The Final Silence

by Stuart Neville

  A box rattled and clanged with a meagre selection of pots and pans, cutlery, and another held a toaster and a kettle. Yet another held a yellowed dinner set, plates of different sizes, cups, a teapot, all covered in a floral pattern.

  ‘I bought that,’ Ida had said when Rea found the set in a cupboard. ‘A wedding present for him and Carol.’

  An old cathode ray television in the back living room looked like it hadn’t worked in years, and a music centre complete with a turntable. The tone arm didn’t have a stylus. Rea looked, but couldn’t find a pair of speakers to go with it.

  It was as if these things, along with the scattering of clocks and ornaments, were placeholders. Items set around Raymond Drew’s house to give it the appearance of a home. Like a film set, Rea thought. Props. She imagined knocking on the walls and finding they were facades made of plywood.

  Most important of all, they had to search for letters, bank statements, bills, any official looking paperwork. Rea’s father had called his solicitor, David Rainey, before he’d even thought to comfort his wife. Rainey had told Graham to find any and all documentation that might help determine the size of the deceased’s estate. They’d need everything they could get their hands on to take to court and apply for a grant of letters of administration, the authority to deal with Raymond’s affairs. Once that was done, Ida would be her brother’s sole heir.

  ‘I think that’s the last of it,’ Ida said.

  Rea counted them. Eight bags and boxes in total.

  Ida read her mind. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’ She climbed the stairs and sat next to Rea. Her voice resonated between the hard surfaces of the stairwell and the hall. ‘What kind of life did he have? Here all alone. He had nothing. No one. There’s not even a photograph around the place. Him or Carol. You’d think he’d have a picture of his wife, wouldn’t you? But there’s nothing. Just . . . this.’

  She waved a hand at the packed-up detritus below. Rea put an arm around her mother’s shoulders. Ida fetched a balled-up tissue from her sleeve, touched it to her nose as she sniffed.

  Ida Carlisle was a small woman, wider than she’d like at the hips, her hair lacquered in place once a week by a fey man at a city-centre salon, grey roots showing through the dyed brown, the merest hint of make-up on her face. Enough to make herself presentable, never enough to be showy.

  ‘There’s always the back bedroom,’ Rea said. ‘There could be an Aladdin’s cave in there, for all we know.’

  The door to the bedroom at the rear of the house was different from the others. The rest were panelled wood, probably hung there when the house was built a century ago. But the back bedroom door was a solid featureless white with a new handle and a lock.

  The day before the funeral, a locksmith had opened the front door of the house, fitted a new tumbler and left them with a set of keys. They hadn’t found the locked door upstairs until he’d gone. Rea’s father had made a half-hearted attempt at putting his shoulder to it, but the door wouldn’t budge. Rea had tried kicking it below the handle, like she’d seen in a police documentary, but she’d only succeeded in bruising the ball of her foot and straining her calf.

  ‘There’ll be nothing in there but old dust and air,’ Ida said. A tear escaped her eye. She caught it with the tissue before it could drip from her cheek.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Rea said, stroking her mother’s back.

  Neither Ida nor Graham Carlisle were comfortable with shows of affection. Hugs. Kisses. Cuddles. Such displays were for infants and television dramas. Rea couldn’t remember ever being told by either of her parents that they loved her. She had no doubt that they did, but to tell her so would run against their Presbyterian grain.

  At the age of eighteen, when Rea left home for university, she made a decision: regardless of whether they returned the gesture, she would tell them she loved them. And she would hug them, and she would kiss them. If that made them cringe, then tough luck. She would not live her life with her emotions tied up and hidden inside her.

  ‘No point in worrying about it now,’ Ida said. ‘I talked to your father last night. About this place.’

  ‘Oh?’ Rea asked.

  ‘When we’ve got it all sorted, all the legal nonsense, we think you should have it.’

  The house had belonged to Raymond’s wife, and she’d inherited it from her parents. When she died, Raymond had stayed on. Now, once the estate was settled, it was Ida’s to do with as she pleased.

