Himself(67)

‘But do you really think that the Widow could commit murder?’ asks Shauna. ‘I know she’s a bit sour and all that.’

‘Well, I don’t think it was hands-on. It think the Widow was most likely the brains behind the operation,’ says Bridget.

At the sink, Shauna raises her eyebrows.

Mahony smiles grimly. ‘Either way, I think it’s time I paid my generous benefactor a visit.’





Chapter 37


May 1976


Mahony stands on Annie Farelly’s doorstep with his finger on the doorbell.

A dead old man zimmers out through the wall and into the flowerbed; he leans on his walking frame and fixes Mahony with a charming toothless grin.

Mahony nods his head. ‘She’s in there hiding, is she?’

The dead old man laughs soundlessly.

Mahony bends down to roar through the letterbox.

‘Annie, will you open the door? I know you’re in there.’

Silence.

‘Do you want me to say my piece in front of the whole town? At the church maybe? I’ve the kind of voice that carries. Or at the General Store? I could even shout it across the square to you, Annie.’

Mahony hears the scraping of bolts and the door opens. The Widow Farelly stands before him with a face that would curdle the milk inside a cow. She has put on a clean apron and has a syringe, with enough sedative to drop a carthorse, cocked and loaded in the dresser drawer.

You can forgive a lone woman for taking precautions.

Otherwise Mahony is quite safe. For Nurse Farelly has hung up her uniform in the empty wardrobe in the never-visited guest room.

For over forty years she was dedicated to efficiently dispatching her duties at Kilterhill Nursing Home. A place where she cared for those who repulsed her more than anything else in the entire world: the old and infirm.

Even as a child, poor Annie was monstrously horrified by old age. It was her job to wash, change and feed Grandma, a fine upstanding woman, who, at the tail end of her life, wound up mewling by the milk pail and flashing her bits at the postman.

When Grandma finally died from the head injuries she sustained from beating herself repeatedly with a copper bedpan, Annie was sent to nursing school to develop her vocation of care. Annie returned to Mulderrig with a second-hand fob watch and a solid reference. Within a week of her return, her daddy, a practical man, had won her a position at Kilterhill Nursing Home. With Annie as the family’s new breadwinner, her daddy could dedicate himself to the full-time occupation of sitting on his arse.

All Annie’s hopes and dreams ended the day she walked in through the front door. It was a daily horror of ripe bedpans and clotted dentures, rivers of incontinence and weeping bedsores. Every evening poor little Annie would go home and cry herself to sleep, for the smell of the old people was still on her. It was in her nose, her mouth and her lungs, in the pores of her skin and the fabric of her hair. She breathed in age and swallowed decay.

But Annie was very good at her job. She saw things the other girls wouldn’t: the unlocked medicine cart and the soiled sheets under the bed, the smears on the teacups and the stains on the nightdresses. Within a month Annie had received a pay rise and the offer of more shifts than her daddy could dream of.

And then came the first death.

On an ordinary Kilterhill morning Annie found that Mrs Kiernan was uncharacteristically unresponsive to her morning cup of tea. Annie felt Mrs Kiernan’s grizzled neck for her pulse. Then she patted her hand and smiled at the woman for the first time.

Later, as Annie stripped the bed and opened the window to let in the fine grey rainy day, she felt a profound sense of completeness. It was just how she felt when she had finished all her tasks neatly and well, but it was stronger, clearer. As if she were entirely secure in the knowledge that things were exactly as they should be.

The manager was glad that the next five residents all died on Annie’s shift, for she dealt with things so marvellously. She was indeed a grand girl. Little Annie always had the facts and figures ready for the duty doctor so he hardly needed to throw his eye over the corpse. Annie would even have their coffin clothes picked out, pressed and ready for them.

How Annie lived for those days. She would wake up in the morning with a calm sort of feeling, a happy anticipation. She would eat a hearty breakfast and cycle joyfully to work. She would smooth down her immaculate hair and pin her white cap in place. She would tie her apron and check her fob watch. Then she would go up into their rooms and close their doors gently behind her.

Annie dealt first with the Problem Patients, those who scampered naked down corridors or moaned half the night and sang half the day. Then she tackled the ones who complained that their beds were too hard and their eggs were too soft. Then she fixed the ones who talked to her, or touched her arm, or tried to make her return their smiles. But even as she sent them out the back door in a casket there were always more crawling in through the front door to replace them.

And Annie’s patients still plague her, even in her retirement. Her house is filled to the rafters with them; they haunt her every corner. Poor Annie isn’t to know it but they are the cold breath on her porridge and the tapping in her loft, the whistling in her chimney and the static on her rug. They crack her china cups and fog her crystal vases. And they take turns staring at her as she sleeps badly every night.

Mahony follows Annie into the parlour through the crowd of dead pensioners orbiting the hallway. As Annie draws near they flinch and scuttle through the walls into well-vacuumed corners.