Flashbacks came when I was reading to Christopher or cooking the dinner. I started staying downstairs at night, huddled by the dying embers of the coal fire.
I chain-smoked, and my body shook from head to toe as I relived one memory after another. I often stayed there until dawn, too scared to get into bed.
‘I want to move away and make a fresh start,’ I told Simon one day.
I desperately hoped that I could somehow learn to live with my memories and life would return to some sort of normality.
Simon agreed to give it a try. Our relationship was being tested, and we both welcomed the chance to make it better.
We moved to Scarborough in September 1993, and Simon found a new job as a taxi driver.
The first few months went well, but one night I was alone in the house when I suddenly felt like I had a spider inside my stomach. It was climbing slowly up towards my mouth and was about to spill out and make me scream.
I thought I was going mad. I put on some old Irish music and drank some vodka to dull the fright and wash the spider away.
As the sharp liquid slid down my throat, my memories started crowding round my head.
They were like ghosts and devils, haunting me and taunting me. I couldn’t shake them off. I saw Daddy’s dirty fingernails clawing me. And I saw Ma stabbing my baby in the face.
‘No!’ I screamed at the shadows. ‘No!’
When Simon came in, I was drunk and hysterical. ‘I have to stop living this lie,’ I sobbed. ‘I did have a baby, and I’m going to find that baby!’
‘Go to the police then,’ he said tenderly. ‘What else can you do?’
I laughed. ‘And tell them what? They’ll think I’m mental. They’ll lock me up.’
‘If you are telling the truth, they won’t,’ Simon said calmly.
I knew he was right, but in the cold light of day I was too frightened to call the police.
My mother had always told me I was crazy and a liar. I knew the police might say the same thing.
Christmas was coming, and I welcomed the distraction. Christopher had put up with a lot of upheaval, and I vowed to make it up to him.
I wanted to spend Christmas Day laughing and playing with him, but as soon as I smelled the turkey cooking I wanted to vomit.
I ran to the bathroom, feeling infected with turkey. It was everywhere, suffocating and poisoning me. I scrubbed my hands, then my whole body, and I vomited violently. Apologizing to Christopher, I wrapped myself up on the sofa, thinking I must have a virus.
‘It’s OK, Mum,’ he said, and as he spoke a bulb flashed in my mind.
Daddy was banging on the floor. I was carrying up his turkey dinner. And now he was hauling me across his lap and pulling down my pants.
The same images flashed before me. I saw those Christmas days. The decorations and the presents were slightly different in each memory, but every time I ended up crying in pain in Daddy’s bed.
‘The bastard! A voice screamed inside my head. I looked at Christopher unwrapping his presents by the tree. Each time he laughed with joy, my heart twanged.
How could parents harm their own child? Had my father’s childhood in the orphanage damaged him so much that he didn’t know his behaviour was so wrong?
I agonized for months and months about phoning the police. One Sunday morning in April 1994, Simon, Christopher and I went for a drive to the beach.
The sun was shining, and Christopher was playing contentedly with a toy on the back seat when I glimpsed myself as an eight-year-old girl, in bed with Daddy. I was telling him he hurt me, and I was crying and whimpering and begging him to stop.
My mind clicked back to Christopher. I pictured our play fights on the living-room carpet. We rolled around and tickled each other, but whenever Christopher said, ‘Stop, Mum! That hurts!’ I stopped immediately and gave him a cuddle to say sorry.
My face was bathed in sunlight, and I felt warm tears trickle down my cheeks.
Whatever had happened in his past, my father couldn’t say he didn’t know it was wrong to hurt me. The second I told him he was hurting me and I wanted him to stop, he should have stopped.
Instead he tied my arms with a belt to stop me struggling free.
The full force of his evil hit me, right there in the car. You stupid cow, I told myself. Of course he knew it was wrong. He’s a wicked child-abuser. There can be no excuse.
What if he’s still abusing other children? You cannot sit back and do nothing.
‘Are you OK?’ Simon asked, noticing my tears.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘The minute I get back home, I’m ringing the police.’
I spent many hours giving a statement to North Yorkshire Police about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child.
The interviews were unbearably upsetting, but liberating too. I had taken the first step towards seeing my parents locked up in jail, where they belonged.
When I got home, deep fear kicked in. I was dealing with sick paedophiles. My mother was a murderer. What would happen next?
One night, Simon came home from work, got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.
He had asked me a million times before, but I had always refused.
I loved him to bits, but the timing had never been right. There was always a trauma going on, and I always put him off, afraid that marriage might change our wonderful relationship.
‘Yes, let’s get married,’ I whispered back. ‘I’m ready now.’
Simon looked surprised and delighted.
‘I love you,’ I told him, then found myself adding, ‘And I want you to legally adopt Christopher.’
I explained to Simon I’d had dark thoughts during my lonely nights in bed when he was out working. I was terrified that when my statement hit the Irish Police, something terrible could happen to me.
‘If I die, I want you to be Christopher’s next of kin. I do not want my parents to have any claim on him, ever.’
He kissed me tenderly. ‘I love you and I want to look after you and Christopher for ever,’ he told me.
We had a simple wedding in August 1994, and I cried tears of joy.
I knew Simon truly loved me, and would do anything for me.
