The Final Silence

by Stuart Neville

  ‘The truth,’ I said, hating him.

  ‘I’ll be nineteen in a couple of weeks,’ he said. ‘But I can pass for younger.’

  I said nothing more until we reached the gate at the far end of the park. It stood open, even approaching midnight. I eased the van through and along the path that wound between the sports fields and open meadows. Other cars, their windows steamed, were parked along the way, weaker men having their itches scratched.

  I never meant to do the boy any harm.

  As much as he made me sick. Even though he waited on a corner, selling himself like a calf for slaughter, and despite all the wretched things he made me feel inside, I did not mean to hurt him. Not really.

  When I found a dark, quiet place, I intended only to do what I needed with him, then take him back to where I’d picked him up. Safe and sound. More or less.

  I climbed out of the van, went to the passenger side, opened the door, and let him out. He waited while I opened the sliding door at the side, saw the mattress and blankets I’d laid on the plywood floor.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘It’s the Ritz.’

  He followed me inside, and I closed the door behind us. At one time, encounters like this terrified me. The closeness, the intimacy, the shame of it. Now I know the shame is all his. He is the one who sells himself so he can afford to blot out his mind with poison. He is the one whose sordid desires brought him here. I am not to blame.

  I knelt there, waiting for him to lie down, passive like a corpse, and let me get on with it. Instead, he knelt too, facing me. I knew something was wrong. He hadn’t detached himself from the now, he was too much here in the present, his eyes watching and seeing.

  ‘So, what do you like?’ he asked.

  ‘Just lie down,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you lie down? Let me show you what I can do.’

  I didn’t answer, even though I wanted to strike him for such obscenity. To offer to do things to me. Like my uncle did. He was no better. I stayed still and watchful.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he said, nodding down towards the mattress.

  I shook my head, only a small movement, but enough to change the expression on his face from weak obedience to fiery hate.

  He tried too hard to be fast, going for his coat pocket, fumbling. I knew what he was reaching for long before he had it out, slashing at the air between us.

  ‘Give me your fucking money,’ he hissed.

  The knife looked like it had come from someone’s kitchen, small and sharp, the kind of knife you’d use for peeling a potato or cutting up an apple.

  ‘Put it away and get out,’ I said.

  He bared his teeth. ‘I said, give me your money, now.’

  ‘I’ll give you one more chance,’ I said. ‘Go. Now. I won’t give you another.’

  He lurched forward on his knees, swiping the blade inches from my face. ‘I’ll fucking cut your face off, I—’

  One hand took his wrist, the other his neck. I slammed his head against the van’s inner wall, making a dull clang. He slumped, quiet, his eyelids flickering.

  Five minutes later, he was tied up with strips of bed sheet, being driven out of the city towards the countryside where the stars are brightest in the sky.

  Weeks later, after I’d left for better work in the south, I heard a news report on the radio saying a body had been found by the River Aire, close to the M1 motorway, hidden in the woods. As far as I know, they never identified him. I sometimes wonder what they did with his corpse. Did it lie in a mortuary somewhere, frozen, waiting to be claimed? How long would they keep it?

  I shouldn’t have done it. The risk was too great. I hadn’t taxed the van when I took him. It didn’t have an MOT. What if the police had stopped me?

  I am careless. I am rash. I am wicked.

  If I let the wicked take over once too often, nothing and no one will save me.

  Not even you.

  9

  ‘HOW MANY’S THAT today?’ Susan asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Lennon said.

  He put his palm to his mouth and tilted his head back. The pills settled on his tongue. He took a mouthful of water, swallowed, set the glass on the drainer. A cough rattled in his lungs, reminding him that the cold still lingered.

  Susan sat at the table, still wearing her work suit. He’d promised to start preparing dinner for the girls before she got home. All he’d managed so far was to rummage through the freezer, looking for something he could blast in the oven or the microwave. Susan wouldn’t approve. She only kept that processed stuff for emergencies, as she’d reminded him many times before.

