The Final Silence (11 page)

‘Fucking bastard,’ she said, anger choking in her throat, sending heat to her eyes. She grabbed for her pocket, dragged her mobile phone from it and fumbled at the touchscreen, looking for his number. The dial tone burred in her ear as Lennon waited across the room, his face blank.

‘This is Graham Carlisle’s voicemail. Please leave your name, number, along with a brief message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

‘You fucking bastard,’ Rea said, unable to hold the furious tears back any longer. ‘I can’t believe you did that. After you promised me. You piece of shit.’

She thumbed the end-call button and threw the phone to the floor. It bounced across the room, clattered off the skirting board. Lennon let out a grumph of discomfort as he bent to pick it up.

‘Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on,’ he said.

Rea covered her eyes with her shaking hands and said, ‘Give me a minute.’

She turned away, sniffed hard, wiped at her wet cheeks, breathing as deeply and steadily as she could manage with the rage sparking and crackling inside her. When it finally settled to a dim smoulder, she turned back to Lennon.

‘So what is it you want me to see?’ he asked.

‘Maybe you should sit down,’ Rea said.

Lennon gave her back her phone then put his hands in his pockets. ‘No, I’m all right.’

Rea took another quivery breath. Swallowed. ‘When I first opened this room, there was a book in the drawer of that desk. Like a big photo album, or a scrapbook.’

Lennon went to the desk, reached down and opened the drawer, looked inside, and slid it closed again.

‘It had newspaper cuttings, handwritten notes, and . . . other things inside.’

Lennon stared back at her. He already thinks I’m crazy, Rea thought. Just say it.

‘It was a book about all the people my uncle had killed.’

Lennon’s expression did not change. He lowered himself into the chair and said, ‘Go on.’

THEY TALKED THROUGH
the afternoon.

Several times, Lennon thought of standing, making his excuses, and leaving Rea to her delusions. But he stayed and listened to it all without comment.

Lennon had dealt with enough crazy people during his years on the force. He had heard hundreds of implausible stories driven by paranoia, schizophrenia, alcohol, drugs, or any number of sicknesses. He had listened to spouses accusing each other of murder plots, to grandmothers convinced their grandchildren were robbing them, to drunkards who claimed to have witnessed the most spectacular of crimes.

But the way Rea talked was different. She started at the start and ended at the end. She didn’t go in circles or contradict herself. She spoke with a calm, clear voice, leaning against the wall, her arms folded, not acting out the drama of it all with waves and gesticulations.

Not that he believed her story. But he didn’t think she’d lost her mind.

When she’d finished, Lennon watched her for a moment, then said, ‘What was the first victim’s name again?’

‘Gwen Headley,’ Rea said, and she spelt the surname.

Lennon took his phone from his pocket, opened the web browser, and entered the girl’s name. He scanned the list of results: old news headlines about the young woman’s disappearance and presumed murder.

‘She was real,’ Rea said as Lennon raised his eyes to meet hers. ‘She really disappeared. They don’t know what happened to her. But I do.’

Raymond Drew had buried Gwen Headley in the foundation trench of the building site he’d been working on, Rea explained. Her remains lay beneath the concrete footing of an office building.

‘There’s no way to prove that,’ Lennon said. ‘Without the book, it’s just your word.’

‘You don’t believe me,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t matter if I believe you or not,’ Lennon said. He considered going easy on her, but there was no point in sugar-coating the truth. ‘No one else will. All you can do is cause more distress to this girl’s family.’

Rea covered her face with her hands as she slid down the wall and hunkered near the floor. Her shoulders trembled.

Lennon crossed the room to her. He wondered if he should comfort her in some way, perhaps put an arm around her. Something told him no, don’t touch her. He crouched down, clenching his jaw at the pain it caused, but kept his hands to himself.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

‘Don’t call me a liar,’ she said.

‘I’m not calling you any—’

‘The book was here. I saw it. I touched it.’

Lennon took a breath before he said it. ‘What book? Rea, there is no book.’

He saw the hate on her face and knew he deserved it.

‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Go. Please.’

He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I want to make sure you’re all right.’

‘Fuck off.’ She spat the words at him, her eyes threatening tears. ‘Look, just go and leave me alone.’