Within weeks of our marriage, the police talked to my family in Ireland.
I was working full-time by then, for a building society in Scarborough, running a small department.
Despite an appalling attendance record at college, I’d come out with outstanding grades and was determined to carve out a good career for myself. I didn’t want to give my parents the satisfaction of stealing my education as well as everything else.
Besides, my job gave me a focus when I woke up with a black cloud of depression over my head. With Christopher at school, I needed to keep busy while I waited for news from the police in Ireland.
I was doing a pretty good job until 10 March 1995, when Esther phoned unexpectedly. I hadn’t heard from her for a while, and I asked if she had any news.
There was a long silence on the end of the phone.
‘You don’t know, do you, Cynthia?’ she said finally.
‘What are you talking about, Esther?’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll go to the phone in the other room.’
As soon as I heard her breathe again, I asked, ‘Who has died, Esther?’
As I said the words, I was sure it was our mother. All those suicide threats over the years flashed before me. She was a coward, and it was the only way she could escape the police closing in on her. It had to be her.
But Esther said another name. She said the name Martin. My little brother, Martin.
I went dizzy. I repeated his name time and time again, gasping for air and shaking my head.
‘How, Esther? When?’
Martin had killed himself in our family home, banging a nail into the door in the living room, the one leading to the hallway that backed on to the bedrooms, and hanging himself. He was twenty-seven-years old.
I sobbed and shook.
I found out later, that he had been terrified and ashamed of it coming out that he had been sexually abused by my father.
He had died three months previously, but nobody had told me because my father didn’t want me at the funeral.
I hung up the phone and lit a cigarette, even though at that point I hadn’t smoked for years.
I watched the smoke swirl in the air as I remembered Martin sitting by my desk in his buggy, looking at me longingly with his big bright eyes.
I shifted on the sofa. I recalled how Martin used to try and sleep fully clothed on the sofa in the sitting room sometimes. Now it was clear to me that it must have been in order to avoid the beds upstairs at 4 White’s Villas.
Back then, my head was fogged with pills and drink and pain and confusion. I didn’t know how tortured our lives were, or how wrong the abuse was.
But I was a grown-up woman now, and my mind was clear. I knew how terribly wrong it was. I knew it wasn’t normal; and I knew we didn’t deserve it.
My parents were sick paedophiles, that was the shocking truth.
When Simon got home, I sobbed in his arms, telling him how it was all my fault Martin had died.
I remembered his suicide attempt when he was sixteen. How could I have put him through all this torment?
I blamed myself every single day. I gave up my job because I couldn’t cope. I needed all my strength to survive, and to carry on my fight. I was not going to let Martin die in vain.
The inquest had taken place without my knowledge, and I found out later that my father told the coroner he believed Martin had killed himself because he was a drug addict and alcoholic.
I also discovered that Martin had warned my mother exactly when, where and why he was going to kill himself.
She should have got help for Martin, but she didn’t because then the real reason he was suicidal would have come out.
Instead, she threatened that, if he killed himself, she would not attend his funeral, and she kept her threat and stayed away when he was buried.
I was incensed. Who did she think she was? Did she think she had the right to decide who lived and died, and who knew about the death?
I screamed in rage. This had to stop.
North Yorkshire police were focusing their investigation on the sexual abuse I suffered at home as a child. Ensuring the safety of other children my father had contact with was, of course, their top priority.
But I decided it was time to speed things up. It was twenty-two years since Noleen had died, and I had waited long enough to punish my mother for her crime. I wanted a murder investigation too.
It was very late one night in April 1995 when I finally found the courage to call Dun Laoghaire police station.
Simon and Christopher were sleeping, and the only sound I could hear was my own blood gushing though my brain. It sounded like a waterfall. I took a deep breath and spoke slowly.
‘Do you remember the baby that was found dead in Lee’s Lane in the 1970s?’ I said to the officer on duty. ‘Well, I am the mother of that baby.’
It was a giant step and, just as I’d hoped, things did indeed move quickly after that, at least to begin with.
The police dug out Noleen’s unsolved murder file from 1973.
They took me back to Lee’s Lane to point to the spot where I had left her in the bag, and a few months later my parents were arrested and brought in for questioning.
It was a massive breakthrough, and I was jangling with nerves as I waited at the police station, knowing my parents were under the same roof, finally facing their demons.
The hours dragged by as their questioning went on. I had agreed to confront them if they didn’t confess.
At lunchtime, I asked if I could visit Noleen’s grave.
I’d been given the number of the plot and had burned it into my memory, afraid it might be snatched away again. At last I felt the time was right to pay my respects.
The police took me to Glasnevin cemetery. Even though Noleen was a murder victim, she had been buried in a cardboard box in the communal ‘Little Angels’ plot with nineteen other babies.
While the officers searched for the grave, I was drawn to a bare plot that was nothing more than a mound of rough earth.
‘This is it,’ I said instinctively, and the number confirmed I was right. A feeling of strength washed over me as I stared at the barren ground.
I had found her after all these years.
I crouched down, laid a small bunch of flowers on the earth, and spoke quietly.
‘I have loved and missed you all these years. My arms have ached to hold you. I am sorry I have taken so long. Do you forgive me? I will make it up to you. I will make them pay.’