Raymond was gone and Shane had now taken his place on the sofa. Man of the house. He was wearing a grey hoodie and jeans. The swelling on his face had not gone down; it had just got darker. He was holding her hand.
‘There probably won’t be any news now,’ said Zara. ‘I feel like one of those mums who has to live in limbo for years – for the rest of her life – not knowing. That’s it. It’s all done now. It’s been five days.’
Shane tightened his hand around hers. There were no tears any longer. There was a sad acceptance that was strange to me. I thought it might be because Zara was including her son while she grieved for Raymond. Two birds one stone. She was mentally preparing herself for the darkest part.
The weird doll that had been on the seat was away. In its place was that sad little cross-stitch cushion, the one about the messy house and children, only there was no mess and no child. The wind whistled down the chimney above the remains of long-dead fire.
‘We’re looking into a few lines of enquiry, Zara,’ Linskey told her. ‘We’ll solve this.’ She was saying this for Shane’s benefit and we kept our eyes on him, but he continued to look at Zara’s hand, at her chipped nails and frayed cuticles. I never saw her biting her nails, like I never saw her smoke, but I knew she did both. She was the kind of woman you could never imagine doing the things she did. I thought about her in Kassie’s house, having the cheek to play wet nurse to someone else’s baby. She didn’t look as if she’d have it in her to be so audacious.
We wanted to ask Zara about the neighbour who throttled River but didn’t want Shane to hear. We didn’t want him to think he was off the hook. Shane was a compulsive liar, a fraudster, a tax evader. I wanted to let him know that these were offences that would, in time, be dealt with.
‘Shane, Mr Cleary said that he gave you a letter on Wednesday, is that right?’ I asked.
He looked baffled. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘What was the letter about?’
‘Is this necessary?’ said Zara.
Linskey was looking at me as though she was thinking the same thing.
‘That’s right – it was my phone contract,’ he said.
‘Shane, were you getting credit at another address?’
‘Yes,’ he said and looked me dead in the eye, daring me to do something about it.
‘The guards have been looking for you over loan applications made in other people’s names.’
Linskey frowned as if to say not now.
‘I’m not perfect,’ Shane said. ‘I’ve made mistakes.’
These things were small fry to him. I just needed to let him know that there was the stain of suspicion on him that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. But he was confessing too easily. He was using it as a deterrent.
‘Okay, we’ll get to that soon,’ said Linskey. ‘You’re obviously aware that you’ve been operating on the wrong side of the law, Shane.’
I could tell by his face that he wasn’t aware. He had no record, a couple of cautions. But hurting people, violence, was not part of his history. It was greed that had got him every time.
‘Zara,’ said Linskey, crouching down to her level like she was a child, ‘tell me, is there anyone else you think we should talk to? Is there anyone with a grievance against you or your family?’
Shane was staring at Zara, waiting for her response.
‘Being a parent means you’re ten per cent uncomfortable all the time,’ Zara said. ‘You’re expected to bond with strangers because they are parents too. Because they had sex around the same time you did.’ She scoffed. ‘When you have a kid like River it becomes more like fifty per cent. People have grievances with me every day because he can’t behave. It’s invisible disabilities, isn’t it? Because he just stares at them. I overheard his nursery teacher say that he gave her the creeps. A four-year-old giving her the creeps? Talking about River as if he’s an adult who’s responsible for his behaviour.’
There was a tear in Shane’s eye. His nose twitched. He looked up and down, avoided looking at anyone in particular, his hand was still around Zara’s.
‘I know it’s hard,’ said Linskey. ‘We expect kids to all get along when we adults can’t manage it, and we’re better equipped apparently.’
Zara smiled thankfully. ‘River doesn’t try to annoy people,’ she said. ‘He’s just brimming over with energy. All day long. He can’t sit still. He has this little thing in his brain that makes him get up to mischief, but he’d never hurt anybody. That’s what annoyed me about these other mums. You’d think he was trying to harm their kids or that he was something less than their kids. How would they like it if it had been their son born like that? He’s a pure-hearted boy. Their kids are the ones who fight … and lie.’