  ‘But Mum, I can’t . . . it’s too much to . . .’

  ‘It’d get you out of that shared place. You’d have a home of your own. No mortgage to tie you down. A house is too hard to buy these days, I mean for a girl on her own, even with the prices falling the way they have.’

  Rea shook her head. ‘But this place has got to be worth a hundred grand, maybe a hundred and twenty. You and Dad could have that for your retirement.’

  ‘Your father retire?’ Ida smiled. ‘He’ll not retire until he drops. Besides, he’s got enough money put away to keep the both of us.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ida said. ‘It’s too big a thing. I can’t get my head around it.’

  ‘Well, think about it. You’ll see it makes sense. Dear knows, there’s precious little left of your uncle here. Hardly anything to show for him being here at all. Whatever’s in that back room, you can give it to charity, or dump it, or . . .’

  She screwed her eyes shut. Her shoulders jerked.

  Rea tightened her hold on her mother, brought Ida’s head to her shoulder. The tears came, Rea felt the wetness through her T-shirt, and Ida seemed to melt against her. Only for a few seconds. Then it passed, and Ida came back to herself, sat upright, stiff and proper like before. Only a redness to her eyes offered any proof of what had happened. They would not mention it again, Rea was sure.

  She went to speak, but Ida’s mobile phone pinged.

  ‘Och, fiddle,’ she muttered, reading a text message.

  ‘What?’ Rea asked.

  ‘Your father. He’s not coming. He got held up at a committee meeting.’

  ‘All right,’ Rea said. ‘I’ll take the stuff to the dump. It’ll take a few runs, but no matter. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?’

  ‘Sleep?’ Ida snorted. ‘I haven’t slept for a week.’

  ‘Well, go and try. I can manage from here.’

  Ida smiled and stroked Rea’s hand. ‘You’re a good girl.’

  The closest she’d come to affection in years. Rea leaned in and planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek.

  ‘Get off!’ Ida swatted her away in mock outrage.

  She stood and descended the stairs. At the front door, Ida turned and regarded her dead brother’s life bagged up and ready to be disposed of. She shook her head once, offered Rea a regretful smile, and left.

  Rea stayed on the stairs for a time, watching the ripples of sunlight through the door’s stained glass. It wasn’t a bad house, and it was a nice street. A small tingle of excitement in her belly.

  A house of her own.

  For the last couple of years she’d shared a place with two other women in the Four Winds area, a sprawling suburb to the south-east of the city. The two housemates were younger than Rea, one of them by more than a decade, fresh out of university and working for a legal practice. They made Rea feel older than her thirty-four years. She caught herself wanting to mother them, to scold them for staying out too late, or for the clothes they wore. And she felt they regarded her as a desperate old spinster aunt, constantly trying to set her up with their work colleagues.

  Once, she had reluctantly agreed to go on a blind date with one of them. He’d been a pleasant enough gentleman, not bad looking, tidy, polite. When he showed her a photograph of his youngest grandchild, Rea felt like screaming.

  Three months had passed since Rea had lost her job. She’d been at the consultancy firm in the city centre for almost six years, specialising in recruitment processes, devising interview strategies and aptitude tests. A good salary, too, e
nough for her to save a decent amount towards a deposit on a house. Since she’d been laid off, the rent on the shared place was eating into her savings, and she had been facing the horrifying prospect of having to move back in with her parents.

  Rea suppressed a shudder. Now a lifeline, a chance to have a house without the burden of a mortgage. But could she take a dead man’s home? And it needed work. A new kitchen, new central heating, and probably a list of things hidden beneath the surface. Rea knew from her friends’ tales of buying houses that the real costs were the hundred secrets the previous owner kept from you. She doubted her savings would cover it.

  But still, a house of her own.

  She thought of the room upstairs. Her mother was probably right, nothing in there but dust and air. But if she was going to take this place as her own she wanted to see every room, locked or not.

