The Sleeping Season

by Kelly Creighton

  ‘I never even tried it,’ Father said.

  ‘But you’re stronger than most,’ I said, tucking the food inside one cheek.

  He skimmed me with a cold eye. ‘Smartness doesn’t suit you, Harriet.’

  Father held his cup up, embarrassed that it was so dainty he had to hold his pinkie out. ‘We paid a lot for your educations,’ he said.

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  ‘Not. A. Penny.’

  ‘Good,’ I murmured.

  ‘There are people who had an opinion about your mother and I giving five children a private school education. They were the ones who smoked – you could be certain of it every time. People are happy to spend money poisoning themselves but they look down their noses at you for investing in your children’s future. They’re always the very same people who are running around, shouting for the whole world to hear, if and when their own children get accepted into university. They don’t mind paying out then because then they can gloat … complain and gloat at the same time.’

  He drank the balance of his tea, squeezed the porcelain handle. He was a different man, from all those self-assured years in the RUC; this other version wondering when his retirement was going to come into play.

  ‘People should speak up more for what they believe in,’ Father said. ‘People should do what they want, and make sure that when they are saying yes they are not saying no to themselves.’

  ‘I know that. You and Mummy always taught me that.’

  I thought about Sorcha Seton and how she had been unable to speak up. I remembered her saying she suspected there was something up with Donald Guy, but a mix of worrying about offending him and the kind of things he would say back to her, and her underlying pity for him stopped her from speaking out. Her discomfort about saying something like I’m going to use another babysitter ended with her boy Rhys being molested time after time.

  ‘What’s Coral going to do about Gus?’ Father asked. ‘If she’d listen to me she’d take him to the police station and get him talked to. You and I he wouldn’t listen to. He needs a scare from a stranger.’

  ‘Bit extreme,’ I said. ‘Look, I hardly see Coral these days. It’d seem rude … coming from me.’

  It was Gus turning out like Brooks was what he was really afraid of. Were cigarettes a gateway to heroin?

  ‘Charlotte couldn’t come with us today because Timothy has an appointment about his hips,’ Father said as he mopped egg yolk up with a soldier of soda farl and pasted the leftovers into the cup of a mushroom.

  ‘I’ll have to call her.’

  I took advantage of the lull in the conversation to finish my lunch.

  Father left a twenty beside our plates. We walked alongside knick-knack stands and baby-grows emblazoned with corny and often sectarian logos.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Father muttered, ‘putting your family values on your child’s clothing.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Next time, you choose the place, Daddy,’ I said.

  We walked to my apartment, where I buzzed him into the visitors’ car park to fetch his car. He climbed in.

  ‘I still think Monaghan was your best bet. I think that’s where the boy is. I think it’s obvious now, the outcome,’ he said.

  But I didn’t want to hear it. I closed his door and walked off.

  Chapter 24

  I limbered up that evening, ran over Queen’s Bridge against the traffic and back towards my apartment. Working off my anger. Thinking, running, processing.

  At the station the plates were being checked on Shane’s jeep. No doubt it had been re-sprayed and was over the water already, or burnt out. Sometimes vehicles showed up in Housing Executive grounds that had unused storage. Owners in the Armagh area were asked to check their garages. I had asked Shane if he’d reported the jeep stolen. He told me he hadn’t. What was the point? It had no tax, no insurance.

  As I ran, I thought of Shane’s brittle scalloped fingernails and his hands, one on top of the other, quivering slightly on the edge of the table. His leg had jiggled, knocking against the table. His nerves must be shot.

  When we took Shane back to his house in Brandon Terrace, he had lifted his mobile phone from the kitchen counter and looked at Linskey and I as if to say, Here it is. I told you. He pressed the screen.

  ‘Battery’s dead,’ he’d said and rummaged for a charger. ‘River,’ he added.

  ‘What’s that, Shane?’ I asked.

  ‘River … he always moves my charger – transports everything.’