We watched a marked police car slowly drive past outside. Zara ran to the window. But it went to one of the semis at the end of the street. I called through to see why it was there. It was for Ian, the little blond man who almost throttled River. There was a warrant for his arrest. Apparently, he pulled a kitchen knife on a twelve-year-old for riding a scrambler past his window and taunting him by calling him Ian Anus.
‘I know him,’ Zara said. ‘River went into his yard once and he got River by the neck. You need a licence to own a dog! he said to me. He’s an ignorant old pig.’
‘What’s he done?’ Shane asked, but I stayed silent.
This Ian man was brought out of the house and put into the police car. The neighbours were flocking outside. ‘Good riddance!’ one shouted.
‘The neighbours will tell me if you won’t,’ said Zara, looking out of the window. ‘They like me again now … now they think I’m someone to pity.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me he had River by the scruff?’ Shane asked her.
Zara sneered. ‘The epilepsy diagnosis is just the start,’ she said, ignoring his question. ‘The label doesn’t change anything. It just means I can say, my boy has a condition. It’s not his fault.’ Zara started to sob. ‘I’m never going to get over this.’
Shane got up and walked to her, held her in his arms. He put his chin on her head and rubbed her back; the cuff of his jumper went up.
There was a scorch mark on his wrist.
Chapter 38
‘Three days,’ Jason threatened me. But it had been four days in January 2015, in the bedroom I once loved, with the man I once loved, him breaking down before my eyes and breaking me and everything else in our lives simultaneously. By the fourth day I didn’t dare dream that I was going to make it out alive. I kept thinking, this is something I feared happening while I was on the job; never for one minute did I think it might happen inside my home, within my marriage, our bed. I just lay there; I was crushed. Jason had collapsed on the floor, blood crusted around his nostrils and upper lip from a screaming-induced nosebleed.
My gun was clenched in his hand. His hoodie, which I had been wearing over my pyjamas, lay crumpled on the floor, spattered with blood that was probably mine.
It’s now or never, I thought. I pulled myself up weakly, feeling like my wrists could snap under me. I took care not to make the bed creak, or any floorboards or stairs. I didn’t breathe as I stepped down them; it was as if I was being pulled down by the front door. I quietly lifted my long, padded winter coat from the coat rack and grabbed my trainers by their heels. I took my purse and the car keys from the hall table, squeezing the keys tight so they made no noise at all.
I didn’t close the front door behind me. I ran to the gate, my heart pounding inside my head, and threw it open. Then I went back to the car and got in, throwing my shoes, coat and purse on the passenger seat. I swung the car out of the drive and into the street, and didn’t look back.
How many times had I told other women, victims of domestic abuse, to go to the PSNI, or the hospital, or Women’s Aid? The answer was far too many. Yet there I was, driving around Belfast on a cold January morning, pulling my duvet-like coat over my lap and down my shins, over my nightwear, so thankful I wasn’t nak
ed. Would that have mattered? I was out, with no idea where to go next.
I tried to work out what day it was, but I’d lost all sense of time. I thought it was a Saturday; it looked like one on the Lisburn Road. I could drive to the hospital, but the part of the hospital that rape victims needed wasn’t open on Saturdays, so I drove to Charly’s, where I sat for a moment, hunched over the steering wheel, waiting for Jason to appear in my rear-view mirror. Then I saw my nieces through the window and thought, what am I doing, leading him here in his state, and with my gun on his person?
I reversed out again and headed for the motorway. I had had no food or sleep for days, but I was hypervigilant. I can’t remember how I got to Fermanagh or how I found our old chalet. It was years since I’d been there. Father hadn’t used it at all since Mother got ill, and not often before then, not once the Sloane kids had all grown up.
