04-The Final Silence

by Stuart Neville

  Flanagan feared for Ruth most of all. She had so many things to warn her daughter of, so many monsters lurking out there in the dark places. They kept her awake at night.

  The bedroom she shared with her husband was a landscape of greys and blacks as Flanagan burrowed in close to his back. She hated to close her eyes in the dark. A terror that had stayed with her since she was around Ruth’s age, maybe younger.

  She had gone into hospital for a small operation on her eyes – looking back, she wasn’t even sure what it was for – and had drifted to sleep with a needle in her arm and her mother’s soft words in her ears. When she emerged from the quicksand and tried to open her eyes, the world had remained blacker than any darkness she could remember.

  She knew with complete certainty they had taken her eyes.

  No one came when she screamed, not even when her voice cracked and gave in. She didn’t know how long passed before a nurse – she assumed it was a nurse – put a hand on her arm and told her everything was all right.

  ‘Where are my eyes?’ she asked.

  The nurse laughed, told her not to be silly, it was just the gauze pads taped over them that made her blind, and they’d have to stay on a while yet. It took almost a full day of sobbing and begging for Flanagan’s mother to convince her the nurse had told the truth.

  From all these years away, it seemed to Flanagan she’d come close to losing her mind in those hours. Now, for her, the dark would always have the taint of madness about it.

  Flanagan shepherded her thoughts back to the present.

  The book.

  Lennon talked about it, though he said he hadn’t seen the volume. But now Flanagan knew that was at least something he wasn’t lying about. Rea Carlisle had been fixated on this book, whether it was real or not. Had she been in some sort of delusional state when she was killed? Book or not, delusion or not, that had no bearing on Lennon being the last to see her alive. It did not change his belief that his fingerprints would be on the murder weapon, the kind of evidence that convictions rested on. He was the obvious suspect, and every minute of Flanagan’s experience as a police officer told her that the most obvious answer to any question was almost always the correct one.

  She thought of Ida Carlisle, lost in her grief. And Graham Carlisle, belligerent, as if his daughter’s killing was no more than a nuisance, that Flanagan’s investigation was somehow an imposition on him. She wondered if he was violent towards his wife. Ida had that quiet fear about her. It was clear he was mentally abusive, an idiot could spot that, but had he ever laid hands on the poor woman?

  God help her, Flanagan thought.

  She whispered a prayer of thanks for her husband’s goodness. Decent men were a rarity, of course, but more so in this part of the world. Flanagan’s father had not been one of them. He had been a drunkard. An abuser. A parasite who drained the life from Flanagan’s mother.

  Thank God for Alistair, who had not complained when Flanagan kept her own name, who was glad to look after the children when work called her away, who was proud of his wife’s achievements.

  She rested her lips against the back of his neck, felt the tickle of the soft hairs there, smelled the good shower gel the children bought him for his birthday.

  Jack Lennon was not a good man, and Flanagan needed to know him better. She had heard whispers about him as soon as she’d set up her temporary office at Ladas Drive station. DCI Hewitt had only reinforced what she’d already been told. His colleagues obviously didn’t trust him, with the exception of CI Uprichard. DS Calvin had ferried stories to her, of how Lennon had helped out a loyalist thug with some traffic offences, how he had got embroiled in a bizarre feud that cost the life of his child’s mother, how he had driven a Ukrainian prostitute – a prostitute suspected of murder – to the airport so she could escape the country on a false passport which he had lifted from a crime scene. That Lennon had brought down a killer of at least five women in the process was incidental.

  Men don’t attract trouble like that by sheer bad luck. Flanagan had learned this in her twenty years on the force. Back when she was in uniform, sweeping up the drunken louts from the city centre on Friday nights, she had observed the same bloodied faces week after week and known that trouble doesn’t go looking for anyone. So why did Jack Lennon lurch from one calamity to another? What kind of man was he?

  She didn’t have long to find out. In less than two weeks, she’d have surgery, and then be away from work for God knows how long. Her case would be passed to someone else, someone who might not care so much about justice for Rea Carlisle. She’d be damned if she’d let that happen.

  The surgery.

  As fatigue began to outweigh Flanagan’s fear of the dark, she remembered the malignant lump in her breast. For the third time that day, with a knuckle between her teeth so she wouldn’t disturb Alistair, she sobbed with fear.

  28

  HE TOURED THE city on foot, using the darkness as his cover. At night, he could go unseen by anyone that mattered. The only time he didn’t feel the eyes of others on him, real or imagined.

  How this place had changed. As a young man, it had seemed to him no more than a large town, its industries dead or dying, its citizens turning on each other among the ruins. People so full of hate they couldn’t tell their true enemy was the poverty that should have united them. Instead they retreated to the worlds of Them and Us, put barricades between, and let the blood flow.

  Now, though. Now it was a real city. Now Belfast glistened and glowed, even at this cold hour. The security barriers that had once closed off the city centre were long gone. A person could enter any of the shops without having their bags searched by a security guard.