  Rea Carlisle decided that before the day was done, she would have the door to the back bedroom opened.

  3

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR JACK Lennon coughed and wiped his nose with an already damp tissue. The tail end of another cold, his third in as many months. The surgeon had warned Lennon he’d be prone to infections now that he was without a spleen. She’d been right.

  His buttocks ached from the thin cushion on the plastic chair, the year-old injuries to his shoulder and side nagging at him. The boardroom’s storage heater wheezed and clanked. The yellowed vertical blinds over the windows swayed in the air currents.

  The lawyer the Police Federation had retained on his behalf sat across the table, running the tip of a pen down the page, his lips moving as he read. Fluorescent light reflected in bright spots on his scalp. Adrian Orr, his name was, and Lennon had seen far too much of him over the last year.

  Orr had made a decent fist of things, but still Lennon found the heat of anger building every time he saw him. He knew he was lucky to have held onto his job this long, that if not for Orr he would have been cut adrift from the force months ago, but still.

  For the first few meetings, Lennon had made an effort, tidied himself up, put on a suit. Now he didn’t bother. Jeans and a shirt were fine for these dull encounters. He hadn’t visited a barber for almost nine months, his dirty-fair hair hanging below his collar and over his eyes. Grey strands had worked their way in. Susan had given up telling him to get it cut. Besides, his daughter Ellen said she liked it.

  ‘Aren’t we done yet?’ Lennon asked.

  ‘Mm?’ Orr looked up from the page.

  ‘Are we nearly finished?’

  ‘Give me a couple more minutes. Just going over these last few notes from the Ombudsman.’

  A heavy ache climbed from the back of Lennon’s neck into his skull. The back pain would follow soon. He rolled his dry tongue around his mouth, thought of the bottle of water on the passenger seat of his car, and the strip of painkillers in the glovebox. He exhaled, an ostentatious sigh he regretted even before his chest had emptied.

  Orr looked up again.

  ‘Please, Jack, settle yourself and let me read. The sooner I get through this the sooner you can go home.’

  The thought of apologising flitted through Lennon’s mind, but the ugly balloon of pride that remained at his core wouldn’t allow it. He shifted in the chair, buttock-to-buttock, then suppressed a grimace at the pain.

  Orr set his pen down, folded his hands atop the page, and readied himself to speak as if he were delivering a speech to the Assembly up in Stormont.

  ‘You’re not going to get a medical pension, I can tell you that now.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Lennon said.

  Orr bristled. ‘I told you before, Jack, I don’t like that kind of language. There’s no call for it.’

  ‘Yes there bloody is,’ Lennon said.

  ‘You shot and killed a fellow officer—’

  ‘Who was shooting at me. He’d have killed me and the girl if I hadn’t—’

  ‘You shot a cop.’ Orr’s cheeks reddened when he realised his voice had risen to a near shout. He took a breath before continuing. ‘You helped a murder suspect flee the country. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances were. Gandhi and Mother Teresa couldn’t talk them into giving you a pension now.’

  For the last year and three months, the Ombudsman, the Policing Board and Lennon’s own superiors had been trying to find some way to sweep away the mess he’d made. Three times he’d been up in front of the misconduct panel at the PSNI headquarters on Knock Road, going over the events again and again for the Assistant Chief Constable. Orr and the Police Federation had done their best to fight his corner, but their best had achieved little.

  The incident had been over a Ukrainian girl called Galya Petrova. She’d been trafficked in to work in a brothel west of the city, but she’d escaped, killing one of her captors in the process. She wouldn’t have lived another day if Lennon hadn’t got her to the airport that cold morning. She almost didn’t make it. He had taken three bullets for her while she fled.

  A young sergeant named Connolly had pulled the trigger after ten thousand pounds had been transferred into his bank account. Lennon had left his colleague’s wife a widow and his twin babies fatherless. He tried not to think about them, reminding himself it was self-defence, but they crept into his consciousness anyway. Every single day.

