Eager to Please

by Julie Parsons

  She nodded.

  ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘They’ll understand, afterwards, when I explain it to them. They’ll get over it.’

  ‘I’ll never be able to thank you for this, Amy,’ he said, and he kissed her gently on her cheek.

  And now he waited. Wherever Rachel was she would want to see the newspapers. She was waiting to see when he was going to be charged with her murder. And when she read about Amy she would know it was him. And she would come. And when she did, he’d be waiting.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ANDREW HAD STOPPED going into work. He had gone to the doctor, Clare’s doctor, and told him that he couldn’t cope any longer. He had asked for medication, antidepressants, tranquillizers, whatever they were called. The doctor had examined him, taken his blood pressure, noted his bad colour, his thinness. Told him he wasn’t eating properly, that he was drinking too much, that he should watch it. He was no use to his wife in this condition.

  ‘Perhaps the time has come, Andy, to get her some residential care. Give you a bit of a break.’

  But he wouldn’t hear of it. What would he have without her? His life was so bounded by her needs. He couldn’t imagine how he would fill his time if he didn’t have Clare to look after.

  He went home, his pills in his pocket, and poured himself a large vodka. They sat together that night. The door to the garden was open. There was a smell of new-mown grass. The boy from next door had cut it. Piled it into little round hillocks all over the lawn.

  She asked him to put on some music.

  ‘You choose,’ she said.

  He picked Elgar. The song ‘Where Corals Lie’, sung by Janet Baker. He set the CD player to repeat. Over and over again. They sat in the dark and listened to the words. Clare asked him about Rachel Beckett, what was the latest news?

  ‘I miss her,’ she said. ‘I liked her. Do you think she’s dead?’

  She began to cough. Her chest was congested. It was pneumonia again, he was sure of it. He listened to the words of the song.

  The deeps have music soft and low,

  When winds awake the airy spry,

  It lures me, lures me on to go,

  And see the land where corals lie.

  ‘What did she have to live for?’ he asked.

  ‘Her daughter, her future. She wanted redemption. I know she did.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘We talked about, you know . . . We talked about how it might be for you after I’ve gone. I told her what we wanted to do. I asked her how you would feel. I asked her how she felt.’

  ‘And.’

  Clare didn’t reply. He looked at her. She lay quietly curled on her side. Her eyes were closed. She had stopped taking her antibiotics. She told him she had had enough.

  ‘It’s time, Andy. Now it’s time.’

  He listened to the music.

  ‘Andy, please, I’m so cold.’

  He got up and walked over to the bed. He lay down beside her and pulled her head on to his chest. She coughed and coughed. He sat up and pulled her up beside him.

  ‘Hush,’ he said, ‘hush. Go to sleep. It’ll be better in the morning.’

  He picked up her glass. He put her pills into her mouth. He gently poured the juice between her lips. She swallowed, choked, swallowed again. She closed her eyes. He listened again to the words of the song.

  Thy lips are like a sunset glow,

  Thy smile is like a morning sky,

  Yet leave me, leave me, let me go

  And see the land where corals lie.

  He remembered one night he had come home and seen Rachel here with his wife. He had walked across the garden and watched them through the window. He had seen the way that Rachel held her, warmed her, wasn’t afraid to be close to her. Wasn’t frightened of her dependency, her pain. He listened now to Clare’s breathing. It was quiet and slow. He laid her back down on the bed. He picked up the pillow. He pressed down hard against her face. He waited. One of her hands moved, stirred, lifted, dropped back down on the bed.

  ‘No,’ the word burst from him. He snatched away the pillow. He laid his head on her chest. Felt the tremor of breath. He held her face between his hands and kissed her gently on either cheek, and then finally on her mouth. She stirred in her sleep. He lay down beside her and pulled her close. He closed his eyes. He slept.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  IT WAS A girl’s voice. An adolescent girl’s voice. Not yet the voice of an adult. But deeper, more resonant than the voice of a child. Jack had never heard it before. But he knew immediately who it was, this sobbing creature who cried out for help.