  He came to the City Hall, a grand palace of a building, more than a century old, its green copper dome towering above. Built when the city flowed with money from its industries, an ostentatious symbol of a wealth that would soon evaporate. Floodlights made it seem an apparition, a ghost of stone that would fade by the morning, as fleeting as the money that had built it.

  Now the money had returned. Where men and women had once constructed ships or woven linen, their grandchildren now wrote computer programs or answered telephones in call centres.

  New ways. Everything changes. Nothing remains. All will burn, eventually. Even him.

  He should not have hurt Rea.

  All he’d wanted was the photograph. Why had he allowed his rage to decide, to take control? He remembered feeling the crowbar connect with her head. The shock of it through his wrist, up into his elbow. Sending crackles of electricity through his body. And then he couldn’t stop. Even as his right mind told him no, go no further, you’ll risk everything. Still he continued, the fury making him raise his hand and bring it down again.

  And he had gained nothing. That policeman had the photograph.

  Anger reared in him.

  No. Calm.

  He had felt his mind fraying since Raymond had died. His one true friend in the whole world. The one who could reach through all the madness in his life and keep him straight. Reminding him that he could keep control if he really wanted to. But he had lost control. The anger had won out and broken poor Rea who should still be drawing breath.

  But now he had restored his balance. Nothing could shake him. Not if he kept the anger in its place, deep inside, where it ought to be. Until he needed it.

  His breath misting on the night air, he walked west, then south, around the City Hall.

  A couple came the other way, staggering, both of them drunk. A young man without a jacket, belly hanging over his jeans. A young woman with too much make-up and not enough skirt. They laughed at something, clinging to each other, her heels click-clacking in a stuttering rhythm. Heading for the taxi rank across the road from the City Hall. The wide footpath left plenty of room for them to pass.

  The young man caught the watcher’s stare.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  He walked on. So calm, nothing could break his control.r />
  ‘Here, I’m talking to you,’ the young man called after him. ‘Don’t you walk away from me.’

  He kept walking, calm as still water.

  ‘Leave it,’ the young woman said. ‘Come on.’

  He left the young man’s coarse shouting behind him, walking through the dark, always in control.

  Control would save his life. The only thing that could, now.

  He thought of the book he and Raymond had shared, now hidden. The hours they had spent together, their hands sometimes touching as they reached to turn the pages. The secrets they exchanged. He remembered the confessions written there, beautiful things recorded for each other, even if to others they would seem shameful.

  Raymond and he did not recognise shame. Once these things were written down, they stayed on the paper, trapped there by ink and glue. Then Raymond and he could look at it and know the shame was not theirs.

  Even the worst things, the most secret things. He remembered every word, recited them as he walked.

  Sickness and a Child

  2ND FEBRUARY 1995

  I KNOW I am unwell.

  In my body, I am sound and fit. In my mind, I am not.

  Anyone can see it. I can see it on my own face when I catch my reflection in a window. That’s why I have no mirrors. I don’t want to see the sickness on me.

  It’s been getting worse. Every night is darker than the last. The hungers and thirsts that torment me become so much sharper. They are real sensations, a gnawing in my belly that no food can satisfy, sand in my throat that no water will wash away.

  One day the noise will grow so loud I will not be able to keep it quiet any longer. And what will happen then? When the sun inside me explodes, when I erupt in the supernova of my final release, who can survive?

  No one.

  I will take the world with me. Every last man, woman and child.

  Child.

  I took a child today.

  Here, in Belfast, where I have not taken a life in twenty years. So close to home. So nearly the end of me.

  The news has been all about the ceasefires for months now. First the republicans, then the loyalists. They say the killing has ended. No one will say the peace is for ever. Not the politicians or the journalists. But they say no more will die.

  People are so happy. I see them on the streets, walking around as if they can start living again. As if the men with the guns could ever have stopped them.

  I walked around Castle Court shopping centre, aimless, going from window to window, display to display. All the people chattering, the noise digging into my head until I wanted to scream at them all to shut up.

  My memory is hazy. I remember the pressure building behind my eyes, like steam in a reactor. It seemed inevitable that something would give. That I would break down there in front of everybody, pulling at my hair, screaming.

  I know that feeling, the teetering on the edge, the anything-can-happen bell that rings inside me. A warning I’ve learned to heed.

  As a younger man, I didn’t heed it. Like the time I encountered that man in the alley and went back to the ship with blood on my clothes. Or the time I beat the Welshman, Aaron Pell, to death in the engine room. He had been needling me all day. Calling me poofter, queer boy, sissy, nancy, every vile thing he could think of.

  Then we were alone and I took a wrench and split his head open. The feeling I had before I lifted the tool, the metal cold in my hand, that climbing force that needs to escape. I felt that today.

  I stood near an escalator, very still, breathing deep, willing the feeling to pass. For calm to return. I wanted my sanity back. Once I felt the pressure leak away, I started walking again. Towards the rear of the centre, to where it opens onto the ugly waste of bricks they built over the grave of Smithfield Market.

  I saw a young woman hunched over a pushchair, wiping snot off a toddler’s face. Another child, perhaps four years old, stood nearby. Crying, his face red. Shouting, I want it, I want it, Mummy, I want it. Over and over.

