Eager to Please

by Julie Parsons

  ‘More, more, have more, dear. You look half starved. What you need is someone to look after you. Why don’t you come and stay with us for a while? Daddy wouldn’t mind, would you, Daddy?’

  Mr Lynch smiled indulgently, accepting without complaint the nickname. He wouldn’t mind, he said, but he thought that Rachel probably wanted to get on with her own life, instead of being stuck with two fuddy-duddy old pensioners.

  The hall and sitting room were hung with paintings and black and white photographs. Graceful old yachts, gaff-rigged, their huge white sails like seagulls’ wings. Rachel looked at them closely, admiring their lines. She recognized a young Mr Lynch at the helm of the most beautiful.

  ‘I used to sail,’ she said. ‘Dinghies mostly. I had my own Enterprise. It was a lovely boat.’

  Mr Lynch nodded.

  ‘Then I had a Dragon. Now that was a beauty. Like one of yours.’

  Mr Lynch nodded, his eyes wandering towards the pictures on the wall.

  ‘I crewed a lot for other people too, anyone who’d have me. Cruisers, racers, you name it. I loved it, out there in the bay.’

  Mr Lynch spoke. ‘There’s nothing like it, the waters of the bay and the Irish sea. The tides can be tricky. There’s a real tidal race. Four knots in either direction. You’d be amazed how far they can carry you.’ He paused and sipped his coffee. ‘You must have missed it,’ he said.

  After lunch Mrs Lynch insisted again. ‘We’ll go for a drive now. We’ll go out as far as the Sugarloaf Mountain. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Such lovely views. Daddy will go in the back, and you, Rachel, in the front, no arguments.’

  As they turned out on to the main road Rachel asked, ‘Would it be all right, do you think? Could we go through Killiney, up the Vico Road? Could we go that way?’

  And fifteen minutes later Rachel had found where they were. The red-tiled roof with the Italianate bell tower, just showing over the high granite wall. The wrought-iron gates, and the bonnet of a car nosing insistently out into their path, so Mrs Lynch had to stop suddenly, complaining.

  ‘Honestly, these people who live in these big houses, they think they own the road.’

  And Rachel had seen the woman and the children in the new black Saab and known what she had to do. It was easy, really so easy. The girls inside always said it was easy.

  ‘You don’t realize,’ they had told her, ‘how fucking soft most people are. They have no defences. They’re not expecting trouble, so when trouble comes they don’t know what’s hit them.’

  So easy. To hang around outside the house. To watch the car coming and going. To see the little girl wearing her special red sweatshirt. ‘Little Darlings Crèche’, it said on the front. And on the back the address and the phone number. They were right, the girls inside. It was dead easy.

  To take the train to the station by the beach below the house. To walk across the shingle, up on to the rocks. To climb up the cliff path and over the few strands of rusty barbed wire on to the railway line. To scramble through the broken fence and into the garden. Careful at first in case she might be noticed. Then moving more openly, as her confidence increased, around the edge of the rocky promontory on which the house was built. Looking back up at it through the gaps in the trees towards the smooth green lawn where the swing hung from the lower branch of the macrocarpa tree. Seeing the children flit past, hearing their shouts and cries. Their mother’s voice calling them in. Facing down the dog, the black Labrador who stood in front of her, barking and barking. His legs firmly planted, a line of hair rising on his back as she held out her hand to him. Feeding him scraps, biscuits and squares of chocolate. Watching the threads of saliva fall from his loose black lips as she held out her peace offerings. Then patting his big heavy head, looking into his dark brown eyes while he licked her hands.

  Mrs Lynch was so kind. She took her shopping. She bought her new clothes. Trousers in linens of grainy black, sludgy green and purple the colour of day-old bruises. Crisp white shirts and blouses. And a jacket made of soft suede, the colour of a chestnut pony. Sandals with straps around her ankles, like the ones that Roman centurions wore, and new shoes that smelt of leather and held her feet gently and carefully. The first real shoes she’d worn for twelve years. And a new bag, leather too, big enough to carry a book and a newspaper, even a carton of milk and a loaf of bread, with a wide strap and little pockets inside. A purse with a zip for coins and a place for notes.