  Mummy, Mummy, please. Mummy, help me. Are you listening, Mummy? Do you hear me? Please come and find me. I know you’re out there somewhere. I know you want to help me. I need you now more than I’ve ever needed you before. So please, come back from wherever you are. Please.

  And then the cry, a long howl of anguish and fear. Then silence. The tape ended abruptly. Nothing more but the hiss of the machine.

  The package had arrived in the first post of the day. It had been lying on his desk with all the rest of the junk. He had picked it up, weighed the padded envelope in his hand, looked at the postmark, looked at the label with his name and address printed on it, then gone to the coffee machine. He was tired. Alison had stayed with him last night, and he didn’t think either of them had got much more than a couple of hours of rest. When he sat down at his desk the longing for sleep had begun to wash over him. And for a moment he had contemplated going sick, sneaking home to crash out on the bed, burying his face in the pillows that smelt of Alison. But he had pushed the thought from him as he picked up the tape again, hunted in his top drawer for his Walkman, slotted it in, pressed play and listened, and felt the bile rise up into his mouth, and the sensation of a stream of iced water slide down his backbone. He pressed the rewind button, then pressed play, and listened again.

  The mid-morning traffic along the sea road and over the toll bridge was nearly as densely packed as the rush-hour crush three hours earlier. He had brought the tape with him, and he played it again and again as the car crept forward. Outside it was raining. A steady leaden downpour that sluiced over the windscreen like the stream from a hosepipe. He sat and listened, the windscreen wipers turned to slow, and waited.

  Her foster-parents had been sent the tape too. And the local guards who were dealing with the girl’s disappearance. The parents were frantic. Phil Brady, the inspector from Clontarf, was at a loss. ‘You’d better come over here, Jack. Give us a bit of a dig-out. Maybe you can make some sense from all of this. Because I can’t.’

  Christ Almighty, frantic parents. He felt he couldn’t cope with them any longer. Or maybe it was just that he’d been better at the personal stuff when he was newer to the job. Or maybe it had just seemed easier, and maybe back then they hadn’t set so much store by it. You weren’t expected to have a postgraduate degree in meaningful dialoguing, or basic bullshit about bereavement as he privately termed it.

  Not that, so far, bereavement was on the agenda. The girl was missing, not dead. Not so far. Although the parents, the foster-parents as he had to keep on reminding himself, didn’t see it that way. They were doing a good job of preparing themselves for the worst. It was spelt out in the rigor of their stiff white faces, and the way they had already begun to speak of Amy in the past tense.

  He sat with them in their small tidy front room, drinking tea, refusing biscuits. There was nothing in their demeanour to suggest that Amy Beckett, or Williams as she called herself, was not their own child. There were photographs of her everywhere. Along with the pictures of their other four children. But it was easy to spot the odd one out. The Williams brood were fair to mousy, with round faces and snub noses. Cute when toddlers but undistinguished as teenagers and young adults. The kind of people you’d pass in the street. The kind of faces that were never picked out in identity parades. Unlike Amy. He walked around the Williamses’ sitting room, looking at the framed photo
graphs hanging on the wall. Mostly school pictures. First communions and confirmations. Amy’s steady gaze followed him as he moved. He could feel her eyes on his back as he turned away. He was reminded of the painting of the Sacred Heart that hung on their landing when he was a kid. The crucified Christ would catch his eye as he walked slowly up towards him, and he would still be watching as he turned quickly at the top of the stairs. That same steady mournful look.

  He asked Mrs Williams if he could see the girl’s room. She opened the door without a word and showed him the way. No Sacred Hearts to be seen on their landing, he noticed, just a series of watercolours. Flower paintings. Detailed, precise, like plates from a botanical reference book. He stopped and looked more closely.

  ‘Yours?’ he asked.

  ‘No, my husband’s.’

  ‘A nice hobby to have.’

  ‘Oh,’ she looked back at him, ‘not quite a hobby. More of an obsession. And one that Amy used to share when she was younger. They used to go off on collecting trips. She was quite expert, very sharp-eyed, great attention to detail. She would find the plants and Dave would paint them.’

