The Mystery of Mercy Close

by Marian Keyes

  Casually, hoping not to attract the attention of Birdie’s neighbours, I slid along the side of her house and round to the back. The kitchen windows were high off the ground, the way kitchen windows often are, and I had to jump to get a proper look in. Ikea job. White cupboards. Not fabulously beautiful but no harm in them.

  I took another jump and saw an oval-shaped wood laminate table and four yellow chairs – Birdie was obviously a big fan of the colour yellow and as colours went it wasn’t the worst – with a polka-dotted apron slung on the back of one of them.

  A third jump revealed a ceramic cookie jar on a shelf and an oil painting of a cupcake on a wall. All a little too Cath Kidston for me, but I’ve seen people do a lot worse with their homes, oh a lot worse.

  At that stage I decided I’d done enough jumping. My wounded knee couldn’t take any more and, really, there was nothing interesting to see.

  I wondered what her upstairs was like. Had she gone mad entirely on the girliness? Did her bed have a pink muslin princess canopy? Or had I got her all wrong? Was her bedroom cool and elegant and grown-up?

  I really did wonder. But to find out I’d have to break in, and on a Sunday afternoon in suburbia, in plain view of youths on the green doing something with matches (what is it with eleven-year-old boys and the desire to set things on fire?), I’d get caught. I was intrigued about the rest of Birdie’s house, but not intrigued enough to run the risk of being arrested, I suppose is the best way of putting it.

  Before I left, I wrote Birdie a little note, telling her I’d ‘popped round’ to see her and how sorry I was to have missed her and that if she felt like talking to me I’d be delighted and, sorry to rub salt into wounds that were obviously raw, but if she felt like telling me how I’d find Gloria, I’d be most grateful and here was my number.

  My hopes of a result weren’t high, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

  I returned to my car and got in and let my head fall back against the headrest. My head was throbbing and I was exhausted. It took a lot of energy to survive a bout of depression. I knew it looked like I was just traipsing around doing close to nothing, but all that inner torment is a killer.

  I swallowed back four painkillers and I closed my eyes. I was thinking of this woman, a friend of my mother’s, who’d got breast cancer. There was no history of it in her family, she wasn’t a smoker, she didn’t take HRT or live a high-stress existence, she hadn’t fought in Operation Desert Storm. Nor were there any of the other reasons that are routinely wheeled out as possible causes of cancer, just to make the misfortunate sufferers feel guilty as well as terrified. Not in the most judgmental of universes could you have said that she’d ‘brought it on herself’. Anyway, she had chemo, she was sick as a dog, her hair fell out, her eyelashes fell out, she was so weak she couldn’t even watch Countdown. After the chemo she had radium treatment, which burned her breast so badly she couldn’t even have a sheet on it at night, and it left her so feeble she had to crawl – quite literally crawl – across her living-room floor. Her hair grew back – different, funnily enough: it used to be curly and it grew back straight. That was twenty years ago. She’s still alive. Going strong. Plays bridge. Quite good at it. Recently enough she won a voucher for a two-night stay in a three-star hotel in Limerick. (Mum came second, but got only a tin of biscuits. Quite sore about it.)

  Then I was thinking about another woman, a friend of my sister Claire’s. She got breast cancer too. As with Mum’s friend, there was no history of it in her family, she wasn’t a smoker, she didn’t take HRT or live a high-stress existence, she hadn’t fought in Operation Desert Storm. Nor were there any of the other reasons that are routinely wheeled out as possible causes of cancer, just to make the misfortunate sufferers feel guilty as well as terrified. Not in the most judgmental of universes could you have said that she’d ‘brought it on herself’. Anyway, she had chemo, she was sick as a dog, her hair fell out, her eyelashes fell out, she was so weak she couldn’t even watch Countdown. After the chemo she had radium treatment, which burned her breast so badly she couldn’t even have a sheet on it at night, and it left her so feeble she had to crawl – quite literally crawl – across her living-room floor. This woman – Selina was her name – did a fair bit of new age stuff as well as taking her medicine. Fighting the war on several fronts, you might say. She was a great espouser of positive thinking; she was going to ‘beat this cancer’. She did yoga, coffee enemas and visualization. She spent a fortune that she didn’t have on going to some swizzer in Peru who promised to shamanize away her cancer. And guess what? She died. She was thirty-four. She had three children. A while after she died I came across her mother lurching around Blackrock shopping centre in a state that I now understand as crazed grief. She half recognized me as someone who’d known her daughter and she stared into my eyes with wild intensity, but at the same time she was completely absent. ‘Selina fought like a tiger,’ she said, holding on to my arm so tightly that she hurt me. ‘She fought like a tiger for life.’

