Authors: Julie Parsons
He didn’t look to see how she would respond. He picked up his coat and stepped away from the table.
‘See you round, Tony.’ He headed for the door.
Didn’t want to get involved. Didn’t want to know about another woman’s grief for her dead daughter. Had enough of that with Margaret and Mary. Look at the
trouble it had got him into. He’d wound up in a nursing-home for six months after that night in the cottage in Ballyknockan. First of all he’d gone on a bender. Then the doctor had
prescribed anti-depressants. Eventually he’d gone to the welfare officer. A nice guy. Checked him into a private clinic in Glenageary. Lots of very sweet Filipina nurses. He slept and ate
plenty of healthy meals. He watched a lot of daytime TV. And he went for therapy. For the first few sessions he did nothing but cry. The therapist was an American, a woman of about his own age,
with pale blonde hair, like a Scandinavian’s, pulled into a loose bun on top of her head. She didn’t say much. When he began to talk he spoke of his father. Over and over again he told
the story of the day he died. It was a Thursday. The first Thursday in the month. Children’s allowance day. A big pay-out at the local post office. There should have been an armed escort.
Should have been, but wasn’t. After the death of Joe McLoughlin there was always an armed escort. He was the blood sacrifice. He was the one who’d had to die. The Provos were waiting
for the Securicor van. There were two of them hanging around the bookie’s next door. A third was in the car parked outside. When Joe and his partner drove up he flashed his lights to get the
guy to move up a space so they could park in the best position. The guy wouldn’t move. Joe got out of the car and walked towards him. Just as the two raiders, their balaclavas pulled down,
came running from the post office, dragging the money sacks behind them. And the guy in the car aimed his gun right at Joe’s face. He blew half of it away.
‘I heard about it immediately. I was a rookie working in the Bridewell. Word came over the radio that a guard had been killed in Dundrum. I knew it was my father. There was this terrible
silence. And the look on all their faces. His body was brought to the morgue in Store Street. They asked me to identify him. I didn’t want to. I was scared of seeing him. And then my mother
arrived. I let her do it. I rationalized it. I said it was her right. She was his next of kin. But it wasn’t that. I was a coward. I was too scared. I let him down. I was his son. I should
have been brave enough to acknowledge the way he would go into the grave. But I couldn’t do it. And I’ve never been able to forgive myself.’
‘And your mother?’ The therapist’s voice was low. ‘What did she say?’
‘We never talked about it. She identified him. She sat with him for as long as they would let her. I don’t know what she thought.’ But he did know. He knew she was
disappointed. All through those dreadful few days, when the coffin came home with its lid closed, and the house was filled with relatives and neighbours and guards from every station around the
country. And the removal to the church, the night of heavy drinking that followed, and the next day the funeral Mass, the burial, the three-course lunch in the hotel, then the session back at the
house where the drink flowed and all the old stories were told time and time again. And he knew what his mother was thinking.
‘How could you know? Are you a mind-reader?’ The therapist leaned forward in her chair.
‘Not a mind-reader, a body-reader. I know my mother. Our eyes didn’t meet. Not once. Not during the whole bloody thing.’
‘And now? How long is it since your father died?’
‘Nearly thirty years.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘Now, well, now she needs me. She’s in a nursing-home. My sister lives in London so there’s only me to go and
see her, to keep an eye on her. So it’s pretty OK between us.’
‘And do you talk about your father?’
‘Yes, we do. But we don’t talk about that. I don’t think either of us can bear to bring it up. I don’t know why I’m talking about it now.’
But he did know. He wanted to talk about Margaret, but there were things he couldn’t say. He doubted that the confidentiality rule would hold if he spilled the beans about what had
happened that night. So he’d dug up his father. And then when he could think of nothing further to say about him he prevaricated. Dredged up some other awful cases. A mother who had
suffocated her two children, then taken an overdose; a man who had set fire to the family home killing his wife and baby; a son who had starved his invalid mother to death and kept her body hidden
in the attic for months. They were all true cases. And they had hurt badly at the time. But he hadn’t been directly involved as he had been with the death of Jimmy Fitzsimons.
