The Death Collector (30 page)

‘So what did you do?’

‘I told him that I didn’t want anything more to do with him. I was staying with my husband.’ Her toes traced circles on the concrete floor as she thought about it. ‘I’d seen him for what he is, the devil sitting on a married woman’s shoulder, whispering, nudging, persuading her to join him in his soulless life. That’s what he is, an empty shell. He just wants to destroy what other people have and that he knows he never can. He is just dead inside; he knows it and it kills him.’ She shook her head. ‘I told him he had sold his soul. He got angry because he knew it was true.’

‘But why were you here last night if you had ended it?’

‘Do you think he was going to let me just walk away?’ she said, her voice raised. ‘Everything had to be on his terms. I wasn’t allowed to be in charge. I’ve met him a couple of times since, to end it, but it always come back to the same thing, that he won’t let me leave.’

‘Last night?’

She looked down, embarrassed. ‘I was going to have one last night with him and show him that I could use him, let him know what he was going to miss out on, and then walk away.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I woke up here.’ She looked at Carl and wiped her eyes. ‘So what now?’

‘We try to get out. Use that broken glass. Attack him with it.’

‘How can I do that? He’s big and strong and I feel awful. I don’t know what he put in my drink.’

‘We do have one big advantage though.’

‘Which is what?’

‘He thinks you’re dead. So he’s going to get a surprise when he realises you’re not.’

Mary Molloy was quiet as they headed back to Manchester. Joe had told her what Nicole had confessed – that the police had talked them into putting Aidan’s number plate into the statement – and Mary’s anger increased. She sat with her knees pressed closely together in the passenger seat, her tan leather handbag perched on top with her fingers gripping the handles.

Joe tried to make small talk but Mary barely responded, just yes and no. It was only when they left some of the clutter of West Yorkshire behind and started up the long motorway rise towards the Pennine tops that she prompted a conversation.

‘Can you see how hard it is for Aidan now?’ she said, staring forward, her jaw clenched. ‘You’ve had proof from her that his case was based on lies. Aidan has to live with that every day.’

‘I saw,’ Joe said. ‘Angry, resentful, but resigned in some way to his fate, that not much is going to get him out of there.’ He glanced across. ‘A bit like you.’

Mary looked back, some flare in her eyes, but as she turned away to look out of the passenger window, Joe knew that she was fighting with herself to keep it together. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her brush the long sweep of her hair to one side and wipe at her eye.

The motorway droned on, all the towns gone and replaced by rolling green hills and meandering lines of drystone walls. The sunlight twinkled on a reservoir surface. Mary turned to look forward.

‘It’s hard for Aidan,’ she said quietly. ‘Every day is wrong for him. He is scared and angry. How can anyone live their life like that?’

Joe noticed how her Irish lilt became more pronounced when she spoke softly. When she was talking tough, her accent became blunted by the years she had spent in England, but when she softened, and became more of the woman she had been before her son’s injustice had toughened her up, a bit more of Ireland returned.

‘I don’t know,’ Joe said.

She fell silent again, lost in the worries she had for her son, Joe’s involvement being one more fight in a life of fighting, and it stayed that way for the rest of the journey.

The motorway came off the high points and the drive turned into a long descent into grey sprawl, the fast sweep becoming the stop-start of city traffic as Joe turned off. The journey ended with grids of terraced streets whose names were familiar to Joe from filling out criminal legal aid forms. The area was just layers of immigration, first settled by the Irish and slowly fleshed out by families from Asia and then Africa. Joe stopped outside a small terraced house whose bricks had been painted with anti-graffiti paint.

‘It’s to stop people daubing things on,’ Mary said, following Joe’s gaze.

‘Why don’t you move?’

‘Why should I? I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. And neither has Aidan.’ She turned to Joe. Her face looked stern but there was pleading in her eyes. ‘So what now?’

‘I just keep digging and see what I can find.’

‘I’ve been looking for longer than you,’ Mary said. ‘Why do you think you can do better?’

