The Child Before

by Michael Scanlon

  ‘Bully?

  ‘Yes,’ Claire said. ‘Makes me squirm when I think about it. In school, with the others, just to belong. I was part of a gang. Nothing heavy, just name calling. Just… Jesus. That’s bad enough. Usually we picked on the pretty ones, the nice, sweet sensitive girls, the girls we perceived a threat to our collective fragile ego. ‘Hey dyke bitch,’ stuff like that. I was such a stereotype. I was really talking about myself. Looking back, I hated myself. Because those girls were definitely not lesbians. I was. But I couldn’t deal with it. I was in the closet, hiding from nobody but myself. I owe a lot of people apologies from back then, if I ever meet them again that is.’ Claire sighed. ‘Anyway. In Dublin. Freedom. Total. Complete. Beautiful freedom. I didn’t just put my foot into the water, I jumped in, and to where it was deepest and wildest, and was swept along, allowing it to take me wherever it willed. The lipstick-femmes liked me – that’s girly lesbians, Beck. Hey, am I making you feel uncomfortable?’

  ‘No,’ Beck said. ‘It’s quite a story. Continue.’

  ‘And I liked them,’ Claire continued. ‘I got quite the reputation, and I gloried in it. They liked me even more because of it. But Lucy Grimes was the one. Gregarious, spontaneous, funny and gorgeous – a perfect woman. I met her at a crime scene, Beck, to finally answer your question. She was freelancing for a daily newspaper. I was on sentry duty. We got chatting. The rest is history.’

  They stopped at a junction and turned right for Cross Beg. The sun was low in the sky now, suspended by the top of the cathedral steeple that looked down on the black slated roofs of the town. The road dipped and curved on its approach, following the contours of the land instead of any direct route, laid down for donkeys and pony traps rather than cars and trucks.

  ‘Hhmm,’ Beck said. ‘You’re lucky, to have found someone you love, and who loves you in return. That’s the perfect hand, better than any pair of aces. It’s what we’re all hot-wired to do, isn’t it? To find someone we want to be with. Yes, we all want that. But then, of course, being human, we usually go and mess it all up.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Beck?’

  He thought of Natalia. And knew again, that it was a fallacy, an illusion, that he was fooling himself. Because he didn’t want someone he could be with. He wanted someone he couldn’t be with. He wanted to be with Natalia, yes, but he didn’t want to be with her either. He didn’t want to be with her, he didn’t want to be with anyone. He couldn’t even be with himself.

  He looked out the window as they passed the roadside sign that announced ‘Welcome to Cross Beg’. A little further on the road became Main Street. Beck noticed two TV satellite trucks parked against the kerb, a film crew on the street, cameraman and reporter. He watched the reporter approach a woman who stopped to talk to them.

  ‘One more day,’ Beck said. ‘That’s what they’ll give us, before they turn their attention on us, before we become the story, and they’ll be down on us like the proverbial ton of bricks.’

  Claire turned into the car park of the station and parked next to the custody door, where prisoners were brought in and out. She cut the engine.

  In the Ops Room he went with her to her desk, glancing over at Sergeant Connor who had just come in from the public office. He stopped by the window and looked out. The weather had dropped a couple of degrees today. The sky was edged by soft grey clouds. He could see through the gaps in the buildings outside a window to the mountains in the distance, partially obscured behind a grey mist.

  ‘The rain is coming,’ he said.

  Fifty-Two

  She smelled of soap and antiseptic when Crabby embraced her. She did not get up, so he had to bend down. He could feel her slender back beneath his hands, her ribcage brittle like dried wood. She reached up and touched his shoulders briefly, before she took her hands away again and held them once more in her lap.

  She did not tell him to take a seat. She did not say anything. He could see it in her eyes. Hurt. And a brooding anger.

  ‘Did they tell you I was no longer for this world or something? Well, I’m healthy as an auld trout you’ll be sad to know.’