  ‘And your hair, dear, we must do something about your hair. When did you last get it cut? You used to have such nice hair, I remember that it was a lovely colour, dark brown, nearly black but not quite, and it waved so prettily. You probably never needed to do anything to it then, but now . . .’

  She collected her from the dry-cleaner’s and took her to the salon in Glasthule, where Rachel sat for hours and listened to the chatter and gossip, while her head was massaged and rubbed, her hair was washed, cut and dried. She looked in the mirrors that lined the walls and watched the woman with the sleek grey curls, whose clothes perfectly complimented her slender body, as she moved about with grace and assurance, comfortable and at ease, suddenly at one with her brand-new skin.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Mrs Lynch as they walked out together. ‘You are very kind. I really appreciate all your help.’ And she leaned over and kissed the older woman on the cheek, smelling her face powder and the rose-scented perfume that drifted up from her body as they stood together in the warm sunshine. ‘More than you can imagine.’

  And Mrs Lynch took her hand and said, ‘I always believed what you said. About that man, your husband’s brother. I never believed him. I tried to convince the others. To get them to see it the way I saw it. But they said there was too much evidence against you. Your fingerprints were on the gun, and his weren’t. I couldn’t understand that either. But I knew there must be an explanation for it. I knew you’d never have killed your husband. Not when he was your daughter’s father.’ And she turned and walked away, stopping once to look back and wave.

  The dog recognized her. And so did the little girl. Her name was Laura. Rachel had heard her mother call out to her and the child respond. She sat on the beach in her smart new clothes, with her jacket and bag lying beside her, and watched the shiny black Labrador running towards her, the two children, the boy and girl, struggling to catch up, and further away, a small figure in the distance, the tall blonde woman with the baby in a sling on her chest. She put out her hand to the dog and stood up. She picked up a piece of driftwood and threw it in a wide curving arc. He ran and leapt into the air, catching the stick in his slobbering jaws before it landed. And the two children laughed and jumped up and down and shouted, ‘Do it again, do it again.’ And when their mother caught up with them, Laura was already telling Rachel that this was her mummy and this was her brother and that was her baby brother. It was so easy then to smile at the tall blonde woman, make a casual remark about the beauty of the day and the sea, and the niceness of her dog and her children. So that within half an hour they were all eating ice creams that Rachel had bought from the shop on the beach. So easy, then, to walk with them to the gate that led from the sea up the side of the cliff to their house. To wave them goodbye. And say to the little girl with the straight dark hair and the solemn expression, ‘Yes, of course, Laura, I’d love to come and see your pussy cat some day, of course I would.’

  Smiling ruefully at her mother, who was shooing her on ahead. Sharing those ‘aren’t children funny?’ kind of expressions, then waving goodbye and walking back along the beach, taking off her beautiful new sandals and rolling up her trousers, paddling in the waves which washed so gently up and down on the shingle and the shells which gleamed beneath the water. Feeling the sun on her back as she walked away from the tall blonde woman and her three lovely children, knowing that it was so easy, and that soon she would be seeing them again. She repeated the name the woman had given her. Ursula Beckett, Mrs Ursula Beckett, wife of Daniel Beckett, Martin’s older brother, Rache
l’s former lover. And the man who had fired the shot that killed her husband. All those long years ago.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THIS TIME THE smell was even stronger. Even the young lads who prided themselves on having stomachs of burnished brass and an attitude to match were looking decidedly green as they clustered around the covered mound on the ground. Jack approached warily. He’d had a bad night. The girls had come to stay and Rosa had insisted on sleeping with him. He didn’t mind, in fact he usually enjoyed her skinny little body curled up against his. But nightmares had jerked her, shrieking, out of her sleep, and then, when he thought he had finally calmed her down, she had suddenly and without warning wet the bed. And by the time he had changed her, himself and the sheets, it was dawn, and although she instantly drifted off, her thumb firmly planted between her lips, he had lain awake, watching the minutes click by on the digital clock until finally, and with a great sense of relief, it had been time to get up.