Lennon hoisted himself to his feet. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be in touch tomorrow. Just to see how you’re doing.’

She nodded and brought her hands to her face once more. ‘Thank you, but I’ll be fine.’

‘Okay,’ he said. He searched for some reassurance he could give her, but he knew all she wanted was for him to be gone. His footsteps reverberated in the stairway as he descended.

‘Wait,’ she called.

Lennon turned and looked up to her.

‘I have a photograph,’ she said, taking something from her hip pocket.

He climbed the stairs, halting a few steps below her. She handed him a Polaroid print. Two rows of three men, the back row in paramilitary garb. To the right of the front row, a young Graham Carlisle.

Lennon said nothing.

‘You recognise my father,’ Rea said. ‘That’s my uncle, Raymond Drew, on the left. There’s one thing you can do to help me.’

‘What’s that?’ Lennon asked.

‘Find out if my father was ever suspected of anything . . . bad.’

‘I’ll ask around,’ Lennon said. ‘Can I hold onto this?’

Rea nodded. ‘I’m sorry for getting angry. I appreciate you coming. I really do.’

‘I know,’ he said, tucking the photograph into his jacket pocket, and left her at the top of the stairs.

He had to slam the front door three times to get it to close behind him, cursing as he did so. Across the street, a fussy-looking man of late middle age stopped washing the windows on his house and watched him. An estate agent’s sign said it was newly let.

Lennon stared back, an ugly flare of anger in his chest, daring the man to say something. The man dropped his gaze and went back to his cleaning.

As Lennon walked back towards the Ormeau Road, he took the phone from his pocket and dialled the direct line to Ladas Drive station. When the duty officer answered, Lennon said, ‘CI Uprichard.’

‘I’ll see if he’s available,’ the officer said. Lennon recognised the voice as belonging to Sergeant Bill Gracey. ‘Who’s calling, please?’

‘DI Jack Lennon.’ He listened to the duty officer’s breathing for a few seconds, then said, ‘They haven’t sacked me yet, Bill. Put me through.’

A pause, then, ‘All right. Hold, please.’

Lennon listened to something that passed for music until he heard the familiar voice.

‘Jack? It’s been a while. How are you?’

‘I’m fucked, Alan, how’s you?’

‘Language, Jack, please. The wife has me on a diet again, but other than that, I’m all right. To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘I need a favour,’ Lennon said.

Uprichard sighed. ‘Why does that give me a bad feeling?’

Chief Inspector Alan Uprichard had been the only one to stick by Lennon after his suspension. The closest thing in the world he had to a real friend, but even that was stretching the point. Uprichard was a stout chap, pushing sixty, a devout Christian whose wife fretted constantly over his health. Lennon couldn’t imagine a man further removed from him in character, yet somehow their friendship endured, though perhaps begrudgingly on Uprichard’s part.

‘You’ve always got a bad feeling,’ Lennon said.

‘True,’ Uprichard said. ‘Go on, then. What is it?’

Lennon told him. When Uprichard was done listening, he asked, ‘Is this going to get me into trouble, Jack?’

‘I hope not,’ Lennon said.

‘And you certainly don’t need more bother hanging over you.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Lennon said. ‘Will you do it for me?’

‘All right,’ Uprichard said, ‘but you owe me.’

‘I already owe you plenty,’ Lennon said. ‘One more debt won’t make any odds.’

‘True. I’ll get back to you. Take care of yourself.’

‘You too.’

As Lennon hung up, he noticed the time on the phone’s display.

‘Shit,’ he said to himself.

‘Forty-five minutes,’ Susan said.

‘I know, I’m sorry.’

Lennon couldn’t look at her across the table. The girls ate in silence. The food on his and Susan’s plates had barely been touched.

‘Have you any idea how embarrassed I am that the school office had to call me?’

‘It won’t happen again,’ Lennon said. ‘I promise.’

‘Anything could’ve happened to them. Anyone could’ve taken them.’

Lennon shook his head. ‘They know not to go with strangers.’

‘You put my daughter at risk.’ Her voice became a thin hiss, anger and hate driving her tongue. ‘And your own. How could you live with yourself if anything happened to Ellen? How could I live with myself for trusting you with Lucy?’