  Did he transport his coat too? I wanted to ask. We had questioned Shane about the coat again in the interview room. Unsurprisingly he knew nothing.

  Shane’s kitchen had smelled clean, clean but metallic. The windows had been on the latch for days. It was cold as a tomb.

  ‘Are you renting here?’ Linskey asked.

  ‘Yep,’ Shane said, still palming his mobile. He gave up looking for the charger, perhaps thinking it was for the best that he couldn’t turn his phone on.

  Thinking about Shane and his mobile made me wonder about his mother. How had Margaret McGuire let him know she was unwell?

  We went into his living room while he went upstairs to get changed for the station. An overhead light doubled as a fan and had a chain hanging from it. The room was scattered with toys – Ben 10, Power Rangers, mainly little figures. Having nephews who were about ten years old I knew they were toys for older boys, not the kind of things River might have been into. Shane had probably got them cheap from a charity shop for his weekend home. There was the comic his neighbour saw him buy in the shop: The Simpsons, a new issue. Six DVDs were stacked by the TV.

  ‘Shane, don’t do anything with those clothes,’ Linskey shouted. ‘Remember, there may be DNA of the carjackers on them. If they’re in the database—’

  ‘I don’t care about the car,’ he shouted down the stairs, cutting Linskey off.

  It’s easy not to care about something when it isn’t yours, I thought. Linskey raised her eyebrows, then cocked her head to listen out for anything more he might want to say.

  ‘Still, we need to take them,’ she said.

  ‘Finding River is the main thing now,’ Shane said, walking into the room. ‘That, and being there for Zee.’ The same pet name Raymond had for Zara.

  For three days River had been the main thing, the only thing we cared about, even though he wasn’t ours. Shane and Zara seemed too calm, but grief – and it was grief, in a way, because they were both anticipating the possibility of it – it worked on people differently. For Zara, I could tell that it had outdistanced her.

  Then Shane escorted us to the front door to say goodbye. His black bin was the only one in the street. He gave us a nod, opened the bin lid a crack and peered in, shut it and bounced it up the kerb to pull it through the house.

  *

  I ran home, got into the shower and thought about River. The poor little soul, stunted, and slipping, out there alone in the cold.

  Linskey phoned me. It wasn’t often she did that.

  ‘Do you remember Brody Pottinger?’ she asked. ‘Remember Sandy Hammitt was talking about him and his mother Verda?’

  ‘Yes …?’

  ‘I was just about to go off shift when Brody walked in. I lingered at the desk because I thought I recognised him. I know it was ten years ago, but this fella had these big sad looking eyes that you just don’t forget.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said as I squeezed the ends of my hair inside a towel.

  ‘He said he wanted to report a case of long-term abuse. They got him a room, and I hung around to find out.’

  ‘Was he there about Verda?’

  ‘He was. So I said that I used to work on his case, that I have a vested interest.’

  ‘You aren’t leaving me, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Linskey said.

  ‘What age is he now?’

  ‘Seventeen. He’s saying his mother hid him in the roofspace, that she abused him for years.’

  ‘Did he say why
she did it?’

  ‘Liked the attention.’

  ‘Christ!’ I said. ‘We do everything in our power to get a child back with their parents but we can’t help what happens afterwards.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ replied Linskey.

  I thought about Brody Pottinger, Sandy Hammitt and his interest in true crime. I thought about the fact that his information was on the money. That night, it felt to me that Sandy Hammitt must have known the case was about to be reopened. I intended to ask if I could work on Brody’s case, once we got River back. And we would get River back – I was adamant we would.

  What I wanted to do was to look into Verda Dolan to see if I could see anything of her in Zara. I wanted to see if she had cried like Zara, if Brody’s mother had a history of tying the boy up in his room too.

  Chapter 25

  The next morning Markus Gourley, the video analyst, looked at multiple screens in front of him, his glasses on top of his head. He pointed at one screen, like a black-and-white blinking eyeball.

