Buried Angels

by Patricia Gibney

  ‘What plans?’

  ‘Where you’re going to live.’

  ‘Oh, that. Right.’ Kirby curled his lip and dropped his eyes.

  Boyd forced himself up from the couch, conscious that Grace had not stirred throughout the conversation with Kirby. At the door, he said, ‘I’m trying to get back to work, you know.’

  ‘My advice is to take your time. Look after yourself first.’ Kirby put a hand on his arm and Boyd felt the pressure on his bones.

  ‘Desk duty, that’s all I want. Otherwise I’ll go mad. I need to have something to focus on other than myself.’ He desperately wanted to ask Kirby about the case Lottie had mentioned on the phone, but he didn’t want to put his friend in an awkward situation.

  ‘You have Grace to worry about now.’ Kirby hoisted the sagging bag onto the crook of his arm, sounding a little too like Lottie.

  ‘I don’t need anyone to worry about me,’ Grace said from the couch.

  ‘See?’ Boyd said.

  Once Kirby had gone, Boyd finished making the bed, this time with Grace helping.

  ‘I don’t want to take your bed,’ she said.

  ‘You’re having it,’ Boyd said. ‘No arguments.’

  ‘But you’re s—’

  ‘Do not say I’m sick, Grace. Please. Okay?’

  ‘That’s fine. I’ll go to bed now. You can have the couch. Goodnight.’

  Later, lying on the uncomfortable couch, still in his clothes, Boyd smiled. Grace was direct. No filter, his mother had always said. With so many people pussyfooting around him lately, he looked forward to some straight talking. His mother had been a straight talker too. Though he’d not seen her much in recent years, he missed her. And then for some unknown reason, he thought of his ex-wife, Jackie. Now why the hell had she popped into his mind? He hoped it wasn’t a forewarning of dire things to come. Bad news always preceded Jackie. Damn her.

  He would close his eyes just for a moment, to blot out her cheating image. Then he would fetch a blanket.

  Before he finished the thought, he was snoring.

  The ringing of his phone woke him ten minutes later.

  ‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ Lottie said when she heard Boyd’s voice yawn a hello.

  ‘No, I’m just getting ready for bed.’

  ‘Liar. You know you shouldn’t have driven back from Galway.’

  ‘Too late now.’ She heard the grin in his voice.

  ‘Your insurance won’t cover you if you crash.’

  ‘I’m a good driver.’

  ‘You’re having chemo treatment. Check your policy.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve already done so, Mrs Fussy Boots.’

  ‘I have. Don’t drive again, Boyd. Your brain is unbalanced from all the toxins you’re being fed. Chemo brain, it’s called. If you need to go anywhere, ask me.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘No need to be smart.’

  He laughed then. ‘Stop worrying, Lottie. I’m fine. I’m sure this week’s treatment will be the last. All my vitals were good last time. My consultant says the chemo is working. Don’t be worrying about me. I’m not going to die on you any time soon.’

  ‘I hope not.’ She stifled a sob.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Boyd said. ‘I’m so sorry, Lottie, that was thoughtless. You know me, I’d never—’

  ‘No, it’s okay. It’s not that.’ She found a tissue up her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘It’s the little girl. It’s breaking my heart. I need a drink.’ She hadn’t touched alcohol in months, and in truth, she knew she couldn’t stop if she started.

  ‘I’m coming over to you.’

  ‘If I need you, I’ll call round to yours. Okay?’ She was too jaded to think, let alone talk any more. ‘I don’t think I’ve even got a bottle of Coke in the house, let alone a bottle of wine.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come over?’ Boyd’s voice was laced with anxiety.

  ‘I’m certain. We’ll chat tomorrow.’

  ‘Lottie, I need to ask you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to go back to work. Let me help with the investigation.’

  ‘No way. Don’t even think about it.’

  ‘Send me the file, then. I’ll have a read of it here. Please let me do something.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said wearily.

  Her bones creaked as she moved off her couch. She switched off the sitting room light and shut the door before turning out the hall light. She checked the lock was secure on the front door and pulled the security chain across. Was Chloe home? Shit, she couldn’t remember if her daughter was working in the pub tonight. She’d have to go upstairs and check. She heard Louis cry out in his sleep.

  ‘Are you gone?’ Boyd said.

  Lottie realised she was still on the call. ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

  ‘I really want to help.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘I love you,’ Boyd said.

  ‘I know you do.’ She hung up and crept up the stairs.

  Twenty-Five

  She shouldn’t have got into the car without double-checking who was driving. But it was their car, she was sure of it. The little china Liverpool FC ball that Jeff had bought at a match last year hung from the rear-view mirror. But how …? She was certain of one thing. She’d made a huge mistake.

  A violent pain surged in her stomach, and she turned over and vomited yellow bile onto the sticky floor. The liquid seeped beneath her prone body, and she felt it bleed through her clothes. She gagged from the smell, but nothing else came forth from the depths of her being. She hoped that whatever she had sipped from the water bottle beside her had not harmed her baby. Please flutter again, little butterfly, she urged the child in her womb. But there was nothing, save for the nausea burning away at her intestines.