He raised his eyes to see the fury in her face. He swallowed his own anger at her words, but couldn’t keep the tremor from his voice. ‘I’d never do anything to hurt our girls. You know that.’

Lennon knew he should have told her the truth the night before. Had he done so, he could have explained that someone needed his help. That he would never have been so late, that he wouldn’t have forgotten the time, if not for an old friend being in trouble. But he had lied, he couldn’t take it back, and he hated himself for it.

Susan sighed. A tear made a crystalline track on her cheek. ‘But you’d let them stand on the side of a road, all alone, for forty-five minutes.’

Lennon got up and left the table.

He slept on the couch until the phone call woke him in the early hours.

IT TOOK HOURS
for Rea Carlisle to die.

Lennon had left. She had gone back to the room, sat down at the desk and wept until the tears were exhausted. Then, suddenly cold, suddenly aware that the house had darkened, she had walked to the landing. She had felt safe in the light. Now the light had burned away.

The blow felt like a sun exploding in her head, then the world turned beneath her feet. She supposed she must have fallen. A memory, vague and greying, of the stairs descending away from her vision, something cool and hard against her cheek.

Then another blow, and she couldn’t see anything at all.

Rea wanted to cry out, to speak, to say something, but her tongue would not obey. It felt blunt and thick inside her mouth. Her voice rose in her chest, squeezed through her throat, out into the air.

An impact on the back of her neck silenced her. Then another, and another, more across her shoulders and back, so many she couldn’t tell one from a doll she had when she was a little girl with blue eyes that closed when you laid it down and school corridors bright lights hard stares and falling cut knees and loving him madly like bitter tastes of god and jesus and doggie can we have the doggie I never get anything I want and sand clinging stinging to my skin and . . .

Pain forced its way through the thickening clouds in her mind. The sound – no, the feeling – of things cracking and splintering inside her and bubbling breath and metal taste and sand and water and mummy tickles stop mummy stop daddy not a baby got to go got to go got to go . . .

And the pain once more, but the shower of blows to her back had stopped and she heard hard breathing, not hers, hers bubbly like chocolate and – no, come back – and someone pulling and stretching at her pockets then cursing then stepping over her and feet clumping down the stairs like a giant and the beanstalk and jack and david and goliath and a sling brought the giant down like the bible says yes jesus loves me this I know cause the bible tells me so deep and wide deep and wide there’s a river running deep and wide . . .

Rea’s consciousness receded and swelled like a tide on a barren shore, but her mind finally left her long before her lungs filled with blood, long before she drowned at the top of the stairs in a house that once belonged to Raymond Drew.

IT WAS LIGHT
outside when Lennon woke. He’d been dreaming of a madman he’d last seen in a burning house outside Drogheda, the flames eating them both.

Lennon breathed hard as his senses fell into place. He was already reaching into his pocket for his phone when it rang again. The display said the number had been withheld.

‘Hello?’ he said, his voice hoarse with sleep.

‘Jack? It’s Alan.’

‘What’s wrong? It’s not even six-thirty yet.’

‘That woman you told me about yesterday,’ Uprichard said. ‘The one in Deramore Gardens.’

‘Yeah? What about her?’

‘She was Graham Carlisle’s daughter?’

‘Yes. Rea Carlisle.’

Lennon listened to Uprichard’s breathing. ‘Alan, what’s wrong?’

‘She’s dead, Jack. She was beaten to death with a crowbar.’

Lennon shook his head. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I turned the radio on when I got up this morning, and there was a report about a woman found dead in Deramore Gardens. I remembered what you’d said, so I rang the station to see what the story was. Her mother got worried because she hadn’t been in touch, so she went to this house and found her there. The medical officer reckons she was killed late yesterday afternoon.’

‘No,’ Lennon said. ‘Couldn’t be. I was with her late afternoon. I rang you when I left the house. There’s been a mistake.’

‘No mistake, Jack. She’s been identified. And a man was seen leaving the house, agitated, slamming the door. I read the description. It was you, Jack. You were seen leaving the house around the time of the killing.’

Lennon thought of the man who’d been cleaning his windows across the road, who’d watched him slam the door and walk away. He stayed quiet for a moment as his sleep-addled brain tried to make sense of what he’d been told.