  ‘This is us here,’ he said. He took off his glasses and swung them by the leg, put the end in his mouth. ‘And there’s Donald, standing there.’ He zoomed in so we could see better.

  The picture was blurred and grainy, but I saw the innards of the warehouse, the outline of a man in a dark fleece counting items on a shelf, writing something down on a piece of what looked like cardboard.

  ‘He’s there one minute,’ said Markus, ‘then the whole rest of the shift – from twelve o’clock till four – he’s gone.’

  My skin crept. The thought of River abducted by a paedophile. I hadn’t truly believed it until now.

  ‘So he did leave work?’ I asked.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ said Markus. He put his glasses down on the end of his nose and removed the video tape from the player. ‘Now you can get the bastard lifted,’ he said, hiking his thumb at the door.

  *

  I was prepping paperwork, sorting through notes, when the woman who lived next door to Zara phoned the station, asking for me directly. Vanessa Bermingham – Ness, as Raymond had called her – wanted to come in to talk. I tried to find out from Ness what she wanted without the need for a meet. We had this information on Donald Guy and we needed to speak to him as a priority, find out where he had been.

  Ness was coming in at nine in the morning. She couldn’t talk at the house, which made me think maybe she had something important for us, something that Zara hadn’t been told about. Could it have been about Raymond’s death? It seemed straight forward, but perhaps his wheezing like a bicycle pump, his general ill health, was throwing Linskey and I off the scent of a crime. Since I had turned thirty-seven, forty-five seemed youthful, relatively speaking, but technically Raymond was middle-aged.

  I got the impression that even as a boy he would have been a placatory character, the polar opposite of River’s personality, by all accounts. How would a man like Raymond have kept up with the boy? And Zara, too, afraid to take River out in case she ended up getting into an argument with someone over his behaviour. You couldn’t be a hermit and be a good parent, surely. But Zara was tough, although she gave off a vibe that a softer centre was in there, underneath it all.

  Ness entered the room, a short woman with soft jowls and a too-small mouth, incessantly tucking her titanium locks behind one ear. She wore a camel-coloured twinset teamed with black trousers; on her feet were unbranded white trainers.

  First off, she told us about a car she had seen driving around.

  ‘I’ve already given a witness statement to Sergeant Simon and Constable Higgins,’ she said, ‘and I didn’t remember anything significant in the first lot of hours after River’s disappearance, but now things are coming back to me. They said, if you remember anything …’

  ‘What kind of things, Ness?’

  ‘This car, it would drive around after midnight. I’d thought nothing of it until yesterday.’

  ‘What type of car was it?’

  ‘I have no idea. A small car.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. Dark-coloured.’

  ‘Did you take down the number plate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has it driven about since River went missing?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Isn’t that strange?’ She drew in a sharp breath. It turned out that she did this after every statement made that she agreed with, even when she had made the statement herself. It was highly irritating and enough to put us off talking to her for long.

  ‘Is it possible that it was someone visiting or someone who lives further down the road?’ I asked her.

  Ness drew her lips tight then she slowly relaxed them, exposing tea-stained teeth. I knew that she sat watching out of her window every night. She probably knew everyone’s business.

  ‘There’s nowhere to go,’ she told us. ‘Anywhere else you can get to directly some other way. This car, it usually slows down outside Zara and Raymond’s, then does a turn and heads back out.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw the car?’

  ‘The start of last week – Monday, a week ago.’

  Linskey took notes. ‘That’s helpful. Many thanks for coming in,’ she said.

  Ness drew another breath. She wasn’t ready to leave just yet. She stayed where she was, adding that a parcel came for her address and that she opened it before realising her mistake.

  ‘It was something perverted,’ she said, her eyes all big. ‘It was a video, for sex. It was for Raymond.’ Ness creased her face at us, wanting reassurance that we knew what she was talking about without her having to describe it. ‘A porn film.’ Sharp breath.

  ‘Did you give him the parcel?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it would have been obvious that I’d seen it. It was opened – DVDs of girls – and you know what, they were wee-weeing on each other.’ She picked at her eyelashes.