‘I don’t know if I can, but this case has come to me for a reason.’

Mary looked back at her house. ‘I didn’t want my life to be this hard,’ she said. ‘I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have done, and I’ve taken knocks, but this?’ She shook her head and let out a long sigh. ‘I used to think that it made me more interesting, like who would you want dinner with: Johnny Cash or Cliff Richard? But now? I think I’ve put up with enough.’

‘Tell me your story,’ Joe said. ‘What brought you to England?’

She paused as she thought about that. ‘Escape,’ she said. ‘And Aidan.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s an old, old story.’

‘I’d like to hear it.’

‘What is there to tell?’

‘Where are you from and why are you here?’

‘On the edge of Dublin, on the way out to a little place by the sea called Howth.’ Her eyes misted over as she thought back. ‘I was eighteen and got myself a job in a pub. The Green Dolphin. All the men used to pour in there after Mass, and there I was, all innocence and smiles, and in he walked. Fergus. He was tall and dark and his smile was just too easy. I fell for him.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I had to fall for the married one, and you can work out how that went down. Fergus is Aidan’s father.’

‘If it’s too private, you don’t have to tell me.’

‘I know, but you’ll understand then how I am like I am. I believed what Fergus told me. He made me promises, told me that we were meant to be together, that he didn’t love his wife any more, and I believed him. It feels like it’s always been that way, that those close to me let me down.’ She allowed herself a little smile. ‘There’s a beach nearby, at Dollymount. Sand dunes and grass and a view towards Dublin. I loved it there. We’d all go there, me and my friends, and those dunes were our own little Lovers’ Lane. And Fergus would take me there in his car, this orange Mazda. I can still see it in my head. The feel of its seat under my skin, the squeaky vinyl. That summer was just the best ever. I was besotted.’

Her eyes had become animated as she talked about it, but then they darkened when she said, ‘It changed when I got pregnant. He became cold, wouldn’t talk to me. He made his peace with his priest and his wife and that’s all that seemed to matter to him. I was nineteen. A single woman carrying a married man’s child.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I did the one thing you aren’t supposed to do if you’re a good Catholic girl from Ireland: I decided to get an abortion. It was the best thing. For me. For Fergus. Even for his wife, so that she wouldn’t see his child being pushed around in a pram.’

‘I don’t know much about Ireland,’ Joe said, ‘but that doesn’t sound like an easy thing to do.’

‘It wasn’t. Still isn’t. I had to come to England for it, except my mother found out why I was going and, well, things got a little crazy. She screamed at me. My father hit me, the first time he had ever done that. The things they said to me were awful. Truly awful. Child killer, evil little woman, marriage-wrecker, and I expected it, but it hurt the same. My older brother attacked Fergus in the pub. The priest was round all the time, trying to talk me out of it and telling me that the sin of carrying a married man’s child was nowhere near the sin of killing it. I was nineteen, for Christ’s sake, with enough to worry about, and all this on top. I had to leave, get away, just to get some breathing space. They told me that if I had the abortion, I was gone from the family for ever and that they could never forgive me.’ She looked down and swallowed. When she looked up again, she had choked back the tears. ‘So that was it.’

‘What, they turned away from you completely?’

‘I was preparing to kill the unborn child of a married man. You have no idea how that sort of thing went down in Ireland back then. Even now. So that was it for me too. I turned my back on them; I was going to make it alone. I stepped off the ferry at Holyhead with all my savings in my purse, just a few hundred pounds, some daft young woman in a floppy hat not knowing where the hell to go or what to do.’

‘Why did you come to Manchester?’

‘I had friends in London and my parents would look for me there first, if they ever got the urge, but I knew someone who’d moved here and that there was an Irish community of sorts. I reckoned I could just lose myself here.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘It was only meant to be short term. I had this dream that I would get the abortion and then see the world. Maybe an apartment in New York overlooking Central Park, because once I was no longer pregnant I could go wherever I wanted. The world was at my feet.’