  She hadn’t the energy to lift her head to orientate herself, but she figured she was in a small enclosed space. Her feet touched a wall. Slowly she reached forward, and her fingers brushed another wall. She raised them upwards, but they flashed through the air. At least the ceiling wasn’t pressing down on her. She tried to see through the darkness, to lift herself on her elbow, but she couldn’t move. She thought she could see a star in a black sky above her. Was she hallucinating?

  Fear gripped her insides like a hand squeezing a stress ball, and she dry-retched. She tried to shout out, but she heard only the echo of a strangled cry, like the cat she had disturbed in Jeff’s aunt’s house. Where was she?

  Slowly she turned sideways, the pool of bile spreading beneath her as she moved. Here, the darkness was complete. It was so intense she could feel it as if it were a solid mass. Who had taken her? She had originally thought it was their car and the driver was Jeff, so she had not hesitated in sliding in when the door opened. But once the central locking clicked into place, she was totally aware that it was not Jeff.

  Stupid.

  The driver had been vaguely familiar. But who was he and why did he have their car? And where was Jeff? She hoped he was okay. A mad thought streaked through her brain. Had Jeff arranged this? Because she went to the guards about the skull? That fucking skull. She wished she’d never picked up the hammer and smashed it into the wall. Now she and her unborn baby were trapped in this coffin-like dark hole with an imaginary star above her.

  Her breathing came in short, sharp bursts as panic set in. She had to calm down. She had to get out. But she didn’t know where she was. Her breathing increased at an alarming rate, and her heart beat so quickly she was sure it would burst out of her ribcage.

  And then the space filled with light.

  ‘Now, missy.’

  She could not be sure it was the same person who’d taken her in the car.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know everything you know.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Her throat felt raw, as if it belonged to someone else.

  ‘Tell me how you knew the skull was in that particular p
lace.’

  ‘Didn’t know. Accidental. No idea.’ She caught her breath. ‘How could I?’

  ‘You think I believe that bullshit? Don’t fucking mess with me. How did you know it was there, and what else did you find? What do you know about me?’

  ‘I … I don’t know what you mean. Found nothing. Only a … skull.’ She was finding it harder to breathe, to concentrate on the words. Her mind was mush, words floating …

  She followed the trajectory of the voice. She couldn’t make out the face and fear travelled so quickly through her body that bile had spewed out of her mouth before she even retched.

  ‘I … need a towel. Something. Please.’ Another wave engulfed her, and she cried out. Pain split her abdomen in two and she thought she had been stabbed. But it was coming from inside. Deep in her womb. Her baby objecting to the frantic emotions racking its once placid watery environment.

  A hand came down. She sensed it like a cold breeze before it struck. The contact sliced open the wound on her face.

  She cried out again. Tasted the blood as it curled into her mouth. ‘My baby. I’m pregnant. Please don’t hurt my baby …’

  ‘You’d better tell me what you know.’

  Emotionless. That was how she would describe the voice if that tall, exhausted-looking detective asked her. A deadpan voice devoid of anything. And that made her blood freeze. No matter what she said, she was not getting out of this alive. She thought of all she had planned for her and Jeff. The love and happiness in her future, her baby, her life. All for nothing. All about to end in the darkness of the unknown, the unseen.

  She had no answers to the shouted questions. And then he was silent.

  Despair made her eyelids close. The cold steel cut into her back, and she heard it snap one of her ribs. The pain might be worse than childbirth, but she’d never know the intensity of that miracle. Never know the joy of holding a new life in her arms.

  The knife was extracted and her body spasmed, but her cries were not for herself. She was crying for the little life that would never see daylight. She was dying. She knew that. As the knife entered her body again, she ignored the torture within which she became engulfed and concentrated on the final soft fluttering in her womb before it ceased all movement.

  Then, at last, Faye gave way to her pain, to the horror and terror, slipping silently into an eternal world with her final thought.

  She would see her baby at last.

  Twenty-Six

  The moon held the sky captive in a surreal light, shining down on the canal and making the water look like something out of a Disney movie. Jack Sheridan had watched from his window as the garda forensic team and divers worked in and around the canal. Now they were tidying up for the night, and a few officers stood around guarding the site.

  There was nothing else out there tonight. Not that there was on any other night. Except for … No, he didn’t want to think about that. He couldn’t upset his parents any more.

  He jumped off his bed and rooted in the bottom of the dresser drawer for his binoculars. Mam had bought them for his ninth birthday, when he’d told her he was interested in birds. I hope it’s the feathered kind, his daddy had laughed. He used to laugh more back then, Jack thought. Not like now. Now his daddy was … Jack tried to think of the word. Maybe … uneasy? Sick? He shook his head.

  With the binoculars clutched in his hands, he raised them to his eyes and focused them. They weren’t much good really. Maybe he could ask for night-vision goggles for his next birthday. But he was told when he got the drone last year that he wasn’t getting any more expensive presents. They couldn’t afford them. Couldn’t even afford to finish Mam’s dream kitchen.

  He watched intently. The divers divested themselves of their suits, working swiftly under lights that had been erected earlier in the evening. He’d love to know what was going on in the tent with the blue roof and white sides. What had they found in the water? Was it more parts of the body? He shivered and dropped the binoculars, which thudded against his chest.