  There was no conscious thought behind the act. None whatsoever. It just happened, natural as breathing.

  On my way past, I took the boy’s hand in mine.

  ‘I’ll get it for you,’ I said.

  He looked up at me as we walked. He did not call out for his mother, just came along with me.

  ‘What is it you want?’ I asked.

  ‘Thomas,’ he said.

  ‘What’s Thomas?’ I asked.

  ‘Thomas Tank,’ he said.

  I knew what he meant. A train from children’s books and television, with big rolling eyes and a constant smile.

  ‘Let’s go and get it,’ I said.

  He looked back over his shoulder.

  I kept walking, my pace quickening so he had to skip to keep up. At any moment, I would hear the mother call his name. And what then?

  The rear exit of the shopping centre was only a few feet ahead. Thirty seconds, and the boy and I would be away, gone, just like that.

  And what then?

  Terror cracked through my delusion.

  What was I doing? I would not get away. I would be seen. They would catch me.

  And what then?

  Even so, I kept walking, the boy trailing from my hand.

  Maybe I wanted to be caught. Maybe, after all this time, I wanted it to end.

  I stopped at the door, my hand on the glass. My heart rattled in my chest like a stone in a jar.

  Madness.

  I let go of the boy’s hand, left him there. As the door swung closed behind me, I heard the mother’s voice, crying for her child, first in terror, then in relief. I walked and walked and didn’t look back once.

  It was on the news tonight.

  Attempted abduction of a child in a busy city centre shopping mall. They had CCTV footage of me leading the boy away, looking down and talking to him. Then abandoning him there at the door, and his mother running to him.

  I will not leave my home for some days. The image was not clear, but it was good enough. No one will see my face for at least a week. I don’t know if I will survive that time alone with myself, just my sickness and me trapped between these walls. But I have to try.

  If I do survive, talk to me. Tell me not to let my mind run free like this. Help me. Make me take control, like you take control.

  Promise you will keep me right.

  29

  LENNON DROVE PAST the triangular block of apartment buildings three times, moving through the light morning traffic, looking for police cars. On the last pass, he slowed at the entrance to the car park. No sign of anything other than residents’ vehicles. He drove to the roundabout at the end of the road and circled back before pulling in.

  He hadn’t expected to see any cops, but was nonetheless relieved to be proven right. If they hadn’t matched the fingerprints yet, they would soon, and Flanagan would come looking for him. All he wanted was to see Ellen, pick up a few things, and then get out of the way.

  Lennon parked the car in his usual space and shut off the engine. Now that all was still and quiet, the hangover’s oily insistence crept in on him. He had woken at seven and hobbled to the hotel’s bathroom to throw up.

  Once he’d recovered and drunk three glassfuls of water, he remembered speaking with Flanagan the night before. What had he said? He had only the most vague recollection of being woken from a drunken sleep and her dismissing him within a minute. Had he been sober, he might not have called. Flanagan had no reason to believe him, and he had no proof of speaking to anyone.

  Maybe he’d simply needed to talk to someone, anyone, even a woman who thought he was a murderer. And perhaps that was the same reason Rea’s killer had called him.

  Not that it mattered now. He got out of the car, locked it, and used his key to get into the building and ride the lift to Susan’s floor.

  When he entered the flat, she was sitting at the table in her kitchenette, staring at him, a forkful of scrambled egg suspended halfway between her mouth and her pla
te. Lucy, not dressed for school, barely looked up from her Cheerios.

  He remembered it was Saturday. The last few days had smeared into one. No school today for Lucy or his daughter.

  He asked, ‘Where’s Ellen?’

  Susan’s fork clanked on the plate. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Lennon took one step further into the apartment. ‘I wanted to see Ellen.’

  ‘Get out,’ Susan said. ‘Get out right now or I’ll call the police.’

  ‘What for? They’ve got nothing to arrest me with.’ Fear grabbed at Lennon’s heart. ‘Where’s Ellen?’

  ‘She’s not here. Get out.’

  He took another step. Susan shot to her feet.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Susan put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. ‘Lucy, go to the bathroom. Lock the door and don’t open it till I come for you.’

  Lucy obeyed without a word. Without looking at Lennon.

  Lennon felt the fear break into anger. He was suddenly aware of his hands, the weight of them, the damage they could do. He willed his face to remain blank, his voice toneless.

  ‘Please tell me where Ellen is,’ he said.

  Susan said nothing until she heard the bathroom door close and the lock snap into place.

  ‘Her aunt Bernie came and got her late last night.’

  Adrenalin hit him like an electric shock, sending tremors through his limbs and down to his fingertips, chasing the hangover from his system. ‘Why did you let Bernie take her? Why did you do that?’

  ‘What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know where you’d gone or when you’d come back for her. So I called Bernie. So Ellen would be with the only real family she’s got.’

  Lennon gripped the edge of the table as rage threatened to lift him off his feet. Anger so hot it seemed to swell inside his skull, ready to split him open. Susan saw it on him and backed away. He sat down, clamped his teeth onto the back of his hand and felt the pain cut through it all.