  Ellen and Lucy were watching television in the living area, giggling at some American cartoon on one of the satellite channels.

  ‘Fish fingers?’ he asked Susan. ‘There’s beans and oven chips.’

  Susan pressed her fingertips to her forehead. ‘There’s plenty of veg there. And chicken thighs. You could roast them.’

  ‘How long for?’

  She placed her hands flat on the table and closed her eyes, made a begrudging decision, and opened them again.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said, standing.

  ‘No, I can—’

  ‘I said, I’ll do it.’

  Susan pushed past him to the fridge. Lennon stood with his hands by his sides for a few moments, wondering how to speak without making her angry.

  Eighteen months, two years ago, she had seemed quietly beautiful to him. Too good for a wastrel like Jack Lennon, so he had resisted her attention up until then. Now he could only see the resentment on her face, masking what had drawn him to her in the first place. He believed all along that he didn’t deserve a woman like Susan, someone as kind and decent. But since she’d taken him in, more out of pity than want, she seemed to have realised it too.

  As she cut open a pack of chicken thighs, Susan asked, ‘So what did you do today?’

  Lennon took the seat she had just left. ‘I told you, I had that meeting with the Police Federation rep this afternoon. I picked Ellen up from her dance class on the way back.’

  ‘She told me you were late,’ Susan said.

  ‘Ten minutes. I had the meeting, I couldn’t move it.’

  ‘The meeting took, what, an hour?’ She set the knife down on the worktop, kept her gaze away from him. ‘Another ten minutes to bring Ellen home. You were barely out of bed when I left here this morning. What did you do with the rest of the day?’

  Lennon ran his fingertips across his chin. He was surprised for a moment to find it smooth to the touch. Then he remembered he had shaved that morning. The first time in nearly a fortnight.

  The girls fell silent, stopped watching their television show, studied their hands instead.

  ‘Well, there wasn’t much I could do.’

  Susan turned to face him. ‘Did you do the laundry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve been asking you for weeks to sort out what stuff you can give to the charity shop. Did you do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you chase up that appointment with the psychologist?’

  ‘No.’

  Her eyes glistened with moisture, her cheeks reddening. ‘So you sat around here most of the day and did sweet fuck all?’

  Without a word, Ellen and Lucy slipped away, heading for the bedroom they shared.

  Lennon had a ridiculous urge to laugh. It turned to a cough as he choked it back. ‘Well, I—’

  She slapped the worktop with her palm. ‘While I went out to work, you pissed about all day long.’

  Lennon spoke louder than he’d intended. ‘I’m not going to—’

  ‘I am not your mother, Jack. You’re not a child. You’re a grown man, and I wish you’d start acting like one.’

  He walked towards the living area. ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’

  ‘And how many of those pills did you take?’

  He grabbed the remote control from the coffee table. ‘I told you, I don�
�t remember.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be taking any at all. You don’t even have a prescription for them. Christ knows where you—’

  ‘I need them for the pain.’

  ‘Bollocks.’ She spat the word at him. ‘You use them for a crutch. Just like you use me for a crutch.’

  He gave no answer as he sat down and flipped through the channels. They did not speak as Susan fetched the girls from their room and served them dinner at the table. Lennon sat and listened to the clank of cutlery on plates. Neither Lucy nor Susan said goodnight to him as they went to bed. Only Ellen embraced him before she left him alone, and he was glad of her touch.

  10

  REA SAT ON the stairs, in the same spot where she had said goodbye to her mother that afternoon. When Ida let herself in, it must have looked as if her daughter hadn’t moved in all that time.

  ‘Right, what’s wrong?’ she asked as she closed the door behind her. She looked like she’d dressed in a hurry. A breeze made the door sway inward again. Ida tutted and shoved harder. This time, it latched.

  ‘You said you didn’t really know your brother,’ Rea said.

  Ida frowned. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, what did you know about him?’

  ‘What I told you. More or less.’

  ‘How did his wife die?’

