Mother’s Only Child (57 page)

‘He’s had an accident.’

‘What sort of accident? He’s bleeding everywhere.’

‘I know. The ambulance is on its way,’ Maria said, very glad to see Patsy and the neighbour coming in the door. Patsy first bounded up the stairs to rescue a frightened and also very angry baby, whose wails had reached a tremendous level when his brother too had left the room, and she came down with Martin in her arms.

‘I can say nothing in front of the children,’ she told the officer firmly. ‘Surely you can see that.’

‘They can come home with me,’ the neighbour said, lifting Martin from Patsy’s arms. ‘What do you say to chocolate biscuits and cocoa?’

Jack’s eyes widened. They didn’t often have chocolate biscuits—chocolate anything for that matter—and he would be glad to be away from that room where there were strange people with serious faces and Greg lying bleeding. He took the hand the neighbour offered him as he said, ‘Can I have two biscuits?’

‘Yes, if you are a good boy,’ the neighbour answered and as Jack was led down the path through the open door, they all heard him say, ‘If I am very, very good, can I have three?

‘Now,’ the policeman said, notebook at the ready. ‘Can you tell me anything about the attacker? Description, anything distinctive?’

‘I can do better than that, officer, I can show you a photograph of him from my wedding day,’ Maria said wearily. ‘It is from years ago, but in the brief glimpse I had of him he has hardly changed. A more up-to-date photograph I should imagine would be given by Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. He was resident there till last year. He is my brother-in-law and his name is Seamus McPhearson.’

Both the policeman and Patsy were astounded by what Maria said, but before they could speak, another policeman was at the door.

‘Call on the blower, sir,’ the young constable said. ‘Two men acting suspiciously, one with a knife, have been seen entering the Nocks Brickworks site.’

‘Two men?’ the officer queried.

‘One of those will probably be my husband,’ Patsy said. ‘He took off after the attacker.’

‘That, madam, was a very foolish thing to do.’

‘I did try to tell him that,’ Patsy said. ‘I couldn’t physically stop him and I did have my hands full, as it were.’

‘Right,’ the officer said. ‘We’ll send in the dogs and large flashlights and flush him out. Set it up, will you, and stress that it is urgent?’

‘Right, sir,’ the younger policeman said, and went out to the car to radio in.

The ambulance men had done all they could for Greg and were preparing to leave. ‘Your questions must wait now,’ Maria told the police. ‘I am going to the hospital with my fiancé.’

‘I can give you a lot of the details and we were on the scene within minutes.’ Patsy said. ‘And now I know
who the man was, I know a lot of the background too, though I have never set eyes on him before.’

As Patsy was answering the policeman’s questions, and Maria was holding Greg’s hand as the ambulance sped through the night to the Accident Hospital, Andrew was feeling it had been a bad mistake to follow the man into this black and dismal hole. He hadn’t a hope in hell of finding anyone in this place, but the man might just see him first and he had a knife. What a bloody fool he had been,

Every nerve ending was twitching as he moved cautiously forwards, and it was hard on that junkfilled ground to be as quiet as he would have liked. Though he stopped often to listen, he couldn’t hear another sound except the odd drone of a car driving down Holly Lane.

He should go back, call the police and let them deal with it. But where was back? He was totally disorientated by such blackness and realised he might easily have wandered around in circles and would never find the way out till there was more light. It was a worrying thought. He wouldn’t give much for his chances if he had to spend a night there. As it was, he was shivering like a leaf and his teeth were chattering, for the bath water had soaked through all his clothes to his skin.

Seamus was, in fact, not far from him, effectively hidden by the darkness, wondering if he should just slip past Andrew and go back to his digs. He could be packed and on the boat home in the morning. Pity he hadn’t been able to mark that conniving bitch, but still, he did for the man who had killed his brother.

He sat and waited for Andrew to go further in and the minutes ticked by, but Seamus was used to waiting quietly in the dark. He was almost ready to make a dash for it when he heard the police siren and decided to wait until it had passed. But the police car didn’t pass. Instead, it pulled up by the fence. This was followed by another one and a police van. Suddenly powerful searchlights were playing over everything.

Andrew saw the man almost beside him with the incriminating and bloodied knife still in his hand. ‘There he is!’