The death of Jimmy Fitzsimons. The slow, agonizing torture of Jimmy Fitzsimons. He had put it out of his mind. He had put the place out of his mind. He could have got into the car and driven out
there any time he wanted. But he hadn’t. He went crazy. He went to the clinic. He got better. He put it out of his mind.
Now he sat in the car in the dark. There was music on the radio. Frank Sinatra was singing. That lovely song, ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’. He remembered. A night in May
– was it 1986, ’87? Some time around then. Frank Sinatra had come to Dublin. Janey had got tickets to go to the concert in the football ground at Lansdowne Road. He hadn’t wanted
to go. He had been in the middle of a murder. A girl found in Blackrock Park. Raped and beaten. They’d followed up the obvious leads. Nothing so far. He’d have preferred to go drinking
with the lads to talk about it. But Janey had insisted. And she was right. It was a magical evening. Old Frankie’s voice was past its best, but he could still weave that spell. And
afterwards, as the crowd drifted out through the gates, a woman somewhere up ahead had started to sing. Her voice was thin and reedy but it didn’t matter. They had all joined in, a surge of
voices. They sang ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’.
Janey had reached out and taken his hand and he had pulled her to him and kissed her. And for once he’d been genuinely sorry that he had to go back to work and not home to be with her.
He began to sing now, in the car, in the dark, the lights of the city filling the sky with a sickly orange glow. The orchestra came in behind Sinatra’s voice, filling and swelling like the
sweep of a spring tide. And he felt the tears again as he sang, and his throat tightened and his voice choked and died away, leaving him suddenly bereft.
He checked the handbrake, checked that the car was in gear, switched off the ignition. He opened the door and got out. He walked around to the boot and put the key into the lock. The metal was
warm to the touch. He swung it up and open. He’d gone shopping earlier in the day. Vegetables from that nice little greengrocer’s in Glasthule and cheese from Caviston’s. A soft
goat cheese from somewhere in Cork and a big slab of Bandon cheddar. He’d been tempted to buy some squid. Lucky he hadn’t. It wouldn’t have lasted long in this heat. The
goat’s cheese gave off a pungent smell that verged on nasty. He gathered together the plastic bags and lifted them up. And saw, underneath, the shiny black cover of Sally Spencer’s
album. He sighed and reached forward. He picked it up, tucked it under his arm, then slammed the boot. He turned towards the house. And as he moved a piece of paper drifted towards his feet,
twirling in the still night air, like a feather. He bent to pick it up. And saw a face he remembered. That he had last seen that night in Ballyknockan. Patrick Holland: Mary’s father,
Margaret’s lover. Who had helped her kill Jimmy Fitzsimons. And who, he knew, was now dead. A heart-attack on holiday in Spain. A huge funeral in Dublin. The great and the good gathered to
mourn him. Crowds spilling out of the church, clustering around his black-clad widow to offer sympathy and support. McLoughlin had stood some way off. He had scanned the crowd. He had been sure
Margaret would be there. He couldn’t believe that she would let Holland go to his grave without saying goodbye. And when he didn’t see her at the church he followed the cortège
to the cemetery. Stood far enough away not to intrude, but close enough to see who was there. Thought his heart would stop beating, just for a moment, when a tall, slim woman wearing dark glasses,
with a black shawl flung around her shoulders, got out of a taxi and walked towards the small knot of mourners by the open grave. Then saw Holland’s widow give a little cry of recognition as
they embraced. And the woman took off her glasses and, of course, she was nothing like Margaret. He left then. Slunk away, dodging behind headstones, and trying not to trip on the cracked slabs of
the old paths. And realized that Mary was buried in this place too. It was fitting, he thought. Father and daughter in the same piece of earth.
He opened the fridge and put away his groceries. And pulled out a bottle of beer. Erdinger, German wheat beer, cloudy to the eye and yeasty to the nose. He flipped off the cap and poured it into
a glass. He sat at the table, and laid the newspaper cutting down. He smoothed it out. It was an account of James de Paor’s funeral. Patrick Holland was one of the chief mourners. He skipped
through the text. Attended the same school, friends at university, called to the Bar in the same year. Some polite read-between-the-lines reference to political differences. And there was a quote:
‘James was one of the best. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but I never for a minute doubted his integrity and commitment to his beliefs. His death is a tragedy for all.’