I took the key from the coal bunker where Mother always left a spare and let myself in. It was a cave of darkness full of this powdery dampness that made me sneeze and hurt all over. I had a cold shower and found some old clothes of my mother’s that smelled like an old dead fire. Then I rang the Chief.
‘Are congratulations in order?’ he asked. It was the first time he ever spoke to me like a human. I clung to it.
‘They are,’ I said. ‘But only congratulate me because I got out of that house alive.’
‘Well, that’s the best any of us can hope for, until we don’t,’ he said.
A wild, tired laugh escaped me.
‘What is it, Sloane? Do you need to speak to HR? Or to Linskey?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Everyone else is too sappy. I can’t take that right now.’ I felt completely hollow as I looked out at the lough.
‘You don’t sound like yourself. Maybe you need some personal leave,’ he said. ‘Awful American invention, but you know what I mean. Sometimes it’s necessary, I hear.’
‘Thanks, Chief, but no,’ I said. ‘I’ve loads of overtime accrued from Christmas. Use it for the days I’ve been off, and just know that I’ll be back … give me four days. Just four. That’s all I need.’
I wanted to buy back a day for each one that had been stolen from me. It would be that easy. I was not the typical victim. I was a detective and I was strong.
‘If you’re sure,’ Dunne said.
‘Positive.’
I texted both my sisters to see if Jason had been around, or if he had killed someone, even himself. It was what I pictured – him hanging from the apple tree at home. Then I felt like a coward for running away, for tiptoeing off and saving my own skin. Another picture filled my mind – of me overpowering him, me grabbing the gun and shooting him right between the eyes. And wouldn’t he have deserved it. He’d raped me. Repeatedly. My own husband. In our own bed.
I looked at Mother’s old clothes on my body, a nautical-style Jaeger jumper and tight creased trousers that I left unbuttoned. They were pulling me tightly at every seam. I thought about the men she’d let walk free from her court and the women and children who had been stalked and abused and beaten. Now I knew how they felt, and now I knew how I felt when I promised them protection and meant it. Mother had often blamed the law for her having to let those men walk free, but once I knew the law, I knew it was her fault.
Since she had been diagnosed I had allowed her to become this paragon. But really, she never looked after women who had to stand in her court and tell the details of their rapes, be raped again where they stood, in essence. Mother stayed poker-faced and let the bastards walk. And it still played out like that, mostly. The law hadn’t changed much since her day. There were still judges who automatically took the side of the accused.
I pulled at the neck of her jumper until it tore at the seam and the fabric sat out from my skin in two fist-sized bunches. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to blame this ordeal on someone I had not chosen to have in my life. Until that day, I had always portioned half the blame of each and every crime to the victim because somewhere along the line, that was what I had been taught. I caught a punch in my cupped hand and screamed. Then I took a breath and looked at my phone.
There were still no replies to the texts I’d sent to my sisters. In the end, they each took hours to get back to me, which told me that Jason wasn’t looking for me, and although I knew he wouldn’t remember that our family had the chalet, I still imagined I heard his car or heard his winter boots outside. Even the sounds of the lough seemed just like him calling my name.
And indubitably there were the dreams. Bad, bad dreams about cells forming and eating me up from the inside. Which they were.
Chapter 39
Chief Dunne sent Higgins and Simon to check out the scene of Shane’s carjacking in Armagh, then on to speak to Cahal Cleary in Monaghan to find out more about these letters that had arrived for Shane and about Margaret McGuire. ‘A weekend away,’ Higgins joked.
‘To get you out of the way, more like,’ Linskey joked in return.
The Chief had ordered them to go to the hospital if they needed to, to check out the story about Margaret having a stroke. He clearly thought Linskey and I had missed something, just like Father had. I asked why I couldn’t go. The Chief was eating pizza from a box at his desk.
‘I think you should stay here,’ he replied.
‘But Cahal knows us now,’ I said.
‘You need to stay here. I want you to bring in Zara and Shane again and quiz them.’