  The remark rubbed against his conscience like rough sandpaper.

  He stood there, his hands by his side, like a little boy again.

  After a moment she cleared her throat, dropped her head and turned her eyes up to look at him. Like a sly observation. Then, deciding that he had been suitably chastised, she parted her lips into a weak smile.

  ‘At least you didn’t forget me completely a grá. Thank you for the hampers. Will you put an extra box of biscuits in next time? I share them out with the others.’

  He went to the bed. It had a foam headboard and two pillows, a beige-coloured duvet. He thought of the coarse wool blanket of before. Maurice sat down on the bed uninvited.

  ‘You look well,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’d say you haven’t changed a bit, but then that’d be a lie. You have changed. It’s been a year after all. Did you have to go so long without seeing me? Ashamed are you? Of your own mother? A grá it breaks my heart.’

  And in that little question was piled the rubbish, the detritus, the broken bits of… himself.

  Yes! I am ashamed.

  But he didn’t say that.

  ‘There’s been another one,’ he said.

  She was reaching to the top of the dresser beside her bed, searching for something, her eyes narrowing in concentration.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘There’s been another one. You probably heard.’

  She found it, a radio bingo book.

  ‘I heard nothing. I don’t listen to the news. I don’t read a newspaper. The world outside these walls does not exist to me. What do I care about news? They’ve got what?’

  ‘I didn’t say they got. I said there’s been another one. A baby. Disappeared.’

  She was holding the bingo book between two slender fingers, lifting it from the dresser. She dropped it now, withdrew her hand onto her lap.

  Her voice was a whisper. ‘Whose baby? Where?’

  ‘Her name is Samantha Power. She had the baby in the car with her. The baby is gone.’

  ‘What car? Where, I asked you?’

  ‘By our village. By Kelly’s Forge. The car was found. The mother was in it, but the baby wasn’t.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘The poor craytur. No sign of the child at all at all?’

  ‘No, just disappeared.’

  Her face crumpled, her eyes looking down into the tunnel of years that had passed, stepping into it now, going back in time. He could tell she was reliving it. Her eyes widened, snapping back into the present, throwing away the bloody cloak of memories that attempted to shroud her.

  ‘Where is the mother?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘She was murdered.’

  The old woman took an intake of breath and brought her hands to her face.

  ‘Why have you come here?’ the sound muffled behind her fingers.

  ‘It was I who found the body.’

  She took her hands away from her face again, looked at him with that same strange look.

  ‘Why have you come here?’ she asked once more, the voice insistent.

  ‘Because I am afraid.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?

  ‘That they will…’

  She laughed aloud.

  ‘That you will end up in here. In the room down the hall from me. Wouldn’t that be nice? Serve you right. So, you didn’t come here out of concern for me. You came here out of concern for yourself.’

  He couldn’t say anything to that. Because it was true.

  ‘They’ll do more than that to you my boy, you can be certain of it. You found the body, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you worry you’ll end up in the Big House. The Loony Bin. What about the prison, did you ever think of that?’
<
br />   ‘What do you mean?’

  She looked tired all of a sudden, very tired. She sucked in her cheeks and her eyes became her face, oversized, staring at him, the flesh around them like burnt, dry clay.

  ‘You look more and more like your father, do you know that?’ she said. ‘He left me to rot in here as well. They all did. Kathleen’s in the Big House and her name is never to be mentioned. Did he ever contact you again? No, he didn’t, did he? I can tell by the look in your eyes. You’re like your father. Selfish. Made a clean break of it so he did. After that one time when he came to see me, bringing you with him.’

  ‘He did stay in contact,’ Maurice whispered. ‘But he and uncle Paddy never got on.’

  ‘Ha, my brother Paddy was the one who took you in. Not your father.’

  It suited them, he wanted to say, they had no children of their own. I worked every hour under God’s sun for that pair. I was just another animal along with the donkey and the plough horse, just another beast of burden.