There were three photographs. One was of Holland helping to carry the coffin from the church. The second was also of Holland, this time comforting Sally. She looked very young and, despite her
obvious grief, very pretty. And the third showed a group of mourners. Marina was immediately recognizable. She had her arm around a younger boy, with the same high cheekbones and a mop of fair
hair. Slightly apart from them was an older boy. A young man, really. He was standing stiffly beside a tall, dark woman. McLoughlin read the caption. Dominic de Paor, Helena de Paor, Marina
Spencer, Tom Spencer. Dominic de Paor was striking. He was tall and well-built with a jutting nose. His tanned face was without expression but his body said it all. He was tense, withdrawn.
McLoughlin stared at the photographs. Helena de Paor. Must be the first wife. She had the look of one of those Japanese women. Almost like a geisha. Her black hair pulled back from her broad
forehead, her face a white mask, her eyebrows dark slashes, like paint. Her son was very like her. Their bodies seemed to cleave to each other. He opened the album and turned the pages, looking for
the empty space from which the cutting had come. He picked up his glass and drank. Then he began to read.
By the time he got up from the table it was dark outside. Three more empty bottles of Erdinger had joined the first under the table. His foot knocked against them as he pushed back his chair and
stood up. He leaned down and gathered them together. A four-bottle job, he thought. Like in the old days when they’d go to the pub after their shift was over and sit in the snug for the rest
of the evening, going through whatever case it was they were working on. A six-pint night would be the usual. And the next morning he’d take out his notebook. And there would be written, in
his small neat hand, everything they had discussed, every conclusion they had come to, every course of action on which they had decided.
And the habit hadn’t left him. He picked up the envelope on which he’d made notes, and his glass, then slid back the doors to the terrace. He stepped outside. The lights of the city
were a sparkling carpet below. The view at night always made him feel as if he was flying. He looked up at the sky. Even the competition from the lights below couldn’t dim the brilliance of
the Plough as it arched across the darkness. He lifted his glass and saluted. Its constancy made him feel secure and safe. He drained his glass and walked around the outside of the house. He could
smell cut grass from the heap in the far corner and the sweetness of the night-scented stock, which had self-seeded in all the beds. A legacy from Janey. Planted that first year they had moved
here. When she had been happy.
He checked that the car was locked, then walked up the drive, pushed shut the heavy wooden gates and slotted the bolt into place. Towards the south, the bulk of Three Rock Mountain loomed in the
distance. Behind it was Kippure, and close by its eastern flank, Djouce Mountain. To the west of Kippure the lake at Blessington and the stone village of Ballyknockan and over the hills, over
Moanbane and Mullaghcleevaun and Duff Hill, and down into the valley with Fancy Mountain on one side and Djouce on the other, Lough Dubh where James de Paor had drowned twenty years ago, and where
his step-daughter Marina drowned too. One was an accident, the other suicide, so the newspapers said. He leaned against the gate. It was very quiet up here tonight. Hardly a sound, except his feet
on the tarmacadam of the drive and his breath. Sometimes the peace was shattered. Like that day on the lake. High summer, the graceful nineteenth-century house. James and Sally, their one-year-old
daughter, Vanessa. Dominic and his friends from school. And his step-brother and -sister, Marina and Tom. Swimming in the lake, sailing and fishing. Picnics in the woods that sloped down behind the
house to the water. Then one day the roar of a motorboat shattering the quiet. A group of kids, teenagers, had stolen it from its mooring. James and Marina had gone out in the dinghy to remonstrate
with them. But something went wrong. The outboard engine stalled. James had stood up to try to start it again as the motorboat careened by. The wash caused the dinghy to swing wildly from side to
side. James fell in. Marina tried to rescue him. But he drowned. A tragic accident. And then, twenty years later, another tragic accident. Another party in the house, this time given by Dominic de
Paor. The morning after, Marina could not be found. It was thought she had gone back to Dublin with some of the other guests. But her body was found trapped in the rocks where the small stream ran
from the upper lake into the lower. Blood tests showed she had drunk three-quarters of a bottle of vodka. There were also traces of cocaine. And one of the tabloids had got hold of details of what
was described as a suicide note. It was addressed to her mother. It said she was sorry for what she had done. She could never forgive herself. She hoped that she would be forgiven, if not in this
life then in the next.