‘But you didn’t have an abortion. You had Aidan.’

Mary nodded. ‘I backed out. I’d travelled to England, with my family hating me for it, but I couldn’t do it. I thought at first it was because I’d had the evil of it knocked into me by the nuns all of my life, but it was something different to that. It was about the life I had growing inside me, the one part of Fergus I could still hold onto. So I had the baby. Aidan.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I never told my parents. I didn’t want them to know. They were prepared to turn their backs on me, and as far as they knew, I’d had the abortion and I wasn’t welcome any more.’

‘But if you’d told them what you’d done, that you’d given birth, it would have been all right, wouldn’t it?’

‘Probably, but it became about how they had treated me, not how they had been right all along.’

‘Did Aidan ever ask about them?’

‘Of course he did, but I couldn’t go back, even though I had done what they wanted, had the baby. I was stubborn, and a couple of years just became a couple of decades.’

Joe sighed. Criminal law usually had some family dysfunction as a background, but for some reason Mary’s story got to him. ‘Do you miss them?’ he said. ‘Do you want to see them again?’

Mary nodded, tearful again. ‘But the things they said. My brother, Stephen, he did a piece in one of the papers after Aidan was sent to prison, saying how he should have been aborted, how Rebecca would still be alive if I had stuck to my reason for leaving. He made it all my fault.’

‘The papers might have twisted that.’

‘Perhaps, but it hurt.’

Joe reached across and put his hand over hers. ‘So we’ll prove them wrong. We’ll get Aidan out and look at rebuilding whatever you’ve left behind.’

Her lip trembled. ‘You’d do that for me?’

‘I’m trying to do the right thing, for me. So yes, I would.’

‘I’d like that,’ she said, wiping tears away from her eyes with her fingertips. ‘My parents are getting old now. I just want to sit on Dollymount Beach and listen to the slow ripple of the sea, feel the salt thicken my hair. I want to see my daddy smiling at me, and not with the disappointment and anger he had when I left. But too much has been said, too much time gone past.’

‘Let’s finish this first,’ Joe said. ‘I promise I won’t let you down. No one should have to make it alone, Mary.’

She looked him in the eyes. ‘Some of us have to,’ she said. ‘And that’s the hard thing. Aidan going to prison is bigger than anything I’ve gone through before. If I begin to trust you and you then let me down, I’m not sure I’ll recover.’

Joe knew then that he carried a heavy responsibility. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.

Mary nodded her approval and patted him on the hand as she climbed out of his car. As he drove away, Joe saw in his rear-view mirror that she didn’t loiter on the street. She walked quickly across the pavement and into her house. It gave Joe a sense of her isolation in her own community and for the first time he started to admire her.

Her whole adult life had been a struggle, but she wasn’t giving in.

Sam had found himself a quiet room in the station, trying to avoid Evans. He was supposed to be off-duty. He couldn’t clock off yet though, despite what had been said. The case was still his, the body he discovered, and he wanted to see it through as much as he could.

It was the room used by the old tape librarian, where old interview tapes were stored on shelves that ran around the room. The shelves were empty now: the tapes stored off-site since the use of digital interviews. The room was bare, apart from a small brown chair and a desk that bore the scratches of cufflinks and watches and rings from where defence lawyers and prosecutors had rested their hands as they counter-signed the self-seal strips that wrapped around the boxes, when the opening of a master tape had to be witnessed to prove that there had been no tampering with evidence.

It rankled with Sam sometimes, how protection for criminals meant mistrust of the police, but the pages of history told how power could be abused whenever people were left to do the job however they felt like it.

He closed his eyes for a moment, just to rest them, but sleep swamped him, his head drooping to his chest, until the images rushed back at him, but distorted by dreams. The dig was different. The chop of his spade was louder, more frantic, and then David Jex was still alive, his hands reaching upwards, his mouth open, soil filling it slowly.