  Ida came to the bottom of the stairs and leaned on the banister. ‘It was awful sad. Turned out she had a wee bit of a drinking problem. She’d had a bellyful of sherry the night she died. She fell down these stairs and cracked her head open.’

  Ida looked down at her feet as if realising she stood on the very tiles that had crushed Carol Drew’s skull.

  Rea asked, ‘Was there ever a question?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how she died. That there might’ve been more to it.’

  ‘What, you mean, something suspicious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ida shook her head. ‘No, no, nothing like that, not at all. Why? What’s going on?’

  Rea didn’t answer. Instead, she asked, ‘What about when you were kids? What was he like then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ida said, lowering herself to sit two steps below Rea. ‘I didn’t really see that much of him. He was only my half-brother, remember. He spent some of the time with an aunt of his, his own father’s sister. She was a hard auld bissum, didn’t have a good word for anybody. She never forgave my mother for marrying again so quick after Raymond’s father died. Raymond lived with us on and off, but him and my father never saw eye to eye. And then there was that bit of trouble with the police.’

  Rea leaned forward. ‘The police?’

  Ida looked down at her hands, knotted them together, like she’d set free some terrible secret. ‘Well . . . there were a few times, actually.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The first couple of times, it was silly stuff. Lifting things out of shops. Sweets, cigarettes, anything he could fit in his pocket. Then there was that tramp he gave a beating to. He swore to our mother this tramp had attacked him. He might’ve gone to prison that time, only the case fell through when the tramp wouldn’t talk to the police, and Raymond was only a teenager, so they couldn’t make it stand.

  ‘My father put him out then, told him he could go back to his aunt’s and never darken our door again. Except she wouldn’t have him either and he wound up living on the streets. After no one had heard from him for a few weeks, my mother made my father take her out in the car looking for him. They found him out by the gasworks living in cardboard boxes.’

  ‘So they took him back?’ Rea asked.

  ‘Well, Mummy didn’t give Daddy much choice in the matter. Either Daddy let Raymond come back or she’d go, and take me with her. So he came back, and he was good for a while. That was the closest we ever got to being a family. But then the burglaries started. A square mile around our house, there was one or two break-ins a week. Hardly anything taken, but the drawers would be gone through, all the private things would be pulled out and thrown around the place. Sometimes, whoever broke in would do their business in the beds.’

  Rea almost laughed, but choked it back. ‘What, you mean shit in them?’

  Ida gave her a hard stare. ‘Language. You’re not too big for a clip round the ear. But yes, that. And other things.’

  Rea didn’t want to think what the “other things” might be.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ida continued, ‘this went on for weeks, maybe a dozen houses were broken into. Then some big fella who worked at the shipyard caught your uncle Raymond climbing over his back wall. He gave Raymond an awful doing. Put him in the hospital. Then, of course, Raymond was off to borstal. It broke Mummy’s heart, and Daddy was finished with him. He was never back in our house again. He joined the merchant navy the week after he turned sixteen.’

  They sat quiet and still for a while, Ida worrying at the tissue she’d pulled from her sleeve, Rea searching for a way to tell her mother the awful thing she had discovered. Eventually, there was nothing for it but to take a breath and say it out loud.

  ‘I got into the back bedroom.’

  Ida looked up from her tissue. ‘Oh? How?’

  ‘I broke in,’ Rea said. ‘I took a crowbar from the garage and forced the door.’

  ‘Och, Rea, who’s going to fix that? Why didn’t you wait and get the locksmith out again?’

  Rea dropped her gaze. ‘I found something in there.’

  ‘What? For goodness’ sake, will you just tell me what you called me back here for?’

  ‘I did a search on my phone for her name,’ Rea said. ‘Gwen Headley. She went missing in Manchester in 1992. All they ever found of her was some clothing in an alley behind the house where she shared a flat with another girl. According to the old news reports I dug up, it rained very heavily the night she disappeared, so the police never found anything useful. Just this one scrap of clothing, it didn’t say what it was. A van was seen in the area. They eventually found out its number plates were stolen off a van of the same make and colour, and a plumber’s sign was taken off another van.

