Lying in Wait(14)

I flew downstairs into the cloakroom where I found Laurence still chatting on the phone, sitting on the wooden stool directly under the old trilby. I thought it had been on the same shelf for thirty years. I remember Daddy wearing it. I hadn’t wanted to throw it out. But now it had to go.

‘What do you want, Mum?’

‘Nothing. It’s fine.’

I would retrieve the hat later.

Laurence joined us in the drawing room. I was trying to keep things breezy to distract him from his father’s shaken demeanour. ‘So who’s this Helen?’ I said, but Andrew hushed me and turned up the volume on the TV. The news was on. It wasn’t the top headline, but maybe the third or fourth item.

‘Concerns are growing for the whereabouts of a 22-year-old Dublin woman who went missing eleven days ago. Annie Doyle has not been seen since the evening of Friday the 14th of November, at her home on Hanbury Street in Dublin’s inner city.’

There was a grainy photograph of the girl. Dark, thin, lots of make-up, clad in a denim jacket, grinning at someone behind the photographer with a beer glass in her hand. She was caught unawares, it seemed, the deformed top lip revealing crooked front teeth. I glanced over at Andrew. He was staring intensely at the television.

‘That must be the woman they were asking you about earlier, Dad.’

‘Shhhhh!’ Andrew said furiously.

A Detective Sergeant O’Toole, leading the investigation, was speaking: ‘… a dark-coloured luxury vehicle was seen in the vicinity of the woman’s home in preceding weeks. We believe that the male driver was a regular visitor to Miss Doyle’s home. We are asking anyone who noticed anything suspicious to notify the gardaí immediately.’

Then they moved on to another story about fuel shortages. Laurence was looking at Andrew, no doubt wondering why he was being so intense. I had to break the atmosphere. ‘I hope they catch whoever it was. That poor girl,’ I said.

Neither Laurence nor Andrew said anything.

‘Who’d like a cup of tea?’

Laurence shook his head, but Andrew was clutching the arms of his chair. I needed him to snap out of this trance.

‘Darling?’ I said a little sharply.

‘What? No,’ he barked. He was very pale. He noticed Laurence looking at him. He flinched a little, and then said, ‘So, who is Helen?’

‘She’s my … my girlfriend.’

‘Girlfriend!’ I whooped, delighted to have the chance to break the tension in the room. ‘Did you meet her at the cinema that night? When you went to see Herbie with your friends?’

Because of what happened, I’d never really asked him about that night, but I should have been suspicious that he was going out with ‘friends’. He found deception difficult, like his father, and now the truth came spilling out.

‘I didn’t go to the cinema with friends. I went to Helen’s house. She asked me over. We ate pizza and watched The Dukes of Hazzard, and that’s all I’m telling you.’ He looked to Andrew for a response. ‘Dad?’

‘That’s great, Laurence, great.’

There was clearly more to Laurence’s date than he was prepared to tell us. I was unsettled by this. I recalled the washing machine going that night. Laurence and I did not, as a rule, keep secrets from each other. Not until now. But I had to take control as Andrew left the room again without a word. I took Laurence’s hands in mine.

‘Laurence, do not interrupt me now. I don’t know what you got up to with this Helen, and I don’t want to know, but you lied to your father and me. You came home with a sprained ankle and gave us a cock and bull story about where you were going, and I don’t know what you were doing in the laundry room that night, I’m not even going to ask. Your father gave you two pounds to enjoy yourself at the cinema, so I’ll have that back, thank you. We are an honest family and we do not tell lies to each other. Is that clear?’

Although none of us mentioned the dead girl again at home, her name, Annie Doyle, was impossible to avoid in the two days after that first news report. Her photograph was on the second page of Andrew’s Irish Times the next day, the same photo with the crooked-toothed deformed smile. She had last been seen that Friday afternoon, entering her home. There were unconfirmed sightings of her around the inner city that morning, and the guards appealed to anyone who might have come into contact with her that day.

A photograph and an interview with her parents appeared in the newspapers the day after that. I studied the photograph. A detective stood behind the remaining three members of the family. You could tell straight away that they were poor. Annie’s father’s face was strained with pain, and his eyes were glassy with exhaustion. He looked rough, unshaven and stocky. His wife was unremarkable. There was another daughter with them in the photo, with her head down and her face hidden behind a mane of hair. Annie’s mother was quoted as saying that she was a good girl really, a very intelligent girl, she said, very bubbly and popular growing up. They appealed to the public to look out for her. They just wanted Annie to come home. Reading it, I couldn’t feel the mother’s anguish. I tried, but I couldn’t imagine it. I wondered what Annie’s father would say if he knew what his darling daughter had been up to. He might actually be relieved to discover that she was dead. And yet I was more sympathetic to him than his wife. The press report went on to detail what Annie had been wearing when she was last seen: a herringbone coat, purple boots and a silver-plated identity bracelet. Unremarkable, cheap stuff that half the young girls in the country might be wearing. They noted that her red hair was dyed black.