  At first, Lennon had argued that the case also revealed and brought about the capture of a killer named Edwin Payntor. Surely that counted for something? But Payntor had committed suicide in custody, and the bodies buried in his cellar could never be formally linked to him.

  The cache of dirty secrets Lennon kept was the only thing that had saved him from being slung out of the force a year ago. He could avoid formal charges if he accepted demotion and the resulting pay cut, they’d said, and serve out the remainder of his thirty-year contract behind a desk. That way, he could be seen to have been punished for his transgressions, keeping the republican politicians on the Policing Board at bay, but not so severely that it would have the unionists shaking their fists.

  But Lennon couldn’t afford a drop in his wage. Not now. And he certainly didn’t want to spend the best part of the next decade doing paperwork. He’d offered them a choice: give him a medical pension and all the attendant benefits, or fight the case through whatever channels were available. And he’d promised them he’d spill every filthy thing he knew.

  Lennon pulled open the driver’s door of the eight-year-old Seat Ibiza, slumped down into the seat, and reached for the glovebox. The headache had swollen inside his skull. It pressed behind his eyes, pulsing with his heartbeat, a sickly rhythm he couldn’t shake. Not without the pills.

  It would be his third dose today, one more than he should have had by this time, but the session with Orr had taken it out of him. No harm in going over his self-imposed limit. Just this once.

  As his hand closed on the small box, a voice said, ‘What happened to the Audi?’

  He turned to the still-open door.

  Detective Chief Inspector Dan Hewitt, hands in his pockets, his well-pressed suit jacket buttoned. To anyone else in the police station’s car park, it would appear he had stopped for a friendly chat with an old colleague. Both Lennon and Hewitt knew different.

  ‘I got rid of it,’ Lennon said, closing the glovebox.

  He could have said it was because he couldn’t afford the repairs after it was rammed by an SUV while he tried to get Galya Petrova to safety, that he’d been forced to sell, pay off the remaining balance on the finance, and buy an ageing hatchback instead. But Hewitt already knew all of that. Lennon wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing it said out loud.

  ‘Audis are for posers, anyway,’ Hewitt said. ‘How’ve you been? You’re still limping a bit.’

  ‘I don’t limp,’ Lennon said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my legs.’

  The bullet that had passed through his flank, above his hip, and the other wound to his shoulder had left him stiff on that side, taking his balance. His gait was visibly off kilter. But it was not a
limp.

  ‘Course not,’ Hewitt said.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just to say hello.’

  ‘Then say it and fuck off.’

  Hewitt laughed. ‘Friendly as ever. You used to be good crack at Garnerville. I don’t really know you any more, do I?’

  ‘I could say the same about you.’

  Hewitt leaned against the car. ‘You could say a lot of things about me, I suppose.’

  Lennon watched the other man’s eyes. ‘If I took the notion, yes, I could.’

  ‘If you took the notion. But you won’t.’ Hewitt leaned closer. ‘Will you, Jack?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘I know you’ve been snooping around,’ Hewitt said. ‘I know you’ve been digging out old records, making copies. You can’t get up to that sort of thing without someone noticing. What are you planning on doing with them?’

  ‘Let’s hope you never have to find out.’

  ‘I can make things go easier for you,’ Hewitt said.

  Lennon went to pull the door closed, but Hewitt blocked it.

  ‘Or I can make things harder for you. Your choice, Jack.’

  Lennon looked up at him, asked, ‘Can you get me out of here with a medical pension?’

  ‘No,’ Hewitt said, stepping back.

  ‘Then you’re no bloody use to me.’

  Lennon closed the door and put the key in the ignition.

  4

  THE DOOR FITTED its frame so tight that when Rea ran her fingertips along the edge she could barely press a nail into the gap. She pushed the door with her palm. No give at all.

  Even though she knew it was pointless, she tried the handle. It was a lever type, rather than the knobs on every other door in the house, a keyhole in its plate. Rea knelt down and peered through. Nothing but black.