  ‘This girl, Gwen, she was from Wales. She had a music degree, played clarinet. She’d stayed on in Manchester after university and got a job in a post office until she could get her music career going full time. Her parents never found out what happened to her. But I know.’

  Ida reached up, put a hand on her daughter’s knee. ‘Rea, love, I don’t understand. What’s this girl got to do with us?’

  ‘It’s all up there, in a book, like a wedding album. Like a scrapbook. He wrote it all down, kept pictures, press cuttings, there’s even a lock of hair and a fingernail.’

  Ida stared at her, shaking her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That girl, Gwen Headley,’ Rea said. ‘Uncle Raymond killed her.’

  Ida closed the book and sat back in the chair.

  ‘I can’t read any more,’ she said. ‘Is it all like that?’

  ‘I couldn’t read much more of it,’ Rea said. ‘Not in detail. A boy in Leeds, a homeless man in Dublin, a prostitute in Glasgow. And on and on. Some of them have names, some of them don’t. I counted eight altogether. Some of it’s just ranting at nothing. There are pages that make no sense at all. It reads like he was kind of coming and going. Out of his mind on one page, completely lucid the next. It’s as if he’s talking to himself sometimes. But all those people . . .’

  Ida stared at some distant point, perhaps a memory of her brother, the stranger that shared her mother.

  Rea leaned against the door frame. ‘How do you want to handle it?’

  Ida looked up at her with a lost expression on her face. ‘What do you mean, handle it?’

  ‘I mean, when we call the police. I suppose Dad will want to be careful it doesn’t affect his standing in the party, and—’

  ‘We can’t call the police,’ Ida said, shaking her head.

  ‘What are you talking about? We have to call them.’

  ‘No,’ Ida s
aid. ‘Not without talking to your father. It could ruin him. He’d never hang on to his seat in Stormont, let alone get the Westminster candidacy. They’d drop him like a stone.’

  ‘Why?’ Rea took a step into the room. ‘It’s not his fault. He’s not even really related to Raymond. They can’t hold this against him.’

  ‘They can and they will. Doesn’t matter that he hadn’t seen Raymond in years, he barely spoke two words to him since Carol died, it doesn’t matter at all. He’ll be finished if this gets out.’

  Rea approached the table.

  ‘But what about Gwen’s parents? They never knew what happened to her. They never got to bury her. There, at the end of that section, he says what he did with her body. How can we not let them bury their daughter?’

  Ida’s voice became shrill and quivery. ‘What good will that do them? It’ll not bring her back, will it? Do you really want them to know what this person did to their wee girl? Do you even know if they’re alive?’

  ‘This person,’ Rea echoed. ‘You mean Raymond. Your brother.’

  ‘My half-brother,’ Ida said. ‘He was no more a brother to me than the man in the moon.’

  ‘Then why not report it?’

  ‘Because we can’t. Your father won’t allow it.’

  ‘I really don’t think it’s up to him.’ Rea leaned on the table, closer to the book than she cared to be. ‘I asked you how to go about it to make this easier on the two of you. But I can’t keep this secret. It’s not just that girl’s parents who are suffering. Look through those pages. How many more of them are there? Women and men, names, places, the things he kept.’

  Ida stood up and moved away from the table. ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I need to call your father.’

  She took the mobile phone from her handbag, the one Rea had bought her for Christmas, and fumbled at the buttons until she found the number she needed. She closed her eyes as she held it to her ear and waited.

  ‘Hello? I know . . . I know you’re busy, but . . . Stop . . . Stop and bloody listen.’

  Ida glanced at Rea, blushing at the vulgarity that had passed her lips.

  ‘It’s important. You have to come to Raymond’s house straight away . . . No . . . No, not later. Right now . . . You’ll see when you get here . . . You’ll see . . . Tell them whatever you like, just get here . . . All right . . . Don’t be long.’