  ‘Would, was, not any longer?’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Williams pushed open the bedroom door, ‘as you can see, adolescence took over.’

  So this was what he had ahead of him, he thought as he looked around at the posters that covered all four walls and the ceiling too.

  ‘Quite a job, isn’t it?’ Mrs Williams craned her head to look up at them. ‘That’s our Amy. When she decides to do something she goes all the way.’

  ‘Your Amy?’ Jack sat down on the stool by the small wooden desk. ‘You do think of her as yours, do you?’

  ‘Well, whose else is she? She came to us when she was barely five. I think you could say we’ve taught her everything she knows. Our children taught her how to be a sister. My husband and I taught her how to be a daughter. My mother and father taught her how to be a granddaughter.’

  ‘And her own mother, what did she teach her?’

  There was silence in the small stuffy room.

  ‘Well, I suppose to be fair she didn’t have much of a chance. And she did give a her good start, I’ll say that for her, especially with her intellectual development. Amy was always very bright. She already knew her alphabet when she came to us. She could count, she had her favourite books and stories. Look,’ she stood in front of him, the skin of her face sagging with anxiety, ‘don’t get me wrong. I know she isn’t ours, not ours by adoption. And as foster-parents we’ve always been very conscious that she might only be with us for a short time. We know all about that. We’ve fostered before. And if Amy had left us we would have fostered again. But there was always something special about her. Something very special. She’s a very special person. Even that first day we met her, there was a quality about her that shone through. Even when she was like this.’

  She picked up a framed photograph from the desk and held it out to him. He looked at the little girl in the bright blue dress, standing holding hands with a smiling man and woman.

  ‘We took it that first day. We always did that with all the children. We thought it would make them feel wanted. And when they left us we gave it to them as a memento. So many of them, you see, don’t have things like this.’ Her voice broke and tears began to trickle from the corners of her eyes. She pulled a tissue from the cuff of her white blouse and wiped her nose. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to keep calm, for everyone’s sake, but I’m so worried about her.’

  Afterwards, as he was driving back into the city centre, he could still smell the perfume that she was wearing. Blue Grass, that’s what it was. He remembered one of his aunt’s loved it. She had boxes of soap and talcum powder all with the same delicate scent stashed in the top of her wardrobe. It had always puzzled him, the possibility of grass being anything other than bright green. He puzzled now over the girl and what had happened to her. Mrs Williams had said that everything had been as normal. Amy was waiting for her Leaving Certificate results to come out. She had a job in a local café. She seemed perfectly fine.

  ‘But how did she react when her mother went missing, and all that stuff in the papers and on TV, all the rehashing of the case? And then the suggestion that something bad might have happened to her. Didn’t that upset her?’

  Mrs Williams sighed deeply. ‘She didn’t say much about it. We hoped that it was a false alarm, nothing really serious. So I suppose we tried to play it down. Not deny it, of course, but just stress that no one was sure what was going on. She had been a bit quiet recently, but she goes through these silent phases anyway, from time to time, every now and then. She kind of withdraws. Spends a lot of time here in her room, listening to music, drawing, reading. We’ve got used to leaving her be. She comes out of it eventually, when she’s ready.’

  ‘And did she mention recently that she had met anyone new, that anyone had made any approaches to her?’

  But of course she hadn’t. She wasn’t one who would tell everything. She would want to have her secrets. Still he thought he might as well show Mrs Williams the photograph of Dan Beckett. Just for the record. Just so he could say he’d done it. He watched her face as she gazed at the picture. She took her time, studying it slowly, then she shook her head.

  ‘He looks familiar for some reason. But it strikes me that he’s far too old to have been friends with Amy. No, I’ve never seen him. Never seen him at all.’