He was spotlit in the powerful beam and he looked scared to death. Dogs were the only thing that Seamus was afraid of and he could hear them the growling and snarling, desperate to be off their leashes.

He threw the knife from him, then took off towards the quarry, running, stumbling and staggering, over the littered ground and tripping and lurching over tussocks of grass, hidden by the darkness.

‘Look out!’ Andrew called. The police also called out a warning, but Seamus was past hearing anything anyone might say. He knew the dogs were free, for behind him he could hear their baying, and the searchlight was keeping him in view so that the dogs could locate him. He would never outrun them.

He was in a panic, dreading to feel the dogs’ hot breath on his neck, their teeth around his arm or leg, dragging him to the floor. He ran faster still. He didn’t know the deep pit was there, but even when the policeman called out another warning he was too fearful to hear it.

Andrew saw it in the beam of the flashlight, and
then, with a horrendous and terrifying scream, the man disappeared.

Patsy and Andrew found Maria sitting in a corridor at the Accident Hospital, crying. With a dread feeling in her heart, Patsy ran forward and Maria turned at the sound. She was buried in a sorrow so deep, little could touch her.

‘Maria,’ Patsy cried. ‘What is it? Is Greg…?’

‘They think that Greg will live this time,’ Maria said. ‘But that hardly matters for I cannot marry him, I know that now. We must part.’

‘What nonsense is this, Maria?’

‘Not nonsense, Patsy,’ Maria said, grasping her hand. ‘You must understand that man came for me tonight. He had no argument with Greg—he got it because of me—and he won’t give up ever. He will hurt everyone associated with me.’

‘The man’s dead,’ Andrew said, but his words didn’t register with Maria.

She said, ‘How could I live with myself if Greg was to be killed outright next time and what if Seamus was to harm his children?’

Patsy sat beside Maria and took hold of both her hands. ‘Listen to me, dear, dear Maria,’ she said. ‘Seamus McPhearson will never terrorise you or anyone else again. The man is dead.’

‘Dead!’ Maria repeated. ‘Really and truly dead? You have seen the dead body?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Then I don’t believe it.’

‘Maria, listen, please,’ Andrew pleaded. ‘The police
caught up with him in the brickworks. I was there too and saw it all. When they released the dogs he took off. He didn’t know about the quarry and by the time he saw it, it was too late. If the fall didn’t kill him then the quicksand did, for by the time the police got down there, there was no trace of him. They say he will probably never be found.

‘Don’t you see what this means?’ Patsy said, giving Maria’s arm a little shake. ‘You are free of the McPhearsons for ever.’

‘You don’t know how good that sounds.’

‘I can guess,’ Patsy said with a smile.

‘And you can become Mrs Hopkins as soon as Greg is well enough.’

‘Yes,’ Maria said. She felt as if she was floating on air, truly free now. Despite Sean telling her he had advised Seamus not to dig too deep to find Barney’s killer, and that he’d seemed to accept it, she knew Seamus didn’t work that way. While he had lived she had always thought there was unfinished business between them, now it was at an end. She couldn’t even feel sorry that his death had been such a brutal one, for had Patsy and Andrew been a minute later she would be dead now, and he wouldn’t have lost a minute’s sleep over it either.

‘Come on,’ she said suddenly. ‘I need to see the children, reassure them, and I cannot see Greg again until tomorrow.’

‘They will be glad to see you,’ Patsy said. ‘Mom was having a bit of a time with them all when we left.’

‘Lead on, then,’ Maria said. She left the hospital filled with elation.

The next afternoon, when Maria saw Greg lying back in the stark hospital bed, his face as white as the pillow he lay against, one arm attached to monitors of some kind, she felt tears prickle her eyes. And then he turned and saw her in the doorway, and his smile lit up his entire face. ‘God, how I have longed to see you,’ he said. ‘Don’t be crying. Come and sit the other side where I can put my arm around you and tell you how much you mean to me.’

‘Oh, Greg,’ Maria cried. ‘I am so pleased to see you looking so well. I really thought he had killed you.’

‘Can’t keep a good man down,’ Greg said with a grin.

‘Do you know who it was attacked you?’ Maria asked.

‘Yeah, the police were in this morning and told me. I never knew Barney’s brother really, he being so much older, and then my dad always told me to steer clear of him because, he had been told, he was a bit of a bad lot.’ He winced suddenly and went on, ‘I have evidence of my own on that score now, of course.’