  Now, four cups of coffee later, he felt dizzy and disorientated and not at all ready for what was lying here, down by the railway line, between Salthill and Seapoint, and stinking to high heaven.

  How to describe the smell of rotting flesh? It didn’t, he had once decided, smell like anything else. There were no possible comparisons to be made. You couldn’t say that it reminded you of the scent of a particular flower or shrub. It wasn’t similar to any food or drink. It was like nothing other than itself. Perhaps it was possible to discriminate between one kind of rot and another. Certainly rotting fish had a particularly potent stench. But, he wondered as the smell rose up and engulfed him, was there a qualitative difference between dead rat, cow or human?

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said out loud to no one in particular as he pushed his way through the tangled mixture of gorse, trailing briars, and buddleia gone wild. ‘What on earth do we have here?’

  He took a deep breath and lifted away the white plastic cover. What lay beneath was human, that much was obvious. But not much else. It was swaddled in a white sheet, wrapped tightly, criss-crossed like a large bandage, over and around its head, torso and legs. It lay on its back, its feet pointing towards the sky. It looked small and neat, a woman, he thought, or perhaps a prepubescent teenager, or an old person, shrunk with age and osteoporosis. Its arms appeared to have been folded over its chest, reminding him, for all the world, of a crusader and his wife he had once seen lying on a slab in an old English church somewhere in the north of England. York was it? He couldn’t quite remember. He squatted down to have a closer look. Something with very sharp teeth had torn at the material, pulling it away, revealing the skin underneath. Bite marks gouged into the body’s pale flesh on the thighs and stomach. But there were no signs of bloodstains anywhere, on the sheet itself or on the green rubberized tarpaulin on which the body lay.

  Jack stood up and moved away. He tasted his breakfast, bitter, curdled. He turned towards the sea, which today at high tide lay smooth and flat, milky blue, just on the other side of the railway line, stretching across Dublin Bay as far as Howth Head. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with cleansing salt air. Then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, covered his face and turned back to the body.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ He touched the groundsheet with the toe of his shoe, looking over at the group of uniformed guards, some of whom were busily organizing the crime scene cordon. ‘Did one of you lot put this down?’

  Of course they hadn’t. Who did he think they were, fucking amateurs? They knew better than to interfere. They knew all about preserving the scene, all that stuff they’d had drummed into them time after time.

  ‘So, tell all. Who found it, and when?’

  It was, it seemed, a local authority surveyor. A young lad, newly qualified, sent down to the stretch of wasteland along by the railway line to begin the preliminary work on the new park the Corporation were planning. Jack could hear the raucous screech as he vomited, somewhere just out of sight behind a large sycamore tree.

  ‘He stepped on it and fell over. Landed right on top of it. It was wrapped in the groundsheet. All nicely parcelled up.’ Tom Sweeney filled in the details.

  ‘So why isn’t it still nicely parcelled up, as you so delicately put it?’

  ‘Because,’ Sweeney’s tone was resigned but caustic, ‘because, as he was getting to his feet he couldn’t help but hold on to the body and in doing so he pulled the plastic off it, and that was when he realized what it was.’

  ‘It?’ Jack knelt down, index finger and thumb clamped over his nostrils. ‘It? Of course we don’t think it’s an “it”, do we, Sweeney? What’re the odds? Not great, I’d say. How about two to one that this here nice little parcel is a “she”?’

  They waited in the sunshine for Johnny Harris, the pathologist, to arrive. In the old days, before they’d all become so scientific, so careful about procedure, they’d have pulled off the sheet themselves and had a good look. But not any longer. Now it all had to be done by the book. And the book said don’t rush into anything. So they waited. Jack moved away and climbed the stairs to the old iron bridge that crossed the railway line. He rested his eyes on the sea, gazing across the bay to Howth in the distance. He dreaded what was lying back there under the briars and nettles. He remembered the days when he had relished it all. The quest, the chase, the hunt, the tracking down. Now all he felt was the pain of the family, the fear of failure. He looked back down to where the body lay covered. He wasn’t even sure how he was going to react when he looked at it. If he could even bring himself to look at it, at her, as she was now, lying there, rotting.