  He asked her if she minded leaving him alone, here, just for a few minutes. She shrugged and said she supposed not, running her hand protectively over the flowered duvet and plumping up the pillows before she left. He sat back and looked around him. There was a cosy nest-like quality about the room, he thought. The small single bed looked inviting, and he had a sudden desire to lie down, although he could imagine how his legs would hang out over the end. ‘Whose been sleeping in my bed,’ he chanted quietly out loud. And smiled. This was a room a kid could be happy in, he decided, and then remembered Judith Hill’s room and how it had looked that day when had gone to see her father for the first time. Cold, clean, empty. Nothing to say for itself. Not giving away a single clue or an ounce of information. And now all its secrets were buried in the family plot in Deans Grange cemetery. The one grave, the headstone with the two names on it. He had been surprised by that, but Elizabeth and Stephen had decided between them. Whatever else, Judith and Mark were still father and daughter, still the same flesh and blood.

  How much did that matter, flesh and blood, the biological link, he wondered as he said goodbye to Pat Williams.

  ‘You will let us know as soon as you hear anything, won’t you? You will do everything you can to find her for us, please?’

  She followed him out on to the footpath. Her hands fluttered like falling leaves. She couldn’t keep them still. He wanted to take them and fold them together, wrap her arms around her body, keep her safe. Instead he just nodded and said that of course he would. He’d phone them later. They weren’t to worry. He was sure that Amy would be home soon.

  His phone rang just as he was bumping across the railway line at Merrion Gates. It was Sweeney’s number on the display. His heart sank. It could be nothing but bad news.

  ‘There’s someone trying to get hold of you, Jack. She’s insisting. She needs to see you. Here, you know the address.’

  Again that dreadful smell of rotting flesh. It hit him as soon as he walked into the hall of the tall redbrick house in Rathmines. The front door had been on the latch, and when he pushed it gently, it swung open. He stood and looked around him. He remembered the sight of Mark Hill’s body hanging from its noose. He called out.

  ‘Mrs Hill, Elizabeth, are you there?’

  There was no reply. He took a couple of steps forward and peered into the sitting room on the right. It was empty but in here the smell was even stronger. And then he heard voices coming from the dining room behind. He called out again, and this time she answered.

  He opened the door and walked in. And
gagged, vomit in his mouth. He pulled out his handkerchief and spat into it, unable to speak. He looked around him. There was blood everywhere and pieces of flesh. Shapes that were both recognizable and unknown. Elizabeth Hill was standing at the door that opened out into the garden. A tall heavy man was standing beside her.

  ‘You remember George Bradley, don’t you?’ she said.

  Jack nodded and looked around him. He tried to find words to ask, to question, but there was nothing there.

  ‘Stephen did it.’ Elizabeth spoke in a low monotone. ‘This is all his handiwork.’

  Flies buzzed over the remains.

  ‘For some reason,’ she said, ‘he was trying to copy the picture.’

  She pointed to the large print of Judith and Holofernes that had been pinned to the wall. Now it hung sagging, torn at the edges. Jack bent down, covering his nose to look more closely at the animal heads which were everywhere. Chickens, birds, the remains of a sheep, something that looked like a cat, even, he was disgusted to see, a couple of rats’ heads. He felt his gorge rise again and backed away.

  ‘Here.’ Elizabeth stepped aside. ‘You’d better go out and get some fresh air.’

  She explained what had happened over a cup of tea in the Bradleys’ bright clean kitchen. She had been coming to see Stephen anyway, she said. But when she arrived they told her that he was no longer staying with them, that he had decided to go home. They were worried about him. They had tried phoning, they had knocked on the front door a number of times, but there was no response.

  ‘Of course, we knew he was in there,’ George Bradley said, ‘from our mews, which is where I have my office. You remember, I’m sure, Mr Donnelly. You visited me there after Judith died. And of course we can see clearly into the house from the windows. And I could see lights on, so I knew he was in there all right.’

  Jack remembered. The bright modern office space. The converted garage. George Bradley had some kind of software company. Very high-tech. Although he had thought at the time that he didn’t look the type. He looked more like a teacher in a posh school, with his grey hair and half-glasses, baggy cord trousers and sleeveless sweater.