  ‘They say I killed a baby,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. ‘Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘I saw Michéal Peoples take her into the forest.’

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘Yes. Did you think I didn’t? Is that why you never mentioned it all these years?’

  ‘It was cursed that place. Better off that it rotted into the ground. We were all cursed living there. Even you. It was not just I who took the baby into the forest. There were others. Your sister was sick, Patrick.’ For the first time she had used his name. His proper Christian name. Patrick. ‘Weak children didn’t live long in Kelly’s Forge. The winters culled them. She’d had pneumonia. Her lungs were weak. She was coughing and coughing. In such pain. She was never going to get better, not back then. Slowly she was dying before our very eyes. It was a release for her, her passing. On that night she was coughing up blood. It never stopped. I was covered in it. She was so, so pale. Michéal Peoples decided. He was the village elder. We trusted him, and he decided that he would take her into the forest. Make her better, or let the forest take her. I followed them though. It was over in minutes. They offered her to the forest. And it was not the first time a sacrifice had been made. Later they said she was freed from suffering. Michéal Peoples promised the village would be freed from sickness. From calamity. For a while at least. Until the next time…

  Crabby felt the energy evaporating from his body, leaving it like a hollow shell. He felt as if he could collapse onto the floor and disintegrate into a million different pieces. His mouth was dry, as if coated in sand.

  ‘What? She died in the wood? She was offered? A sacrifice? What are you talking about?’

  ‘She was coughing blood. But it wasn’t the same. They needed a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice. They cut her throat.’

  Crabby got to his feet, but he felt his legs could not carry his weight, so he sat on the bed again.

  ‘Are you completely and utterly crazy? You really are, aren’t you. You’re crazy.’

  ‘Bernadette,’ she said. ‘Your baby sister. That’s what happened to her. The big policeman was right all along. I was half-deranged with the grief. They thought it was me. Of course. But it wasn’t. It was the others. It was the way of the village. Outsiders knew nothing of our ways, there were rumours of course, and gossip, mutterings as we passed by on the street, but no one knew, and what’s more, no one cared.’

  ‘No. I don’t believe it. You crazy bitch.’

  ‘Now. You tell this crazy bitch. Did you kill that girl? It’s in you, I have no doubt.’

  The way she asked. Direct. Cold. In your face.

  His own mother.

  Maurice leaned forward, twisting his hands together. He dropped his head, kept it there.

  She waited for an answer. He slowly got to his feet again, walked tentatively to the door, turned, stared at her.

  ‘Maybe I did kill her. Maybe I ripped her throat open. All that fresh, hot blood. Would you be proud of me, mother? Another sacrifice too, in a way.’

  His mother showed no emotion, her eyes still, unblinking. But then she slowly contorted her lips into a twisted smile.

  Crabby opened the door and stepped out of the room, closed it gently, and walked away.

  Fifty-Three

  Danny tugged on the peak of his baseball cap.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ he said, looking round. ‘But you don’t have plans, do you?’

  Vicky laughed.

  ‘Yes, I do, Danny. They’re in my head, that’s all’

  He removed the baseball cap and scratched his head, put it back on again. Both doors and all the windows in the old single storey house were open, a cool evening breeze blowing through. He pointed to the ceiling.

  ‘What’s going to happen with that? It’s just rotted plyboard.’

  She moved to the table in the centre of the room. It was covered in papers and home improvement magazines. She leaned over it. ‘Come here. See this.’ She fished out a sheet of paper and pushed it across the table towards him.

  Danny didn’t look at it. He was looking down her shirt.

  Vicky smiled, waited a moment, then straightened.

  ‘This is going to be one big room, pre-production facilities over there,’ she pointed. ‘And over there…’

  ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ Danny said. ‘Pre-production what? I thought you said this was a house renovation. That I can do, but…’

  Vicky placed her hands on her wide hips, stuck her chest out.