  But she died.

  And that’s my point. People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they don’t. And it doesn’t matter if the sickness is cancer or if it’s depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop. Sometimes the alternative stuff works and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes you wonder whether outside interference makes any difference at all; whether an illness is like a storm; whether it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, either you will be alive or you will be dead.

  Jesus Christ, here came Walter Wolcott!

  Out of his car he hopped, thumping on Birdie’s front door, peering in windows. Subtle as a sledgehammer.

  I looked at him considering a drainpipe, wondering if he’d be able to use it to climb up the wall of the house, to gawk in through the bedroom windows.

  ‘It’ll never hold you,’ I called out. ‘You’ll bring the whole house down.’

  He glared at me and I gave him a cheery wave, then I drove off.

  I kept going north. For some reason I was thinking about Antonia Kelly, the woman who’d been my therapist.

  She’d been nothing like I’d expected. She didn’t make me lie on a couch and ask me about my childhood or my dreams. She didn’t bounce every question I asked her back at me by asking what I thought about it.

  She was the one thing that she wasn’t meant to be: she was my friend. My only friend, as it happened. She was the one person I could be brutally honest with and she never judged me.

  She’d say, ‘How are you, Helen?’ And I’d answer, ‘I’ve been thinking of taking the breadknife and cutting out my stomach. If I could just cut out my guts, these feelings might go away.’

  And she wouldn’t burst into tears. Or tell me I had to be strong. Or say that she’d be devastated if I died. Or ring one of my sisters and tell them I was a selfish, self-indulgent whinger.

  I didn’t have to protect her from how horrific I felt. She’d seen it all before and she was unshockable.

  Early on in our ‘relationship’ I was in her waiting room and, at random, picked one of her books off her shelves. It fell open and a sentence on the page jumped out at me: ‘At some stage in their therapeutic career, many therapists will lose a client to suicide.’

  And I knew Antonia Kelly had. Lost a client to suicide, that is. And I thought: Excellent, this one knows what she’s dealing with here.

  She didn’t fix me. She didn’t provide reasons for why I wanted to die. But she pulled off the near-impossible job of offering me both detachment and compassion. The detachment part – well, I was nothing to her, nobody. Twice a week I had an hour when I could slow down the terrible thoughts in my washing machine head and let my mouth say them and my ears hear them and not have to worry about how it impacted on her.

  But, at the same time, I knew she cared about me. I wasn’t sure what bad stuff she’d gone through herself – I asked and she wouldn’t tell me
, of course. She wouldn’t even talk to me about her lovely black Audi TT, which I’d accidentally spotted her driving one day – but I knew she’d seen other people writhing in front of her in similar agonies. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one.

  Even though I was paying her and even though I never found out the details you normally discover about people close to you – like if they have a boyfriend or children or if ice cream hurts their teeth or if they have a ‘thing’ about red setters – she was my true friend. She walked steadfastly alongside me through the rocky, smoke-black nightmare. She couldn’t keep me from tripping and stumbling, she couldn’t give me anything to stop the pain, but she encouraged me to keep going.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, she kept me alive.