‘Well, the man’s dead and gone now, and can never hurt me or anyone belonging to me ever again.’

‘So, we can get on with arranging our marriage. No need for us to hang about, Easter is a nice time of the year.’

‘But, Greg, I’ll hardly have the dress and bridesmaid outfits ready for then.’

‘Oh,’ Greg said with a wry smile, ‘shall we postpone it for a year or two then?’

‘You dare,’ Maria said in mock severity. ‘If I have to work till midnight every night I will be ready for
Easter, never fear. But one thing I insist on and that is to tell your parents about our marriage. They were always good to me.’

Greg’s face was like a mask, something she had never seen before, and he said, ‘How do you explain to my two daughters that my parents couldn’t stand their mother?’

‘Greg,’ Maria protested, ‘do you think I would ever do such a thing? I’ll not let them know it had anything to do with Nancy. Trust me in this.’

Greg’s face relaxed. ‘Of course I trust you,’ he said, ‘and you must do as you see fit.’

On Greg’s insistence, Maria moved into his house, for, with his girls, they would be too squashed in their own. That evening, with Martin in bed, Maria told the children about the wedding in April.

‘There are lots of people to invite to a wedding and some of them you may never have seen before. I mean, Anna and Shirley, did you know that you have grandparents in Moville?’

‘No,’ Anna said.

‘Why haven’t we seen them before?’ Shirley asked.

‘They had some silly fight with your daddy and probably said things they regretted later—you know how it is when you are angry. We’ve all done that, haven’t we?’

‘Yeah,’ Anna said, ‘but we make it up later.’

‘And probably they would have, too, but the war got in the way and your daddy had to go away and fight. The row might have been about him joining up. He didn’t have to because Ireland wasn’t in the last war.’

‘Doesn’t he know what it was about?’

‘No. After all these years he can’t remember how it began, but he says it was probably over something silly,’ Maria told them ‘But because he wasn’t able to go and sort it out, it grew and grew in importance and neither side wanted to back down.’

Both girls nodded solemnly. They could see how that could be.

‘Anyway, this is a new start for us all and your daddy thinks it is time to try and make amends, and he has asked me to invite them to the wedding.’

‘Have we got grandparents we can invite?’ Jack asked.

‘No, Jack.’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s just how it is,’ Maria said.

‘It’s not fair,’

‘Jack!’

‘Never mind,’ Shirley said. ‘When your mom marries our dad, we’ll all be brothers and sisters and so you will be able to share our grandparents.’

‘All of us?’

‘Course.’

‘Oh, that is all right then,’ Jack said. Maria smiled to herself. Jack could be an aggravating child at times. But at others, he could lighten the tone as he had then. She had wondered if Nancy had ever let slip to her daughters, Anna especially, that Greg’s parents had resented her, but she couldn’t have done that, for Anna’s surprise that she had grandparents in Ireland had been genuine.

That night Maria composed a very careful letter to Greg’s parents and hoped that the breach between them might be healed.

Greg was in hospital a fortnight and so he was still there when the reply came from his parents. Maria guessed who it was from. She noted the Moville postmark, yet didn’t recognise the handwriting and so, though it was addressed to her, she took it to the hospital that afternoon unopened.

Greg was ridiculously nervous about opening it, but he needn’t have worried. His mother wrote that many times she and Greg’s father had regretted the angry and unforgiving words said when they were both in a state of shock. They had often wished them unsaid and didn’t know how to heal the breach, for they had no address once Greg had left the training camp, and after the war no idea at all where he had gone.

They went on to say that they deplored the years spent apart, would not miss his wedding for a fortune, and were looking forward to meeting his daughters.

‘How stiff-necked I have been,’ Greg said, as he folded up the letter. Maria noticed with compassion and sympathy that his eyes were glitteringly bright. ‘I should have written to them, apologised, because I did hurt and disappoint them, especially my mother, very much.’

‘You weren’t to know how they might be feeling.’

‘It wouldn’t have taken much to find out.’ Greg said. ‘Nancy wanted me to do that too, you know. She said people say things in the heat of the moment that they don’t mean and for the girls’ sakes now and again she would ask me to contact them. I wish I had. I feel they have missed out as well as the girls.’