  I thought about Ness watching it out of curiosity.

  ‘Then there’s this man,’ she said, when she saw we weren’t interested in this information about Raymond. ‘He wears a hoodie, walks his dog by the house at five in the morning, goes to the bottom of the street and turns.’ Another sharp little breath.

  ‘Can you tell us any more about him? What height is he?’

  ‘Average height for a man.’

  ‘His build.’

  ‘He’s a chunky bug. Stocky.’

  ‘The dog?’

  ‘Sorry, you must think I’m of no use,’ Ness said.

  Linskey was quick to reassure her that she was far from useless.

  ‘The dog left a big pockle of dirt in my front garden once. That’s why I started watching out, in case the man lets his dog do its business there to annoy me ’cus I was banging the bedroom window at him. And then you wonder if you should have made such a fuss. I was a bit scared then, the way he looked up at me.’

  ‘Did you see his face?’

  ‘A bit. His hood was up, sure. Always is.’

  I got the feeling we weren’t giving Ness what she needed, which was attention. But who would know how to expose a family better than the person who lives next door?

  ‘Ness, is it true that River is a bit of a climber? Has he ever climbed into your trees, for instance?’ I knew I was being as subtle as a blade. Linskey threw me a look as if to say it was a waste of time asking.

  ‘He is.’ Ness nodded. ‘Zara and I had words often enough about it. He snapped a bough, you see. What happened was, River was messing all the neighbours about – not intentionally but just boisterous. If you told him off he’d give you the doe eyes. It takes a community to raise a child, I told Zara when she came to my door, nearly having a nervous breakdown. She’s overprotective. All I said to him was “Ach, come on River, you’re going to fall and hurt yourself or break something.” Zara was screaming, roaring she was, that if my cat so much as looked at her wrong she’d complain to the council about him.’ Ness sighed.

  ‘What does that matter now?’ she asked. ‘Zara just couldn�
��t grasp that I was trying to look after my property, same as anyone would. But she must think I’m soft that she comes to my door and shouts at me. Everyone in the street has had issue with River and she never went near any of them. Zara knows they wouldn’t stand for it, whereas I, for a good year, was at her beck and call. I’d get her groceries, get Raymond his lotto done, even though she’s not working. All she does is a breastfeeding class in the community centre and that’s the height of it. But him and her not working, missy got too comfortable.

  ‘Then my son came around one day and saw everything I was doing for them, and me not well myself. He told me they were a bunch of entitled moochers and made me promise to stop. So if she asked me to get Raymond his lotto I was to say no. After that, after I stopped being their skivvy, Zara turned on me, dirty looks and all, and then the time River was in the tree, when I told him to get down, she went biccies. So we never spoke again … until Monday. Once River went missing it was a different story. I went to get them some shopping. I just hope she doesn’t expect it from me all the time. I wouldn’t really mind but – don’t think poorly of me – it’s just that she wouldn’t give you the steam off her piss in return. I’d do anything for anybody who’d show the same compassion back. Zara’d give you nothing – not a hello, not an ounce of patience. She’s what you’d call a user. Anyone with a bit of humanity goes into their house and anyone with a scrap of sense doesn’t make a habit of it.’

  ‘What about the other neighbours?’ I asked. ‘We heard there was an incident involving a neighbour putting their hands on the boy.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ness. ‘River ruined the ornaments in Ian’s front yard. He had the poor child by the scruff. Zara went mad at that, right enough, but I couldn’t blame her – he’s a horrible, horrible, little man. Small man syndrome, that’s what he has. All the kids hate him. But River kept running away. Zara told me once, when I was delivering their lotto tickets, that she’d get these calls to the door and it would be someone or other returning the child to her and she didn’t even know he’d gone. River would wait until Zara was loading laundry or washing the dishes and then he’d let himself out. And I remember, when I used to be in there after getting them shopping, when someone kept phoning and hanging up and they both seemed very fidgety. Raymond and Zara.’