  He didn’t want to think about what he and Gavin had found on the tracks. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it made him feel sick. He hoped it wasn’t someone he knew. And he hoped whoever had put it there didn’t know he was the one who had found it.

  He folded up the strap of his binoculars and slid them back into their case. Then he pulled down the blind on the window and fell onto his bed. He put his hand under the pillow and felt for the tiny USB stick. He had downloaded last night’s images onto it. He wasn’t sure what they were, but somehow he knew they might be important. He had no idea what to do with the USB. He just knew he had to keep it safe until he figured everything out.

  He wrapped his fingers around the tiny stick and stayed that way for a long time, wondering how Gavin was doing.

  The duvet cover was sopping wet from her tears. Ruby O’Keeffe did not care. Her PlayStation flickered and her phone vibrated with notifications, but she ignored them all.

  She stared. Stared hard. The photograph in the silver frame on her bedside cabinet mocked her. She must have been aged about six or seven, always a tomboy. Dad standing beside her. Fishing rods in hand. And a sick-looking fish dangling from the hook he was holding. Happy times. Or were they? Had it all been an illusion? A smokescreen to hide what was really going on in his life. Ruby wanted to lash out and knock the photo to the floor. To get up out of bed and smash it into tiny pieces.

  But she did none of those things. She just lay there staring at the smile on her dad’s face.

  The longer she stared at the photo, the more she thought the smile was not a very nice one.

  The longer the night wore on, the harder her heart grew.

  By morning light, Ruby O’Keeffe was convinced she hated her father.

  *

  Twenty years earlier

  They were all dead. My mother and sisters. I’d seen the blood. I had to escape.

  I climbed out of the window and ran as fast as I could. I ran as if I was on the heels of the wind itself. I ran as if the devil was in pursuit. I heard his footsteps, trundling through the grassy field behind me.

  My feet were bare and torn. Blood stained my hands and probably my face, but I didn’t care about that. I had to keep running.

  I veered away from the canal and into the field on the right, following its natural trajectory. Though it was dark, I could see the rusted steel wheels and pits. I skirted around them without dropping my pace. I knew I was in the middle of the old filter beds. We had played here, my sisters and I. An out-of-bounds warren of adventure. Now it was a snare, a treacherous hazard, and my feet would betray me at any second. But I could not slow down. I did not want to think what might happen if he caught me.

  Before me, the road intersected the land like a long grey snake. Beyond it was the graveyard. I thought it might give me protection. A place for the dead to hide; a place where no one would look for a living being. But how to get across the road unseen?

  He was somewhere behind me. I struggled to listen, to hear anything above the crashing thumps of my heart. The birds were silent in the trees, but I heard the rustling leaves and the scurrying of small creatures in the grass about my feet.

  I had no plan. No reason. No skill.

  I was fourteen years old.

  I had to escape.

  With a hurried glance up and down the road, I flew across the tarmac as though I had wings on my bleeding heels.

  No! Too late I realised that there was a thick chain with a rusted padlock on the tall graveyard gate.

  I ran along the wall, hoping for a way through. Monster trees loomed out over the dark road, their shadows like angry claws, urgent in their quest to snap me into their midst.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. A human hand. And I knew then that there was only one way I could ever escape.

  Twenty-Seven

  Tuesday

  Lottie knocked on Chloe’s door and entered her daughter’s bedroom.

  Chloe sat u
p with a start. ‘What’s wrong? House on fire?’

  ‘Not this time.’ Lottie sat on the side of the bed. ‘I want to talk to you about Instagram.’

  ‘Mam! It can’t even be five o’clock in the morning.’ Chloe pulled the pillow over her head.

  ‘It’s six thirty.’

  ‘It’s like, still night-time. I was working till twelve. Let me sleep.’

  ‘I will. But first you have to explain Instagram.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You’re not going away, are you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Chloe sat up and dragged her phone out from under the other pillow, charging cable attached.

  ‘Don’t even start,’ she said, catching Lottie’s look of horror. She tapped the screen. ‘It’s just people’s stories.’

  ‘How can someone get stuff gifted?’ Lottie said.

  ‘If you advertise for free, a company will send you products. I don’t really know how, but it’s way cooler than Facebook.’

  ‘Can you check if Tamara Robinson is on it?’

  ‘Tamara? She’s like … huge.’

  ‘Really? I never heard of her before yesterday.’

  ‘She’s a massive cosmetics influencer. I’ve spent a week’s wages based on her recommendations.’

  ‘You did not.’

  ‘I did so.’ Chloe tapped the phone and turned it towards Lottie again. ‘See those there? They’re people’s stories.’ She tapped one of the circles. ‘That’s Tamara.’

  Lottie took the phone and watched as Tamara Robinson demonstrated how to apply eyeshadow, all the time showing the brand of the palette she was using. The young woman looked beautiful. ‘Is she paid for doing this?’

  ‘I don’t know if she gets like a salary, but she gets products for free.’

  ‘Maybe you could try doing this, Chloe. Then you wouldn’t have to spend all your wages on make-up.’