Himself(82)

Mahony watches as Johnnie runs out through the wall, stripped to the waist. He stands out in the road dancing suggestively and waving his shirt.

‘It’s a great day for Johnnie. He’s on top form,’ says Mahony.

Mrs Cauley smiles. ‘He’s with me now, isn’t he? I can feel him.’

Mahony looks up. Above them Miss Mulhearne is attempting to hide behind the old rusted school bell. She’s sobbing or laughing, Mahony can’t tell which, only that her dim shoulders are shaking. Johnnie points up at her, throws down his shirt and starts to unbuckle his trousers. Miss Mulhearne covers her eyes.

Mahony smiles at Mrs Cauley. ‘So you can. He never leaves your side.’

Mrs Lavelle opens her eyes wide. Awake and lucid she throws the blanket off her knees, stretches her legs and stands up. She walks around the room, trailing her hand over furniture, picking up ornaments. She licks her finger and draws in the dust on the mantelpiece. Four letters. She reads the name back to herself and finds that she’s hardly surprised at all. She finds a hairpin and without knowing how she picks the lock on the parlour door and slips out into the hallway.

She stands in front of the mirror and takes a good look.

Mrs Lavelle is not herself any more.

She takes a scarf and ties it around her head.

She breathes kisses on the glass and gives herself come-hithers.

She tries the front door: it’s locked, as is the back door. With remarkable dexterity for an elderly woman with rheumatoid arthritis, she levers the kitchen window open with a bread knife, hitches up her skirt and climbs out of it.

Outside, Mary Lavelle kicks off her carpet slippers and dances barefoot through the garden.

Inside, it’s quieter than it has been for weeks. Now the only dead thing in Mary Lavelle’s house is the moth in her sugar bowl.





Chapter 46


May 1976


Jack’s squad car is parked on his drive when Annie Farelly arrives at his house. When she rings the doorbell he comes round the side of the house in his uniform, wiping his hands on a cloth.

‘Annie, I’m just in the garage, getting a few tools together before I go down to keep an eye on the set.’ He smiles. ‘Tadhg trips over the threshold every time he crosses it.’

Annie tries to smile. ‘He’s throwing himself into the role.’

Jack laughs. Then he stops, noticing the bruises on her temple, on her jaw, under a dredging of face powder.

‘What happened to you?’ He reaches over, as if to touch her.

Annie colours. ‘I fell in the bath.’

He puts his hand down and looks at her closely. ‘Come to the play with me, Annie. I can bring you down to the village in the car.’

‘Ah no, it’s not for me. But thank you all the same, Jack.’

Jack, like a gentleman, won’t press her. ‘So what do I owe this pleasure to?’ he smiles, his eyes kind.

‘It doesn’t appear that you have time to talk. I’ll come back another time.’

‘Of course I’ve time, there’s always time. Will we go inside the house?’

‘Ah no, I won’t keep you.’

‘Well then, come round to the garage. You can talk to me while I pack a bag.’

She nods.

He opens a deckchair and sets it by the workbench and spreads a clean rag on the seat for her. She sits down and, bolstered by the expression of patient concern on his face, she begins.

She tells him everything she’s left unsaid these long years. Sitting there before him in her mauve cardigan and cream blouse, in her low-heeled shoes and old-fashioned gloves.

He looks down at the tin of tacks in his hand and she tells him of the high esteem she holds him in. For doing what he did for the sake of the village, although not one of them knows to thank him for it. And now Mahony won’t rest until he gets to the bottom of his mother’s disappearance, and Mrs Cauley is snooping, and Bridget Doosey is in on the act too. Annie recounts Mahony’s refusal of her bribe: a sum she had reserved to build and furnish a new conservatory, and she stops, just for a moment, to recall in her own mind the rattan furniture she has been willing to forgo.

When she has finished, Jack puts down the tin of tacks.

He stands with his back to her, taking off his uniform jacket. ‘How did you know, Annie?’

‘I saw you walking into the forest that day and I saw the look on your face. As soon as Bridget Doosey started putting it out that Orla had disappeared, I just knew.’

He hangs up his jacket. ‘And you’ve never told anyone?’

‘Not a soul.’

He takes off his tie and drapes it over his jacket and turns to face her. ‘And what’s the town’s opinion of this great crime?’

‘A few think it never happened, that Orla left town. A few think that Tadhg or Jimmy Nylon might know something about it, or Tom even, up in the forest. That one of them might be involved.’

Jack shakes his head.

Annie nods sagely. ‘Well, I don’t think anyone really believes that.’

‘And what about me?’ Jack rolls up his sleeves. ‘Is Jack Brophy a suspect?’

‘You’d be the last person—’

He sends her spinning then picks her up again and again. He pushes her up against the workbench, holding her face pinched in his fingers. ‘Look at me,’ he says.