull up outside our gate. I almost started to hyperventilate. Were they here to arrest Dad or was it just one of their routine visits? A heavyset guy got out just as I turned into the driveway. I recognized him from the television news. It was the man in charge of the missing person investigation. Another man sat in the back seat and a uniformed guard was the driver.

  ‘How’r’ye, son. I’m Detective Sergeant Declan O’Toole, and that there’ – he nodded towards the back seat – ‘is Detective James Mooney. Do you live in there?’ He pointed towards our house.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Detective Mooney got out of the car and stood behind O’Toole. ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘Laurence Fitzsimons.’

  ‘And is your father home?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He doesn’t normally get home until after six.’

  Detective Mooney nodded and walked back towards the car, but O’Toole told him to hold on. He had a sly smirk on his face. I didn’t like him.

  ‘So you’re the son of Judge Fitzsimons, are you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I wanted to run away up the driveway, but the guard put his hand on my shoulder to keep me there.

  ‘Well, aren’t you a fine big lad.’ He was trying to be my friend. I said nothing. ‘Tell me something, Laurence, do you remember the weekend of the 14th of November, two weeks ago now.’

  ‘Yeah, why?’

  ‘Were you home that weekend yourself?’

  I wondered if I should ask to have a lawyer present, but the detective was keeping it all very casual. He wasn’t writing anything down. But I was terrified.

  ‘I was in my girlfriend’s house that Friday night. You can check with her.’

  ‘Ah here, no need to be defensive, sonny. I’m not accusing you of anything at all, it’s just a routine thing I’m doing here, y’know?’ He was much more confident than Mooney, who I had heard questioning my dad. He was … jolly.

  ‘Why are you asking me about that weekend?’

  He ignored my question. ‘And tell me now, was it a late night like, that Friday? What time did you get home to your own bed? Or did you?’ He nudged and winked at me as if we were a comic double act.

  ‘I had a midnight curfew. But I was home just after eleven.’

  ‘A curfew, eh? And were your mam and dad waiting up for you to get a full report?’ He winked again.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re sure now? Both of them?’

  ‘Yes.’ I kept my voice as still as possible, though I could not control the flush in my cheeks. The lie came so easily, it surprised even me.

  ‘And did your dad go out again that weekend at all?’

  ‘No. We all stayed in.’

  ‘Don’t you have a great memory?’

  ‘I remember it because I sprained my ankle and Mum and Dad were home the whole time, fetching me stuff.’

  ‘Grand, that’s all I needed to know, sonny. I’m just crossing people off a list. It’s a dirty job, but sure, someone has to do it, ha?’ He winked again and went to get into his car.

  ‘Are you not going up to the house?’ I said, nodding towards Avalon.

  ‘No need, no need at all.’

  Detective Mooney, who had stood silently all this time, whispered urgently into O’Toole’s ear. O’Toole waved him away, annoyed, but said, ‘Oh, one more thing, does your dad ever wear a hat? A trilby-type hat?’ He pulled a photograph of a hat out of his pocket. ‘This shape,’ he said, pointing at the photo. I heaved a huge sigh of relief.

  ‘No. Never. He doesn’t have a hat.’ O’Toole looked at Mooney with smug satisfaction on his face.

  ‘Good, good, that’s it then, I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘But why are you asking about that weekend, and my dad and a hat?’

  He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Ongoing investigation, but you’ve nothing to worry about now, off you go!’ He tooted the horn and drove off.

  They were looking for a different man, a man who wore a hat. I needn’t have lied at all. Dad was guilty about something, though – maybe he had gone out that night for another reason. I was almost relieved to think that he might be having an affair, and the bracelet belonged to his fancy woman, Marnie. None of the reports had mentioned the name on the bracelet, and one would assume that it would be the woman’s own name, Annie. So Marnie must be Dad’s floozie. That was better than … whatever had happened to a missing prostitute. The knot in my stomach loosened.

  Mum was cutting fabric on the kitchen table when I came in.

  ‘Mum,’ I said jovially when I got in the front door, ‘Dad’s off the hook. They’re looking for a fella in a hat!’

  She didn’t look up. ‘What are you talking about, darling?’

  ‘There were two detectives outside just now, and one of them was asking me about that night, the night he questioned Dad about, but they’re looking for a guy in a hat.’

  She smiled sweetly. ‘Good heavens, a guard asking you questions. What did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him Dad and you were here when I got home from my night out and that Dad did
n’t even own a hat.’

  She laughed. ‘So ridiculous, questioning a schoolboy.’

  ‘I hope they catch him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The fella in the hat!’ I foraged in the fridge for some cheese and cut two slices of thick bread from the loaf.

  ‘Leave room for your dinner,’ said Mum. As if.

  I was relieved that I no longer had to think about this girl. After the newspapers had been thrown out, I had retrieved them from the bin and cut out the articles about the missing woman. Unusually, Dad had recently been buying all of the newspapers, including the ones he had claimed to despise. We were not a house that would ordinarily take the Sunday World. At first, there was just information about where she had last been seen, a description of what she may have been wearing, but the later reports suggested that she was leading a sordid life. I had been poring over them nightly, looking at her snaggle-toothed grin, her misshapen mouth, desperate to rule out my father’s involvement. I had raided the desk in his study, looking for evidence of an affair he was having, but really looking for some link between him and Annie Doyle. I don’t know what I expected to find – a photograph? A legal case file that named her? It was ridiculous and I knew it. Prostitutes did not give receipts or hand out business cards.

  I had had nightmares in which I was having sex with Annie in Helen’s distorted bedroom, and others in which I was stabbing her viciously with my father’s silver letter-opener and then I’d see my mother’s face, and I’d wake up, drenched in sweat and guilt-ridden. Now I was free of all that.

  Until two days later, when I noticed a gap on the shelf where my grandfather’s old trilby hat had been for as long as I could remember. I asked Mum where it had gone. ‘Oh, I think your father finally threw it out,’ she said absent-mindedly, and all the fear and anxiety swept back up into my heart. I nervously asked Dad if he had thrown out the hat.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ was his first question, before he claimed that he didn’t know what had happened to it, his voice quivering as he spoke.

  I knew. I knew for sure he was lying.

  I didn’t do anything with this knowledge. I was scared of what it meant. I had lied to the guard now, so I could go to jail too. What had he done with the woman? I know we were broke, but if he was going to kidnap someone, shouldn’t he have chosen someone rich? He wasn’t that desperate, surely. And where were the ransom demands? The IRA had kidnapped a man but everyone knew it was the IRA, and they kidnapped a rich guy, a foreign industrialist. My father was not a stupid man. That led me to the idea that maybe Annie Doyle had been in trouble with the IRA or some criminal gang, and Dad had given her the money to move away abroad with a new identity. Dad was helping a young woman in trouble. Wasn’t that more likely? But if that was the case, why were the police not involved? Maybe the guards were not being told because the case was so sensitive that it had to be entrusted to a judge. I tried to believe that version of events because, as unlikely as it seemed, the alternatives were too dreadful to contemplate.