  ‘You know I do TV work, Danny, I freelance for production companies all the time.’

  Danny shrugged. He didn’t know the ins and outs of it.

  ‘Anyway, Danny, this girl has plans of her own. Pre-production is just a fancy name for fixtures and fitting. The real work takes place in Dublin, at a facility there. Look at my drawings, please.’

  Danny looked down now, his eyes running slowly over the neatly drawn plans.

  ‘OK, seems straightforward enough, seems doable’ he said after a while. He looked around again. ‘The walls have to come out.’ And looking up. ‘And that ceiling too, and the new one will need to be raised. I’ll need help with this, the roof especially.’

  Vicky smiled again.

  ‘Danny,’ she said sweetly. ‘Speaking of help. There’s something else that you can help me with.’

  His eyes fell away from the roof and settled on her. He suddenly looked like a little boy.

  ‘Is there,’ he said. ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘You’ve heard of Angela’s Ashes, Danny, haven’t you?’ Vicky said, clearing away papers from the table top and placing a mug of coffee down in front of him.

  He picked it up and took a sip, cradled it in his hands.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ he said.

  ‘Well, suffice to say, it’s an epic of woe, in the tradition of Irish suffering, if I can put it like that.’

  A vacant look crossed Danny’s face.

  ‘I’m going to do something similar, Danny,’ she said. ‘But centred on Cross Beg, on recent developments, and old ones too…’

  ‘Can I be honest, Vicky,’ Danny said. ‘But you’ve lost me.’

  ‘I’m going to make a documentary about what happened in 1954, Danny. Remember, a baby disappeared. And I’m going to tie it in with what’s happening now, with Samantha Power’s baby, and how she was murdered. I’m going to build a chronicle between the past and present, a crossover if you will, between the History Channel and True Detective. Something like that.’

  Danny took a sip of coffee.

  ‘Still lost,’ he said. ‘Anyway, that was a long time ago. There’s no connection between the two, what happened then and now, is there? No one even remembers it.’

  ‘No matter. Can’t you see? It’ll make for great TV. I’m going to use the current investigation as a backdrop. And I’m going to do some digging of my own.’

  ‘Ah,’ Danny said, ‘like your one in Murder She Wrote. That the kind of thing you mean?’

  ‘Ye
s, Danny, exactly… something like that anyway. And I need your help?’

  His eyes widened. ‘Me? How?’

  Vicky paused, then continued, her voice low, conspiratorial.

  ‘Samantha Power was in Crabby’s supermarket before she was killed, I heard about it. I heard the cops were in there for ages looking at the CCTV. I want that footage, Danny.’

  He frowned.

  ‘I dunno, that’s best left to the cops, Vicky… anyway, how am I supposed to help you get that?’

  Vicky gave a vague smile. ‘Because you do all the maintenance work right, don’t you?’

  Danny pursed his lips.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it maintenance work,’ he said. ‘More like bits and bobs. But it’s regular. A couple of times a week. I’m due in there day after tomorrow in fact. Here, I don’t want to upset Crabby now.’

  Vicky gave Danny her best smile yet, moved around the table, closer to him.

  ‘No one needs to know. I just want to get that CCTV. It’s straightforward. You give me a ring when you’re there, I go in and can have it all on a memory stick in seconds.’ She ran an index finger over the back of his hand.

  Danny looked down, but still, he shook his head.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of this,’ he said. ‘This sounds like trouble.’

  ‘It’s called investigative journalism,’ Vicky said. ‘And I’ll win an award for it one day. Especially if the cops can’t solve it, because you know what? I think I can.’

  Danny angled his head to the side as he looked at her.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘I think I know who killed Samantha Power,’ she said.

  His eyes narrowed.

  ‘You serious?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You’ve got to go to the gardai. You can’t keep that to yourself. Who is it?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘And what about the baby?… Ah no, Vicky, you’ve got to go to the cops.’