  I was wondering if I should ring her and ask if she could see me. But something was stopping me. I finally identified it as pride. I’d been so proud when I’d done over a year of therapy and was pronounced fit enough to stop. When we’d finished, she’d said her door was always open, and I’d gaily said that that was good to know. But I hadn’t meant it; I’d been sure I was permanently cured. So the thought of slinking back into her room, with my head in a shambles, felt like a terrible failure. The wrong way to look at things, as I’m sure she would have told me: therapy is a relationship most people ‘engage with’ several times during their lives.

  Pondering this, I drove almost all the way to Belfast, did a twirl around the Belfast ring-road and drove back towards the south. By the time I reached the seaside suburbs of North Dublin it was about midnight. I called in again to Birdie Salaman but there was still no sign of her or her car. Her curtains hadn’t been drawn; there were no changes at all.

  So where was she? Did her absence mean anything? Was it connected with Wayne’s?

  Or was she just away for the weekend, visiting a friend – maybe even a new boyfriend? I mean, why not? Why not just go with the least sinister interpretation?

  Still unsure what to think, I went back to Wayne’s and let myself in. I double-locked the door from the inside and put the chain on. I didn’t want Walter Wolcott bursting in on me unannounced. I had every right to be there. I was … well, yes, I was working.

  Besides, he was probably two hundred and thirty kilometres away in some backwater in North Antrim, waking up the woman of the house at Hyacinth B&B, demanding to know if Wayne was slumbering under one of her peach quilts. Thorough, Walter Wolcott was. You couldn’t say he wasn’t thorough.

  There was a missed call from Artie, but no message. I rang him back and it went straight to voicemail. Obviously I’d left it too late; he must have gone to bed. But this afternoon things had ended on a slightly ragged note, almost hostile, and I’d have liked a chance to talk to him to smooth them out. I left a sympathetic message saying that I hoped everything was okay with Bella, and then, feeling slightly uneasy, I hung up and took a sleeping tablet. One of my own this time.

  I was no good to Wayne if I was sleep deprived. I needed my wits about me because something was going to happen in the morning. I could sense it. I could feel something coming.

  And something did happen in the morning. Bright and early, an email arrived.

  MONDAY

  53

  Very bright and early – 6.47 a.m. to be exact – I woke up on Wayne’s living-room floor. I had allowed myself the luxury of a cushion for my sore head, but that was the only liberty I had taken.

  Some intuition had roused me from my drug-induced slumber. I reached for my phone and when I saw that the email report was in from Sharkey, the finance hacker, with details of all the action on Wayne’s credit cards and bank account, I was suddenly fully awake and shaking with anticipation. Now I’d see exactly where Wayne had been for the past four days, where he’d been staying, what he’d been buying, how much money he’d been withdrawing. My mouth was practically watering.

  Sharkey said that the details were fully inclusive up to midnight last night, so if anything had happened in the last seven hours, it wasn’t on the report, but that was fine with me. Info on the past four days was all I needed.

  To my total shock, there had been no action whatsoever on any of Wayne’s cards. Nothing. Sharkey had included every transaction for the past two months, but it all came to an abrupt halt on Wednesday night.

  My head started banging with pain and I stared at my phone, scrolling up and down, wondering if I was missing something. But no, nothing at all had happened.

  Okay, two of Wayne’s credit cards were maxed out so he couldn’t have used either of them, but he had a third card with plenty of room on it and he had a debit card.

  His final purchase had been a pizza at 21.36 on Wednesday evening, and since then he’d made no charges to any of his three credit cards, he’d bought nothing by direct debit and he hadn’t withdrawn a single cent from an ATM.

  It was like he’d fallen off the edge of the planet.

  I was stunned into immobility. My brain had frozen.

  The next obvious question would be, had there been a massive cash withdrawal in the days coming up to Wayne’s disappearance? And there hadn’t been. He’d taken out one hundred euro last Sunday, but that was business as usual; his pattern was to withdraw one hundred euro every few days, his walking-around money, obviously.