  They were all silent as Johnny Harris carefully pulled the sheet away from her face. Her eyes were open. She stared up at them as if in wonder.

  ‘Female,’ he said, and someone laughed nervously.

  Above their heads a blackbird burst into song, trilling loudly up and down the scale. A train passed by and, as a sudden breeze blew in from the sea, the trees and bushes around them shook their branches, the bright green summer foliage whispering and hissing.

  Johnny Harris peeled some more of the sheet away.

  ‘Age? Late teens, early twenties.’ He moved her neck gently with his gloved hands.

  ‘Probable cause of death? Strangulation.’ He worked his way down her bare white body, revealing her arms, folded, one over the other. He touched the piece of cloth that was threaded through her small fingers.

  ‘What do you reckon, Jack?’ Jack moved closer and leaned over. ‘Looks like a man’s tie, doesn’t it? Those diagonal stripes, the same colours repeated. Looks like a school tie, university, something like that.’

  ‘How about the Garda Representative Association?’ Tom Sweeney put in. And they all sniggered again.

  Jack watched as Johnny Harris carefully peeled away the covering from her lower abdomen, her genital area and her upper thighs.

  He tried to remember the words of the Act of Contrition. They hovered on his lips. He closed his eyes. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I confess my sins above every other evil.

  He lifted his hand and blessed himself. Johnny Harris pointed his finger at the bruises that mottled her skin. He differentiated between the marks that had been made by a fist before death and the teeth marks that had occurred more recently.

  ‘Rodents,’ he said, ‘possibly even cats.’

  There were small puckered scars on the wrinkled skin of her knees. Traces of childhood, he thought, falls from swings, and bicycles, grazes and scratches. Her feet were thin and white, with high insteps. Her nails had been painted scarlet. Like Rosa’s toenails. She had shown them to him this morning as he was buckling her sandals. Look, Daddy, aren’t they pretty? Mummy did it for me.

  ‘Look.’ Johnny Harris pointed again. ‘See how they’ve grown. Even since she’s been dead.’ Jack looked at the thin line of white that showed above her cuticle. Then he stood back and watched as they carefully placed her inside the body bag. The metallic zing of the closing zip pushed
all other sounds away. Johnny Harris peeled off his gloves. They dangled from his hands. Like an insect’s discarded skin, Jack thought, and felt sick again.

  ‘I’ll give you a call when I’ve had a closer look,’ he said, stepping out of his overalls.

  Jack nodded. ‘Fingerprint her, will you? Just in case.’

  A name, that was what he needed. First and foremost. And with the name would come its own particular list of suspects, motives and opportunities. And with a bit of old-fashioned luck everything else would fall into place.

  It was early evening by the time he saw her again. He was tired. A thorough search of the wasteland by the railway had revealed nothing of interest. A heap of old beer cans and plastic cider bottles. A variety of shoes. Plenty of dog shit and some of the human variety. But no footprints, no handy dropped clues. None of the junk with which the average detective novel was littered. Unfortunately, he thought sourly, feeling a headache work its way up his neck and settle itself behind his eyes. They’d already started their house-to-house questioning. So far, so predictable. No one had seen anything unusual. Of course, there was always such a large amount of traffic turning off the sea road at Monkstown, heading down the hill to the car park next to the station. Even more since it had been extended recently, making room for extra commuters. One old biddy in a dingy flat on the top floor of the terrace of houses above told him there were always odd goings on there, night and day. Jack noticed the pair of binoculars on the window sill.

  ‘Bird watching?’ he asked, lifting them up and putting them to his eyes.

  She grinned broadly. There was a great view from her front window. And of course the added bonus that the car park was well lit at night-time.

  ‘Who’ye looking for?’ she asked, pouring him weak tea from a tarnished silver pot.