‘I agree, but we don’t have grounds to arrest.’
‘Find grounds. Every contact leaves a mark. There has to be some physical evidence.’ He was probably thinking about the public, that it was days now and there hadn’t been an arrest. ‘There’s a tip-off from a neighbour. Vanessa Bermingham phoned to say she saw a man go into Zara’s house and she recognises him. I need you to look into it. Higgins and Simon can do their thing in Monaghan and you can pull the strings up here. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said, turning to walk out of the office; then I turned back. ‘When will I see you, Greg?’ I asked him.
‘I’ll be tied up until we have a conviction, darlin’,’ Dunne said.
Linskey was walking into the office, her hand poised to knock. She turned on her heel.
‘Diane,’ I said, rushing after her, ‘we have a tip-off from Ness Bermingham.’
Linskey glared back. ‘Find another mug,’ she said.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I know when people are lying to me. It’s a skill I have. Believe me, you aren’t the first.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You and your Chief. I suspected it this last while but you’ve just confirmed it. What on earth are you playing at?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Does this kind of thing excite you, talking about Paul, this man you’re involved with, and it’s Greg all along.’
‘I didn’t want to lie to you. My father and my family know Greg.’
‘Yeah, you’re right to hide it from them. Charles wouldn’t like this at all. He had standards.’
I was surprised. I’d always thought it was well known that Father cheated on Mother. With all the praise he had had for Linskey as her mentor, Mother even believed at one point that there was something going on between them, and I hadn’t cared.
‘Greg and I know how to be professional,’ I said.
‘Yes, there’s a level of proficiency in the way he does this to Jocelyn, but I thought you had more sense.’
Linskey went and made herself a coffee. I waited until she was done; eventually she sat down.
‘Jocelyn is crying on my shoulder, telling me she knows he’s seeing someone again. It’s what he does, don’t you know that?’
‘Then why doesn’t she leave him … if she knows?’
‘Why do you think he keeps his distance from me, Harry? I’ve told her repeatedly to leave him. This is the position you’ve put me in. I could lose Jocelyn as a friend. She might think I’ve told her to le
ave him to leave the way clear for you.’
‘I don’t want him full-time.’
Linskey laughed. I remembered her telling me that as soon as Geordie had cheated on her, the trust was gone, and so was she.
‘You had a good one in Jason,’ she said. ‘You didn’t give yourself time. Greg has taken advantage of you.’
‘I’m not some stupid kid, Diane,’ I said. ‘What do you know about Jason really? That he didn’t cheat? There are worse things you can do than that … and anyway, the first thing we’re taught here is to believe no one.’ My phone was going in my pocket. ‘We’ll pick this up again in a minute.’ I told Linskey.
I had been avoiding Charly, but now it seemed preferable to the tirade of aggro Linskey was heaping on me.
‘I didn’t want to phone you, Harry,’ Charlotte said hysterically. ‘I know how busy you are, but I just want you to know that Timothy’s in hospital. He’s stopped breathing.’
I instantly forgot the texts she’d sent about the dinner party with Paul, her insistence that I give the man a chance, my last text telling her to butt out and get herself a hobby.
‘Coral has the boys,’ she said. ‘David’s parents have the girls.’
I felt jealous of Coral for being asked to do something I knew I was in no position to do. But Coral had always been a caretaker. Certainly, she had helped me in 2015. And I allowed her, telling myself I could be weak for four days, but that was all. I was no victim.
‘Will you let Daddy know?’ said Charly. ‘I can’t call him. He’ll start going on. You know what he’s like.’
‘I’ll let him know. I’ll get there as soon as I’m done in work,’ I said.
I could tell she was pissed off I had to put work first, but at least she knew where her boy was. Zara Reede, I now fully believed, did not.
Before Charly hung up I said, ‘Timmy will be fine – my little man will be okay.’
It reminded me of the neighbours outside Zara’s at the start of the week, how empty words were, how they didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
The Sleeping Season Page 18