  So where was he that he didn’t need any money? How had he managed to get there? You can’t hire a car, you can’t stay in a hotel, you can’t eat a meal, you can’t do anything without it showing up on a card.

  For a moment I felt the way I had right at the start of this job, that Wayne was dead. I’d felt it. At the time I’d thought I was just confusing the stuff in my own head with Wayne’s state of mind, but now, looking at the complete blanks on all his cards, he felt dead. All that whiteness, all that blankness – it looked like death to me.

  A short fierce jab of something terrible got me in my gut. I closed my eyes, then opened them again and stared at the tender skin on the inside of my left wrist, at the little wriggles of blue veins.

  No. I must have overlooked something. Was it possible that Wayne had a secret credit card? But that would mean he’d destroyed all the paperwork on it and that was getting very elaborate. Too elaborate to be feasible.

  How about Sharkey’s information? Could it be relied on? Absolutely. Not only had he (or it might be a ‘she’) a cast-iron reputation, but he had included tons of information in his report that I was able to cross-reference with the statements upstairs in Wayne’s office. Sharkey had listed Wayne’s mortgage payments, utility bills and standing orders going back over the past two months, all for the right amounts and on the correct dates. He’d even included the recent direct debit to Wayne’s health insurer and I knew that had really happened because Jay Parker had opened the receipt that had come in the mail.

  So what was going on? Was Wayne really mixed up in something dodgy? Harry Gilliam’s terrifying phone call had pointed that way. But Wayne just didn’t seem the sort.

  So what about him voluntarily disappearing? The thing is that nobody ‘disappears’, not really. Someone always knows where they are. Someone, somewhere – possibly the elusive Gloria – was helping Wayne.

  I started trying to remember what people had said to me when I’d asked them to do the blue-sky thinking. There’s always a grain of truth in what people say, even if they don’t know it themselves. In fact I probably already knew where Wayne was. I had all the information. I just didn’t know what was relevant and what wasn’t.

  But, with a stab of fear, I realized I was winding down; my mental state was getting worse. My battery was starting to run out and I had to find Wayne before I was totally shanghaied.

  So was he driving around Connemara in a camper van looking at gorse, as Frankie had suggested? Well, if he was, good luck to him; Connemara was a big place, with a lot of gorse, and there was no way I was up to the task. Jay Parker had said Wayne was at a pie-eating competition in North Tipperary, but a quick Google search revealed there was no such thing.r />
  Roger St Leger, once he’d stopped being facetious, had said Wayne was ‘probably at home, hiding under the bed’. And what was it Zeezah had said? A throwaway remark about Wayne getting some TLC from his parents.

  Something clicked for me. It didn’t matter how much everyone said that Wayne wouldn’t be hiding somewhere obvious, it didn’t matter that Mrs Diffney had rung me in tears – I’d seen how loving his family were, and if he was in some sort of trouble it was really likely he’d make for them.

  And something else clicked into place. Listen to Zeezah.

  Then I thought: Had she really felt Roger St Leger’s crotch? Had she really?

  Clonakilty was 300 kilometres away, which meant a long drive ahead of me, listening to Tom Dunne on the radio. For a moment I felt there was a merciful God. I loved Tom Dunne. I really, really loved Tom Dunne. I was in genuine danger of becoming a Tom Dunne ‘window licker’.

  Before I embarked on my odyssey, I took a quick gander in Wayne’s bathroom mirror to check on how my injuries looked. My left eye was less bloodshot and although my forehead actually looked worse – the bruise was already going a dark purple colour – I covered it with my fringe. To look at me you wouldn’t know initially that I had a great big gash across the top of my face. This was good. I was about to engage with middle-class people and they tended to be wary around people who looked like they got into regular scraps.

  I wanted to ring Artie but it was too early. He’d probably ring me soon enough but Jay Parker was also bound to be ringing any minute now for the first of the day’s updates, and I couldn’t face breaking the news about the inactivity on Wayne’s credit cards, so I put my phone on silent.